Genesis 1: 1 In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters (NAB).
The Literal and Spiritual Senses
The literal meaning of heaven in this verse is heaven, as one would normally understand God’s home. I am suggesting that heaven does not mean sky, and what is known today as space and outer space.
Good morning Jim,
Nice reflections. Please consider the following. I would like to suggest that ‘heavens’ (it is plural in Hebrew) does refer to the sky and space, but I promote this not to promote a tired and forced dovetailing of modern scientific theory with the ancient narrative, like the idea of the sudden creation of light being the equivalent of the big bang.
No, the reason I promote ‘heavens’ to mean the visible sky is because it is paired with the term for ‘land’. To the ancient writer this would have been, outside of God, ‘everything’ - the sky and land. But while the ancient writer did not possess our scientific understanding of things, he did perhaps have a more philosophical intent with his choice of the words ‘heavens and earth’. Perhaps ultimately he meant ‘Time and Space’ (not outer space) or ‘Time and Matter’.
What?
Huh?
How do I arrive at this? Am I injecting my preferences into the ancient text? There is always a risk of that occurring. However I believe I can justify my suggestion.
First we must ask, What was the sky or heavens to the ancient person? The answer, or at least a strong component of the answer is ‘Time’, or more specific the universal ‘timepiece’ for keeping track of time. We, today, still rely on the ‘movements of the heavens’ to determine our calendar year. However, today, the dissection of this ‘heavenly’ year is much more technically removed from the other celestial movements than it was in ancient times. For example our months are not truely lunar. Ancient civilization was much more connected, or better, dependent on the ‘heavens’ for determining civil, communal, liturgical and personal ‘time’. Artificial time, or time not strictly connected to some celestial phenomena, in the form of hour glasses or water clocks may have been in operation, but the overall experience of time for the common ancient person was tied to the heavens. In Genesis we see this ancient realization when God puts all the celestial things in place. The ‘great’ and ‘lesser’ light and the stars are not mere adornment, they “mark the fixed times, the days and the years, …”. With this detail of the creation narrative we see that the term ‘heavens’ at least has the possibility to invoke the idea of ‘Time’ in the ancient mind - I would suggest a strong possibility.
That the term ‘earth’ or ‘land’ could invoke an idea of ‘Space’ or ‘Matter’ seems straight forward enough. Earth, and all that is in it is essentially ‘matter which is spacial’.
So, perhaps, there is some fledgling ontological aspiration captured and preserved in this opening statement of the Bible. Perhaps, within the limited terminology available, the ancient writer - in an attempt to itemize the essential things that point to that One Essential Thing - tried to convey a very ontologically significant thought, “In the beginning God created Time and Space/Matter.”
Time and Space/Matter are prerequisites for temporal Existence.
Maybe the aspiring thought of the opening statement in the mind of the ancient writer was… "God is the creator and beginning of all that Exists ( i.e. Time and Space/Matter i.e. the Heavens and the Earth).
Perhaps.
Maybe.
Possibly.
I have to wonder if the ancient writer was preoccupied with the origins of the angels at all in this opening verse. Later in the narrative, Augustine in City of God reads the statement, ‘Let there be light’ to reference allegorically the creation or existence of angels and the subsequent separation of light and dark to refer to the fall of the rebellious angels. He sites that only newly created ‘light’ is declared ‘good’ and not the resulting darkness. This has spiritual significance for Augustine as darkness is the only created entity in the 7-day creation narrative that is not declared good.
Also, it is very interesting to me that water is never created outright.
Thanks for listening,
Peter K
