I have recently undertaken to read the Bible from the beginning to end, something I have never done before in full. I suspect that if I just did so by myself then I would soon quit from boredom, so I decided to discuss my thoughts on the topic with others here in this forum to give me a motivation to continue along as I do so.
How this will work is I will read a few chapters and write my thoughts about the work as I read along, then do some minor edits at the end of the reading. I won't be copy-pasting the actual text itself here. For reference I will be reading the New International Version (NIV) but discussion of any other versions is welcome in the thread. With all that said, let's begin.
The first obvious things that we notice as we read the first few verses are of course how little the story matches with what we know of modern science. The obvious things such as day and night existing before the sun and moon, light and plants existing before the sun, etc. These are hard statements to ignore considering modern scientific knowledge. However, I am not reading this book to find things to criticize about it or try to prove some point. I want to try to get a genuine understanding of it. After all these stories were created thousands of years ago by ignorant people, for them it was natural to look at the blue sea and see it is made of water then look at the blue sky and assume it is made of water being held above us (Genesis 1:6) It makes sense that someone would look into the sky during a full moon and think that the moon produces light (Genesis 1:16) even if we know these things to be false.
So then ignoring the obvious scientific inaccuracies, let's look deeper into this. As early as the second verse we start to see something interesting. The biblical description of God "Hovering over the waters" and the later creation of land paints a picture of the early world being covered entirely in water. Scientifically nonsense, of course, but that isn't the interesting part. The theme of the early universe starting as a vast expanse of water is a common one in many mythologies. Ancient Egyptian, Hindu, and even some Native American Folklore share this concept. This would seem to give credence to the idea that early mythologies, including the oral traditions from which the biblical tales are descended, either borrowed heavily from each other or share one or several common ancestor mythologies from which all take inspiration.
The next verse that catches my attention that I would like to talk about is Genesis 1:27. In most teachings of the biblical creation story Eve is presented as being the first human woman. In this verse, however, it states that man and woman were created at the same time. This is not an obscure translation error that got missed, the NIV is not the only English version to say this. For those of you that do not know there are many books and stories which existed within the same tradition as the original biblical stories but were later removed from the narrative and this verse is an example of a vestigial remnant of one such story. In the original story the first woman on earth was Lilith, and she was made from the same dirt that Adam was made from. She refused to be subservient to Adam however and she left the Garden of Eden prior to The Fall. This story does not exist in the Bible today because of mankinds tinkering with the stories over time, but it existed within the tradition at one point and this verse is one piece of evidence for that.
Well, that completes the first chapter of Genesis and I think that is a good place to stop this OP. I expected to get farther along than I did because I did not think there would be this much to comment on but I think this is enough to induce a dialogue for now. Looking forward to seeing if anyone else is interested in this topic and if this does lead to an interesting conversation perhaps I will continue to read the next few chapters and we can discuss that as well.
