A minor but perhaps important sometime quibble. .... so if it is indeed a vision, even a stylized vision, even then, it corresponds to actual progression.
Thanks for the thoughts. Yes, I've heard that, but on reading Genesis carefully, I'm not sure it fits so well. Again and again the order in Genesis is wrong if read literally. (I've marked the ones that are solved by the "can't see through clouds" idea with *).
Some examples, by day of "creation":
Initial State
Watery abyss with no land.
wrong - Land has always existed on Earth
1 Light (no Sun yet)wrong - Light without sun? *
2 Firmament/inverted bowl
wrong - Hebrew word shows this to be solid, but there has never been a solid dome over the earth.
3 Dry land, then All land plants
wrong - sea animals preceded land plants
4 Moon, Sun, stars and the whole universe *
wrong - Those existed long before life and most of the other things made in days 1-3.
5 Aquatic Animals & Birds
wrong - Birds were not before animals on land.
6 Land animals and humans
But this is a different order than
Genesis 2.
7 Rest
* Proposed solution is "clouds covered the early earth, blocking out the light, being removed on 'day' 4." However, this doesn't work on at least two counts. First, it doesn't say that. If one is using a literal-only reading, then it specifically says "made" (bara) the sun, which is not "became visible". "Became visible" would have been easy to write if that was intended. It can't be a person's perspective, because there were no people then, and bacteria don't have eyes. If it's a vision, then a vision can show anything, and very often doesn't show literal history (there are many visions throughout scripture, such as in Rev, with all kinds of symbolism).
Secondly - even with the "cloud" idea, it still doesn't work for the order. The sky was visible *(day 4) hundreds of millions of years before there were land plants (day 3) - again in the wrong order.
Third - 'day' 4, as well as the rest of the story (along with literally dozens of other verses in the Bibles) shows a flat earth, under a hard dome, under water, with little stars inside the dome as little lights. We can't take that literally without rejecting both a spherical earth as well as heliocentrism.
Just like any other primitive creation story, some things are right here and there - especially since most of these stories (as shown above) go from simpler to complex, as makes sense.
Our story isn't anywhere close to being in the right order if read literally. The most accurate stories are by religions made up recently - like scientology. But that, of course, only means that we knew more when they made up the religion, not that scientology is right.
In Christ-
Papias
I liked your post and we agree on almost everything, .........., so that they get the real message, which pretty much every time is via metaphor, like "dust to dust" and such, telling us key things about life and our human condition. The Garden is about the birth of self-consciousness and moral judgement, and the resulting loss of bliss, ...
Yep. Good stuff. Have a fun day-
Papias
But please consider just a moment the endless possible ways to read Genesis 1 -- for instance, if the "days" are like widely spaced snapshots in time (individual visions for instance, or separate scenes), we don't know a precise time between them of course, so that doesn't even connect in any manner to the precise length of the constant cloud cover, right? (e.g. significant but not total cloudiness might last 1.4 billion years, 1.8 bn, etc., (who knows?) but "day" 4 might be long past that time period, and doesn't have to be on the first days the cloudiness broke...etc.....) But, we could argue (or better merely discuss without any ego) our points, and it's involves quite a bit of hypothetical pieces, and we want to avoid being caught up in argument. Better is if we do this:
