"Let us make human beings..."

In the account of the creation of heaven and earth in Gen 1:1-2:3, the portion concerning the creation of humanity in Genesis 1:26-30 holds a special place. Occurring, as it does, as the final creative act, it appears to be the culmination of all the others. The heavens and earth were first created as a place for humans to dwell. The land and seas were then commanded to bring forth vegetation and animals, but humans were not products of earth or water; they were created in the “image of God.” Only humans are specifically created as male and female and only humans are given dominion over the earth and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Perhaps no other passage in the first chapter of Genesis has generated more analysis and debate than v. 26, not only amongst bible scholars, but also with theologians as well. Here is the verse:

Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. (NABRE)

The two big questions this passage raises are: 1) Why is God speaking in the first-person plural? And 2) What is meant by the “image and likeness” of God? I had intended to address these questions in just one blog article, but that response got so long that I needed to break it up into two separate articles. Therefore, in the rest of this article, I will deal with the first question on the use of the divine plural. In my next article, I will complete the discussion on the “image of God”.

“Let us make human beings in our image…” Who is God talking to here? The divine plural is used only here, in Gen 3:22 and 11:7, and in Isaiah 6:8. The passage from Isaiah is particularly instructive. The prophet describes a vision of the Lord, seated on his throne, with seraphim stationed above him. There are other examples in the OT of God presiding over an assembly of heavenly beings (1 Kings 22:19-22; Psalms 82; Job 1:6; 2:1). When Isaiah hears the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” it is understood that God is addressing the heavenly court.


God surrounded by the host of heaven in Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" on the Sistine Chapel.

This is perhaps the most common explanation for the use of the divine plural here and in the other passages in Genesis, but there are some problems with this explanation. Unlike Isaiah, a heavenly court has not been described in Genesis. If the reader were to assume such a heavenly assembly, those being addressed are not merely being consulted, but are also included in the act of creation (“let us make…in our image”). Finally, the following verse (1:27) states that this image is, in fact, the “image of God”. So if this explanation of God addressing a heavenly court were correct, the author would be saying that the assembly of divine beings are part of God. Since the author of Genesis 1 goes to great pains to assert that God is unique and acting alone in the creation, this seems unlikely.

Since the early days of the Christian Church, this passage has been interpreted as referring to the Trinity. God the Father is addressing either the Son or the Spirit, or both. Gen 1:2 could be translated as saying either “a mighty wind” or “the spirit of God” was hovering over the abyss. Some commentators, latching on to the “spirit of God” translation, claim this as evidence of at least a duality within the Godhead: the creator and the spirit. But there are problems here as well. The idea of the Trinity is unknown in the OT and there is nothing to suggest the divine plurality in the verse is limited to three persons. In v. 29, the author is back to using first-person singular (“I give you every seed-bearing plant…”), so the divine plural is not used for direct dialogue. (This would also eliminate the possibility that the divine plural is similar to the royal “we” used by a king or queen. Also, there are no examples of the royal plural in the OT.)

Since we only see the divine plural used (in Gen 1:26, 3:22, and 11:7) where God is addressing himself and not in other instances (such as Gen 1:29) when God is addressing human beings, perhaps the best explanation for the use of the divine plural is one of self-deliberation or self-decision, much as we might say to ourselves, “Let’s see” or “Let’s do this.” A parallel for similar usage would be Song of Songs 1:9-11 where the lover speaks in the first-person, using the same words of Gen 1:26: “Let us make ornaments of gold studded with silver.”

If this interpretation is correct, then there’s no great theological point being made with the choice of words. It is simply a rhetorical device on the part of the author. One may, of course, choose to believe that the divinely-inspired author is – maybe subconsciously – revealing the germ of a Trinitarian understanding of God that can only be fully understood in retrospect, in light of later church doctrine. Such an interpretation is not impossible, but it hardly seems to be the intention of the human author.

With that out of the way, we’ll look at what the “image and likeness” of God means in my next article.

I Saw the Light

Many readers of the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:3 have wondered why God creates light on the first day but doesn’t create the sun, moon and stars until the fourth day. Now, the ancient Hebrew may not have had a very sophisticated understanding of astronomy, but he must have had some idea that light came from the sun. How does one explain this obvious blunder?

Creationist Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis explains it this way: “God created light first. He then created the sun to be the light-bearer for earth.” Thanks for clearing that up, Ken.

Reviewing other creationist websites, the most common explanation is that the light created on Day 1 emanated from a source other than the sun. Perhaps it was a cosmic light coming from God. At any rate, it alternated in some fashion with the darkness to provide Day and Night. (There was no rotation of the earth because, as we previously discussed, the ANE concept of the cosmos was of a flat, unmovable earth.) The sun, moon and stars were created on Day 4 as sources for the light that had already been created on Day 1. (For the time being we're going to ignore that the moon only shines by reflected light from the sun.)

In fact, some creationists argue that the counter-intuitive order of light before sun is “a hallmark of authenticity” because if the story had been made up, the author would have God creating the sun on the first day. “Having ‘day’ without the sun would have been generally inconceivable to the ancients.” The problem with that statement is that it was very conceivable to the ancients.

In 1849, archaeologists digging through the ruins of a library in in Nineveh (modern-day Mosul in Iraq) discovered thousands of fragments of clay tablets from various texts. One of these texts was a Babylonian creation myth called Enuma Elish, after its first two words. In 1000 lines on seven tablets, the epic tells the story of the god Marduk who slayed the sea monster Tiamat and, after using her carcass to create a new world, established the city of Babylon where Marduk was celebrated as king of the gods.

On line 38 of the first tablet of Enuma Elish, one god complains to another: “By day I cannot rest, by night [I cannot lie down]”. The account of Marduk creating the stars of the zodiac, moon and sun is on the fragmentary fifth tablet. The stated purpose of creating the zodiac was to regulate the months and the moon was appointed “to determine the days”. And therein lies a very important clue. The cosmic light that alternated with darkness provided a sense of Day and Night, a degree of order over the chaos of darkness that existed prior to light’s existence. But without sun, moon and stars, there was no way to know if the day had just begun or was about the end. No way to know if it was time to plant crops or if winter was coming. By creating the heavenly bodies, Marduk was really creating a way for humans to reckon Time.

This matches up with how the Bible describes the purpose of the heavenly bodies. According to Gen 1:14, the sun, moon and stars were created to “be signs for the seasons, the days and the years” (v. 14). But why couldn’t the astral bodies have been created on the first day?

To the ancient mind, it would have been impossible for God to have created them on Day 1 because the prerequisites were missing. On Day 1, there was nothing but the watery abyss and darkness. At a minimum, God needed to create the dome of sky in which to place the heavenly bodies. But, you also have to consider that the end goal of the Genesis author was to provide justification for the Sabbath rest. That required a regime of creative activity spread out over six days. When you start off with only primordial darkness, the first creative act has to be the creation of light in order to begin the cycle of Day and Night. And, as the Enuma Elish shows, the idea of light existing prior to the heavenly bodies was certainly an option. But why wait until Day 4 to create sun, moon and stars?


Sunrise on the Florida shoreline (photo by author)

Genesis 1:1-2:3 has an orderly, parallel structure that the rambling Enuma Elish lacks. Many have noticed that in the first three days, God creates: 1) light, 2) the firmament to separate the waters above the sky from the waters of the sea, and 3) dry land. During the next three days, God creates: 1) moving bodies of light, 2) living creatures to inhabit the sky and sea, and 3) living creatures and humans to inhabit the dry land. At the end of the third day, God creates vegetation on the new earth, and on the sixth day, he gives the vegetation over to his creatures as food. (God’s original intent was that there would be no killing for food. That would only come later, after the Flood.) Finally, on the seventh day, God rested.

The creation of the light-giving bodies on Day 4 parallels the creation of light itself on Day 1. The prerequisites are now in place: light alternates with darkness to give us orderly days, the dome of sky separating the waters will provide the location for the astral bodies, and the dry land will be the dwelling place for humanity. From the earth, humans will be able to track the motions of the light-giving bodies as they move through the sky so they can know when it is time to celebrate the Sabbath and other religious feasts.

Far from being a goof, creation of light prior to the sun was a logical necessity once you understand the goal behind the creation account in Gen 1:1-2:3 and the ancient concept of the cosmos.

Under the Dome

Young earth creationists are believers in biblical literalism; that is, interpreting the Bible according to a literal meaning of its words, not allowing for a figurative or metaphorical understanding. To know what the scripture text says is to know what it means. So when Genesis 1 says that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, that’s exactly how long it took. When they add up the dates from genealogies and other biblical chronological references, they come up with a date of 4000 BCE for the creation of the world, so the world must therefore be no older than 6000 years. Since for them the Bible is also inerrant, when science or history are in conflict with the Bible, science or history must conform to what the Bible says. Any facts have to be interpreted in light of the Bible’s clear meaning.

With this in mind, what are the implications of a literal interpretation of Genesis 1? When God set about creating the cosmos, there was nothing but chaos: “the earth was a formless waste and darkness covered the abyss and a mighty wind swept over the waters” (v. 2). One pictures a vast, wind-tossed sea covering the earth in utter darkness. It doesn’t say God created the primeval sea. It was already there. God’s first order of business is to create light (v. 3) to separate day from night.

God’s second creative act is to make a dome to separate “the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome” (v. 7). The Hebrew word raqiya (translated as “dome” or “firmament”) derives from a verb meaning to flatten or stamp down, suggesting a metal sheet that physically separates the upper waters from the lower waters. Later on (Gen 7:11), the Flood will be partially brought about by opening the “windows of the heavens”. In other words, openings in the solid firmament will allow the waters above the dome to flood the earth.

God’s third order of business is to gather the lower waters together in one place, allowing dry land to appear (v. 9). With this completed, the chaotic conditions present at the start of the first day have been reversed. The earth now has a form. It is bound by the sea, but the sea no longer covers it. Darkness is tamed by light and the chaotic waters of the abyss have been separated by a dome to prevent them from overcoming the earth.

With dry land in place, God can now bring forth vegetation (vv. 11-12). God will then go on to create the sun, moon and stars and place them in the dome of sky (vv. 14-18), as well as creating sea creatures and birds (vv. 20-22), land animals (vv. 24-25), and finally humans (vv. 26-27). In case you noticed, yes, light is created three days before the sun. And, yes, the sun and moon and stars are placed in, not above the dome. We’ll have to address those topics another time.




The heavens and earth according to the Bible



The ancient Near Eastern concept of the earth is not that of a sphere revolving around the sun, but more like a snow globe, except the water is above the dome and not contained within it. The land is a flat expanse surrounded by the primeval sea (Job 26:10; Prov 8:27) and is held up by pillars (1 Sam 2:8) to keep it from sinking into the waters. The dome of heaven is set upon the earth (Amos 9:6;), held up by mighty mountains, and the sun, moon and stars were placed within the dome. Together, the heavens above the dome and the earth below comprise the entire universe.

A literal reading of Genesis 1 is consistent with this view. However, I don’t think even the hardest-core young earth creationist would attempt to argue this literal reading of the text. Why is that? Because only the most deluded of people would try to argue that the earth is really flat with a metal dome for a sky. That might have worked for someone living in the Bronze Age, but anyone who has seen weather satellite photos taken from orbit knows that is absurd.

So the creationist will have to insist the true meaning of the text in Genesis 1 is something other than the obvious, literal meaning. They will insist that nothing in Genesis 1 is inconsistent with a spherical earth. The firmament is not a solid dome or, if it was at one time, that was before the Flood when it was destroyed, allowing the waters above it to drown the earth. Or maybe it was a vapor canopy or made of ice. If they get really desperate, they will claim that the words of the text are undefined or figurative in nature, even though we need to believe the universe was created in six 24-hour days, because that part has to be taken literally. How’s that for cognitive dissonance?

There is plenty of scriptural support for the ANE concept of a flat, immovable earth with a solid dome and waters above the dome. (This brief article sums up the biblical evidence for a flat earth.) It is every bit as “scientific” as a 6000-year old earth and creation of the universe in six days. But creationists deny the Bible describes the former and affirms it describes the latter. Furthermore, they will insist that we must believe this to be true because to deny any single part of the Bible is to deny all of the Bible. But aren't they denying a part of the Bible when they deny the scriptural view of a flat, immovable earth?

A Day in the Life

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of The Beatles. “A Day in the Life” from their Sgt. Pepper album is a quintessential Lennon-McCartney song. Beginning with John Lennon's dark musings (“I read the news today, oh boy”) about a man who “blew his mind out in a car” and watching a war movie, we transition to an upbeat Paul McCartney ditty about the life of a bloke who “woke up, got out of bed” and started daydreaming on a bus, only to return to Lennon counting “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” Lennon and McCartney wrote two separate songs, but merged them into one with some chaotic orchestration patching the seams. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

We see a similar process at work in much of the Bible where strands of multiple sources are edited together to form a unified whole. No better is that demonstrated than in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis.

The very first chapter of Genesis has the familiar six-day creation story. Throughout the chapter, appears the formulaic “And God said…” followed by some command (“let there be light”, “let the waters be gathered together”, and so on), words indicating the fulfillment of the command (“it was so”), and an assessment (“God saw that it was good”). In Gen 2:3. God blessed the seventh day because that is when he rested (shabat, in Hebrew, the basis of the noun sabbath). The main point of the story is an explanation of why we should rest on the Sabbath. A secondary point is a polemic against rival religions by showing that God is the creator of objects like light, astral bodies, and animals that were regarded as divine beings in other cultures.




"Creation of Sun and Moon" on the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo

Gen 2:4 begins the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. At first it appears to be a recapitulation with specificity of events occurring on the sixth day of creation, but Gen 2.5 points out that at this point there was “no plant of the field” because there were no humans to till the ground. So the Lord God formed “the human” (ha’adam) from “the ground” (ha’adamah) and, only then, “made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” (v. 9). Not wanting his creature to be alone, the Lord God formed out of the ground animals and birds (v. 19), but they were not suitable companions for the human, so the Lord God finally made a woman from the side of the human (v. 22). Indeed, the second creation story reaches its peak when the woman is brought to the human and he recognizes “bone from my bone and flesh from my flesh”. The point of this story seems to be that human beings are not meant to be alone but in community and the core of community is the special relationship between men and women.

Gen 2 is an entirely different creation story from Gen 1. The order of events in Gen 1 are plants-animals-humans (male and female). The order of events in Gen 2 are human (male)-plants-animals-human (female). In Gen 1, God orders something created and it is done. In Gen 2, the Lord God “formed” humans and animals out of the ground. Even the words for the deity are different. In Gen 1, the deity is referred to as “God” (elohim) but in Gen 2, the deity is called the Lord God (YHWH elohim).

In most English translations, “Lord” sounds like an honorific title (for example, “Lord Byron”), but it is actually the deity’s personal name, Yahweh (written in Hebrew using only the consonants YHWH). Jews do not utter the deity’s personal name, so in synagogue readings, they will say “my Lord” (adonay) wherever YHWH appears in the text. English translators followed this tradition, and put “Lord” is small caps to indicate that YHWH is being translated. Elohim is the common noun used to refer to a deity. The combination YHWH elohim only appears in Gen 2-3 (except for Exodus 9:30 where it may be a scribal mistake).

So what we have here are two creation tales that were joined together at some point. In the first, we have a heaven-centered viewpoint with Elohim, the universal deity, creating by divine fiat. In the second, we have a much more human-centered viewpoint with YHWH, the personal name of Israel’s deity, forming humans and animals from the ground the way a potter fashions earthern vessels. When the two stories were placed together, the redactor added the common noun Elohim after personal name YHWH in Gen 2-3, possibly to make the transition less jarring or to subtly indicate that the personal deity of Israel is the same universal deity of creation.

Continuing to read through the remaining chapters in Genesis and the other books of the Pentateuch, we will continue to notice the jump from Elohim to YHWH and back again. Using different names for the deity is one of the clues that we are dealing with different traditions or sources. Other clues are names (Israel vs. Jacob, Sinai vs. Horeb), distinctive vocabulary, or favored themes (rituals, laws, dates and numbers). Much like a detective identifying four different individuals at the scene of the crime from the clues they left behind, biblical scholars have identified at least four different traditions that were combined to make up the first five books of the Bible. This theory of composition is usually referred to as the documentary hypothesis.

There are some detractors of the documentary hypothesis. Some are fundamentalists who believe that the first five books were written by Moses because Jesus said it was (e.g., Luke 24:44). Others are critical scripture scholars who think supporters of the documentary hypothesis have developed an overly-complicated theory or doubt that individual traditions can be separated into individual continuous sources. Whether an editor combined completely separate sources or just fragments of various traditions together, there does seem to be overwhelming evidence that we are dealing with multiple sources and not just a single work by one author. Just like with “A Day in the Life”, the end result is a harmonious composition, but the individual components come from separate artists...and sometimes the seams show.

Memories of Pearl Harbor

My father was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. In fact, it was his 25th birthday. He had just finished Mass when the bombing started and he took refuge underneath a truck. He told me about other events that happened to him during World War II, but I never wrote them down or made a voice recording of them. Dad died some years back, so I only have what I remember of his war stories to share with my own son. Maybe one day I’ll write them down, but they’ll be only fragmentary and won't be accurate because Dad’s experiences were not my experiences.

That progression from a lived experience to oral history and finally to written history describes how the individual books of the Bible came to be written. Taking the gospels as an example, we begin with the lived experience of people encountering Jesus of Nazareth, particularly those who became his followers. After his crucifixion, they began preaching and telling others about him and his message. As the generation of those who knew Jesus in the flesh began to die off, it became necessary to record those events in writing.

But there’s no guarantee that two people experiencing the same event will remember it in the same way. During his days in the Army, my dad’s best friend was a man named Jacques. Decades after the war, Jacques looked up Dad and they had a reunion. Jacques recalls taking refuge from the bombing with Dad and Dad was certain that Jacques was not with him when he was hiding under the truck. Who was right?



Dad (on left) and Jacques during WWII

In the Gospel of John, the evangelist points out that when Jesus was condemned by Pontius Pilate, it was Preparation Day, the day before the start of Passover when the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple. The other gospel authors say that the Last Supper on the previous evening was the Passover seder, so the crucifixion occurred on Passover Day. A biblical literalist who can admit of no contradictions in scripture would argue – without any evidence, I might add -- that it was Passover according to one calendar but Preparation Day according to a different calendar. But if we don’t make it an article of faith that there are no errors in scripture, then this inconsistency in separate accounts of the Passion story is easily understandable as a lived event filtered through two different faith traditions. They agree on the larger picture, but not on every single detail.

Similarly with the stories of the Old Testament, although it must be said that the further back you go, the longer the period of time between a faith event and its subsequent written narrative becomes. Just because Genesis is the first book of the Bible and describes the creation of the world does not mean that it was the first book to be written down. Genesis has some old traditions in it, but in its current form, it was finalized around the time of the Babylonian Captivity. And that was centuries after the time of the patriarchs.

The thinking used to be that there was a kernel of historical truth in the stories of Israel’s formation (Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, etc.) but archaeological discoveries over the past 50 years have not only failed to find evidence to support that, but have actually found evidence in the opposite direction. Instead of being a pastoral group who escaped slavery in Egypt and infiltrated a Canaanite civilization, it seems that the people of Israel were Canaanite all along. They overthrew the ruling class and invented a foundation narrative centering around a God to whom they gave credit for their origins.

Indeed, there were probably multiple origin narratives and, at some point, these were edited together to form the first books of the Bible that we have today. A classic example of that are the first two chapters of Genesis. In the first chapter, God (Elohim in Hebrew) creates the world in six days with human beings being the last to be created, yet in the second chapter the Lord God (Yahweh Elohim) creates man first, and then the animals, and finally woman. Different names for God are one clue for identifying the varying source material forming the biblical work.

This editorial process went on for many centuries. A third-century BCE Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint) shows a number of significant differences from the Hebrew text we have today, shorter in some places and longer in others. This is evidence that the source material was still being shaped by editors.

The takeaway from this is that the Bible did not come about because God whispered into the ears of Moses and others, who then dutifully wrote down the words to form the texts we have today. Neither did inspired authors record historical events as it happened or shortly after the fact. Instead, it is a more complicated process of oral transmission, theological reflection and editing. If we want to refer to the Bible as “the Word of God”, we also have to recognize that it comes to us in human words, subject to the foibles and limitations of human minds.

The Norton Anthology of Israelite Literature

If you were to walk into my office at home and peruse some of the titles, what would you see? You would find books on the Bible, religion in general and Catholicism in particular. You would also find the collected works of William Shakespeare and Stephen Jay Gould, and a witches’ brew of books on the JFK assassination. Round it off with some classic s/f works like The Lord of the Rings, The Foundation Trilogy, and the Dune series.

Now, let’s suppose that the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts and buries Dallas under volcanic ash for 2500 years before archaeologists excavate the ruins of my office. Ten percent of the books have survived but have lost their covers and some are not completely intact. Fortunately, the future archaeologists are able to read the pages that survive but don’t have much in the way of reference points to the culture of the early 21st century. What would they think of my library?

Because the vocabulary and writing styles are just so different, they would not automatically assume all the books were written by the same author. Neither would they classify all the material as works of fiction or works of non-fiction because some documents were narratives whereas others were not. I think the surviving JFK assassination books would give them pause as to whether to pigeonhole them under fact or fiction. As for Shakespeare and Tolkien, the language and settings are obviously more archaic, so they would suspect those works were written centuries prior to the majority of the texts. The s/f works must be some sort of prophetic material since they describe technology that is far beyond what the 21st century was capable of producing.

In effect, this is what we have with the Bible. Although it is bound between two covers, the Bible is a library of books not a single book. A library of books that were written by various authors over several centuries and with various literary forms: narrative, poetry, proverbial wisdom, prophetic and apocalyptic material, and correspondence. Some of the books appear to have been heavily edited, mixing material from different sources. Others seem to have additional material added on to them. All of the source texts date to over 2000 years ago and we know very little, if anything, about the authors and the times in which they lived.

I can anticipate some objections to this analysis.

“The unity of the whole that is the Bible distinguishes it from just a library of random books.” There is a nugget of truth here. True, there is more of a theme to the various books of the Bible than you would find in some random collection of books in a library. With one or two exceptions, every biblical book mentions God and that’s why those books were preserved rather than the Book of the Wars of the Lord (referenced in Numbers 21:14-15), the Book of Jashar (Joshua 10:13), or any of the dozens of other lost works referenced in the Bible. And, as we see with books that never made it into the New Testament, unless the work supported a message that was acceptable to the larger Christian community, it was rejected. So there was intention on the part of the scribes and religious leaders in selecting the right kind of books to make up the Bible. It wasn’t random. It's sort of The Norton Anthology of Israelite Literature.



The anthology provides an overview of poetry, drama, prose fiction, essays, and letters from Beowulf to the beginning of the 21st century.

“One sees in the Bible an order from creation to the end of the world, the history of creation.” The obvious problem here is that the Hebrew Bible does not contain Revelation. But the bigger problem is that the order is imposed by the religious leaders who defined the canon of the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, the first five books (known as the Torah) are followed by a section called The Prophets. Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings are included with Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. in the second section but Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah and Esther are included with the remaining books in the third section called The Writings.

“The Bible is one book with one principal author and it is all about one subject, Jesus the Messiah.” Just because you can make connections between the Old and New Testaments doesn’t mean those connections are real. For example, you can make the argument that the Tabernacle in the wilderness (described in Exodus 25-30) prefigures the Temple of Solomon, but if you claim it is prophesized Jesus Christ (the Tabernacle had a lampstand; Jesus is the light of the world), I think you are reading more into scripture than is there. The early Christians were Jews, so it is natural that they would borrow Jewish symbolism and religious language in writing the New Testament.

If I knew the Yellowstone Supervolcano was going to blow and that my library would be the only surviving texts from the early 21st century, I would curate the contents to better represent our civilization and culture. I’d include history texts and examples of classic literature, art and music. In the same way, the Hebrew Bible is a time capsule of the best the Israelite culture had to offer. The New Testament is the primary record of the origins of a new world religion. The Bible is more than just “God’s plan of salvation”. It is the distillation of centuries of hopes and dreams for liberation, identity, and community.