Tohu wa-Bohu , Primordial Elements and Creatio ex Nihilo | Semantic Scholar
That’s a link to an article with 30+ relevant cited papers. Some good books that really exhausts this subject is “ The Lost World of Genesis 1 “by John Walton ,
“The Bible & Ancient Science: Principles of Interpretation” by Denis Lamoureux and even Richard Friedman’s “ commentary on the Torah touches up on this. Tim Mackie, another old testament scholar , also dives pretty deep into this on his podcast “ The Bible Project “ in this series which is free and roughly 7-8 hours long broken up into several episodes. Genesis 1 and the Origins of the Universe Podcast | BibleProject™
While the scriptures are profitable for everyone, not everyone will be able to grasp the nuances and depths it Carrie’s within. Many have a very plain reading of scriptures. Just enough to satisfy the reading a child may do. But this well crafted verse within this amazingly inspired text comes with one major drawback for modern Christians. It was written for and to ancient Jewish people. They had a very different concept of their world then we do. They had a ancient near eastern understanding of cosmology and we have a very modern one.
For example when we think of nothingness, of everything disappearing except us we imagine a Hollywood style set where someone is running around aimlessly in a 2d white or black room. But for ancient Mesopotamians, especially Jews, nothingness was what they called Tohu wa-bohu which we usually translate as formless and void.
So nothingness to ancient Jewish men and women was just a deep dark ocean as far as you can see with dark clouds as well. That’s why you never see what day water was created. It was considered chaos.
Thoughts?
That’s a link to an article with 30+ relevant cited papers. Some good books that really exhausts this subject is “ The Lost World of Genesis 1 “by John Walton ,
“The Bible & Ancient Science: Principles of Interpretation” by Denis Lamoureux and even Richard Friedman’s “ commentary on the Torah touches up on this. Tim Mackie, another old testament scholar , also dives pretty deep into this on his podcast “ The Bible Project “ in this series which is free and roughly 7-8 hours long broken up into several episodes. Genesis 1 and the Origins of the Universe Podcast | BibleProject™
While the scriptures are profitable for everyone, not everyone will be able to grasp the nuances and depths it Carrie’s within. Many have a very plain reading of scriptures. Just enough to satisfy the reading a child may do. But this well crafted verse within this amazingly inspired text comes with one major drawback for modern Christians. It was written for and to ancient Jewish people. They had a very different concept of their world then we do. They had a ancient near eastern understanding of cosmology and we have a very modern one.
For example when we think of nothingness, of everything disappearing except us we imagine a Hollywood style set where someone is running around aimlessly in a 2d white or black room. But for ancient Mesopotamians, especially Jews, nothingness was what they called Tohu wa-bohu which we usually translate as formless and void.
So nothingness to ancient Jewish men and women was just a deep dark ocean as far as you can see with dark clouds as well. That’s why you never see what day water was created. It was considered chaos.
Thoughts?
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