Custance Without Form And Void Pdf Download
Avery Blaschko
Some scholars propose that Genesis 1:2 can or should be translated "Now the earth became without form, and void . . ." as opposed to the common rendering "The earth was without form, and void . . ." Others dismiss this idea entirely. They assume the original Hebrew word hayah must be translated "was" and then assume the earth was originally created in this disorderly way.
"It should be noted in this connection that the verb was in Genesis 1:2 may quite possibly be rendered 'became' and be construed to mean: 'And the earth became formless and void.' Only a cosmic catastrophe could account for the introduction of chaotic confusion into the original perfection of God's creation. This interpretation certainly seems to be exegetically tenable . . ." (A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, 1974, p. 184).
In a footnote Archer adds, "Properly speaking, this verb hayah never has the meaning of static being like the copular verb 'to be.' Its basic notion is that of becoming or emerging as such and such, or of coming into being . . .
Sometimes a distinction is attempted along the following lines: hayah means 'become' only when it is followed by the preposition le; otherwise there is no explicit idea of becoming. But this distinction will not stand up under analysis. In Genesis 3:20 the proper rendering is: 'And Adam called the name of his wife Eve, because she became the mother of all living.' No le follows the verb in this case.
So also in Genesis 4:20: 'Jabal became the father of tent dwellers.' Therefore there can be no grammatical objection raised to translating Genesis 1:2: 'And the earth became a wasteness and desolation'" (ibid.).
Some scholars also argue against translating hayah "became" instead of "was" in Genesis 1:2 because they assume this interpretation came about only recently, after scientists determined the earth to be very old. Thus they consider this explanation a desperate attempt to reconcile the Genesis account with modern geology. The explanation that there existed an indefinite period between the initial beautiful creation described in Genesis 1:1 and the earth becoming waste and void in verse 2 has been called, sometimes disparagingly, "the gap theory." The idea was attributed to Thomas Chalmers in the 19th century and to Cyrus Scofield in the 20th.
Yet this interpretation that the earth "became" waste and void has been discussed for close to 2,000 years, as pointed out by the late Arthur Custance in his book Without Form and Void: A Study of the Meaning of Genesis 1:2.
The Hebrew scholars who wrote the Targum of Onkelos, the earliest of the Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament, rendered Genesis 1:2 with an Aramaic expression Dr. Custance translates as "and the earth was laid waste" (1988, p. 15). The original language evidently led them to understand that something had occurred which had "laid waste" the earth, and they interpreted this as a destruction.
In the Middle Ages the Flemish scholar Hugo St. Victor (1097-1141) wrote about Genesis 1:2, "Perhaps enough has already been debated about these matters thus far, if we add only this, 'how long did the world remain in this disorder before the regular re-ordering . . . of it was taken in hand?' (De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei, Book 1, part 1, chapter 6).
According to The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, the Dutch scholar Simon Episcopius (1583-1643) taught that the earth had originally been created before the six days of creation described in Genesis (1952, Vol. 3, p. 302). This was roughly 200 years before geology embraced an ancient origin for the earth.
Perhaps the best treatment on both sides of this question is given by Dr. Custance in his book. He states: "To me, this issue is important, and after studying the problem for some thirty years and after reading everything I could lay my hands on pro and con and after accumulating in my own library some 300 commentaries on Genesis, the earliest being dated 1670, I am persuaded that there is, on the basis of the evidence, far more reason to translate Gen. 1:2 as 'But the earth had become a ruin and a desolation, etc.' than there is for any of the conventional translations in our modern versions" (p. 7).
There are three major types of creationism espoused by fundamentalist antievolutionists, each with variants, plus a few less popular types. Of the three major types, "strict" young-Earth Flood geology creation is the best knownindeed, it is often assumed that all creationists are of this type. This type aims to employ the most literal and direct interpretation of Genesis, and the strictest fundamentalists tend to insist upon it: fiat ex nihilo ("out of nothing") creation in six, twenty-four-hour days about six thousand or so years ago. Creationism is often assumed to mean young-Earth ex nihilo creation because, in this time of resurgent fundamentalism, the most prominent and effective creationist effortsthose of the Institute for Creation Research, the Creation Research Society, the Creation-Science Research Center, the Bible-Science Association, and othersall insist upon young-Earth creationism.
It takes, however, an extremely stubborn faith to maintain belief in strict young-Earth creation in the face of the overwhelmingand still increasingscientific evidence of the great age of Earth and the universe (not to mention the difficulty of interpreting all geology in terms of a single, recent flood). Because of the obvious difficulties of the extreme young-Earth Flood geology position, many creationists hold one of the two other main positions: "day-age" or "gap theory" creationism. These allow the faithful to maintain belief in supernatural creation and the falsity of evolution but also allow for indefinitely long ageseither during (in between) the six days of creation or before. Each also involves critical compromises with the plainest, most literal reading of the Bible in order to force scripture into concordance with scientific evidence regarding the age of Earth.
"Day-age" creationism takes a simple approach: the six "days" of creation were not literal twenty-four-hour days but, rather, long ages. There are various means of reconciling this interpretation with the biblical account which need not concern us here. The advantages of this interpretation are obvious: each creation "day" can be made as long as necessary, and the successive appearance of forms of life in the fossil record millions of years apart presents no problemas long as these can all be interpreted as occurring in the same order as the sequence of events described in the six "days" of Genesis. (And this latter point does involve some stubborn difficulties. To mention only two: plants are created on the third day, although the sun is not created until the following "day"millions of years later; and birds, as well as fish, are created on the fifth day, before land animalsin direct contradiction to the fossil record.)
The "gap theory," also known as the "ruin-restitution" theory, preserves the literal, recent six twenty-four-hour-day creation but assumes that the vast ages so well attested to by science occurred prior to this set of events. In other words, Earthand lifewas created before the creation week of Genesis. This exegesis is accomplished by postulating a tremendous "gap" between the very first two verses of Genesis, into which go all the geological ages:
Gap theory advocates, by this maneuver, are able to reconcile the scientific evidence for an old Earth and universe and for life itself. They, just as much as the young-Earth creationists, reject evolution; to them, the re-creation six thousand or so years ago was not entirely ex nihilo (although humans may have been created out of nothing) but was certainly by divine fiat. Therefore, although they differ markedly from "strict" creationists regarding the age of Earth, their antievolution attitudes and arguments are virtually identical.
The gap theory, incidentally, has nothing to do with the fact that there are two conflicting creation accounts in Genesis. Because gap theory creationism has received little attention compared to young-Earth creationism, and because its proponents tend to use the same anti-evolution arguments anyway, many critics of creationism are not aware of its existence or are confused about what it claims. The two founders of the British anti-creationist group, Association for the Protection of Evolution (APE), for instance, erroneously reported in Nature that the gap theory "proposes that geology happened sometime between the Fall of Adam and the Flood" (Howgate and Lewis, 1984, p. 703). The editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin mistook the gap theory for an attempt to reconcile the two creation accounts of Genesis, as did Michael Cavanaugh in his otherwise excellent sociological study of creationism (Franczyk, 1986; Cavanaugh, 1983, 169n.).
The first is A. J. Ferris's The Conflict of Science and Religion, in which the author writes that some races of humankindNegroes, Mongols, and the likewere created first, in the first chapter of Genesis (to which he gives a day-age interpretation). Ferris's second chapter concerns the creation of Adam and the Adamic race. Adam's son Cain interbred with the pre-Adamic coloreds; their offspring are the Latin and Teuton races. (Later, Ham also interbred with the pre-Adamic line.) The purity of the Adamic race was maintained through Shem's line (Israel) and through Japheth (the Slavs). Ferris argues that the judgment of the Flood was upon Seth's line onlythat it was a regional, not worldwide, flood, which the pre Adamite races survived. The Association of the Covenant People, the British Columbia based publisher of Ferris's book, preaches Nordic-Celtic supremacy and British-Israelism (the doctrine that the British and Americans are the true descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel) in its journal Identity.
The second work is E. K. V. Pearce's Who Was Adam? (1969; cited in Pun, 1982, p. 267). Pearce suggests that there were two Adams: the Adam of the first Genesis creation account lived in the Old Stone Age; the Adam of Genesis 2 in the New Stone Age. (Pun, by the way, opts for "progressive creationism" or variations of the day-age theory, with intermittent or overlapping "days.")
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