The meaning of 'bara'

I've come across this interesting paper on the meaning of the Hebrew word 'bara', which is often translated as 'created' in the Genesis 1 creation account.

The word is used selectively:

v1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

v21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.

v27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Its interesting to ponder on why these aspects were selected for bara creation. Traditional lexical entries for the word have defined it as meaning 'to create or form' but this paper suggests that it is better rendered as 'to separate'. Van Wolde describes it as being:

... a temporal process in which God moves the objects along a path, at the beginning of which they are not distin- guished and proximate, and at the end of which they are spatially distant and kept separate

This difference is a significant one. I don't think it would be in keeping with the context of this chapter to force the meaning of the words to fit the physical creation processes (this approach nearly always ends up going wrong somewhere along the line), but rather to think about what spiritual messages this is giving us....

P.S A number of scholars and commentators disagree with this thesis. See here, for example.

Bad Religion

Last week there were a number of reports in the press of a debate between Tony Blair and Chris Hitchins on whether religion is a force for good in the world or not. Most accounts agree that Hitchins won the debate, indeed he has previously written at great length on the evils of religion (e.g. 'God is not good').

For those of us with a positive experience of religion it is not hard to see how distorted Hitchens' views are. He is more one sided than the Second Test in Adelaide, rarely giving any acknowledgement to the other side of the story (though ironically his younger brother, Peter, is a convert to christianity from atheism).

But, with a tip of the hat and a nod of the head to Heaven in ordinarie, I saw this quote from Charles Dickens' character 'the Ghost of Christmas Present'. It neatly describes the difference between good and bad religion, a difference which often parallels that between good and bad science.

‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’

Life out of death

Perhaps Agatha Christie would have been intrigued by this piece of new research.

The chemistry of life revolves around six key chemicals. Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur make up the major ingredients of many of our body's building materials.

However, from the bottom of a lake in California comes a bacteria that uses arsenic as a substitute for phosphorus. Arsenic has a similar size and charge to phosphorus which makes the switch possible and this in turn presents interesting discussion points. If phosphorus can be substituted then what else? Could there be an entirely different system of life out there based on different elements?

Whilst this is a genuinely novel discovery it is unlikely that it can be extended so far. For a start even this finding has its limits:

It is thought that downstream metabolic processes are generally not compatible with As-incorporating molecules because of differences in the reactivities of P- and As-compounds. These downstream biochemical pathways may require the more chemically stable P-based metabolites

This microbe probably represents the outer fringes of what makes up the biosphere, rather than the doorway into another world of possibilities.