Category: Bible

Down yonder, a reader (quoting me) writes:

Maybe, though the literal sense of those texts is that God will send a great age of peace, during which it will be as if all strife–even between animals–will be eliminated.

Er. No. What you mean here is that the meaning of the passage is certainly metaphorical. Which, to be sure, it is. Lions, leopards, lambs, kids — even if the beasts will literally exist, they will be part of, and symbolically represent, that peace.

The literal meaning is what the passage actually says not what it actually means, even if that meaning is demonstrably false or makes no sense.

Er, yes, actually.

This may be a case of field-specific jargon.

In biblical studies the "literal" sense of the text–in the proper sense of the word–is what the author meant, not what his words say.

Thus when Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son, the literal sense of the text is not that there was this son who demanded his inheritance and went and spent it on loose living and came back to his father, who received him.

The literal sense is that God is always willing to take back a sinner, no matter what he has done.

I know it’s paradoxical to call this the literal sense, but this is the sense in which the term is used in classical exegesis (e.g., in the dictum that the literal sense of the text is always the foundation of the spiritual and you can’t play the spirital against the literal.

Thus the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:

115 According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. the profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

116 The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."

Unfortunately, there is no word that has become firmly established for what you are calling "literal," and someitmes biblical scholars casually speak of it as literal, too–leading to confusion.

To avoid this problem, in what I originally wrote I contrasted literal with "even more literal." In other places, I’ve used the terms hyper-literal or literalistic.

In any event, the contrast remains between the surface meaning of the words of a text and what the author intended to communicate by them. In biblical studies–as paradoxical as it sounds–the latter is properly considered the literal sense of the text, not the former.

For those who may ont be aware, maranatha is a word based on what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 16:11:

If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha (KJV).

Unfortunately, maranatha is not a single word in Aramaic. It’s a combination of two words, and the correct division of them here is not clear.

This has not stopped countless Evangelical ministries from slapping Maranatha on all kinds of things, though.

Now, with that as introduction, a reader writes:

How does not pronounce:  Marana tha and Maran atha?

And am I correct that it was used as a short prayer?

I assume that the first question is "how does one pronounce" these two phrases.

The easies way to answer that is to simply show you how they’re pronounced, so I did a quick audiopost over on my audio blog.

LISTEN TO IT HERE.

As to its use as a prayer, we need to go into what it means. 

The early manuscripts that we have do not have spaces between the words, and so we have to guess at word division.

It’s clear that the first word of the phrase means "Our Lord," rendered here as Mar (the ordinary Aramaic word for "Lord"), with the possessive suffix "our" tacked on to it. The question is: What is the suffix? Is it -an or -ana? This is what causes the two word divisions as marana tha and maran atha.

The first of these is commonly understood to mean "Our Lord, come!" and the second clearly means "Our Lord comes" (or "Our Lord has come.")

My Aramaic instructor (who is a native speaker of modern Aramaic and who uses classical Aramaic professionally) is utterly convinced that the first division of the word is wrong. In fact, he is contemptuous of those who use the first division as know-nothings on Aramaic.

If I recall correctly, he has three arguments for this:

1. -ana simply is not a pronoun suffix in Aramaic.
2. Putting the verb atheh into the imperative form would not cause the first letter (which is a consonant in Aramaic) to drop off.
3. Even if the first letter did drop off, the pronunciation rules of Aramaic would require the resulting word to be pronounced ta, not tha.

Normally I generally defer to my instructor on such matters, but let’s look briefly at his arguments.

1. I do have at least a couple of grammars of early Aramaic on my shelves listing -ana as the suffix meaning "our," so there may have been some dialects of Aramaic where "our" was -ana rather than just -an.

2. This seems to be the weightiest argument. I’ve consulted multiple grammars and lexicons, and unless the verb atheh had a really, really irregular imperative form in Paul’s dialect, it just should not become tha (or ta). It should be atha, and I can find no indication in any of the lexicons that it had an irregular form in in the imperative. Some lexicons explicitly list atha as the imperative form.

3. This argument also has weight, though it could be gotten around if marana ta had already become perceived as one word, in which case the usual pronunciation rules would change it to maranatha. The problem is that this seems to be a distinctively Christian phrase (applying specifically to Jesus and not to God as "Our Lord"), and there just weren’t that many years between Jesus’ ministry and Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It’s hard to imagine marana ta becoming one word that fast.

I think there’s also exegetical evidence that points to the correct reading being Maran atha. Paul has just issued a "Let him be anathema." It seems to me that it makes more sense to say "Let him be anathema [because] Our Lord comes" than "Let him be anathema. Come, Our Lord!"

The first would make Maran atha an affirmation of the Lord’s future coming, when those who have become anathema will be judged. The second would be a vengeful calling down of divine judgment upon them.

As to its use in prayer, if Maranatha is understood as "Our Lord, Come!" then it’s a prayer on its face.

Even if not, it still became part of Christian prayer via the liturgy. In the Didache ("did-ah-khay") the instructions regarding the Eucharist include what seems to be a part of a prayer which reads in part:

10:12 Hosanna to the God of David.
10:13 If any man is holy, let him come;
10:14 If any man is not, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen [SOURCE].

In this case Maran atha isn’t a term addressed directly to God but is an affirmation term, like Amen, which functions at the end of a prayer to mean (roughly) "So may it be" or "It is so." This also is not a word addressed directly to God on its face, but is an affirmation that one has confidence in what God will do. Maran atha, like Amen, thus may be a prayer affirmation addressed indirectly to God.

The Didache is a first century Christian document that may not have been written very long after Paul lived. Some even argue that it was contemporary with Paul’s letters. However that may be, neither Paul nor the Didache are the likely source of the phrase. They are both probably drawn on an earlier source, possibly the first liturgies celebrated in the Aramaic-speaking Christian community.

A correspondent writes:

1. Noah had three sons. What order were they in birth (who was oldest, second and youngest)?

It is commonly thought that the order is Shem, Ham, and then Japheth. The main reason is that this the the order the names are given in when they are introduced in Genesis 5:32 and elsewhere. Also, Genesis 10:21 explicitly states that Shem is Japheth’s elder brother.

I have seen it argued that Ham was the oldest but lost his birthright due to the incident where Noah got drunk, but the arguments for this are not convincing.

2. Does the birth order in this case have any theological significance ?

It shows Israel being descended from the firstborn (actual or legal, depending on the birth order theory you take).

3. One of the sons was the father of the chosen people, the other the Canaanites.    What happened to the descendants of the third son ? 

They went a variety of places, many of which were overseas from Israel, which is why Genesis 10:5 describes them as being maritime peoples, since that is how the Israelites encountered them (via the sea). They also went other places, generally to the north, northeast , and northwest from Israel’s perspective.

One thing you should be aware of regarding ancient near eastern genealogies like the one in Genesis 10 is that they aren’t exclusively biological in nature. They also include legal adoptions of peoples and tribes. If two tribes formed an alliance or merged culturally then they one tribe would be adopted into the lineage of the other. This is similar to how in our modern genealogies we don’t separate out people who were adopted. Grandma is still Grandma whether your mother was physically born to Grandma or whether she was adopted by her. The ancient near easterners did the same thing, only they did it with tribes instead of just individuals, and they allowed the adoptions to take place after the original patriarch of the lineage was dead. (We can see these kind of adoptions happening elsewhere in the genealogies of Israel in the Bible, as when Caleb is reckoned both as a Kennizite and as a descendant of Judah.)

As a result, the table of nations given in Genesis 10 isn’t simply a biological record. It includes biological factors as well as cultural and political affiliations, resulting in adoptions of tribes into lineages that aren’t necessarily biologically related. This kind of genalogization is how patriarchical cultures keep track of everybody and how they relate to each other.

The upshot is that the decendants of Japheth aren’t necessarily all biological descendants of his. Some may be descendants attributed to him by adoption even after his death.

In general, the Japhethites represent speakers of Indo-European languages like Greek.

A reader writes:

Are you familiar with this 2nd Edition of the Ignatius Catholic Leather Bible that has just been released?  It is leather and I would like to get one, but I am never sure on what will be considered a "good" translation.   I have read your tracts on Bible translations already and know that you recommend the RSV, so is the 2nd Edition RSV going to be pretty much the same thing and trustworthy?

I had not previously been familiar with the 2nd edition of the Ignatius Bible, though my confidence in the publishing house is such that I would have been able to recommend it anyway.

By a strange coincidence, however, I happened to have the chance to examine a copy of it today. (Our purchaser at Catholic Answers wanted me to look over a copy to see if it was something we want to carry.)

As a result, I now have more familiarity with it and can give a more specific response.

It appears that they have done three basic things:

1. They re-typeset it so that it looks better than it did before on the page.
2. They took the notes that used to appear in appendices at the end of the Old and New Testaments and put them on the pages that the notes apply to, so you no longer have to flip to the back of the book.
3. They made minor changes to confusing and archaic language at a very small number of points in the translation.

Here’s how the Ignatius web site (www.ignatius.com) describes this edition:

A completely new typeset and designed edition of the popular Ignatius Revised Standard Version Bible, with minor revisions to some of the archaic language used in the first edition. This revised version is a contemporary English translation without dumbing-down the text. This second edition of the RSV doesn’t put the biblical text through a filter to make it acceptable to current tastes and prejudices, and it retains the beauty of the RSV language that has made it such a joy to read and reflect on the Word of God. Now the only Catholic Bible in standard English is even more beautiful in word and design!

Note the clause that I’ve highlighted in blue. This is code for "this Bible does not make feminist revisions to the genders that are found in the biblical text."

That’s a good thing.

And I’d have no problem recommending this edition.

It occurred to me that folks who are latecomers to the Genesis 1 discussion might want to read the posts in chronological order rather than reverse-chronological order, since together they form basically a single article.

This’ll also be a more convenient format for folks who want to link to them.

So here they are. . . .

Continue reading “Genesis One”

The Framework Interpretation holds that the six days of creation are not intended to be taken literally as a chronology of how God made the world. That’s what they seem to be on the surface, but there are clues in the text–such as the creation of the sun three days after the day/night cycle has been established–that tell us that this is not meant to be taken literally.

The Framework Interpretation holds that Genesis 1 tells us what God did without attempting to tell us in a literal fashion when God did it. Instead, the facts of creation have been fitted into the framework of a single Hebrew week. (The week being a characteristic measure of time among the Hebrews; prior ancient cultures didn’t have weeks.)

The Fourth Day sun problem that other interpretations have (and have typically solved by introducing things the text does not mention, like atmospheric conditions that clear up, allowing the sun to be seen, or days that overlap each other chronologically) is of itself significant evidence for the Framework Interpretation.

But the interpretation could be strengthened if we could sketch out the specific way in which the events of creation have been fitted into a framework–in other words, if we could point to the framework itself. It’s a fair question, after all: "If this isn’t organized chronologically, how is it organized?"

A careful reading of the text reveals this, and we can see not just that the author has arranged things out of chronological order in a way detectable to the ancients, we can see specifically how he has organized them. We know what his organizational criteria were.

For centuries it has been recognized that the six days of creation are divided into two sets of three. In the first set, God divides one thing from another: He divides the light and the darkness on Day One (giving rise to day and night), he divides the waters above from the waters below on Day Two (giving rise to the sky and the sea), and he divides the waters below from each other (giving rise to the dry land) on Day Three. Classically, this is known as the work of division or distinction.

In the second three days, God goes back over the realms he produced in the first three days by division and then populates or "adorns" them. On Day Four he populates the day and the night with the sun, moon, and stars. On Day Five he populates the sky and sea with the birds and the fish. And on Day Six he populates the land (between the divided waters) with the animals and man. Classically, this is known as the work of adornment.

That this two-fold movement represents the ordering principle of Genesis 1 also is reflected at the beginning and end of the narrative. At the beginning we are told that "the earth was without form and void" (Gen. 1:2). The work of distinction cures the "without form" problem, and the work of adornment cures the "void" (empty) problem. Likewise, at the end of the narrative we are told "the heavens and the earth were finished [i.e., by distinction], and all the host of them [i.e., by adornment]" (2:1).

People have recognized for centuries that these are the ordering principles at work in Genesis 1. This is not something modern Bible scholars came up with (e.g., see Aquinas, ST I:74:1).

I don’t fault anyone who has a different view of the text (particularly the Ordinary Day Interpretation), but this one seems to me to be the most plausible view if you give the text a careful reading.

The dislocation of the creation of the sun thus tells us that the text is using a non-chronological ordering, and the recognition of the two phases of creation (distinction and adornment) proceeding through the same three spheres (day & night > sky & sea > dry land) tells us what ordering system is being used.

And none of this is predicated on modern science. It was all there "in the beginning."

The Ordinary Day Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that the six days of creation are six 24-hour days that followed each other consecutively (not overlapping, with no gaps), so that God created the world and had a day left over to rest in the space of an ordinary week.

This is the most plausible interpretation of the text if you give it a casual reading, which is why it has been the overwhelmingly most popular interpretation throughout Church history (and before). Most folks in history have read the text in a casual manner (or, at least, a manner that didn’t give full weight to the points that I’ll get into), and if you do that then this seems to be the obvious interpretation of the text.

I have a lot of respect for this interpretation–much more respect than I do for the others we’ve considered–because it does so much justice to the different aspects of Genesis 1.

I think that there is an interpretation that is even more plausible if you give the text a careful reading, but I want to give the Ordinary Day Interpretation its dues. It’s an interpretation that a reasonable person can come to upon reading the text–as evidence by the fact that so many reasonable people have done so throughout history. It’s more plausible by leaps and bounds than the others we have considered. And I would most definitely hold this view of the text if I didn’t think there was a more plausible one.

But I think there is. The first big clue to that is the fact that the day/night cycle is established on Day One but the sun isn’t created until Day Four. As I mentioned, the ancients knew just as well as we do that it’s the light of the sun that causes it to be day and the absence of the sun that causes it to be night. Origen and Augustine even commented on the fact that the creation of the sun is dislocated from the creation of the day/night cycle.

Now: We know from other passages in Scripture that the biblical authors didn’t always record things in chronological order, but sometimes recorded them according to other criteria, and the dislocation of the creation of the sun and the day/night cycle is a big clue that that’s what we’re looking at here.

It’s the author’s way of telegraphing to the audience the fact that this is a non-chronological sequence and that we need to look more deeply at the text to figure out what’s going on.

That leads to the final and–I think–most plausible interpretation of the text on strictly literary grounds.

The Gap Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that the timeline offered to us in Genesis 1 is meant to be taken literally and sequentially but that there are gaps in it.

One version of the theory holds that there is a gap between Genesis 1:1 and the creation of light in 1:3. As this is usually articulated, God first created the world and then it fell into a state of disrepair somehow (possibly by the fall of the angels) so that it became "formless and void" and God then set about a cosmic renovation project, which is what the six days record.

Advocates of this view appeal to certain words in the Hebrew of Genesis 1 that maybe could be translated in a way that would allow for this theory (but not require it) and to certain other passages in the Old Testament whose support for this theory is highly contestible.

These are just scraps though, not solid evidence for the theory.

The Gap Interpretation simply does not leap off the page as a plausible interpretation when you read this text. I am not aware of anyone in the ancient world who proposed it, and it has every appearance of being a desperate expedient to square Genesis 1 with the findings of modern science rather than a plausible interpretation of the text in its own right.

(It’s also not clear how well it accomplishes its intended task, since modern science does not view the current world order as having been re-established/created in a period of six days following a cataclysm of some kind. To try to deal with this problem, some have suggested additional gaps between the six days, so that they represent six individual days–scattered throughout billions of years–on which God did things, but this also is in no way suggested by the text.)

We’ve also still got the Fourth Day sun problem. (And we may have the land-animals-before-birds problem if you go for a gap of millions of years between Day Five and Day Six.)

While one could postulate that there was a space of time before God initiated the day/night cycle on Day One without doing unjust violence to the text, positing that there was a prior creation that deteriorated and that Genesis 1 is simply the story of how THIS PHASE of cosmic history got started is NOT a plausible reading.

The reason is that it mistakes the primary function of the Genesis 1 narrative. It’s a creation story, not a re-creation story. If it were meant to be the latter then the author would have needed to signal this fact in some clearer way than he did. On its face, the commonsense interpretation of the chapter is that Genesis 1 tells us the story of how God established THE WORLD, not just this phase of the world’s history.

So, again, the kindest thing I can say about this is that it is an interesting stab at interpretation but that it is so speculative that it is completely without support–or substantial support, at any rate.

The next interpretation of Genesis 1 that I’d like to consider is the Revelatory Day Interpretation. According to this interpretation, the six days of creation are not days through which the world was created. Instead, they are six days through which the creation of the world was revealed to man.

The idea is that God showed Moses (or somebody) a series of visions at a rate of one per day in which he disclosed the mystery of creation. Genesis 1 thus serves as a kind of diary of the visions.

This gets around–or potentially gets around–a number of problems.

The first and most obvious one is that it gets around the evening and morning problem I mentioned in the previous post. The evening and morning hendiadys has its usual meaning: It refers to a 24-hour day.

But it doesn’t get around the Fourth Day sun problem–at least unless you want to say that the visions of the six days zoom around in history rather than telling what God did in chronological order.

(Nor, for those wanting to square all this with modern science, does it get around the land-animals-after-birds problem unless you adopt the "zoom around" theory.)

But these are small matters.

The real problem with the Revelatory Day Interpretation is that there is nothing in the text to suggest it. The text does not have the usual language of biblical prophecy. We don’t have Moses writing "And on the second day God showed me this and on the third day he showed me that." The latter is the kind of language we find elsewhere in the prophets, but it isn’t what we find in Genesis 1.

Worse, the very first day is taken up with the creation of the day/night cycle. That seems to be a peg that roots the interpretation of the six days as being days in which the world is created rather than days in which the creation is revealed.

I mean, if you spend your first day setting up the day/night cycle and then you say "and there was evening and there was morning, one day" then you’ve strongly suggested that the "one day" was the one you were just talking about–in which the day/night cycle was created. If you then slap a parallel formula onto the end of each of the other days then it suggests that they, too, were days in which these things were created, not days in which they were revealed.

At a minimum, it would be EXTRAORDINARILY MISLEADING to the reader to do this.

So the most charitable thing I can say about the Revelatory Day Interpretation is that it is an interesting stab at what the days mean, but it is completely without support and on its face contrary to the text, making it almost as demonstrably false as the Day-Age Interpretation.

The Day-Age Interpretation of Genesis 1 holds that each of the six days of creation represents a long, indefinite period of time rather than a 24-hour day. Each day may represent millions or billions of years, allowing the Genesis 1 chronology to be squared with the findings of modern science.

In its favor, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation can point to the fact that, in Hebrew as in English, the word "day" can mean a number of things. It can mean "the daylight hours of the day," "a 24-hour day," or "an undefined period of time."

Sentences like the following three are thus equally possible in both English and Hebrew:

• "He went out during the day, but he came home again at night."
• "We’re open 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
• "Many Christians were put to death in the Emperor Nero’s day."

Strictly focusing on the word "day" (Hebrew, yom, which rhymes with "foam") it is possible that the six days of creation could be read as six long periods of time.

Advocates of the interpretation can even point to the fact that Genesis 2:4 uses the word yom in precisely this sense, speaking of "the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens."

But there are problems.

First, the Genesis 2:4 reference seems to be part of a different literary unit. We seem to have moved on from the recounting of the week of creation to zoom in on the specific creation of Adam and Eve. This means that the use of the word yom in 2:4 may not shed all that much light on its use in chapter 1. Further, since Genesis 1 depicted the creation of the heavens and the earth as a succession of six yoms (to stick an English plural ending on a Hebrew word; the Hebrew plural would be yomim, pronounced yo-meem) and since 2:4 depicts it as being created in a single yom, that’s at least prima facie evidence that yom is being used in different senses in these passages.

These are small matters, though. Now for some big ones.

The Day-Age Interpretation has a HUGE problem with the fact that the day/night cycle is set up on Day One, while the sun isn’t created until Day Four.

The ancients knew that the fact that the sun is shining is what provides daylight and makes it day, and that the absence of the sun is why the sky is dark at night. This is not something that you need Charles Darwin or even Galileo Galilei to tell you. It’s pretty blog obvious. We know the ancients understood it because some of them–like Origen and Augustine–commented on the fact that the sun was created after the day/night cycle and speculated on what this might mean for the nature of these days.

To get around this problem, advocates of the Day-Age Interpretation have tried proposing a number of theories, none of which are plausible readings of the text in Genesis.

For example: There was a mist or cloud or barrier or atmospheric condition of some kind that blocked clear vision of the sun until the fourth age but which let daylight seep through in a diffuse way for the first three ages. Well, that’s not suggested by anything in Genesis 1. It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is otherwise in trouble.

Or: The Day-Ages in Genesis 1 aren’t concurrent. They overlap with each other, so the sun would have been visible from the earth’s surface in earlier ages. (This variant also can get around the problem of how birds and fish get created on Day Five even though land animals aren’t created till Day Six. Modern science suggests that the order was fish > land animals > birds, which doesn’t square with Genesis 1 unless the days overlap.) Again, this is not suggested by ANYTHING in Genesis 1. It’s pure speculation designed to prop up a theory that is otherwise in trouble.

But even if the sun-on-Day-Four problem could be solved, there’s another LARGER problem which is completely insoluble as far as I’m concerned.

It’s this: At the end of each day in Genesis 1 the text says a variant on, "And there was evening and there was morning, a second day" (the last bit of the phrase is what changes).

Evening and morning were the two cusps of the 24-hour day in Hebrew time reckoning. The placement of evening first also represents Hebrew time reckoning, since the Hebrew day began at sunset, so evening came before morning. "There was evening and there was morning" is a kind of hendiadys that expresses the whole of the Hebrew day. It’s like saying "day and night" in English–a way of gesturing to the whole of a 24-hour day by naming the two opposing parts of it.

That’s why the phrase is then followed by "one day, "a second day," "a third day," and so on. The evening and morning hendiadys emphasizes the two parts of each of the six days of creation.

Now here’s the problem: The evening and morning hendiadys clearly points us in the direction of a 24-hour day, and the Day-Age Interpretation has an INSURMOUNTABLE problem in that this hendiadys would NEVER have been used to describe a long, indistinct period of time. Long periods of time (especially ones millions or billions of years long) are not divisible in terms of a single evening and a single morning–not by anything other than the interpreter’s fiat, at any rate. This was NOT a part of ancient Hebrew time reckoning, and it would have occurred to NOBODY in the ancient world.

And so I think the Day-Age Interpretation is demonstrably false. It simply is not a credible reading of the text in literary terms.