In 1924 Dr Arie Noordtzij, 1871-1944, neo-Calvinist theologian and Professor at Leiden, published God’s Word and the Testimony of the Ages, which subsequently was deemed to inaugurate the so-called Framework Hypothesis. He did not, in fact, coin this term, but did advance a framework structure for Genesis 1 which was the basis of a novel ‘ideal’ interpretation that has subsequently been enthusiastically embraced or emphatically rejected, according to point of view. But most scholarship in either category in fact does not pursue Noordtzij’s own agenda, which is to set Genesis 1 in canonical context as a proto-evangelium. Noordtzij, rejecting all ‘natural-historical’ interpretations (his term), particularly the Gap Theory and the Day-Age theory, sees the Sabbath as the important telos of creation. Accordingly, Noordtzij advances a highly figurative, canonical interpretation, demonstrating that Scripture holds creation and redemption together throughout NT and OT alike, and sees Genesis 1 as falling in this category.
With only an occasional exception, most modern scholarship sees the entities created on Days 4–6 as ‘filling’, ‘occupying’ or ‘ruling’ the domains created on Days 1–3. E.J. Young demonstrates the weakness of these motifs, but this study proposes that the second triad entities instead characterise the domains of the first triad, and, against Meredith Kline, that the term ‘rule’ should be understood in this sense only. I engage with Kline, Young, and many others.
This study presents and analyses Noordtzij’s figurative scheme as he intended it, and, in a manner seemingly not pursued before, extends it. First, I review Genesis 1:2, observing that the terms ‘tohu wa bohu’, ‘hoshek’, and ‘tehom’, whilst clearly neutral in Genesis 1, do later serve as metaphors for judgement, destruction, death and alienation from God for post-fall humanity in canonical Scripture. But ‘the Spirit was hovering’ offers a token of hope. Then, I grant considerable significance to the separations of Days 1–3 in Genesis 1, rarely observed in scholarship. I then show how these separations, symbolising the separation between humanity and God, soon occasioned by humankind’s sin after the fall, are all nullified explicitly in the closing chapters of Revelation, resulting in a new cosmos without darkness, with no separation between ‘earth’ and ‘heaven’, and no ‘sea’, the symbol of death. The conclusion of this study is that, even more than Noordtzij ever thought, Genesis 1 stands decidedly as the earliest proto-evangelium of Scripture.