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Preface Introduction Chapters Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Appendices Appendix I Appendix II Appendix III Appendix IV Appendix V Appendix VI Appendix VII Appendix VIII Appendix IX Appendix X Appendix XI Appendix XII Appendix XIII Appendix XIV Appendix XV Appendix XVI Appendix XVII Appendix XVIII Appendix XIX Appendix XX Appendix XXI Indexes References Names Biblical References General Bibliography |
A LONG-HELD VIEW. It is a rare thing
nowadays to find in a scholarly work on Genesis any acknowledgment of the
fact that there is evidence of a discontinuity between the first two
verses of Chapter One and that this was ever recognized by commentators
until modern Geology arose to challenge the Mosaic cosmogony. The usual view is that
when geologists "proved" the earth to be billions of year sold,
conservative biblical students suddenly dis- covered a way of salvaging
the Mosaic account by introducing a gap of unknown duration
between these two verses. This is
supposed to have solved the problem
of time by an expeditious interpretation previously unrecognized.
This convenient little device was attrib- uted by many to Chalmers
of the middle of the last century, and popularized among
"fundamentalists" by Scofield in the first quarter of the present century.
Both the impetus which brought it to general notice and the company it
kept in its heyday combined to make it doubly suspected among
conservative scholars and totally ignored by liberal ones. However, D. F. Payne of
the University of Sheffield, England, in pg
1 of 31 a paper published recently
by Tyndale Press entitled. Genesis One Reconsidered, makes this brief aside
at the appropriate place: "The 'gap' theory itself, as a
matter of exegesis, antedated (my emphasis) the scientific challenge,
but the latter gave it a new impetus". Grant- ed then that the view did
antedate the modern geological challenge, by how long did it do
so? Just how far back can one trace
this now rather unpopular view and
how explicit are the earlier references? And on what grounds was it
held prior to the general acceptance of the views of Laplace,
Hutton, and Lyell? If its
antecedence can be established with any
certainty, one then has to find some other reason than the threat of
Geology for its having arisen. The view was undoubtedly
held by early commentators without any evidence that it was being
presented as an "answer" to some suspected challenge to the veracity
of Scripture. It must therefore have arisen either because a careful
study of the original text of Scripture itself had given intimations of
it, or perhaps due to some ancient tradition about the after-effects of
the catastrophe itself, such after-effects as might well have been
observed by early man before the new order had effectively buried the
evidences of the old. For man
must have been created soon
enough after the event to observe at least some of the evidence which
time has since eroded away. There is evidence of a tremendous and comparatively
recent geological catastrophe still to be
observed even today in certain parts of the world. There are numerous instances of mammoths
and other animals which were by some
agency killed en masse and instantly buried together, the
preyed upon with the predator, while apparently still in the prime of
life. Such animal cemeteries have
frequently been reported in northern
latitudes: in Siberia, for example.
And similar indications may
well have existed in former years in much lower latitudes where
early man could have come across them and pondered their meaning.
Such evidences of destruction, even if it occurred before the
creation of Man, must surely have set men's minds to wondering what
had been the cause. There is no
reason to suppose that early man
was any less observant than his modern descendants, or any less
curious about the cause of such mass des- truction of living forms. At any rate, here in broad
outline is the situation in so far as ancient and modern
literature reflects some knowledge of such an event. This outline will
be explored in detail subsequently - but a summary review may help to
establish the general picture. And it will show that it is
indeed a long-held view. We are in no position at
present to determine precisely how the Jewish
commentators made the discovery, but their early literature (the Midrash for example)
reveals that they had some intimation of an early pre-Adamic
catastrophe affecting the whole earth.
Sim- ilarly, clear evidence
appears in the oldest extant Version of the Hebrew Scriptures (the
Targum of 0nkelos)and some intimation may be seen in the
"punctuation marks" of the Massoretic text of Genesis Chapter One. Early Jewish writers subsequently built
up some abstruse arguments about
God's dealings with Israel on the basis of this belief and it would
seem that Paul in his Epistle to the Corinth- ians is at one point
making indirect reference to this traditional background. A few of the early Church
Fathers accepted this interpretation and based some of their
doctrines upon it. It is true that both they and their Jewish antecedents
used arguments which to us seem at times to have no force whatever,
but this is not the issue. The truth is, as we shall see, that the idea
of a once ordered world having been brought to ruin as a
consequence of divine judgment just prior to the creation of Adam, was
apparently quite widespread. It was
not debated: it was merely held by
some and not by others. Those who held it referred to it and
built up arguments upon it without apparently feeling the need to
apologize for believing as they did, nor for ex- plaining the grounds for
their faith. During succeeding
centuries not a few scholars kept the view alive, and medieval scholars
wrote about it at some length - often using phraseology which gives
their work a remarkably modern ring. The Book of Jasher,
Alcuin's version, seems clearly to assume it - even though the
document itself has a questionable pedigree. It certainly antedates modern Geology
in any case. And for the past two
hundred years many translators and comment- ators have maintained the
view and elaborated upon it at length. In short, it is not
a recent interpretation of the text of Gen. 1.1 and 1.2, but an ancient one
long antedating modern geological views. Indeed - it could be as
old as the writing of Gen. 1.2 itself!
Some of the ancient Sumerian
and Babylonian fragments that, when pieced together, give us a general
view of their cosmogony, seem to lend support to it as a very
ancient belief. It is perfectly true that these epics and legends are full
of fantasy and absurdity if read at their face value - but it is not
absolutely certain that the writers themselves intended them to be taken
precisely at face value. It may have been for teaching purposes. The
use of animation as a mnemonic aid is recognized widely today,
and scientific textbooks for schools and colleges adopt this technique
of teaching without requiring us to believe, for example, that
metallic elements do actually "marry"! Such a simile is employed in
metallurgical literature because it aptly conveys what seems to be
happening when one metal unites with another. The Sumerians and
Babylonians may have animated their cosmogonies for the same
reason, while they themselves actually held much more down-to-earth
views on the matter. We should not assume that their thinking
was altogether childish. At any
rate, there are evidences in
these ancient texts that they looked upon the earth's very early history
as having been one in which things had in some way and at one
particular point in time "gone wrong". And this sense of catastrophe
is not limited to a recollection of the Fall of man. It seems to refer to something prior to
it. It was on a cosmic scale. Since there
are reverberations of these catastrophic events even as far away as
China, it is possible that the earliest writers had knowledge of
things which we now discern only very dimly if at all, and that this
knowledge was generally shared by mankind prior to the dispersion of
Genesis 11. See Appendix XXI. It is surprising that this
almost unbroken thread of testimony to a view that is now widely
held to be of recent origin should have been consistently ignored or
unrecognized for so long. Admittedly it is at times evanescent and occasionally
ambiguous, and admittedly the fanciful methods of
interpreting Scripture adopted by the Jewish Commentators and often
emulated by the early Church Fathers do not exactly encourage one to
seek for solid factual information in their writings, yet at other
times they are quite explicit in their present- ations. At any rate,
whatever use or abuse they may have made of the information they had,
there can really be no doubt that they DID have information of this
sort, and this information seems never to have been entirely lost
sight of from New Testament times to the present. It is worth exploring all
the strands we have, for in one way or another they each tend to
contribute light to the total picture. Yet it must be emphasized once
again, after saying all this, that while it is valuable to be able to
correct a false impression about the antiquity of this view, it really
proves nothing about the correctness or other- wise of the view
espoused. The only way this can be
done is by a study of the text
itself.... which is undertaken in the chapters which follow: the present
objective is a lesser one, a historical sketch. Now after or during the
Babylonian Captivity, the Jewish people gradually accumulated the comments
and explanations of their best known teachers about the
Old Testament for some 1500 years - or well on into the Christian era. This body of traditional teaching was gathered together into the
Midrash which thus became the oldest pre- Christian exposition of
the Old Testament. It was already the basis of rabbinical teaching in
the time of our Lord and must have been quite familiar to Paul. According to the Revised Edition
of Chambers's Encyclopedia published in 1860, under
the heading "Genesis", the view which was then being popularized by
Buckland and others to the effect that an interval of unknown
duration was to be interposed between Gen. 1.1 and 1.2 was already to be
found in the Midrash. In his great work, The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginsberg has put
into continuous narrative a precis of
their legends, as far as possible in the original phrase sand terms. In Volume
1 which covers the period from the Creation to Jacob, he has
this excerpt on Genesis 1: "Nor is this world
inhabited by man the first of things earthly created by
God. He made several other worlds before ours, but He
destroyed them all, because He was pleased with none until He
created ours." Clearly this reflects the
tradition under lying the translation which appears in the Targum of
Onkelos to be noted below. Furthermore, in the
Massoretic Text in which the Jewish scholars tried to incorporate enough
"indicators" to guide the reader as to correct punctuation there
is one small mark which is technically known as Rebhia
which is classified as a "disjunctive accent" in- tended to notify the
reader that he should pause before proceeding to the next verse. In short,
this mark indicates a "break" in the text. Such a mark appears at the
end of Genesis 1.1. This mark has
been noted by several scholars
including Luther. It is one
indication among others, that the
initial waw ( should be rendered
"but" rather than "and", a dis-junctive rather than a con-junctive. Another piece of
substantiating evidence is to be found in the Targum of Onkelos, the earliest
of the Aramaic Versions of the Old Testament written by
Hebrew Scholars. According to the Babylonian Talmud, Onkelos was a
proselyte, the son of a man named Calonicas, and although he was
the composer of the Targum which bears his name, he is held actually
to have received it from Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua, both of
whom lived towards the end of the first and the beginning of the
second century A.D. However, since
in the Jerusalem Talmud the very
same thing is related by the same auth- orities (and almost in the
same words) of the proselyte Aquila of
Pontes, whose Greek version of the Bible was used by the Greek- speaking Jews down to the
time of Justinian, it is sometimes argued that Onkelos is but another
name for Aquila. Aquila Ponticus was a relative of the Emperor
Hadrian, living in the second century B.C. Thus even if Onkelos is
not yet completely identified, the Targum attributed to him must
still be placed early in the second century B .C. As his translation into
Aramaic of Gen.1.2, Onkelos has the following: In this passage, the
verb verb which itself means
"to cut" or "to lay waste". We have here, therefore, a rendering
"and the earth was laid waste", an interpret- ation of the original
Hebrew of Gen. 1.2 which leaves little room for doubt that Onkelos
understood this to mean that something had occurr- ed between verse 1 and
verse 2 to reduce the earth to this desolated condition, It reflects
Ginsberg's Jewish legend. Akiba ben Joseph was an
influential Jewish rabbi who was president of the School Bene Barek
near Saffa. He laid the basis for
the Mishna. When Barcochebas rebelled against the
Romans, Akiba joined him and was
captured. He was executed in 135 A.D.
The ancient work known as The
Book of Light or Sefer Hazzohar,
some- times simply Zohar was
traditionally ascribed to one of Akiba's disciples, a certain
Simeon ben Jochai. In this work,
which thus represents an opinion held
towards the end of the first century and the early part of the
second, there is a comment on Gen. 2.4-6 which, though difficult to
follow, reads thus: "These are the
generations (ie., this is the history of....) of heaven and earth....
Now wherever there is written the word 'these' ( And these are the
generations of the destruction which is signified in verse 2 of
chapter 1. The earth was Tohu and Bohu. These indeed are the
worlds of which it is said that the blessed God created
them and destroyed them, and, on that account, the earth was desolate
and empty." Here, then, we have a
comment which in the time of our Lord was held widely enough
that Paul might very well have known about it. In which case we may better understand the
background of his words in writing to the Corinthians
(II Cor. 4.6) where he said, "God
Who commanded the light to
shine out of darkness hath shined into our hearts, to give the
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus". Now very few will deny
that in this passage Paul is referring back to Gen. 1.3, "And God
said, Let there be light". What
is not ab- solutely certain is how
far one can press the analogy. Personally, I believe it makes excellent
sense to assume here that Paul had in mind an interpretation of these
first three verses of Genesis 1 which sees the situation as a ruin
about to be restored by God's creative power, commencing with the giving
of light where all was formerly darkness. This is , after
all, precisely the position that the unredeemed soul is in. The analogy is most
pointed and reasonable. And if we once allow that this is what
was in Paul's mind, then we must surely also admit that Paul, speaking
by inspiration, set his seal upon the truth of the interpretation of
Gen. 1.2 for which we are here contending; and the more ancient
tradition which lies behind the words of Akiba and the rendering of
Onkelos receive a measure of confirmation. In his Rabbinical
Commentary on Genesis, Paul Isaac Hershon has this somewhat obscure
quotation which reinforces Paul's analogy: '"And the earth was
desolate and void'. The earth will be desolate, for the
shekinah will depart at the destruction of the Temple, and hence it
is said: 'And the Spirit of God hovered upon the face of
the water'; which intimates to us that even although we be
in exile (after the destruction of the Temple) yet the Torah
shall not depart from us; and there- fore it is added: 'And God
said. Let there be light'. This shows us that after the
captivity God will again enlighten us, and send us the
Messiah....". Admittedly, this mode of
interpretation is strange to us, but there is really no doubt what is
intended. The Promised Land with its capital city epitomized by
the Temple, was once the place of God's Shekinah glory. But now it
has been destroyed and made empty, as Jer.4.24 f. predicted.
Nevertheless, it was not destroyed perm- anently , for the Spirit of
God still hovers over the place of His former 'glory', though for the
present it is destroyed and made empty. In due time, just as God's
Spirit hovered over the destroyed earth with a promise of new life to
come upon it, so will He restore the Land and the Temple and renew
His glory by the presence of His Messiah |
) which
introduces verse 2
is compounded with the Aramaic
) the
previous words are put aside.