I’ve written on the text before, but I just completed a full translation and study of Genesis 1…so I’ll blog about it again 
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Genesis 1 is perhaps one of the best-known passages in the Bible, but it’s continually misused. For the last 100+ years, North American evangelicalism has grossly misconstrued the creation story and turned it into something it’s not: a science lesson; scientific conclusions have been drawn from a text that has nothing to do with science. I know this will probably get me labeled as a “liberal” by many who may stumble across this post, but all I’m doing is attempting to flesh out what the text says – not the English text, the original text…the Hebrew.
First off, Genesis 1 reeks of Hebrew stylistic and poetic devices – and this comes out even in English. The text is wrought with repetition and poetic verbiage. These characteristics absolutely must be taken into account when reading this text. Poetry is never to be taken literally. I’m sorry for the harsh tone, but we’re talking about the Bible; whether or not the world was created in six consecutive 24-hour periods is never addressed – one way or another – in Genesis 1. Biblical Hebrew scholars almost unanimously agree that the repetition of “And there was evening and there was morning…” is entirely a structural device used for organizing the text and to aid in memorization, not to provide readers with a timeline.
Filed under: Bible Study, Christianity, Faith, Theology
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