Thank you for the video. I'm especially glad that you covered the verb "bara". I would ask you if you could go into the meaning of that verb. Some researchers claim that this verb does not mean "to create". Dear Mauro Biglino, could you provide your literal translation of Genesis 1:1? That would complete an otherwise very good lecture.
I'm tickled by some questions. E.g:
King James Bible
''For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.''
King James Bible
''The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people:''
King James Bible
''When the most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.''
Evidently Jehovah wanted exactly that nation and Elion gave it to him as an inheritance because that nation already belonged to Jehovah's clan of Elohim. Am I right?
In 2019 Biglino himself finally admitted that "barà" can be translated as "to create". The whole debate on this matter is a waste of time: whether it's a creation from nothing or like an artist that creates a sculpture, the difference is irrelevant because in Genesis 1 we have an entity that makes the heavens, the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars and puts them on the sky, and it's therefore God, not a human or a group of aliens on a spaceship. Yes, at the time the Bible was written the concept of creation from nothing didn't exist, so what? The authors imagined God with their mentality where shapeless matter always existed and God arranged it to create the world, the sky,etc. As to Elyon/the Most High, it's just a title of Yahweh, not a separate deity. In Deut 32 the two words are used as synonyms. Yahweh was not assigned the people of Israel, he chose them. To better understand that Elyon and Yahweh are the same see Genesis 14:22; Psalm 7:17; Psalm 47:2; Psalm 83:18.
Yes, that's exactly what it says in some translations, but the analysis of those words: "Yahweh, El, Elyon, qoneh", says something else: Namely, for "Yahweh, El, Elyon", Mauro categorically claims in his lectures that these expressions do not mean the transcendental God.
This "qanah" means the following:
The origin of the word and prim. root
Definition
to get, to acquire
NASB translation
acquire (6), acquire (1), acquire (2), buy (20), buy (23), buyer (4), buy (2), buy (1), establish (1), acquire acquisition (1) , acquired (1), get (3), get (1), get (1), owner (1), own (1), own (2), buy (3), buyer (3), reclaim (1) , bought (1), sold (1), sure bought (2).
Biglino is a joke: he takes the concept of God that was developed in the Greek world centuries after the Bible was written and says "You see? Such a concept isn't supported by the Bible". Well, duh! What else would anyone expect?? Of course the Bible does not contain anything that was developed centuries later in a totally different culture. The biblical God Yahweh made the world, the heavens, the stars,etc. That's what the Bible says many, many times. That's what matters. It's evidently a myth, not the detailed chronicle of actual events. The biblical authors imagined their God according to their mentality and to their very limited knowledge of Nature. As to the meaning of qoneh, which is the participle of qanah, the "Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language" by Ernst Klein and published in Israel by the University of Haifa, says "to create; to acquire, get; to buy; to possess, own; Related to Ugaritic "qny" (=he created, produced)".
''As to the meaning of qoneh, which is the participle of qanah, the "Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language" by Ernst Klein and published in Israel by the University of Haifa, says "to create; to acquire, get; to buy; to possess, own; Related to Ugaritic "qny" (=he created, produced)".
So, the dictionary you mentioned does not claim that the word in question means to create from nothing. We are looking for such a God. Every other kind of creation is also characteristic of humans.
You are mistaken. As I said before you can't expect the Bible to use concepts that did not exist at the time it was written, and creation from nothing is one of them. It's not just the Bible or the ancient Israel: no one among the Near East peoples (Sumerians, Assyrians, Babilonians,etc) had the notion of a god or gods who created matter from nothing. It was a concept that simply did not exist in any of their cultures, and yet their literature is full of gods who create the world, the sky,etc. To say that they were not gods because they do not reflect our modern idea of god is simply absurd and it shows how harmful Biglino's misinformation is.
Apostle Paul, whom many atheists and Pharisees hate for no reason and say that he is the founder of Christianity and not Christ, knew about the concept of creation from nothing. (See Hebrews 11:3)
Of course. As I said before, the concept of creation from nothing stems from the Greek culture centuries after the Bible was written. In the first century AD the Bible had already been re-interpreted that way by the Jews themselves. Just consider Philo Judaeus, a prominent Jewish philosopher who completely revolutionized the interpretation of the Bible. He basically read every word of it through the principles of Greek philosophy, which of course had nothing to do with the mentality of the biblical authors. Christianity itself wouldn't exist without Philo's works.
Mauro Biglino presented two dictionaries in which it is written that the word "olam" should not be translated as "eternity". What does your Hebrew dictionary say about that term? How is it translated?
He actually quoted just one dictionary, not two, it's the Philippe Reymond and it's very basic, only 500 pages long. Biglino never quoted the whole definition, he astutely stopped at the first line because cherry-picking is the essence of his work. That entry actually goes on and says that it should be translated as "forever". Other dictionaries (Brown-Driver-Briggs, Ernst Klein, David Clines) include similar definitions such as "everlastingness", "perpetuity", and even "eternity" (some of them only in regard to the intensive plural form "olamim"). The Köhler-Baumgarten says "eternal, eternity, but not in a philosophical sense".
That. You are right. He quoted a dictionary, but said that in many dictionaries it says "do not translate with eternity", but that the word means ''a very long time''.
I do not like Biglino at all, but to be honest I never heard him say that other dictionaries tell the reader "do not translate as eternity". If he did said that, he lied because I have every dictionary he ever mentioned in all of his career plus a few others, so I know for a fact that such a claim would not be true.
Many years ago I listened to a lecture by the chief rabbi of Serbia. At the end of his presentation, he said the following: "in the Jewish language, the term "God" is called "Makom". It means "place" in Hebrew. I remember being surprised by his statement. At that time I read the family Bible very often and in it, as you know, the concept of God is found in thousands of places, and this gentleman rabbi said "Makom" is their equivalent word for that concept. If this is true, it turns out that Mauro Biglino is right when he claims that "Elohim" does not mean "God". Namely, that no one in the world knows exactly what that word means.
''I do not like Biglino at all, but to be honest I never heard him say that other dictionaries tell the reader "do not translate as eternity". If he did said that, he lied because I have every dictionary he ever mentioned in all of his career plus a few others, so I know for a fact that such a claim would not be true.''
In this video he said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1bVQOlXTm0
In English subtitles 13:08 minutes.
Mark my words: Biglino shamelessly lies about "elohim". There is not a single dictionary or scholar or native Hebrew speaker in the whole world that supports such false claim. Bear in mind that I'm a deeply secular person, an atheist, and I've therefore no interest whatsoever in defending any religious belief, let alone christianity which I consider the greatest tragedy in human history. But that doesn't mean I condone lies, on the contrary I value integrity and intellectual honesty above anything else. Elohim means God or gods depending on the context, and that's a fact, not an opinion. I do not believe in the biblical God at all but this opinion of mine doesn't change the fact that the Bible does talk about God, and the Hebrew text calls elohim any God, even heathen ones. As to what you heard from the Serbian Rabbi, it has nothing to do with Biglino's lie. That Rabbi was talking about "haMakom" ("the Place") which is one of the dozens of names for God invented by Jewish mysticism centuries after the Bible was written, and all of this is the result of the influence of Greek philosophy on Judaism. Because of that, the Jews themselves began to interpret the Bible in a metaphisical way and they came up with the transcendental view of Yhwh. It must be stressed that "haMakom" is not the meaning of elohim but a name, an epithet used to indicate Yhwh and it's therefore one of the possible ways to replace the tetragrammaton. If you read how the ancient Jews came up with such a name you'll laugh at its absurdity. Just a couple of examples: Philo Judaeus and Genesis Rabbah. As I said earlier, Philo was a famous Jewish philosopher of the first century, and in his work "On Dreams" (Book 1, 63-64) , he wrote: “God Himself is called a Place by reason of His containing things, and being contained by nothing whatever [...] for He is that which He Himself has occupied, and nothing encloses Him but Himself. [...] The Deity, being contained by nothing, is of necessity Itself Its own place” (I've shortened the passage for clarity, but if you read it all you'll be amazed at his ramblings on this subject). Rabbah Genesis is a rabbinical commentary written around the fourth century AD and it says "Why do we give a changed name to the Holy One, blessed be He, and call him ‘the Place’? Because He is the Place of the world. R. Jose b. Halafta said: We do not know whether God is the place of His world or whether His world is His place, but from the verse 'Behold, there is a place with Me' (Exodus 33:21), it follows that the Lord is the Place of His world, but His world is not His place. R. Isaac said: It is written, 'The everlasting God is a dwelling-place' (Deut.33: 27): now we do not know whether the Holy One, blessed be He, is the dwelling-place of His world or whether His world is His dwelling-place. But from the text "Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place" (Psalm 90:1), it follows that the Lord is the dwelling-place of His world but His world is not His dwelling-place. "
I know that Judaism claims that God is the place of the world, but that the world is not His place. Similarly, Orthodox theologians teach that God created the world, but that the world is not of His substance. I think that Kabbalists believe that space was created by the "contraction of God", that something else could exist besides God. Adventists, for example, say that God has a house in the universe. It is interesting that our great Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla also claimed that there is a core in the universe from where all our inspiration and all our life and energy come. He said: "I haven't penetrated the secret of that core, but I know it exists."
I found this on a portal, and I see that the lady was also quoted by Mauro Biglino in his videos:
>>Did God create the Earth or is the translation from the Hebrew wrong?
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", the sentence with which the Book of Genesis begins, according to a professor and author of numerous books on the Old Testament, was wrongly translated from Hebrew, which starts the debate about whether God is the creator of the Earth. Professor Ellen Van Vold claims that the beginning of the Book of Genesis has been mistranslated for years and that the Bible was never actually meant to indicate that God created our planet, but that He created the living world on it. Van Vold studied the text of the Book of Genesis in Hebrew in the context of the Bible as a whole and the story of the creation of the world from ancient Mesopotamia. Analyzing the text, she came to the conclusion that the Hebrew word "bara" does not mean "to create", but "to separate spatially". This is why, according to her opinion, the Bible should say "In the beginning God separated heaven and earth". The professor stated that her analysis showed that the beginning of the Bible does not describe the origin of the planet, but life on Earth. "The usual idea about the creation of the world out of nothingness, 'creatio ex nihilo', is the result of a wrong interpretation," said the professor, adding that "the traditional teaching about God as the Creator is put into question".<<
The quoted seems interesting to me, but then how to translate the terms "asah" and "bara" in Genesis 1:26,27? If I were to translate them with the expression "separate", for example the term "asah" means to make, and the term "bara" means to separate, it would mean that God first made man as a single being or organism, and then separated into male and female.
Van Wolde has been repeatedly criticized by her colleagues because she didn't provide convincing evidence to support her claim. It's not just Genesis 1:26-27 that doesn't fit her definition, there's also 1:21 where the verb barà is used to describe the creation of the "sea monsters".
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