Wednesday bible story

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And (Ruach Elohim) the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And all that God SAID, it was so!

A short but hopefully succinct Bible study this morning. I'm not SURE it'll be succinct, because I haven't started writing it yet. And this will be basically unedited because, in a bit of a hurry now, as today in 7H is busy. I have to take Linda two places this morning as soon as I punch Publish, and this afternoon is the bishop's ZOOM meeting with priest associates of the diocese.

We have two completely different creation stories in the Bible. The Seven Day Creation story in Genesis One, in which humans are created last as the pinnacle of God's loving work. And the story of the Lord God and ha-adam the earthling in the Garden of Eden. Both stories emphasize our prime importance to God.

Our first reading for Trinity Sunday is the first creation story in Genesis, so I'll focus on that, but I probably won't be able to resist saying a little something about the second story, because in the Bible they are linked and related, and we humans are a common theme.

Our story for Sunday, Genesis 1:1-2:4a, is printed below. It's probably much more recent than the second story (which begins at Genesis 2:4b). In our seven-day story, God, Elohim, speaks all that is into creation by his Word. All this God does day-by-day over a six day period, and then on the seventh day, God rewards himself and us by creating the Sabbath as a day of rest. And God makes the sabbath mandatory, so our bosses can't cheat us out of our rest time by making us work 24/7.

On our calendar, the Sabbath is Saturday, which is honored in Jewish tradition and by some Christians (Seventh-Day Adventists come to mind) as the day of rest. Most Christians observe the first day, Sunday, as our day of rest because we honor Sunday as the Day of Jesus' Resurrection.

We read this creation story on Trinity Sunday because for Christians it's trinitarian: God the Father creates, God the Spirit (Hebrew ruach,  Greek pneuma - - both words are what I think is called onomatopoeia, because the Hebrew breathing sound "ruuuuaaaaach" and the Greek spitting sound "p-neuuuuma" both sound out what the word means) moves, hovers, over the earth, and God the Word (Greek logos) speaks "Let there be" and it was so. In the prologue to the Gospel according to John, we are reminded that "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God", and that everything that was created was created through the Logos; and that the Logos was Jesus. 

The Bible is a compilation of books and stories written by different authors over centuries, which Jewish tradition defined and canonized (made it a rule) the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) as their sacred scripture, and the early Christian church assembled, defined, and canonized the New Testament as our sacred Christian scripture in addition to the Old Testament that was Jesus' scripture. The Old Testament language is Hebrew, but a few hundred years before Christ, it was translated into Greek because that was the common spoken language of the day and because Hebrew had basically fallen into disuse; that Greek translation is called the Septuagint or LXX (Roman numerals for seventy). If you want to go deeper into that, ask me in Sunday School, but I'm mentioning it now because in a few minutes I'm gonna point out a couple things.

The first Creation story, 7-Day, seems likely to date from the time after the Jews' return to Judea and Jerusalem from the Babylonian Exile (597-538 BC). Scholars call it the Priestly Story or P-Story because it's sophisticated theology about God that seems not unlikely to have been written by a Temple priest. Writing it was necessary because on returning from Babylon, the priests and other returnees found that the lower class Jews whom the Babylonians had left behind (only the upper class nobles and learned folk had been carried away into captivity), the farmers, shepherds &c, had intermingled with the gentiles around them, intermarried, taken up their pagan religions of Sun God, Moon God, Earth God, Fertility God, and all that, (abandoning Temple cult religion because the Temple was destroyed and their notion was that God lived there, and if God's house was destroyed, God was gone) forgetting their Jewish heritage of belonging to the Lord, the one true God of Creation. Finding this on return from captivity, and as the Temple was rebuilt, the priest(s) wrote this 7-Day story to show the people that the Palestinian pagan gods that they had turned to were nonsense, that all of that had been created by Elohim the one true God of Israel simply by speaking his Word. That's sort of an etiology of the 7-Day story.

You can read the story (below), I'm not gonna pick through it like I would do in Sunday School class. But I need to point this out.

It's to be Trinity Sunday, so, again, note the Trinitarian personifications, persona, persons, manifestation, self-revelations, of God in the story: 
God, creator, Father, 
ruach, pneuma, breath, wind, Spirit,
said, word, logos, Son.

And look (scroll down) to part of Psalm 33 (in the LXX, it's Psalm 32). It lends Jewish "authenticity" to our Christian reflection of God, who has Word (Logos) and Spirit (ruach, pneuma, breath), creating by the Word of the Lord (the Jew's Greek language translation of their Hebrew bible says the Logos of Kyrie). 

What else did I want to say? Well that the second creation story, Genesis 2:4b and following, a very earthy story of the Lord God digging in the dirt, is probably centuries, or millennia, older than the 7-Day story. Some of us, myself included, visualize it having been told those evenings under the stars, during their forty years in the wilderness with Moses, as a beloved old campfire story. I mean, Genesis is full of those wonderful old Sunday School bible stories. 

Again, as I say, both stories are part of our canon of the Bible as the inspired Word of God.

T+

Art: The Universe and Creation by Deynira Harris
https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/deyanira-harris
click the link and look at her art. I think she's inspired. TW+

The word onomatopoeia comes from the combination of two Greek words, onoma meaning "name" and poiein meaning "to make," so onomatopoeia literally means "to make a name (or sound)." That is to say that the word means nothing more than the sound it makes


Psalm 33:1-6 (NRSV)
The Greatness and Goodness of God

1 Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous.
    Praise befits the upright.
2 Praise the Lord with the lyre;
    make melody to him with the harp of ten strings.
3 Sing to him a new song;
    play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.
4 For the word (logos) of the Lord is upright,
    and all his work is done in faithfulness.
5 He loves righteousness and justice;
    the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.
6 By the word (logos) of the Lord the heavens were made,
    and all their host by the breath (pneuma) of his mouth.
6 τῷ λόγῳ τοῦ Κυρίου οἱ οὐρανοὶ ἐστερεώθησαν καὶ τῷ  πνεύματι τοῦ στόματος αὐτοῦ πᾶσα ἡ δύναμις αὐτῶν· 
7 He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle;
    he put the deeps in storehouses.
8 Let all the earth fear the Lord;
    let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.
9 For he spoke, and it came to be;
       he commanded, and it stood firm.





Genesis 1:1-2:4a (NRSV)
Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath

1 In the beginning when God created[a] the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God[b] swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

6 And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” 7 So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. 8 God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

9 And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. 11 Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. 12 The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. 17 God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, 18 to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

20 And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” 21 So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

24 And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

26 Then God said, “Let us make humankind[c] in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth,[d] and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

27 So God created humankind[e] in his image,
    in the image of God he created them;[f]
    male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” 29 God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

2 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. 2 And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

4 These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

Another Account of the Creation
In the day that the Lord[g] God made the earth and the heavens,

Footnotes:
(a) Genesis 1:1 Or when God began to create or In the beginning God created
(b) Genesis 1:2 Or while the spirit of God or while a mighty wind
(c) Genesis 1:26 Heb adam
(d) Genesis 1:26 Syr: Heb and over all the earth
(e) Genesis 1:27 Heb adam
(f) Genesis 1:27 Heb him
(g) Genesis 2:4 Heb YHWH, as in other places where “Lord” is spelled with capital letters (see also Ex 3.14–15 with notes).

Art: The Universe and Creation by Deynira Harris
https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/deyanira-harris