Here's a report from the Telegraph about a Professor Ellen van Wolde who recently "discovered" that the Hebrew word "bara," which has been understood for thousands of years to mean "create," doesn't really mean that at all. It means only to "spatially separate."Naturally, one wonders how the good professor has the chutzpah to break with such tradition (i.e. to rebuke every other Hebrew scholar who ever lived) but we're assured that she "re-analyzed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia."
Ah, that's it. Clever girl.
So according to Professor van Wolde, the first sentence of Genesis, "In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth," is not at all accurate. There was already stuff there. Water, dirt and even sea monsters, she claims. "God did create some things, but not the Heaven and Earth. The usual idea of creating-out-of-nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is a big misunderstanding."
What perception! What remarkable value she got out of her brave comparative religion study! I mean, figuring out that she was right while all those hundreds of generations of rabbis were all wrong!
And, of course, this isn't just one interpretation to add to the mix. Not at all. It's a done deal. Professor van Wolde has spoken. "The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now."
Wow. Untenable, huh? What a bum deal for all those Old Testament patriarchs and yes, even Jesus too, who didn't have the good fortune to have Professor van Wolde around to explain just what the Hebrew language really meant.
Sigh.
Arrogance is always maddening. But arrogance of this extreme is laughable too.
For some incisive commentary on this supremely precocious professor, check out one of my favorites, Gerald Warner:
...If a “respected” Old Testament scholar and author – and a professor to boot – says that God did not create the world, who are we groundlings to dissent? But there is no comfort here either for the Dawkins-Grayling-Parris claque of noisy God-deniers. For Professor van Wolde is a believer, albeit of a highly idiosyncratic kind. She acknowledges that God created humans and animals, but not the Earth itself, which was already there when He started. The Van Wolde God is a part-time, piece-work, flexi-hours, jobsworth kind of Creator. Homo Sapiens? Check. Tyrannosaurus Rex? Job done. Planet Earth? Not my department, mate.
Has Professor van Wolde – how can one express this in a caring way? – been overworking? Her thesis is that the Hebrew verb “bara” in the opening sentence of the Book of Genesis does not mean “to create” but “to spatially separate”. So God did not create the Heaven and the Earth, but separated them. Uh-huh? So, who stuck them together in the first place? Who, in fact, made them?
Contradictorily, Professor van Wolde concedes that “technically” the verb “bara” does mean “create”. But, she contends, “Something was wrong with the verb.” Of course there was: if you simply accept the same “technical” meaning of the verb as the thousands of scriptural scholars – Jewish, Catholic, Protestant – who have studied the text for millennia, you will never generate sensational headlines around the world or fill lecture theatres...
