The Creator's Sabbath Rest: A Clue to Genesis 1

Description

BEWARE of the Modernism that "Genesis 1 is clearly a post-exilic document". It is not (unless he means it was first commited to written form in the Babylonian Exile?). Moses authored the Pentateuch.

Genesis l, or the first chapter of the first book in the Bible, has now for two millennia been a chief sticking point between science and religion. That chapter will indeed remain a source of endless embarrassment for the believer as long as it is taken for a sort of scientific cosmology, inviting thereby the baneful specter of concordism. It is shown in this booklet that Genesis 1 was not meant to be such a cosmology, but a parable with a most important moral: In Genesis 1 the Creator himself is set up as a role model for observing the sabbath after his greatest work, which is the creation of all. Once seen in this light, details, which in Genesis 1 relate to the particulars of the Hebrew world picture, will not call for a comparison with the ever vaster scientific knowledge about the unfolding of the universe.