The ACTUAL Creation Event
First, it is important to note that “Reshit”, the best English phraseology for the Hebrew word for “Beginning”: every place it occurs in Scripture (including this one) refers to a block of time - not a specific moment…an ‘age’ or period of time, not a ‘point’.
In Job 8:7 ‘reshit’ refers to Job's early life, the entire period up to when his misfortunes began. “And though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great.“
If ‘reshit’ was here read as it is commonly understood in Genesis this would mean, not that Job’s early life was fairly insignificant, but that at the moment of his birth he was a small child - not a likely reading.
In Genesis 10:10 ‘reshit’ refers to the first phase or period of Nimrod’s kingdom.
“The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.” So, either all of these cities were founded at the same moment, or this is an overview of the ‘early days’ or ‘reshit’ of his kingdom.
In Jeremiah 28:1:
“In that same year, at the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the fifth month of the fourth year, Hananiah the son of Azzur, the prophet from Gibeon, spoke to me in the house of the LORD” Understood in context, this was 4 years in - so, if it was still the ‘beginning’ of his reign, this ‘beginning’ has been 4 years long…it is used this way through most of the Old Testament.
Given it’s use elsewhere in the Pentateuch (the books of Moses), and throughout the rest of the Old Testament, there is no good reason that “in the beginning” in Genesis 1:1 should be a moment, rather than simply a referencing to an earlier period of time (which would indeed have a beginning and an end, but a length of time itself which has no necessary boundaries length-wise)…
Basically, ‘in the beginning’ should understood much like the phrase ‘in my youth’, not, as is commonly understood, ‘at the moment of my birth’.
Of course, that leaves the age of the earth entirely beyond the scope of the Bible - it simply doesn’t address the issue.
Given this, of course, is there any reason the universe could not be billions of years old? There are already clear examples of it representing 4 year period, and the early period of a kingdom (God only knows how long that was - the founding of 5 or 6 other cities can take a while), and multiple times it refers to one’s childhood, which in the Old Testament, where people’s ages sometimes SEEM to reach 900 years+, that can be a long time. Given its context, it’s pretty clear that the word simply references some unspecified period of time in the past. I can see no linguistic reason to limit the word’s scope, otherwise. My only case that it could mean ‘billions’ of years, of course, is that it’s used at the beginning of genesis in reference to the period of time during which the Universe came into being to the point in time where the fertile creasant (Promised Land/Eden) was prepared for the introduction of human life. Given what we know scientifically, since ‘reshit’ is referring to that period of time, if Science is correct on the age of the universe, by necessity that would be what ‘reshit’ was referencing, and such would easily fit within it’s semantic usage.
Again, the creation story in Genesis is the single hardest section of the Bible to translate. Not only is Hebrew vague (quite the opposite of Greek) - sometimes a single word (like the word “day”, for instance) can have 10 - 15 different meaning depending on the context of the word. On top of that, Hebrew, as it was originally written (for instance, in the earliest texts of the Old Testament, one of which would be the book of Genesis) was not a written language as we understand it: it was an oral one. Even during Jesus time and afterwards most young men were expected to have memorized the entire Torah (the first 5 books of our Christian Bible). The original written texts of Genesis, therefore, was only written in a way to remind someone that had already memorized the contents of the text - they only wrote down consonants - no vowels. It would be sort of like you memorizing a paper, then writing down the first and last letter of every word on a piece of paper to use as ‘notes’ to remind you of what you were going to say. Someone that didn’t know the text honestly couldn’t read it, or would only be guessing at what you might have intended to say. The fact that many of the words in the so-called ‘creation story’ (which I call, from a ‘Historical Creationism’ perspective, the ‘ordering story’) are used no where else in the entire Old Testament, at least not within this context, means that their meaning is - to a great degree - up for grabs. That is why one can make a solid case for long-day creationism (like Hugh Ross), a position I respect and at one time held myself, short-day creationism (which has many problems, but a few benefits from a theological perspective), and many other modified versions of the creation story.
Here’s the short of it: If one single author or editor was responsible for Torah (tradition says that Moses was behind it to a large degree), then one would expect the usage and definition of words over the course of those 5 books to be consistent. The word translated ‘earth’ during the ‘creation story’ literally means ‘dirt beneath your feet’, and is translated through-out the rest of the torah as ‘land’, most often referring to the ‘promised land’. The word translated ‘heavens and earth’ is a Hebrew phrase that doesn’t mean ‘land’, but ‘all that is’ - in modern terms: ‘universe’. So, here’s the creation story in total - “In the beginning (which is not a specific time, but in Hebrew is the equivalent to our phrase “when I was younger”, meaning that some undetermined period of time sometime in the distance past) God created (the word ‘created’ in Hebrew can mean any number of things, which I’ll address next) the ‘Heavens and the Earth’ (i.e. - all that exists). That’s the entire Creation Story from a Historical Creationist perspective. That’s all God tells us about the creation - no details.
Created almost 4 years ago
