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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #196, Reconciling the Bible with Science: Part 1, Nehemia speaks to Orthodox Jewish physicist Dr. Gerald Schroeder, who expounds a biblical proverb to explain the age of the universe and presents the argument that God created a pre-Adamic race.

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Gerald: God created the laws of nature that predate the universe; they’re not physical, they’re outside of time. They can create something from nothing. That’s the definition of God in this universe.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Gerald Schroeder. He has his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a renowned physicist who has written about reconciling the Bible with science. Shalom, Dr. Schroeder. We’ve had you on the program before, I think you probably don’t remember.

Gerald: No, I do remember but I don’t remember the date.

Nehemia: Oh, it must have been almost 10 years ago.

Gerald: Really? Wow!

Nehemia: I was trying to get a Minion cake from a bakery. I think it was called New York Bakery, or something, on Emek Refaim Street in Jerusalem, and your wife was right in front of me, and she got my cake!

Gerald: Okay! That I don’t remember.

Nehemia: It was the day before we did the recording! And you mentioned, as we were getting to know each other, something about a Minion cake, and I was like, “That was my Minion cake!” That was your wife! It’s a small world!

So, Dr. Schroeder, let’s jump into it. I had another guest on my program recently who talked about, from a scientific perspective, his explanation that the world is only 6,000 years old. And you have a different explanation of the age of the universe. The age of the Earth in particular, I think, is what we’re more interested in.

Gerald: It’s the age of the universe, so it’s the same thing.

Nehemia: So, how old is the Earth?

Gerald: Who was the person, so I have some perspective here?

Nehemia: It was Kent Hovind.

Gerald: Ken?

Nehemia: Kent Hovind. He is a Christian Evangelical Young Earth Creationist.

Gerald: Okay. The first question I have to ask him is, how fluent is he in Hebrew? That was the first question you should have asked him. I didn’t hear the recording. If he’s not fluent in Hebrew, he should stay out of the argument since the whole text is based on the Hebrew text. The whole argument is totally related to… There’s a proverb that says, “A word well spoken,” it’s Proverbs 25, “A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver.”

The commentator Maimonides in about the year, I’m making a guess, 1110, 1120-30, almost a thousand years ago, writes, “What was King Solomon talking about when he wrote ‘A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver?’” And he writes like this… this was well before anyone was worried about dinosaurs or cavemen. We’re talking about almost a thousand years ago. He says, “The Torah has several levels of meaning. ‘A word well spoken is like apples of gold in dishes of silver.’ The ‘dishes of silver’ is the literal text of the Torah. And when you look at a dish from a distance, you see the silver dish, but you can’t see what’s inside it. Only when you look deep into the dish itself do you find the apples of gold. What’s the silver dish? The literal text of the Bible. What’s the golden apples? The secrets of why one word was chosen over another.”

Now, you’ll notice that it wasn’t apples of silver in dishes of gold, it was golden apples in dishes of silver. The silver is the literal text; the gold, being more valuable, takes that text way beyond the meaning. The silver dish has huge value, obviously. No one’s throwing out a silver dish, at least not in my house. I don’t know about your house, but not in my house.

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