1-“God,” “heaven,” and “earth”-the first occurs thirty-five times in Genesis 1:1–2:3, and the third twenty-one (If one follows the scholarly consensus that ends the first creation account after 2:4a, this last heptad In the description of the first day, “light” is mentioned five times and “day” (which 1:5 defines as its synonym), twice: the total is again seven. The first verse, for example, consists of seven words the second, of fourteen.
Hardly limited to the seven days in which the action takes place, groups or multiples of seven appear throughout the passage.
The unevenness has occasionally emboldened biblical critics to reconstruct the Urtext with a freedom and a zeal that would have shamedĪgainst the claims of those who see the heptadic structure of Genesis 1:1–2:3 as a late imposition, one can cite the remarkable discoveries of Umberto Cassuto found that the heptadic principle extends far deeper into the text than had been thought. Already in the Mishnah it was observed that “the world was created with ten a statement that is countered in the Gemara with the position that there were actually only The lower figure, which expresses the occurrences of the clause “God said,” is then disputed on the ground that the first word of the Torah must be included in the tabulation: does not the psalmist tell us that “By the word of the the heavens were More recently, scholars have observed that two acts of creation characterize both the third and the sixth day, so that the total number of creative acts reaches eight, and it has been pointed out that the creation of the sky as we know it “cuts across the second and third To give one last example of many that might be cited, scholars have often detected a contradiction between God’s creation through a verbal command alone and his creation through more vivid, anthropomorphic images-separating, making, and All of this suggests an unevenness in Genesis 1:1–2:3 which belies our first impression of an exceedingly schematic creation story with nothing out of place. There is, to be sure, no dearth of scholars who argue that even here the seven days is a late imposition upon a text that originally exhibited no arithmetic principle of structure. In none of the other literature that we have examined so far do we find anything reminiscent of the schema of seven days of creation that dominates the overture to the Bible.
The formal feature that most strikingly sets Genesis off from its Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Israelite antecedents and parallels is its heptadic structure.
0 kommentar(er)
