φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own…
The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the…
The book of Genesis contains within it a series of stories that each represent a new and growingly sophisticated beginning. The first, lowest resolution, is Genesis 1:1 and God’s creation of habitable order out of chaos. Our last post dealt with the second beginning, the creation of man in Genesis 2:7. With the introduction of…
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. (Gen. 2:7) And just like that, here in Genesis 2:7, God creates man. Like with so many of the biblical stories, the brevity of the sentence belies the…
In a departure from my set posting schedule, today, rather than a Main Project post, I’ve decided to post a Philological Concerns essay. The reason for the order switch is that I believe this essay on ancient philology will be crucial towards real engagement with this week’s Main Project topic. There are roughly 15,000 languages…
As we move to Genesis 2 and get closer to the first lines of the Adam and Eve story, there is a quick end to the creation of Genesis 1. After extracting habitable order from chaos using the articulated word, God sets to the task of creating the world as we know it. He does…
Ernest Becker, in his groundbreaking 1973 book The Denial of Death, famously says that “man is a god that shits.” Becker’s way of expressing this might be off-putting to some, but I think he really hits a home run here. We are not apes and we are not angels, but there is some kind of bridge…
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” -Mark Twain In Genesis, and throughout the biblical stories, we are presented with a world in which human consciousness is of paramount importance. The modern world has seen its share of objections to the idea that human consciousness matters from the Club of Rome types and…
Using the KJV, the story of Adam and Eve has a total of eight hundred and ten words. Contained in this incredibly short and dense story are a number of themes. In no particular order and likely not exhaustive we see the themes of the divine order, the relationship between God and humanity, free will,…
In this week’s Main Project post we continued our discussion of the creation. After the heavens and earth were separated, but before Man was brought forth, God’s creative action differentiated the cosmos bringing forth the world and its denizens as we know it. With each step of the creation of order God’s final pronouncement on…