How Evolution Proves the Bible

<p>In this episode of Based Camp, Malcolm and Simone Collins dive deep into the Book of Genesis, revealing surprising alignments between the ancient text and modern evolutionary science. </p><p>Malcolm challenges common Sunday-school interpretations, showing how Genesis describes a timeline that closely matches scientific understanding: from the early Earth and origin of life, through aquatic creatures and large reptiles, to birds, land animals, and finally humanity. They explore alternate translations of key Hebrew words (like “yom” for “day/era”, “yatsar” for “formed/planned”, and “taninim” for great reptilian creatures), discuss the Big Bang, prebiotic Earth, the evolution of sexuality, and why Genesis stands out among global creation myths.</p><p>A fascinating conversation blending biblical scholarship, evolutionary biology, and philosophical insight that will challenge both skeptics and literalists.</p><p>Episode Transcript</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Hello, Simone. I’m excited to talk with you today. In a recent episode, I pointed out, I was like, “It is weird to within a modern context in Christianity and stuff like this, when people are saying that evolution is not coherent with Genesis.”</p><p>And I would say that at least my readings of Genesis, evolution makes me believe Genesis more because Genesis says a bunch of stuff that aligns with what we know of the, about the evolutionary timeline without saying anything that disconfirms the evolutionary timeline. So we are gonna get into this.</p><p>And it’s, it’s, it’s such a fun topic for me to get into because when I was a kid, and I believe that Genesis said what, as I call it, Sunday school Christianity, you know? Well Genesis says X, Y, and Z, and and I- if you look at it, and then don’t look up alternate translations of the words in it whenever something looks a little fishy or looks like it may be [00:01:00] factually incorrect or don’t look up how that word is used in other places in the Old Testament you immediately are like, “Okay, that’s believable,” right?</p><p>And so that’s stupid because that’s an old story for savages.</p><p><strong>Speaker 2:</strong> We will call them cave Jews</p><p><strong>Speaker 3:</strong> Attacker!</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And then you come at it with a more modern mindset. I mean, just if you look at the mere timeline given in it, right? It says first you have non-animal life. Then you have the vast array... No, it doesn’t even say, like, fishes.</p><p>It’s, it’s the vast array of creatures that live in the sea.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Mm-hmm.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Along with some form of large reptilian creature. Hmm ... which, which, no- What could that</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> be?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah, what, what could that be? Now, no, there’s, there’s a lot of really cool... First, it’s not as simple as saying, like, fi- they easily could have wr- fishes, right?</p><p>But if you’re describing- Yeah ... the [00:02:00] evolutionary timeline- Yeah ... the vast array of things that live in the sea is a very good description for early animal life. 100%,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And I’m also gonna go into stuff in the translations here, where a lot of people argue that the, the giant thing that’s written here, the 吨, or whatever is like a leviathan, that it is a giant sea creature-like serpent or something like that.</p><p>And I’m gonna point out that actually if you read the, the correct, the Hebrew, which we’ll go into- Mm-hmm Isn’t necessarily talking about a sea animal. It’s only talking about a large reptilian creature. It just talks about it in the same context as it’s talking about sea animals, so people often assumed it was talking about sea animals.</p><p>And then it says- there were also some very large</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> sea animals</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> though There were some large reptiles, but I’m just saying, like, if I was trying to give an evolutionary timeline of history. Then it says you’ve got the birds. Then you’ve got the creatures on Earth today. So like before we go into this, this is, even broadly most people are aware it gives this timeline.[00:03:00]</p><p>Do you know how many other religions, and I’m talking even if I go Native American traditions, even if I go African traditions, ‘cause I have gone through AI after AI trying to find a single other religion that gets the evolutionary timeline as close to right as this. There isn’t one.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. I, I can’t think of one, for sure.</p><p>One. There, there isn’t- Based on all the folk traditions I’ve heard, everything, yeah</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> There isn’t even one that gets the first two simple steps right. Mm. Non-animal life and aquatic life. Or fishes, or anything. Like, I tried to give it so many outs. Wow. Nothing. Nothing comes close to getting those two stages right.</p><p>So again, this isn’t just like they randomly threw stuff together and happened to get it right. This is, like, easily very, very right related stuff. So we’re gonna get into that. Very, very fun.</p><p><strong>Speaker 3:</strong> So note, a lot of people will be like, “Well, there’s some really obvious mistakes that you find. For [00:04:00] example, that non-animal based life came about before the sun and the moon.” To which I would be like, “Well, actually, hold on a second here. , Do you know what the oldest evidence of life we have on Earth is?</p><p>It’s</p><p>Australia’s Jack Hills zircons, which date about 4.4 billion years old, , into the Hadean era. All right? So do you know when the moon was formed? Formed, by the way, from a collision of a body about the size of Mars into Earth, which led to the surface being largely covered in magma for a period that would likely have wiped out any evidence we had of life from before that period. It was formed f- 4.5 billion years ago. So the moon is from 4.5 billion years ago in an event that would have wiped any evidence of life existing before it off [00:05:00] the surface of the Earth. Then 4.4 billion years ago, we see evidence of life. What’s the chance you think that there could have been life on Earth before this collision, and that it in some way influenced or seeded the life that came after the collision?</p><p>I’m gonna at least say, like, from my perspective, at least 20 to 30%, and I wouldn’t have known that without going into this.</p><p>Otherwise, you have to assume that coincidentally life just happened to first evolve almost immediately after this collision during one of the most violent times of Earth’s history, which seems unlikely</p><p>And then you can say, “Well, okay, but the sun definitely existed before that.” And we can say, “All right, but if you read the Bible, it says that it separated the night from the day.” That is the point of the creation of the sun in this particular story.</p><p>, And if [00:06:00] we go 4.4 billion years ago to those Jackson Hill zircons, right, , the atmosphere was still transitioning,</p><p>, More specifically, it had really high levels of CO2, potentially tens of hundreds of times higher than modern, and a very high level of water vapor that sustained a really strong greenhouse effect and permanent very thick cloud layers</p><p>, And the image I have in the background here is an image from, as you can see, it’s from a scientific catalog, right, of what scientists think Earth looked like during this period of Earth’s history.</p><p>So it would have been, , extremely, extremely diffuse and hazy. , Most days during that period from what we know , of Earth would have just looked like an orangish, reddish overcast.</p><p>Things you would not have been able to see, or would have been able to see very rarely, maybe once every few hundred years or something like that, are the stars and a [00:07:00] clear day and night. So actually, the Bible isn’t even that wrong on some of the weirder claims it makes</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> A note here we’re gonna go into, like a lot of people will be like, “Uh-uh. It says that God formed the animals with the dirt, that it formed man with the dirt.”</p><p>And we’re gonna point out the word that is translated in your Sunday school Bible into formed throughout the rest of the</p><p>Old Testament, do you know what it means? No, actually. Planned. Really? It y- Oh. Yes. And we’ll go through instances. It, it, it can be used to mean formed, but it could equally be used to say, “God planned the dirt to become human.</p><p>God planned-” Oh my word ... “the dirt to become animals.” Ooh. But we’re gonna go over all sorts of fun stuff like this which is fun. And we’re gonna mostly be focused on the first story of Genesis, ‘cause Genesis sort of has two beginning of Earth stories that aren’t really that contradictory. We have [00:08:00] another episode, the Adam and Eve story, that goes over that one.</p><p>I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever produced, if you’re interested. It’s, doesn’t even contradict normal Christianity that much and it’s very elucidating for, I think, a lot of people, around what’s actually in the Adam and Eve story, because it’s not often what you’re taught. And note here when people are like, “Well, if it’s saying that God like planned man to come out of dirt or whatever,” right?</p><p>Like that, that still doesn’t mean evolution, right? You know? Because evolution is a natural process, so that wouldn’t be God doing it. And here I’m gonna be like, okay, let’s just talk about the nature of miracles. Imagine God was like, “I’m gonna shoot that guy with lightning.” Right? Like calling the shots.</p><p>And then all of a sudden you see lightning come down from the sky and shock a guy, and he falls over dead. And then you turn and you go, “Yeah, but that was static in the clouds that caused that lightning, and so I don’t really think that that was a miracle,” right? You know, because it was done through natural processes.</p><p>I’m like, actually, that’s, that’s a little bit more impressive than just [00:09:00] magicking it, okay? Right. Let’s go into this, “now the Lord God formed out the ground all the wild animals and the birds in the s- sky.” So, the word used here for formed means to mold, shape, or fashion. It can mean that, okay? However it’s frequently used to describe a plan, a purpose, a division, or preordaining.</p><p>Mm-hmm ... and specifically the root idea of yatsar is to, through a plan, mold or shape something into a specific form. So if we’re gonna look at instances where we see it used this way you have Isaiah 22:11, “But you did not look to Him who did it or planned it,” and this is the same word here, “or have a regard for Him who planned it y- long ago.”</p><p>A- a- again, the planned here is the same word that was used to mean form or translated as form in Genesis. If you go to Isaiah 37:27 and there’s a parallel in 2 Kings 19:25, “Have you not heard that I [00:10:00] determined it long ago? I planned it from the days of old.” The word planned here is the same word that’s used for form.</p><p>I’m not gonna go through every instance. We’ve got an instance in I- Isaiah 46:11 Plasm 42:20 Jeremiah 18:11. Basically, it’s just everywhere. This is not an uncommon way to use that word. And people can say, “Well, obviously when the Bible was written, that’s not the way the savage people of, you know, however many, four or five thousand years ago were meant to understand these lines.”</p><p>And I’m gonna say, isn’t that even kind of crazier- Exactly ... that truth could be baked into the text, that as science continued to uncover things, we were able to reread it in a way that would never make sense to somebody 5,000 years ago, but is not disconfirming of modern science. Can you see why that affirms my faith that there might have been some actual divine inspiration for this, instead of disconfirms?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Mm-hmm.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> [00:11:00] Now let’s go to another thing that people will complain about. They will say, “Well, it says days,” right? It says on day one, on day two, et cetera, right?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> And- The Bible in general get, it throws me with timing. You know, he lived for 100-something years. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I often hear the and I always thought this was a really bad counter-explanation- Oh</p><p>Where they’ll be like, “Well, you know, because days didn’t really exist yet at the beginning of time and the human concept of day didn’t exist- Hmm ... these days could mean any amount of time you want them to be,” right? And I always found this to be very flimsy. I was like, “Come on.” Like, that, that really just seems like re-begging the point.</p><p>Like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t buy that. But okay, let’s ask this question again. The word that’s translated as day here, especially with the concept of a morning and night attached to it, which you do have in this- Oh, really? Okay ... is it in other parts of the Old Testament in [00:12:00] Hebrew writing used to refer to something longer than a single day?</p><p>Or does the word sometimes mean something other than a literal one day? Oh, so what’s the, what’s the answer? All over the place. So, a- and some even very, very common ones. So the day of the Lord this is Isaiah 2:12, 13:6, 13:9, Joel 1:15, 2:1. I don’t need to go over all the places. It’s all over the place.</p><p>And it refers to a future period of divine judgment and/or blessing, often involving cosmic signs and battles. Mm. Pretty much all Christians and Jews believe in the day of the Lord, and none of them believe it’s one day. Like, that’s not a, a common interpretation, yet it’s all over the Bible and, and very...</p><p>And this is within the communities that take the creationist literalist approach. This is the thing that gets me, ‘cause what we’re gonna be going over is a lot of verses here where day is used to mean something longer than a day, that are [00:13:00] taken to mean that by the same groups that say in- Genesis it must mean a literal day.</p><p>So the word that we’re translating as a day here, you don’t even need to be like, oh, you know, in the perception of God, a day of a thousand years or whatever. It literally in other places of the Bible is translated to mean era. , And when you think about a word like the era of the Lord instead of the day of the Lord, it actually sort of makes more sense when we see this mistranslation appear in other places as well.</p><p>, Now, do I think to the savage cave geo, , when they heard this story that they weren’t thinking of literal days? No, they probably were. They simply didn’t have any context to understand the context of billions or trillions of years. So it makes sense that we would have talked if they were having some form of supernatural inspiration to write down a true big history time span [00:14:00] of Earth, they would have used this word, , that I think divinely has another meaning in other parts of the Bible, which is era, , to say some period of time</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So, another instance here, Joshua 24:7 “And you lived in the wilderness many days.” Now this is translated as a long time , and this refers to the 40 years of wandering. Now 40 years of wandering isn’t just many days, okay? That’s 40 effing years of wandering, right?</p><p>Mm-hmm. Then you have Josiah 6:2, “After two days He will revive us, and on the third day He will raise us up.” Many scholars, including most of the scholars who take a literal interpretation of days in Genesis, see this as prophetic of a longer period. Oh. Often linked to Israel’s restoration or even the time of Christ’s restoration.</p><p>Using the a day is like a thousand years principle from Psalms 94 and Peter 3:8. Psalms. And note... Songs, whatever, blah. People say the day is like a thousand years one they use to [00:15:00] mean they argue it in this. I’ve heard that argument before. I just find it a lot more convincing that, And, and again, you have Daniel 8:2, where again you have days used to mean something that is generally agreed as being much longer than a day.</p><p>But what’s interesting here is in Daniel 8:26, you also even have the convention of evening and morning attached with this concept of a day- Hmm ... to delineate something that is much longer than what we, when we’re talking about a literal day mean. And, and this to me is just much more compelling. If this word is used all over the place to mean something other than a literal day why would we not see it as being more like the term era or epoch?</p><p>Which it does seem to be referencing in terms of time horizons if we’re looking at evolutionary and geological history, okay? Yeah. Yes. And so you can say, “Well, if they wanted to say epoch, why didn’t they say epoch? [00:16:00] Why didn’t they say billions of years?” And the answer is they just didn’t have those words.</p><p>Right? That those, those words aren’t in the Bible. The scales of time that this verse is talking about is simply not talked about anywhere else in the Bible. Huh. So of course they wouldn’t use it. Of course somebody, of, of people living in a freaking desert 10,000 years ago wouldn’t have had the concept of geological history to write that down.</p><p>Right. If it was explained to them, it would look like this.</p><p><strong>Speaker 9:</strong> So what alternate word could they have used other than the word they used if they wanted to use a word that was closer to something like an era or an epoch? There really is only one other word, and once you know it, it’s immediately obvious why it wasn’t used if you’re trying to be true. It’s the word tekufa or tekaph, and this appears four times in the Tanakh.</p><p>So what does this [00:17:00] mean? It means a cycle, a turn, or a circuit. So it would have indicated a view of time and history that is much closer to like a Hindu or Buddhist one, which is not in alignment with what we know about evolution or the way history works. So suppose the cave Jew who was having these revelations, he says, let’s suppose some sort of angel is inspiring them or something, and it’s like a really, really long time period.</p><p>And they’re like, oh, you mean like a turn or a cycle? And they’re like, no, not like that. Do you have any other words you can use?</p><p>the wild thing about the AI response, , is I asked it, is there any word in ancient Hebrew of the time of the Old Testament that can be used to mean era or epoch, , or did such a word not exist yet? So not only did it give me this cycle word, but it then says under that if, basically, if you’re not using that word, the next best word to use is yom, the word that’s actually used here.</p><p>, What’s also really [00:18:00] cool is if you look at the scholarly debate on this, what they’ll say is, okay, yes, it’s within the s- called the semantic range of the word yom to be used as era, in that sometimes it’s used to mean era or epoch in the Bible. But that’s not how it’s normally used in the Bible the vast majority of times because, I mean, you’re just gonna be talking about days a lot more often than you’ll be talking about epoch or era.</p><p>But to me, that’s a really bad argument for it being interpreted that way in this particular context because yes, obviously you use the word day more than the word era, but in this context, era just makes a lot more sense when we know actual scientific history. More than that, when people come and they go, “Well, look, it talks about having night times and day times in this story,” and it’s like, bro, even in English, you would hear somebody be like, “Well, at the sunset of the Victorian era,” , you don’t think, oh, well, that meant that the [00:19:00] Victorian era happened in a day</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> All right, now we’re gonna go over all of the lines from Genesis, and go over how actually affirming they are, and how f- from my perspective of modern science seems to affirm them. And we’ll go over the one or two contradictions where I’m like, “This is a genuine problem.”</p><p>But the genuine problems are actually even more interesting to me, because they present things where if, like, techno-puritism, our version of Christianity, becomes a, a religion that’s popular, people can say, “Look, they predicted science would overturn this based on the Bible- Ooh ... 50 years ago, 100 years ago.”</p><p>And if we end up being right about those things that is going to be very, very spicy in terms of affirmation of there’s some form of divine inspiration for this story. All right, so let’s go into this. In the beginning, God created heavens and the Earth. Now, the Earth was formless and empty.</p><p>Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. [00:20:00] So immediately we have a number of problems here, right? Like, if you’re taking a normal Sunday school, typically you just read this line and you drop it. You’re just like, “Okay, something just... Whatever. Yeah, I guess.</p><p>God’s hovering over waters.” That sounds like normal you know, pagan nonsense, right? Like, like, like, the type of thing I’d expect some tribal group to write or something, right? Maybe, maybe a little more fluttery, but whatever. And then you go, “No, no, no, no.” Like, let’s, let’s suppose I’m taking this seriously, right?</p><p>This doesn’t make sense the way it’s translated to English here.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Specifically... Okay, so it’s talking about a formless, empty darkness. First of all, very interesting if you’re thinking about, like, pre-Big Bang. How do you describe reality, time before the Big Bang? I think a formless, empty darkness is a pretty good description.</p><p>And-</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> 100%, yeah ...</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> and people can then say, “Well, look here. It’s saying now [00:21:00] the Earth was a formless, empty darkness.” And I’m gonna be like clearly that’s not what it means, because it can’t both be the Earth and a formless, empty darkness.” So Earth- Yeah ... in this context clearly means everything, not just the Earth as we understand it.</p><p>Secondarily, you now have the issue of, okay, so you have, The earth with a formless, empty darkness over the surface of the deep, right? Okay. So, and then God-</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> That implies also, yeah, like a, the earth covered in oceans, which is how it was in the beginning, right?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yes, during a, part of our early history, but we’re, we’ll get to that in a second.</p><p>But it then says, so basically you have two things. You have the water, right? The, the, the surface of the deep. And then the, the formless empty deep itself, and then the darkness, right? Yeah. And these two things are, are, are sort of in, in opposition to each other. And then you have the, the spirit of God hovering over the water.</p><p>So wait, that doesn’t make any sense because the earth with a formless, empty darkness over the [00:22:00] surface of the deep. So that means now God is either, like, under the water in the deep, or he is the formless empty darkness, right? You’re on one of two- Mm-hmm ... sides of this water surface. It, assuming the word over in this context means that he is literally spatially hovering over something.</p><p>So then you have to look. You have to say, well, does the word over mean anything else? Which we’ll get into in a second. It does, by the way. Ooh. There’s a spoiler. And then secondarily, we have the word hovering here, which is a very weird word that is used very, very rarely in the Old Testament and doesn’t at all mean what hovering...</p><p>Hovering is a terrible translation of the word. It basically means- It’s worthless ... a thing in constant non-hurried movement/development.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Oh. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Now I can see how hovering would be, like, the closest- I can ... you’re gonna get to as an easy word.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But I think that’s actually a way more [00:23:00] important to understand what that word, because as soon as you’re like, “That’s a-” Yeah, it sounds like</p><p>weird word to use there,” right? Yeah. Yeah. So let’s go against this. Okay. So first of all what are the other things that over could mean in this context? Mm-hmm. It could mean against. They are putting God as something that exists in opposition to the formlessness before time, okay? Before the Big Bang, right?</p><p>Or it could mean sort of like, after. So, here you have this in Proverbs 25:11. You have this in Leviticus 15:25, and you have this in Job 21:32 where you’ve got, It, it, it sort of means, like- either after or in the right time in relation to Hmm. Like th- th- God is a thing that exists both after in opposition to the formless empty darkness.</p><p>Which to me seems a lot easier to... Like, that, that doesn’t have any problems for me. I’m like, “Okay, that seems true.” And then let’s look at what this word hovering [00:24:00] means. We’ve gone over this before, but just to go over it quickly it means not standing still, but vibrating with life or purpose, in constant movement.</p><p>Hmm. But also in a non-hurried way. So where do we see this in other places? We see this in Deuteronomy 32:11 and this, Deuteronomy ... like, like an eagle stirs upon its nest and hovers over- Hmm ... its young. Okay. So one of the only other instances we have of this is something protectively guarding its young or something that’s, that’s gestating, right?</p><p>And then in, which is a way better term than, than hover as well in this context the sort of brooding over something. And then in Jeremiah 23:9, we have, “My heart is broken within me, all my bones,” and then this word and here it’s translated to tremble, like a constant shake of, of shaking or movement.</p><p>If you take, and I’m not gonna go too into techno-puritan stuff here ‘cause I don’t wanna... This is not what this episode’s about. It’s about evolution. But this is very affirming of a techno-puritan understanding of God [00:25:00] rather than being a, a static entity, being an evolving entity. But to continue here.</p><p>So next line here. And then God said, so keep in mind, we have dark, dark, empty, formless void, right? So what does God do in relation to the dark, empty void, right? I’m sure you know this part of the story, Go- Simone. He says, “Let there be light,” and then there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from darkness.</p><p>God called the light day, and the darkness called night, and there was evening, and there was morning the first day.</p><p><strong>Speaker 10:</strong> Many of you want to say, “Well, there couldn’t have been a meaningful day and night at the creation of the universe.” Note here that clearly this doesn’t mean day and night as we experience it on Earth, because that happens in a future one of the eras, specifically the, “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night.’”</p><p>So clearly this is talking about something else in regard to night and day. , Here, what I assume it means, [00:26:00] because it talks about the light or the photons that are emitted with the Big Bang, is probably light and dark matter and energy</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Now first, great explanation of the Big Bang if you’re trying to explain the Big Bang to savages living in the woods 10,000 years ago or in a desert 10,000 years ago. You’re not gonna...</p><p>Imagine trying to explain to them, it’s like, okay, so, like, time didn’t exactly exist in any way we understand it. The laws of physics probably didn’t even exist before the Big Bang. And then there was this, like, giant explosion, and all of these photons came out of it. And they’re like, “What the are you talking about?”</p><p>And you’re like, “There was a dark and formless void- Yeah ... and then there was light.” Yeah. And they’re like, “Ah, yes, that makes sense now.” I get it now. Yeah, you</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> have to use language that can be passed on, that can make sense in the context in which it’s being... Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Any- Understood ... there, I, I do not, I do not literally think this could have been any closer to accurate Yeah, the</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> [00:27:00] highest fidelity language possible.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yes, that could have been passed on in desert savages for thousands of years. And we do know that this was passed on with a high degree of fidelity because we have Old Testament from the Dead Sea Scrolls that have fragments of this story. Oh, right.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Literally 1,000 years before our next fully intact version, and they have virtually no differences.</p><p>They have a few differences in, like, poetic language where, like, there’s a few places where they’re a little repetitive, and those repetitive parts are gone. And I can see how a scribe just didn’t cover the repetitive parts. But, like, generally it served its purpose. Okay? So now we’re gonna go to the next one.</p><p>Okay? And note here separating darkness from light. This could be something that we yet to understand about the universe. We do know that there are a lot of problems with understanding dark matter in the universe right now. Matter appears to exist in oppositional forms. Could this make some sense once we better understand dark matter and dark [00:28:00] energy?</p><p>It might. We know that they appear to be pretty por- important in the cosmic order. And larger than what we consider regular matter that we interact with regularly. So it seems relevant that they would mention it here. Yeah. To continue.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> By the way, had, had you ever thought about all of this in these terms or?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I remember the last time I started reading Genesis, I was like, “Oh my God,” ‘cause that was my first time reading it after historical geology and, you know, these things are touched on from that perspective. Like, here’s what we know from the fossil record. Here’s what we know from- Mm-hmm ... studying Earth and, you know, doing deep core samples and all these other crazy things.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah. And you were just like, “This isn’t as... This is, like, pretty accurate.” I was like, “</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. Oh my God.” Yeah, because it... Well, I didn’t expect it at all because you hear that there’s all these young Earth creationists, and then you just assume that the Bible is, like, really explicit. Like, boom, it, you know, that everything happened, and everyone was there at the same time, and the...</p><p>Yeah, it, it just- Yeah, no, for</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> me, young Earth creationism is just [00:29:00] literally ignoring what, what the Bible says in favor of what your Sunday school teacher said. Like, I don’t mean to... I know we have young Earth creationist fans and everything like that, but, like, that, I, it just seems like if, if the Bible isn’t antagonistic to these ideas it just seems like sticking a spoke in your own, like, wheels of your own bicycle, and then it crashes, and you’re like, “Oh, wha...”</p><p>Like, fans will sometimes come to me and- And they’ll be like, “I can convince you that the Bible actually means X or Y.” And I’m like, “But then I just wouldn’t believe the Bible because this is, like, easily observably wrong,” right? Like, I believe the Bible because it aligns, it’s coherent with reality. And it’s coherent with a very sophisticated understanding of reality that there is no way that people of that period could have had, which is why I believe that they didn’t come up with this out of nowhere.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Mm-hmm.</p><p><strong>Speaker 12:</strong> And if you want to come to me with like a, “Well, why do you believe in evolution, Malcolm? That’s crazy. There’s big gaps in the fossil record and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s like, okay, so my first job, , outside of [00:30:00] like household, local jobs, stuff like that, was working in the human evolution department at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.</p><p>, If you go through the exhibit on human evolution in that and you go to the part of the exhibit that is just every ho- hominid fossil we have from like Australopithecus to modern man, I constructed that. I had to go through every single one of those fossils and take, you know, 380 images of them. Um, this idea that you cannot see when you’re looking at the entire fossil record a clear gradient of evolution that matches well with the historic timeline is just factually wrong.</p><p>, Yes, we have some gaps, but every time you fill one gap, you now have two gaps on either side of that gap. You’re always gonna have gaps until you find literally every skeleton of every iterative change going back. Like, it, it’s just not doable. But in terms of like the broad strokes, [00:31:00] either, , evolution is true or God used a number of miracles to try to make it look as if evolution was true in some form of test that we’re not, one, warned about in the Bible, and two, I can’t understand why a good God would lay out for us.</p><p>That’s why I believe it, right? Like, , I, I think that to just deny this when, when I personally held many of these extremely valuable skulls, right? Like, I’ve, I’ve gone through the record. I had skulls all around me at this, at this point in my career. , And it-- there’s this very clear gradient, and looking at that and being like, “Okay, so either God is in some way testing us by giving us this much evidence, , or, , it’s almost kind of miraculous that, that so many of the missing links, if you talk about how not populous our [00:32:00] species and our ancestors were, ended up surviving.</p><p>Or God made sure that we preserved a fairly good record so that we could understand how we came to be and our role in the, , greater chain of life.”</p><p><strong>Speaker 13:</strong> Also, that just broadly seems like such an un-God thing to do. God gives us this great and giant puzzle to solve through generations of research, , laying it all out very clearly for us as we, we build this puzzle, and the outcome of the puzzle is the test? Like, that we’re supposed to not believe it even though the Bible doesn’t clearly contradict it?</p><p>, That, that doesn’t seem... Like, what’s the point of the test?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Anyway if people are wondering how I do believe it, I believe that, like, a bunch of traditions form randomly, and this was the one that was the closest to an absolutely true tradition, and so it was favored through history. But that’s a different... You want to get into our track series. So to continue here “And God [00:33:00] said ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate the water from water.’</p><p>So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it, and was, and it was so. God called the vault sky, and there was an evening, and there was morning the second day.” And this is one area where I’m really not sure what’s meant here. I don’t see how this... It, it doesn’t discorrelate with modern science, because if we’re right about what’s meant by water here, he’s talking about not literal water, but the formlessness before time.</p><p>Mm-hmm. So, what, what could this be? I don’t know. I assume it’s something that physics just doesn’t have... It doesn’t, it’s not contradictory to any of our understanding of physics, because what’s on the other side of the vault is what we call the sky. So it’s whatever is at the end of the sky. And we just don’t have the physics to understand this yet.</p><p>Now, if you take a literalist interpretation w- the way that people used to understand this, like if you go back to, you know, ancient Hebrew times, they thought [00:34:00] you look at the sky and it’s like a literal dome over your head. And on the other side of that dome is the water, the, the endless, the endless void, and the, the you know, the stars are all sort of painted on the dome.</p><p>That’s the way that they used to understand it. So it’s neither disconforming, it’s, it’s, it’s predictive, I guess I would say, of this.</p><p>So, one of the things that I wanted to go into here was why water? Like, wh- why do they keep talking about water here? Why do they use water in these analogies?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Well, I think they use water for the same reason they use fire. You know, burn it with fire. That doesn’t mean... Like, sometimes there are no other ways to describe things, like deleting or, you know, other forms of elimination, Yeah, which is</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> what we argue the lake of fire likely means, and Gehenna likely means, is where you burn things.</p><p>But- water, it appears to be because if you look at creation myths from around this period in this area whatever was at the beginning is typically thought of as deep abyss, depths, primeval, whole ocean. There’s no, there was no</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> concept for a vacuum. How do you explain that to someone? Mm-hmm. This is not a [00:35:00] hole.</p><p>It’s like the opposite of a hole. The, the biggest thing you could possibly give to someone for them to imagine is the ocean, is some vast body of water. That is the closest they can get to a, a large empty void.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah, well, here’s another fun thing. Do you know what else the term that we’re translating as water here could be translated into?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Oh, no. Do tell.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Semen. Oh. Well, hold on. If you’re thinking about it from a life-giving perspective, Sure, yeah ... and you’re looking at what’s, what’s the... You could think of it as anti-life if you’re talking about, like, the abyss versus life itself.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Mm. Right?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But anyway, to continue here. “And then God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered into one place, and let dry ground appear,’ and it was so.</p><p>God called the dry ground land, and the gathered waters he called seas, and God saw it was good.” Now this I do not see as disconfirming or affirming. This appears to be talking about actual water on Earth and the creation [00:36:00] of dry land. We know that- Well, yeah,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> B- because they switched from water to seas, which also implies to me that when they are referring to water, they’re referring to something that is not water.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Well, and this- ‘Cause they couldn’t have just said the oceans. They’d say seas ... this appears to be talking</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> about something that is similar to the water that we’re talking about before. But, like, here I take it is this is where we transition to talking about what you and I talk about as water, okay?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Mm.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And again, not seeing any problems here so far, right? Because again, God doesn’t need to... If, if we assume that, like, God striking somebody with lightning is still God doing it even if it’s done through a natural process water forming on Earth’s surface water e- building the water cycle on the Earth’s surface, dry land appearing on Earth’s surface all of these things could be described as God doing it in just the same way, right?</p><p>So nothing particularly affirms a scientific, disaffirms a scientific understanding here. Then we have “Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation, seed-bearing plants, and trees. On the land bear fruit with seed in it according to the various kinds.’ And it [00:37:00] was so. The land produced vegetation, plants bearing seed according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in accordance with their kind.</p><p>And God saw it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning the third day.” Now, this is actually one of the worst parts- For this, which I think would surprise a lot of people, that this is one of the most out of line with our actual understanding of geological history</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Because of the evening and morning part?</p><p>No,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> not evening- Or because we had,</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> like early plants- Seed-bearing plants are a fairly modern evolutionary adaptation</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Oh, interesting. Unless they’re, by seed-bearing they’re just r- referring to other forms of can reproduce, you know?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So first, you caught it. The word used for fruit here does not mean literal fruit in the way that we mean fruit.</p><p>Mm. It appears that that is the way that this was conveyed to people 10,000 years ago. They likely thought it exclusively meant, like, what we consider and eat as fruit. Like, God’s- Yeah ... preparing the world for mankind’s inhabitation. But- But there were no other</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> words for, like, capable of [00:38:00] reproduction, or self-reproducing, or whatever.</p><p>Yeah, yeah. Yeah</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> But the, the actual wording here can mean basically any form of reproduction where there’s some form of, like, edible side product. And I would even go further, and to say that this could be taken to more allegorically to describe the beginning of the life cycle. You’re talking about, when I see vegetation being talked about here there is no way they could have said pre-animal microbial life, right?</p><p>Like, you simply aren’t gonna get that recorded in a 10,000-year-old document, okay? So you’re trying to explain pre-animal microbial life to people 10,000 years ago. Exactly. You’re</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> like, “</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> It’s kind of like vegetation. It, it, it has fruiting bodies,” which is what we still call parts of, like, the budding process with early microbial life.</p><p><strong>Speaker 11:</strong> It’s like somebody’s coming to me and they’re like, oh, this is clearly not supernaturally inspired [00:39:00] because the cave Jews didn’t write single cellular microbial life and early self-replicating RNA-like structures. Like how would they even conceptually have done that? That’s a literally insane level of requirement.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> So I’m okay with that, and I would also even go so far as to say that this to me indicates that something like a vegetation or something like seed, seeds may exist earlier in the evolutionary timeline than we actually think it does. Ooh, that could be interesting. This would be one of the bigger pictures I’m gonna put into</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> this, right?</p><p>But I really, I don’t know. Like, in terms of my reading, when we come back to language and the limitations of language at the time, and other things that you read in the Bible, you know, about the way that seed is described, like- Mm-hmm ... spilled seed, et cetera, like humans don’t have seeds, do we? Yeah, that’s a good point.</p><p>Yeah. Yeah, we spill them So it could just mean- So I’m really not reading this too literally when it’s like, “Oh, but there weren’t [00:40:00] technically seeds yet.” No, seed was a thing used for like- But the intentional- ... reproductive capabilities ...</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> the intentional mention, okay, so if we take plants to mean, like, early microbial life, right?</p><p>Like, that’s- Uh-huh ... what they’re trying to describe. Yeah and the, the explicit mean- measuring of seed-bearing microbial life, right? Mm. That could bear fruit with seed in it- That could be describing the evolution of sexuality- Mm-hmm ... which would fit right here on the sexual, the, the evolutionary timeline.</p><p>Yeah. And it would probably be the closest way you could... And it’s a very important evolutionary leap, probably one of the-</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> 100%, yeah ...</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> next to the evolution of intelligence, I’d say. Mm-hmm. Sexuality and intelligence are the two biggest evolutionary leaps we’re aware of. Yeah. Do- in terms of how, how they affect the evolutionary timeline.</p><p>Intelligence basically allows you to evolve ideas faster than you can die. Sexuality allows you to remix genes and choose genetically fit individuals to have way, way, way more offspring than they would otherwise have. And it is a hugely important, happened at around this time. Yeah. That’s what I think that this is.</p><p>Mm-hmm. [00:41:00] Okay, great. All right, all right. So that’s even a further- There we go ... clarification. Yeah.</p><p><strong>Speaker 14:</strong> Note here, if this is talking about the evolution of sexuality, that then definitely didn’t happen before the collision that created the moon. So we have to guess that when the stars in the sky and the sun and the moon being created in terms of a night and day cycle on Earth is talked about as having after this, it must mean an unobscured sky.</p><p>Because there were periods of history going after that where you still had an obscured sky during periods, long periods, like eons of rain, for example, certain periods of Earth’s history.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Okay. Then next “And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures and let birds fly above the earth and across the vault of the sky.’” And note here, like, birds are clearly... This is one that really gets me, where some [00:42:00] biblical literalist will say okay, well, the sky vault clearly, like, outer space exists, right?</p><p>So the sky vault is not referring to just, like, the sky in the way, like, ancient people 10,000 years ago meant it. Like, we’re meant to take this literally.” Except when he talks about birds here he, he talks about them in the context of flying across the vault of the sky, right? So the birds are on the same plane as the sky vault, which is why I think our interpretation of this is more accurate.</p><p>We’re to say, like, how would you communicate this to somebody 10,000 years ago? But anyway “And then God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures. Let the birds fly above and across the sky.’ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and moves about according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.</p><p>And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase your number and fill the water and the seas, and let the birds increase on earth.’ And there was evening, [00:43:00] and that was the morning of the fifth day.” Now, this particular passage gets, like, heavily bastardized to try to argue for a- Sunday school.</p><p>Like, they literally basically removed a really important line for this because they were embarrassed about it. Mm. Even though it actually... So they, I’ll, I’ll show you where the line was removed. So, “God created the great creatures of the sea.” That is not, that is not what it says at all. That’s not what it says.</p><p>I mean, you could interpret it that way if you were trying to, in the same way that in the King James version they translate this word to mean whales, because whales was the biggest thing they were aware of at the time that lived in the sea. But that isn’t what the word would come close to traditionally meaning in Hebrew.</p><p>So let’s go into this to go into, one, they say fish, then birds, right? Well, fish and something, and then birds. And we’ll go into what’s, what’s the thing that they said existed alongside, and not just fish, things in the sea. This is really [00:44:00] interesting, right? Because they could have said fish, right? Which would have been evolutionarily wrong.</p><p>But instead what they say is, “The creatures of the sea.” That’s an interesting way to put something if you’re looking at, like, a Cambrian explosion or something like that after the evolutionary of sex- sexuality. But okay, let’s, let’s see what’s actually said in this line, ‘cause this line is, I think, really cool, and really affirming to me that there was some divine inspiration here.</p><p>So, “And God created the great tannim and every living creature which moves which the waters swarmed according to their kinds and every winged bird.” So we need to make a few notes here. All right? So in, first it says, “God created the great tannim.” This is what is often interpreted as le- sea leviathans, right?</p><p>In, in some older in- interpretations of texts. But that is not what it means in Hebrew. So we’ll go into what it means in Hebrew, and I also wanna point something out here which often people get wrong, is note the construction of this sentence. And this is also [00:45:00] true in Hebrew, which we’ll get to. It says nowhere in this sentence that the tannim live in the sea.</p><p>It says nowhere in this sentence that they are an exclusively aquatic creature. It says, “And God created the great tannim and every living creature which moves in the waters and swarmed across according to their kinds.” Oh. The tannim are something different from what’s in the sea. Oh ... so let’s continue here The relative - clause, which the waters swarmed, grammatically - modifies living creatures that move.</p><p>The tannim are introduced first with their own direct object marker. They’re connected by and to the rest. In Biblical Hebrew, the relative clause introduced by blank normally modifies the ne- sorry, blank is a word I can’t pronounce in Hebrew. Yeah. The nearest preceding noun or noun phrase that it logically could describe.</p><p>Here, the nearest phrase is every living creature that moves. The tannim sit before [00:46:00] that, and thus are clearly not modified by the phrase purely aquatic. And note here this gets interesting, because what could tannim be? Like, what is it generally used to talk about in Hebrew?</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Right,</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> actually. It is typically used to talk about dragons- Oh</p><p>sea monsters- Oh ... crocodiles air, long- So just large reptilian animals. Yeah, but not necessarily reptiles. ‘Cause they could’ve said reptiles. They had a word for reptiles. They didn’t- They did ... say reptiles. Oh. Dinosaurs are not reptiles, okay? They said something that is large and reptile-like, kind of like a dragon, existed after the explosion of life within the sea, or along the same timeline as life within the sea, before birds.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Huh. Well. [00:47:00] Mm. That would work. Yes, that would work. That’s pretty</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> cool.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> That is pretty cool. Mm-hmm.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> By the way, if you’re wondering, Ezekiel 29:3 and 32:2 is where they refer to crocodiles and large river sea s- serpents. And then for m- mythical monsters, you see in Isaiah 27:1 and Psalms 24:13. And this reminds me- Like alms</p><p>well, I saw, I don’t, I don’t speak these foreign tongues. That’s, that’s a Jew tongue. Lazarus. You’re trying to get me to speak like a Jew, okay? And I’m not gonna do that, all right? The parcel tongue, Simone. parcel tongue.</p><p><strong>Speaker 15:</strong> . I heard you speak in Parseltongue, snake language. I spoke a different language? But I didn’t realize.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> I’m gonna end up... Th- this is how they get you. They get you with their words, saying it’s, it’s Bible talk.</p><p>And it is Bible talk, but you gotta be careful, right? I’m joking here, by the way, people. Obviously everything I’m analyzing here is relevant in both a [00:48:00] Christian and Jewish context because they both have the same book. So both would be equally affirmed if there was any proof that this book did have a degree of divine inspiration.</p><p>And again, if you wanna get into our thoughts on Judaism, see the question that breaks Judaism where we go way into like why. We actually thought about converting to Judaism. You can see in some of our earlier videos. But like as I dug into it, I just decided no, like I’m, I’m, I’m, I find Christianity more compelling when I look at the evidence.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> We’re also a little too asocial hikikomori for for Judaism.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Well, yeah, and I also said like even if I converted to Judaism, I’d be a Misnagdim Jew. This is a Jew that doesn’t believe that Kabbalah should be widely taught and is against the Hasidics. Oh, totally. And that would immediately put me on the outs with al- like the Misnagdim basically lost the Jewish culture war a generation ago, right?</p><p>Two generations ago. So there’s, there’s no like... Also Christ seems to have obviously been the Messiah. Sorry, I just have to go. This is a whole different thing. You can see our question [00:49:00] that breaks Judaism if you want to get into that. It actually becomes sort of absurd to think that Jesus wasn’t obviously the Messiah when you look at everything in context.</p><p>Don’t mean to offend our Jewish listeners on this one, but yeah that’s not for this episode. But what’s really interesting about this word taninim is in various times people have attempted to retranslate it than to mean something other than what it literally means, and every time they have removed something that would authenticate the truth of the Bible, right?</p><p>They’ve tried to change it to whales when it clearly doesn’t mean whales anywhere else. Hmm. They have tried to change it to just large sea animals when it clearly doesn’t mean just large sea animals anywhere else. Hmm. It means a large reptilian-like animal that is not specifically a reptile.</p><p>I really c- that, that to me is just sort of shocking how spot on that is. But anyway, to continue here.</p><p>Oh, by the way, fun side note that came from one of our fans that some people will [00:50:00] like. Regarding biblical animal timeline, there’s a fun side note about the word used to describe the creation of each group. The most... They mostly use the same verb, but there are two that use a different verb, man and the tenenimum.</p><p>The King James Version translates the latter as whales, presumably because giant sea predators was the only point of reference for them. But apparently in Hebrew there was more a reptilian connotation they say, which is true. Okay. But what he’s saying is that there is enough linguistic wiggle room to argue that God had a special plan for giant reptiles, and now he’s wondering if there was a dinosaur bible somewhere.</p><p>Where is</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> the lost dinosaur bible? I want, I want it.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Well, there’s actually a theory that there could’ve been a dinosaur civilization as big as our own. And, like, we just wouldn’t have any evidence of it if you look at how quickly, like, our own civilization would dissolve into the time record. Huh. If, like, we just stopped existing right now.</p><p>Yeah. And so we don’t know that there wasn’t a large dinosaur civilization that lasted [00:51:00] maybe only 300, 400 years.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> God’s failson, the dinosaurs. Right?</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Okay. To continue here. And then God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds, the livestocks, the creatures that move along the ground, the wild animals, each according to its kind,” and it was so.</p><p>God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds, and God saw that it was good. So, what you’re gonna note in this is you can say, well, it’s saying all land animals came after things like birds and dinosaurs, which is, like, clearly not true, right?</p><p>Like, people would be like, “There were some land animals before that.” And I’m gonna say, yeah, but you have to consider the context. God is talking to people 10,000 years ago, and he’s saying, “All of these things that you see, that you consider animals,” like your livestock animals, which are clearly referenced here.</p><p>All of these came after the dinosaurs, the fish, and the [00:52:00] birds, which is true. Almost every land animal the ancient Hebrews would have been aware of evolved after dinosaurs and birds evolved. Yeah, yeah. So he’s right from an evolutionary timeline perspective. Absolutely. It still all tracks. Mm-hmm. Not, no lie detected here which again is astonishing for something this old.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Yeah. Well, and especially considering this is not some universal folk belief. This, this didn’t exist with other really old folklore traditions or religions. Yeah, if it was</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> a universal or common folk belief, I would have a totally different perspective on this. Yes.</p><p><strong>Speaker 17:</strong> And when AI goes over this, it’ll always hedge and be like, “Well, he’s overstating just how much, , other religious beliefs or there’s no other religious belief or traditional story about how the world was formed that comes close to a scientific ordered understanding that we have today.” , And then I always tell the AI, “Okay, [00:53:00] find one, and I’m gonna give you wiggle room.</p><p>Find one that comes one-tenth as close. Find one that comes one-fifth as close.” , AI can’t find one because there just isn’t one. This is really quite unique, and if this story wasn’t the white people story, everyone would be freaking out about the random tribe of wherever that has a creation story that almost exactly mirrors the evolutionary and historic timeline we’re aware of</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Okay. Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”</p><p>So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God He created them, male and female He created them. Just a techno puritan side note here that’s really only relevant for our interpretation of this story but the word created here, right here, could be, in Biblical Hebrew, you have something called the perfect conjuration or the qatal form of verbs.</p><p>Huh. The [00:54:00] same type used in created in Genesis 1:27. It can describe future events, especially in prophetic context. This is often called the prophetic perfect. Hebrew verbs focus more on aspect completed versus ongoing actions in strict timeline, past, present, future. Hmm. The qatal perfect form views as an action as a whole completed from the speaker’s perspective.</p><p>Oh. In prophecy, a future event that is so certain because God has decreed that it will happen. So you can look at something like Isaiah 53, where he says, “He was wounded,” and you get this conjuration, “for our transgressions. He was bruised for our inequities.” Written centuries before Jesus, and yet it’s written as in this, this future perfect form.</p><p>Eh, then you have things like Isaiah 5:13, Numbers 24:17 where you get a similar conjuration here. A lot of people don’t care about this. This isn’t necessary for most people as they understand this story. Do you mean</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> conjugation? You mean conjugation.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> Yeah, conjugation. What’d I say?</p><p>Conjuration. Conjuration. But I get</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> [00:55:00] what you... I mean, ‘cause you’re sort of describing the God-like conjuring. But that’s super... I had never heard of that before. That’s fascinating. Yeah. A whole new- Well, it</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> can be read as just in the past tense if you want to. Okay. But it doesn’t have to be read in the past tense.</p><p>The way Hebrew is constructed, it can be taken as something that is an ongoing process. God is creating mankind in His image, which is our religious- So</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> cool. I like that much more ...</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> that is, that is being laid out of the prophecy here. Do I wanna go into this? Well, we go over a lot of this in the other track, but I can just quickly go into this. This is a track... Well, not even the track. The one where we go over the Adam and Eve story. Or, or I think it might be- Oh ... a track that we go over souls and stuff like this.</p><p>Mm-hmm. But the key feature of the phrase where God is breathing life into man, I mean, this is in the second story, ‘cause you, you know, it would be like, “Didn’t God breathe life into man?” They use the term nephesh here which w- generally does not mean a disembodied soul or anything like that. It, it sort of means to animate a living creature.</p><p>Hmm. So it’s basically like there was inanimate dirt, [00:56:00] right? And then through a plan, again, I’ve pointed out that the word here can be translated as plan, not form. So God, through a plan animated the dirt with this word nefesh. And so, if you see the turn here, man does not have a nefesh, man is a nefesh, in the way that the, the story is constructed here.</p><p>And it means a living creature, a being or person. And so if we look at other places, like where it’s used we see it used throughout, like, as God is, is, is giving other creatures their life. We see similar words being used here to nefesh. So this isn’t, like, a unique human soul, unless you’re saying that He’s giving souls to all of the other animals in these particular scenes here.</p><p>And it’s, it’s very clear because it first appears in the animals in chapter one, and then it’s deliberately reused for humans in 2:7. Like, this, this is not a coincidence. This is not a mistake on the original authors, which is actually kind of weird. And we also see the same word [00:57:00] used with something like Jeremiah 15:9, “She breathes out her nefesh,” her life, right?</p><p>Oh. So it’s basically like your breath. When it leaves you, you die.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> Mm-hmm.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And this, again, gets to one of the lines that we find to be very important from the Bible, just sort of as a closing here. This is Ecclesiastes 3:18-19. If I have any line from the Bible that’s, like, my favorite line “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals.</p><p>Surely the fate of human beings is that of the animals. The same fate awaits them both. As one dies, so does the other. All have the same breath. Humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.”</p><p>Meaningless, by the way, is a bad translation here. A better translation is everything is evanescent or life is evanescent</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> And the word used for all have the same breath here, do you wanna know where that word is used in Genesis?</p><p>Where? It’s the word that is translated as spirit in the phrase, “The spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Oh. So the same breath that the [00:58:00] animals have- Yeah ... that the humans have is used to describe the animating force of God in opposition to the formless darkness that existed at the beginning of time, and that was in constant movement when you have the word hovering here.</p><p>And a lot of people, we go into that Ecclesiastes line a lot more in some of our tracks if you’re interested. It’s, it’s very clear about what it means because it, it goes over a series of things where it goes over, like, hubristic things that people think, and then it contrasts them with what is actually true.</p><p>And this is one of the... It starts with the hubristic, what man thinks, that man is completely separate from this world, and then it says, “But man is tested.” And you see this framing over and over again in this section. Like, it’s, it’s not vague, th- this is meant to be a- No, you really are tested to see if you are so arrogant as to think that you are truly distinct from the natural world and from animals, which we then take into this reading here of Genesis.</p><p>Yeah. So again, spicy episode by [00:59:00] us. I guess I’ll put it in our religious stuff. It’s not that spicy compared to our other ones ‘cause I can’t- I love it. I love it ... explain</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> crazy religion. I, I just, I remember, like, really thinking- Oh ... “Huh,” when I was reading Genesis, and going into it in, in greater depth with you is so much fun.</p><p>I have to run. Go. I love you. I love you, too. Bye, gorgeous. Bye. All right, I’m hitting record. Oh, you beat me to it.</p><p><strong>Malcolm Collins:</strong> All right, I’ll just get started here.</p><p><strong>Simone Collins:</strong> I’m, yeah, I’m r- I’ve been looking forward to this all day, so thank you.</p><p><strong>Speaker 19:</strong> Yeah, look at that Motion? Yeah, we’re motion liking that. You think so? Look, I’m floating. And I’m Off you go. Sail away.</p> <br /><br />This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&#38;utm_campaign=CTA_2">basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe</a>