How old do you think the universe is?

[good samaritan]

[QUOTE=mfblume;1486237]

My point is that LIFE for some reason is always said to be created, not made. The bodies have DNA. But our life is not God. I cannot agree with that. His Spirit is Life and getting His actual Spirit in us is not the same as having natural life. Natural life can die. God cannot die.

Where does it say that life is always created? You implying that from its "usage" in a few places, and as Esaias has already stated it is not always used as created from nothing.

And I do not believe the spirit of man is eternal either. Eternal has no beginning, and our human spirits had a beginning.

Do you believe that we are eternal? Eternity as I understand it is has no beginning nor end.

Acts 17:28 For in him we live, and move, and have our being

There is a lot that I do not know and I am speaking my own ideas that are based upon scritptures that come to me. IMHO

What I guess I'm trying to say is that LIFE is always associated with creation. Even the Psalm that parallels Genesis 1 in the same sequence notes life was created by earth was RENEWED.

Psalms 104:30 Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.

Are you not basing that from usage?

DNA belongs to the body. But LIFE is something aside from even that. It is created.

I interpret life as being given rather than created. Creation is just the finished product.

https://goo.gl/images/L0Ynpk

That does not prove our spirits are God's life.

I prefer to say our life is from God's Spirit.

I cannot see where there is foundation for saying man's life always existed because it is from God.

It is the breath of life that God breathed. The word breath/n šâmâ is also used in places as Spirit. I should say that is the Spirit of God that came into man to give him life. The Spirit of God is where our life comes and that Spirit of God is eternal (no, begining no end).

Again the issue is whether or not it is true that bara means to create from nothing and asa means to form already existing material.

The Biblical usage indicates that it does not.

[good samaritan]

Originally Posted by mfblume

Again, no. Hebrew is a dead language.

This may be a dumb question, but how do the rabbi's know it? If it is a dead language that ceased to used how do people know it? The English translated Bible is the safest thing I have to go by. If the Hebrew word is used interchangeably throughout our Bible either the word is interchangeable or our Bible translation is wrong. I will take the KJV over a non believing Jewish Rabbi.

[n david]

If you have Netflix, there's a new documentary on there called, "Is Genesis History," and goes into the questions of how old the earth is, how long creation took and if the flood was real or global vs regional.

Haven't watched the whole thing, only about 15 minutes of it this morning.

[Esaias]

Originally Posted by Esaias

Now, as for making the case for a large gap of time between 1:1 and 1:2, you said this:

Earth was put in ruination after verse 1.

Genesis 1:2 says "earth was void..."

"WAS" is translated from :

hayah {haw-yaw} v AV - was, come to pass, came, has been, were happened, become, pertained, to be, become, come to pass, exist, happen, fall out.

So, from the Hebrew HAYAH, we get the idea that the earth "became" void and without form. Or "was made" void and without form.

This necessitated a MAKING, or FORMING the material already created long before in renovation.

You have selected a possible definition based on how the word has been translated. but you have not shown that "became" or "was made" is the required and necessary definition in this instance. As I pointed out to Amanah, who referenced a similar translational claim from the website she quoted, I have not found any translation into English from the Hebrew, Greek, or Latin bibles that supports this reading of "became" or "was made". (On a side note, if the correct translation is "was made" then that would actually imply that when God bara'd the heavens and the earth, and the earth "was made" void and without form, then God bara'd the earth void and without form - meaning He had not yet furnished it with it's contents such as living creatures nor shaped it by separating the waters from the dry land, etc.)

Can you supply any English Bible translation where reputable translators who are fluent in the Hebrew translated the verse as you have proposed it should be translated?

And furthermore, even assuming that your proposed translation is correct and all the translators of all English Bibles somehow missed this one, it STILL doesn't demonstrate anything whatsoever in regard to the length of time which passed between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2! Let's assume your proposed correction to the translations of the Bible is correct. Let's assume that God created heaven and earth, and THEN something happened and it got all wrecked. That in itself provides ZERO data regarding how long it was between the creation of heaven and earth and the wrecking, or how long between the wrecking and the start of the "renovation". God could have created heaven and earth, and five days later it all got wrecked. And sat there in a wrecked state for 18 seconds. I'm not saying that's how it went down, I'm saying such a scenario is POSSIBLE with the data we have been presented with so far, and assuming your proposed correction to the translation is indeed correct.

And regardless of any of this, it STILL doesn't tell us how old the earth is. Prior to the separation of night from day, there were no evenings and mornings. The night could have sat there for 100,000,000,000 years before God said "Let there be light", or it could have sat there for .00000000000001 nanoseconds for all we know.

Please understand I am not asserting there is no gap of time between verse 1 and 2, or that there was not a catastrophic wrecking of things. Neither am I saying there was. What I am saying is that so far there has been no real evidence presented that there was.

bump

[Esaias]

As for asking a local rabbi, since that is an appeal to authority (not always a bad thing), I'd like to know who this rabbi is, his credentials in translation, etc. I'd like to know if he is qualified to overturn and correct all previous scholars' translations.

I'd like to also know if he is chabad or not, if he is chasidic or not, etc. And I'd like to see what sources he draws on for whatever he says.

And further, I'd like to know if he believes he is bound to tell the truth concerning Torah to a gentile.

[Amanah]

Reference material to look at later

http://custance.org/Library/Volume6/.../Chapter2.html


About the Author

Arthur C. Custance was born and educated in England and moved to Canada in 1928. In his second year at the University of Toronto he was converted to faith in Christ. The experience so changed his thinking that he switched courses, obtaining an honours M.A. in Hebrew and Greek. In his 13 years of formal education, he explored many facets of knowledge and was particularly interested in anthropology and origins. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in 1959 while serving as head of the Human Engineering Laboratories of the Defence Research Board in Ottawa (Canada) and was engaged in research work for 15 years. During that time he also wrote and published The Doorway Papers, and in retirement in 1970, he wrote 6 major books. His writings are characterized by a rare combination of scholarly thoroughness and biblical orthodoxy.


http://creation.com/from-the-beginning-of-the-creation

[Esaias]

Re: usage vs definition.

"How does a word get into a Merriam-Webster dictionary?

This is one of the questions Merriam-Webster editors are most often asked.
The answer is simple: usage.
Tracking Word Usage

To decide which words to include in the dictionary and to determine what they mean, Merriam-Webster editors study the language as it's used. They carefully monitor which words people use most often and how they use them."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/help...nto-dictionary

"Our dictionaries today

Using world-class technology, our dictionary programmes constantly monitor the use of language so that our experts can identify and record the changes taking place. The result is dictionaries which give a window on to how language is used today."

https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/o...g-dictionaries

Thus, the definitions of words in a dictionary (including Strong's, Thayer's, Liddell's, Or Brown's, etc) are determined by how the words are USED.

[Esaias]

http://www.torahphilosophy.com/2008/...d-genesis.html

"Traditionally, many Jews have understood the creation story in the first few chapters of Genesis to imply that the universe was created about six thousand years ago and before that nothing material existed. I have the impression that most ultra-Orthodox people would still agree with this.

There is however a problem with this interpretation.

In the 18th century, scientists began studying fossils more intensively. In 1841 three primary layers were identified by geologist John Phillips. One layer, the Paleozoic, consists primarily of extinct shellfish such as trilobites and plants such as ferns. The Mesozoic includes huge extinct reptiles, the dinosaurs. The Cenozoic includes an abundance of mammals, many huge and now extinct such as the mammoths, and flowering plants. All paleontologists since 1841 have confirmed the existence of these primary layers.

This seems to present a problem for Judaism, since Genesis seems to teach that there was one creation event and all life that has ever existed was created at that time. Any fossil layers should include modern day life as well as any species that may have become extinct since creation, however this is not the case.

Rabbi Yisrael Lipschitz, the rabbi of Danzig, Germany gave a speech in April, 1842 (published as Derush Ohr HaChayyim, found in the back pages of the Tiferes Yisrael Mishnayot Nezikin volume 1) resolving the fossil question. Midrash Rabbah Breishis 3:7 and 9:2 states that many other worlds were created and destroyed previously to this one. The commentaries on the midrash explain that the earlier worlds were gradually improved upon and refined. Furthermore, Midrash Rabbah Breishis 1:5 states that this world is like a king's palace which was built on a landfill - a garbage dump of some sort. The Talmud Chagigah 13b states that 974 generations of people existed before creation."

Seriously? Talmud?

"The Bible's first thirty four verses are absolutely literal, however they are not describing historical events which happened one time only. Rather, they are describing a cycle of creative events which continues constantly and which did, at certain points in history, millions or billions of years ago, bring these aspects of the universe into physical form for the first time. The first plants may have appeared 500 million years ago - but they appeared on Tuesday and this week they also received renewed energies on Tuesday. The same applies to each other day of the six days of creation. This is what Genesis 1 teaches us. (This also explains why there are "two creation stories" in Genesis. There aren't. Genesis 1 is not merely history.)"

Seriously? I think there's a reason we are warned to not give heed to Jewish fables.

[Scott Pitta]

I would say the world is about 2 weeks older than when this question was first asked here at the forum

[Amanah]

Originally Posted by Scott Pitta

I would say the world is about 2 weeks older than when this question was first asked here at the forum

hush