Abstract
My years of teaching the Hebrew language inductively from the text of Genesis 1-8 had led me through that text repeatedly and carefully. I began to see that in many places where we had previously insisted upon a certain approach to translation, there were other real possibilities that were being ignored by Old Testament students. Without breaking a single rule of Hebrew Syntax, I began to see that Genesis 1:1 could be the place where the universe and the earth had come into being. I did not accept this position to account for geological ages but to account for the language of the passage. I discovered that the Scriptures in at least three passages explicitly stated that God had deliberately covered the earth with water (briefly, I believe) after its creation. Apart from recognition of Genesis 1:2 and its contribution, where otherwise does Genesis one describe the creation of the seas? For that matter, if verse one is not the time of the creation of the heavens and earth, then where in the text of Genesis is the earth created? It exists and is covered by the great deep in verse 2. I began to recognize that this universal sea, totally without lifeforms, perfectly fit the evidence found in early Precambrian "Archaeozoic" deposits. It soon became clear that the uplift of the continent on the third day perfectly accounted for the dramatic and fierce distortion of those sedimentary deposits into the Vishnu Schists which I observed at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It also accounted for the vast hydraulic deposits with rare marine bottom life fossils and could account for Burdick's fossil pollen find in the Hakatai Shale.