I’ve been a Christian for 22 years (since the age of 25) and learned a lot over the years. The past two years I’ve been rethinking the Genesis creation story, as I’ve always been trying to understand the Bible more in its historical context. I post my change of understanding to others for dialogue.
I began at 25 yrs old with churches that were young earth creationists (10k yrs at most), who were influenced by Answers In Genesis (Ken Ham), who read modern YEC science into scripture, and everything in those 7 days in a literal and modern way. I’ve since abandoned YEC and a modern interpretation, yet retained a literal real Adam, biblical inerrancy and inspiration, and now see the Genesis creation story as myth, not myth as falsehood, but a form of communication that brought in a real historical people, Adam and Eve, but a story more specifically telling the people of Israel who they were in the world (from beginning to their present).
I was with you until the "myth" part.
Has anyone else taken this road?
I, too, was brought up with a YEC viewpoint. Which is based on how Gen 1:2 has been translated. In my late teens, I heard about the "GAP theory", that there is an unknown time gap between v.1 and 2. All of which would account for what science claims is a very old earth. However, I wasn't given any actual evidence for this, other than what was said.
Many years later, I discovered one of the most valuable verses in the Bible regarding how to study. Acts 17:11 - Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and
examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
So, I began applying this verse to what pastors/teachers/etc were saying. iow, does the Bible say what people claim?
At some point, I thought about Genesis 1:1,2. I met a Greek and Hebrew expert, whose church Bible is in Hebrew for the OT and Greek for the NT! He pointed me to biblehub.com as a resource for studying how Greek/Hebrew words are used in every other place in the OT or NT. When I studied the key words in v.2, I realized that the translators didn't translate those words the same way they did the rest of the OT. When seeing how these key words were translated in the rest of the OT, a different meaning began to develop.
Finally, every English translation begins v.2 with "and". The Hebrew has 1 word that can mean either "and" or "but", unlike the Greek and English. The Septuagint translates the conjunction as "but".
So, here is the traditional translation:
And the earth
was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And this is how the key words should be translated:
But the earth became an uninhabitable wasteland; (I didn't examine the rest of the verse).
What is interesting is comparing this translation with what Isa 45:18 says:
For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it;
he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!): "I am the LORD, and there is no other.
Now, the blue words in the traditional verse is "tohu wabohu" and contradicts Isa 45:18, which says God did NOT create the earth 'empty', which is the same word in Gen 1:2.
So, either God did or did not create the earth "tohu". Using the corrected translation, developed from how the key words are translated elsewhere in the OT, there is no contradiction.
What we have is that God didn't create the earth a wasteland (Isa 45:18) BUT the earth BECAME a wasteland.
All that said, Genesis 1:2ff is about a restoration of God's original creation. So the earth can be every bit as old as science has measured, without any "damage" to the biblical text.
So I don't see any "myth" about Gen 1. Just a straightforward account of original creation (Gen 1:1) and the earth becoming a wasteland (without any explanation) and God restoring earth and putting man on it.