Genesis 1:2 "God's active force" and equivalents
by Spike Tassel 30 Replies latest watchtower bible
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FuzzyPaul
I posted a late comment on this thread in which I contradict the hypothesis of Renai. I believe Jesus is fully qualified to be called "God". Jesus has a God and Father but is still god as well. The WT uses a very narrow version of The Trinity to contradict.
There are three separate persons all of whom occupy the same office by the will of The First Cause. The Father is called "creater", Jesus is the director of creation, and the Holy Spirit is the agent of creation. NO other individual or group in scripture has that unique ability or relationship. The three persons of the Triune God are interchangeable in scripture. Notice the persons of God referenced in the NT in passages on baptism. NO other persons in scripture get any level of authority nearing theirs - yet they all do of each other. Evidence of a heirarchy in the triune God concept does not deny their being in the office of God.
In that thread note how early on a person quotes the Catechism of The Catholic Church. Its not what the WT leads one to think is thought.
Read my post, Fuzzy
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FuzzyPaul
From the paper on the study of The Holy Spirit called "pneumatology" by:
Michel Rene Barnes
Veni Creator Spiritus
Dedicated to the work of Frank McCloin
" the LXX rendering of Isaiah 63:9 says
"…not an ambassador, nor an angel, but he himself saved them…." "
He himself" is God, and the text is emphatic that God saved Israel directly. The MT, however, says:
"In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them"
The MT version of Isaiah 63:9 is widely regarded by contemporary scholars as a key expression of Jewish angelomorphic pneumatology, and I will not here belabor the significance of the MT Hebrew text in this case."
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"The Spirit Creator
The Jewish Doctrine of the Spirit Creator
The first reference to the "Spirit of God" appears in the second line of the first book of the Bible. We remember these first few words, sometimes only vaguely, but they are worth saying again here.
(1) In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. (2) The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. (3) And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light.
If one reads this passage with the question of sources or original literary units in mind, then Genesis 1:1-2 has the appearance of having previously "stood alone" without being part of the "And God said" literary tradition that begins at Gen. 1:3. If, on the other hand, one reads this passage from the perspective of the literary unit Genesis 1, then what is striking is that "Spirit of God" does not appear again in the creation account in the first chapter of Genesis"
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" The second example of a Spirit-creator text is found in Job: "The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life." (Job 33:4) The passage may be seen as a condensed reference to the creation tradition expressed at Genesis 1:2b and Genesis 2:7.20 Clearer echoes of these Genesis spirit expressions can be found in two other pasages in Job 26:4: "With whom have you sent your words? Whose breath-of-life has come forth from you? "
which echoes the description of Genesis 1:1-2b and 2:7. The final Job passage is 27:3, "…as long as my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils," which again echoes the description of Genesis 2: 7.
There are two psalms from First Temple Judaism that seem to associate the Spirit of God with creating: Ps. 33 and Ps. 104.
By the Word of the Lord the heavens were spread out, And by the Spirit of His mouth all their power. (Ps. 33:6)
When thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the ground. (Ps. 104:30) " ...
Found at :
http://www.mu.edu/maqom/spiritus.pdf .
Jesus said to Nicodemus:
"The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit."
Literally it reads:
(From the Kingdom Interlinear)
The - spirit - where - it is willing - is blowing, - and - the - sound - of it - you are hearing, - but - not - you have known - wherefrom - it is coming - and - where - it is going under; - thus - is - everyone - the - having been generated - out of - the - spirit.
Or the wind blows “where it wants to”?
Thus I think that the absolute inability of man to understand the nature of GOD limits us. This is the nature of a mysticism, it draws us in despite a readable surface meaning, one gets enticed to understand a veiled truth by testing all possible notions. We are not reading a newspaper, it is The Words of God.
Belief in the word of God is at the heart of salvation and the Watchtower was started to “prove the Freemasonry of the Bible” ( Charles Russell said that ) not to restore Biblical truth. The Triune God concept is closer to truth than any WT idea, all of Christendom's doctrines are I found.
Jesus prayer in John 17:20, 21
"I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.”
Regards, Fuzzy
Hope this can be read now.
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Narkissos
I have no major objection to "active force" as a tentative generic, embracing definition of ruach (a meta-definition actually, trying to reconcile in an exterior, objective, artificial and abstract way a polysemy of concrete and metaphorical "meanings," which usually split as "breath," "wind" and "spirit" in Western versions) -- at least prior to the development of angelology in the latest strata of the OT (to which, incidentally, both NT christology and pneumatology can be traced back).
One problem (a very frequent one in the NWT: think "undeserved kindness" or "system of things" for instance) is using such an artificial and abstract definition, however "accurate" it may seem from a dictionary perspective, as a translation. It kills both the concrete sense(s) of the word and the metaphors that depend on this(these) concrete sense(s). Sure enough, breath and wind can be intellectually construed as "active forces". But the sensorial evocation of "breath" and "wind" is lost in "active force".
An additional problem (which I pointed out above) is doing so inconsistently. It disrupts the contextual and intertextual semantic potential of the word. Imagine you define'elohim as "powerful suprahuman being" for instance (why not). Then use that definition as a translation in Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning a powerful suprahuman being created the heavens and the earth" -- oddly artificial and abstract rendering, but semantically accurate from a "definition" point of view. Then translate 'elohim as "God" in the next verse? You don't give your reader a chance.
(Fwiw, in the French translation I worked on after I left the WT, we decided to use souffle = "breath" as the main rendering of ruach in the OT; souffle in French can be used poetically of "wind" and is also susceptible of metaphorical/figurative usage. It doesn't exactly reflect the use of ruach as it gives priority to a physiological meaning over the meteorological one for instance, which is not necessarily the case in Hebrew. But the advantage of keeping one concrete reference for both the concrete and metaphorical uses of the Hebrew word ultimately overweighed this inconvenience, in face of the major alternative inconvenience of blurring the essential connection between "breath," "wind" and "spirit" -- which was still very much apparent in Greek pneuma and Latin spiritus btw. -- plus the specific French ambiguity of esprit which stands for both "spirit" and "mind").
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PrimateDave
I'm not taking sides in this issue, but since FuzzyPaul used a quote from the JPS Tanakh 1917, I will provide the quote from JPS Tanakh 1999:
"a wind from God sweeping over the water"
Footnote: Others "the spirit of"
Dave
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slimboyfat
Maybe "active force" as a translation in Genesis 1:1 gives a sense of God's active role during creation. An "active force" is conceptually involved in the formative process, whereas both wind and breath could be viewed as passive accompaniments. Then again I have read that the verb translated "moving to and fro" might connote a nurturing rather than an interventionist role. Narkissos in the context I don't know if "active force" sounds (quite) as odd as "powerful suprahuman being" would, but I can see your point. The Good News Bible translates ruach as "power" in Genesis 1:2. I don't know if they use that translation elsewhere. Maybe the translators for that version also felt the word merited a different translation here than elsewhere.
Incidentally Vivian Capel opted for something similar to your "powerful suprahuman being" translation for the anarthrous theos in John 1:1: 'At the beginning of Creation, there dwelt with God a mighty spirit, the Marshall, who produced all things in their order.'
I notice that talking about human life Genesis 6:17 in the NWT is rendered: 'And as for me, here I am bringing the deluge of waters on the earth to bring to ruin all flesh in which the force of life is active* from under the heavens. Everything that is in the earth will expire.'
The footnote reads: 'Lit., "in which the active force (spirit) of life [is]." Heb., 'asher-boh' ru'ach chaiyim'. Here ru'ach means "active force; spirit." See 1:2 ftn, "Force."'
Genesis 7:15 and 22 (and maybe elsewhere) also use, "the force of life is/was active".
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Chalam
Hello Narkissos,
I have no major objection to "active force" as a tentative generic
The thing is the NWT claims to be the "most accurate" translation. It is quite clear from the second verse in the bible and a quick look at the hebrew that that claim is a total lie.
Now when you consider the extensive heretical WT teaching regarding the Holy Spirit which builds upon this mistranslated verse the reader is building a house without foundations Luke 6:47-49
Once again, the NWT claims being "the most accurate translation" not a paraphrase.
Even if you look at a paraphrase, it is likely to be for more accurate than the NWT! See here for example.
Genesis 1:2 (The Message)
Heaven and Earth
1-2 First this: God created the Heavens and Earth—all you see, all you don't see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God's Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss. The NWT is a sham and a farce. It is spiritually and physically dangerous to those who read it and listen to those who "translated" it and use it to "teach". All the best, Stephen -
PrimateDave
How can one define accurate? Language is such a flexible thing, and translators always bring their biases to their work. That is just the way it works. When we read something that fits our own personal biases, we tend to accept it as "more accurate." Even the best translation is a distortion of an original work. I can only imagine how beautifully the Hebrew text reads to a native Hebrew speaker. My second language is Spanish, and even after twenty years speaking it I sometimes feel like a beginner. For example, an English translation of Don Quixote probably could never quite compare to reading the original work in Spanish, even though the two languages share so much more in common than English and Hebrew.
Dave
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Narkissos
sbf,
Interesting. I focused on the theological uses of ruach (God's "spirit"/"breath"/"wind") rather than on the anthropological or zoological ones (although they are often connected, cf. Psalm 104:29f, their/your ruach), but it is indeed amazing that the NWT managed to fit the concept of "force" more consistently into the latter than into the former...
Again, what I most dislike about "active force" is the abstraction, and the underlying embarrassment at the concrete (anthropo- or zoomorphical) image of God's (or gods') breath as felt in the wind and breath of living beings, which ruach basically implies: even if it does become more and more abstract in the course of religious and literary development, it is never completely separated from this concrete sense (cf. John 3 where the concrete notion of "wind" and the figurative notion of "spirit" are still intertwined, in a one-word pun as it were; or Ezekiel 37 where the "meteorological" and "physiological" senses are inseparable).
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Leolaia
What seems a little odd to me about a more abstract "active force" rendering in this context is that the piel verb it occurs with is a rare word that is used mainly with certain living creatures, namely, birds. The piel of rchp occurs once again in Deuteronomy 32:11 where it refers to the hovering of an eagle over its young: "Like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young (yrchp `l-gwzlyw), that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions". The Syriac cognate rachep similarly has the sense of hovering and brooding. Ephrem Syrus used it to refer to a hen brooding over its chicks (rmrchp' `l-bnt'), as well using the adverb mrchpn'yt "hovering attitude" to refer to the seraphim hovering over the heavenly throne (1.117E-118A, 2.29F); other writers used it to describe the angels hovering over Mary. The Ugaritic cognate rchp was also used exclusively to refer to the soaring, fluttering, and hovering of eagles, such as in this passage in the Tale of Aqhat: "Above him some eagles will hover (rchp), a flock of hawks will be watching. Among the falcons I shall hover, above Aqhat I shall place you" (KTU 1.18 iv 20-23). If the verb had connotations of hovering birds (later extended via analogy to winged angels), it seems odd that out of all the places to render rwch as an abstract "active force" in the OT, this should be the place.
If there is a bird metaphor here, I think this would give a slight edge in favor of "wind" (as a movement of air) over "spirit", although both are certainly possible. This is particularly the case since elsewhere in the OT the wind was depicted through a similar avian metaphor: "He lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters, he makes the clouds his chariot, and he rides on the wings of the wind (knpy rwch)" (Psalm 104:3; cf. Psalm 18:10 which combines the motif of wind with watery darkness, and cf. also the literary connection elsewhere between Psalm 104 and Genesis 1). In Akkadian literature, the wind was described in avian terms (as in the legend of Adapa and the South Wind, whose wing he breaks) and birds were depicted with the attributes of wind (as in the Disputation Between Bird and Fish, in which the bird is described as "looking about for its nest spreading open winds and legs like a tempest whirling in the midst of heaven circling the sky").
Wind is also a very common feature in ANE creation narratives. The cosmogony in the Enuma Elish involved Marduk throwing every sort of wind at Tiamat, "roiling Tiamat, churning day and night" (1.105-109). Compare Daniel 7:2 which had "the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea" which produces the monstrous beast defeated by God. The Phoenician creation myth reported by Philo of Byblos also parallels Genesis 1:2: "At the beginning of everything there was darkness and a strong wind or darkness and a whining wind and a black slimy chaos...From the embrace of the wind with the uncreated deep, Mot was born who some say is mud and others call a putrescence of a watery mixture" (cited in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 1.10). A close parallel to Philo can also be found in the Nicolaitan gnostic myth reported by Pseudo-Tertullian (Adversus Omnes Haereses 1.6), Filastrius (Adversus Haereses 33.3-4), and Epiphanius (Panarion 25.5-6), e.g. the version of Filastrius: "In the beginning, he says, there were only darkness, the deep and water. And out of these a division was made in the middle and the wind separated these elements". Philo shows clear influence from the Egyptian cosmology of Hermopolis (cf. his reference to Taautos, i.e. Thoth), which is very similar and the gnostic cosmology also is almost certainly rooted in Egyptian hermetic traditions. With respect to the biblical priestly account in Genesis 1, it is also interesting that Psalm 104 (which John Day and others regard as either a source for Genesis 1 or a closely cognate tradition) reflects probable Egyptian literary influence as suggested by the remarkable parallels with Akhenaten's Hymn of the Aten. I think it is not improbable that the cosmologies of the Levant reflect both Egyptian and Mesopotamian influences; even the Theogony of Hesiod has some interesting parallels as well with ideas found in the East.