101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

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yth #14:
God created earth on the third day.
The Myth: And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the
waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.…And the evening and the morning
were the third day. (Gen. 1:10, 13)
The Reality: God gathered the waters and created dry land on the second day
of Creation.
On the third day of Creation, according to Genesis, God gathered the primeval
waters together and created dry land. He called this dry land“Earth.” We already have
seen that this story constitutes a piece of the Egyptian Creation myth. But there is
another problem—while Genesis places this event on the third day, a careful reading
of the Genesis Creation story indicates that the biblical redactor made a mistake and
that this event, in the original Genesis account, occurred on the second day.
The Bible, like many ancient texts, often uses literary formulas, short phrases that
a scribe employs either as an idiomatic expression or to indicate something about the
nature of the text. These textual formulas most often appear as elements in a listing,
where they divide one section of a list from another, as is commonly done in ancient
king lists. The biblical stories of the kings of Israel and Judah illustrate this technique.
At the end of each story, the biblical scribe often attached the following sentence (or a
slightly altered version of it):“And the rest of the acts of [king’s name], and all that he
did, and his [attributes associated with the king], are they not written in the book of
[source work cited]?”
The Bible has many such textual formulas. On occasion, for instance, it introduces a
section of narrative by telling us “These are the generations of…” where the material
describes the events associated with a particular family. The Genesis Creation story
also makes use of a textual formula.
At the end of each day’s activities, except for the second day, God reviewed what he
did and then declared“that it was good.” On the seventh day, God rested so he had no