1:9 And God said, "Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.": and it was so.
God named the expanse above the waters the heaven. Naming creation upon the earth will be a function for Adam later. Here in 1:8, Heaven is the generic name for all the area above the ground.
We see a dark development later in Homer's Illiad when Althaia invokes the underworld gods by lying flat upon the earth, beating the ground (9.565ff). In the ancient's minds, if you were down upon the earth you were in the realm of hell or Domos Hades, the dwelling place of the unseen, not heaven. Quite different from the way God shows us the grandeur of His creation.
God speaks with a purpose again and that purpose is to give us a dry habitat to dwell in. God commands (Hebrew command form is here translated as Let-It Be is understood) that the waters underneath the expanse are gathered into an area so that a non-water covered place would arise. And it happened just this way.
The words Dry Land here are better translated as Dryness. So God says, Let-it be, the dryness appear.
This is the beginning of the Precambrian Supereon into the Archeazoic eon.
The largest defined unit of time is the supereon, composed of eons. Eons are divided into eras, which are in turn divided into periods, epochs and ages.
The most common large-scale time scale is millions of years (Megaannum or Ma), or also Mya for "millions of years ago." But long-term measurements still requires very large numbers. By using the galactic year this gives numbers that are easier to remember. The Galactic Year (GY) is the time it takes for the solar system to revolve once around the galactic core, or about 250 Ma.
By this measure, oceans appeared on Earth after 4 GY, life began at 5 GY, and multicellular organisms first appeared at 15 GY. Dinosaurs went extinct about 0.4 GY ago, and the true age of mammals began about 0.2 GY ago. The age of the Earth is estimated at about 20 GY or about 4.570 billion years old.© 2009 Roy Blizzard III
Natalie again has several questions below.
ReplyDelete1)Do you believe in evolution?
I personally believe the earth is several thousand years old, not millions
of years old. However, that is not what I am gathering from your blog.
2)what is "Homer's Iliad"?
NAG
You first need to define what you mean by "evolution". If you mean Darwin's theory that he postulated in the 1800's, unequivocally no! It has been utterly disproven as there has never been found as sign of a transitional form of life from a lower(say a Rat)to a higher (say a monkey). In fact, all DNA work over the last 100 years has proven it to be impossible. You have 3 types of mutations, 1)a change mutation which gives changes within a species, such as a white buffalo(not an albino, but a true white one)2) a subtractive mutation such as a Mule-breeding between a horse and a donkey they are almost always sterile and lastly 3) an additive mutation which we've never seen and don't know how to get one.
If you speak of evolution as simply "change" then yes I believe in change, as we all change on a day to day basis.
Whether the Earth is millions of years old or just a few thousand years old really doesn't matter to me as a Biblical researcher as the Biblical text would allow for either/or. However, as soon as I say that the Earth is only this age or that age etc, then I have to be able to defend that position and I have to make sense when I do it. I can't use arguments like, "well God created the Earth with all the signs of age in it to confuse the wise". Why? Because it makes no sense when you understand God and the way He operates. If one were to believe this then God would not be Trustworthy and we know he is. So this argument falls flat on it's face. To be honest with you Nat, I have not seen any real good evidence for a young Earth. There are a lot of people who claim this or that, but the evidence they give all has holes in the "proofs" they give that are contradicted by 99% of the other "proofs" for an old Earth. However, arguing for either one is a rather pointless exercise that takes ones mind off of God and puts it in the realm of speculation either way. One must see truth and study it and come to conclusions based on a thorough study of all sides of the issues before one can say this has to be the more logical explanation.
The Iliad is one of the oldest complete stories in ancient history. Homer-a Greek author writes about the battle of Troy in the book called the Iliad and the follow up to it was called the Odyssey the journey home of Odysseus to Greece from Troy.