Subtle Science or Transcendence of God using Ancient Concepts: You Decide - Isaiah 40 and Job 38

Good morning to my fellow disciples. I apologize for not taking the time to write a new post yet this month. It has been a very hectic Summer with my added responsibilities as a teaching assistant to the normal shortened and more intensive Summer term, but I will make it up to you today with a two-part post.

I’d like today to take a brief look at how we approach the Bible, taking a close look at a few passages as illustration. Modern Science and Philosophy have brought a lot to the table in the past few hundred years. Faced with apologetic evidence from a few who seek to destroy our faith in God’s revelation to us in the Bible, Christians have often either abandoned their faith in the veracity of the Bible or have turned the Bible into a tool to combat Science. The Bible is indeed True. It is a faithful representation of the nature of God and God’s relationship to man. But those who have turned the Bible into a tool to combat Science miss the point of the Biblical message entirely. If we want to truly understand the message of the Bible we need to move beyond using it as an apologetic tool, often in the form of a weapon against flesh and blood (in contrast to Ephesians 6), and instead view it as an attestation of the reality of God and an attestation of how God has remained True to His Word over the course of the history of mankind.

With this hermeneutic in mind--that is, the way I am approaching the text--I want to take a close look at two passages often incorrectly used as a proof against Science and show how they demonstrate the reality of the truthfulness of God’s word. First let’s look at Job 38:12-15. In some Christian’s minds, Job is viewed as the oldest book of the Bible. This is not my view, but I am not here to debate dating. Let’s just assume for a moment that it is the oldest book in the Bible so we can hear the full argument. Christian apologists against Science will often quote Job 38:14 as a proof that the oldest book in the Bible refers to the Earth as round. The King James version is most often used to support this view, as it has God speak the following phrase to Job and his associates: “It (the Earth) is turned as clay to the seal.” They read this as throwing a sphere of clay on the potter’s wheel and letting it spin on its axis, similar to how the Earth is a globe that spins on its own axis.

We know today that the Earth is round and that it spins on its own axis, and there is nothing wrong with knowing that God, who sets all things in motion, created this sphere and set it spinning. But that is a true claim that is deducted from what we know outside the Bible and applying it to the passage. The passage in itself doesn’t say anything about this. What we have here in Job is a scene near the end of the book where God has come down to rebuke Job’s associates for continuing to say Job did something wrong. God is likening himself and his ways to a Master Potter shaping not only human clay vessels but also all of creation. If Job’s associates can’t understand how God is shaping all of creation, then how could they understand why he chose to shape Job the way he did? This is an allegory, not a scientific statement of the shape of the Earth.

In fact, if we were to read Job 38:14 as a Scientific statement that God “turns” the Earth as a globe, we would have to read the entire paragraph of 38:12-15 in the same light. 38:12 suggests God commands light--no problem there, we read that in Genesis 1 that God spoke light into existence via a command: “Let there be light!” But when we get to 38:13 we run into problems. The dawn (i.e. morning Sun) is said to “take hold of the ends of the Earth.” The word for “ends” literally means “wings” and is often appropriately translated “edges.” A clay statue under heat can be envisioned here, with God grabbing the edges of a clay eagle’s wings and “shaking out” the unwanted excess pieces of clay, likened to wicked people whose power will be broken (v 15).

If we don’t interpret it as literal “wings” but rather stick with the allegorical “edges,” we still run into problems, as we now are using 38:14 as allegory to support a metaphor of spinning clay as an exact replica of the spinning Earth. This spinning earth shouldn’t have any edges. What could this be referring to? To answer this question we should look to the second passage often incorrectly used to suggest the same thing, Isaiah 40:17-24. 

In Isaiah 40:22, we read in most English translations that God “sits above the circle of the Earth.” Those who wish to read the Bible as a scientific weapon against Modern Science use this passage frequently to say that long before any man conceived the idea of the Earth as a globe that God subtly put this notion into the Bible. While I am not debating God’s scientific knowledge of the Earth, the concept of a globe here is abusively forced upon the text by Modern readers. There is a word for a sphere in the Hebrew Bible, but it is not used here. The word that is used here refers specificly to a flat circle or a compass and can best be rendered “disc.” 

This concept of the world as a disc (with edges) was common in the ancient world. The picture painted by the writers of the Bible is a disc of land surrounded by water. The heavens were above the Earth and below the Earth was an abyss, a bottomless pit. Some in the Ancient world felt that below the Earth a god was forced to hold the world in place, but the Bible rejects this notion, saying that God created even this foundation. Not surprisingly, this foundation is specifically mentioned in the preceding verse, Isaiah 40:21.

Read in context of 40:21, the passage clearly refers to this model of the Earth. However, read in context with all of 40:17-24, we understand that the Bible is not affirming anything about the Ancient view of the structure of the Earth, nor is it subtly referring to knowledge to come. What the passage is focusing on is the utter transcendence of God who created everything and who can be a comforter to Israel in her time of exile. 

As promised, this will be a two-part entry. The next entry will be a personal paraphrase of all of Isaiah 40. You may read it at your convenience and form your own personal opinion as to whether God is trying to tell us something Scientifically about the structure of the Earth or whether Isaiah is focusing on the transcendence of God quite unlike anything the Ancient (and Modern) world could ever dream of. Let me conclude with this prayer:

LORD God, Father, Creator of All things, 

Forgive us for coming to your word with our personal agendas. Forgive us for focusing on trivia instead of You. Forgive us for using Your Word as a weapon against flesh and blood.  

Give us ears to hear Your Living Word. Give us eyes to perceive Your transcendence. Give us hearts to love others in the same way You have always loved us.

We pray this in Your Name alone, Let it be!

"Science vs the Bible" - A Brief Portrayal of a Failing Worldview

Today's entry comes not straight from the pages of the Bible but rather from a personal life lesson that occurred while studying variations of the Hebrew Bible this morning. One of the requirements for 700-level Old Testament courses at Asbury is in-depth text criticism. Essentially what this means is that students must interact with different versions of Ancient Hebrew manuscripts, some of which are mere fragments of passages, and make a substantial case for reconstructing the "original" Hebrew text.

If we, as Christians, believe that the Bible "as originally given" is the inspired word of God, figuring out what that original word is and constantly reworking hypotheses to accomodate new archaeological findings of even-older manuscripts is an important step in helping others understand the Message of the Bible. While the current versions based primarily on copies by Jewish scholars dating from around 600 CE are fairly reliable, they are not carbon copy replicas of the "original text."

This isn't a task for everyone. Undergraduate students can often get by without even taking any courses in Hebrew, and graduate students who are training for pastoral ministry rather than for a career in the Academy can often excel in their profession by simply taking elementary language courses. But there are some who God has called to aid or train the pastors and teachers by doing this type of original research, and according to Scripture, those who he has called he will equip.

I say all this to lay out a parallel that I found striking as I was practicing my own text criticism this morning. I--a novice at best--was busy making a substantial case for a variation of a word in Genesis 4 this morning, having spent several hours studying this particular word, the variations, and different ways other ancient texts have translated it. In the middle of my study I received an email about a fossil that was found near the Panama Canal that suggested there may have been a camal-like creature with a crocodile-like snout and teeth. As evidence they showed a picture of a jawbone fragment that was slightly larger than the length of the scientist's hand.

Instantly my mind switched gears from what I was doing and immediately reverted back to my early childhood anti-science education. I sarcastically and rhetorically asked myself, "How could anybody trust that information? No one can reconstruct an extinct species from a single fossil fragment!" I had read a single sentence along the lines of, "A new study suggests camels with long, crocodile-like snouts once lived near what is now the Panama Canal," looked at the photo, and had dismissed the entire study as invalid based on simple prejudice--and given the nature of my current assignment, a rather hypocritical prejudice at that.

While I realise there are significant differences between the science/art of textual criticism and the science/art of reconstructing extinct species, what struck me as hypocritical was that my upbringing had led me to be prejudiced against reconstructing based on fragments because I assumed the falsehood that "the fragment is all there is" was true. Now, I know nothing about this study other than what I mentioned, and the source of the email was a particularly unreliable source known for intentionally making extreme hyperboles for the purpose of making people laugh. In this particular case, my conclusion could have been based on the incredulity of the source, but it wasn't. It was instantly based on the subject matter.

As my personal studies are revealing, the fragment is not all there is. One does not simply find a bone (or a word) and assume it belongs to something completely different. There are rules that scientists (or scholars) must follow before making public speculations regarding the nature of a bone (or a word). I'm not a paleontologist--I'm simply a novice paleographer--so I don't know all of the rules, but I trust that some people do, and I trust that those who are qualified to teach the teachers follow those rules, and perhaps even rewrite them as necessary.

The moral of the story: don't be so quick to judge a study solely based on the subject matter. When it comes down to it, very few of us are experts in the fields we most often like to discredit. And when it comes down to it, we can either trust those who God has called and equipped in their fields, or we can trust that our own lack of calling and equipping is better than God's discernment. I guess it goes back to Genesis 1 vs Genesis 3.

Never simply disbelieve because you don't feel like putting forth the effort to understand.