In the beginning

I've grown bored waiting and waiting for the one with a clever blog name to actually do some blogging. And I've come up with a name of my own. "Beret" as in hat. And "Sheet" as in a document. As in a particular document which is old hat to many of us. Ok, not that clever. Sorry.

That's right, in Nathan's honor, I'm going to be writing about that infamous book. The Book. The one which was originally published in that awesome white-fire-on-black-fire font. Yeah, the Judeo-Christian Bible. Specifically, the beginning of it, the first parts of Genesis.

From what I've heard, the first few chapters of Genesis are not the oldest part of the Bible. Apparently Job has that distinction. But, it does come first, in the internal chronology, and when you open the book. It seems like the logical place to begin. After all, they always say, "Begin at the beginning." And, in fact, it begins "In the beginning...". How cool is that? It sounds so authoritative.

1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

By the way, by default I'm going to quote the King James Version. It's probably not the best translation, and I'll refer to others as needed, but it's the one that sounds familiar to me.

Ok, we're reading a text, and this is how it starts. We're full of prejudices, but we're trying to set them aside as we try to understand the text. What does it say? What does it mean? What was the author trying to tell us? What did the author tell us?

"Last Monday Kevin built a doghouse and a bird feeder." To me, this tells a little story. On Sunday there was no doghouse or bird feeder, but Kevin was at Home Depot buying wood, saws, hammers. On Monday, Kevin was sweaty, industrious and inhaling sawdust. On Tuesday the doghouse and bird feeder were happily housing dogs and feeding birds in Kevin's back yard.

But "Last Monday" is hardly the same as "In the beginning". In the beginning of what? Well, that gets answered pretty quick: in the beginning of the heaven and the earth. Now, I'm not ready to interpret what "heaven" means in this sentence; "heaven" is something people disagree on. But we all pretty well know what "earth" is. We've all seen pictures of Earth taken from the Moon; inevitably, that's what I imagine when I hear "the earth". That's probably not exactly the image the authors had in mind, as the passage is generally considered to have been written before the Moon landing. But still, we've all been to the earth; most of us live there. Er, here. So, the beginning of the earth. Definitely before my time. Way way back. It's pretty reasonable for most purposes to call that the beginning, full stop. "The Beginning." With a capital letter, and all.

So, ok, we're talking about what happened in The Beginning. This is a story with scope. In fact, this is a sentence with scope. Pretty exciting stuff. And two things happened in The Beginning: God created the earth; and God created the heaven. Still setting heaven aside, we all know that the earth is pretty big. Even if we haven't seen pictures of it from space, or looked up its circumference, we've taken some very long walks on it without reaching the end of it. Ok, sure, it's roughly spherical, so there isn't really an end, but still, it's a big sphere. So, creating it is quite a task. You'd need a pretty good project manager for it. So, Kevin must be a pretty impressive person. Oops, sorry. I mean, God must be a pretty impressive person. After all, he created the earth.

So this first sentence doesn't tell us much about what the author means by heaven, but it does get started on what is meant by "God". We learn two things about God, other than that he's likely to be a main character in the text. One: he created the earth (and the heaven), so he's impressive. Two: he was already around at The Beginning, and presumably Before The Beginning.

A note: I'm using "he" as a pronoun for "God". Apologies to those who would prefer "He" or "she" or something else. For now, I also want to leave open the "it" option; when a beaver creates a dam, we still call it "it".

The fact that God existed before the heaven or the earth suggests to me that God isn't a person. That God doesn't walk and breathe and eat and sweat.

Now, there's the possibility that The Beginning is even more capitalized: THE Beginning. THE Beginning of the universe, THE Beginning of time. That would make God pretty clearly non-corporeal, non-physical, abstract. It's not even clear what "before the beginning of time" means, so "abstract" is an understatement. But, if it's just (just!) The Beginning of the earth, then it's less clear.

Ok, let me suggest that there's one hint in this sentence about "heaven", although it's clearly debatable. "The heaven" is parallel to "the earth"; they were both created in the beginning by God. We all know that the earth is a nice physical real place we all visit occasionally. That suggests that "the heaven" here is intended to be something physical, tangible.

Some other things should be clear by now. One, I can ramble on a lot, even talking about a single sentence. Two, when I say I'm trying to set my prejudices aside, part of what I mean is that I'm trying very hard not to read anything in the words "God" and "heaven" that are not intended.

Here's a beginning for you: We all have, floating around in our heads, our own personal concepts of what "God" and "heaven" mean. For most of us, directly and indirectly, those concepts derive from this text. Now, this text was not the beginning of those concepts; the concepts are older, probably much older. But in cultures which are predominantly Christian, at least historically, the concepts largely come through this Bible. So, there's something interesting about trying to understand what the author intended.

Another aside: I'm saying "author", but I really mean "author or authors". And probably "authors". This story was probably told and retold and rethought and redesigned for many generations before being written down. But that's a prejudice of mine, most likely. Regardless, we can treat the text as having an author; and try to understand the author through the text.