THE GENESIS OF EVERYTHING The thought-world of the BibleÂ’s account of creation
By Dr John P. Dickson Honorary Associate: Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University, Sydney.
INTRODUCTION: A NOISY DEBATE
In recent years the biblical account of creation in Genesis chapter 1 has been the subject of an increasingly heated debate between so called ‘biblical fundamentalists’, on the one hand, and those branded ‘scientific materialists’, on the other. Of course, these labels are often used pejoratively, so let me flag that my use of these epithets in this paper is one of convenience not criticism.
The fundamentalists insist, principally on the basis of Genesis 1, that the universe was created in just one week about 6000 years ago. The materialists retort, principally on the basis of scientific data, that such a view is ridiculous and that the universe is closer to 14 billion years old. The Judeo-Christian account of origins is therefore dismissed by materialists as irrelevant for our day.
In this paper, I hope to show that both sides of the debate – as they typically present themselves – make a similar mistake. They form their conclusions about the biblical account of creation in almost total isolation from the conclusions of the majority of contemporary biblical historians. And it is as an historian that I wish to address this theme.
Fundamentalists and materialists approach Genesis 1 in what one might call a ‘literalistic’ fashion. I use the word literalistic here deliberately, as I want to distinguish between literalistic and ‘literal’. A literal reading asks: based on the literary style and historical setting of a text, what was the author’s intended message. A literalistic reading, on the other hand, takes the words of a text at face value, interpreting them without sufficient attention to literary genre and historical context.
Both fundamentalists and materialists interpret Genesis 1 as if the original author were offering an historical prose designed to narrate the mechanics of creation. Biblical historians, however, have for over a century, understood Genesis 1 as falling into a completely different literary genre – something other than historical prose – and containing a drastically different rhetorical purpose – something other than a mechanical account of creation. These two issues – genre and purpose – are critical for understanding this fundamental portion of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. In what follows I want to unpack what modern scholars are saying about these issues, and I hope to demonstrate that, properly understood, Genesis 1 contains nothing scientifically problematic for the modern enquirer. I emphasise the adverb ‘scientifically’ because there is plenty in Genesis 1 that is philosophically and existentially confronting. That, as we’ll see, is the aim of the text.
1. INTERPRETATION OF GENESIS 1 IN THE PRE-SCIENTIFIC ERA
Before I give an account of what modern scholars are saying about the genre and purpose of Genesis, I want to make clear that a non-literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1, such as that advocated below, is by no means a recent phenomenon.
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I’ve been asked by sceptical friends in the past whether the interpretation offered by biblical historians today is simply an act of acquiescence in the face of the troubling conclusions of modern science: “We now know that life took billions of years to form,” my friends say, “so now you guys change what you teach about Genesis.” Interestingly, this is also what my fundamentalist friends think. They politely accuse me of being captive to the Zeitgeist (the ‘spirit of the age’), and weak in my stand for biblical truth.
Be that as it may, the antecedents of a non-literalistic approach to Genesis 1 lie in the very distant past indeed.
1.1. The Jewish scholar Philo
The prolific Jewish scholar, Philo (10 BC – AD 50), who lived and worked in Alexandria in the first century AD, wrote a treatise titled On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses. In this work, Philo says that God probably created everything simultaneously and that the ‘six days’ spoken of in Genesis indicate not temporal sequence but divine orderliness (Creation 13, 2
.1 Keep in mind that Philo was the leading intellectual of the largest first century Jewish community outside Palestine.2
1.2. The Greek ‘Fathers’
Philo is followed in this interpretation by the second century Christian theologian and evangelist, Clement of Alexandria (AD 150-215), for whom the six days are symbolic (Stromata VI, 16). A generation later, Origen (185-254), the most influential theologian of the third century Greek church – again, an Alexandrian – understood Days 2-6 of the Genesis account as days in time but he regarded Day 1 as a non-temporal day.3 What’s interesting here is that a leading Christian scholar of antiquity is comfortable combining both concrete and metaphorical approaches to Genesis 1.4
1.3. The Latin Fathers and beyond
Moving to Latin speaking scholars, Saint Ambrose (AD 339-397), the fourth century Bishop of Milan, taught a fully symbolic understanding of Genesis 1.5 Moreover, his greatest convert, and
1 In the introduction to the Loeb Classical Library edition of On the Creation the translators summarise Philo’s view thus: “By ‘six days’ Moses does not indicate a space of time in which the world was made, but the principles of order and productivity which governed its making” (original emphasis), LCL 226 p.2.
2 For a concise history of the Jewish community of the intellectual centre of Alexandria (and PhiloÂ’s place in it) see Binder, D. D. Into the Temple Courts: The Place of the Synagogues in the Second Temple Period. Vol. 169, SBL Dissertation Series. Atlanta: SBL, 1999, 246-254.
3 He reasoned that without matter – which was not created until Day 2 – there is no time. In this Origen may well be following Philo who makes almost exactly the same point about Day 1 (Creation 15, 26-27, 34-35).
4 Origen Homilies on Genesis 1.1 (see The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 5, 71 (Origen: Homilies on Genesis and Exodus), trans. Ronald E. Heine. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982.
5 For a history of interpretation of these sections of Genesis see Genesis 1-3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigue in the Garden (ed. Gregory Allen Robbins). New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1988. For an account of the interpretations of the ancient Fathers, in particular, see Clark, A. E., “Heresy, Asceticism, Adam, and Eve: interpretations of Genesis 1-2 in the later Latin Fathers” (99-133) in the same volume. Clark makes this interesting suggestion that the more literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3 of most fifth century Fathers arose in part as a response to the ascetic, anti-creation, heresies that a non-literal interpretation was thought to allow. A detailed account of patristic (both Greek and Latin)
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perhaps history’s most influential theologian, Saint Augustine, famously championed a quite sophisticated, non-literalistic reading of the text. Augustine understood the ‘days’ in Genesis 1 as successive epochs in which the substance of matter, which God had created in an instant in the distant past, was fashioned into the various forms we now recognise.6 Augustine’s view was endorsed by some of the biggest names in the medieval church.7
My point is: a non-literalistic interpretation of Genesis 1 is not necessarily a nervous, modern reaction to the rise of contemporary science. It is a viewpoint with a long and venerable history in both Jewish and Christian traditions.
Having said this, there are aspects of the modern interpretation of Genesis 1 that only became possible in the 16th – 19th centuries, at precisely the time of the scientific revolution. This is no coincidence. The Renaissance and Enlightenment periods precipitated a literary revolution in parallel with the scientific one. This was a time of increasing sophistication in the historical-critical analysis of ancient texts in their original languages. Out of such analyses have come particular conclusions about the genre and purpose of Genesis chapter 1.
2. THE GENRE OF GENESIS 1
Firstly, then, let me speak about genre.
2.1. The importance of genre
With the rise of literary criticism modern biblical scholars have begun to appreciate the importance of genre for interpreting ancient texts. When you and I pick up the daily newspaper we have no problem moving from news-report, to editorial, to satire, to TV guide, to comics, and so on. We don’t need a heading which says: ‘Now for a work of satire’. We all just understand the literary forms and read the relevant pieces appropriately.
Ancient people operated in much the same way. Within the Bible alone we can discern not only poetry and prose but also legal formula, historical report, parable, aphorism, prophecy, creed, hymn, epistle, homily and apocalyptic.
2.2. The example of ‘apocalyptic’ in Revelation
Actually, ‘apocalyptic’ offers a good parallel for the present discussion. In the book of Revelation, the closing text of the Bible, the writer narrates cosmic visions replete with symbols and codes
interpretations of Genesis 1 is also found in Appendix 7 of St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, vol. 10. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967, 202-210.
6 Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.1, 1.29. (See The Works of Saint Augustine: a translation for the 21st century, part I, vol. 13. New York: New City Press, 2002).
7 Including the Venerable Bede in the 8th century (Hexaemeron 1, 1), and St Albert the Great (Commentary on the Sentence 12, B, I) and the incomparable Thomas Aquinas (II Sentences 12, 3, I) in the 13th century. For Aquinas’ own careful and even comparison of Augustine’s view of creation with other ancient Fathers see Summa Theologiae Ia. 74, 1-3. Excellent articles on the interpretation of the ‘Six Days’ (Hexaemeron) among medieval theologians are found in Appendices 8 and 9 in St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, vol. 10. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967, 211-224.
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involving numbers, colours and even animals (the famous ‘666, the mark of the Beast’ comes from the book of Revelation).
A literalistic interpretation of, say, Revelation 19 – to take just one example – would have us believe that Jesus will return to earth one day with eyes of fire, riding a white horse, wearing a blood-stained robe upon his back and multiple crowns upon his head.8 Some Christians sincerely expect things to pan out in just this way.
However, scholars have long pointed out that large sections of the book of Revelation correspond to the ancient literary device known as ‘apocalyptic’, in which numbers, colours, animals and so on, were employed with specific referents. The writer of Revelation would never have predicted that audiences might one day read his work as offering a concrete description of things to come.
A similar situation pertains to the first book of the Bible. Genesis 1 isn’t written in apocalyptic, of course, but it is composed in a style quite different from the ‘historical narrative’ of, say, the Gospels in their accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, for instance. There is no getting around the fact that the Gospels writers were endeavoring to write history at that point – whether or not readers end up believing what is claimed.
Genesis 1, on the other hand, is not an historical report. Nor is it even written in prose. The original Hebrew of this passage is marked by intricate structure, rhythm, parallelism, chiasmus, repetition and the lavish use of number symbolism. These are features we never observe together in the parts of Scripture we normally recognise as historical prose.
2.3. Number symbolism in Genesis 1
I don’t intend to take you through all of these literary devices in Genesis 1 but I will draw your attention to the number symbolism which is quite compelling.9 It is well known that in Hebrew thought the number seven symbolises ‘wholeness’ as a characteristic of God’s perfection. Some of you will have seen, for instance, the seven candle lamp stand, or Menorah, which has long been a symbol of the Jewish faith. Menorah: emblem of the State of Israel
In Genesis 1, multiples of seven appear in quite extraordinary ways, and for ancient readers, who were attuned to observing such things, these multiples conveyed a powerful message. The first sentence of Genesis 1 consists of seven Hebrew words. Instantly, the ancient reader’s attention is focused. The second sentence contains fourteen words. The word ‘earth’ – one half of the created
8 Revelation 19:11-13 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.
9 A very good introduction to the literary characteristics of Genesis 1 can be found in Wenham, G. J., Genesis 1-15. Waco: Word Books, 1987, 1-40.
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sphere – appears in the chapter 21 times, as does the word ‘heaven’, the other half of the created sphere.10 Moreover, ‘God’, the lead actor, is mentioned exactly 35 times, and the refrains “and it was so” and “God saw that it was good” occur seven times each. And it hardly needs to be pointed out that the whole account is structured around seven scenes, or seven days of the week. The artistry throughout the chapter is stunning and, to ancient readers, unmistakable. It casts the creation as a work of art, sharing in the perfection of God.
My point is this: short of including a prescript for the benefit of modern readers the original author could hardly have made it clearer that his message is conveyed in a literary, rather than prosaic, form.11
2.4. Literary style and the question of ‘truth’
None of this should trouble modern Christians, as if truths expressed by literary device were somehow less true than those expressed in simple prose. When Romeo says: “What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!,” we all understand what’s being said. The statement is no less an expression of truth than if Romeo had said, “Juliet is at the window and she is pretty.” Only someone unacquainted with the English literary tradition would quibble over the ontological differences between Juliet and the sun!
Did God create ‘light’ on Day 1 of creation? Well, he might have – and I guess in view of Big Bang theory this is not such an outrageous idea! But this is not the point of Genesis 1:3. The highly ‘literary’ presentation style of our passage makes it unlikely, in my opinion, that the author intended us to link any of his statements with a particular physical event in time. Again, the example of the book of Revelation comes to mind.
3. THE PURPOSE OF GENESIS 1
But genre is only half of the matter. Equally important is an appreciation of the historical purpose of Genesis.
3.1. Avoiding anachronism
As citizens of a scientific age we assume that any document which mentions the origins of the world must be concerned with the mechanics of those origins, in other words, with how the universe was made. But that is surely anachronistic. One of the first rules of historical enquiry is: thou shalt not read contemporary assumptions into ancient artifacts. In the case of Genesis we absolutely must remember that this text was composed two and half thousand years before the scientific era, at a time when intellectuals were not even asking questions about the mechanics of creation.
10 I use the word ‘chapter’ loosely. It is commonly noted that the opening literary section of Genesis runs from 1:1 through to 2:3. Appropriately, the NIV places the heading for the second section at 2:4. For the details see Wenham, Genesis 1-15, 6.
11 In contrasting Genesis 1 with ‘prose’ I am not suggesting that the passage conforms to the genre of poetry such as we find in the Psalms.
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3.2. Paganism and biblical ‘subversion’
So what is the purpose of this portion of Scripture, according to biblical historians? In a nutshell, the opening section of the Bible appears to have been written to provide a picture of physical and social reality that debunks the views held by pagan cultures of the time. In short, Genesis 1 is a piece of subversive theology.
To anyone familiar with the Old Testament this subversive – anti-pagan – intent will come as no surprise. One of the golden threads of the Old Testament is its sustained critique of the pagan religions of Israel’s neighbours – the Egyptians, Canaanites and Babylonians. The first two of the Ten Commandments, for instance, are all about shunning the pagan deities of the ancient world.12 Moreover, the book of Psalms – the hymn book of ancient Jews – regularly and explicitly declares that the creation owes its existence not to the pagan gods but to Yahweh, the God of Israel.13 Given the prominence of this motif in the Old Testament it would in fact be surprising if the Old Testament’s longest statement about creation did not take a swipe at pagan understandings of the universe.
Fortunately, we donÂ’t have to speculate about all this. Through a stroke of very good fortune, scholars are now able to see just how the writer of Genesis has gone about this task of debunking his ancient rivals.
3.3. Enuma elish: a Babylonian Creation Myth
Just as DarwinÂ’s On the Origin of Species was about to be published (185
, archaeologists working in Mosul in Northwest Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia) in the early 1850s discovered tablets almost three thousand years old.14 On these tablets was written in cuneiform an account of creation held sacred by IsraelÂ’s near and dominant neighbours, the ancient Babylonians. Suddenly, we were in a position to compare Genesis 1 with a pagan creation tradition which, according to most scholars, predates the biblical account by several centuries.15
We now know that if you were raised in Babylonian culture of the second millennium BC your view of origins would have been based on a story that was as popular as our Santa Claus fable and as socially influential as Darwinism. The story came to be called Enuma elish,16 and to make a long,
12 Exodus 20:3-5 You shall have no other gods before me. 4 You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them.
13 Psalm 95 1 Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD Â… 3 For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods. 4 In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. 5 The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Psalm 96 4 Â… great is the LORD and most worthy of praise; he is to be feared above all gods. 5 For all the gods of the nations are idols, but the LORD made the heavens.
14 Hess R. S., “One Hundred Fifty Years of Comparative Studies on Genesis 1-11: An Overview,” in “I Studied Inscriptions from before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11 (eds. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura).Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994, 3-26.
15 For the dates of the documents and inscriptions in question see the relevant chapters in ‘I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood’.
16 The title comes from the opening words of the cuneiform text: “When on high (enuma elish) …” The texts of various Mesopotamian myths, Enuma elish, can be found in Dalley, S. (trans.), Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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seven-tablet story short, it basically concerns the violent adventures of the original family of the gods. Apsu and Tiamat, the father and mother of the gods, go to war against their offspring because of all the chaos the youngsters bring to their peaceful kingdom. Both divine parents are killed by the greatest of the junior warrior gods, Marduk, who goes on to fashion the universe out of the various bits and pieces of the vanquished gods.
As bizarre as all this sounds, stories like Enuma elish were critical expressions of ancient peopleÂ’s understanding of the purpose and significance of life. Indeed, Enuma elish was so important in Babylon it was publicly recited in the capital every New YearÂ’s day. It was their national mythic story. It was Christmas and ANZAC Day rolled into one.
The fascinating thing about all this is that Genesis 1 shares numerous thematic and stylistic features with the pagan myths we’ve uncovered in the last 150 years. Enuma elish provides the simplest point of comparison. Both Enuma elish and Genesis begin in the first paragraph with a watery chaos at the dawn of time. Instantly, then, we know we are dealing with similar thought-worlds. Both stories, furthermore, proceed in seven movements: seven days in Genesis 1 and seven scenes written on seven tablets in Enuma elish. The narratives even share the same order of creation, beginning with the heavens, then the sea, then the earth, and so on, climaxing with the creation of men and women – which, incidentally, occurs in the sixth scene, or day, in both accounts.
Let me make something very clear. After initial speculation that Genesis had plagiarised pagan creation motifs17 it soon dawned on scholars that what we read in Genesis 1 is philosophically antithetical to the message of the pagan myths. Historians soon realised something they should have expected already given the criticism of paganism elsewhere in the Old Testament: Genesis 1 is a polemic against pagan theology.18 Genesis uses stylistic elements of its pagan equivalents in order very cleverly to debunk the view of the world expressed in those traditions. The parallels constitute not an emulation or endorsement of paganism but a parody or subversion of it. Genesis storms onto the ancient Middle Eastern stage with guns blazing, so to speak, making profoundly controversial claims about God, the environment and the purpose of human life.
Exactly how Genesis achieves these subversive aims is the concern of the remainder of the paper.
17 Leading the charge with the theory that Genesis was deeply dependent on the Babylonian myths was Herman Gunkel’s monograph of 1895, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung über Gen 1 und Ap Joh 12. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. For an abridged English translation of the relevant parts of Gunkel’s study see Anderson, B. W. (ed.). Creation and the Old Testament (Issues in Religion and Theology 6). Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984, 25-52.
18 Standard introductions to this theme in scholarship are found in Sarna, N. M., Understanding Genesis. New York: Schocken Books, 1970; Kapelrud, A., “The mythological features of Genesis chapter I and the author’s intentions,” Vetus Testamentum vol. 24, no. 2, (1974) 178-186; Tsumura, D. T., “Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Stories of Creation and Flood: an Introduction,” in “I Studied Inscriptions from before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11 (eds. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura).Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994, 3-26. A vigorous attempt to rebut the ‘majority view’ espoused above is found in Kaiser W. C., “The literary form of Genesis 1-11,” in New Perspectives on the Old Testament (ed. J. Barton Payne). London: Word Books, 48-65.
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4. THE SOLITARY GOD
The most prominent theme in Genesis 1 will have struck ancient pagan readers as a perverse novelty. The creation of the universe, says Genesis, was a solo performance. Behind the entire cosmos, in all its intricacy and variation, there is just one God. To give it a modern philosophical tag, Genesis 1 proclaims an uncompromising ‘monotheism’. It does this in a number of ways.
4.1. A striking introduction
Firstly, it begins with a striking introduction: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The writer doesn’t bother to warm us up to the notion of one Creator; he just puts it on the table right up-front. A single God, says Genesis, created not just this particular mountain or that particular constellation but the “the heavens and the earth,” which is the ancient way of saying ‘everything’.
4.2. A solo performance
Secondly, the chapter has just one performer. There is plenty of activity in the account – lots of speaking, making, seeing, separating, naming and so on – but only one actor.19 Compared with other creation accounts of the time, Genesis 1 is a conspicuously lonely affair.
4.3. The use of ‘god’ instead of ‘Yahweh’
The third way the passage proclaims monotheism is subtle but highly effective, especially for ancient readers. It has to do with the use, or rather non-use, of GodÂ’s personal name. Pagan creation myths always named their gods so that readers could know which god did what. So, in the Babylonian Enuma elish no fewer than nine separate deities are named in the first two paragraphs.20
The ancient Jews also had a personal name for their god: ‘Yahweh’, or the more anglicized, ‘Jehovah’,21 and it appears many times throughout the rest of Genesis. What is fascinating is that of the 35 references in this chapter to Israel’s Lord not one employs the divine name. The author simply uses the noun ‘God’ – elohim in Hebrew.22 The effect of this is to undercut any suggestion that Yahweh was simply a Hebrew member of the pagan pantheon. “There is not Yahweh and Apsu and Tiamat and so on,” says the author of Genesis. “There is just ‘God’.” And by repeating the noun 35 times the writer makes his point loud and clear.
19 The second paragraph sets up the pattern well (v.3): And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning--the first day.
20 Apsu, Tiamat, Lahmu, Lahamu, Ansar, Kisar, Anu, Nudimmud, and Mummu.
21 The name ‘Yahweh’ is represented in English Bibles by the word ‘Lord’, written in capital letters. This is rather unhelpful really because the word doesn’t mean ‘lord’ at all; it’s a personal name and was intended to be used as such.
22 Only in the introduction to the next section, in chapter 2:4, does the author name this Creator-God as Yahweh elohim, the God named Yahweh. This is such a striking feature of the text that some scholars have proposed that chapters one and two were written by different authors. The first they call the elohist because he preferred the generic word ‘god’ or elohim, and the second they call the yahwist because he preferred God’s personal name. The phenomenon is far more easily explained, as above.
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5. COHERENCE IN CREATION
A corollary of pagan polytheism was a belief in the essential incoherence or randomness of the universe. In Enuma elish, for example, the physical world is said to have been fashioned as an after-thought, out of the bloody carnage of the war of the gods. The creation, in this view, is ‘haphazard’ in origin and ‘tainted’ in character. This was the broad viewpoint of ancient societies.
By contrast, Genesis 1 insists upon the elegance and intention of creation, in other words, upon its coherence. The universe is not a mindless collection of unpredictable forces, but the ordered accomplishment of a single creative genius. Monotheism in the Creator, says Genesis, results in coherence in the creation. This theme is emphasised at almost every point in the chapter.
5.1. The number ‘7’ and wholeness
IÂ’ve mentioned already the artful use of multiples of seven throughout the chapter. In accordance with Hebrew literary conventions, this underlines the ordered perfection of creation.
5.2. The careful structure of the passage
A more obvious device is the careful literary structure of the passage. Each creative scene follows a deliberate four-fold pattern: a creative command (“let there be light,” for example) followed by a report of the fulfillment of the command (“and there was light”), an elaboration of creative detail (“he separated the light from the darkness”) and, finally, a concluding day-formula (“and there was evening, and there was morning – the first day”). This pattern carries on through the whole account. The effect of all this is to underline the order and coherence of creation.23
5.3. Repetition of the word ‘good’
The repeated affirmation of the ‘goodness’ of the creation serves the same point. Verses 4, 7, 12, 16, 21 and 25 tell us that what God made ‘was good’. The seventh and climactic reference in v.31 says the creation “was very good.” One gets the impression that the author is trying to counter the low view of creation present in just about every pagan culture of the time.
5.4. The demystification of the heavens
The final contribution to this theme of coherence is particularly subversive in an ancient context. Many ancient societies worshipped the sun and moon as gods in their own right.24 Genesis 1, however (vv.14-16),25 describes these heavenly bodies simply as ‘lights’ – a big light for the day
23 This insight corresponds to that of the first century Jewish author, Philo, as mentioned at 1.1.
24 In fact, in Egypt, Amon-Re, the Sun-god, was said to rule the entire Egyptian pantheon, a collection of no fewer than 2000 deities.
25 v.14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. 9
and a small one for the night.26 Moreover, these lights are said to have been given by God to serve the inhabitants of the earth, rather than to be served by them. Anyone familiar with paganism will not have failed to see the significance of these comments.
The number symbolism, the careful structure, the affirmation of the creation’s ‘goodness’, and the demystification of the heavenly bodies, all combine to challenge pagan notions of the capricious nature of the physical world. The creation is not random or possessed by spiritual powers, says Genesis 1; it is the coherent masterpiece of a creative genius.
6. THE PLACE OF MEN AND WOMEN
The subversive intention of Genesis 1 reaches its climax in its description of the place given to men and women in the world by the Creator.
6.1. Man in Enuma elish
As I said earlier, Enuma elish essentially recounts a primeval war of the gods. The eventual victor is a young buck named Marduk. He and his armies destroy the patriarch and matriarch of the gods and out of the bloody remains create the various items of the universe. Those gods who had supported the vanquished deities were sentenced to an eternity of servitude, collecting and preparing food for the victors.
Here is where human beings come in. The defeated gods begin to complain about the sheer indignity of being used merely to fetch food for other gods. They petition Marduk to create some other creature more well-suited to a life of slavery. The idea quite pleases Marduk and so, out of the goodness of his heart and the pools of blood left over from the battle, Marduk fashions a man, a being whose central task in life is to serve the gods with food offerings.27 To read from Tablet 6:
When Marduk heard the complaints of the gods, he said: ‘I will establish a savage, 'man' shall be his name. He shall be charged with the service of the gods, that they might be at ease!’ Out of Kinju’s blood they fashioned mankind. Marduk imposed the service on mankind and let free the gods.
The clear ‘message’ of the story is that humans must know their place at the bottom of the divine scheme of things. Their role is to serve the needs and pleasures of the gods.28
It is against just such ancient views of humanity that our passage has something striking to say. According to Genesis 1, men and women lie at the centre of the CreatorÂ’s intentions and affections for the world. The theme is conveyed in a number of ways.
26 He even refuses to use the normal Hebrew words for he sun and moon, shamash and yarih, which might have been construed as divine names corresponding to Amon-Re in Egyptian.
27 This same basic story, though in more detail, is narrated in Tablet 1 of the Babylonian Atra-Hasis Epic which dates about the middle of the second millennium BC. On this see Millard, A. R., “A New Babylonian ‘Genesis’ Story,” in “I Studied Inscriptions from before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1-11 (eds. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura).Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994, 114-128.
28 The ancient practice of placating deities with food offerings derives from stories such as this.
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6.2. Interruption of the rhythm
First is the deliberate interruption to the rhythmic structure of the chapter. I mentioned a moment ago that each creative scene follows a careful four-fold pattern: a creative command followed by a report of the fulfillment of the command, an elaboration of creative detail, and a concluding day-formula. What I didn’t tell you is that in the final scene this pattern breaks down. Verse 26, which describes of the creation of humankind, is introduced not with a creative command but with a divine deliberation – a pause in the rhythm of the text that tells us something special is about to happen. God does not say “Let there be man” as we should expect from the pattern set up throughout the chapter. Rather, the Creator declares to himself: “Let us make man in our image.” The break in the rhythm is obvious and flags to readers that they have arrived at something special, a climax in the message of the chapter. The contrast with Enuma elish is striking. Humans were last in the list of creative acts in Enuma elish because they were an afterthought. They are last in the list of creative acts in Genesis because they are the highpoint of the account.
6.3. Men and women in the ‘image of God’
The contrast with paganism deepens in the elaboration of the act of human creation. In Enuma elish the first man, as we saw, was fashioned out of the blood of the vanquished god, Kinju. The man, in other words, was a product of the loserÂ’s left-overs, to put it crudely. In Genesis 1, however, weÂ’re told that men and women were created in the very image of God. Verse 27 makes the point emphatically:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
The phrase, ‘the image of a god’ was used in two related ways in antiquity.29 Firstly, it was used of the many statues of deities set up throughout pagan cities. These were regarded as representatives, ‘images’, of the divine presence. The second use of the epithet was in relation to kings. Ancient cultures, particularly Egyptian and Babylonian, described their kings as divine ‘images’. The idea was similar to that in connection with religious statues. Kings were considered divine representatives or ambassadors. They exercised the rule of the gods over the people. Genesis 1 appears to endorse this notion of the divine ambassador but it does so in a completely democratised fashion. According to the author, all people, not just kings, have been fashioned in the image of the one true God.30
Human beings are not the product of a defeated godÂ’s blood; they are divine representatives, created to exercise GodÂ’s careful rule over the creation, to ensure that his interests are realised in the world.31
29 There are all sorts of philosophical suggestions about what it means to be made in the ‘image of God’. Some take the phrase as a reference to our critical faculties, others to our moral perception, still others take it to mean we possess a spirit just as God is a spirit. The historical analysis above, however, offers a more cogent interpretation.
30 Notice also that v.27 makes a point of including both male and female persons within the image of God.
31 It’s precisely this logic that leads to the words added in v.26: “let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air” and so on. The point is reiterated in v.28: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground’.”
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6.4. The service of God
There is another striking point made in these paragraphs. I noted earlier that the purpose of humanity according to Enuma elish (and other pagan myths) was to serve the gods with food offerings. In light of this, Genesis 1:29 will have sounded very odd to ancient ears. Having urged men and women to exercise the divine rule over the earth, God then offers food to them:
Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth Â… They will be yours for food.
God serves us. What a subversive thought this was in ancient times! ItÂ’s a theme which reaches its climax in biblical tradition in the equally radical notion of ChristÂ’s offering of himself for the sins of the world. What Genesis conveys metaphorically, Jesus would embody historically. But, of course, that is to range outside my brief in this paper.
CONCLUSION: GENESIS AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING
I have argued in this paper that the author of Genesis 1 would not have been even vaguely aware of the assumptions that would be brought to his text years later by biblical fundamentalists and scientific materialists. He was not concerned with how the universe originated. Rather, he sought to answer the more urgent questions of antiquity: (1) From whom did the creation originate?; (2) What is the nature of that creation?; and (3) What place do men and women occupy in the creation? This amounts, of course, to the question of the significance of life. And so I want to conclude, perhaps a little provocatively, with the words of the French philosopher and Nobel Laureate, Albert Camus (1913-1960), who, although an atheist, insisted that the greatest question of life was one broached not by science but by philosophy:
Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, renounced it with the greatest of ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense he did right. That truth was not worth the stake Â… On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.32
In its highly literary way, and against the backdrop of competing pagan claims, Genesis chapter 1 declares not a scientific truth but an answer to this “most urgent of questions.”
those interested can PM me, i can send u the PDF file... easier to read
Tis probably will happen again in future