To drive that point home, the play-on-words is obvious in Hebrew but harder to see in English:
HA-ADAM (the human) came from the AFAR MIN HA-ADAMAH (the soil/dust of the ground).
We call this paranomasia, aka punning.
We could easily paraphrase it as “the soil-man came from the soil” (or “the red soil-man came from the red soil”) in order to emphasize this punning.
And as @Swamidass noted, HA-ADAM is primarily a description rather than the proper noun (person’s name) that most English speakers assume. (Certainly it is treated as a person’s name later in the Bible but we should never lose sight of its original meaning.)
As we can see, the elemental abundance of H, C, N, O, and numerous other elements essential to the human body, pretty closely matches the abundance in the sun. Also of note are Calcium, Chlorine, Potassium, Sodium etc. Afaik dying and massive main sequence stars are primarily powered by the CNO cycle, implying those elements would also be among the most abundant in their cores.
I do like the poetic parallel’s between “dust of the earth” and “stardust”, but it’s hard to see that as the original meaning of Scripture. As poetic expansion now? Sure. I support that.
In contrast to that, “dirt of the earth” and “stardirt” just don’t have the same poetic ring to them, even though they have the same underlying astrophysics.
Let me know if I’m wrong on this. I was suggesting earlier that the main atoms we see are abundant in life also seem to be part of the molecules in DNA.
Is it correct to say that also certain elements are more present in our solar system and other ones more prevalent outside of it?
I note that silicon and most metals are outliers, as is phosphorous in the opposite direction. But it’s nice to know that we have almost exactly our daily allowance of rubidium.
I just realized my ideas about the “dust” of the Bible are not that much of a stretch or un-intuitive (is that a word?). For example, I was watching videos and we call cosmic dust, “dust” even though it’s not dust either. It’s just small particles. I like the double meaning of “dust” as being both connected to the earth and also as particles.
Thanks! Really interesting. What I’ve thought about as I read Proverbs 8 is that wisdom is a female, and the account of creation described there stops at day 3 basically…so is the rest of creation specially a manifestation of God’s wisdom? And it says Wisdom “then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight” so here we see that the female Wisdom is separate from all the creation of the earth described. It’s sort of a reversal of Adamah being in feminine form. Not exactly sure what I’m trying to say, but… it maybe shows God’s plan of salvation through the woman…flipping the script on the fall again.
Yes, the possible play on words here was pointed out to me by one of my teachers back in 1977 or so. There are other possible word-plays in the text as well. Of course, deciding whether a particular similarity of words or sounds is a deliberate device of the author or is just a coincidence involves literary judgment, and scholars will differ over whether particular claims are plausible. In this case, I think it’s plausible, and indeed, when the expected harmony between man and ground (based on the likeness of the terms) turns into a tension (the ground will become hard to work, and thus in a sense an opponent of human well-being, rather than an aid to it), it is almost as if Genesis wants us to ponder this apparently ironic development.
I’ve had very similar thoughts about the “waters,” especially since 2 Peter 3:5 says the earth was formed from the waters rather than being a separate entity.
And I have thought for a while that it’s interesting that the verb in Genesis switches from “create” to “make” when it gets to living things. Taking a strictly evolutionary view, one possible interpretation of the “dust” - as understood broadly as particles - is that it could be a reference to the descent of man from microorganisms. I’m not totally sold on that interpretation - it seems like it could be a stretch - but I do think it’s important that all living things were made from pre-existing matter rather than created ex nihilo.
That’s not true. What translation are you referring to? The first thing that he “makes” is, if I recall, the sun, moon, and stars. But life is all “let the earth bring forth” and such.
Not quite. He does switch from “create” to “make”, but both are used for living things. God “creates” (the verb is bara’) the great sea-monsters (or however you wish to translate tanninim) and the moving things that swarm the waters (maybe fish, but not called that here) and the birds. Later on he “makes” (asah) the land animals. But then he “creates” (bara’) man. The significance of these shifts in vocabulary is of course a source of endless discussion by Biblical scholars and theologians. But the significance will be lost if one isn’t careful to note exactly what word is used.
I don’t know what translation you are using, but generally the old King James Version, the American Standard Version of about 1901, and the Revised Standard Version of about 1952, tend to preserve consistency of Hebrew vocabulary for the early chapters of Genesis. If you are Hebrew-less, I would regularly consult these translations. The best Bible software programs have all of these translations as options. Of course, you can also use Strong’s or Young’s Concordance to find the exact Hebrew words used in each place, when in doubt about the consistency of your translation. I used to prefer Young’s, but Strong’s is quite usable.
Dust is mentioned 107 times in the NKJV version, primarily in Genesis (6), Job (19), Psalms (14) and Isaiah (17)…I read through them, they refer primarily to mans understanding of dirt/household dust, but also to elements…or matter…building blocks to life and the result of decay.
Ecclesiastes provides the most accurate global biblical agreement in 3:20…All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust…which to me seems more to refer to elements/particles/atoms, base life building blocks as man currently understands them to be. Ecclesiastes 3 in full explains however, that God is in control and that we will never really know how or why he does things, we don’t have the capacity to understand omniscience, omnipresence, etc. Our job is to have faith in Him.
It also says that God says “let there be light”. This whole thing about letting things be or do some thing or perform some action, is hard to parse, and could even be understood as if reality is sort of given permission by God to do it’s own thing. Almost like God has sort of set up the initial conditions, and then finally decides to press the “play” button to see what happens.
Evolution and creation don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can see value in both if you see that God created the process of evolution and was there at the beginning when evolution began. For something to evolve, it first has to be created. The chicken and the egg argument (another spoiler…the answer is egg).
Funny thing is…according to 1 John, God is light…according to the gospel of John, so is Jesus…and those who are in Christ are the light of the world…I love the battle of good and evil, light and darkness…it’s so “Star Wars”…the argument you’re posing is in regard to predestination which I haven’t seen yet in the posts here, but something that even Christians disagree on.
