In The Beginning

By Allison Kohn

This is a conversation on the book of Genesis, not as though it was a science book, nor is it a history book. As I say in the preface, I like to think of it as an introduction to who Yahweh is.
As we study the book of Genesis we will not impose any modern issues on the text. We will be studying from the point of view of the ones it was first written to and from; therefore, we will have to have some understanding of how the ancients saw their world and where the information for the book came from. We know that Moses wrote it, but where did Moses get his information?
Moses was an educated man. He would have had the writings from the entire known world to study and compare. It is possible that he had access to records brought to Egypt by his ancestors. Perhaps Abraham brought them from Ur. Or, God could have dictated them to Moses. That; however, will not be our focus as we study this book of beginnings.
In the beginning Yahweh created the heavens and the earth and the Word – that Word that later became flesh and dwelt among us – was with Yahweh – and he was Yahweh. Yahweh is the third person of the verb heyah “To Be”. Whether in the first or third person the word expresses our God as THE (one and only) Self-existent One responsible for all existence including his own –the great I AM.
“All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.”1

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allison Kohn
• Release date: Dec 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311966308

Allison Kohn

Allison Kohn is a 75 year old ordained Presbyterian elder who has worked with both children (of all ages) and adults to help them with their Christian walk. She has published 11 books - five of them in the Baker family Saga. Since her example, Jesus, used stories to teach truth, she does the same. Everyone wants to be entertained and a good book teaches in an entertaining way, just as a good sermon preaches in an entertaining way. The author has a lot of experience with people and how they react to the ups and downs of life and she puts it to work in her writing.

Book preview

Genesis is not a science book, nor is it a history book.⁴⁹ I like to think of it as an introduction to who Yahweh is.

As we study the book of Genesis we will not impose any modern issues on the text. We will be studying from the point of view of the ones it was first written to and from; therefore, we will have to have some understanding of how the ancients saw their world and where the information for the book came from. We know that Moses wrote it, but where did Moses get his information?

Moses was an educated man. He would have had the writings from the entire known world to study and compare. It is possible that he had access to records brought to Egypt by his ancestors. Perhaps Abraham brought them from Ur. Or, God could have dictated them to Moses. That; however, will not be our focus as we study this book of beginnings.

In the beginning Yahweh created the heavens and the earth and the Word – that Word that later became flesh and dwelt among us – was with Yahweh – and he was Yahweh. Yahweh is the third person of the verb heyah To Be. Whether in the first or third person the word expresses our God as THE (one and only) Self-existent One responsible for all existence including his own –the great I AM.

All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.¹

Chapter 1

The descendants of Israel had spent 500 years in Egypt, inundated with myths of how different gods created the physical world and the human race. They had to be told the truth. No primordial mound or Island of Creation arose from a primeval ocean with the favorite god of the different areas being the creator god. Humans were not created to do any god’s dirty work – weren’t the slave of any lazy god. The sun, moon, and stars are not gods. The universe didn’t originate from a cosmic struggle of the gods and mankind was not created from the blood of a god for the purpose of serving the gods.²

There was no concept of a natural world in the thinking process of the ancient Near East.³ Everyone believed that everything that happened in life was the result of a deity’s activity – favorable or not.⁴

Moses’ job was to tell his people who really created the universe and what he was like – as much as they were able to understand. He had to introduce Yahweh to a people who had pre-conceived ideas and deep rooted concepts of god/human relationships. He had to, at the direction of the Holy Spirit of Yahweh; communicate to the people from their point of understanding. Yahweh always stoops down to our level – we are incapable of reaching up to his level of understanding, even though the blood of Meshach – and the children of Israel didn’t have the blood of Christ yet.

The word create (Hebrew bārā) concerns fuction.⁵

"1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2.And the earth was unproductive6 - There was nothing functional7. And darkness was upon the face of the deep. Light and darkness are thought of as functions in the ancient Near East.⁸ And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

"3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

Yahweh made light functional. Let there be light would read Let there be a period of light. Verse one is all that is said about the actual creation, as we understand it today, of the universe.

4. God saw the light, that is was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.

A king named objects and people in ancient times to show ownership or sovereignty.⁹ Yahweh did not name light and darkness in verse 5, but a period of light and a period of darkness. This is a metonymy, a figure of speech in which the name of one thing is used in place of another.¹⁰ Time is created, a function - not a material substance.

Yahweh separated cosmic space. As John Walton¹¹says, on the second day Yahweh established cosmic order and set up a system that serves as the basis for weather.

Yahweh exercised his prerogative as sovereign to name the sky and instruct it to control precipitation.

Yahweh separated terrestrial space. Yahweh named the dry land and the pooled water. Egyptian cosmology was common knowledge to the Israelites; the primeval mound reflecting the yearly reality of the fertile soil emerging after the flooding of the Nile.  Ancient Egyptians believed that the Nileflooded every year because Isis's tears of sorrow for her dead husband, Osiris. ¹² Moses told us that Yahweh demonstrated his right as Sovereign to assign function to and name the utilities for the basis of food;¹³ therefor, the Nile’s yearly blessings were from Yahweh.

In days¹⁴ 1-3 Yahweh tells the ancient descendants of Israel– and us – that it is he¹⁵ who established the functions controlling time, weather, and food. Yahweh is assuring the ancient Israelites and us that he established the functionaries as well as their functions.¹⁶

The two great lights link to day one in that they are created to direct time. Yahweh is the maker of those two great lights and the establisher of their functions. Their use is people oriented. They were not gods, as the people in the ancient world perceived them to be, they were Yahweh’s assistants, who were given the function of regulating day, night, times of sowing and harvest, etc.¹⁷

It was and is Yahweh that was and is responsible for the water, air and land abounding with life. Our God put them there. He contradicts the ancients’ belief that the land and sea contained creatures that are threats to human beings¹⁸, including the Loch Ness monster, Sasquatch, and Cupacabra. All living creatures are part of the blessings of Yahweh.

Humanity

Yahweh said Let us... because he is Royalty and because he is Unity. As John Walton points out¹⁹ the image of God is the most important- and the focus - of creation. Humankind’s function is to reflect Yahweh’s character and act in his stead – as his stewards - in the world where he placed them. As Yahweh’s representatives we are to care for his creation as he would care for it. We were not given the right to subdue it as people today think of subduing an enemy. Yahweh’s creation is not our enemy. Yahweh gave us the responsibility of caring for his creation. It is not ours to exploit – it is his. Yahweh blessed us with time, weather, and food and gave us the responsibility of caring for them so he would continue to see that they were good - functioning well. Our function is to subdue and rule with consideration and feeling. We also have an inter-relational function. We were created male and female. As Yahweh’s image we were created to reflect his love to each other and his creation.

"Then God said, ‘I’ve given you every seed-bearing plant on Earth And every kind of fruit bearing tree, Given them to you for food. To all animals and all birds, Everything that moves and breaths, I give whatever grows out of the ground for food.’ And there it was."²⁰

Summary of Chapter 1

Then as now, there are many creation stories. Moses, through the power and leading of the Holy Spirit of Yahweh revealed the truth about the beginning of everything in the first chapter of Genesis – the book of beginnings. Yahweh is the originator of all that is. He alone is responsible for the perfect performance of each of his utilities. He alone is responsible for the existence of every living thing. He created humans with the distinctive purpose of reflecting his glorious character and equipped him to represent his God on the earth by giving him a brain and body superior to any other animal. Yahweh declared his creation work a very good job.

Blessed be your glorious name, and may it be exalted above all blessing and praise. You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is in it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything and the multitudes of heaven worship you.- 21 In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.²²

Prayer: Lord of all, our blessed redeemer and the joy of our days, we thank you for your great love and care. You truly do all things well and we adore you. Thank you for your many blessings – as we look at the starry sky above us at night or the clouds and blue sky in the daytime, we see that we are small and insignificant in compression and remember that you have given us your image and the responsibility of living out your purpose on this earth of yours. Help us to remember to be faithful and obedient to you – dead to ourselves and let you live through us.

Chapter 2

We must remind ourselves again that this book was written for the ancient decedents of Israel and go back and see how the people of that time and space would think. John Walton is a student of ancient cosmology and a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College. As he says, ²³the people whom Moses was writing to would have understood the account of the seventh day of rest to be a temple text and consider it to be the most important of the seven days. To the ancients rest resulted when a crisis was resolved. Rest would be a matter of engagement without obstacles as opposed to our definition of disengagement without responsibilities.

Yahweh disengaged from the set-up tasks and began regular operations. The universe is the temple he rules from.

Now we have the story of how it all started with the understanding of the people it was first written to. Here Yahweh, through Moses, tells his people that before any vegetation had sprouted from the earth or rain had fallen from the sky the earth was watered from underground springs.

Again, this is not a scientific explanation; this is a story to explain to the people of the Near East, through whom Yahweh chooses to spread his love to the rest of the world, what a wonderful world mankind lost.

Yahweh formed man out of the dust of the ground, planted a garden for him to live and work in and put those two trees in the middle surrounded by other trees that were beautiful to look at and good to eat from. Yahweh had given mankind his image – his moral fiber. He was able to choose right and hang on to his righteous character.

The description of the Garden of Eden as a place where all the senses are continually pleased demonstrates how much mankind had to loose.

The creation of woman would indicate that we need community and the best companion for a man is a woman. Man had already named all the other animals and didn’t find any with his brain power or any other attribute to match his abilities and stimulate his growth. The picture of Yahweh taking a rib from Adam and forming it into a mate for him suggests more to us now than it would have to us back in the time and space of the ancient Near East. If you want to read a delivery of this story from the perspective of a man who loves his own wife read The Surgery from Curious Tales: From The Time Before The Flood by S. D. Davidson.

My own emotions and brain cells tell me that asexual life loses more than sexual and intellectual intercourse. Two people working side by side, even without speech, improves the sensual appreciation of the work. The same goes for play.

Summary of Chapter 2

The garden Yahweh put his image in to take care of was a promise of eternal rest. It was a place where mankind could choose to follow his Maker’s rules and keep company with Yahweh with a life free and light.²⁴ The trees are like the tree in Psalm 1:3 and the one in Matthew 3:10. They represent choices. We, like the first humans created in the image of Yahweh, make the choice every day to either follow our Maker’s instructions and take care of our world or exploit it.

Prayer: Lord, help me to be like the tree in Psalm 1:3 with my roots firmly planted in your word so that I will bear the fruit of your Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control perpetually; with works that are a result of letting you live through me that will endure the refining fires.

Chapter 3

Yahweh made it clear that he had made the serpent, it had free will, but Yahweh doesn’t lose control even though he gives his creatures the ability and right to choose to do right or wrong. The fact that the serpent was about to go against his Maker and lie to the humans indicates to me that Yahweh’s creatures had been making the wrong choices before. We know the serpent represents Satan.²⁷ We don’t know if Satan spoke through a serpent to Eve but I suspect he did. However, the purpose of our study isn’t to ascertain whether Eve talked to a snake. Eve had been told that if she disobeyed Yahweh she would be separating herself from her Maker.

For thousands of years the serpent has been an archetype of societies. They were regarded with awe because of their complex and mutable characteristics.²⁵ The Egyptian serpent, Apophis was a violent malevolent force.²⁶

There are a lot of things to learn from the story of Eve and the serpent. He started by getting her to defend Yahweh from his slander. That put the germ of doubt in her mind so when he told her what Yahweh said wasn’t quite true, she listened and decided she wanted to know everything. She had everything she needed to be happy and fulfilled, but she wanted more. Making a bad choice, she not only broke her bond with Yahweh, she took Adam with her. He shouldn’t have followed her but they were united in their ambitions so he went along with her. It’s a familiar pattern – we aren’t satisfied with making our own wrong choices and leaving others alone, we want others to join us, especially those closest to us.

Wrong choices result in shame. These humans that Yahweh had given his image saw the corruption right away and tried to hide it by covering themselves with fig leaves. That would be laughable if we hadn’t all tried something in the same vein time and again. When Yahweh approached them about what they had done, they tried the blame game. Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. The serpent did seduce Eve and we’ve all been seduced by our own serpents and given in to his guiles so we can empathize with our ancestors.

You wouldn’t be here studying this first book of Moses with me if you didn’t know and weren’t glad that Yeshua paid it all. The first thing Yahweh did after explaining to Adam and Eve what dying was like was to promise them that Yeshua would come and defeat the corruption they had brought to the human race. Then he removed them from the garden so they couldn’t eat of the tree of life and live forever in their corrupted condition – forever in pain and increasingly unhappy in their sinful condition.

Another thing Yahweh did right away was to cover their shame himself. We can’t do anything about our imperfect condition ourselves. Yahweh can and does. We have the promise of eternal life restored. Yeshua came and told us that if we believe him we step from death into life.28

For some reason I am very stiff and sore this morning. I got up to get a cup of coffee and my legs had a hard time moving. When I bent down to pour the drink into my cup my back screamed at me to stop. I have a pain in my head – like a knife going through it. I could feel guilty because I’m not the perfect person Yahweh created me to be, but I don’t because Yeshua took all my guilt away on the cross. I don’t understand it at all, but I don’t have to. Yahweh’s ways are so far above mine – after all, he alone is the Only Wise God, the Creator of all that is and I am only his very small creature. But he loves me and planned for me before the foundation of the earth, so I will rest in him and rejoice.

Summary of chapter 3

You know the story of how Adam landed us in the dilemma we’re in – first sin, then death, and no one exempt from either sin or death. That sin disturbed relations with God in everything and everyone...²⁹

By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of his divine being. So nobody has a good excuse to ignore him.30

Prayer: Lord, I am so grateful you didn’t throw my ancestors away and start over or just forget you’d ever made man in your own image. I hear so often that you shouldn’t allow sin in the world, but that comes from people who have sinned themselves and don’t acknowledge the fact that their own damaged nature is capable of the vilest sin as well as the sin that they see as innocent mistakes. I once thought I was better than my ancestors, Adam and Eve, and was incapable of the kind of sin the world considers evil. Now I know that I was wrong. When I admitted that I am capable of the worst kind of sin, I saw that your grace is greater than all my sin – your strength is stronger than my weakness – and your love is deeper than my inability to love. Whatever and wherever I lack, you are able to fill with your great love, strength, mercy, and grace. Just as you supplied the covering for Adam and Eve with the blood of an innocent animal, you cover my sin – my imperfections – with the blood of your perfect son. I thank you and praise your holy blessed name.

Chapter 4

Remember we’re studying this from the perspective of our ancient ancestors.

The man Adam was working hard to bring food to his family.

Eve had a son. It was painful, but when it was all over she was glad the Lord gave her a man. I’m sure she was doubly glad when she brought another son into the world. They grew up and brought offerings to the Lord. Cain brought his "fig