Theology Midterm

4 Reading the Creation

StoriesAgain

,,;::::is)'')t We begin with the Hebrew Bible, commonly known among Christians as "the Old Testament. "1 As in most recent scholarship, I will use the term "Hebrew Bible"

instead of "Old Testament," for two reasons. The first is respect for Judaism. For Jews, the Hebrew Bible is the Bible, not "the Old Testament." The second reason pertains to Christians. For many Christian

readers, the adjective "old" implies outmoded or superceded, as if the "New" Testament were intended to replace the "Old" Tes- tament. Commonly accompanying this usage is the notion that the "Old" Testament speaks of a God of law and judgment, whereas the "New': Testament speaks of a God of grace and love. Though this stereotype is widespread among Christians, it is simply wrong: both visions of God appear in both testaments. The notion that the New Testament (and its God) replaces the Old Testament (and its God) was rejected by earlyChristianity in the second century.? Despite a continuing Christian tendency to relegate the "Old" Testament to second place, it is for Christians

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just as much "Biblc.t'jusr as sacred scripture, as is the New Tes- tament. When Christians do not see this, we not only reject much of our heritage but impoverish our understanding on esus, the New Testament, and Christianity itself. Within the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Bible has three main

divisions. In English, they are called "the Law," "the Prophets," and "the Writings." In Hebrew, they are, respectively, Torah, Neviim, and Ketbuvim. The first letters of each of the Hebrew terms form the acronym Tanak, a common Jewish term for the Hebrew Bible as a whole. The Torah is the first and foundational division of the Hebrew

Bible. Itconsists of fivebooks: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Num- bers, and Deuteronomy. Though the books themselves do not say anything about their authorship, both the Jewish and Chris- tian traditions have attributed them to Moses. Thus they are sometimes spoken of as "the fivebooks of Moses." And though the most common English designation for this group of books is "the Law," the Torah contains much more than what is com- monly meant by the word "law." The word "torah" itself means more; it can be translated as "instruction" or "teaching." The Torah does indeed include the laws of Israel, but it also contains the stories of her origins. It is "instruction" and "teaching" about the people's story and identity, aswell as the foundation of their laws. In other words, it combines narrative and legal traditions. The Torah is also commonly called "the Pentateuch" (as we

sawearlier), a Greek word meaning "the fivescrolls." In fact, this is probably the most commonly used term for these fivebooks. The Pentateuch begins with Israel's stories of creation, to

which we now turn.

Israel's Stories of the World's Beginnings

Ancient Israel's stories of the world's beginnings in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are among the best-known parts of the Bible. Almost everybody in Western culture has heard of them:

Reading the Creation Stories Again 59

• The creation of the world in six days • Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their tempration by a . talking serpent, and their expulsion from Edeu

• Their sons Cain and Abel, and Cain's murder of Abel • The great ages of early people, with Methuselah toppiug the list at 969 years

• The giants. born from the sexual union of "the sons of God" with "the daughters of men"

• Noah's ark and the great flood • The building of the Tower of Babel, its destruction by God, and the fragmentation of humankind into different lan- guage groups

Major battles about the factual truth of these stories have marked Western culture in the modern period. Prior to the birth of modernity in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries, however, the factual truth of Genesis was ac- cepted in the Jewish and Christian worlds without controversy, even though its stories were not always read Iitcrally.f There was little or no reason to question their factuality. Theology and sci- ence alike took it for granted that the universe was relatively young and that the earth and its continents, mountains, oceans, and varieties of life were created in very much the same form in which we now find them. Common estimates of the time of cre- ation ranged from 6000 BCE to 4000 BCE. Around 1650, the age of the earth was calculated with great pre-

cision by an Anglican archbishop of Dublin named James Ussher. Using the genealogies in Genesis, Ussher concluded that creation occurred in the year 4004 BCE.4 His calculation was made just in time to collide with the birth of modern science. Geology and pa- leontology soon began to point to ari immeasurably older earth. The challenge to the factual reading of the Genesis stories of cre- ation was intensified by Charles Darwin's argument for evolution in On the Origin of Species,published in 1859. Suddeuly the issue was not simply the age of the earth but the development of present life forms from much earlier life forms through natural processes.

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The nineteenth century was a time of intense conflict between science and the Bible. Some intellectuals and village atheists de- lighted in using science to debunk the Bible and Christianiry. Among Christians, some adjusted quickly to thenew scientific claims and integrated them into a nonliteral reading of Gcnesis.f Others felt that the truth of the Bible and Christianiry were under attack. The controversy continues to this day, though it involves a

much smaller number of Christians. Advocates of scientific cre- ationism still defend the factual accuracy of the six-day creation story.v Expeditions are launched every fewyears to Mt, Ararat in Turkey, in search of the remains of Noah's ark. Some still think of the Garden of Eden as a real place and seek to figure out its geographical location. (Most often it ispinpointed somewhere in the Middle East, though I recall seeing a pamphlet arguing that it was in Wisconsin.) But contemporary biblical scholarship does not read these

stories as historically factual accounts of the world's begin- nings. Instead, it sees them as ancient Israel's stories of the world's beginnings and interprets them as profoundly true mythological stories. In this chapter, I will describe these sto- ries as seen through the lens of contemporary scholarship. More specifically, I will offer a historical-metaphorical reading, focusing primarily on the creation stories in the first three chapters of Genesis. First, though, I will describe how I heard these creation stories

the first time.

Hearing the Creation Stories the First Time

As a child growing up in the church, I heard the stories in Gene- sis in a state of precritical naivete and thus heard them as true stories? Though I cannot recall a time when I took the sixdays of creation literally, I am sure I did so in very early childhood. And I would have done so without effort, even as I apparently let go of hearing them literally without conflict. When I learned

Reading the Creation Stories Again 61

about dinosaurs and the immense age and sizeof the universe in elementary school, I did not experience a religious crisis. But as I think back on those years, I realize that I continued to

take Adam and Eve quite literally as the first two human beings and that letting go of them was more of an issue. In elementary school, I learned about early humanoids with names like Nean- derthal, Cro-Magnon, and Peking." But it was not until my teenage years that I was struck by the implications of the evi- dence of such creatures. When I entered the stage of critical thinking, I began to wonder if I was supposed to identify the earliest of these with Adam and Eve. But I thought of these early humanoids as "hulking brutes, perhaps barely capable of lan- guage. They did not seem likely candidates for Adam and Eve, whose sons Cain and Abel had engaged in the complex tasks of farming and herding-and Cain had even built a city. So I began to take seriously the likelihood that Adam and Eve

had not been real people. But if that likelihood turned out to be true, what were we to make of the story of the first sin, com- monly called "the fall," in the Garden of Eden? If "the fall" was not historical, how (I wondered) would this affect the Christian story of universal sin, our need for redemption, and Jesus' death as the necessary sacrifice?Something more seemed to be at stake in the historical factuality of Adam and Eve and "the fall" than was involved in lengthening the sixdaysof creation to geological epochs. Resolving these questions was a major theological prob- lem for me. As I wrestled with it, the foundations of my religious understanding began to shake. If the story ofAdam and Evewas not "true" (as a modern teenager, I thought of truth as that which was factual), what happened to the truth of the Bible and Christianity as a whole? I now see these chapters quite differently. Reading them

through the lens of historical scholarship and with sensitivity to their meanings as metaphorical narratives has enabled me once again to see them as profoundly true stories. And because their purpose is not to provide a factually accurate account of the world's beginnings, it is beside the point to argue whether they

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are accurate or mistaken factual accounts. They are not God's stories of the world's beginnings; rather, they are ancient Is- rael's stories of the world's beginnings. As we look at these stories now, we will ask two key questions:

Why did ancient Israel tell these stories? And why did they tell them this way?A historical-metaphorical approach provides illu- minating answers to both.

Historical Illumination The first eleven chapters of Genesis need to be understood not only as the introduction to the Pentateuch, but also in the con- text of the Pentateuch as a whole. They are ancient Israel's stories of her prehistory. By that I

mean two things. First, they are Israel's account of humankind in the. time before her own particular history, a history whose telling begins with the stories of Abraham and Sarah, the father and mother of Israel. Abraham and Sarah, then, are the first his- torical figures in the Bible." Their names appear in a genealogy at the end of Genesis 11, and the story of their call to be the ances- tors ofIsrael begins in Genesis 12. Everything before them is Is- rael's prehistory and functions as a prologue to the Pentateuch and Israel's story of her own ancestors. Second, to call these early chapters of Genesis prehistory

means that they are not to be read ashistorical accounts. Rather, as ancient Israel's stories about the remote beginnings before there was an Israel, they are to be read as a particular kind of metaphorical narrative-namely, as myths, about which I will soon say more. For now, I simply note that while myths are not literally true, they can nevertheless be profoundly true, rich in powerfully persuasive meanings. There is one further point before we turn to the stories them-

selves. Namely, though we typicallybegin reading the Bible with the first chapters of Genesis, they are not where ancient Israel first began telling her story. The creation stories were written rel- atively late. Israel as a people came into existence with the exo-

Reading the Creation Stories Again 63

dus from Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE. At the earliest, Is- rael told a story of creation some three hundred years later. As we shall see in the next chapter, the story of the exodus, the covenant, and the gift of the promised land is Israel's primal nar- rative and foundational story. In short, Israel told the story of the exodus and God's creation of her as a people long before she told the story of God's creation of the world.

Two Stories of Creation

The first three chapters of Genesis contain two stories of creation, written about four hundred years apart. The first one, Genesis 1.1-2.3, wasprobably written in the 500s BCE. Commonly called the "priestly" or "P" story, it is part of a larger block of material extending through the Pentateuch and reflecting priestly and rit- ual concerns. The second one was written earlier. It begins in Genesis 2.4 and continues through the end of chapter 3. Perhaps written in the 900s BCE, it is commonly called the "Yahwist" or "J" creation story, because the author uses "Yahweh" as the name of God. 10 The Yahwist story is also part of a larger narrative ac- count of Israel's origins that extends throughout much of the Pentateuch.U The two stories are quite different.

The P Story The P story (and the Bible as a whole) begins with the earth as "a formless void." In the primeval darkness, the wind (or Spirit) of God moves over the primordial waters:

In the beginning, when God created the heavensand the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the faceof the deep, while awind from God sweptover the face of the waters.P

Then God creates the universe in six days. In a literary struc- ture repeated for each day of creation, the story begins with the creation of light:

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Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day.and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.13

In rapid succession, the rest of the universe is created. On day two, God creates the dome of the sky (the "firmament"), sepa- rating the primordial waters above the sky from those below. On day three, God creates dry land, the seas, and vegetation. On day four, lights are placed in the dome of the sky: sun, moon, and srars.t- On day five, God creates sea life and birds. Finally, on day six, God creates land creatures, concluding with the simultane- ous creation of man and woman: "Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness .... So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."'!.' There are interesting correlations between what God creates on

each of the first three days and what God creates on each of the second three days. A "domain" is created and then populated:

Day one: light Day two: waters and the sky Day three: dry land

Day four: sun, moon, and stars Day five: sea life and birds Day six: land creatures

Then, we are told, on the seventh day God rests, thereby blessing and hallowing that day as the sabbath.

TheJ Story The J creation story begins in Genesis 2.4. It focuses on the cre- ation of humankind and barely treats the creation' of the world. It does not mention the creation of light, or firmament, or sun, moon, and stars, or sea creatures. Rather, it begins with the cre- ation of humankind, of adhasn, a Hebrew word meaning "hu- mankind" and often translated "man." The creation of adbam is . the climax of the very long sentence with which the story begins:

Reading the Creation Stories Again 65

In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heav- ens, when no plant of the fieldwasyet in the earth and no herb of the fieldhad yet sprnng up-for the LORD God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole faceof the ground-then the LORD God formed adham from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath oflife; and adham be- came a livingbeing.le

The P story portrays humankind as the climax of creation by having people created last, after everything else. The J story gives humankind priority by having people created first, before vegetation and animals. In the P story, humans as male and fe- male are created simultaneously; in J, the creation of woman comes later. To provide adham with a place to live, God plants the Garden

of Eden and gives adham permission to eat of all of its trees, ex- cept one: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evilyou shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."!? Then God creates companions for adham: "Then the LORD

God said, 'It is not good that adham should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner. ,,, God creates every beast of the field, and every bird of the air, and brings them to adham. But none of them meets the need: "There was not found a helper fit for adham." So God puts adham to sleep and forms woman out of one of his ribs. No longer alone, adham exclaims, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."18 Into this paradise comes a talking snake. The serpent tempts

the primeval couple to eat from the forbidden tree, "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." He promises them that if they do, they "will be like God, knowing good and evil." They accept the serpent's invitation, and their liveschange dramatically. Now aware of their nakedness, they make loincloths out of fig leaves. Of more serious consequence, they are afraid and hide themselves

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from God. Punishment follows. The woman, now named Eve, is sentenced to pain in childbearing and subjugation to her hus- band. The man, now named Adam, is sentenced to the toil and sweat ofraising food from an earth filledwith thorns and thistles. Both are exiled from the Garden of Eden. The story concludes with Adam and Eve living "east of Eden," the garden's entrance guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. Life in paradise is over.l9 To return to our two key questions: Why did the people of an-

cient Israel tell these stories, and why did they tell them this way? One answer sometimes given is that these stories functioned as primitive science: ancient Israel did not know how the world came into existence, and so she created these stories in order to explain how things came to be. But there is much more going on here thin a prescientific explanation of origins. To state my central claim in advance, Israel told these stories to express her deepest convictions about God and the world, and about what is often called "human nature "-that is,what we are like, and what OUf lives "east of Eden" are like. Before treating more fully the first of these key questions, I

begin with the second question: Why did ancient Israel tell the stories this JVay?

Reading the P Story through a Historical lens Historical study helps us to understand why ancient Israel told these stories in the way that she did. As already noted, the P story was most likelywritten in the 500s BCE. To connect this to ancient Israel's history, the Jewish people went into exile in Babylon after the Babylonian Empire conquered their homeland and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The exile lasted almost fifty years, until 539 BCE, when a small number of Iews returned to a Jerusalem in rnins and began the task of rebuilding a Jewish homeland under the domination of anew imperial power, Persia. Thus, the P story of creation was written during or shortly after the exile.

R,eading the Creation Stories Again 67

The Six-DayCreation Because the Jews were.sharply reduced in numbers duriug this period of history, distinctive practices as a means of sustaining their identity as a people became vitally important. Among these practices was the observance of the sabbath (the seventh day of the week) as a day of rest. Thongh sabbath observance predated the exile, it became even more important during and after the exile. So why does creation take sixdays in the P story? To make the point that even God observes the sabbath. Rather than being intended as a literal account of how long creation took, the six- day creation story was meant to reinforce the importance of the sabbath. '

The Ancient Cosmology The word "cosmology" refers to one's image or "map" of the cosmos or universe. In common with Babylonian and other an- cient Middle Eastern cosmologies, the ancient Israelites thought of the earth as the center of the universe. Above the earth was the dome of the sky, called the "firmament" in many English translations. This understancling is reflected in the P story. On the second day of creation, God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters .... And God called the dome Sky." On the fourth day, God created the sun, moon, and starsand "set them in the dome of the skyto give light upon the earth. "20 What seems like a strange notion to us today actually coincides

well with human experience. The sky looks like a dome over our heads. On it are mounted the sun, moon, and stars, and it rotates around us. Moreover, the notion that there is water above the dome of the sky also reflects experience: water comes from the sky as rain aud snow. Thus, as the flood begins in the time of Noah, we are told, "The fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the firmament were opened."2l Far from pro- viclingus with an understanding of the universe that can be rec- onciled with modern or postmodern science, the cosmology of the P creation story simply reflects the way ancient Israel thought

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things were. Israel told the story this way because she thought of the uuiverse this way. Thus it is Israel's story of creation, not God's story of creation.

The Literary Form of the P Story The P story of creation was likely adapted from an ancient Is- raelite liturgy or hymn of praise to God. Its use of repeating phrases suggests refrains such as are found in hymns and litur- gies. Each of the following is repeated seven times:

"God said, 'Let there be ... '" "And it was so." "And God saw that it was good."

"There was evening and there was morning .-.. ".is repeated after each day of creation. Moreover, the sixdays of creation sug- gest six stanzas. If a liturgy does lie behind the first chapter of Genesis, we should imagine it being sung or chanted, perhaps antiphonally with a cantor and one or more choirs. The recognition that the P story is likely to have been a hymn

or liturgy has an immediate implication: we do not expect hymns to provide accurate factual information. When Christians sing the hymn "Jesus shall reign where're the sun does its successive journeysrun," we arenot saying that we believe the sun goes around the earth. The language of hymns is the language of po- etry, metaphor, and praise. Creation cannot be described, but it can be sung.22 Indeed, Genesis 1 has been described as a "doxology." The

roots of that word mean "words of, or about, glory." A doxol- ogy is a hymn ofpraise, as the most familiarEnglish doxology re- minds us: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow,praise God all creatures here below." Thus the book of Genesis and the Bible as a whole begin with a hymn of praise to God as creator. It is difficult to imagine amore appropriate beginning.

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The Proclamation of Israel's God as Creator The origin of the P story in the time after the Babylonian con- quest adds one more dimension of meaning. In antiquity, when a nation was decisively conquered by another nation, it was com- monly thought that the god (or gods) of the victorious nation had defeated the god of the vanquished nation, exposing that god as inferior or perhaps as no god at all. To many-Babyloni- ans and Jews alike-s-it looked during the exile as if the gods of imperial Babylon had triumphed over the God ofIsrael. In this setting, the opening line and the central claim of the P

creation story defiantly assert that the God ofIsrael is the creator of heaven and earth-of all that is. It proclaims the lordship of Israel's God over against the lordship of Babylon and its gods. The story affirms a "counter-world," an alternative world to the world of ernpire.P This affirmation is, as we shall see, a theme that runs throughout the Bible from beginning to end.

Reading the J Story through a Historical Lens Just as the P story is illuminated by setting it in its historical con- text, so also is the J story of creation.

The Symbolic Meaning of Names The author of the J story uses names in such a way as to suggest that they are symbolic. Adam is not a proper name in ancient. Hebrew; no other person in the Bible is named Adam..Rather, Adam is the Hebrew adham, which (as already noted) is a com- mon noun meaning "humankind." Indeed, the term involves a play on words: adham comes from the Hebrew word adhamah, which means "ground" or "dust." In other words, the first human is a "dust-creature." We are made of dust, made from the earth. Moreover, because this word means "humankind," its use suggests that the author is thinking not of a specifichuman but of Everyman (to borrow the name of the well-known meclieval morality play). The author is telling the story not of a particular person but of "everyone."

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So also the name Eve is not a proper name in Hebrew. It means "mother of all living." "Garden of Eden" also has a sym- bolic meaning: it means "garden of delights" (and, by extension, paradise). Living in a semiarid climate, the ancient Hebrews pic- tured paradise as a green and bountiful garden filledwith streams of flowing water.

Connections to Israel's History There are a number of suggestiveparallels between the narrative flow of the J story and Israel's history, Like adham, ancient Israel was created in a dry land (through the covenant with God in the Sinai desert). Like adham, ancient Israel was given a green and pleasant land in which to live.As in the caseof adham, a prohibi- tion came with the covenant and gift of the land, with the threat of expulsion if the prohibition was violated. And, more specula- tively, the tempter is a serpent, a common symbol of Canaanite fertility religion, which was the primary temptation to infidelity to God that Israel faced in the land. The J story may thus have a prophetic edge to it: if Israel abandons the covenant of faith- fulness toYahweh,she facesexpulsionand exilefrom the land/ gar- den that God had given to her.>

Reading the Creation Stories through a Metaphorical Lens

Now that we have seen some of the historical reasons why Israel told the creation stories as she did, we turn to a reading of these chapters as metaphorical narratives. A metaphorical (and thus nonliteral) approach to these stories is not new. In the third cen- tury, a Christian biblical scholar named Origen, commouly seen along with St. Augustine asone of the two most brilliant theolo- gians of the early church, wrote:

What intelligent person can imagine that there was a first day, then a second and third day, evening and mortling, without the sun, the moon, and the stars? [Sun, moon, and stars are ere-

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ated on the fourth day.] And that the first day-if it makes sense to call it such-existed even without a sky?[The sky is created on the second day.]Who is foolish enough to believe that, likea human gardener, God planted a garden in 'Eden in the East and placed in it a tree of life, visibleand physical,so that by biting into its fruit one would obtain life?And that by eating from another tree, one would come to know good and evil?And when it is said that God walked in the garden in the evening and that Adam hid himself behind a tree, I cannot imagine that anyonewilldoubt that thesedetailspoint symbol- icallyto spiritualmeanings byusing a historicalnarrativewhich did not literallyhappcn.s-

The Creation Stories as Myths As we begin to address the question of why Israel told these sto- ries, it is important to realize that the Genesis stories of creation are myths. That term needs careful explanation, because it has been virtually ruined by its most common modern use. In popu- lar language, "myth" is a dismissive term. To call something a myth is to dismiss it: one need not take it seriously.A myth is seen as a mistaken belief, a falsehood. But the term means something very clifferent in the study of

religion. Myths are not explanations. Myths are not primitive sci- ence. Myths are not mistaken beliefs. Rather, myths are meta- phorical narratives about the relation between this world and the sacred. Myths typically speak about the beginning and ending of the world, its origin and destiny, in relation to God. Myths use nonliteral language; in this sense, they do not narrate facts. But myths are necessary if we are to speak at all about the world's origin and destiny in God. We have no other language for such matters. The clifference between the common clismissiveuse of the

word "myth" and its meaning in the srudy of religion is pointed to in the tide of a book written by Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest scholars of religion in the twentieth century: Myth and Reality.26 In the modern world, myth and reality are commonly

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seen as opposites: we speak of myth or reality. Eliade's point is the opposite: myth and reality go together, myth being the lan- guage for talking about what is ultimately real. For Eliade, myths are true, even though not literally true. To cite another definition: "Myth is a form of poetry which

transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth. "27 To echo what I said about metaphor in the previous chapter, myth ispoetry plus, not science minus. In Christian thought, the Genesis stories of creation have been

.an exceedingly rich mine of mythological and theological mean- ings. They treat the great themes of God as creator, the God- world relationship, the nature of reality, human nature, and the character of human existence. As we explore these themes, we will use conceptual language to clarify the meanings of Israel's myths of the beginnings.

God as Creator To the extent that there is a literal affirmation in ancient Israel's creation myths, it is simply this: God is the source of everything that is. As one of my seminary professors said several decades ago, "The only literal statement in Genesis 1 is 'God created the heavens and the earth.'" Genesis speaks of creation as having happened "in the begin-

ning." In subsequent Christian thought, there are two quite dif- ferent ways of understanding this statement. The first sees creation as "historical origination." Namely, at_a particular mo- ment in the past, at the beginning of time, God created. The sec- ond sees the notion of creation as pointing to a Telation of "ontological dependence." This perhaps unfamiliar phrase means that God is the source of everything that is in every moment of time.28 For this view,affirming that God iscreator is not primarily a statement about origination iri the remote past; rather, it is a statement about the present dependence of the universe upon God. If God ceased to vibrate the universe (and us) into exis- tence, it (and we) would cease to exist. In traditional Christian language, God ascreator is also the sustainer of everything that is:

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The latter way of thinking about creation seems more impor- tant. From a scientific point of view,we do not know whether there was a time when there was "nothing." The contemporary "big-bang theory" of the universe's origin, which speaks of a moment roughly fifteen billion years ago when the present universe began, is quite compatible with thinking of creation as historical origination. Indeed, some have seen the primordial "cosmic flash" of the big-bang theory as strikingly similar to the first act of creation on the first day of the Genesis story: "Let there be light." Twenty years ago, a scientist wryly observed about the big-bang theory:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story euds like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance;he is about to conquer the highest peak; ashe pulls himselfover the finalrock, he isgreeted bya band of theologians who have been sitting there for ccn- turies.J?

But it is alsopossible that there were universes before the pres- ent one. Indeed, it is possible that there have alwaysbeen uni- verses. Seeing the statement "God is the creator" as a claim about ontological dependence means that Christians and Chris- tian theology can be religiously indifferent to the question of whether the universe had a beginning. To say "God is creator" affirms a relationship and process that continues into the pres- ent. It need not refer to a specificevent at aparticular time in the distant past. This way of thinking about God as creator is compatible not

only with the big-bang theory but also with whatever scientific theory might (and almost certainly will) replace it. Indeed, thinking about creation this way means that the affirmation of God as "maker of heaven and earth" is compatible with any sci- entific account of the universe's origins. At the level of ultimate origins, there need be no conflict between Genesis and science. The two do not direcdy compete.

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The God-World Relationship Just as there are two ways of thinking about creation, so there are two models for thinking about the God-world relationship- that is, the relation of God as creator to the universe.s? The first is known as a "production" model. Namely, like an artisan or artist, God makes the universe as something separate from God's self. Once created, the universe exists separate from God, just as a house or a painting exists separate from the builder or artist who produced it. This model is associated with a particular con- cept of God. Known as "supernatural theism," this way of think- ing about God conceptualizes God as "another being" separate from the universe. The second way of thinking about the God-world relation has

been called a "procreative" or "emanationist" model: God brings forth the universe from God's being. Because the universe comes out of God's being, it is in some sense "God-stuff." This model does not identify the universe with God, for God is more than the universe; rather, it sees the universe as being "of God" and "in God." (In other words, the model is panentheistic.)31 To quote a passage from the New Testament, God is "the one in whom we [and everything] liveand move and have our being."32 The differences between these two models for thinking about

the God-world relation matter. The production model suggests that the universe is separate from God and that creation hap- pened in some past moment. The procreative model affirms the presence of God within and beyond the universe and fits the no- tion that creation is an ongoing process, not simply a past event. Finally, whereas the production model and its association with supernatural theism emphasize God's separation from the world, the latter model leads to a much more intimate sense of the closeness of God to the world-indeed, of the presence of God in the world. Obviously, the Genesis stories speak of creation using a pro-

duction model. In Genesis 1, God speaks and the universe comes into being. In Genesis 2, God is like an artisan molding adham out of earth, like a gardener planting a garden, and so forth. In

Reading the Creation StoriesAgain , 75

short, God is portrayed as creating a universe separate from God. But because this is the language of myth and metaphor, the

way we think about the creation stories need not be confined to a semiliteral reading. To cite an analogy, the Bible often speaks of God as a person-like being; this is the natural language of wor- ship and devotion. But that does not mean we must think of God as a person-like being. In any case, whether our thoughts of creation follow a production model or a procreative model, the central truth-claim of the myth remains: God is the source of everything.

The Nature of Reality Central to Genesis 1 is the refrain repeated after each day of cre- ation: "And God saw that it was good." The pronouncement covers everything that exists. To nse a Latin phrase from me- dieval theology, Esse qua essebonum est, or "Being as being is good." This does not mean that everything that happens is good. But whatever exists is good. The creation story is thus strikingly world -affirming. Indeed,

the Jewish tradition as a whole has consistently been world- affirming, in spite of the horrendoussufferings that Jews have experienced. The affirmation is also central to Christian the- ology, although popular Christianity, with its emphasis on the afterlife, has sometimes seen the world (especially "the flesh") as highly problematic, something to keep at a distance, a place to get through on the way to one's heavenly home. But against all world-denying theologies and philosophies, Genesis affirms the world as the good creation of the good God. All that is is good.

Human Nature Ancient Israel's stories of creation affirm two things about us. We are the climax of creation, created in the image of God and given dominion over the earth. Yetwe are also "dust-creatures," people made of earth. As dust-creatures, we are finite and mor- tal. "You are dust, and to dust you will return" are the final words spoken by God to Adam in paradise.ss

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We do not know what ancient Israel meant by affirming that we are created "in the image of God." Perhaps the claim simply reflects the fact that the Genesis stories of creation are anthro- pocentric; that is, they are told from a human point of view and are human-centered, highlighting humans as the climax of cre- ation. The stories are also theocentric, of course-that is, cen- tered in God-but the divine creation they describe leads up to us: we are God's culminating act of creation. Thus whatever cre- ated "in the image of God" means, it is clear that ancient Israel thought there was something special about us. The paradoxical juxtaposition of our special status and our

. smallness in relation to the universe is expressed in the familiar words of one of the creation psalms. In the first half of Psalm 8, the author addresses God and reflects on our insignificance:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established:

what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

Then the author affirms:

Yetyou have made them a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hand; you have put all things under their feet.

The assessment is realistic. We are small, we are finite, we are mortal. And yet there is something different about us. Though we have learned in the last half-century not to speak of

an absolute difference between us and the nonhuman animals, we do have greater consciousness than any species we know of. In us, the universe has become conscious of itself. And to a degree that ancient Israel clid not dream of, we have become dominant, with very mixed consequences for the earth and ourselves.st Yetwe are

Reading the Creation Stories Again 77

creatures of dust, fated to return to dust. Moreover, according to Genesis, we are not simply mortal, but "fallen."

The Character of Human Existence The term "the fall" does not occur in the Genesis story of cre- ation. As a description of the events surrounding Adam and Eve's expulsion from paradise, it is largely a Christian label; Jews typically,do not speak of "the fall." Within the Christian tradition, "the fall" has commonly been

understood to mean "the fall into sin.» It has also been associ- ated with the notion of "original sin," which is not simply the first sin, but a sinfulness that is transmitted to every individual in every generation. This latter notion, which goes far beyond what the Bible says, is usually attributed to the brilliant but troubled theologian Augustine around 400 CEo So as we hear and read this story again, we should try to free ourselves of specifically Christian associations of "the fall." Though the term "the fall" does not occur in rile story itself,

the story of Adam and Eve's accepting the temptation offered by the snake points to something having gone wrong. The con- sequences are vivid, evocative, and thorough, Adam and Eve find themselves living east of Eden in a world that must endure toil and sweat for one's bread and pain and suffering in child- birth. They are banished from paradise forever. The rest of the stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis describe the deep- ening consequences. In the next generation, murder: Adam and Eve's son Cain kills his brother Abel. The violence deepens, until even the boundaries of the cosmos are violated: "the sons of God" are mating with "the daughters of men," with mon- strous consequences. Things are so out of control that God sends a flood to destroy all life except for those on Noah's ark, so that creation can be renewed. But soon thereafter, the cycle begins again in the story of the tower of Babel: humans try to build a tower that reaches into the heavens. But God overturns their effort and humankind is ftagmented into its "babble" of different languages.

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Clearly the Hebrew storyteller is saying that something has gone wrong. Life began in paradise but is now lived outside the garden, in an exile of hard labor, suffering, pain, violence, and fragmentation. Though the world is beautiful, something is not right; we do live in a world of suffering and pain. But what went wrong? What action, desire or deed, led to

such pervasive consequences? The language of the storyteller is evocative, not precise. It does not clearly point to a particular reading. Thus, over the centuries, a variety of understandings of "what went wrong" have emerged. Each leads to a somewhat different understanding of "sin"-that primal act that plunged human beings into a world of suffering-and each expresses nu- ances of "whatwent wrong."

The Primal Act as Disobedience The first understanding is the simplest, though not necessarily the most perceptive. The act re- sponsible for Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden was disobedi- ence. God gave them a command, they disobeyed it, and that was that. The emphasis is on the disobedience itself, not on what the act of disobedience was. For this view in its most elementary form, it would have made no difference if God's prohibition had been, "Please don't eat the daisies." This view typically leads to seeing sin in general as a matter of disobedience: God gives us commands and rules and laws, and we break them. The human problem is disobeying God the law-giver.

The Primal Act as Hubris A second understanding agrees that disobedience was involved but emphasizes what the act of disobe- dience involved. In particular, it focuses on the first half of the ser- pent's temptation: «You will be like God, knowing good and evil." The desire is to become Godlike, to tower above who we are, to be the center of creation. In the Christian theological tradition, this is known as hubris, a Greek word commonly translated "pride." But in this context it means more than the everyday meaning

of the word "pride," as in the sentence, "I was proud of myself when I did that." Hubris means exceeding one's proper limits; it

Reading the Creation Stories Again 79

means giving to one's self the place that belongs to God alone; it means malting one's self the center. Hubris can take many forms, ranging from aworld-conquering arrogance to aself-preoccupied malaise. What these forms have in common is a life centered in the self and its concerns. Sin-the human problem-is thus hubris understood asself-centeredness.

The Primal Act as Sloth A third understanding is almost the op- posite of the pride discussed above. The word "sloth" does not mean "laziness" in this context. Rather, it means "leavingit to the snake"-letting something else author one's existence. It means uncritically accepting somebody else's ideas about how to. live one's life. In this view,sin-the human problem-is heteronomy: living the agenda of others.3S

The Primal Act as the Birth of Consciousness A fourth under- standing also focuses on what the primal act was, but it empha- sizes the second half of the serpent's temptation: "Youwill be like God, knowinggood and evil." "Knowing good and evil" is under- stood broadly to mean having knowledge of opposites, a capabil- ity that is intrinsic to the birth of consciousness. Consciousness involves distinguishing one thing from another; above all, it in- volves the self-world distinction, the awareness that the world is "other" than one's self. The birth of consciousness is something we all experience; all

of us become aware of the self-world distinction very early in life. Thus we cannot avoid the primal act. Iudeed, this under- standing emphasizes not the disobedience and sinfulness of "the fall," but its inevitability. All of us begin life in the womb with an experiential sense of undifferentiated unity; we begin in par- adise. But the very process of growing up and the birth of consciousness that is intrinsic to it propels us into a world of di- vision, anxiety, and suffering. Living "east of Eden" is intrinsic to the experience of being human. We all go through "the fall" and live in a state of exile and estrangement; it cannot be avoided.w

80 THE HEBREW BIBLE

These various understandings can also be combined. For exam- ple, the birth of consciousness typically leads to hubris, under- stood as being centered in one's self. Moreover, centering in one's self intensifies the sense of separation from the world, deepening the experience of exile. The process of socialization leads to sloth understood asheteronomy: we internalize and live in accord with the agendas of others, including parents, culture, and religion. Al; already mentioned, it is impossible to say that the Hebrew

storyteller intended one of these more than the other, or in- tended any or allof these. But the creation stories are an example par excellence of a religious classic: they are stories that have a surplus of meanings. Moreover, whatever the storyteller's sense of what went wrong

in paradise, the story's picture of the consequences is persuasive and compelling. Most of us most of the time live "east of Eden." What this means isvividlyportrayed in the painting The Expulsion ofAdam and Eve by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Masaceio. As the first couple is driven out of Eden, Adam's head is down, both hands covering his eyes; Eve's face is upturned, but her mouth is open in ahowl of pain, her features full of grief and sor- row. At least some of the time, lifeoutside of Eden is like that.

The Creation Stories and Postcritical Naivete

Given the richness of meaning that a historical-metaphorical reading of Genesis reveals, the creation stories strike me as pro- foundly true. Critical thinking leads to an understanding of why the details of Genesis are as they are and also makes clear that their truth is not to be understood in literal, factual terms. Rather, their truth is expressed in the nonconceptuallanguage of myth and metaphor, and no particular reading can exhaust their meanings. But I can hear the truth of their central claims. "This"-the

universe and we-is not self-caused, but grounded in the sacred. "This" is utterly remarkable and wondrous, a Mystery beyond

Reading the Creation Stories Again 81

words that evokes wonder, awe, and praise, We begin out lives "in paradise," but we all experience expulsion into a world of exile, anxiety, self-preoccupation, bondage, and conflict. And yes, also a world of goodness and beauty: it is the creation of God. Bur it is a world in which something is awry. The rest of the Bible is to a large extent the story (and stories)

of this state of affairs: the human predicament and its solution. Our lives east of Eden are marked by exile, and we need to re- turn and reconnect; by bondage, and we need liberation; by blindness and deafness, and we need to see and hear again; by fragmentation, and we need wholeness; by violence and con- flict, and we need to learn justice and peace; by self- and other- centeredness, and we need to center in God. Such are the central claimsofIsrael's stories of human beginnings.

NOTES 1. The Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament arc identical in con- tent, though divided differently. In the former, there are twenty-four books; in the latter, thirty-nine books. The Catholic Old Testament in- cludes another twelve books, commonly called "The Apocrypha" or "Deuterocanonical" books. Orthodox Christians (often called "Eastern Orthodox") include another four.

2. This rejection came about in what is known 'as the Marcionite controversy. Marcion was a second-century Roman Christian who rejected the Hebrew Bible as un-Christian and affirmed a very abbreviated portion of what later became the New Testament.

3. See quotation from the third-century Christian theologian Origen later in this chapter.

4. The dates he calculated still appear in the margins of some Bibles. 5. See George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 17-26; Ian G. Barbour, Issuesin Science a'nd Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp- 9~104, and Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), pp. 49-74.

6. For an analysis and critique of Sscieutific creationism" orvcreation science," see Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science (Atlanta: Knox, 1984). His book as a whole is an excellent study of the cre- ation stories, integrating modern biblical scholarship, science, and myth.

7. For a discussion of precritical naivete, see chap. 3. 8. And, of course, we now know of humanoids much older than the ones I heard of when I was a child.

9. To speak of them as historical figures does not imply that the stories about them are straightforward historical reports, or even that we have any accu-

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rate historical information about them. Rather, it means that Israel located the story of Abraham and Sarah in a recognizable historical context.

10. Let me explain why J is the common abbreviation for the "Yahwist" source of the Pentateuch. The source theory of the Pentateuch originated in Ger- man biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century. The German language, which does not have the letter 1;uses the letter] for the sound made by the English Y Thus in German the name of God is "Iahweh" and the abbrevia- rion is]. But it is conventional in English to spell "Iahweh" as "Yahweh." Hence the odd result that the Yahwisr source is the J source.

II. In this section I accept what has been the common scholarly understanding of the sources of the Pentateuch for over a century. Recently that under- standing has come under review and revision bv some Hebrew Bible schol- ars. Though P and its dating in the 500s are still widely accepted, there are serious questions about whether J should be thought of as an early con- nected narrative or as a mixture of traditions from many periods of Israel's history, with some of it as late in date as P. For a summary of the case made by several scholars for regarding much of J as late, see Joseph Blenkinsopp, TIle Pentateuch (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Some recent scholars con- tinue to see] as early. See, for example, Terence Fretheim's commentary on Genesis in The New Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), vol. 1, Pp. 319-674. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg's The Book of] (New York; Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) is based on an early date for] (and some- what provocatively and eccentrically argues that the author was likely a woman). If the debate among Hebrew Bible scholars concludes with a later date for J, my analysis would not be affected in any significant way, for my comments on J do not depend upon an early date.

12. Gen. 1.1-2. 13. Gen. 1.3-5. 14. The sequence of creative acts points to the impossibility of reconciling the

Genesis stories of creation with modern scientific knowledge simply by ex- tending the timeframe from days to geological epochs. Note that light is created on the first day and yet sun, moon, and stars are not created until the fourth day. Indeed, the creation of vegetation (day three) precedes the creation of sun, moon, and stars.

15. Gen. 1.26-27. The use of the plural pronouns "us" and "our" has often puzzled people: Who is God talking to? Though Christians have sometimes seen this as a reference to the Trinity, that is impossible in an ancient He- brew story, roughly a thousand years earlier than the notion of the Trinity. Most scholars think that the passage makes use of the image of God as a king surrounded by a heavenly council, such as we find, for example, in I Kings 22.19-23. .

16. Gen. 2.4--7. Note: whenever the word LoRD appears all incapital Ietrers, as it does here, it is a translation of "Yahweh," the Hebrew sacred name of God.

17. Gen. 2.17. 18. Gen. 2.18-23. 19. Gen. 3.1-24.

Reading the Creation Stories Again 83

20. Gen. 1.6,14-17. 21. Gen. 7.11. 22. For other hymns of creation in the Hebrew Bible, see Ps. 8, Ps. 104. 23. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: Knox, 1982), pp. 24-27. His expo-

sition of Gen. 1-3 is filled with brilliant insights (pp. 11-54). 24. If T is early, then the possibility of exile is a warning. If J is late, then exile

has happened. And whether or not the J material is early, its integration into the P narrative occurs during or after Israel's actual experience of exile..

25. Origen, De Principiis, 4.1.16. Translation is mine; parenthetical material added. For an older English translation, see The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979, reprint of1885 edition) vol. 4, p. 365. Origcn also says that the Bible con- . tains "countless instances of a similar kind that were recorded as having oc- curred, but which did not literally take place." Even "the gospels themselves arc filled with the same kind of narratives." Origen also strongly affirms that he sees much of the Bible as historical.

26. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 27. H. 'and H. A. Frankfurt, The InteltectualAdventure ofAncient Man (Chicago:

Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 8. The quotation continues by affirming that myth is "a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning."

28. But not of everything that happens. The distinction between "everything that is" and "everything that happens" is important. To say that God is the source of every existing entity is not to say that God is the cause of every- thing that happens. This applies especially to human behavior, but also to "natural" occurrences such as weather, earthquakes, hurricanes, and so forth. .

29. Robert Iastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, 1980), pp. 105-6. The literature on the relationship between religion and science is vast. Among recent books that I especially recommend are Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science (see note 6 above); Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 2000); Philip Clayton, God and Contemporary Science (Grand Rapids: Ecrdmans, 1997); Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperSanFran- cisco, 1997).

30. For the two models, see Sallie McFague, The Body of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 151-57. See also her Models of God (Philadelphia: For- tress, 1987), pp. 109-16.

31. This view is not to be confused with pantheism, commonly understood to mean the identification of the universe with God. The roots of panentheism are very ancient. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the roots go back to the Bible's affirmation of both the transcendence and tile immanence of God. For my description of the differences between supernatural theism, pantheism, and panentheism, see The God We Never Knew (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), chaps. 2-3. As an explicitly developed concept, . panentheism is becoming more and more common among mainline Christ- ian theologians. See, for example, Clayton, God and Contemporary Science, pp.82-124.

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32. Acts 17.28. 33. Gen. 3.19 34. Some historians of culture have argued that the modern domination and

destruction of nature has its roots in the Bible as the sacred text of Western culture, especially the creation story with its affirmation of God-given human dominion in Gen. 1.28:·"Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." The indictment has some substance: the dominion text was often cited to legit- imate modern Western "development" of the world. But it is probably not fair to the text itself. Walter Brueggemann comments that the dominance referred to in Gen. 1.28 "is that of a shepherd who cares for, tends, and feeds the animals" and notes that it pertains to "securing the well-being of every other creature and bringing the promise of each to full fruition" (Genesis, p. 32).

35. lowe this understanding to the title and content of Harvey Cox's On Not Leaving It to the Snake (New York:Macmillan, 1967). Paul Tillich, one of the two most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, makes the same point when he speaks of "heteronomy" asone of three ways of living one's life. "Heteronomy" means living in accord with the agenda of others (people, culture, the nation) and so forth). "Autonomy" means livingwith one's self as the center (and is thus hubris). "Theonomy" means living with God as one's center; it is the desirable state of affairs, and that from which we have "fallen" into either heteronomy or autonomy.

36. For an exposition of this understanding within the framework of Jungian psychology, see Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (New York:Penguin) 1973), esp. pp. 16-36.