13) The world view of Genesis - reflections on Disciple Program Week 2

Thank you to each of you who attended last night and for your questions arising from the study of Gen 1-2 and its two accounts of creation. It is good to see how you are wrestling with these creation accounts that come to us from a very different world than our own. Not only do they come to us from a different time and place, the world view was clearly pre-scientific and quite clearly limited in its scope.

The world of the Old Testament is that of the Ancient Near East some 4000-3000 years ago and both their understanding of the physical world, and their geography, was understandably significantly different to our own - accustomed as we are to satellite imagery and radar maps. The internet has made the world so much smaller and it is easy to forget that in biblical times so little was known about the peoples that lived beyond the horizon other than the information brought by travelers, traders and armies.  In Gen 10 mention is made of Noah's sons Shem, Ham and Japheth and their repopulating the world after the flood. Just how much the perspective is limited to that of the Ancient Near East can be seen in the map below.

The understanding of the physical world was also quite different from our own and rather than thinking of planet earth as part of a solar system in the context of an enormous and infinite universe the sun, moon and stars were contained within a firmament that separated the waters above from the waters below. As you can see in the accompanying graphic the idea of the earth as a planet rotating around the sun was foreign to them.

Image from Logos Bible Software

The population of the world around 1000 BCE is estimated to be about 50 million people. The focus of the Biblical writers was on the peoples of the Ancient Near East and it would be safe to assume that they knew nothing of the Americas, the Pacific rim or East Asia as we know it today. All of us grow up limited by our context and while we can see the limitations of the Biblical world view 200 years from now imagine what they will be saying about the limitations of the knowledge of people of the 21st Century!