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Good to see you. Hey, this is kind of your area isn't it? What do you think? Is gluadys still around? Do you think she'd tackle this?
Thanks.
Nothing to tackle really. It looks to me as if the professor has succumbed to the common temptation in academic life to draw attention to oneself by throwing out a zinger. "God didn't create" is a nice shock value headline for what appears to be a much less controversial thesis on the meaning of 'bara'.
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Nothing to tackle really. It looks to me as if the professor has succumbed to the common temptation in academic life to draw attention to oneself by throwing out a zinger. "God didn't create" is a nice shock value headline for what appears to be a much less controversial thesis on the meaning of 'bara'.
I agree. The headlines in our newspapers said something like "God didn't create", where it would have been more correct to state "Professor says "bara" means "separate" instead of "create". But that's boring, right?
Most biblical scholars interpret "bara" as "create". Van Wolde's argument seems to be based mostly on the fact that created objects are mentioned in pairs. But you can mention a lot of things in pairs without the intention to separate them. Perhaps there was a preference for saying things like that in Hebrew, a matter of idiom. So if she doesn't have more proof than this, it's not enough for me.
By the way, Van Wolde is not the first to see bara as separate.
I have a thread on this, but it bears repeating here.
If God is using evolution as His modus operandi, then I have two excellent questions for TEs:
Is God still creating?
When will/did He stop creating?
I find it hard to believe He creates right up to the moment He destroys everything and rebuilds it.
Maybe he Created the universe in the form of a small, hot, dense universe, then sat back and waited for humans to evolve. Then he bestowed humans with a spirit. Or something.
Interpret Genesis as allegory, it's much easier.
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I also envisioned God poofing things into existence. Why would an all-powerful God do anything more labouring?
That depends entirely on what God was wanting to do....
Did he want the finished project? If so, why didn't he just create the universe at the very end, like skipping to the last page of a book.
I'm more inclined to think that, if God did create the universe, he would of started "In the VERY Beginning."
Remember, there is no such thing as "Labour" to an all powerful God; There's no such thing as Time. Whether he started at the Beginning of the Story or at the end, it's all the same unless you believe that the story is more important then just knowing "Who did it."
Maybe he was curious to see what would happen if he started at the beginning. It's not like it would have been difficult for him nor would it take any time (for him.)
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Originally Posted by Wiccan_Child
I also envisioned God poofing things into existence. Why would an all-powerful God do anything more labouring?
Whether God in the first creation story is "all-powerful" or not we are not told. Anyway, why would you think that there has been done something "more labouring [than ...]"? In Genesis, God is described as creating, shaping etc things by spoken word, which is somewhat reminiscient of a king giving out commands and orders. I.e. as doing things not very labouriously.
They were translating the AV1560 Geneva Bible --- the AV1611's predecessor.
what? no they weren't
go read up on the KJV AV, please.
the KJV was translated from greek, hebrew and aramaic texts, just like every other bible.
with some latin thrown in.
thats why its a translation, you know a book translated from another language?
the geneva bible was written in english, so it wouldn't be a translation
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what? no they weren't
go read up on the KJV AV, please.
the KJV was translated from greek, hebrew and aramaic texts, just like every other bible.
with some latin thrown in.
thats why its a translation, you know a book translated from another language?
the geneva bible was written in english, so it wouldn't be a translation
Um ... no.
The King James translators only used those other sources for reference.
Well, that's not entirely true: he created somethings, but not (say), the Heavens and the Earth.
Thoughts? Ideas?
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb "bara", which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean "to create" but to "spatially separate".
The first sentence should now read "in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth"
What I would want to know is how do you separate the Heaven from the earth or the earth from the heaven? Was the heaven attached to the earth at some point? I wonder what that looked like.
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Last edited by Doveaman; 13th October 2009 at 09:51 PM.
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