The Skies, Land & Beginning at the Way Back When

BECOMING HUMAN, Part Four

Logan Rowland
Aug 23, 2017 · 5 min read

Part 1: The Story Behind Everything

Last Part: Gods, Monsters & the Ancient Cosmos

Up Next: The Ancient Meaning of Create


Last post we explored one of the ancient Israelites neighbors, the Babylonians, creation narrative. The purpose was to point out the radical worldview difference between ours and theirs. The Babylonian creation myth, The Enuma Elish, is foreign, strange and unsettling.

(A quick refresher: the king of the gods, Marduk, killed his great great g-ma, Tiamat, the dragon goddess who was the sea, whatever that means, and built the skies and earth from her corpse. Remember? WEIRD.)

When we open our Bibles, we are entering into a strange, wonderful, enchanted, unsettling and fully different world than our own. We wouldn’t (at least I hope we wouldn’t) go to some other country and expect to experience American culture there. If you’re going to Mexico, you will probably buy a language book, and maybe even read a book or watch some YouTube videos about the culture. You wouldn’t go there and expect it to look like Dallas, Texas.

When we read the Bible we are entering into another world, culture and time, so we need to put in a little work to read it fully. The problem with reading the Bible in modern times is that we become far too familiar with it. And we desperately need to recover its strangeness.

We read passages over and over again, hear sermons preached over passages more often than that, and we often have the stories pounded into our eardrums since we were children. And when we become too familiar with the scriptures, we often miss what’s just below the surface.

Perhaps one of the most famous single verses in all of the Bible, Genesis 1.1 is one of the most clearest culprits of this problem.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
— Genesis 1.1

So many of us know this verse by heart, even those of us who don’t even believe any of this stuff. For a lot of us this verse is more connected to our beliefs and arguments about the origins of the world than the beginning of a grand story.

Have we become too familiar with Genesis 1.1?

Let’s talk about that.

RESHIT.

That’s the Hebrew word used in Genesis 1.1 that we translate beginning.

And no, it isn’t pronounced the way your thinking, stop laughing. It’s pronounced reh-sheet and has nothing to do with a bad time in the bathroom (sorry mom).

What is most interesting about this word is that it isn’t about a specific time, so-to-speak. The Hebrew word reshit (think, reh-sheet, please) is actually an indeterminate amount of time.

Let me give you a modern example.

My wife uses the phrase, “the other day,” all the time. Whether she means two days ago, a few weeks ago, last year or even, like, six years ago, she says: the other day I saw a pretty crazy thing. She isn’t giving me a specific time, but rather, an indeterminate time way back when.

One more example.

The other day (see what I did there?) my wife and I went and visited a elderly family friend in surgery rehab. His first words to us: I haven’t seen you two in a coon’s age. Does he literally mean 2 to 3 years (yes, I googled how long racoons live, leave me alone)? Or does he mean: wow, I haven’t seen you two since way back when?

Do you see where I’m going here?

If the author or authors of Genesis did want to mark this beginning as a true beginning, they had another word at their disposal that meant a literal beginning: techillah.

(and yes, it is pronounced how you probably think — tekh-il-law.

What does this mean? Well, it could mean that a clearer, more faithful translation of this verse (at least into our language and culture and time) would be:

Way back when God created…

All of a sudden, this is beginning to look less like a first action and beginning and more like a title for what’s to come, does it not? An interesting observation is that Genesis One actually concludes in the beginning of chapter two:

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
— Genesis 2.1

This conclusion seems to clearly connect to Genesis 1.1, implying the first sentence of the Bible is an introduction, rather than an initial action.

SHAMAYIM & ERETS

Let’s finish this sentence.

When you read “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth?” what do you imagine? Most of us understand the word heavens in the Bible often means the sky, but what about the word earth?

The Hebrew word usually translated as earth is erets and is literally translated: earth.

Earth-shattering, no?

Here’s the thing: when we think earth, we imagine a planet rocketing through space. When the ancient world thought earth, they thought the ground beneath my feet.

The earth is the land, not the planet.

What about shamayim?

We may be feeling pretty good about knowing that heavens often means sky, but how does it make you feel to learn that the ancient world thought the sky was solid? Or that the ancient world said skies rather than sky?

The hebrew word shamayim is plural and connotes something grander than just sky. The realm above us, in all its vast array, is a vastness of things, rather than a single thing.

Is your head spinning yet?

It would seem that our own Bible just might be as foreign, strange and unsettling as the world it came out of.

And we’re just getting started.

Until next time, live questionably everybody!

NEXT TIME: what on earth did the ancient world think “creation” meant?

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Logan Rowland

Written by

I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m a writer.

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