...God created the heaven and the earth."
Let me make something abundantly clear before I go on. This is not an article about religion, God or creationism., but for first line in a book that one's a doozy. For those of you who don't know that definite statement is the first line in The Holy Bible, King James Version (first published in 1611). The book of Genesis goes on to explain how God also created light, the separation of light and dark as days, the "firmament" (which I'll come back to), land, plants, the sun and the moon, sea creatures, mammals, man and finally woman.
In that precise order.
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| There's a song in this picture somewhere. |
What makes the story of creation so important and genuinely fascinating for me is the fact it originates 3400 years ago. Many people either don't know or simply forget that the story of creation appears first in the Torah and pre-dates Jesus by a millennia. More so than the age of the story is it's accuracy in many ways.
As I've already said this isn't an article about Religion or creationism and I'm not for one second trying to back up the belief that God created the Earth, but if you remove God from the story and look at the events it details it gets
a lot right. That is to say someone 3400 years ago had a grasp of the history of the Earth and the universe to some degree.
3400 years ago!
Let's look back at that list again but remove God. First came the heavens - literally space, then the earth. That's true, not entirely the whole story but accurate none the less. At this point the story refers to water on the earth but no land. Next came light and dark - day and night. While the originators of the story would not know this they had nailed fact number 2: The Earth is rotating causing periods of day and night.
Next comes the firmament, a word translated from Hebrew which refers to an extended solid surface or dome. In the story of creation a firmament is placed to "divide the waters from the waters" and is somewhat confusing until God names the firmament Heaven. Seeing as land is yet to be mentioned the clearest interpretation of this would be that the firmament is the atmosphere. Which ever way you look at it the mentioning of the firmament is the first mistake but for 3400 years ago was a pretty close approximation.
The next big error comes with the formation of land, then the sun and moon?! Science would show it was more likely land first then seas as the planet cooled. After that though things get very interesting.
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| Little old us! |
Plants are the first life mentioned, grass and herbs and fruit trees. God sits back and watches the tree bear fruit and seed and new trees grow. This would be simple knowledge to people of the era, the earliest farms being over 1000 years before them, but the creation of animal life is another matter.
In the story first came sea creatures some of which would make their way onto land. Then came sea mammals, namely the whale, and some of those would also crawl onto land. That's exactly Darwin's theory in a nutshell. While it's highly unlikely the whale was the first mammal (Jonah and the shrew would have been an interesting story!) the idea of life crawling out of the oceans is the science we teach today. Finally, just before putting his feet up, God makes people and gives them the Earth.
To recap then, and this is the bit that blows me away, First came space and planets, then an atmosphere, land and seas. Next plant life, the animal life then humans who took "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." For a story that's 3400 years old that's not far off the scientifically believed hypothesises.
While researching this I happened across some very interesting information. For example: there is no consensus as to what came first animal or plant life, some lifeforms cannot evolve and do not show any sign of Darwinian evolution, the oldest farm discovered was in northern Iraq. Also, the story of creation isn't as cut and shut as many people believe and is widely open to interpretation both linguistically and symbolically.
The specific text I referenced is
here
As for what I believe that's not for this article, maybe another day,
Cheers,
R.
