Origins Worksheet
Question 1: What does each approach (more plain/literal vs. more poetic/figural) think is the author's intention in writing Genesis 1 and 2?
The way in which one perceives the first two chapters of Genesis is extremely important because it dictates whether the creation story was an actual event, or rather, a symbolic anecdote. One who believes that the writing in Genesis is a literal account of the creation story would believe that Genesis is the account of how God brought about order from a lack of order, and explains mankind’s functional origins (Larsen, 2012). This means that the first few chapters of Genesis explain the institution of God’s temple in the cosmos, and therefore explain its origin. However, readers need to be careful to assess
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In order to evaluate the validity of each argument, it is important to evaluate the original Hebrew text. A strength for the literal translation of Genesis can be found when one interprets the Hebrew meaning of the word “yom”, which means day. Many people argue that when the “days” are mentioned in the creation account, they are referring to long ages. However, when studied in context, in the 357 times that the word “yom” is used outside of the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, it is used to mean a literal 24-hour day (Stambaugh, 1988). This would be irrational, then, to assume that Moses would use the same word to describe two drastically different scenarios. If Moses desired to indicate that each day of creation was a specific age of time, He could have easily chosen another word to use within the Genesis account of creation. Understanding the length of the days in creation is incredibly important, because if God did indeed create the world in six 24-hour periods, there is little room for figurative interpretation of