Tag: God

What the Text of Genesis 1–2 Reveals about Its Own Compositional Nature and the Beliefs and Views of Its Authors

The following is excerpted from the Conclusion to Genesis 1 and the Creationism Debate (p. 117-120) First, when the text of Genesis 1:1—3:24 is read and understood on its own terms and from within its own cultural and literary contexts, we notice that the text itself reveals that the beginning chapters of the book of Genesis preserve two creation accounts—that it is in fact a composite text. We furthermore saw inRead More

#63. Can a mortal see God face-to-face and live OR not? (Gen 16:13, 32:30; Ex 24:9-11, 33:11; Num 14:14; Deut 5:21, 34:10 vs Ex 33:20; John 1:18, 5:37; 1 Tim 6:16)

This is an oldie but a goodie as they say, and can be found on numerous other sites and throughout the literature. I will keep to my procedure of stressing that such contradictions are the result of an editorial process that brought together different textual traditions written over a period of 1,000 years, each expressing divergent and contradictory beliefs, worldviews, and theologies. In fact, contradictory traditions now preserved side-by-side in the Bible yieldRead More