Genesis is the name we use for the first book of the Old Testament. It literally means: IN THE BEGINNING.

But the stories in the first book of the Old Testament were not originally recounted in Greek, but in an ancient Hebrew dialect. And the Hebrew word for "In the beginning" is "Bereshit". It is no wonder that English speaking Christians all over the world refer to the first book of their sacred two part Bible as "Genesis". And not Bereshit.

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.  The God said, Let there be light. And there was light. God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night. Thus evening came and morning followed--the first day. (Gen. C1, Verse 1-5)

So far, so good. What may one glean from this beginning?

In the beginning, God started with something.  Not nothing.  An abyss, a wasteland, a mighty wind and some water.

If there was something (that is at the time of creation and before God had begun to create the heavens and the earth) then at some other time prior to all of this, the abyss, the wasteland, the mighty wind and some water must also have been created at some point. There simply is no attempt to delve into this issue by the authors.

Whoever wrote Bereshit had little interest in the questions surrounding the origins of the universe that intrigue theoretical physicists and theoretical mathematicians today.

Prior to this first day of creation, there had been no night and day and there had been no light. Although when there is no light, there must have been darkness. Of course no one could see the darkness anyway, so what is the difference?

Of course, no God had not yet created the sun, the moon or the stars. He would not get around to this until the fourth day. The obvious question would be:

Where did this light come from without the sun, the moon and the stars and how could there have been a day or an evening?

This analysis may seem trite, but there are people in the world that are literalists. That is, they profess to believe in every single word written in the Bereshit and that every word was literally written by God.

And yet, by the time on briefly scans the first paragraph of this mighty tome, the only conclusions to be drawn from it would be that the opening lines are not only philosophically inconsistent, but fly in the face of truths that were known by the ancient Greeks over 2500 years ago.

Because there are literalists who content that an actual omnipotent being of some kind wrote the Bereshit, the obvious must never be taken for granted.

Aside from the fact that the earth was not created before the heavens--however formless at the time, there certainly could be no day or night or any way of discerning the day from the night.

A more interesting query to me involves the necessity of God speaking during the creation of this fairy tale universe. To whom is He speaking? I think it may be relevant to skip over to the New Testament at this point and take a look at the first lines contained in the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word

The Word was in God's presence,

And the Word was God.

He was present to God in the beginning.

Through him all things came into being

And apart from him nothing came to be.

Whatever came to be in him, found life,

Life for the light of men,

The light shines on in the darkness

A darkness that did not overcome it.

(John 1, 1-5)

Thus John, whoever he was or whoever they were, began this gospel with a song. But why a song?

The Prologue is a hymn, formally poetic in style, perhaps an independent composition and only later adapted and edited as an overture to the gospel...The Roman writer Pliny mentions the Christians in Asia Minor as singing hymns to Christ as a God. Commentators are divided on whether the initial reference to the early ministry of Jesus Christ is I, 9 or I, 14.

In the beginning; these the first words of Bereshit 1, 1 serve as the Hebrew title of that book. Here however, they introduce the two verses describing the situation before creation. Was: three times in the first verse this verb is used of the Word. First it indicates timeless existence; next relationship to the Father; finally identity with God. (NAB 1169 f. 1 & 2)

In other words, John wished to bring his followers back to the concept of Bereshit. In the beginning.

But John also may be demonstrating something else here.  He seems to be shedding light upon some facets of the original Bereshit. He starts his entire testament with a song. This may give us a clue as to the origins of Bereshit. That is, the original Bereshit as well as the so-called Prologue of John, was meant to be sung. Not read. Not simply recited. But sung.

He also provides an explanation as to why God has to keep saying things while He is involved in the six days of creation.

I will reexamine this later but the opening lines of Bereshit have always struck me as having something to do with man's need to personify language itself.

Why do we put our hand on a text while making a vow?

Why do we always stress that the Bible is the Word of God?

What is so important about the word Word?

Why are we not more interested in the aims or intentions of God? Words can be defined in so many different ways in terms of context, in terms of multiple meanings, in terms of argument. Just as the ancient sophists or the modern day spinners.

After all, a rose by any other name is still a rose.

Actions speak louder than words.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Even the Nixon Administration would contend that they wished the public to take more note of what it did than what it said.

When we are in argument over some issue, we may look at our foe and state firmly: Those are mere words. I cannot believe you are serious.

And what type of words are we really talking about?

Songs?

Oral pronouncements?

The written word?

To me anyway, words are more than just thoughts. Words represent the communication, the translation of thoughts.

Which brings me back to the original question: Who is God supposed to be communicating to while he pronounces that everything he has accomplished is good?

Then God said, Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters, to separate on body of water from the other. And so it happened. God made the dome and it separated the water above the dome from the water below it. God called the dome the sky. Evening came and morning followed...the second day. (Gen C1, Verse 6-8)

Now I spent a lot of time in Minneapolis and I am more than just familiar with the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome where the Twins play baseball and the Vikings pretend to play football. (I know, we are destroying this landmark that everybody hated when it was first built, at least in this state)

Whatever the author thought God was creating, I can assure you that He was not creating a dome. At the least a dome is:

A hemispherical roof or vault or a structure or other object resembling a dome.

Anyone should be able to discern that whoever wrote this opus thought the world was flat and not a globe.

And the writer was most surely wrong about his flat world. (No apologies due that asshat Friedman)

Even many Greeks knew the world was round.

Aristarchus or Aristarch (Greek: Ἀρίσταρχος; 310 BC - ca. 230 BC) was a Greek astronomer and mathematician, born on the island of Samos, in Greece. He was the first person to present an explicit argument for a heliocentric model of the solar system, placing the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the known universe. He was influenced by the Pythagorean Philolaus of Kroton, but, in contrast to Philolaus, he had both identified the central fire with the Sun, as well as putting other planets in correct order from the Sun. His astronomical ideas were rejected in favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy until they were successfully revived nearly 1800 years later by Copernicus and extensively developed and built upon by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. The crater Aristarchus on the Moon is named in his honor.

So we had a solar system, in theory, 2200 years ago. Ha. If you wade through some Aristotle you will find certain chapters depicting the earth as an orb.

And Ptolemy, the second century Egyptian astronomer even went so far as to make a globe to represent our planet and it was used by scholar for over a thousand years. Columbus actually used a Ptolemic globe. Since Ptolemy was off on his scale model of the earth, Columbus really did think he was going to Asia in 1492. And no sailor really believed the world was flat. You could see the curve on the horizon when traveling out to sea.

Besides this, any idiot could see that the Moon was an orb. And any idiot could discern that the moon was round even when it was crescent because the moon that is not lit still manages to block out the stars.  We have such strange views on what the so-called ancients thought!!!

Back to the Bereshit.  How anyone could discern the second day from night, even God, is beyond me.

Then God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered into a single basin, so that the dry land might appear. And so it happened: the water under the sky was gathered into its basin, and the dry land appeared. God called the dry land the earth and the basin of water he called the sea. God saw how good it was. Then God said, let the earth bear forth vegetation, every kind of plant that bears seeds and every kind of fruit tree on earth that be as fruit with its seed in it. And so it happened; the earth brought...God saw how good it was, Evening came and morning followed---the third day. (Gen. C1, Verse 9-13)

Then God said: let there be lights in the dome of the sky, to separate day from night. Let them mark the fixed times, the days and the years, and serve as luminaries in the dome of the sky, to shed light upon the earth. And so it happened: God made the two great lights, the greater one to govern the day and the lesser one to govern the night and he made the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to shed light upon the earth to govern the day and the night and to separate light from the darkness. God saw how good it was. Evening came, and morning followed--the fourth day. (Gen C1, Verse 14-19)

The third and fourth day have to be read together in order to see how absolutely idiotic the entire first chapter of Bereshit is. How could there have been any vegetation without the sun?  What the hell separated the day from the night without the sun, moon or the stars? And how would you measure the first three days?

Then God said, Let the water teem with an abundance of living creatures and on the earth let birds fly beneath the dome of the sky. And so it happened. God created the great sea monsters and all kind of swimming creatures with which the water teems and all kinds of winged birds. God saw how good it was and God blessed them saying, be fruitful and multiply and fill the water of the seas and let the birds multiply on the earth. Evening came and morning followed the fifth day. (Gen. C1, Verse 20-23)

There is not much to add here. Except that birds were not created before a least some of the creatures enumerated in the next stanza of the poem. That is, fish did not evolve  into birds. Fish had to evolve into land creatures first. Most likely birds evolved from dinosaurs.  I bring this up because some 'intellectuals' have said that at least the bible got the order right in terms of stages in the evolutionary process.

Absolutely nothing is 'correct' from either a scientific perspective or any sane man's perspective.

Then god said, let the earth bring forth all kinds of living creatures; cattle, creeping things and wild animals of all kinds. And so it happened; God made all kinds of wild animals, all kinds of cattle and all kinds of creeping things of the earth. God saw how good it was. Then God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and the cattle and all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground....

Thus we end the first chapter of Bereshit .

We will see if my Bereshit study continues depending upon who decides to read this.

(I actually wrote a 60 page essay on Bereshit on an old computer when I was not on line some four years ago. I lost it all except 40 pages I just found today that I must have printed. Ha. I have alluded to some of the stuff in this piece in other posts. The purpose of the essay was to point out the actual language that is being used to attack the Theory of Evolution. Do not be fooled. When 'they' say they are not saying the earth is 6000 (or 8000, some do claim 8,000) years old, they are lying. They are all, and I mean all, literalists as far as bible study goes. And it pisses me off.  'They' will also claim that I am not a biblical scholar. Bullshit. They are supposed to be good protestants--no Catholics believe this crap and if they do they are ignoring Rome and their own bishopric in this country.  And protestants claimed that no pope, no bishop, no scholar knows the bible better than a good old religious guy who reads his own family bible. HA!!!)