Interpreting Genesis 1

Modern readers bring a distinctive perspective to the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians call ‘the Old Testament’. Unlike readers before the modern era, we wonder how (and whether) all this fits with modern science, how it relates to things like evolution? Such questions were emphatically not in the mind of the author of Genesis and his first readers. Nevertheless, they are in the minds of readers today, and so there is no point in attempting to side-step the issues. But before we can hope to answer the question of what relevance (if any) the first chapter of Genesis has to contemporary scientific debates, we need to put it in its context – and that means its historical, cultural, religious, as well as its literary context. You may have heard it said that “A text taken out of context becomes a pretext.” In other words, unless we pay attention to context, verses and texts can be made to mean almost anything we want them to. And so let us start by asking “what kind of literature is Genesis 1?”

Structure and Poetic Parallelism

The fact that there are obvious problems with taking the order of events depicted in Genesis 1 in literal, chronological fashion (e.g. light is created and days pass before the sun is made) should immediately suggest the possibility that the order and structure have some other purpose than chronology in mind. If we set the days side by side, we immediately see a parallelism between days 1-3 of creation and days 4-6:

Forming		Filling
Day 1: light & dark, day & night		Day 4: sun, moon, stars
Day 2: waters above & below		Day 5: birds and fish/sea animals
Day 3: dry land		Day 6: land animals
	Day 7: Sabbath rest

By looking at the structure of this passage and its description of the seven days of creation, we see that the emphasis lies, not on the order of events in which creation took place, but on the completeness of it. God made all places, and all things that dwell in them. This parallelism certainly alerts us to the very real possibility that the order of the days intends to emphasize something other than the chronological order of events.

Science and Biblical Interpretation

Those who call themselves ‘creation-scientists’ frequently emphasize that Pasteur and others have disproved the idea of ‘spontaneous generation’, i.e. the idea that life can originate from non-living matter. However, ‘spontaneous generation’ appears to be precisely the way the author of Genesis understood life to have arisen! Let’s take a look at Genesis 1:11-12,20:

1:11 God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and fruit trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds." It was so. 1:12 The land produced vegetation-plants yielding seeds according to their kinds, and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. God saw that it was good… 1:20 God said, "Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky."

Here we find the earth and the water producing life at God’s command. If one takes Genesis in a completely literal fashion, as certain fundamentalist interpreters argue that one must, then we find that the very scientific conclusions appealed to by ‘creation scientists’ are at odds, not only with evolution, but with the book of Genesis as well! This is but one of many ironies about the position of literalist, seven-day creationists. In fact, science has essentially disproved the pre-scientific view (found in the book of Genesis as well) that life arises all at once, fully-formed, from non-living matter. It has never disproved that life can develop from naturally-occurring building blocks such as amino acids over long periods of time. Nor can it ever disprove that at some point in the past a divine being commanded life to simply ‘pop into existence’ out of nothing. But what science can do is show how life, in accordance with the known laws of science, could have developed without the need for miraculous divine intervention. And when this is coupled with the evidence of speciation (both among living organisms and in the fossil record), it certainly becomes clear that so-called ‘creation scientists’ really don’t have much of a case. Genesis was written in the context of a pre-scientific worldview, and that is the language it speaks.

So if Genesis does not teach modern science, then what is it about? To me, it seems to address precisely the concerns about the doctrine of God and creation that the author’s contemporaries had. The following links will take you to the text of the Babylonian creation myth, called Enuma Elish:

In this story, which was the creation myth of the dominant culture in the time Genesis 1 was written, the world originates from Tiamat, the dragon of chaos and of the waters of the sea. In Genesis, the world is without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep waters (the Hebrew word used is tehom, a word derived from the same root as ‘Tiamat’). In the Babylonian story, the gods who wish to create order must do battle with Tiamat. Although in other parts of the Bible there are allusions to the story of God battling the sea (we shall return to this subject below), in Genesis 1 God simply speaks, and the waters submit to God’s command. As in the Enuma Elish story, where Marduk begins reigning in Tiamat by using the power of the winds, so in Genesis the spirit/wind of God is upon the face of the deep (tehom). Nevertheless it is significant God does not need helpers for the work of creation, unlike the gods who band together for the battle in Enuma Elish. And just like Marduk, so also God in Genesis takes the waters and divides them, so that those above are kept there by a solid firmament, whereas those below become the sea:

Genesis 1:6-10

Enuma Elish (tablet 4)

And God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."
And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.

And God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear." And it was so.

God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

Then the lord rested, gazing upon her dead body,
While he divided the flesh of the ... , and devised a cunning plan.

He split her up like a flat fish into two halves;
One half of her he established as a covering for heaven.
He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman,
And bade them not to let her waters come forth.
He passed through the heavens, he surveyed the regions thereof,

And over against the Deep he set the dwelling of Nudimmud.

And the lord measured the structure of the Deep,
And he founded E-sara, a mansion like unto it.
The mansion E-sara which he created as heaven,
He caused Anu, Bel, and Ea in their districts to inhabit.

In the context of the ideas of that time rather than ours, the Genesis creation story makes a lot of sense. It takes up contemporary ideas precisely to transform them and challenge them. It is addressed to a different, pre-scientific world. Understood as part of a ‘war of myths’, attempting to answer Babylon’s understanding of God and creation on their own terms, the language of Genesis makes a lot of sense. As a scientific discourse addressed to the issue of Darwinism, it makes almost no sense at all. I will leave you the reader to decide which reading is ‘better’.

There are still hints left within the Bible that indicate that once Israel held a view of God’s battle with the sea that was much closer to that of her neighbors. The reason that this earlier, ‘more mythological’ language is preserved in the Bible as we now have it is probably the fact that the language of God’s victory over the sea was applied as well to the exodus from Egypt, and thus could not be entirely done away with. In a sense, in the P creation account in Genesis 1, and in the references to the exodus, a sort of ‘demythologization’ is taking place, as traditional mythical language is applied either to historical events or to creation understood in a more theologically sophisticated manner. Nonetheless, take a look at the following verses to see remnants of the earlier forms of these ideas, where God fights against the sea monster, called Rahab, Leviathan, or Yam (i.e. Sea):

God vs. Rahab the sea monster: Isaiah 51:9-10; Psalm 89:10-11; Job 26:12-13. (The name Rahab is applied to Egypt in Ps. 87:4)

A Warning from Saint Augustine

St. Augustine wrote: "Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances,... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, lest the unbeliever see only ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn." (De Genesi ad litteram [The Literal Meaning of Genesis] Book 12). This seems to me good advice to follow, even though some of Augustine’s own statements seem with hindsight to be just as subject to his own criticism! Nevertheless, his own interpretation attempts to harmonize the Bible with the science and philosophy of his day, and warns that we cannot be certain exactly what kinds of days the days of creation in Genesis were.

Want more information about creation (especially creation out of nothing)? Try the following links:

GENESIS 1 - 2

Interpreting Israel's Creation Story

The Perspective From Which We Read

Structure and Poetic Parallelism

Science and Biblical Interpretation

A Warning from Saint Augustine

OTHER LINKS