Footprints, Cosmology and Biblical Association

Scriptural association of the Genesis cosmogony with contemporary scientific cosmology is an interesting and informative practice for amateur theophysicians’ research. One hopes that the investigations are within the will of God and teleologically correct and even blessed—a word from old English meaning sprinkled with blood…an etymology from the words bleed and bled, in this case from the atoning, redeeming blood of the Lamb of God Jesus Christ.

The physics of God in creating the Universe will always be beyond the ken or understanding of humanity at some point, because it is unlikely that God actually has a need for a specific finite physics other than his will. Humanity thirty four hundred years ago would not have been able to comprehend any sort of modern multi-dimensional quantum mechanics that are represented in present micro-cosmological theories, and they are at best temporal phenomenal descriptions of a limited presentation of a pluralistic character useful for-humanity. The physics of creation given for people of such simple understanding thousands of years ago would need then to be non-specific yet truthful and yet given in such a way as to be consistent with later technical scientific investigations.

A part of scriptural association is of course to understand the contextual and historical origin of the book of Genesis as best as possible. The earliest written fragments of Genesis believed to remain in direct continuity are posited to have been written by the J or Jehovist writer during the reign of Rehoboam approx. 975 B.C.

Jews (in old English ju was another word for ‘you’ which gives Martin Buber’s I/ Thou a different shade of meaning) gained literacy during Egyptian captivity yet had a non-scriptural worship tradition retroactive to the era of Abraham. Following the Exodus the worship tradition may have begun accumulating some written fragments, yet the acts of the Jews in the desert and in Israel until the time of Rehoboam were perhaps largely priestly, liturgical, rule based and with a limited number of discrete written historically valid ‘papers’.

The flood story would possibly have been within the knowledge of the Jewish tradition dating back at least to the time of Abraham in Ur before 2000 B.C. The tales of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian/Sumerian/Akkadian flood story with Utnaphishtim have been discovered in cuneiform tablet fragments as old as 2200 B.C. Avrm or Abraham would have known of the flood story and interpreted it within the geo-values of that era in which world probably referred to the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain. After Exodus the Jews probably encountered creation and flood stories from Syria as well as Babylon and other of course Egypt, and were of an informed position when correlating that with what information they received through direct inspiration of God.

The J writer may not have included the entire present book of Genesis originally, instead redactors from the P or Priestly writer to those in or following the Babylonian captivity in the 7th century B.C. may have put more of their historical written materials into the book of Genesis with the loss of their Temple worship at Jerusalem.

Scriptural association with contemporary physical cosmological concepts may benefit from better comprehension of ancient historical element that pertain to the composition of the book of Genesis such as cultural anthropology, history and religious and language developments. The representative language of Genesis should not perhaps be simply naively interpreted into today’s paradigms of science, yet if so the paradigm is remarkably similar to general parameters of evolution.

The prose poem ‘Footprints’ has as a subject paradigm analogy of the relational role Jesus Christ/God has to mankind. The redeeming presence of Jesus Christ is transcendent and ‘lifts’ one out of the mundane or extreme secular roles and relationships that rule, sometimes inflexibly or with oppression, the secular world of human social reality.

‘Footprints’ is about relationships and not about economics or politics. Some purely corrupt secularists tend to interpret everything within a Marxist materialist paradigm and misunderstand how any Christian could believe in a power of God to transcend worldly relationships. In old English ‘hebban’ meant ‘to lift’, obviously the writer of ‘Footprints’ analogized the power of Jesus Christ ‘to lift’ the troubled soul on the beach walking with God out of the mundane and practico-inert through the relationship of faith or even epiphany. ‘Hebban’ may be a cognate of a world for ‘heaven’ incidentally, yet for the cosmologically naïve or unsophisticated people of ancient Israel to lift ‘up’ would have been as good a concept for heaven’s location as anyplace. That is heaven is a place away from the gravitationally bound, temporal world of oppression, pain and death, regardless of its locale in some better place or Utopia of God beyond this world or even Universe. If it was located in an extra-dimensional alternative universe humanity then and now would not comprehend the physics of it, which are inevitably ever beyond any comprehension by a sentient being other than God.

When such gross errors of misunderstanding exist even of a modern work such as ‘Footprints’, it is easy to understand that errors of context and meaning of ancient materials in Genesis are as likely to occur.