Genesis: world created by Gods word, not slain deity

Instead of divine warfare, we find peaceful speech; instead of a cosmos born from the corpse of a slaughtered deity, we find creation declared “good”; instead of humanity fashioned as a slave race to relieve the gods of labor, we find humans ...

The Old Testament begins with the famous words “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). There is, in the Bible as it stands, no prelude to or explanation of this text, so…

1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Bible, King James Version · Genesis · Gen.1 · [1] In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. [2] And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. [3] And God said, Let there be light: ...

In the beginning, about 3,000 years ago*, Jewish desert dwellers in what is present-day southern Israel told a story around campfires about the creation of the first man and first woman. The story they told, and passed on to generations of future desert dwellers, described a pre-creation scene ...

Christianity, in turn, adopted ... Word was God" (John 1:1). When the Jews came into contact with Greek thought, there followed a major reinterpretation of the underlying cosmology of the Genesis narrative. The biblical authors conceived the cosmos as a flat disc-shaped Earth in the centre, an underworld for the dead below, and heaven above. Below the Earth were the "waters of chaos", the cosmic sea, home to mythic monsters defeated and slain by God; in ...

Biblical creation makes it clear that God created everything in six days around 6000 years ago, in stark contrast to evolution.

Moses was a myth buster. He mentions certain mythical elements in order to debunk them. He did this not by presenting a counter-myth but by presenting what actually happened. This explains why Genesis reads like history rather than poetry. This explains why Genesis includes allusions to false mythical elements in a way radically different from the myths of the Ancient Near East.

Some have used these documents to reject Moses as the writer of Genesis, and some have used these documents to suggest that Genesis itself is either myth, poetry, or even simply an argument (a theological polemic) used as a rebuttal of these supposedly older myths.