Preface

Author’s Note: You may be wondering, what right does an atheist have to even write Bible commentary and why would he bother? Well, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I have decided to do this because (near as I can tell) a commentary like what I am about to embark on does not currently exist. The Bible is a source of confusion, resentment, morality, immorality, judgement and mercy. It’s been used to defend just about every course of action imaginable and to alternately condemn all those same courses of action. I have been chided for my lack of respect for the book, for not considering it to be the word of God. Rather than take the abstract view, I decided I will just start blogging about the book and analyzing the various bits and pieces as I go. This will be the Bible as I see it.

I wasn’t sure exactly where to start with this process since the Bible itself is available in so many translations. I personally have eight translations at my fingertips right this second and online access to many more although to be honest, none of them is right since they all suffer from one major problem… they aren’t the book that was written originally. Translations are translations and they make assumptions, alterations and guesses that alter the original meanings of the text dramatically. For example, the following two sentences mean the same thing but read dramatically differently:

He rested on his bottom reading a ribald magazine.

He sat on his ass reading porn.

Notice, they mean the same thing but the first is written in much better taste than the second. Both might be rendered into a second language in the same way buy a translator who wanted to present a certain image of the person being written about. Subtleties of language are readily apparent to people who use the language on a regular basis, but the languages the Bible was written in are so far removed from their original places and cultures that the subtleties of meaning are often lost and have to be guessed at by translators. So it’s no surprise that from the very beginning the Bible is a source of conflict and alternate interpretation. Nobody really knows what a scripture actually meant to the person writing the words in the first place. How could they know? They weren’t there and the subtleties are gone.

This is, to my mind, a major strike against the claim that the Bible comes from God. I can’t believe that he would allow his book to be so full of alternate views and ideas from the very first verse. Anyhow, translation is obviously an issue, so what I have done is this. I have purchased the New Oxford Annotated Bible (to go along with the other seven translations I have at my disposal) and I have decided to use it as my main translation because:

a) it is generally considered to do a relatively accurate job at rendering the original meanings and when a verse can be read in multiple ways it provides the alternate readings

b) it does not endorse or promote any particular Bible viewpoint

c) the annotations are scholarly, up-to-date and sound

It doesn’t provide the full picture of everything as you’re reading it as it still puts a Christian worldview on things and hides the intricacies of the original language usage (such as puns, rhymes and other subtleties lost in translation) but it’s about the best English one I’ve found. With all that in mind, on to Genesis…

Overview of Genesis

I had previously been raised to think that Genesis was written by Moses in the wilderness about 1450 BCE. This is just plain wrong. Incorrect. Silly, in fact. It is, however, what many people still believe, so I will summarize the two sides of the argument with the following table:

Evidence In Favor of Moses Writing Genesis Evidence In Favor of A Lot of People Writing Genesis Long After Moses Was Dead
Tradition Mentions of places that didn’t exist until hundreds of years later
Tradition Use of camels as beasts of burden which didn’t happen until hundreds of years later
Tradition Obvious differences in language, names given to God, style, etc…
Tradition Contradictions that only clear up when you consider that there were multiple writers and an editor
Tradition The sum total weight of the convergence of data from all modern archeaological and textual analysis related to the time period and text of Genesis

The view that Genesis was written by Moses isn’t held by many people any more except people who are ignorant of a) archeaology and b) the actual contents of the book of Genesis. Sadly, it’s these people who are most ignorant who tend to use Genesis as a club to beat other people with. The less you know about the Bible, the more you are likely to use it to treat other people like crap it seems (and yes, I mean you, fundamentalists… learn about your own damn book).

To somebody like me, there is no shock or shame in the revelation of science, archeaology and textual analysis that the Genesis myths in chapters 1 through 11 are actually just that, myths. They came from earlier myths from Sumer, as logically they would because the people who wrote them were descended from the very same folks. The earliest Bible stories refer to God by the name El, which was actually not a synonym for the word God but was a name, a proper name, like Odin or Zeus… in fact, exactly like Odin or Zeus since El was the name of the top God in the Canaanite pantheon. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s been discovered that the Isrealites weren’t monotheistic at first, but rather were (gasp!) pagan, just like the rest of the culture they started in. At first El was not the same god as Yahwah/Jehovah/YHWH/Senor Tetragrammaton. No, that was a later whitewashing, fixing, cleaning up if you will. That is part of the subtlety that is lost in translation that I was talking about. In the original languages it’s much clearer that this religion had pagan roots, that they adopted El, invented YHWH and later tried to say they had been the same all along. It’s so much easier when you can just call say GOD wherever either word appears to make it “more understandable” for the modern reader but this already means that the original meaning has been lost before you do anything at all. I mean, if two people wrote two stories about two different Gods at different time periods and they were eventually combined into one book (which is what happened) the logical thing to do would be to say that both names referred to the same god, right? That’s what happened in Genesis so actually understanding Genesis would be easiest if it were split back apart, but it seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. Maybe it will someday.

So, I mentioned that Genesis starts with controversy, so let’s get into it…

Genesis 1:1-2:3
or “The Bible Gets Off On the Wrong Foot

What could possibly be questionable about Genesis 1:1? It’s just “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”, right? Not so fast, buffalo breath. Genesis 1:1 is the subject of some debate because nobody actually knows if it is supposed to be “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” or “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth” and the “when” makes a world of difference. Without the “when” the creation is coming out of nowhere. With it, God is working with the watery void, crafting order out of chaos. Which is it? Was there already matter and chaos or was there nothing? You might think the Bible is clear on this, but in actuality, it’s not. The very first sentence of the Bible is hazy in it’s meaning and it’s haziness could lead to the belief that God didn’t create the universe, but rather provided it with shape, or it could be used to support the idea that there was nothing until God made it or, if you study the original languages and the parallels to the Babylonion Enuma Elish, it can simply be seen as a retelling of the Babylonion creation myth. These questions have been debated for centuries and they lead to massively different theological outlooks. My point here is not to push my view (I support number three, BTW, and consider the whole story a retelling of the older myth, thereby proving nothing about the creation of the world but telling lots about the history of Jewish culture) but rather to point out to anybody who thinks that the word of God is clearly stated in the Bible that it most definitely is not. The book starts off fuzzy and doesn’t get much better after that at making itself clear. This has to make any logically minded person skeptical of it as a communication from God.

Additionally, the creation story presented in the beginning of the Bible contradicts the second creation story that comes in chapter two AND the fossil record by being completely wrong on the order of creation and by presenting the completely absurd idea that there was an ocean in the sky separated by a metal dome with windows in it from the land. This was not metaphorical language. The word translated “firmament” literally meant a metal dome, hammered brass. Anybody reading those words back in the past would have taken them to mean that the sky was a solid metal dome above their heads which held back the waters above. It is only because science has helped modern humans understand that the sky is not a metal dome that we no longer labor under that silly delusion. Thank you science. However, it is modern religious thought that causes the original meaning of those words to be obscured. No thank you religion.

Another subtlety lost in the translation is that GOD is actually a rendering of the word ELOHIM, which technically means “GODS”. It’s a plural. Now, later monotheistic traditions in Judaism have decided to say that the plural was just a way to denote majesty, but archeaology and logic give a different picture. If the Isrealites were originally believers in multiple gods, it is only logical that when they used the word for “Gods” they meant just that, Gods.

So, my attempt at paraphrasing the Genesis creation account in a way that takes all this into account and makes the, erm, difficulties, with the text clear would be something like the following take on Genesis 1:1-8, as it probably would have been understood by a reader at the time it was written:

“In the beginning, THE GODS (ELOHIM, hereafter rendered as THE GODS) created the heavens and earth. (Or maybe they didn’t really, maybe the earth and heavens were already there and this next bit only describes what the earth was like when they got to it. It’s a little unclear.) But regardless of whether it was created from nothing or whether it was just this way when this part happened, the earth was a formless void and it was dark all over the face of the deep (TEHOM: Doesn’t that word TEHOM make you think of Tiamat, the Babylonion goddess representing oceanic chaos in the original version of this story? It probably should, but you might miss that in translation, but I digress.) Back to the point… the earth was a formless void while a wind (yes, “wind”, air the word used means air when it’s used in other places, it means air here regardless of some people’s desire to read “spirit” or “active force” here, it’s just plain old wind being blown by THE GODS) from THE GODS swept over the face of the waters. Then THE GODS said, “Let there be light” and there was light. And THE GODS saw that the light was good; and THE GODS separated the light from the darkness. THE GODS called the light day and the darkness night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day. And THE GODS said, “Let there be a hammered metal dome between the upper waters and the lower waters.” So, THE GODS made the dome and separated the waters above the dome from the waters below it. And it was so. THE GODS called the dome Sky.”

Now, you might read this and think, “well that sounds pretty primitive”. There isn’t a metal dome in the sky (no matter what Martin Luther thought) and I’m pretty certain there is only one GOD in the Bible. You think these things because you have the benefit of looking back over a multi-millenium religious tradition in which these things have been so added to and translated and reworked that you don’t even have the original flavor around any more. The desire to turn this into a harmonious work about a monotheistic God that spells out his long term plan for mankind removes the ability to see it for what it actually was when written, what it actually is. This account is a great example of what I’m talking about. With just a few changes that render it more closely in line with what the original writers actually wrote, it becomes almost unrecognizable to a modern Christian. It certainly isn’t the type of “accurate history” that creationists claim. Not only is there no metal dome in the sky but the entire order of creation is also wrong. Add to this that the language is polytheistic and derived from the older Sumerian and Babylonian myths and you it is pretty clear that the modern conception of what the first Genesis creation account means, what it is, is wrong. It’s a nice story, it’s a good record of where the Isrealites came from, but it ain’t a story about Jehovah creating the universe. It’s lots of things, but it isn’t that.

Interestingly, this initial seven day creation story is only one of two creation stories in the Bible. I’ll get to the second one in my next post.

More From Ryan Sutter

RyanSutter has content marketing with Arkayne Socialize.

Related posts