Introducing Genesis 1 & 2, with their radical message. Reading them to answer HOW questions is misreading! They intend to answer more important WHY questions.
It began a podcast series on the Essential 100 Bible Readings, the Bible readings themselves are available as audio (MP3) files here.
(I also dealt with Genesis 1 in a previous post.)
I have probably expressed the shock factor of the use of Elohim in Gen 1 too strongly in the podcast, see this short Bible Dictionary entry on ‘elohim for a brief explanation.
[…] get in the way – to podcast on 5 Minute Bible on all these 100 passages. The first reading is Genesis 1 & 2, I am in two minds about the choice of putting the two chapters […]
[…] Genesis 1 and 2 […]
Do we know how long plural elohim lived in tension with the alternative view of a single God? What was the time period during which this was a radical new way of seeing things, so that using “Elohim” to refer to a single supreme deity was controversial – and when does the original creation of this text fit in?
Thanks for the really good questions, Bruce, and for the email correspondence too 🙂
The answer is complicated and made me realise that I may have overstated things in the podcast (or at least not said them as carefully as I should. So I am rewriting the text above that accompanies it and linking to a short Bible dictionary entry on ‘elohim I prepared.