Verse 2 does not describe a chaotic state. This is a complete
misunderstanding of the text. When the text says
that the earth is without form and void, what that means is that the earth is an
uninhabitable waste. The same expression, "Tohu
wa-bohu," is used to describe the desolated land ravaged by war. It's a state of
desolation and inhospitable to life. It is not
the Greek idea of a chaos. Quite the contrary, the way the
primordial ocean is described is that it has a surface above which
the Spirit of God is hovering. Below it is the
land that will eventually emerge and be the dry land. It is ordinary water
that will eventually fill the streams and oceans and lakes and will fall from
the sky as rain, and as such has the usual
properties associated with water, such as liquidity,
a certain specific density, a certain surface tension, and so on and
so forth, that ancient Israelites would have been familiar with.
So this is anything but a chaos. It is a highly ordered state; it is a
dark ocean of water. I think that if an Israelite reading
this passage were to imagine it in his mind,
it would be what an Israeli sailor would experience on a moonless night,
overcast out on the Mediterranean Sea: a dark ocean of water that
precedes the emergence of the dry land and God's creation of life.
[Moderator] So to the clarifying of that, you know, I've heard people say that a lot of the
water language is in fact just that: chaos language.
[Craig] That's incorrect. [Moderator] That's incorrect. So like in the book of Revelation where he says
like there's going to be no sea, there's going to be no water,
like the beast comes out of the the sea, that these kinds of... this is imagery of
chaos language? Not necessarily Genesis but like forward? [Craig] Let's
not draw in these other books of the Bible.
That would be bad hermeneutics to impose things like book of Revelation, written
hundreds of years later by another writer, upon the
interpretation of Genesis [right right right.] We need to understand Genesis
within the context of the Pentateuch and against the background of ancient
near eastern thought, for example the myths of Mesopotamia
and Egypt. And many many scholars have misunderstood
Genesis 1:2 to be a reflection of a kind of primordial chaos
associated, for example, with Egyptian myths,
when in fact it is utterly distinct from those myths in this regard, and as I
say, describes an ordinary ocean
filled with ordinary water that would eventually be in our lakes and
oceans and and rivers and fall from the sky. [Moderator 2] Okay.
So then I think that partly answers one of the questions I was going to ask,
which was do you believe in a pre-creation
chaos theory, the idea that Genesis 1:2 actually chronologically
precedes Genesis 1:1 where Genesis 1:1 describes sort of God ordering the
universe, but then Genesis 1:2 describes the state
of chaos that preceded that? What I'm hearing is no you don't believe that.
[Craig] You're right, I think that's quite a mistake. Further confirmation of my claim
would be the fact that the flood returns the earth to its primordial
condition, and the flood is clearly not
a chaos in the Greek sense. It has a surface,
there's a boat, an ark, floating on top of it. It's covering the mountains,
there are clouds above that give rain, birds flying in the air; the
return of the earth to its primordial condition in the flood
is definitely not a return to some kind of chaos.