Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Mike Sangrey <msangrey AT BlueFeltHat.org>]

On Sat, 2002-08-17 at 17:18, Andrew & Debby Kulikovsky wrote:
<snip>
> This is not correct. There is no reason why you can't have time without 
> light.
> I don't think you have understood Einstein - most people including many 
> physicists don't!

I won't carry this discussion any further, but I'd rather the idea not
get dismissed with a simple "wave of the hand."

Perhaps I should have used the term `energy' instead of `light'.  With
only Mass and no Energy, you can't talk about the space-time continuum. 
If you can't use space-time language (that is, you can't convey `tense'
using any linguistic feature), how do you describe the creation of
Mass?  Well, you simply state it--just like Gen. 1:1 does.  However, as
soon as you have Energy AND Mass in place, you can start using
space-time continuum language.  You can start saying things like "that
which just happened was day one."  You can't talk about a day zero thing
since the whole concept of `day' doesn't make any sense until you have
both Energy AND Mass in place.

I might add that the "evening and morning" language, used by the author
to stress a rather short time, can fit just fine when one assumes an
earth centric, gravitationally influenced, relativistic time.  You've
got a really big ball of water; there would have to be gravitational
effects on time going on as the different pieces of the universe come
into existence through those first 6 days.  It's really not that
difficult to postulate large variances in time between different places
of the universe as a result of the event horizon (or horizons)
shrinking.  In short, the language of Gen. 1 is not scientifically
weird.

ISTM that we often implicitly massage the original language to fit our
own cosmological assumptions, especially here in Gen 1.  I'm just
pointing out (albeit with a LOT of stuff not covered) a different
cosmology so that Hebrew experts can have another perspective as they
work with the language data.  We don't have to pit the language data
against the cosmological data.  They can, and IMO, should, agree just
fine.

-- 
Mike Sangrey
msangrey AT BlueFeltHat.org
Landisburg, Pa.
                        "The first one last wins."
            "A net of highly cohesive details reveals the truth."