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Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Sun May 06, 2018 6:35 pm
by Ethan
What it means by separating, is related too the ancient expression, 'Breaking of the Day' or Daybreak .

Isaiah 58:8 - Then shall thy light break forth as the morning.

The Hebrew word here is 'Baqa' "Split, Cleave or Break' the Septuagint reads Ragh (ῥαγή) "smite", so the language is literally
saying that the 'Light' broke or cleaved in half . i.e Gen 1:4 "Divided the light, there was morning and evening. It's an expression.

Gen 1:1 can also reads 'In the Beginning the-luminaries divided the Skies and the-land.

Gen 1:27 - The god divided the man from the rib and from the rib he created Man and Woman.
* the word 'image' and 'rib' are from the same root.

Genesis 1 is not a 'creation-story' or something that happened at a particular time in history, it's Annual through the Seven-months, starting with Nissan and concluding with the Harvest, the Seventh-Month ( September ).

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 9:36 am
by byblos
lpetrich wrote: Sun May 06, 2018 5:48 pm
Ethan wrote: Thu Apr 26, 2018 8:51 pm The two parts of Genesis were written by the same person ...
The two Genesis stories are stylistically very different. They also have different subject matter, different ways of creating, differemt amounts of orderliness, etc. Even God's level of happiness differs.

In the first one, God creates not only by commanding, but also by separating. This may be a relic of some story like the Enuma Elish one, where a god creates the familiar Universe by cutting up a primordial monster.
Yes it is. But that's the effect of chiastic structuring. Please look up Yehuda Radday and chiasms. It is chiasms that make the "multiple authors" claim impossible. The Noah's ark narrative, for instance, is a perfect chiasm - to the point where it looks like a hawk (like Horus).

Enuma Elish is not the primary source for Genesis 1. It's the Amenta myths. This is because the Egyptian Book of the Dead displays a travel throughout the entire universe by the gods - heaven, earth and the underworld. This is exactly what the Queen of Heaven did.
Furthermore, the language of Genesis 1 is closer to the Egyptian language (as shown by Gardiner and Budge) and has monotheistic African elements. Only in Africa (prior to the Bible) will you see terms like "it was good", "in the beginning", "sun, moon and stars" and "God". These phrases are absent in Mesopotamia.

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 9:38 am
by byblos
Ethan wrote: Fri May 04, 2018 8:31 am The Queen of Heaven is most likely the effeminate form of Jehovah, note the that name יהוה is feminine by default, this is why Lexicons won't disclose the gender, but it matches with ἰοῦν ( IO ) and Daphne . In Fact the histories of Herodotus begins with the Phoenicians entering Egypt with IO.

Here is something interesting about Jeremiah 44 , it mentions 'Tahpanhes which derives from the Greek , 'Daphne' , this was a Greek colony
in Egypt that was established during the reign of Psamtik I, alongside Elephantine. (664–610 BCE ).

Thus why do we see 'Queen Daphne (Tahpenes) in 1 Kings 11:19-20 alongside Solomon & Rehoboam?
Very interesting Ethan. Thanks. I'll look into that.

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 2:32 pm
by lpetrich
I'll look at methods of creation more closely. Creation from nothing or creation from pre-existing material?

I'll start with the second story. It starts with a barren land with water as a mist above it or else as springs in it and streams on it (translations vary).

God creates Adam from dust and brings Adam to life by breathing into his nostrils. Clearly pre-existing material.
God made plants grow out of the ground. Looks like pre-existing material.
God forms all the animals from the ground. Clearly pre-existing material.
God forms Eve from one of Adam's ribs. Clearly pre-existing material.

So God uses pre-existing material all the way.

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Tue May 15, 2018 3:08 pm
by lpetrich
The first creation story is rather different.

Genesis 1:1-2, usually translated as something like:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered its depths. The Spirit of God hovered over the water.

This is often interpreted as God poofing the Earth into existence in a dark and formless state. But it can be stated in a fashion that makes God use pre-existing matter:

In the beginning of when God was creating the heavens and the earth,
the earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered its depths. The Spirit of God hovered over the water.

Notice how the first two sentences now flow together.


God creates light by commanding it into existence, and he then separates it from darkness.

Then God creates the vault of heaven by commanding it into existence. It divided the water above it from the water below it.

God then commands the water below that vault to be gathered in one place, and when it was, it revealed dry land. He then commanded the land to make plants, and they grew.

God creates the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, though with no details given. He then creates flying and aquatic animals by commanding the sky and the sea to produce them, and he creates land animals by commanding the land to produce them.

However, that story does not go into detail about how humanity was created, despite telling us that God created both sexes at the same time and made them resemble him.


Let's see what was created from what:
  • Commanding: light, vault of heaven
  • From pre-existing material: daylight, celestial water, terrestrial water, land, plants, aquatic animals, flying animals, and land animals.
  • Ambiguous: the earth and heaven initially, the celestial bodies, humanity

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Wed May 16, 2018 8:44 am
by byblos
lpetrich wrote: Tue May 15, 2018 2:32 pm I'll look at methods of creation more closely. Creation from nothing or creation from pre-existing material?

I'll start with the second story. It starts with a barren land with water as a mist above it or else as springs in it and streams on it (translations vary).

God creates Adam from dust and brings Adam to life by breathing into his nostrils. Clearly pre-existing material.
God made plants grow out of the ground. Looks like pre-existing material.
God forms all the animals from the ground. Clearly pre-existing material.
God forms Eve from one of Adam's ribs. Clearly pre-existing material.

So God uses pre-existing material all the way.
It's pre-existing material because the 7-day process already happened. The Amenta myths reflect the same thing. Ptah and the Ali create the heavens and the earth, separate the heavens from the earth and then the Garden of Amenta is created. But we start to see more Sumerian elements added with Eve coming from Adam's rib: The Enki-Nihursag-Ninti myth reflects this. Ninti means lady of the rib.

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Wed May 16, 2018 9:00 am
by lpetrich
byblos wrote: Wed May 16, 2018 8:44 am
lpetrich wrote: Tue May 15, 2018 2:32 pm I'll start with the second story. ...

So God uses pre-existing material all the way.
It's pre-existing material because the 7-day process already happened. ...
That's shoehorning the two stories together. Something I find very implausible

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Wed May 16, 2018 9:36 am
by byblos
lpetrich wrote: Wed May 16, 2018 9:00 am
byblos wrote: Wed May 16, 2018 8:44 am
lpetrich wrote: Tue May 15, 2018 2:32 pm I'll start with the second story. ...

So God uses pre-existing material all the way.
It's pre-existing material because the 7-day process already happened. ...
That's shoehorning the two stories together. Something I find very implausible
Why? Fusion is demonstrated in many parts of the Bible including the Exodus and the Book of Revelation. Revelation has over 400 Old Testament Allusions fused with Egyptian myths from the Egyptian Book of the Dead in order to make it Apolcalyptic ("from hidden") due to the (scattered) Jewish Diaspora of the 1st century BC. The reason why fusion is in the Book of Genesis is that the Genesis 1-11 author (a servant of Jeremiah (Genesis 1 is similar to the tohu-bohu of Jeremiah 4)) was in both Africa and Mesopotamia - sending a message to all the Jewish exiles.

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Thu May 17, 2018 8:00 am
by semiopen
byblos wrote: Wed Apr 25, 2018 8:24 am ...By the 6th century BC, Jews left Israel to go to Babylon, Armenia and Egypt...

As for the Sabbath, the Jews of Elephantine DID keep the Sabbath by this time.
That almost sounds true and it's cool how authoritative you make it seem.

You probably are referring to the four times ostraca from Elephantine refer to "SBH" which is probably Shabbat, however these are from the 5th centtury BCE (why not use BY - Before Yoshke - instead of BC?). Moreover, they do not suggest, in any way, that the Jews "DID keep the Sabbath" so far as I understand them. The simplest way to research this is to google - elephantine Sabbath ostraca.

In other posts you refer to Chiastic_structure for example
byblos wrote: Fri May 11, 2018 9:36 am
...that's the effect of chiastic structuring. Please look up Yehuda Radday and chiasms. It is chiasms that make the "multiple authors" claim impossible. The Noah's ark narrative, for instance, is a perfect chiasm - to the point where it looks like a hawk (like Horus).
As the wiki points out -
Gordon Wenham has analyzed the Genesis Flood narrative and has shown that it is essentially an elaborate chiasm.[6] Based on the earlier study of grammatical structure by F. I. Andersen,[7] Wenham illustrated a chiastic structure as displayed in the following two tables.
The tables in the wiki demonstrate that an argument for a chiastic structure is concrete, to my knowledge nobody has demonstrated a chiastic structure for the creation narrative. If you had a personally developed argument, surely we would expect to see it at least partially described in posts here.

However, one has to, at least partially, admire how well you spin bullshit.

Re: The Two Genesis Creation Stories

Posted: Fri May 18, 2018 6:49 am
by lpetrich
Being a chiasm may only mean that a single author created that structure. That author could easily have used material from more than one source, as the author of the Noah's-Flood story apparently did.