Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
It constantly bugs me, but this point requires significant and regular correction. While official Christian doctrine almost universally endorses a position of creation ex nihilo—which means basically a creation from out of nothing—this idea was not arrived at by way of a straightforward reading of the biblical creation texts. The idea of creation ex nihilo receives support from most English translations of Genesis 1:1 by translating the first word as an adjective, and not an adverb: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In actual fact, this is a very strange translation of this word, ברשאית, which where elsewhere used almost universally functions as a temporal qualifier of the verbal clause. My (much better) translation is "When God began creating the sky and the ground, the ground was a chaotic soup and darkness encroached upon the surface of that chaos." You can see that in this alternative rendering, there is no suggestion that there was nothing prior to God's first creative act. Rather to the contrary, the Genesis 1 creation story makes much better sense in its depiction of God fashioning the cosmos from functionless raw materials.
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Thanks for this, I know I've read similar things before (even just a straight reading of a common translation of verse two makes more sense that way).
Easy to see why it would it wouldn't be the popular view, if the Spirit of God is moving over the surface of pre-existing waters, where did the waters come from?! Oops!
EDIT: Also gives me a chance to post my favorite cosmology graphic: