In the beginning, God SEPARATED the Heaven and the Earth.....

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Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

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"

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I'm not sure what would be so significant about this. It can fairly be argued God still owns both heaven and earth.

3 Replies

@tycoon,

It can be argued that god is a fairy tale, a human creation..

0 Replies

@tycoon,

tycoon wrote:

I'm not sure what would be so significant about this. It can fairly be argued God still owns both heaven and earth.

You've got any proof for that?

0 Replies

@tycoon,

"It can be argued" is the lead-in of the intellectually lazy.

One can argue just about anything. It doesn't follow that it is in any way valid, however.

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The Earth was actually made by a consortium of investors. God was hired to fix it up and increase the resale value.

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@DrewDad,

And next week Professor vanWolde will compute and conclusively demonstrate just how many angels can actually dance on the head of a common pin. I can hardly wait.

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@DrewDad,

I get the relevance DD. Even if the Bible is bullshit, and the sentence doesn't matter cause it's make believe anyways, it certainly would shake the religion tree, and some fruit might fall. You could even eat that fruit of knowledge, guilt (and sin) free.

T
K
O

1 Reply

@Diest TKO,

The bottom line is that this has no relevance of any sort to reality, whether one is a believer or, like most of us, not. It is an academic quibble over semantics, not too far removed from the Medieval argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Whether the word is "created" or "separated" can be of interest only to other Bible scholars. It's not going to "shake the religion tree," DTKO because: 1) you and I see it as fantasy; 2)true believers will simply reject it out-of-hand. It is meaningless, either way.

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I find this interesting, since it alludes to what some quantum physicists have wondered, as to whether there are parallel universes? Now if parallel universes were separated in the beginning, we might just be thinking of one of them as heaven?

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Either creation/separation, the myth is still a copy of the several found in Babylonian writings from fifteen to twenty centuries before Christ supposedly arrived.
or
There are several Chinese creation myths which say that the world started out as an egg. Maybe god used a gigantic separator.

Joe( Yolk= earth, egg-white = mostly cloudy skies)Nation

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It amuses me that there are so many responses stating that this thread is of no significance.

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@ebrown p,

It amuses me to assume that God spoke Hebrew.

1 Reply

@farmerman,

Then perhaps Yahweh isn't God.

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@DrewDad,

I'd also like to point out another of my favorite mis-translations.

The word that they used for Mary actually translates better as "maiden" rather than "virgin". "Maiden" can mean virgin, but it can also mean "girl" or "young woman".

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@ebrown p,

It amuses all of us too.
Joe(wonders how many will be willing to kill over change in translation)Nation

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In the beginning, God SEPARATED the Heaven and the Earth.....

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