Hermeneutics

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel."

—Matthew 1:22-23, NRSV

A guy who calls himself the Thinking Christian has a Facebook post in which he attempts to make the case that his way of reading the Bible is the logical way, and therefore the only way.

In every situation, there is only ONE truth. 2+2 always = 4; P always = P; a lie always = a lie; etc.

We have seen that, although fundamentalists insist that the Bible could not be reliable if the Pentateuch was written by anyone other than Moses, centuries of Bible scholarship have led most scholars to the conclusion that these books were written by later authors.

But does any of this scholarship make a difference? The teachings are the same, regardless of who put the words on the paper. Right?

The documentary hypothesis (DH) has been the leading scholarly view on the authorship of the pentateuch since the 19th century. Fundamentalists haven't accepted it, and probably never will, but the DH has been dominant in the scholarly community for more than a century.

By the early 20th century, the documentary hypothesis (DH) had become the leading explanation for the multiple points of view found in the Pentateuch. Not everyone has been happy with this development.

The documentary hypothesis (DH) would come to full fruition in the 19th century when scholars identified two more sources—"P", which focuses on rituals of interest to priests, and "D", which comprises the majority of the book of Deuteronomy—as well as a redactor "R" who brought everything together into the five books we know today.

The first five books of the Bible—known by Jews as the Torah and by Christians as the Pentateuch—are traditionally attributed to Moses.

But since the mid-1600s, scholars have been raising doubts about Mosaic authorship. In the 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes gave examples of passages that indicated they were written long after Moses' time.

After examining the meaning of the word "day" in the context of Genesis 1 and within the larger context of Genesis, and considering the cosmological assumptions of ancient Israel, it's time to look at the meaning(s) of the first chapter of Genesis.

Creationists sometimes allege that we can't find any meaning if we read Genesis as anything other than history.

In recent posts I've looked at the use of the word "day" in the Genesis 1 creation story, and at how that story should be understood within the larger context of Genesis. This context is important if we are to dig below the surface and find the deeper meaning of the Bible's first creation story.

In the previous post I concluded the story of Genesis 1 describes creation in six days. But if we want to understand this first creation story in Genesis, we can't ignore the second creation story, the story of Adam and Eve, of the garden and the serpent, which says all of creation—from forming the heavens and the earth to making the first human—happened in a single day.