Today we move on to the second tablet from which Genesis was compiled: Genesis 2:4b-5:1a. Our tablet begins thus:

“In the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens, no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for Yahweh God had not caused it to rain on the earth. There was not a man to till the ground, but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole surface of the ground.”

Notice that I’ve changed the period at the end of 2:4b to a comma as there is no punctuation in the original Hebrew and given the toledoths-as-colophons Wiseman hypothesis, 2:4b is not the rest of the sentence that begins in 2:4a, but rather the start of the sentence in 2:5.

Looking towards the other end of tablet, we find the closing passage reads: “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” Under the Wiseman hypothesis, this suggests that Genesis 2:4b-5:1a originally come from a “book” in tablet form written by Adam (the first man created by God) describing his origins (translated as ‘generations’). The Wiseman hypothesis fits quite well as the account indeed records the origins of Adam, giving details that would have only been readily available to Adam, and stops well before Adam’s death. It also explains the strangeness of having what appear to be two creation stories and the odd repetition when verse 2:4 is seen as a single sentence instead of the end of one document and the beginning of another. Rather than two creation stories, we have one creation story in a document from God’s point of view followed by a separate document that records Adam’s origins from his own view. As we move through Genesis and examine its component documents, we shall see how the Wiseman hypothesis neatly accounts for peculiarities like these that remain as mysteries in competing theories about the history of text of Genesis. Such explanative power is the sign of a superior hypothesis.

Returning to the opening passage of our current document, we find that it introduces what is known as the tetragrammaton (Greek for “four letter word”) – the four Hebrew letters יְהוָ֥ה that spell the divine name. Unlike Elohim, which is akin to a role or title, the tetragrammaton denotes the actual personal name of God. Fittingly enough, it seems related to the Hebrew root for “to be” and is understood to roughly mean “the self-existent one” or “He who brings into being”. In the past, this name has been rendered in English as Jehovah. However, due to pronunciation shifts in the English language as well as advances in our understanding of written ancient Hebrew, the modern consensus is that the divine name is more properly transliterated as YHWH and rendered as Yahweh. The fact that the WEB renders this word as Yahweh is another reason why I chose to use this translation for this study.

YHWH occurs 6,828 times in the standard Hebrew texts and is the most commonly used word to refer to God in the Bible. In addition to the commandment in Exodus 20:7 (“You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain, for Yahweh will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.”), the Bible tells us frequently that God considers His name and its reputation very important and that He desires people to know Him by His name. Unfortunately, an overzealousness in avoiding the accidental violation of the commandment against misusing the divine name eventually led to the practice of restricting the pronouncing of YHWH to the High Priest on Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement) in the days when the Temple was still standing in Jerusalem. Since the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the divine name has not been pronounced and certainty about its correct pronunciation has been lost to the past. During readings of the Hebrew Scriptures, the word Adonai (which is the majestic plural form of the word Adon, meaning “my lord”) was read aloud in place of YHWH. As a result, the practice of translating YHWH as “Lord” has taken root which seems a shame if not wrong considering the extreme importance that God placed upon His name and people knowing Him by it.

It’s nice that a modern English translation like the WEB has restored YHWH to the Bible. It makes a striking difference I think to see God’s name in use throughout the text instead of the classic rendering “LORD”. It especially makes the numerous verses that invoke the sacredness of God’s name resonate more effectively when one actually sees that name right there in the surrounding text.

We begin our reading of Genesis with the story of creation Gen 1:1-2:4a where the 2:4a portion of the last verse is “This is the history of the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created”.

One thing today’s passage demonstrates nicely is that the division of the Bible into chapters is fairly arbitrary and has more to do with creating roughly similar sized sections of text to serve as easy reference markers rather than logically contained units. Today’s passage is a logically complete story and yet it consists of the entire first chapter plus the first three and a half verses of chapter two.

Examining the toledoth colophon, we see that the tablet basis of this section would have been entitled “the [toledoth] of the heavens and of the earth” and that the tablet is dated to “when they were created”. Absent is the formula’s typical inclusion of an author or tablet owner. Thus, it would seem that the indicated author is the only possible observer of the events described: God Himself.

Returning to the first verse, straight off the bat, we find something of interest lurking in the original Hebrew. The word that is translated here as ‘God’ is elohim. The first thing to note is that elohim is the plural form of eloah which is the poetic or emphatic form of el roughly meaning “mighty one”. This plural word elohim is the word that we see translated as ‘God’ throughout this entire passage – indeed almost every reference to ‘God’ (as opposed to ‘god’ or ‘God of X’) in the Old Testament is to this word elohim which occurs over 2500 times.

I point out the plural nature of elohim because sometimes people will try to argue that this word really should be translated as ‘gods’ and that this is a suppressed sign of a supposed origin of Hebrew monotheism in polytheism. Such arguments are based upon either ignorance of Hebrew grammar or an overriding desire to find evidence for the a priori assumption that monotheism evolved from polytheism rather than the other way around. While elohim may be plural, it is almost always paired with singular verbs and singular adjectives indicating that the plural is not a plural of number but a plural of majesty or excellence. In the very few cases where elohim is translated as ‘God’ in association with adjectives and verbs that are plural, there are quite reasonable explanations that do not rely upon conjuring up a monotheist conspiracy. Here’s a series of three essays that dig into the details:  Elohim: Plural or Singular Part I, Part II, and Part III.

The second essay referenced above also touches upon another issue that surfaces in today’s passage. In verse 1:26a we have: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’”. Here, the verb paired with elohim is singular indicating the majestic plural rather than a numerical plural. Also, in verse 1:27, we have “God created man in his own image” and again the verb indicates singular. So to whom then is God referring or  speaking when He says ‘us’ and ‘our’? The consensus is that God is employing the “royal we”, speaking to His heavenly court surrounded by His angels, or doing both. Some writers suggest that this an early hint at the doctrine of the trinity, but I find the other explanation more likely.

I’ll briefly touch upon the matter of how I understand this story. There are various conflicting schools of thought among believers ranging from the more literal approach to the more figurative. I’ve seen good and bad arguments from all across the board – often from the same source. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure where my own understanding lies as I’ve changed positions over the years shifting in different directions based upon further exposure to various evidence and lines of reason and haven’t really found myself stabilizing. I currently lean towards the theory that this tablet was written by Moses from a series of seven prophetic visions of God’s creation of the universe and that God’s intent is a theological statement of His supremacy over the creation in contrast to competing contemporary creation accounts that involved complex battles between gods where heaven, the sea, the sun, and the moon were all divine participants rather than mere creations.

Regardless of the interpretation of the passage, it has many interesting literary aspects such as the pattern of each day beginning with God first decreeing what He will do, then doing it, and finally declaring the result good. The first three days describe the creation of forms through separation, and the next three days parallel the first three by filling their corresponding forms. There is definite emphasis on the final result of God’s creation being very good.

We begin our journey with the Old Testament. The exact books that make up the Old Testament vary among Christian denominations with some including only the books found in the canonical Hebrew Bible of Judaism and others also including all or some of the deuterocanonical (second canonical) books which consist of Jewish writings that were included in the Septuagint which is the Koine Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was translated in stages between the 3rd and 2nd Centuries BC in Alexandria. The nature of these books was in dispute in the early Church, and they are not considered canonical in Judaism although they were read by the Jews and some passages from them are cited in the New Testament. When I first read the Bible, I read an NIV copy, which, being a modern Protestant translation, did not include the deuterocanonical books. During this study, I will include these books seeing as they are available with the WEB translation and I think it will be interesting to encounter these works regardless of their canonical status.

The first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) are known as the Pentateuch or the Torah which is Hebrew for “law”, “teaching”, or “instruction”. According to Jewish religious tradition, the Torah was authored by the Hebrew prophet Moses. In addition, the Torah itself and later books of the Bible including the Gospels attest to the Torah as being the work of Moses. When it is said that Moses wrote the Torah, the claim is that Moses was the primary author, but that he likely drew upon existing materials when writing the portions that predate his life and that later editors added some expository material such as the recording of the death of Moses and helpful annotations that provide updated names of peoples and places so that later Jewish readers during the time of the Jewish Kingdom and the Babylonian Exile could understand archaic references.

Critical secular scholars since the 18th century have posited differing explanations for the origins of the Torah with the dominant theory being variations on the Wellhausen documentary hypothesis (sometimes known as JEDP theory for Jahwist source, Elohist source, Deuteronomist source, and Priestly source) which alleges that the Torah was edited together at a late date from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives. While this theory frequently pops up in the writings of skeptics who wish to undermine the notion that the Bible is divinely inspired, it has many flaws including loaded and dubious assumptions several of which have crumbled under the evidence of later archeological discoveries. Modern scholarship has trended towards abandoning the classical documentary hypothesis, but unfortunately, it is still sometimes treated by those with only a fleeting familarity with the Bible and Ancient Near East cultures as though it were established fact beyond controversy.

Given my faith in Jesus as God’s definitive messenger and His role as the center of my interpretative understanding of the Bible, the fact that Jesus claims in the New Testament that Moses is the author of the Torah means that I start with this as my assumption and place the burden of proof on those who would claim that Moses did not author the Torah. From my readings on the documentary hypothesis, I do not think that the burden of proof has been met. Instead, I find that a far more compelling approach is based upon the Wiseman hypothesis which notes the distinctive toledoth (‘These are the generations of …’) passages in Genesis and sees them as colophons that mark the ends of tablets.

For an excellent introductory analysis of the Wiseman hypothesis and how it lays bare the structure of Genesis, I recommend reading Who Wrote Genesis? Are the Toledoths Colophons?. For further reading on the authorship of the Torah, I suggest: Did Moses Write the Pentateuch?, JEDP Theory Articles and The Documentary Theory of the Authorship of the Pentateuch.

Now that the matter of authorship has been touched upon, we are in a position to turn our attention directly to the first book of the Torah: the book of Genesis. The title, which comes from the Septuagint, is Greek for “birth” or “origin” and stems from the both the general subject matter of the work and from the frequent usage of the Greek geneseos in the text which corresponds with the Hebrew toledoth for “account” or “family origins” in the original Hebrew manuscripts. The original Hebrew title B’reishit means “in the beginning” and is the first word of the Hebrew text – a method by which all five books of the Torah are named in the Hebrew versions.

Genesis begins with an account of God creating the world and mankind. It then gives an account of early human history leading up to the pivotal figure of Abraham whose special relationship with God leads him to become the father of the Jewish and Arab peoples. Finally, Genesis follows the story of Abraham’s descendants until we find the fledging 12 tribes of Israel moving from their ancestral lands in Canaan (ancient Palestine) to live among the Egyptian people.

That’s plenty to digest for today. Tomorrow we’ll dive into the opening story of Genesis.

I’ve decided to start blogging through the Bible on a semi-daily basis. I see this as a useful exercise in many ways:

1. It will force me to write regularly which is a long languished goal of mine.
2. At the end, I will have completely read the Bible for a second time.
3. I will be able to record and focus my thoughts and understanding of the Bible.
4. Hopefully, I can provide some commentary of interest or value to my right-wing Christian brothers and sisters and to my atheist comrades.

For my translation, I’ve decided to use the World English Bible (WEB) as I like the principles that it is based upon – especially the fact that it is copyright free. You can read more about the WEB here: http://www.ebible.org/web/webfaq.htm.

The Christian Bible consists of two book collections: the Old Testament (or Old Covenant) and the New Testament (or New Covenant). The Old Testament is essentially the books of the Hebrew Bible while the New Testament collects the early Christian writings that recorded the lives and teachings of Jesus and His early followers. As I begin a given section or book, I will provide some introductory comments for it.

It seems appropriate for me to briefly discuss here the logical dependencies of my religious beliefs as this will provide some insight into how I approach the Bible.

Belief Dependency Flowchart

The starting point for my religious beliefs is theism. I’m not trying to justify my beliefs here and so will not go into how I arrived at my theist position, but it is mostly independent of my other more specialized religious beliefs other than some interplay with my second foundational religious belief: the belief in the truth of the Gospels which provide accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. While theism is definitely the logically prior belief and the core belief that provides a foundation for the rest, my belief in the truth of the Gospels does provide supporting evidence for my theism even as it depends upon the possibility of the theistic hypothesis.

From my theism and from my acceptance of the Gospels follows my belief that Jesus is God’s definitive revelation to mankind, and it is this belief that forms the backbone of my belief in the truth of Bible and also represents the key to my interpretation of the Bible. The Bible is a large collection of writings that span across centuries and cultures. There are definitely passages that taken together present ambiguities or difficulties – though by no means are they necessarily the contradictions that a naive skeptic would paint them as. In fact, with a proper understanding of the relevant cultures and historical context as well as a proper attitude towards the text (seeking a solution rather decreeing an insurmountable problem), I find no contradictions in the Bible.

That’s probably enough material for today. Tomorrow, I’ll kick things off properly…

What better place to start than “In the Beginning…“?

My last attempt at a theme for this blog resulted in something that was too hard to read. At the time, I figured I would return to my theme at some point and solve its readability issues, but alas I have been simply too busy with work at my new job to take a stab at it. So over the last few days of vacation, I tried my hand at quickly producing a new theme. I think the result is something that is easy to read and sufficiently bleak for my aesthetic tastes.

I decided that seeing as I was moving from Mephisto to WordPress, I should take the time to revamp the look of my website. I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the flat and old-fashioned style of my old theme, and I also was starting to find the color scheme a little harsh on the eyes. Despite my love for hurling politically significant colors at my visitors, the good old red and black look just wasn’t cutting it for me.

Finally, although I will continue to make reference to my anarchist political beliefs in these pages, I decided that it may be counterproductive to litter the pages with symbols of Christianity, anarchism and communism that scream at you from every corner. Sure, if a sympathetic reader comes to my site, they will feel at home with the symbolism, but your average Joe, who might at some point find that he agrees with a lot of the ideas that form the basis for anarchist thought, might never get that far because when he comes to the site and sees a bunch of freaky symbols, his knee jerk reaction might be to leave posthaste for greener blogging pastures.

So instead of the whole Christo-anarchism-run-amok theme, I have now turned towards instead simply striving for something I find aesthetically pleasing.

I hope you like it as well.

Expect subtle changes as I continue to work on improving readability in a few troublesome places over the next few days.

In the several months since I first started blogging, I have enjoyed using Mephisto. It’s a nice blogging tool and was a great way for me to play around with a bonafide Ruby on Rails application. However, thanks to my new job at a Rails shop, I will soon be getting all the Rails action that I need on a daily basis without any need for an alternative outlet.

In addition, I have found the almost complete lack of activity on the Mephisto website disconcerting. I understand that the developers of Mephisto are busy and that Mephisto is just a side project for them, so it’s not that I expect anything from them. It’s not as if I or other Mephisto users are paying them for the wonderful work that they do. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable producing a growing body of blog posts here at the wrathful dove on a system that may simply stagnate should its developers lose interest in further development.

For this last reason, I have been toying with the idea for several months of switching my blogging software. I have considered Typo and WordPress on numerous occasions. WordPress seems the obvious standard by which other blogging software is judged and is a fine product, but every time that I considered moving to WordPress, I ran into a roadblock that I had constructed for myself: I wanted a playground for Rails development and so was committed to maintaining my blog in Ruby. Thus, instead of WordPress, I focused my attention on Typo.

I went so far as to install Typo on a Linux machine on my home network, and I definitely liked what I saw. In many ways, I was puzzled why so many people had left Typo for Mephisto. I had heard a lot of talk about Mephisto’s supposedly cleaner and simpler admin interface, but I found myself preferring the power and features available with Typo. In my estimation, Typo’s admin interface seems quite adequate in the simplicity department, too. The only other complaint that I had heard about Typo was that it was flaky and slow. I never did enough experimentation to determine whether I would experience these problems with Typo, so I have nothing to say about Typo’s stability. However, the possibility having been raised did give me pause about moving to Typo.

Still, I suspect I may have moved to Typo if it hadn’t been for my new Rails job combined with one other significant detail.

My blog runs on a Slicehost account that I share with my friend Josh. He runs WordPress and some other PHP based sites. He has grown to share my distaste for PHP and was interested in the possibility of running a Rails application for one of his projects. When we started looking into this idea, we noticed for the first time how much of a memory hog a Rails application is. As discussed in this blog post, Rails doesn’t “scale down”. It’s great for large web applications, but it doesn’t work so nicely for small web sites. Sure, it can provide the backbone for a small website, but the cost in memory footprint just isn’t worth it when you can develop the same kinds of small web sites in PHP and not run out of resources so rapidly.

There was one final issue that weighed in on my blogging software setup. I had chosen to run my Mephisto based blog on top of a PostgreSQL database because it is my database preference. However, Josh’s web applications were all base upon MySQL databases and so it seemed wasteful of our limited Slice resources to be running two different database servers.

All these factors came together in my decision to migrate my blog from Mephisto with PostgreSQL to WordPress with MySQL.

The move has been very smooth, and in all honesty, I’m loving the excellent features that WordPress brings to the table out of the box. It truly is the gold standard of blog software even if it is apparently written in crufty PHP.

Last weekend, I purchased myself a domain for this blog, finally. It was actually part of an exercise in testing the practical length of time it takes for a DNS server change to propogate successfully. I had originally been planning on purchasing a different domain for a different purpose altogether, but I was sort of luke warm about it. However, my lovely and brilliant wife thought it made sense to buy one for this blog which I slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner – especially with domain prices on GoDaddy so cheap!

Now all my faithful readers (all 2-3 of you) can find me at http://wrathfuldove.org or http://www.wrathfuldove.org.

Ever since I started looking into using Mephisto for my blog and reading about the various ways of deploying a production Rails site, I had heard about the company Slicehost and how it was an excellent hosting company that was among other things friendly to Rails development. Later, when it came time to develop a website for some aquaintances I ran across Slicehost’s name again and continued to read good things about them, but their price range and my acquaintances’ needs didn’t fit with what Slicehost offered.

But the prospect of having a virtual dedicated server with full root access and complete control over the system right down to the responsibility for the security and maintenance of the box along with complete control of the ports was quite alluring. I kept returning to the Slicehost page hungry for a Slice of my own.

Everytime I looked, I could never really justify the cost for my own modest needs, i.e. this blog. But then, I started getting back in touch with a local anarchist group whose website had become stagnant. They were hoping to some new things with it and I was planning on helping them out. When I saw the hosting plan that the group currently uses and considered the kind of site that the group really wanted and needed, I thought that a hosting upgrade for their site was definitely in order. While considering options for their site, I thought that perhaps if I had a Slicehost account then perhaps I could offer the group free hosting for their website.

Which set wheels turning in my head…

I knew that my friend Josh was running into difficulties with his family blog and his wife’s photography business site because his ISP had started blocking various ports. The same possibility loomed over my blog as it too resided on a home based server that was fully at the mercy of the Charter Cable powers that be.

So it occurred to me that Josh and I might together have enough needs to justify splitting the costs.

Fortunately, Josh agreed with my idea, and so we purchased ourselves a 256slice and have been quite happy with the results! So for the last two months, this blog has been happily running on our new Slice instead of a Virtual Ubuntu Feisty server running on top of my old Athlon 64 2800 Windows box.

This move actually fixed several problems for me. First, my Windows box has always been pretty flaky. I purchased it from a local shop that puts together systems, and it has exhibited all sorts of problems including the motherboard burning out two sticks of RAM and one catestrophic failure to boot that led to an OS corruption and a complete reinstall. It’s been fairly stable for awhile now, but it does have two persistant flukes: the front USB port appears to short circuit and cause a shutdown of the machine if used and whenever the house experiences a short power flicker, the computer shut offs and requires me to unplug and replug it in before the power button will successfully boot the machine again. Thanks to this last issue, I would more often than I like find my blog down during the day and not be able to fix the problem until I returned home.

Another problem was that the DynamicDNS service that had mapped theweatherses.org to my home network did not offer the free email forwarding that my domain registar had offered when we were using its DNS servers. As a result, the email aliases that my wife had set up suddenly stopped working when I began to point our domain to our home machines. I had gotten around this problem by running my own mail server, but then one day my ISP decided to start blocking port 25.

Now with the Slicehost, I no longer need to pay for the DynamicDNS service that mapped my domain to a server. Instead, I have returned to my registar’s DNS servers and the email aliases have become functional once more. Problem solved!

The only lingering issue was connecting to my home network via a static domain now that theweatherses.org no longer pointed home, but fortunately, I could now simply make use of a free DynamicDNS service to map to a less spiffy domain that is just as useful for the simple purpose of providing a static means of connecting to my home network.

So far the Slicehost has been a wonderful experience! It’s nice to have a spot on the Internet with which one can pretty much do anything.

Way back in February, my good friend Jason ran across the following quote from Shakespeare:

Thou wilt be as valiant as the wrathful dove or most magnanimous mouse.

-Spoken by Falstaff in Henry IV, part 2

He thought the phrase the wrathful dove fit perfectly for my blog, and I quite agreed!

After many weeks of procrastination, I’ve finally taken the time to update the site with a new logo and its new name. Thanks go out to the authors of the excellent Christian anarchist website Jesus Radicals whose logo featuring the raised fist with a nail through the wrist inspired me when I was designing the blog’s new logo.

I suppose here is as good a place as any for explaining the imagery for those who may not be familiar with all the symbols used in the blog’s logo.

I designed the symbol on the left as a Christian anarcho-communist flag. The color black symbolizes a world without national borders or boundaries that artificially divide the people from one another. The color red symbolizes the blood of comrades and martyrs who have died for humanity and for God. The black flag basis for the design is one of the historical symbols of anarchism. The cross is one of the most recognizable symbols of Christianity and obviously symbolizes Christ’s sacrificial suffering and submission on the cross for all people. The hammer and sickle is a sign of communism. It represents the unity of the workers and common people of the world via overlapping symbols for agricultural workers (sickle) and industrial workers (hammer). Taken altogether, I find it a beautiful symbol of a world of solidarity and unity under the loving Kingdom of Christ.

The symbol on the right combines the raised fist which has been used by various leftist movements over the years as a salute and a symbol of solidarity. The addition of the nail through the wrist brings a Christian dimension to the symbol and for me represents Christ’s unity and suffering with his people as they struggle to live lives that reflect the values and reality of his Kingdom. I added an olive branch clutched in the fist to emphasize the pacifism and non-violence that I embrace and believe an integral part of my faith and politics.