Saturday, October 10, 2009

Ellen van Wolde

From the Telegraph:
Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis "in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth" is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world -- and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Prof Van Wolde, who once worked with the Italian academic and novelist Umberto Eco, said her new analysis showed that the beginning of the Bible was not the beginning of time, but the beginning of a narration.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is intriguing. Can one create at all in the absence of the other. The charm of creating form nothing makes little sense unless you require a first cause for security but realistically this is a mind opening restatement

Anonymous said...

Is this idea just loony postmodern deconstruction of the text or good scholarship? Not enough information is provided to decide.

Joel said...

Hi,

I have an review of Dr. Van Wolde's paper here for readers who are interested.

-Joel

Melisende said...

Thanks Joel!

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