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

Myths of the Beginning 35
act to declare good. The narrative, however, still has him bless and sanctify the last day.
On the third and sixth day, however, God also declares something good in the middle
of the day. We will consider the first mid-day declaration in this discussion, and the
other mid-day declaration when we look at Myth #15.
The phrase “that it was good” constitutes a textual formula. Its placement at the
end of each day’s activities serves to signify that the day’s actions were completed and
that God liked what he saw. So, why is there no such declaration at the end of the second
day, and why does the third day have two such declarations?
The mid-day declaration on the third day takes place after God gathered the
waters and created the dry land. The second declaration on that day occurs after God
created the vegetation. This textual arrangement is puzzling.
Most biblical scholars accept that the Creation account is mythological but they
offer up no useful explanation for why biblical scribes omitted the textual formula on
the second day and introduced it twice on the third day. Many religiously orthodox
interpreters, on the other hand, suggest that God intended to gather the waters
together and create dry land on the second day, after raising the firmament, but he
didn’t have time to complete the task. Therefore, he reserved the blessing until after
completing the task on the next day.
Although this explanation assumes a literal interpretation of the day as a fixed
duration of time, it overlooks God’s omnipotence and that the tasks in question were
certainly far less taxing than, say, creating the sun or any other single star, which would
take far more energy than simply raising a firmament and gathering the waters on the
tiny little earth. Yet, God created all of the stars, as well as the planets and the moon all
on one day.
The obvious solution to this paradox is that the biblical redactors made a mistake,
the equivalent of a misplaced cut and paste job. Since the blessing for the second day
doesn’t occur until the middle of the third day, it seems reasonable to conclude that the
gathering of the waters together was part of the second day’s events, a logical followup
to the raising of the firmament in the middle of the waters. The biblical redactor
appears to have assumed that the emerging dry land belonged more logically with the
appearance of vegetation, so he prematurely inserted a break in the second day and