The first portion of this is not a line-by-line "Bible study," but a series of observations meant to broaden our understanding of the text. Each section can be read independently of the others.
The text itself appears at the bottom of the Newsletter, with comments--"Footnotes," as it were--on specific words and phrases for those who are interested.
Between the two is a special gift I made just for you. Scroll on down!
I KNOW it's long. But it's the first. Later lessons will certainly be shorter. And you have my blessing if you want to skip parts!
The Context of This Lesson
The first verses of Genesis are embedded in several layers, like a Russian doll.
Before we get to the first verses of Genesis, the Bible's first book, we need to talk just a little bit about the divisions in which these verses are included. Like a Russian doll going from outside to in, they are:
The Bible: a collection of 66 "books" or texts in the Protestant version, 73 in the Catholic one.
The "Old Testament": essentially the Hebrew scriptures. The Catholics had included some books that were not in the Hebrew Bible, which the Protestants took out at the Reformation. This accounts for the difference in numbers (39 vs 46); the New Testament in both versions has 27 books.
The Pentateuch: the first five books of everyone's Bible--Jewish, Protestant, or Catholic. Sometimes called the "Five Books of Moses," or the "law," since the last four books (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) are centered around the career of Moses "the Lawgiver," and the laws that he (allegedly) gave. And finally,
The book of Genesis: which is about "beginnings" (the meaning of the name in Greek). The first ten+ chapters recount myths about the beginnings of the world and nature, the human race, the sabbath, sin, work, languages, and other etiological events; from Chapter 11 Verse 10 we start the run-up to the life of Abram and his descendants, a story which lasts to the end of the book. It's about the quasi-historical beginnings of the Jewish people and their patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (and his sons).
You can read MUCH more about this in a "backgrounder" starting here.
So here's what Genesis looks like in the Big Bookcase of the Bible (and these are separate books):
Genesis in the context of the "Law" (the Pentateuch); the "Old Testament"; and the Bible.
Now, let's begin this week's message.
Comparing Creation Myths
Verbatim caption from Wikipedia: “Auðumbla licks free Búri as she produces rivers of rivers of milk from her udders in an illustration from an Icelandic 18th century manuscript of the Prose Edda”
Let's face it: a lot of the world's creation myths are, well, grotesque, at least to our sensibilities.
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Some (not all) of the ancient Chinese believed that there was a man, named Pangu, who emerged from the cosmic egg of Yin and Yang. He was a primitive, hairy giant, with horns on his head. With his axe, he split Yin from Yang, and stood between them to keep them separate. Some 18,000 years later, he died, and "His breath became the wind...; his voice, thunder; his left eye, the Sun; his right eye, the Moon; his head, the mountains...; his blood, rivers; his muscles, fertile land; his facial hair, the stars and Milky Way; his fur (!), bushes and forests; his bones, valuable minerals; his bone marrow, precious jewels; his sweat, rain; and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became animals" (per Wikipedia). (With all this detail, one wonders what happened to his, uh, nether parts?)
He is still an object of worship among some Daoists today.
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The Norse creation story is just as... odd, and also involves a dismemberment. Frost and flame met over the void called Ginnungagap, and the drops generated thereby formed into a godlike, destructive giant named Ymir. While he slept, more giants leapt from his legs and his sweaty armpits. A cow named Audhumbla also emerged from the frost, and fed Ymir with her milk. She licked salt-licks, out of which emerged the first proper god, named Buri. Odin was among that god's grandchildren; Odin's mother was a giantess of Ymir's line. Odin and his brothers then slew Ymir, and the world was made from his corpse: oceans from blood; soil from muscles and skin; vegetation from hair; clouds from brains; and the sky from his skull, which was held aloft by four dwarfs.
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The Aztec creation of this world (the fifth) kicks off when the gods sacrifice themselves by jumping into a fire, which sets the sun in motion and starts the ticking of time. The very first of their worlds, though, came when a divine couple created itself as a dual unity, then gave birth to four more gods, who created the world. Humans came when they ground up a mess of bones and dropped the blood of a sacrificed god onto it. And on it goes.
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The Yoruba of Africa say the world was created by a lesser god, Obatala, through the use of a gold chain (to climb down from heaven); a snail's shell full of sand (which he poured down on water to form the land); a white hen, to scratch the sand around and spread it out); a palm nut (from which, after Obatala planted it, all vegetation sprang instantaneously); and a black cat, to keep him company while all this was going on!
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Why did I force you to read through all this? Well, on a 1-10 scale of sublimity, with 10 being modern science and 1 being something like these stories, I think the Biblical account is somewhere around a 7. (Though I admit my upbringing may have conditioned me to think so!) It doesn't partake of some of the more unsightly elements, but nor does it reach the sublime level of, say, Carl Sagan's description in his series Cosmos. It's too long to post in its entirety here (I gave you more here), but it ends with this sublime thought:
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are creatures of the cosmos and have always hungered to know our origins, to understand our connection with the universe. How did everything come to be? Every culture on the planet has devised its own response to the riddle posed by the universe. Every culture celebrates the cycles of life and nature. There are many different ways of being human. But an extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. We are one species. We are star stuff, harvesting starlight. Our lives, our past and our future, are tied to the sun, the moon, and the stars.
Now that's a creation "myth" I can get behind!
[This section is lifted, with some changes, from my "About" page, which you can see here.]
Little Red Riding Hood (Wikipedia)
History? Science? Fairy Tale? Myth?
I want to put to rest a "straw man" set up by militant atheists: that "the Bible is a book of fairy tales."
It is not.
It certainly has some elements that feel like fairy tales: talking animals (snakes, donkeys); "magic" (water into wine, figures suddenly appearing and then disappearing again; raising the dead); a surface lack of moral complexity (God is entirely good, the devil entirely bad); and so on.
But the differences between fairy tales and Bible stories are at either end of the phenomena, what philosophers call etiology and teleology. The Bible, like any proper fairy tale, arose from a community. However, it was taken as the focus of that community, rather than merely an evening's entertainment (with a moral). That's its etiology or origin. And its end result--its teleos--was nothing less than the salvation of a people. No fairy tale ever aspired to that.
Furthermore, look at the magnified effect of the Bible on the world today. No one builds edifices to praise Little Red Riding Hood; starts universities in the name of Thumbelina; or goes to war over differing understandings of "The Monkey and the Crocodile."
Rather, I would say, the Bible is chock-full of myth, in the fullest and most empowered (and empowering) sense of that word: what Joseph Campbell called "an energy-evoking and energy-directing sign" or system of signs, and nothing short of the "Masks of God." Wikipedia calls them "stories that play a fundamental role in a society."
Joseph Campbell (Wikipedia)
Campbell enumerated those "fundamental roles" as:
The Mystical Function, which opens the individual to the wonder of life and the universe, characterized by awe;
The Cosmological Function, which helps the individual determine his or her place in the universe;
The Social Function, which helps to organize the lives of those living in a community; and
The Pedagogical Function, which teaches the individual how to live a human life.
These four functions overlap, of course, but they provide a useful framework in examining the myths embodied in the Bible.
Oh, one more thing about a myth? It is not necessarily untrue.
And let's not forget, the Bible also contains history, poetry, letters, instruction, pithy sayings, and sometimes just danged good stories.
Science and the Bible
Mo vs Chuck: Grudge match of the centuries
Okay, we might just as well open this whole can o' worms right now.
The Bible is not, and was never meant to be, a book of science. (And the first verses of Genesis are not meant to be read as such. It is a poem, or maybe a hymn.) A friend on Facebook recently posted a verse that he and many others interpret as addressing the Bible/science "divide": 1 Timothy 6:20 reads "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to your trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and opposition [to your belief] of science falsely so called..." Proponents of the-Bible-as-science-text use this to claim that real science recognizes the six-day creation that we'll get to in a moment.
Unfortunately for their case, "science" in the early 17th century, when the King James Version of the Bible was translated, did not mean the works of Newton or Darwin or Einstein, none of whom had yet been born. It simply meant "knowledge," from the Latin scientia. So Timothy was to hold on to his faith in the face of "profane and vain babblings" (I love that!) and opposition from "false knowledge," not from modern science.
So let's not make the mistake of reading religious texts as "scientific" in any modern sense. Rather, let's keep in mind that by and large their focus is on the relationship of humans to the divine. And that is what the first verses of Genesis try to establish.
I graduated from college, children, before the Internet was invented. So professors in my school would use the large glass window in their office doors to display what now would be on their Facebook walls: jokes, posters, printed quotes, and the like. (These also served to hide whatever was going on inside!) I remember one in particular that struck me as intriguing (though it's old hat now); it looked something like this:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the scientific version of what the Genesis creation account attempts to do. It's not meant to teach the process of creation, but to poetically place the human community in creation--and not incidentally, in its proper relationship to God. This is Campbell's cosmological function.
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And now, let's take a look at the story.
In the Beginning, God… (1:1 & 2)
One version of William Blake's Ancient of Days (Wikipedia)
I have heard "True Believers" say (with a straight face): "In the beginning, God! That's all we need to know about where everything came from!" Setting aside all the stuff that's been left out of this statement, we really need to look at two questions: "In the beginning of what?" and "Who is this 'God'?"
Notes addressing both of these questions can be found in my "Footnotes" below. But here's a spoiler: It's the beginning of this world, not necessarily of the entire universe; and the idea of God is much more complex than they'd like you to believe--perhaps even--plural?
The Six Days (1:3-31)
Now let's move rather quickly through the six days of creation; you can read the full text below.
The order of creation is like this:
Day 1 (verses 3-5): God created light (divided from darkness, so day and night).
Day 2 (verses 6-8): God created a firmament (the sky) dividing the waters below (the seas) from the waters above (space?).
Day 3 (verses 9-13): God created the dry land, grass, and other plants, including trees.
Day 4 (verses 14-19): God created the sun, the moon, and the stars; thus, seasons, time, etc.
Day 5 (verses 20-23): God created fish and birds.
Day 6 (verses 24-31): God created land creatures, including humans.
The problem with poetry is that it ain't science. Look at that list again, and see if any problems jump out at you.
First, how could "the evening and the morning" be "the first day" (and the second, and the third) if there was no sun, moon, day, or night until the fourth? Furthermore, how could plants grow from the third day with no sunlight (especially if you're trying to prove these days were exceedingly long?) Weasel words: Some say God only revealed the sun and moon that day; they were there, but behind clouds, before this. But my Bible clearly says, "And God made two great lights."
No. Stop trying to twist this into a scientific explanation, before there even was science. This is poetry, for cryin' out loud! By insisting that this is "science," you hoist yourself by your own petard.
I love what "Saint" Augustine (in Book XII of his Confessions) said about understanding the Bible (here translated by Maria Boulding, O.S.B.; emphasis is mine):
Accordingly, when anyone claims, "Moses meant what I say," and another retorts, "No, rather what I find there," I think that I will be answering in a more religious spirit if I say, "Why not both, if both are true?" And if there is a third possibility, and a fourth, and if someone else sees an entirely different meaning in these words, why should we not think that he [Moses, alleged author of the Pentateuch] was aware of all of them...?
There are indeed many ways to understand almost any text, and the way of the literalist "True Believer," while popular in some circles, to my mind leads to more questions than answers. (Skim down to the "joke" in my "About" page for more on this.)
The Seventh Day (2:1-3)
God rests above the creation on the 7th day; from a 1696 Russian Bible (Wikipedia)
Much has been made of the "Seventh Day" of creation, on which God "rested."
But did God really need to rest? Is he not omnipotent, and therefore impervious to fatigue? Well, it doesn't mean he took a snooze or anything like that. Some True Believers will tell you it means the Creation was completed, not requiring any "evolution" to improve it--after all, "the heavens and the earth were finished"--but that God still had plenty of non-evolution-y to keep him busy. So in their mind, he "rested from all his work which God created and made," but not from his other duties.
There is another way to look at it. Many of the Bible's stories are what folklorists call "etiological"--that is, they explain the origin of something, often a social custom. Now, the Jews, like many (but not all!) cultures, had a seven day week. And they set aside one of those days as a day of rest (in later days, quite strictly, as we'll see when we get to the Ten Commandments).
So these verses may simply "explain" the practice of having a weekly day of rest, called "the Sabbath." Incidentally, this was Saturday, not the Sunday of the Christians (long story)--"Saturday" in Spanish (through the Latin) is still "Sabado": Sabbath. This is also the basis of the word "sabbatical," a rejuvenating year (traditionally given once every seven years) for certain professionals.
And that's about that! Please do read the text below, and its "footnotes," as thoughtfully as you can. It really is a beautiful paean to our world, from a religious perspective.
In fact, this passage is so beautiful that I've decided to give you a little gift. Here is a classic reading of the seven-day creation account by the actor Alexander Scourby. Enjoy!
A Reading of the Genesis Account by Alexander Scourby
THE TEXT
1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
1:1 In the beginning...: Now, modern Hebrew scholars agree that the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void… (verses 1 & 2) are a pretty serious mistranslation. It would be better stated something like, "In the beginning of God's creation of the heaven and the earth, the earth was without form and void…"
Thus, it was not the beginning of everything, as some have asserted; it was the time at which he started this particular creation, and allows for other things to have happened before that. It ain't the Big Bang!
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1:1 God: Okay, that explains "the beginning." But what about "God?"
Numerous Hebrew words are translated as the proper name of the deity to whom Christians still look. The King James does a masterful job of keeping these straight by using different English words, as well. The two most common are "God" (Hebrew Elohim) and "Lord" or "Jehovah" (Hebrew Yahweh--sort of). The one used here is Elohim.
Which is a sticky problem, because Elohim is a plural. It is sometimes (rarely) translated "gods" or "angels" in addition to its many singular forms: judge, goddess (!), and so on. It may hark back to an earlier Middle Eastern story in which the world was indeed created by gods, not God; but language is conservative, and changing an attribute like "single" or "plural" may have been easier than changing a name. (Think about this: When was the last time you "dialed" or "hung up" a phone? The process has changed dramatically, but the language hangs on.)
But by agreement, Elohim is usually (in 2,591 out of its 2,606 appearances) rendered God-in-the-singular, with or without the capital (but always capitalized when referring to the Hebrew deity--2,346 times). (Never mind that in 1:26 this "singular" God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…" and that this happens later on as well.)
True Believers say the use of a plural to name God is a hint at the existence of the Trinity--an idea which, though the three "persons" are mentioned together a number of times in the New Testament, is never explicitly stated in the Bible, and was only formulated as a doctrine by the so-called "church fathers" a century or so later.
The use of Elohim is usually a mark of the "Elohist" or "E" source in the documentary hypothesis discussed on the "About" page. This distinguishes it from "the LORD God" (YHWH) of the "Jahwist" ("J") source used in the creation account of Genesis 2, which we'll discuss next week. But the "Priestly" ("P") source also uses Elohim, and the lofty nature of this passage with its transcendent creator (and ritualistic structure) single this out as being from the P or Priestly source.
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1:2 without form, and void: The Hebrew for this is beautiful, tohu va bohu, which has been translated "formless and empty"--sort of like the scientific description of Earth's "primordial soup" but on a cosmic scale. But it can't be entirely formless and empty, I guess, because "darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." It sounds like there was some kind of form (a face), and something occupying it. But never mind; just keep repeating, "tohu va bohu, tohu va bohu…"
1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
1:3+ And God said: God creates "by fiat"--no, not by an Italian car (that name is an acronym); it means by "authoritative decree." He spoke, it happened. We get the English word "fiat" directly from the Latin for "let it be done." That's power!
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1:4+ and God saw that it was good: A half-dozen times God sees that what he has created is "good," and once more--after making us--that something is "very good." What does he mean by that?
Well, it would be pretty easy to think that he was mighty pleased with himself. It's like he did a fist-pump and said, "Nailed it!"
But it's more than that. God is here identifying the creation with his own nature. Let's jump ahead to something in the Psalms (19:1): "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork." And in Romans 1:20 Paul writes (paraphrased a little), "From the creation of the world God's invisible attributes are clearly seen, his eternal power and Godhead being understood by the things that are made..."
This last one verges on pantheism, doesn't it? The idea that physical reality is identical with divinity? That the universe is the body of God? Or at least panentheism, that the divine not only extends beyond space and time, but also pervades and interpenetrates every part of the universe? I'm quite comfortable with the idea that Nature is "god" (with a small "g"), but to the True Believer this would be heresy!
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1:5+ the evening and the morning: It's true that the word "day" can have a number of meanings. There is that portion of a 24-hour day which is light: "I worked all day." There is the 24-hour period itself: "The day I was born was a Sunday." And there is some indeterminate period: "I knew him back in the day." Some Biblical literalists ("True Believers") try to wiggle out of a strict interpretation of God's Six Days being literal 24-hour days, using, for example, 2 Peter 3:8, which states that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day," thus claiming that it could be an indeterminate amount of time.
But sorry: evening and morning means each day of creation had to be a 24-hour period. (Starting with the evening, by the way, is still the Jewish way of counting time, sundown to sundown. Who knew when midnight struck before clocks?)
1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
1:9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
1:10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
1:13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
1:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
1:17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
1:18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
1:19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moves, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
1:23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
1:25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creeps upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.
1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
1:26 Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: What does it mean to say that humans were made in God's "image" and "likeness"? Interestingly, this verse is as often as not used to read back into the nature of God the attributes of humans! One such list (from Dr. Scofield--see my About page) is that God is "personal, rational, and moral." That is, he is not an impersonal "force"; he is not without thought, feelings, or willpower; and he is not amoral (like, say, gravity).
I'm reminded of the wisecrack of Montesquieu (1689-1755) that "If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides," or the much earlier one of Xenophanes (died 475 BCE) that "The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub–nosed and black; Thracians that they are pale and red-haired" and elsewhere "If cattle and horses and lions had hands and could use their hands to create works as men do, horses would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies like those of horses, and cattle like cattle, with the sort of form they themselves have."
Xenophanes goes a little too far. No serious True Believer has suggested that God literally has two eyes and a nose and so forth; any such language is understood to be metaphorical. (Where metaphor stops and literality begins is a question of some debate!) But did God create Man: or did Man create God? The answer to this question is a true shibboleth.
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1:26 and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and so forth: This alludes to concept that in the Middle Ages was described as the Great Chain of Being. In its simplest form, it puts God at the top; then Angelic beings, Humanity, Animals, Plants, and finally Minerals at the bottom. Thus "Man" has dominion (control) over everything from Humanity down. (And it's just this sort of thinking that has gotten us into some of our worst environmental predicaments!)
The modern concept of a web has replaced much of this hierarchical thinking.
2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
See my thoughts on this in the section titled "The Seventh Day (2:1-3)" above.
2:1 host: "host" here means "a multitude or great number of persons or things." So here it refers to all the things God created, from stars to creeping things.
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That's it! A sort of long one, what with introducing a bunch of new ideas and all. In the future they probably won't (usually) be this long.
See you next week, when we'll tackle Genesis 2: Adam and Eve!