4:54 PM
@brilliant What, then, is your clear rule on what to interpret literally and what to interpret metaphorically? Are you able to go through the entire Bible and say, "This verse is literal, this verse is metaphorical, this verse is literal, this verse is metaphorical"?
@brilliant The whole idea that the Creation story must be taken literally is only a century or two old. It is, in fact, a reaction to new developments in science that showed that the world is not, in fact, only 6,000 years old. Before that, whether or not the Creation story was literally true wasn't a big issue.
@brilliant The scientific evidence is that the earth is billions of years old. And that's easy to reconcile with the biblical dating: the biblical dating on which that 6,000 year old hypothesis is based occurs primarily in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, which were never intended to be taken literally. The Bible is primarily a spiritual book.
@brilliant And yes, I can deny that certain things in the Creation account are exactly what they are and not metaphors. In fact, I do deny that. Just because there is an actual earth, that doesn't mean "earth" in Genesis 1 isn't a metaphor. Just (as I already said) that the metaphor uses things we know of (in this case, the earth) to speak of higher things.
Ditto for the animals created in Genesis 1:25. And clearly Isaiah is using them as metaphors also, and is not concerned with literal, physical carnivores becoming herbivores. Why would God, in God's Word, bother talking about such trivial things?
The Bible is full of metaphor. And it assumes a certain amount of intelligence in the reader, such that it doesn't continually add the label, "The following account is a metaphor. Read it metaphorically, not literally."
I really suspect that the early humans who passed down the Creation stories orally, and then wrote them down, are looking down at today's "Christians," doing a facepalm, and saying, "How could they be such idiots? Don't they understand anything?!?"
For a considerably more detailed version, see Volume 1 of
Secrets of Heaven, by Emanuel Swedenborg. It's all explained there, including the spiritual meanings of the earth, the water, the plants, the animals, and so on.
@brilliant And incidentally, though Genesis 1:1 is commonly translated as, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," it should really be translated, "the sky and the land." The ancient Hebrews did not have our concept of the Earth as a globe in space. Their concept was of the land stretching to the horizon, and the sky above it. So right from the outset Genesis 1 simply doesn't describe what we think of as "the Earth."
Further, the human authors of that story were not so stupid as not to realize that the sun was the source of the light that God created. They did not think that God first created light, and only three days later created the source of the light. You would have to think that those early humans were idiots to think that they were not speaking metaphorically.
They were also not so stupid that they couldn't recognize that the second Creation story, in Genesis 2:4-25, tells a completely different story of Creation than the first Creation story, in Genesis 1:1-2:3. Do you think they didn't notice that the two stories say that things were created in a completely different way, and a completely different order?
The first Creation story has things created in this order:
1. Plants and trees
2. Fish and birds
3. Land animals
4. Humans, both male and female
The second Creation story has things created in this order:
1. Humans
2. Plants and trees
3. Land animals and birds (fish are not mentioned in Genesis 2)
4. Female humans as separate from male humans
The second Creation story is not a more detailed version of the first. It is a completely different story of Creation. Do you think the early human authors and compilers of the Bible were so stupid that they didn't notice that?
If they had meant their stories to be literal accounts of the physical creation of the universe, don't you think they would have done a better job of harmonizing the two stories, instead of making them flatly contradict one another, as they do?
Clearly the human authors and compilers of the Bible were not thinking literally, but metaphorically, when they wrote down those stories. They were not thinking about how the world was physically created, but about how God created humans as spiritual beings in relationship with God, and how the story of humanity's relationship with God unfolded.