The Earth in Gen 1:2 is under water, it was without form, it wasn't dry land...yet. The Earth doesn't appear until the 3rd day, in the beginning refers to when Heaven and Earth came to exist, they didn't exist yet in Gen 1:2. That primordial world in Gen 1:2 from which Earth emerged on the 3rd day is called "tehom" in the Bible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehom
The word "earth" is a place holder in verse 2. Thinking that the earth is the center of the universe, may seem like a cliché or even disproven, but the account does seem to indicate that the earth was the first solid thing brought into form from the "ocean" of space, and everything else in the universe followed, including "the stars" as a seemingly foot note in this account. Correct the earth had no substance and by extension had no crust, no rock, nothing that could substantially be anything considered solid. Not even sure if the "water" was solid.....
You cannot say they did not exist, and then turn around and say something existed that was a "world". According to the definition of "tehom", it would be space itself.
I get the impression that if space had a face, would it look like a black hole?
The light was the collision between Tehom and God and it resulted in a world spinning closer to the sun where night and day alternate with a new sky to be ruled over by various lights
There was nothing in space before the Light event that would resemble an already existing universe. Neither did God collide with anything. He spoke a thought. To some I guess a lot of speaking at once would create a cacophony of sound, but there was only God. There were no planets until land appeared, and it would seem that earth was the first planet mentioned. God created the matter of the universe in verse one. The Genesis account does not mention planets, already existing.
In some myths Heaven and Earth were one before being cleaved in two by God and Heaven was left behind to mark the spot of the battle. This is why Heaven is the name God gave the firmament, a hammered out bracelet dividing the waters above from the waters below
In most myths, including the current cosmology the universe was a chain reaction. But Genesis does not say that. The separation of the waters could easily describe the stretching of space, and even the notion of hammering out space like a bracelet (although a very rough and brute comparison, because nothing in physics is "solid"). The "bracelet" myth is the action being done, not the fact that a bracelet is solid. They did not have balloons back then. It has been likened to the stretching of a balloon being filled with air, except the universe is allegedly flat... that has also been used to describe the earth at one time.... because the universe shows no curve. The earth does if you are high enough, and was always a sphere.
The asteroid belt straddles the snow line of the early solar system, the water below became our Seas and the water above is still there. The water content of asteroids varies based on their location above and below the snow line. Thats where our water came from... Researchers are trying to import our water, they need to import the planet
If anything tehom (the deep) although it is considered "water" could be what the universe looked like before there were any stars and planets. Before there were Galaxies and clusters, that had form, space could have looked like a deep empty void of "water". Water can be a gas, but I am guessing that the ancients may not have known that. God would have known, he created it. The heaven and earth in verse 1, was the creation of this tehom. Verse one is not defined as land and sky, because when the two words are used together it signifies the whole of space.
(Even if the word "the" is not implied and it is a prepositional phrase, it would still read correctly that space was created empty and void, and it looked like a swirling ocean, because it had no form. You cannot take the definition given four days later and apply it there, because the two words together came first and had no definition in single form until the appropriate time.
Water is just hydrogen and oxygen
The order of night and day was established in Gen 1:2-3, the darkness preceded both God and the light. Tehom was in darkness and covered by water... So Gen 1:2 could be interpreted to mean the 1st day started with the darkness (evening) before the light (day). But the light was God's first creative act, God did not create the darkness, the waters or the submerged Earth
The pre-earth was covered in the water or part of the matter that was space. Tehom was space, and it had no covering. Light was the energy that brought the universe to "life". God may have stretched out space, but he did not divide it. The firmament is a stretching or expanding. IMO, the matter was already divided. The separating was an act of expansion, which did move objects further apart, but they are all still considered part of space and the universe. Although in doing a search for tehom, there is another person online who thinks that before the earth “met” God, it was drifting through space.
I cannot see how stating the beginning was not actually the beginning, but billions of years after the fact.
The first day started with evening. That event was after the light event which only lasted millionths of a second. There was no time to speak of associated with the Light. That event would be the very first light, giving us the Cosmic microwave background.
The very first verse states that God created. If God just manipulated, there would have been other words with a clearer definition. The word used could mean "to shape", but if one has the ability to manipulate the universe, what would stop them from creating it? God did form the universe, because it says that the stars were also a result of the action started in verse 1. They just came later in the narrative. I am beginning to lean towards the idea that "to shape" could also mean that Verse 6 was more than "earth centric" but was the expansion of the whole universe. God both created and shaped the universe according to the narrative. Darkness is just an attribute of space that is still there today. Otherwise all of space may as well be full of light and instead of photons there would be a particle that made everything dark compared to the surrounding light. The light only lasted for less than a second before God turned it off and allowed it to be dark again. Light and Dark do define day and night respectively, but a day is also a specific time period. If it is always light, then the night would have to be artificial. If it was always dark, then the day would have to be artificial. The day was defined even before there was a planet we now call earth. First there was matter created and the whole was called tehom. That matter was called earth, even before it became a planet. Then came light. Then came expansion. Then came the planet earth. Then came plant life. Then came the rest of the solar system. Then came birds and fish, and finally animal life.
But the atmosphere is not firm and the Earth didn't exist on the 2nd day. The primordial world in Gen 1:2 had an atmosphere, the world was covered by water. What changed was the appearance of Earth on the 3rd followed by its sky on the 4th
If the atmosphere is not firm, why do you keep calling it a hammered bracelet?
There was no world covered with water. What changed is the void became a physical planet. It received it's sky and atmosphere all in one process. There was only a formless "mass" before the land appeared, not a solid planet. The point when it became a solidified planet was the words stating that there was dry land. The planet was "drawn" out of space. I suppose there may be some who would interpret that as coming from another spot in space, but God is doing the work, it did not just happen to "run into" God. It just says that God divided matter from the void of space, and a planet materialized.
The heavens became the observable sky but Heaven was unseen. The text defines it as something firm dividing or separating the waters above from what would become our seas.
mid-13c., from Latin firmamentum "firmament," literally "a support or strengthening," from firmus "firm" (see firm (adj.)), used in Vulgate to translate Greek stereoma "firm or solid structure," which translated Hebrew raqia, a word used of both the vault of the sky and the floor of the earth in the Old Testament, probably literally "expanse," from raqa "to spread out," but in Syriac meaning "to make firm or solid," hence the erroneous translation.
Is it an error to keep using the wrong definition for the Hebrew word? See above.
But when hammering a bracelet, you do not make it firm and solid, you stretch it out. The bracelet is not a good example because it was already hard and solid. The Hebrew word comes from space and physics where nothing is solid nor pre-existing, and God is expanding mostly emptiness.
I don't believe in the Second Coming. I wonder if Bhsup does.
I don't believe a believer who does not accept the First Coming can actually believe that Jesus was the Christ. If Jesus was not the Christ, how can they take the name Christian? It would just be a historical connotation in my opinion. The Jews as a religion do not accept the Christ either, because it is just another term for Messiah. If they take the word of modern critics, there was never a David or first "Messiah" to father the Messiah. How can there be a Second Coming, when there was never a First? Literally, how can something be rejected, if it does not exist? If God does not interact with humans, then the term Christian is useless, as it comes from the word meaning; God's Anointed One. As for the need for there to be a God creator, God covered that, and was BEING. God is technically the only existence.
It can suck a person in. I was into astrology for awhile, and had my own copy of Chariots of the Gods (and a few other similar books). But I took an anthropology course in high school, and the teacher showed the Chariots of the Gods film. The aerial views of the Mayan and Aztec pyramids, plus some of the music, were designed to make the viewer get carried away... and then the teacher explained why it's all nonsense.
Shortly after that, the original Cosmos started on PBS (this was 35 years ago)... and I left pseudoscience behind ever since.
This made it rather annoying when my dad - an otherwise sensible person when it comes to science, as he always encouraged me in astronomy and geography/geology - got into this "ancient aliens" nonsense and kept prodding me to read some tabloid article he'd read on UFOs, or watch some UFO video.
You and God have something in common. A strong dislike for astrology. It would seem that God likes science, even if humans use it to explain God away. I think that it would be safe to assume that God wants us to know everything there is to know about the universe around us. Having a method to map the stars, figure them out, and even predict what may happen is not some taboo. It is when you let them start controlling your life and living in fear that becomes a problem.
