Christians, even those of us who don't know Hebrew, have an interest in studying the OT as carefully as we can. For good or ill, the interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis has become a theological hot-spot, and it raises questions for laymen like me, who yearn for the unity in the family of Christ, but who also are committed to the purity of doctrine. Before addressing the text directly, I will say a few words about inspiration in general, then procede to investigate the cultural context in which the text was written.
There seem to be two kinds of processes by which a divine revelation is given in human language. First, something like a voice from heaven may directly announce the message. Second, God may use an inspired author's natural abilities to produce the message. When Paul wrote his epistles he was writing as himself, by means of his own natural abilities; he is not reporting what he heard spoken by a voice from heaven. Rather, God, who forordains whatsoever comes to pass, forordained that Paul, in writing out of his own natural abilities, would produce a letter that is also the very word of God, infallible and inerrant.
On which of these models should we understand the Pentateuch? Certainly, there are many places where it is recorded that God spoke directly--in giving the ten commandments, for instance. But the work as a whole is not that way. It is rather a reporting of something that the author was eyewitness to (assuming, as I believe, that most of the Pentateuch was written either by Moses, or by someone closely connected with Moses). How did the author of Numbers know, for instance, that "the people of Israel, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kadesh. And Miriam died there and was buried there"? Because he was there when it happened; not because God spoke those words from heaven.
For this reason, the historical facts about Moses are relevant to understanding the original meaning of the text. Now, if the Pentateuch was written by a Hebrew man educated in the royal house of Egypt, a knowledge of what the Egyptians thought about the origin of the world, and of how they talked about that sort of thing, would help in understanding the first chapter of Genesis. I want to suggest that Moses is using symbols common in Egyptian mythology in order to criticize and repudiate Egyptian theology.
Ancient Egytptians, of course, didn't write abstract philosophical treatises. They told stories. But their stories weren't just stories. According to Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark, the stories were understood to be symbolic, particularly in the Hermopolitan and Memphite traditions, which become relatively abstract in their speculations, even though they always retain a connection to the concrete story. And this is so important to my argument that I am going to repeat it: the Egyptians themselves -- some of them at least -- understood their stories to be, at least in part, symbolic representations of more or less abstract ideas.
Rundle Clark writes, "The basic principle of Egyptian cosmology is the Primeval Waters. It is common to all the accounts of the origin of the universe however much they may differ in detail. Every creation myth assumes that before the beginning of things the Primordial Abyss of waters was everywhere. ... all was dark and formless. The present cosmos is a vast cavity, rather like an air-bubble, amid the limitless expanse. ... For the Egyptians as for the Hebrews, the sky was a 'firmament' which 'divides the waters from the waters.' The universe is the abode of light. Thus, all the legends of origin are ... explanations of how the positive region of light and form was generated amid the indefinite watery nothingness of the timeless night." (Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, 35)He continues, "Water is formless, it has no positive features and of itself assumes no shape. The Primeval Waters being infinite, all dimensions, directions or spatial qualities of any kind are irrelevant. Nevertheless the waters are not nothing. They are the basic matter of the universe ..." (ibid.) But in some traditions the Waters are identified as nothingness. "At Hermopolis, ... there was a doctrine that the idea of the abyss could be best conveyed by saying what it was not. ... The Shu Texts of the First Intermediate Period [c. 2250 B.C.], which are strongly influenced by Hermopolitan ideas, have preserved a phrase: 'in the infinity, the nothingness, the nowhere and the dark.'" (54)
The Egyptian creation account begins in these waters, and this is how they begin: In the beginning, something comes into existence of itself, emerging out of the nothingness of the abyss.
Rundle Clark again: "The emergence from the waters has four aspects: it signifies the coming of light, life, land and consciousness. The legends of how things began--the cosmogenies--differ according to which elements are stressed. ... There is no recorded cosmogony where only one of these four elements is considered in isolation; every account is a compound of several symbols." (36) In the most common version what arises is the high god Atum, who is a mound of earth. After coming into existence, the first thing Atum does is masturbate. His hand is therefore (!) deified as a goddess. Atum's semen becomes two deities, the god Shu (Life) and the goddess Tefnut (Order); it is also said that those two came from Atum's spit, or breath, or word. Throughout the mythology, to a greater or lesser degree, the deity who begets is identified with those things that are begotten. And those things -- the structural elements of the world -- are also treated as deities in their own right. Rundle Clark, again, "The basic arrangement of the universe is, then, a combination of Atum as Primary Spirit, Life and the World Order." Sometimes Shu and Tefnut are portrayed as the limbs of Atum, which Atum forms the earth out of. In one place it says that Shu is "coextensive" with Atum. and sometimes it is said that Atum was still in the Primeval Waters when he engendered Shu and Tefnut. This might be an attempt to express the idea that Atum created himself while he was still non-existent. Atum is called "Self-Creator" in the Coffin Texts.
From the union of Shu and Tefnut come to two more deities, Geb (Earth) and Nut (Heaven). At first Geb and Nut are joined together. Shu separates them, lifting the Heavens above the Earth. From the union of Geb and Nut come Osiris, Isis, Seth and a few other gods. Osiris (who represents fertility and agriculture) rules over Egypt in a golden age. Then Seth kills Osiris and scatters his body parts. Isis gathers the body parts of Osiris, partly revives him, and, in spite of the fact that he is still mostly dead, copulates with him. She then gives birth to Horus, who fights with his uncle Seth for the rule of Egypt. In this struggle, Seth stands for brute strength and Horus stand for law and order. Horus is declared the winner, and becomes Pharaoh. Every time Egypt's Pharaoh dies, he becomes Osiris, and his son (the next Pharaoh) becomes Horus. The reigning Pharaoh is thus always Horus, responsible for law and order, and his dead father is always Osiris, responsible for the fertility of the crops.
A: The historical context.
Now let's return to Genesis. One of the things that always used to puzzle me, before I had read anything about Egyptian mythology, was the fact that there was no account of the creation of water. God makes light, and then separates it from darkness, but when he separates the waters, he doesn't make them first. It's as if they were already there. Does this mean that water was some kind of preexisting stuff, coeternal with God?
But of course I didn't have a similar puzzlement concerning darkness. Obviously, darkness is just an absence of light, a nothing rather than a something. God doesn't need to create it before separating it from light. Now, in the Egyptian culture, the Primeval Waters also were understood, at least by some, as symbolic of nothingness, emptiness, non-being. Thus I think it makes sense to see the waters over which the Spirit broods as symbolic of the non-being of the world before creation, and parallel to the words "formless and void" that describe the "earth" (but remember this is before earth, in the sense of "land", was created). This conjecture is coroborated by the fact that throughout the scriptures this symbolism is repeated: the sea represents the threat of uncreation. In the great flood, God repents of his having created, and destroys all except those who are in the ark, which is a type of Christ. And when the Israelites pass through the waters of the Red Sea, they experience a kind of baptism into death, while the Egyptians are swallowed by that death. And when Jonah is tossed into the sea, he speaks of being in the belly of Sheol (the place of the dead); Jonah's three-day sojourn beneath the Waters represents Christ's three days in the grave (As Tim Keller puts it: your maker was unmade that you might be remade). This symbolism may also explain why the disciples are so astonished when Christ commands the wind and waves, and when he walks on the sea: perhaps they understood these things to be symbolic of the kind of ex-nihilo creative power that belongs to God alone. It also explains why, when God creates the new heavens and earth, there is no longer any sea (Revelation 21.1), and no more night (v.25).
Some Hebrew scholars [citation needed] hold that the word usually translated "beginning" should, by the grammar of the sentence, be understood as an active verb in a dependent clause, rather than as a participle; that is, not "In the beginning God created ...", but, "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, ..." and now note the parallelism that comes to light if we understand what follows as three ways of symbolically speaking of the non-being of pre-creation: "When God begant to create the heavens and the earth: 1) the earth was formless and void, 2) darkness was over the face of the abyss, 3) and the Sprit of God was brooding over the face of the Waters."
And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light.
One sees here the repudiation of three core ideas in Egyptian cosmology. First, God does not arise out of nothingness, he is eternal; when all else is nothing, he is already there. This is implicit in the structure of the story -- it doesn't have to be stated explicitly. Secondly, God does not engender the world, he creates it, not out of himself, but out of nothing, in such a way that the creature is entirely distinct from Him. Thirdly, the lineaments of the world are never deified. The creator alone is divine, never the creature.
Now we approach the heart of the controversy: "God called the light 'day' and the darkness he called 'night', and there was evening and there was morning, the first day." Are we to understand this first day as a 24 hr. period? One argument often urged against that interpretation is that the length of a 24 hr. day is defined by the cirucuit of the sun, and the sun has not yet been created. It only comes in on the fourth day. But the more important point is this: if my basic approach is right, we are in a highly symbolic context here. The creation of light is the dawn of time. It is that light that is called "day", and the preceding time of darkness, which was over the face of the abyss in v.1, and which God separated light from, is called "night". What sort of "separation" is this? The distinction between night and day, evening and morning, is not spatial. The separation of night and day represents the distinction of before and after. The darkness of non-being (pre-creation), followed by the light of created being.
So we can undestand the evening of the first day as the darkness of pre-creation. If we wish to think of this less picturesquely and more abstractly, we must say that the evening of the first day is either infinite in past time, or else that it is outside of time altogether. We might even interpret the "separation" of night and day as the creation of time itself: God created time by making a distinction between "before" and "after". In any event, just as the first day is not a 24 hr. period, neither are any of the others, for all the days of creation are of the same sort, whatever sort of days they may be. On this interpretation, each evening-morning sequence can be seen as a recapitulation of the sequence: pre-creation darkness, followed by created light.
Concerning the Egyptian cosmogeny as it occurs in Spell 75 of the Coffin Texts, Rundle Clark writes, "Creation is not a series of events in time but a speculation about the principles of life and the arrangement of the cosmos." If this is a correct understanding of the Egyptian text, then it is at least possible that Moses, using the same symbolic "language", in speaking of evening-and-morning, evening-and-morning, also was not speaking of a series of events in time, but rather of the mystery of God's calling being from nothingness, form from formlessness, life from non-life, time from "the indefinite watery nothingness of the timeless night", and, in general, each of the various lineaments of the world, ex nihilo.
In sum, given that we know Moses was raised and educated as an Egyptian, given the symbolic, quasi-philosophical character of Egyptian creation accounts, given the role that such motifs as water, abyss, darkness, night, light, day, heaven and earth play in those accounts, a reasonable conjecture seems to me to be that the seven days (seven represents completeness and perfection in both Egyptian and Hebrew literature) should not be interpreted as consecutive time-periods, whether 24 hr days, or "ages" of indefinite length. They are not sequential time-period at all. Rather, each of the six days of creation can be seen as re-expressing, each in its own different way, how God began with absence, emptiness, formlessness, chaos, and by his power brought being, fullness, form, and order. And the seventh day represents God's satisfaction in his work and its perfection.
B: The textual context.
Let us look now at the context of ch.1 in relation to the rest of Genesis. Notice that ch. 1 comes before the first "toledot" (usually translated "generations") . The most prominent structural feature of the book of Genesis is that it is divided into ten sections, each beginning, "these are the generations of ...". History was conceptualized, in Genesis, as a series of "generations". Thomas Cahill, in The Gift of the Jews, notes how, by means of the toledots, the Hebrew scriptures introduce the idea of "history". This was a radical idea in its time. For the first time, the most important stories by which a people defined themselves were stories about particular, unrepeatable events in their past. Before, the important stories of a culture were always situated in an ever-recurring cycle. (Horus is always defeating Seth as the Pharaoh's laws conquer the elements of brute force in society; Osiris is always dying as each year seed is planted in the ground). Now, for the Hebrews, the most important stories of their culture came together to form a connected story about the chosen people.
But the first chapter of Genesis precedes the toledots, standing as a kind of introductory section. I think we could say that in a certain sense it precedes history. The dawn of time is not a historical event, but a pre-historical event. Note, I'm not saying it didn't really happen in the past. It certainly did. And in that sense it is "history". But it is possible to describe past events in a non-historical way. It is possible to describe them in a highly symbolic way. And this is how I am suggesting that we should understand Genesis 1, if, as I surmise, the Hebrew concept of "history" has to do with human beings and their geneologies, so that things that happened in the past before there were human beings would not be "history" in that sense. (I once heard a story about some missionaries who were ministering to a secluded tribe somewhere, and it wasn't until they they started translating the geneologies that the tribe members realized that the Bible was about real people).
On the other hand, I could be wrong. I am neither an Egyptologist nor a Hebrew scholar. What I have written is a layman's conjecture. Even so, it should cast doubt on the statement that I have often heard made that the book of Genesis "very clearly" contradicts the current scientific consensus that the universe is some billions of years old. A more careful investigation of the text and of the cultural context in which it was written could lead one to accept or to reject my conjecture. But this is something about which reasonable Christians, who care about understanding God's word aright, can disagree. One thing at least should be clear: I am not squeezing the text to fit a modern scientific theory. I am trying to understand it in terms of the context in which it was written.
The question of how long ago God created the world is not one that vexes me much. God, being omnipotent, certainly could have done it a few thousand or a few billion years ago. If he had decided to do it differently than he did, my faith in Christ's atoning work would not be affected, I would not worship God any less, my hope in the resurrection would remain undiminished, my submission to the apostolic teaching of the NT, and my commitment to the plenary verbal inspiration of the whole Bible, would remain intact. And for this reason I am deeply vexed when Christian brothers are disfellowshiped or called heretics, Christian ministers defrocked, Christian teachers removed from their posts, all on account of their interpretation of one passage, which has no significant theological ramifications.
All of the great eccumenical doctrines, which Christians have historically regarded as essential to their faith, and all of the Calvinistic distinctives, which Reformed churches have historically believed to be important for maintaining the purity of the gospel, remain untouched by this question. The church has never regarded Augustine as apostate simply for believing, as he did, that the creation was instantaneous, rather than taking 6 times 24 hours. Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield retain their status as two of the most important conservative Reformed theologians, even believing, as they did, that the testimony of Scripture was consistent with a universe very much older than 6,000 yrs. Those who would raise this question to the level of an essential doctrine are guilty of theological innovation of the worst sort. It is destructive of the unity of the brethren; it undermines the teaching ministry of the church; and it should be loudly repudiated by those in positions of authority among the people of God.
Does it matter, then, what the first chapter of Genesis means? Certainly. And not just the agreed upon aspects (for we all agree it means, among other things, that God is eternal, that nothing else is, that God alone is the ultimate source of both the existence and the order of all things, that what God made was good and perfect, that he made it out of nothing, and that the creature is distinct from the creator and is never to be worshiped). Every exegetical question matters. It matters because it is the word of God, and whatever God says matters to his people. And the best way to come to a true understanding of what God in fact is saying to his people in this, or any passage, is to hash it out together, as brothers, united in faith, guided by the Spirit, working out our differences in interpretation, ideally from a framework of basic agreement on the system of doctrine passed on to us in Scripture as a whole. This goal is not attained by making every exegetical question a test of orthodoxy.
Whatever your interpretation of Genesis 1, whether you agree with me or not, I plead with you to stand boldly against the theological innovation that would make a shibboleth of this.
Posted by mccartney at July 15, 2008 12:42 PM