Handy in Refering to Exodus 20:11 & 31:17
How do we reconcile the idea that the earth was in place eons before the six days of creation with these two texts in which it's clear that the creation of the heavens and the earth was part of the six days?
My first question would be without gettting into the definition of the word "Man." Days according to who, Adam, who didn't exist, and wasn't placed in the Garden till the 8th day, or God?
Gen 1:1 in English then Hebrew & my commentary on it
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth
(be)re'shiyth elohiym bara 'eth shamayim 'eth 'erets
In the Origin (of Things) God (plural - Male and Female) created (first time) the heaven and earth.
The above representation numerically in Hebrew represents completeness, The links to its explaination are below. Lets take a side trip here to prove that the 1st verse of Genesis meant what it said, which interpreted means completeness as in the number 7 means complete.
Ivan Nikolayevitsh Panin was a mathematics genius, one of the top ten men in his field at the time. Panin was born in Russia in 1855, a skeptic under the growing influence of Communism, he participated in plots against the Czar at an early age and was exiled and emigrated to Germany and then to the US. Later after graduating from Harvard University in 1882 became a Christian and began to devote time studying the Bible, he also read fluently in a number of languages. He spent 50 years of his life painstakingly exploring the numerical structures of the Scriptures.
In the original languages of the Bible, mostly Hebrew and Greek, there are no separate symbols for numbers, letters of the alphabet are used to indicate numbers. The numeric value of a word is the sum total of all its letters. It was this curiosity that first caused Dr Panin to begin toying with the numbers behind the texts. Sequences and patterns began to emerge. This complex system of numbering saturates every book of the Scriptures illustrating further the deeper meaning of Scripture in types and shadows.
Dr Panin says the laws of probability are exceeded into the billions when we try and rationalise the authorship of the Bible as the work of man. He once said: "If human logic is worth anything at all we are simply driven to the conclusion that if my facts I have presented are true, man could never have done this. Panin supplied a representative of the Nobel Research Foundation with over 43,000 pages of his studies accompanied by his statement that this was his evidence that the Bible was the Word of God. Their reply was - "As far as our investigation has proceeded we find the evidence overwhelmingly in favor of such a statement." Had It not been controversial due to the fact it involved the Bible they said the would have awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.
The works of Dr Ivan Panin have been put before the experts many times. He challenged nine noted rationalists and Bible critics through the medium of the "New York Sun" newspaper to publicly refute or give explanation for a few of his presented facts other than the obvious; that the Word of God was the product of a Divine Mastermind above all possibility of human
construction, carrying within itself a self-checking and protecting factor to ensure against additions and subtractions to its text in the original languages. Four made lame excuses; the rest were silent. He issued a challenge throughout leading newspapers of the world to offer a natural explanation or refute the facts; not a single person has ever been able to do so. Taking any given subject, like a genealogy, a passage of Scripture, a book of the Bible or the Bible in its entirety, he demonstrated that numbers do not lie.
Consider for a moment the difficulty of constructing a similar book, even with the design in mind. With each additional paragraph, the difficulty of constructing it increases not in arithmetical but geometric progression. He must try to write paragraphs to develop fixed numerical relations constantly to what goes both before and after. It must not only conform to the numerical pattern consistently and in sufficient detail to yield evidence after evidence of design in its structure, but it must also make sense and read in smooth, literary style in the same simple majesty of the Bible documents.
The Hebrew text also reveals the same amazing phenomena. For example, the very first verse in the Bible has been a target for much criticism. Observe the incredible detail the pattern reveals in just one simple verse of seven Hebrew words;
Genesis 1:1 - "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
The 7 words have exactly 28 letters (4 x 7).
There are 3 nouns (God, heaven, and earth) with a gematria of exactly 777 (111 x 7).
There is one verb ("created") with a numeric value of 203 (29 x 7).
The first 3 words contain the subject and have exactly 14 letters (2 x 7); the other four contain the object and also have exactly 14 letters.
The Hebrew words for the two objects (heaven and earth) each have exactly 7 letters; the value of the first, middle, and last letters in the sentence is 133 (19 x 7).
The numeric value of the first and last words in the sentence is 1,393 (199 x 7).
The value of the first and last letters of the verse is 497 (71 x 7).
The value of the first and the last letters of each word in between is 896 (128 x 7).
The Hebrew particle "eth" is used with the article "the" twice; its total value is 406 (58 x 7).
The last letters of the first and last words are valued at 490 (70 x 7).
The 4th, 5th, and 6th words have 7 letters each...etc.!!
There are over 30 different numeric features in this one verse alone. The chances of coincidence that 7 could occur this many times are in the billion's. Explain it if you can in any other way than the obvious - God was in the writing of the Book that bears His Name.
For sake of argument to totally understand what I am saying, since so little information is available, apart from myth, which I won't go into here, I suggest you look at these two sites.( I know we didn't even get to the second verse of Genesis, I'm sorry )
http://homepage.virgin.net/vernon.jenkins/
http://members.home.nl/frankcolijn/fran ... ndexEN.htm
: . However, I do want to try to follow along with all of this information, and if y'all can be patient with me, I'll try to ask some intelligent questions from time to time.
