Look, it’s all semantics, okay? Whatever you want to call God — Hashem, Elokim, the Creator, the One, the Dude, Yud-Key-a-bunch-of-other-letters — you’re basically talking about the extraworldly force Who brought the universe into being. It’s God, people.
Well: not necessarily so.
DailyGlobal.com is reporting that Professor Ellen van Wolde, a Bible scholar, believes that the world was already around when God came along. The second word in the Torah, bara, which we believe means “created,” she posits to actually mean “separated” — “In the beginning, God separated the heaven from the earth.”
“It meant to say that God did create humans and animals, but not the Earth itself,†she says. “There were sea monsters. 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.â€
Reports the article: “According to [the Bible] there used to be an enormous body of water in which monsters were living, covered in darkness.”
It also mentions that van Wolde used to work with Umberto Eco, one of my favorite novelists and a famed professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. The question of what exactly a professor of semiotics is is the subject for an entirely different blog post, but, according to Google, Eco is one of only a handful of professors of semiotics that actually exist.
