"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Genesis 1:1
This week we dove into the first episode of the BEMA podcast: Trust the Story. This episode was jam packed with mind blowing material. One of the main points is that Genesis 1, the creation story, is not a scientific lab report. It is filled with elements of poetry. Of of those elements is repetition. Their are patterns of 3, 7, and 10 within this chapter. In the original hebrew there are seven words within the first sentence and fourteen in the second. As a western christian I would miss that detail. There patterns of phrases such as "It was so" and "God saw." The word earth appears 21 times in this chapter and God is mentioned 35 times, both of which are multiples of 7. The phrase "And God said" appears 10 times; three times referring to people and three times referring to creatures. The phrase "Let there be" also appears 10 times; three times referring to heaven and seven times referring to earth. What I found interesting is that the threes and sevens seem to correlate with each other. It's interesting that heaven and people are the threes and creatures and earth are the sevens. I wonder if the eastern audience would make that same association and realize right off the bat that God associates us with heaven and not earth. Creatures are associated with earth while we are associated with heaven. It makes sense given that we are created in his image.
One of the things stated regularly is that the bible is written to an eastern audience not a western one. We have very different mindsets and very different ways of interpreting things. In literature there are tools such as a chiasmus to point towards a major idea to be uncovered by the reader. I love how the eastern mindset desires for the reader to find the point or the treasure on their own as opposed to a western mindset where we have bullet points, spoonfeeding, the audience the ideas. I have found in my own path of learning that when I learn something on my own then I feel so enriched by it. I can certainly learn from bullet points or a Powerpoint presentation, but when I find the treasure on my own I feel so rewarded. Here are some slides from the presentation attached to this episode:
A Chiasmus or chiasm according to literaryterms.net "comes from a Greek word meaning “crossed,” and it refers to a grammatical structure that inverts a previous phrase. That is, you say one thing, and then you say something very similar, but flipped around" (https://literaryterms.net/chiasmus/). I love some of the examples they share on this page:
All for one and one for all! (The Three Musketeers)
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. (Mark 2:27)
Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
(John F. Kennedy, 1961)
I don't want to give you the treasure from the chiasm, but I suggest listening to the episode (https://www.bemadiscipleship.com/1) or watching the video at the top and finding out during the conversation. There's so much more I can share in this text but listening to the episode and being lead down the path to the treasure is so much better than reading it. I hope you take the opportunity to listen to this episode and join us weekly as we continue the discussion.
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