AT FIRST
Estimated reading time: less than a minute.
Nowadays there is often a debate about how to understand the first chapter of the book of Genesis, how it relates to the data of modern science, etc. But it’s worth thinking about this: how were these lines understood in the context of their time? Today, for example, people often ask the question: “is there a God?” For us, the first phrase of the Bible - “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” - sounds like the answer, first of all, to this question. But the ancient reader was firmly convinced that gods exist, and that the world around them was created by them. Reading the same phrase about the creation of the world, he most likely asked himself: “which of the gods, and in what way?”
But the book of Genesis is not a theological treatise that discusses the properties and definitions of God. The properties of God and the world he created are revealed primarily in the story of creation. It would be absurd to look in these lines for confirmation or refutation of facts and hypotheses from the field of natural sciences - the Bible is talking about absolutely nothing about that, and the natural scientific ideas of its earthly authors were quite consistent with their time. Nowhere, for example, will we find any indication that the earth is round and revolves around the sun. But we can easily find in the Bible a description of some of the principles by which the universe is organized.
The universe is created strictly ordered: heaven and earth, light and darkness, day and night. When God begins to create living nature, then from the very moment of its origin it looks like many species, different from each other and self-reproducing: “And the earth brought forth green plants, grass yielding seed according to its kind, and a tree bearing fruit, in which is its seed. according to his kind." Oddly enough, even in Soviet times this simple truth was unknown to the People's Academician Comrade. Lysenko...
In addition, the universe itself is becoming more and more involved in the creative process. If heaven and earth arose directly from nothing, then grass and trees, according to the word of God, were already produced by the earth. All these events, according to the book of Genesis, took “three days,” but this hardly means a period of 72 astronomical hours, because the orderly alternation of day and night does not appear until the fourth day, when God creates the sun and moon. Apparently, the word “day” here refers to a period of time of indefinite duration - perhaps billions of years in terms of our time.
The creation of the sun and moon on the fourth day seems, at first glance, illogical. Light and darkness, day and night are already separated from each other - and only then do luminaries appear, called upon to “manage” their alternation. Some commentators believe that here the creation of the world is shown from the point of view of an earthly observer: the earth's atmosphere at certain geological periods was opaque, they say, and the sun and moon were simply not visible. But rather, here we have a particular manifestation of the general principle: first matter is created, and then it is ordered: the “clockwork mechanism” of the sun and moon is started.”
And when on the fifth day God creates fish and birds, and on the sixth day - animals (they also came from water and earth), then He transfers one more authority to his creation: “and God blessed them, saying: be fruitful and multiply, and fill waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” But living nature, unlike living nature, is not yet structured, it does not have its own head. And then God creates man.
The language of the first chapters of Genesis is poetic. The Bible says that the first man was created "from the dust of the ground." So the biblical author, apparently, wanted to describe the inextricable connection of man with the material world in which he lives. However, in man there is not only a material and animal beginning. The Bible tells about it this way: man did not come to life until God breathed into him his Spirit, which became the breath of man.
“Why did God create man?” – this was a question my little daughter once asked me, many years ago. After thinking a little, I answered: “So that He has someone to love.” This answer still seems to me to be the most correct. Looking over His creation at the end of each day, God said “good,” but only at the end of the sixth day, immediately after the creation of man, did He say, “very good!” But at the very beginning of their history we see another goal: “And God said: Let us make man as our image and as our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over all the creeping things that creep on the earth." Man is created not just “in the image” of God (as we read in the Synodal Translation), but as His image and likeness, as His icon in this world. This, in particular, means that man is called upon to dominate the world of living nature. From now on, God shares with His creation not just His creative power, but also His power over the created world.
Man's power over the newly created world manifested itself most clearly when man gave the animals names. A name in the ancient East (and not only in the East, and not only in antiquity) was by no means considered a random combination of sounds - knowledge of the true name indicated an understanding of the essence of its bearer.
It is after the story about the naming of animals that the biblical author places the story about the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam. The first story about the creation of man and woman emphasizes the internal unity of humanity, and the second, where Eve emerges from Adam’s rib, explains the primacy of man, which in ancient times seemed unshakable. But this story also emphasizes the close connection of the two sexes - not indifferent equality, as modernity demands, but unity up to fusion: “a man will leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife; and the two will become one flesh.”
The very first man is simply called Man
- this is exactly how the Hebrew word
Adam
.
This name is associated with the word adama
, “soil,” and this connection can be explained in two ways.
Man was created “from the dust of the earth,” that is, unlike God, he belongs to the material world. But this world is not only the source of his appearance, but also the point of application of his creative forces, without which this world cannot fully bear fruit: “...and there was no man ( adam
) to cultivate the earth (
adam
).” God settles man in Eden, the Garden of Eden, “to cultivate and keep it.” Thus, man was called to participate in the creation of the world - to preserve and increase what God created. By the way, nowhere in the Bible does it say that God would take away this privilege from him...
Babylonian myths, much older than the Old Testament, also offer their own story of the creation of the world. The first pair of gods, Apsu and Tiamat, gave birth to many deities who gradually began to quarrel with their parents. A series of wars and “palace coups” ended with the god Marduk killing the ancestor Tiamat in battle, tearing her apart and creating the universe from parts of her body.
It was necessary to maintain order in the created world, and the supreme gods entrusted this work to the younger ones. They soon got tired of such a life, they rebelled and forced the supreme gods to create a replacement for them - man. People regularly carried out their duties, but at the same time they also multiplied, and after twelve hundred years the numerous humanity began to make such noise that the gods could not sleep. To regulate the number of their servants, the gods successively sent epidemics and droughts to them. But these measures did not help for long, and finally the gods decided to resort to a radical remedy: a flood. However, here we are already approaching the story of the biblical Noah...
It is characteristic that for the Babylonians, as well as for other pagan peoples, the relationship between the gods and humanity was completely devoid of a moral element: the gods create or destroy people in much the same way as people breed bees or exterminate cockroaches, based on their interests. But the biblical text is strikingly different from all of them. There is one God, says the Bible, and in the ancient world this sounded sensational. He was not born by anyone, was not at enmity with anyone, and did not win his throne in a stubborn struggle. He single-handedly created this world with His word, and man became the crown of this creation: a ruler and co-creator, and not a slave at all.
At the end of the story of the six days of creation we read: “And God finished on the seventh day His work that He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work that He had done.
And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, for on it He rested from all His works.” As is easy to see, our weekly days off go back precisely to this story (not a single people of antiquity, except the Israelis, thought of having non-working days for themselves so often and so regularly). But there is something more important here. Creation is completed, the ability to create has been transferred to man, who can now take care of this world. God, of course, does not abandon him. We read that on the seventh day He simultaneously completes creation and rests (the creators of the Russian Synodal translation found this so strange that they inaccurately translated “completed by the seventh day”). This can be understood in such a way that now God’s action in the world must be accomplished through His image - man.
The Bible actually tells us how successful this plan was and what happened next.
The first day of creation is a week or an indivisible day
“And God separate the boundaries of light and the boundaries of darkness, and God will call light day, and call darkness night,” Paleya Tolovaya tells about the events of the first day.
The Old Believers call it week. Because it is 1 - a unit that is not divisible.
Despite the external semantic similarity of the biblical and saroverical versions of the events of the first day of creation, upon careful examination, they have nothing in common. In the Bible: “...God said: Let there be light. And there was light...” That is, the light appeared by order of God. In Paleya Tolkovaya, God did not create it: “And God separate the boundary between light and the boundary of darkness...”.
Here is the explanation given by Bogumil Qatar about the first day of creation:
“The word used “separate” literally means to separate what was previously indivisible. And our indivisible is week or “first”. But God does not separate him first, who simply has no one to separate from, since he, the light, is the ONLY one. God separates BETWEEN light and BETWEEN darkness. There is a separation of borders, not light and darkness - they are only tools for performing the task of separating borders.”
God did not create light on the first day of creation, but space. With the help of light and darkness. Indeed, how do we perceive the space around us? We see it in the light of day and feel it in the dark. For us it is seen in the form of a play of light and darkness. It is extremely important for a person to be somewhere specific. We definitely need psychologically “so that people don’t feel like heaven and earth are without beginning.”
We cannot imagine a limitless Universe. Well, this is not given to us. We just pretend to imagine. It turns out that God created space and distance only for human convenience. In His world there is no need for them.
Day two of creation - Monday
After the first day of creation - the week - the second came - Monday. That is, the day AFTER THE WEEK. And Monday is a hard day. You know, have you heard? Why is that? But because on this day God created matter. All massive, huge objects of the universe are great weights.
“It is quite obvious that light is a volume, it creates a vessel (the heliosphere) with its standing wave, it fills it and changes everything that was there before, that is, darkness. Light appears, the volume of illuminated space appears, and therefore all its characteristics. When the masses are created on Monday, they will find themselves in both light and darkness and they will have their own characteristics, such as weight, mass, volume, dimensions, physical properties, etc. But they will be tied to light and darkness, because “all this is just a consequence of space,” explains the bookish Commissioner of Qatar.
Indeed, to create space itself, the separation of light and darkness is sufficient. But imagine how you feel on a dark night, when you can’t see anything. You turn on the flashlight, light appears and there is emptiness in the beam. Absolute. A bottomless shining abyss opens before you.
What am I talking about? About the fact that light alone is not enough for a person to perceive space. He still needs that very play of light and darkness, or rather shadows. And for this game we need material objects that obscure the light and have different illumination characteristics.
The Creator spoils us with his inventions, oh, how he spoils us.
Third day of creation - Tuesday
Why is the third day of the creation of the world Tuesday? Yes, because it echoes day one. God repeated his actions, but in a different, more local and specific way. On Tuesday he divided the heavens, separated water and land. Tuesday SECOND week.
These three days are the most important in all of God's creation, according to the Commissioner of Qatar. If you read his continuation of the miniature “How Much Does a Soul Weigh”, you will discover a treasure trove of sparkling and unexpected thoughts. I will only say that the first three days of the creation of the world became the basis of the Law of God or the Law of the House, which Cathar derived in his work. I can’t resist one more quote from his miniature:
“The Law of the House is the true Law of Nature - the Three Kinds - the Trinity. Look at the hands of the angels of the Trinity - they show the interaction of all natural properties with each other. This is the main law of the Universe, born in the first three days of creation: week, Monday and Tuesday (Nike-Christ echoes this). Trinity is not 1-2-3, but 1-2-1 and only 4 - Genus and Three Genus."
Now you have an idea of how the creation of the world is presented day by day in the Bible. And how the Old Believers interpret it. It is striking that in the first case there is a lot of empty scholasticism and sobbing “ah” and “oh”. The second contains a deep analysis of the text and the desire to understand the laws of the universe and comprehend God’s plan.
Ivan Ivanovich A.
