The Ancient Genesis

My initial intention was not to write a book, nor to attack any-one’s fundamental beliefs. I am simply deeply devoted to re-searching and discovering truth. Three years after accumulating so much information from ancient Rabbis, current Rabbis, scien-tists, early church fathers, Hebrew definitions, culture and tradi-tions, I found that I needed to store this information, as well as my ideas, into solid form so that I could always go back to it. The book was then born and progressed through a year of further developments and changes.

I entitled this the Ancient Genesis because it was in research-ing ancient Rabbis' commentaries, early church fathers and their understandings of the text as well as researching the ancient He-brew language, that brought light for me to many issues of to-day. This understanding of the text, then, is something new for most people, but really it is an old understanding coupled with modern science to help reveal the secrets and plainest truths of the scripture.

Upon reading this, your beliefs will most likely be challenged. Upon being challenged; however, there is a plethora of infor-mation that I hope will encourage you in your own searches for truth, whether or not you agree with my conclusions.

I found my own traditions and beliefs challenged as well in this research, but in the end found that to be true to the word of God, I had to let go of these ‘comfortable’ traditions in light of truths. A famous writer once said, ‘those who want to be comfortable will lose comfort in the end, but those who want truth will find truth and in the end also be comforted in that truth.’

When Christians say ‘Christian Science’, what really is being taught is often Christian fiction. The churches feed us infor-mation that is actually not scientifically accurate, but sounds convincing. This is because they themselves are misguided. Though well intentioned, they are driving their feet into the ground of literalism and traditions, unknowingly preventing the very growth they are suppose to encourage. Ninety five percent of the known scientists are telling us the truth about what they are observing. Five percent make up the ‘creationists’, and they are mocked by scientists as wasting the real scientists' time.

I have researched this topic for over four years. I began by thinking I was going to disprove evolution to myself; instead, I found that it was true. It is the will of God. It is not contradicto-ry to the Bible and in fact is in the Bible.

The problem is that in recent years, because of this influx of science, many Christian organizations and pastors are pushing their feet into the ground, saying, 'we won’t budge,' and 'evolu-tion is evil'. They don't want to look at any other point of view that contradicts their fundamentals. They teach children their way in church, and instead of encouraging independent thinking, they tell their congregation what to think.

Atheists, on the other hand, are pushing an agenda of 'evolu-tion proves there is no God.' Both sides are wrong. The pastors are wrong for not understanding Genesis and not being open to welcome other perspectives. The atheists are wrong for pushing an anti-God agenda, atheists like ‘Dawkins’.

Evolution makes no assertions or claims on the origins of life or on whether God exists or not. Let me say that again: Evolution makes no assertions or claims on the origins of life or on whether God exists or not. It only gives us the evidence of what life has been doing since it has existed: evolving, changing and (becoming closer to what God wants, in my view).

Before this rush of science, many thinkers, early church fathers, Rabbis, philosophers, and Kabbalists read the Bible and were free to think and come to their own conclusions. Some Rabbis like Maimondies said that Genesis is a metaphorical account, yielding spiritual truths. Some Rabbis said it was literal, but the point was freedom of thought and an encouragement of think-ing.

Some wondered about ‘yom’- ‘day’ - is it long? Is it short? A famous Rabbi Rashbam, the great grandson of Rashi, asks that very question in his commentary, asking whether it was a long or short time from Moses to the creation in Genesis. Moses himself addresses this in Deuteronomy and says the 'days of old' and the 'years of many generations'.

To Moses, Creation was 'old'. Rabbi Nachimandies, or Ram-ban, calls the mayim –prime matter- which today in the English text is translated as 'water'. There are many eye-opening secrets when one studies the ancient texts and comments. I don’t think they were meant to be secret, but they have become that way to many Christians today, who don’t know who these rabbis are, or what the ancients thought of the scriptures. The lack of knowledge also exists for many Jews who are familiar with the names, but lack any real study of the ancient Rabbis' works.

I personally view Genesis 1 as literal, and Genesis 2 with Adam and Eve as literal people in a literal place bounded up with symbols and metaphors. But then, how can I read Genesis 1 literally and also take science literally?

Because they are saying the same exact thing. It is just that today we are in our modern-day mind-set, reading our modern-day English Bibles, thinking we have it all figured out. The truth is that most of us don’t really know the first thing about the Cre-ation stories in Genesis, except what we were told by our Sun-day-school teachers. Those who have studied it usually have only studied the English versions and understandings of it. You will hardly ever see a Christian who knows who Rabbi Ramban or Rambam are, or a Christian who even considers commentary out-side of his own Greek-Roman influenced modern texts.

But how are we to understand the Ancient Hebrew if we are not going to understand the ancient culture, its people and language, and how the Rabbis of their time and after may have understood their words and the words of the scrip-ture?

If I want to understand something written by Hebrew people in a Hebrew culture of a Middle-East mindset, I need to look to people who speak old Hebrew, understand the ancient culture and mindset, and read their ideas and comments, and learn from them. I’d better look at the original old Hebrew language myself and find out what it is telling ME, and not what a pastor tells me it is saying to me.

In doing that, I have found that there is no contradiction, only what seems to be contradiction from a lack of deep study with the word. Christians today do so much surface reading, but Jews 2,000 years ago read in-depth. They could take years to study a single chapter thoroughly. The Genesis is layered with deep meanings and understandings for anyone willing to listen to it. This book addresses many of the points I have found in my stud-ies. Specifically: Evolution is not evil. God guided it and contin-ues to guide it.

I ask that every reader approach this reading with a mind that is open. Do not limit your thought only to the teachings of sci-ence or to the teachings of your local church. We must ask our-selves, ‘is this belief I have been taught based on something sound in the Bible, or is it based on a tradition passed down to me?’ Often those who are good-intentioned can miss what is meant in the Word of God. Erroneous ideas are frequently passed down from generation to generation, not really supporting the truth of God’s creations or His Word.

We have to remember that in 60 A.D., Christianity started be-coming more gentile than Jewish, and began breaking away from her Jewish brothers in language, tradition, culture and under-standing. We have to also be aware that this fusion was sealed after Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, unified the Catholic Church under Rome about 1700 years ago, giving it a lot of power - empirical power. It was unified with Paganism and often misunderstood the original scriptures.

Since Rome dominated the world, so did the teaching of the Church at that time and is the ultimate source of a lot of our mis-information today. The Church was not able to accept Jewish views, discarding Judaic teachings in favor of Greek and Roman pagan teaching. They embraced ideas that were more accepted by common gentile people than Judaism, with all of its rules and particular behaviors.

This is the reason we have Easter eggs, which originally were in honor of the fertility god of the pagans. They have nothing to do with Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. This is the reason for the Easter bunny, Christmas trees, and why Mass is held on Sunday, the first day of the week, and not Saturday, the true Sabbath and seventh day of the week. Most Christians do not even know what a Saturday Sabbath is, and yet it is commanded for us to keep in the Ten Commandments.

This is the reason that most Christians have no idea what the seven feasts of Israel are, although they were commanded to be kept in the Hebrew scriptures through Moses, and they reveal to us the fulfillments of Christ Messiah. Many do not even know what the Passover means. This is the reason many Christians view Christ’s sacrifice as offering forgiveness, when sacrifice of the Lamb was for atonement, and forgiveness was always made available for anyone with a prayerful and repenting heart.

There are many similar issues in regards to salvation, Messiah, Genesis, Women in Church leadership, that are wrongly under-stood because of the lack of Jewish understanding being re-placed by gentile misunderstanding. These various issues are dis-cussed in my book, Christianity and Sensibility. In this book, however, I will discuss only the issue of evolution and God in relationship to the Genesis account.

Many traditions and beliefs are in error, and these errors have been passed down continuously to us through Catholic and Protestant teachings in our local churches. Most pastors learn from similar theological backgrounds and universities, and like-wise share a common thinking. Let us not tell our congregation what to think, but let us teach them how to think

For example: Galileo was a deeply religious man, but also a sci-entist, who discovered that the earth rotates around the sun. The Catholic Church, because of its misunderstanding of the scrip-ture in Joshua 10:12, declared him to be a heretic and imprisoned him. We now know that Galileo was right, and we now know the same about the book of Joshua. We say the sun rises and the sun sets. But we speak from what it is doing for us, our human perspective, not from scientific or literal interpretation. Let us look at this debated scripture:

O sun, stand still over Gideon,

O moon, over the valley of Aijalon,

So the sun stood still,

And the moon stopped,

Till the nation avenged itself on its enemies.

This is poetic and descriptive of what the sun and moon are doing from the earth’s point of view, from Joshua’s point of view. If the earth had stopped rotating, the sun and moon would be standing still to him – not because the sun and moon stopped moving, but because we stopped moving.

Let us not close our mind to truth, simply because it doesn’t fit our preconceived versions of it, because we could just be wrong, and that doesn’t help us or the truth of God. I like to define my-self as a Messianic Christian, which is a third branch of Christi-anity, separate from Catholic and Protestant thinking. It is a re-turn to our Jewish roots in faith.

My Biblical Scientific Views:

Day 1:

The only supernatural creation - (Quantum Fluctuations)

God’s light bara (Ex Nihilo) ‘energy/forces from nothing’.

All the energy and forces needed for creation.

The 1 force became 4 natural forces (which led to the natural laws) All of the processes afterward followed natural processes using the energy and four natural forces born.

The forces and energy were born simultaneously. Energy with-out the forces/laws could not form a successful universe and life. Forces/laws without the energy is essentially nothing, boundaries of nothing. Therefore they both needed each other, and are in-terwoven into each other’s fabric. Born with the first use of Bara in day 1.

The only physical creation.

Day 2, 3, 4, 5, 6:

God asah, or used natural processes to guide, form, make, command, direct information. In day 5 and 6 bara is used for the creation of the soul in animals and spirit in mankind. This is not for the physical creations. Understanding Rosh Hashanna helps to see this.

My chronological scientific views:

Quantum Fluctuations

Natural Inflationary big bang

Cosmological natural evolution

First life through natural processes

Biological natural evolution

I define myself as a Theist Evolutionist.

I personally view YHVH God as a supreme, infinite, spiritu-al, intelligent force, as a spark for the birth of ‘energy from nothing’ at the Big Bang, which was interwoven with the natural forces/laws.

Our natural world is governed by these laws, and the energy is finite within it. However, God, this source of energy, is infinite and is therefore not bound by these laws. This is why, in the be-ginning, Ex Nihilo is possible with the seeming formation of en-ergy out of nothing. (Mathematically Infinities are not bound by our natural laws). To me this is simply a transferring of energy from a spiritual plane of existence (Hashem himself) into our natural plane - the creation and formation of our natural plane.

After this energy transfer from God to this natural world, the energy is separated from its infinite source, making it finite and bound to laws of physics which were established by God. I view these laws as being established to predominately guide our universe and the life on our earth, which 9.5 times out of 10 is guided by it. I would say 95% of the existence of everything has been established through natural processes alone. The other 5% is with this life force, Hashem, supernaturally affecting the natural world.

Bara (The Hebrew word for something from nothing as in a miracle or Ex Nihilo) is used for three purposes only in the Genesis account.

‘in the beginning HASHEM CREATED’ is the first use of bara and the creation of all the energy/photons which formed protons/neutrons/electrons in day 1, as well as the 4 forces and subsequent laws that would be needed to yield the creation

Ancient Rav Ezra says, ‘God used natural forces to set boundaries.

Everything out of nothing - Day One

Rosh Hashanah is seen commemorating this time with the first blow of the trumpet. Inflationary Big Bang is also my favor-ite scientific theory, which would have been ‘in the beginning’, created by YHVH.

Quantum Fluctuations within the study of Quantum physics reveals that ‘something from nothing’ (as in, all this energy from nothing) for our universe’s origins is probable and many physi-cists, including Stephen Hawking, now agree that is what oc-curred: all of this came from nothing.

This ‘seemingly’ violates the first law of second dynamics temporarily. But from above, you can see how this energy is merely switching planes of existence, and thus is not in reality ‘something from nothing’ or violating the natural laws. Though as far as the natural world is concerned, it is ‘something from nothing’, because it once was not and now it is.

However we must also note that the 2nd law of thermody-namics applies to the finite and breaks down with the infinite and is not applicable in the very early beginnings of our universe, and applies only to a closed/isolated system. The universe is most likely not closed, as it is interconnected to wormholes of other universes and if you believe in God, God would also be that outside source of energy.

The second use of bara (creation of the spirit of animal life) - Day Five. This also corresponds to the Cambrian Explosion in science. I think this use of bara is indicating a spiritual creation, the creation of the soul of animal life here, as is seen in Rosh Hashanah with its second trumpet sound.

God also commands life to become fertile and ‘swarm with swarms’, which is what it does according to Cambrian Explo-sion findings. Oxygen levels increase, an atmosphere is forming, the snowball earth is melted away and green lush plants are able to birth and develop now. Animal life is able to sustain itself. Cell life becomes complex at this time on the scientific timeline, and complex animal life appears abundantly. Without this abun-dance of complex animal life, we may not have emerged at all.

In Rosh Hashanna this second trumpet blow is for the creation of animal life. Interestingly, is that each blow, three, represents a CREATION / BARA stated in the Genesis account. As I said earlier, the usage of Bara in Genesis is for three purposes.

The third use of bara (the creation of the spirit of man) – Day Six. This bara is indicating a spiritual creation of man, which is in the image of Hashem himself. This image, according to Ez-ra, is a spiritual one, that of an eternal soul, and according to the other ancient rabbis (Rashi, Rashbam, maimondies, aand Ram-bam, nahimandies) this image is one of ‘wisdom’, ‘understand-ing’, ‘intelligence’, ‘thought’, and ‘action’.

This spirit that was bara seems to yield all the above character-istics, because to be given a spirit is also to be these things. These may be the characteristics needed for our 'reason', 'morality', 'conscious’, 'judgment' and consequently our ‘accountability which marks the appearance of Adam’.

God’s image is not a physical one, it is spiritual

Mankind is being made in the image of YHVH God. Man is ’wise, understanding, morally conscious, spiritual.’ Therefore ac-countability soon will follow. This third use of bara also can be found in the celebrations of Rosh Hashanah with the third trum-pet sound, celebrating the creation of the soul of man. When we were made in God's image, God gave us a SPIRIT. This is unique to the Homo sapiens sapiens. Day 6 is not Adam. It is Mankind, generally speaking. All of the mankind population, Homo sapiens sapeins, received a Spirit.

Though Homo sapiens sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago, this spiritual awakening occurred, in my view, about 50,000 years ago. This marks the revolution of mankind in art, crafts, ‘thinking’, language; Man is giving meaning to things all over the world.

50,000 years - spiritually speaking, the scripture tells us that God has revealed himself to a 1,000 generations When added up, given that early generations were a 1000 and 500 years long, this leads to 50,000 years. So Homo sapiens sapiens received the spirit in the image of God about 50,000 years ago. The Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and even the Homo sapien and other an-cestors of man, were ‘animals with a soul’. Remember, in day 5, all animal life received a soul with the second purpose of bara.

However, a spirit is akin to God and to the Homo sapiens sapiens 50,000 years ago, at the point of the ‘awakening’.

Adam was one of many evolved Homo sapiens, but he is unique in that his story marks the turning point of mankind. He becomes separate from his creator and begins to communicate with him, asking about his existence, and to be held accountable by Him for his shortcomings and sins. Adam marks the eating from the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ and thus justly marks the beginning of mankind’s accountable, spiritual journey.

Adam and Eve are significant because they mark the moment the Homo sapiens sapeins became aware of sin, and thus became accountable for his/her spiritual decisions and actions, ‘from na-ked to now being clothed’. Remember above, I said accountabil-ity soon follows.

This is the definition of ‘man’ in Hebrew and Greek, one who is aware, one who is perishing, one of sin, one of God, of Christ. All these definitions take affect AFTER Adam.

This is why he is the First Man.

I have included the Hominid timeline for you at the end of Part One.

All the natural creation days - 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - use asah and commands. They are not using the verb bara, ‘to create as from nothing’.

Only day 1 uses bara for the creation of the natural world.

Day 5 and 6 use asah and bara; the bara used is for the creation of the soul and spirit, not the natural world. The asah is used for the natural processes. The only time ‘exotic physics’ in our natu-ral world took place was in day 1, possibly quantum fluctuations. The other days - 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6 - all involved the laws of physics as we know them to be, and followed the natural laws. This is WHY God created these natural forces/laws, because he wanted them to guide his creation. He did not create them to then subse-quently defy them. This is seen by the usage of asah, and God commanded in those days.

This is also ancient Rav Nahimandies’ (1100 A.D.) view. He predates modern science, and so his conclusions are based upon his closeness to God, his study of the Hebrew language and cul-ture, and study of his ancients. It is not based in a rationale from modern science.

The rabbi Nahimandies calls asah, ‘creation by in-formation’ and he calls bara ‘creation from nothing’. (As seen in his com-mentaries and in the back of my