GENESIS: Chapter One

‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’

Thus The Bible begins. The Christian God, originally the God of the Israelites, designed and created all of existence. Though I assume the term heaven really just means the sky, limiting creation to the Earth alone, but I could be wrong in my assumption.

When God created the universe he also created Time, or so modern day Christians believe. Before creation, they explain, there was no such concept as Time, it simply did not exist. God of course exists outside of Time, being far more ancient than the universe he created.

Where did God originate?

According to the people who believe in his existence God was not created, he has always been, he will always be. He’s an eternal entity with no origin.

Now, modern day Biblical scholars believe that Genesis was composed around the 7^th or 6^th centuries B.C.E. it’s a well known fact, amongst the learned, that the Biblical creation story is heavily influenced by the earlier Babylonian Enuma Elish. The Babylonians believed in a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, but so did some Israelites, in ancient days there were opposing views amongst the Israelites, the one we are all aware of is the monotheistic belief , a singular God, Yahweh, who created everything. The less well known view is that some Israelites followed a polytheistic belief, just like the Babylonians, these Israelites had a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. A Divine Council, this was not unique to the Israelites nor the Babylonians, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians, Celt, Greeks, Romans and Nordic folk had a belief in a vast Divine Council.

The Israelite Divine Council owed much to the Babylonians, but also the Canaanites. In a Ugarit text it states that El and Ba’al resided over a council of the Divine. El was adopted by the Israelites as a name form of Yahweh. Ba’al in later Christian times was relegated to merely being a demon residing in Hell.

In Christian belief they interpret these discrepancies in The Bible when it appears a singular God is conversing with others as being his conversation with an hierarchy of Archangels. They neglect the obvious, that the Israelites worshipped many Gods, including the wife of Yahweh, Asherah, a Semitic Mother Goddess, her history can be traced back to the Sumerian civilization, apparently the world’s first civilization, in their pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, Asherah was the wife of Anu, an influence on the Israelite Yahweh.

There have been many other creation myths, independent of The Bible. The Ancient Greeks believed that in the beginning there was Chaos. From Chaos was birthed the Earth, Gaia, she produced Uranus, the sky, and he fathered upon Gaia many children including The Titans, the Cyclopes and the Giants.

In the Rig Veda creation myth Tvastr, the creator, created the Earth and the Sky, which later produced an entire pantheon of Gods and Goddesses.

In Chinese myth, there was the Cosmic Egg, which when it broke apart became the Heavens and the Earth.

In Babylonian myth, in the beginning there was Apsu and Tiamat, their reproduction gave birth to the Gods and Goddesses. These Gods killed Apsu, Tiamat seeking revenge was killed by the God Marduk, who divided Tiamat into the Heavens and the Earth

Early peoples, from all over the world, were interested in the question of their origins, they had many imaginative stories, all fictional, but just as valid as Genesis.

Genesis

There are several differing opinions on the origins of the Book of Genesis. The religious folk believe the work was written by Moses during a conversation he had with their Lord God. My version of The Bible features the Book of Genesis as being titled thusly, The First Book Of Moses Called Genesis.

Not all Biblical scholars agree that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis, nor the four other books that make up the Torah, or Pentateuch. Throughout the 20th Century most scholars agreed that these five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, originate from four sources. The Yahwist: this source receives its name from the fact that God is sometimes referred to as Yahweh, or to be more accurate YHVH, in most English translations of The Bible YHVH is replaced with ‘the Lord’ or more simply ‘God.’

The Yahwists parts of The Bible were believed to date from about 950 B.C.E. but now it’s thought they might be as late as the 6th or 5th centuries B.C.E., which was the period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian captivity, or exile. During this time period the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah were held as captive in Babylon, obviously.

Another source is known as the Elohist, which derives its name from the term Elohim, which is used to identify God. In many parts of the Hebrew Bible in which this term is used it’s use is to describe not a singular God, but a pantheon of gods, or powers. This Elohist interpretation of God could be considered quite an abstract version. Originally the term Elohim, or El, was that used for God before the story of Moses, after which God is referred to as YHVH. This Elohist version of God is seen to be a being capable of sympathy and regret, unlike the YHVH version, and to begin with God, as Elohim, appears in person throughout Genesis. 

In the Elohist tale of Abraham, he, Abraham does sacrifice his son Isaac. Later stories revised this version, and allowed Abraham to substitute a ram in place of his son. There are other differences between the different sources.

The third source is called, the Deuteronomist, this source is regarded as being from a school of authors, rather than from a singular source. During the middle of the 20th Century scholars identified that the Deuteronomist school were Levites from the country. Levites are members of the tribe of Levi, both Moses and his brother Aaron, obviously, were Levites.

This source primarily concerns itself with the covenant between Israel and Yahweh. The peoples of Israel, originally the character Jacob, Yahweh decided that Israel and his people are the chosen people of God, and Yahweh demands that Israel and his people live according to his Law.

The fourth source is called the Priestly source, and is a product created after the Babylonian captivity, when Judah was a province of the Persian Empire, around the 5th Century B.C.E. it was intended to show the Jews that though everything seemed bleak, all hope lost, God had not abandoned his chosen peoples. His covenant with the folk of Israel had remained strong.

These four different sources contain many contradictions, inconsistencies and repeat the same ideas, one of the many contradictions is the various names of God, a singular God, who is referred to differently throughout the four sources, as though each source refers to a very different God. There are, for example in this Book of Genesis, two different creation myths.

Overall, the Book of Genesis is regarded as an antiquarian work of history, perhaps the best of its type, a form of literature that concerns itself with the origins of the world, the first humans and stories of ancestors and of heroes.

For more information on the origins of the Book of Genesis these websites are recommended:

http://www.british-israel.ca/Genesis.htm

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/gen1st.htm

http://www.biblica.com/niv/study-bible/genesis/

On The Origin Of Species

Published on 24th November 1859, this work is a scientific masterpiece, written by Charles Darwin, and is of course the foundation of evolutionary biology. It’s full title was On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In 1872, for the sixth edition, the title was changed to The Origin of Species.

Charles Darwin’s book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of many generations through a process of natural selection. Charles Darwin presented a body of evidence that life arose through common descent. He, Darwin, included evidence that he gathered during his journey on The Beagle expedition in the 1830’s and other subsequent findings from his other researches, correspondences and experiments.

For more on this important book, see these:

http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Freeman_OntheOriginofSpecies.html

http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S155.htm

The Old Testament

The above is the Christian term for the collections of ancient Israeli religious writing. The Old Testament forms the first section, and in total majority, of the Christian Bibles.

The Old Testament tells the story of how God selected his chosen people, it tells the story of the Israelites from their conquest of Canaan to their defeat and exile in Babylon. The Old Testament is the story of the Jewish peoples and their very unique relationship with God.

In Christianity different Bibles contain a different amount of Old Testament books. Originally when The Bible was compiled during the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Christian Bible contained forty six Old Testament books, and the Catholic Bibles still do, the Protestant Bibles however thirty nine Old Testament books.

The first five books are known as the Torah and are regarded as the Books of Moses dictacted to him by God, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, which describe the death and burial of Moses.

Between 280 and 130 B.C.E. the books of The Old Testament were translated from Hebrew into Greek, originally these scriptures were written, and read, as separate scrolls, bound books and Bibles did not, yet, exist. The Greek translations of the Bible contain several books not found in the modern Hebrew Bible, and so differs from what was originally intended.

Around 400 C.E. Pope Damasus I, commissioned Jerome, the leading scholar of the day, to produce an updated Latin version of the Bible, Latin had by this time replaced Greek as the language of these early Christians. Jerome used the Hebrew Bible for his translation of The Old Testament and ignored the Greek translations. His Old Testament became part of the standard Bible as used in Western Churches, while in Eastern Churches they use the Greek.

http://www.bible-history.com/old-testament/

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/plaintexthistories.asp?historyid=ab85

History of the Big Bang Theory

The Greek philosopher Aristotle held the view that the Universe had existed for an infinite time, that it had no beginning it always was, this caused problems for later philosophers, especially Jewish and Islamic philosophers of the Middle Ages, they held the view that the Universe was the creation of their God, IHVH, Allah.

Eventually logical arguments arose of why Aristotle was wrong, and that the Universe was finite, having a beginning, a middle and eventually an ending. Johannes Kepler in 1610 argued against the infinite Universe view, using observation he concluded that the Universe was indeed finite having a starting point somewhere in the distant past. Later in the 17th Century Sir Isaac Newton scientifically explained large scale motion throughout the Universe, and this view of an infinite Universe became redundant.

In 1848 Edgar Allan Poe wrote the poem Eureka, and though not a scientific work, Poe tried to explain the beginnings of the Universe based upon the knowledge of those times, knowledge gained through experimentation and observation. His work was, obviously, ignored by the scientific community, however in recent years a greater appreciation of his ideas has flourished.

According to Poe, the earliest state of matter was the primordial particle, it was a singular particle which was torn apart by a powerful repulsive force, the particle being fragmented into atoms then spread evenly throughout space until the repulsive force was exhausted. This ending of the repulsive force causes attraction to become a reaction, matter begins to clump together forming stars and star systems, thus the material Universe is drawn together by gravity, and finally collapsing and ending, returning the primordial particle and begins the process all over again.

This process, in a fashion, describes a Newtonian evolving Universe, which shares similar properties to a relativistic model of the Universe, and for this reason Poe anticipated some ideas of modern cosmology.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble presented a comprehensive observational foundation for the Big Bang Theory, he discovered, through experimental observations, that relative to the Earth, and all other observable bodies, planets, moons and stars, that galaxies are receding in every direction, this observation is now known as Hubble’s Law, and is consistent with Einstein’s General Relativity, the idea that the Universe is expanding, rapidly, not the bodies in space moving further outward and apart into an infinitely larger preexisting empty void, no, it’s the very fabric of existence is expanding.

Hubble’s Law contradicted the cosmological principle which states the Universe if viewed on a huge scale does not expand in any preferred direction. There was, of course, opposition within the scientific community to this expanding Universe, Fred Hoyle, argued that though the Universe was expanding, the idea that it had a beginning was pseudo-science, and resembled far too closely for his liking, religious interpretations of existence. He formulated, along with Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi, the idea that the Universe was in a “steady state.”

It was Fred Hoyle who was responsible for coining the term “Big Bang” on BBC radio’s Third Programme, in March 1949. In the end, increasing observational evidence convinced most cosmologists that Hoyle’s Steady State model was incorrect and that the Big Bang was the theory that agreed best with observations.

With the development of better, more precise, technologies it as become apparent that no other theory of creation can explain the wide range of observations better than The Big Bang Theory, for this reason, observations and experimentations, it is the only theory viable.

For more information seek here:

http://www.thebigview.com/spacetime/universe.html

http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-powered-the-big-bang/

King James Version

The King James Version of The Bible is the version I own, it is, and obviously, an English translation of the Christian Bible originally translated by forty seven scholars employed by the Church of England, this version was started in 1604 and finished in 1611, during the reign of King James I.

The Old Testament was translated from Hebrew, and the New Testament from Greek. The King James Bible is the book used by Anglicans and Protestants. At first there was a little opposition to this version of The Bible, the leading Hebrew scholar at the time Hugh Broughton, condemned this translation, having issue with the King James Version not being a word for word accurate translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. Others took issue with the book being written in English and not Latin, they considering English to be an ugly, vulgar tongue.

Over the years people have pointed out many inaccuracies in this version of The Bible, some of which have been printing errors, originally some early versions of the King James Version contained over fifteen hundred printing errors, though I imagine such errors were easily made, the printing process being in its early stages.

In 1769 Benjamin Blayney, a specialist in the Hebrew language and practices of, took on the mammoth task of editing the King James Version, his revised edition became known as the Oxford standard text. This new edition of the King James Version of The Bible contains over twenty thousand differences from the original 1611 edition. Over the next one hundred years scholars, especially those who specialised in ancient languages, in particular Hebrew and Greek, found many errors of translation in this version of The Bible, and eventually more accurate versions of the King James Version appeared. A Revised Version in 1881, that never found popularity, and revised editions in the 20th Century updated the King James Version. The 20th Century editions are the versions most in use currently, having replaced the Oxford standard text, these new versions correct errors in the Oxford standard text, though there are groups who refuse to accept these new versions as their King James Version, and claim that the Oxford standard text is the true word of God, which if course it is not, being a revised edition of the 1611 King James Version, which itself is a translation of older Bibles.

The King James Version has been termed “the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language’.

For more on the King James Version I recommend these sites:

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html

http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/knowkjv.html

The History of Evolutionary Theory

The theory of evolution I had always thought as being from modern times, you know an idea made popular by Charles Darwin, it was nice to discover I was wrong. I like finding out stuff I didn’t originally know. The idea actually dates back to ancient times, the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and early Muslims all promoted ideas of evolutionary theory, though in different forms as we understand now.

Anaximander of Miletus, circa 610-546 B.C.E., proposed the idea that the very first animals lived in water, in Earth’s distant past, he theorised that during this period the Earth was going through a wet phase, and that the first land dwelling ancestors of us, humans, must have been water borne, spending only a small part of their time on dry land.

In China the idea of Taoism regards humans, nature and the heavens as existing in a state of constant transformation in response to differing environments.

Titus Lucretius Carus in 50 B.C.E. wrote On The Nature of Things, which provides the best surviving explanation of the ideas of the Greek Epicurean philosophers. It describes the development of the Cosmos, the Earth and living things upon the Earth, including humans and their societies, as being purely naturalistic mechanisms without any interference from a supernatural agency.

The ideas these Greeks and Romans had about creation, about existence died out in Europe when the Roman Empire eventually fell, though their ideas were not lost to Islamic philosophers and early scientists. Ibn Khadun’s scientific thoughts anticipated the biological theory of evolution. In 1377 Ibn Khaldun published the Muqqadimah, in which he asserted that we humans originally developed from the world of monkeys, in some sort of process by which a species became more numerous.

In the 18th Century, with the emergence into science of paleontology, naturalists began to develop ideas that animals had indeed changed from their original forms, altering the previously held ideas that all animals had always been the way they are.

In 1800 the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck presented in a lecture the idea that animals had evolved naturally over a vast period of time, and that in many cases the environment gave rise to changes in animal species. Though his idea was mostly rejected, some modern evolutionary biologists claim he was the primary evolutionary theorist, and influenced evolutionary biology right up to the present day.

Later in the 1800s, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their theory of evolution. Their ideas proposed an idea of common descent and a tree of life. Leading to the idea, shocking at the time, that two very different species could share a common ancestor. For the first half of the 19th Century the scientific community believed that although geology showed that the Earth and life upon it, was very old, that humans had only appeared a few thousand years ago. A series of discoveries in the 1840’s and 1850’s proved their beliefs wrong, stone tools were discovered alongside the bones of now extinct animals, demonstrating that some form of human existed beside species of animals long since dead.

In 1863 Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, proposed the idea, which became widely accepted, that humans had existed during a prehistoric period, which stretched back many thousands of years before the beginnings of written history. At that time there was no fossil evidence to demonstrate such human evolution.

Carolus Linnaeus had been criticised for grouping humans and apes together as primates. But within a few years of the publication of The Origin of Species the concept of evolution became widespread within the scientific community. Thus began the divide between science and religion. Science had factual evidence to prove evolution to be a truth.

For more information:

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/History-of-the-Theory-of-Evolution.topicArticleId-8741,articleId-8634.html

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/evolution/how-did-evol-theory-develop/