I apologize for my absence. It’s been some time since my last post. My manuscript for Genesis 1 and the Creationism Debate is now complete and has been submitted, so I hope to turn my attention back to this site.

UPDATE: Book is now finished and on sale at publishers website.

For those interested, my book attempts to present an unbiased and culturally-contextualized reading of Genesis 1—the primary aim being to re-present as faithfully and objectively as possible this author’s worldview and his beliefs about the nature and origin of the world and of man and woman—not those of later readers or those influenced by later interpretive frameworks. Said differently . . .

Modern readers often assume that Genesis 1 depicts the creation of the Earth and Sky as we know it. But this ancient document and the ancient priestly worldview it represents nowhere supports such modern assumptions.

Far from presenting God creating Earth, a spherical planet orbiting a sun in one of many galaxies in infinite space (none of whose ideas existed to the author of this text), the text of Genesis 1 presents its god forming the substance earth, that is per our text dry, habitable, flat land which now rests on the waters below (see Genesis 1:9-10 — God Creates Dry Land not the Planet Earth!), and encasing it within a finite area of space, itself enclosed and defined by a solid domed expanse called the sky, which further functioned to hold back the primordial waters above it (see Genesis 1:6-8 — Life Inside a Water Bubble). In short, what the god of Genesis 1 creates is this:

This illustration was done by a graphic designer I hired to illustrate the textual argument that Genesis 1 is making. I am quite happy with it, as far as it accurately captures the world that the author of Genesis 1 has the creator god of his text create. It is a description of the world as its author and his broader culture perceived it. You can read my textual argument on each section of Genesis 1 and how it leads to this particular worldview in my series of posts entitled Genesis’ Two Creation Accounts.

In the end, my forthcoming book convincingly demonstrates that ancient texts do indeed represent the beliefs and worldviews of ancient peoples and cultures—not those of God, not those of later readers, and especially not those of modern day Creationists.