Introduction
The trouble with communication is that we have to use words.
It is obvious that words need to be translated from one language to another, and this gets doubly difficult if the original language is no longer a currently spoken language.
Within these pages I am going to try to understand the opening chapters of Genesis in the light of modern science. I am even going to do a risky thing. I am going to try to retell those stories as if they were a communication intended for the 21st century, and not the several millennia ago when they were first read.
This will not be a translation, nor even a paraphrase, simply a retelling using the benefit of modern knowledge. It will sound awkward and will have lost all the familiarity of the original, which had a lot of poetry built into it. If it has any merit it will be because it might be a better understanding in 21st century terms of what the original communication intended.
This treatment will only be applied to the early chapters. When we move from them to what are obviously family chronicles, these will be presented with comments, using a modern translation. The overall intention is to give the reader the chance to view the whole book of Genesis, hopefully with a good appreciation of its value to us today.
This is not a scholarly work. I am not qualified to deliver that. But I have read widely, both of scientific books and those written by defenders of a 'creationist' viewpoint. My chief premise is that there is a lot for us to learn from the book of Genesis, whatever our starting point, and this is what I hope to explore.
There are no footnotes detailing sources. Where there are statements of opinion, they are simply my own. Supporting citations will be incorporated in the text itself, with the hope that this will make the whole narrative flow more easily.
The English Bible translation used is the World English Bible, a widely published modern translation that has been made available in the public domain. The only modification will be to omit chapter and verse numbers, and the footnotes, for improved readability. Chapter divisions and verse numbers were never part of the original, in any case. A different font will indicate this incorporated text.