Okay, everyone would say the word Bara' means creation out of nothing.
Okay, that is demonstrably untrue,
and you don't have to know Hebrew to be able to figure this out.
Not all alternatives are created equal.
Pardon the terrible allusion to Genesis 1 there.
They just aren't. Some of them hold water and some of them don't.
And we ought to know that, to avoid sort of bumping into the ones that don't,
and we think they do, and then we get embarrassed along the way,
or some atheists who's really put a lot of time into studying the text,
undermines your apologetics argument and then that can upset you
or the people that follow you, or the people that listen to you, so on and so forth.
So we want to be upfront and say, you know, not all these things really work
as well as others and some don't work at all.
Examples: overstating or just being inaccurate when it comes to the meaning of bara'.
Okay, this is less common today than when I went to Bible college and seminary.
When I went to Bible college and seminary, basically everybody that
I ever heard preach about this stuff would say things like
the word Bara', let's just click out to it. We'll go over here for now.
This is Genesis 1:1 in the interlinear.So we have Bereshit bara,
here's the verb translated created. Okay, everyone would say
the word Bara means creation out of nothing.
That is demonstrably untrue,
and you don't have to know Hebrew to be able to figure this out.
I'm going to show you some searches here in a moment, but just think about it;
if you go to Genesis 1:26 Okay, you ought to have this one sort of
embedded in your consciousness by this point
because we seem to wind up here a lot.
Genesis 1:26 «God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens
and over the livestock and over all the earth
and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created», let's just turn our interlinear on here. There it is Bara'.
So God bara' mankind, humankind.
Question: were Adam and Eve created out of nothing? Nope.
Okay, because you get to Genesis 2, Adam is formed from the dust of the ground.
And Eve is made from the side of Adam. Okay? They're both made with pre existing material.
That alone tells you that bara' does not mean creation from nothing.
Just that one fact. Now, the argument would go well, you know,
okay, it doesn't mean that for people but it still means that in Genesis 1:1.
Okay, now you're on shaky ground. Right? So what gets created in Genesis 1:1,
we have the heavens and the earth, right?
Now if we look back, just store that away; heavens and earth.
I'm sure you can remember that.
If we go back here, we have let us make man there's ‘ă·śeh.
That's a verb that can be used to take pre existing material and make something from it.
And we know that this works because both the male and the female are created
from something else, okay? They are ‘ā·śāh.
No one says ‘ā·śāh means creation from nothing
because you can't really find a verse that even looks that way.
When you get to Genesis 2, like I said, When humanity is created,
we go down here. «The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground»
yî·ṣer, it's a different verb. Again, this is a verb you would use
you're using pre existing material to create something else.
Now if we go back to Genesis 1:1, let's just go there. And we'll do it over here since
we can just do our right click search just so that you see how I got that other stuff.
So we've got created. Right click, we're on the lemma, Bible word study.
Here is our word study on Bara'. Now, if you do this in Logos,
if you come down here to where it says grammatical relationships.
This is one of the things that sets the software apart from stuff you get on the internet.
This tells you all the subjects of that verb in the Hebrew Bible.
This tells you all the objects of that verb. The thing is that are created (Bara'),
and the adverbs are just circumstances associated with the creation.
Now we know that one of the objects is heaven, right? Heavens and the earth.
Heavens and the earth are one of the things that are Bara'. I wonder what happens
if we do the same kind of search on Shamayim?
Okay, Bible word study. let that run a little bit.
If we go down here, shemaiah. What are the verbs? Okay, what gets created?
Or Shamayim, heavens and earth, what other verbs are there that go with that?
There's a lot of them. Look at all those. One of them is ‘ā·śāh.
Do we realize that there are verses like Psalm 33:6
where the heavens and earth are ‘ā·śāh, not bara'?
So can we really say that bara' in Genesis 1:1 must mean creation from nothing.
Because if it does, that, we've got a problem with Psalm 33:6, don't we?
Again, I could do the same thing with Earth and you're going to get the same thing.
You know, plus, with yî·ṣer thrown in there. So we need to be a little careful
about what we're saying and what we're claiming in that regard.