A Torah Scroll contains the first 5 books of the Bible written in Hebrew. The above is a picture of our Torah Scroll. It’s approximately 155 years old and it somehow survived the Holocaust in Poland, but we have no information on its previous owners, as the elderly scribe from whom we obtained it, could no longer remember.

When I first saw it, I thought that it had turned brown with age, but then after we had used it in our Shabbat Seder for the 2nd year, we began to see that it had been through a fire, and somebody had rescued it. There’s some parts where cinders fell on it, but miraculously, by the grace of HaShem, they landed either in-between the writing, or in-between the columns. (You can see some of the places where they were patched up in the above picture.) The signature scars (the most intense smoke damage) are where the scroll was closed in the portion of scripture where it says, “And God tested Abraham” Genesis 22:1. Oh man… and the tears well up… When I investigated the Jewish calendar for 1939 to find out what week that Torah Portion (Genesis 18:1-22:24) would have been read, I discovered that it would have been towards the end of October, beginning of November. What was going on at that time in Poland? Hitler was in the process of burning down every synagogue in Poland, and sending their congregations to the death camps where most of them were murdered and then their bodies were burned up in the ovens. Why would Hitler do that? It’s because he was an evolutionist, and this is a result of what he believed . There’s no adequate way to describe the horror of the consequences that were a result of that belief. And even though Hitler is long gone, the dangers of Evolution are still lurking, waiting to devour at any given opportunity. (See Jerry Bergman’s research http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/tj/v13/n2/nazi or you can read ‘Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race’ by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)

We hang pictures up of our Torah Scroll every year in our Creation Science Booth in Missoula, Montana. We also set in front of it a Holocaust Menorah ( That’s a menorah that has 6 candles 2 for children, 2 for parents, 2 for grandparents) and rocks. (It’s a custom to place a rock when you go to visit a grave in Jewish culture. The rocks represent the members of our congregation.) And Mourners’ Kaddish is posted there too…

What has all this got to do with Genesis chapter 1? Well in my case, I began to learn Hebrew because the leader (Louis Levinson) of our Messianic Jewish Congregation (Beth Tephila) wanted everyone in the congregation to know Hebrew well enough to be able to read from a Torah Scroll, when the LORD should see fit to provide the money for us to purchase one. (The price for a new one is somewhere between $40,000 to $70,000, but a used one is somewhere between $5000 & $10,000.) Our goal was to raise enough money to purchase a good used one. ( That was more important than being in our own building.) It took us at least 5 years to raise the money. Then we were able to purchase the one in the picture for $6000. When the LORD put it in our hands, we had no idea at the time that it’s true value would be priceless!

And as the LORD would have it, our Hebrew Teacher (Chuck Nagle) was also into Creation Science. (He owned just about every multi-media presentation that AIG & ICR had put out at that time.) His method of teaching Hebrew was by giving us Genesis chapter one to translate. [Kind of like the dad who throws the kid in the pool and commands, “Learn to swim!”] He gave us the information we needed and told us what tools to use, and so we learned to dissect each word! About 5 months into his class, he mentioned that he had just completed translating all the way from Genesis chapter 1 through chapter 11, and that it had taken 9 months to do so. (Of course, he had been studying Hebrew by then for nearly 25 years!) Because I was also a student of Creation Science, I decided to set out to do the same thing in order to see what the Hebrew Text has to say on the subject, but it took me 3½ years to dissect all eleven chapters, and since then, I have continually gone back over them because they contain so much information. There are different opinions about the pre-Flood earth, and how the Flood happened, among Creationists. My recourse for deciding the truth is to hold all such research up to the light of the Hebrew Text. The Hebrew Text is very clear concerning Flood Theories. It also explains how the Universe was formed, but I’m not sure that even Creationists have touched on that one yet! They’ve found pieces of the puzzle, but how do those pieces all fit together? The Hebrew Text gives the answers.

The Formation of The Universe

In the first eleven chapters of Genesis, each paragraph starts with a statement. The rest of the sentences are about that statement and each one ‘hooks’ on to the statement by beginning with the word ‘and’ (which is the Hebrew letter vav). The best way to describe this is a train engine with a string of attached train cars. The train cars have no power of their own. All the power is in the locomotive. In a similar way, the opening statement is what the paragraph is all about, and not the contents of the individual cars. Genesis 1:1 starts with ‘In the beginning God created ‘et’ the 2-heavens and ‘et’ the earth.’ Some people think that because the next sentence says that ‘the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep’ that the text is simply describing the formation of the earth and it’s outer atmosphere and its contents. But that’s not the way the paragraph works. ‘And the earth was formless and void’ is one train car. ‘And darkness was over the face of the deep’ is a different train car. Neither one of them is the locomotive. The locomotive is the creation of ‘the 2-heavens and the earth’. (The scriptures tell us that the 3rd heaven is beyond the physical creation. Paul was caught up to the 3rd heaven, 2 Cor 12:2.) The 2-heavens would be the universe and its contents, including the earth. And the train car that says the earth was formless and void, means exactly that! The earth didn’t exist at that point in time. It didn’t have a shape or contents. There wasn’t anything that existed about it, not even a core! It only had an assigned location somewhere inside a huge mass of water, as in ‘X marks the spot of the future location of the earth’. That ‘train car’ was empty!

The next train car says ‘and darkness was over the surface of the deep’. Question: If the earth didn’t exist at that point in time, what body of water is this referring to? Go back to the locomotive to find out. The statement concerns the 2-heavens and the earth, so this body of water has to do with the whole universe, and not just the earth.

And the next train car says that the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. The Hebrew word describes the word for moving as a hovering action. A Humming Bird hovers. So does a helicopter! But I think that the Spirit of God was completely encasing this mass of water and hovering over it at the same time, with a movement far greater than the speed of light.

What comes to my thinking is a ball of water being pushed inward from all sides and then being released over and over again. It seems to me that the heat would be intense, and the whole mass of water would light up, and then expand outwards. The next train car says ‘and God said “Let there be light and there is light”. Then the next train car says that God inspected the light. Then the train car after that says that He divided the light from the darkness. My theory on that one is that He caused that whole mass of water to spin in a complete circle in the same amount of time as a 24 hour Day of Rest (Exodus 20:11). {Can He do that? Apparently so, because the scriptures say that in the future He is going to roll the sky up as a scroll! (Is 34:4 & Rev 6:14).} The spin would have controlled the way the heated water moved outwards. But what shape was this mass of water in to begin with? Was it in a ball, or in more like a cylinder /scroll shaped, or something entirely different? Was it a long shape that was wide on the ends and narrow in the middle?

Let’s stop and look at the Hebrew Text of Genesis:

My former Hebrew Teacher Chuck Nagle and his widow Julie did the research for night/lila.

The Hebrew word for “night” literally means “twist” or “pivot.” The root word from which it is formed means “spiral.”

So picture this: a huge fully charged mass of water spinning in a complete circle, probably way faster than the speed of light… At some point the centrifugal force is going to cause the water to move outwards from the center, & if the Spirit of God is still encasing it, then the waters will gather at the extremities causing the center to be hollow with some residue of moisture in places, maybe even in a fixed location (depending on how the outer waters are made to circulate). What comes to my way of thinking is a washing machine on spin cycle. The water exits from the center in all directions, & keeps going until it runs into a boundary. Another thought to add to this is that in a cyclone/hurricane the center is calm.

Does the Hebrew Text say anything about this? Yes! But before we go there, I have to explain something else: In the Hebrew Text, when a word is plural, if the 3rd letter from the end has a little line under it (called a ‘patach’) and the yod after it has a little dot under it (called a hireq) then the word is plural to the value of 2. It means that there are 2 of whatever the word is: 2 sheep, 2 dogs, 2 waters, 2 heavens, etc. We’ve already come across this in the very first verse of Genesis. Now we are about to find some more of these dual plural words.

Ok, so then as He begins to spin this mass of water in a complete circle for the 2nd day, here’s how verse 6 reads:

[raqia: ‘an extended surface’. It comes from a word meaning something that is produced by hammering, stamping, or stretching’. In some versions it’s translated as ‘the expanse’ & in other versions it’s translated as ‘the firmament’. It’s some kind of an ‘structure’ & not a ‘nothing’.]

[The dissection of the words here are 2 waters to 2 waters. Some will argue that mī-ēēm /water is usually written as a dual plural. The answer to that one is that the next time it is used, is in Genesis 6 for the Flood waters, and from that point onwards the 2 waters are combined. In Genesis 2 there is a different word used for water. It’s ‘sha-kah’ & it means fresh drinking water.

Besides that, why is mayim/ mī-ēēm specifically a dual plural instead of a normal plural word?]

Later He places the sun, moon & stars in the ‘raqia’, & the birds will fly on the ‘face’ of the ‘raqia’. Here is a ‘flat’ diagram of it: (the drawing of the ‘earth’ is way out of proportion!)

So at the end of Day 2 outer space has been formed (but it is empty!) & there’s 2 distinct bodies of water beyond it, & somewhere in the ‘middle’ of outer space is the earth, but at that time it consists solely of 2 separate bodies of water.

Ok… It’s ‘brain picking time’! How do the 2 separate bodies of water above outer space/the raqia function? Do they function somewhat similar to the way a whirlpool exists within a river, & if the volume & the speed of the river changes, then the whirlpool collapses. Isaiah 34:4, Matthew 24:29, Mark 13: 24-25, & Revelation 6:12-17 all say that during the Tribulation the stars are going to fall & the sky is going to roll up like a scroll, so at that point in time are the 2 waters beyond the raqia/outer space going to change their speed & cause the raqia to collapse? How do they hold the universe in place? It’s something beyond our imaginations, because most of us can’t imagine how big the universe itself is, and much less 2 bodies of water far bigger.

And then there’s the thought of the possibility that those waters may have turned to ice. Would that hold the universe and all the fixed locations of the stars in place? In the beginning the water was liquid, and it may still be, or did it freeze solid? And how wide is it? What physical principles on earth do we understand that would help explain it?

Aside from the question of how are those outer waters holding the universe together, another question is, ‘When God stretched out the Raqia, did the intense heat roll up into stars?’