Feeling Small and Standing in Awe: Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 I have spent most of my life near the sea. Every once in a while I like to visit the beaches here in my hometown of San Diego and just watch the people. Invariably there will be someone visiting from the middle of America who has never seen the ocean. Watching their awe is interesting. And it is almost a certainty: They will comment on how ‘big’ it seems. Or on how small they feel as they look down at the tide as it washes over their feet and then up at the perfectly flat horizon. It is seems especially amazing as the sun dips below that horizon. I imagine if I were to find myself in the middle of America – let’s say in the ‘Big Sky’ country of Montana – I would be as enthralled by the expanse of the sky as they would be by the expanse of the sea. The sea and sky just seem to hold our attention in that way. As the writer of Ecclesiastes said: There is nothing new under the sun. From the beginning of time people have been enthralled by these things. Among the people of Canaan – the neighbors of the ancient Hebrews – the ‘sky god’ was the highest of their many gods. The sun, of course, was a god to be reckoned with, as was the moon. But they traversed the expanse of the sky. And then there were mountains and rivers, each having their own gods. The ‘mouth of the rivers’ was thought to be the dwelling place of the gods. All of these things were part of stories told among the people of the Ancient Near East – what scholars (and perhaps me pretending to be one in these pages) like to abbreviate as the ‘ANE’. Their literature – their storytelling – reflects a ‘tradition’, if you will, that the book of Genesis participates in. Evangelical Christians like myself believe that the Bible is uniquely inspired by God. But this need not mean it exists completely outside the literary traditions of the people among whom the ancient Hebrews lived. Indeed, as I’ll invite the reader to see in the coming pages, the writer of Genesis adopts these literary conventions, their stories and the forms of those stories – and then twists and turns them in unique, surprising and compelling ways. The writer starts – well – at the beginning. He makes a claim which is actually not at all remarkable when read as part of this larger literary tradition: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The writer takes the appellation (it is not really a ‘name’ in the proper sense) ‘El’ and makes it plural: ‘Elohim’. This is a word used among the ANE for the ‘sky god’. To claim that the ‘sky god’ created the heavens and the earth might have been interesting, but it likely would not have been revolutionary. This was the highest of their gods, after all. The reader would not have to wait long, though, to encounter truly revolutionary ideas. Those ideas do not come until later, but here they are hinted at. Instead of taking something and fashioning something else, this most high god simply says: “Let there be light…” and light there is. In the classroom we seem to be attracted to smart-sounding Latin terms for things like this. God creates everything ex nihilo – out of nothing. This, all by itself, makes this particular instance of the creation story unique among its ANE peers.

After creating light, the story tells us that “God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.” Far from just being a dry account of the first week of time itself, this is the beginning of a story. And it is clear the main character in the story is this most high god. Like all good stories, we are invited into the inner life of intentions, motives and judgments of the main characters. The foundation of this character development is laid here; we see God both ‘ordering’ (separating the light from the darkness) and ‘judging’ (God saw that it was good). This is a pivotal assertion of which I will try to convince you throughout this book. God is presented here as one whose intentions are fundamentally good. His ordering is for the good. His judgment is for the good. It is this second observation that is probably the most important for us today. To say that God ‘judges’ is to inescapably evoke the image of a stern magistrate sitting on an elevated platform in a black robe – ready to meet out punishment. While ordering and judging – separating good from bad – must mean some reward for those who do good and some punishment for those who do evil, it is a mistake to consider the judgment of God before establishing the goodness of Him and His creation. If we do this first, then we realize that while misfortune may well reflect the judgment of God, that judgment is essential to the underlying good of His creation. He simply wants to reconcile His creation to His good order. It is at this point that it is helpful to back up and take note of something commentators on the Hebrew Bible have long sought to explain. Hebrew stories are quite a bit more sophisticated than they may first appear. Often – and we see some of this in modern cinema – the beginning and ending of the story share similarities in theme, action, and even sometimes in the sounds of the words themselves. We might call this ‘circular narrative’. But for Hebrew story telling it is even more sophisticated. The second part of a story often parallels the second-to-last part, the third part being similar to the third-tolast part, and so on. This tends to ‘collapse’ the story into its middle, where the real point of the story is driven home. Some Hebrew biblical scholars see this in the seven days of creation. Days 1 through 3 parallel days 5 through 7, with the story collapsing into the fourth day – the middle of the story. If we are paying attention to story – and allowing Genesis to ‘live’ in its original ANE literary tradition, this theory looks attractive. The sky, again, was the all-encompassing context of human existence. The sun was, of course, quite high – both literally and in the pantheon of gods. The moon had its own place of prominence. The stars were thought to signify future possibilities (astrology) from the very beginning of recorded history. And all of these heavenly bodies traversed the sky. And so it is smack in the middle of the seven days that we see God creating the sun and moon; again to ‘separate’ (order) the day from the night. They were created to order the seasons, the days and the years. And indeed, from the beginning of time a day has been reckoned by the rising of the sun, a month by the course of the moon, and a year by the path the sun takes through the sky. But what is most compelling about this fourth day is the words the writer uses for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’. The Hebrew language has perfectly fine words for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’. But both – coming as they do from Canaanite descendants – would have carried quite a bit of religious baggage. The writer wants his reader to recognize the story and its forms – but he wants the reader to notice significant nuances. By refusing the ‘normal’ words and referring to the sun as the ‘greater light’ and the moon as the ‘lesser light’ the writer seems to deliberately demote the sun and the moon. By ‘demote’ I mean in the sense

of their place in the story. There is no ‘sun god’ to play a part; the sun is not a character. There is no ‘moon god’ to speak in dialog here. They are exactly what the writer says they are and nothing more: “…the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night.” This phrase is itself explanatory to “God made the two great lights…” and then followed by what almost seems an afterthought. To paraphrase: “Oh, yeah, by the way, God made the stars also.” And so those who might have been characters in other ANE stories have not only been stripped of their roles, they never had roles as characters to begin with. They are not objects to worship or fear. They are simply what they are – created to separate the day from the night and to serve as markers of days, seasons and years. And God saw that this was good… We are beginning to notice that this pattern of ordering and judging is prominent in the story. It flows from the creating and making. And it is good. We are being introduced to the most high god, and in a startling way that demotes all other pretenders from this role in the story. If we back up to the second day, we see God creates the sky (“the expanse between the waters…”) to “[separate] the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse.” I’ll address the matter of the nature of storytelling language later, but I’ll preview that discussion here because it brings us back to that place where we are standing in awe before the expanse of the sea, watching as the tide rolls over our bare feet. Now just add to this scene a light rain. You reach down and scoop up some water from the ocean as it laps against your feet and hold it out in your left palm. Your hold out your right palm, which is dry – for now – until the rain pools up in it as well. It looks the same. It feels the same. It is the same. So for the ancient – long before anyone knew anything about the ‘water cycle’ – there simply had to have been an expanse of water above. Where else would this water in my right palm come from? And so the story explains that the sky provides order between the waters below (the seas) and the waters above (what we know to be the atmosphere). Remembering that this ‘god’ is the ‘most high god’ – the ‘storm god’ in the Canaanite imagination – we see how important this really is. Ancient people lived in fear of the storms, their rains, hail and winds. But the sky was created to bring order to this, and to order it for the good. The third day – the creation of dry land by gathering the seas and the creation of vegetation – is the only day among the first four not to invoke the theme of separation. But here we begin to see the creation of things ‘after [their] kind’. What is to be separated has been separated (day four is a special case as noted above) but the ordering of creation is still a work in progress as now things are created after their kind. And so we see in the fifth day. The birds for the sky (created on the second day) and the fish for the sea (created on the third day), again, after their kind. Here we also see the first blessing. The grammar is interesting because the first part (“Be fruitful and multiply”) suggests that God is directly addressing the birds and fish. The last part (“…let birds multiply on the earth”) seems a little less direct. But this will be rounded out beautifully on the sixth day. Here God creates the animals to populate the land (just as the birds for the sky and fish for the sea), all “after their kind.” And then he creates man, male and female, “in his image.” There is probably no part of the creation story which has generated more discussion, debate and reflection than what it means to be created “in the image of

God.” In keeping with my desire to stay focused on the story, I will not delve much at all into the history of this thinking. I will, however, make some relatively simple observations. Just not yet. First we have to note that here we see a form of actual dialog: “Then God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness…” Of course the question is: Who is God speaking to? Some Christian readers have surmised this alludes to the ‘Trinity’: the Christian belief that God exists as three ‘persons’ with God the Father speaking here to God the Son (Jesus) and God the Holy Spirit. I think this is highly unlikely because there is a better answer in noticing that this is used elsewhere as a storytelling device: In Chapter 11 of Genesis, the story of the Tower of Babel, the “…whole earth…said to one another: ‘Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.. [and] let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.’” Now I doubt anyone would argue that ‘the whole earth’ gathered together in some grand coliseum to cook up this idea of building a tower. The same observation can be made about the ‘Let us…’ said by God here. While I do believe in the Christian teaching known as the ‘Trinity’, and would have no objection to the idea that God could have been speaking to the Son and Holy Spirit, in terms of the storytelling, who God is speaking to is rather beside the point. By the time we get to Chapter 11 in this book I hope to have convinced you of the importance of how character development in the stories open windows into both God’s intentions and motives, and ours broadly represented by the human characters in the story. Seeing as Hebrew storytelling uses dialog for this purpose, the most ‘fully formed’ dialog in a story signals to the reader that the window is being opened widest to these intentions and motives. So it is here, when God says “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness…” that the storyteller is using the most fully formed dialog in the story to draw our attention to God’s motives and intentions. If we remember that God is the main character (indeed the only character in the storytelling sense) this is something to which we ought to pay close attention. I’ll do that some here. But again, just not yet. First I want to call our attention to the first appearance of another storytelling device – repetition. This, especially, makes Hebrew stories read oddly to us in the modern West. But for the ANE – long before the printing press when stories were mainly told orally – it is a device that draws our attention to subtle differences. We see that here: “God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” This is the second time that God speaks a blessing. The first time it was a bit oblique, sounding like he was speaking to the fish and birds. Here that subtly is gone: He said “…to them…” The dialog is even more direct and more fully formed in this second blessing than it was in the first. But the similarities (repetitions) prompt us to notice these differences. And so this second blessing is a clearer indication of God’s intentions and motives, but it cannot be understood apart from the first

blessing. This should lead us to the conclusion that God’s command in the blessing to ‘subdue’ and ‘rule over’ creation cannot mean in a manner which disregards the clear intention that the animal world (fish, birds, ‘beasts’, cattle, creeping things, etc.) thrive together with mankind. In light of this, we will ask ourselves at the end of this chapter what it means to align our motives and intentions toward our environment with God’s motives and intentions as expressed in His blessings. And so the sixth day ends with God ‘giving’: We see a repeat of “plant yielding seed” and “fruit yielding seed” for food, and “every green plant for food” has been given to “to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life.” In light of the ancient compulsion to offer food ‘sacrifices’ to this or that god, this clearly flips the relationship. This god is at no time in need of any food sacrifice that might be offered by man. Rather, this most high god ‘gives’ the entirety of plant life as food for his creation. And lastly, God “saw that it was very good…” The end of this creation narrative actually crosses over our chapter and verse divisions into Chapter 2. And here we see this storytelling tendency to return to the imagery and words of the beginning. “Thus the heavens and the earth were completed.” This returns the one who has never seen the ocean, or the one like me who has never seen the sky quite like the folks in ‘Big Sky’ country, to that place of awe where we are feeling so small before the expanse of the sea and sky (or ‘the heavens and the earth’). But even more importantly, that very first sentence which says “…God created…” is driven home with finality here. The verbs here in 2:1-3 – ‘completed’ (2X), ‘rested’ (2X), ‘blessed’, ‘sanctified’, ‘created’ and ‘made’ – act as a summary of the story. The universality of creation – that everything that ‘is’ was created by this most high god – is a bold claim. But even more important is the character development – the motives and intentions of this most high god are universally for the good of his creation. And those motives and intentions are most clearly known in the creation of mankind in his image and likeness.

The Language of Storytelling It is not possible to comment on the creation story and not observe the controversies that have surrounded it. It is rather common to trace these controversies to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. And the ideas of gradual evolution first proposed by Darwin can then be seen in the writings of biblical scholars who began to think of religion along these ‘evolutionary’ lines. A debate then ensued which religion and philosophy students would call the ‘fundamentalist/modernist controversies’. The writings of those who viewed religion in evolutionary terms were seen by others as a threat to the reliability of the biblical narrative. This is the origin of the arguments in favor of a literal reading of the creation story, and the subsequent ‘creation/evolution’ debates which have raged ever since. Here I am less interested in engaging those debates than in showing that perhaps we have created for ourselves a whole raft of problems that really do not exist. We have done this by ‘missing the literary forest for the lexicographical tree’. I’ll apologize here for falling into the $10 vocabulary of the seminary classroom – the ‘lexicographical tree’ simply means we get so focused on the dictionary meaning of the words (‘lexicon’ is just a smart-sounding word for dictionary) that we miss the divinely inspired artistry of the story. But the controversy which is most instructive for us actually predates the ‘fundamentalist/modernist controversies’ by quite a bit.

We are all familiar, of course, with Galileo Galilei – to the point where his first name is all we need to evoke the controversy. But the controversy was actually not about the heavens revolving around the earth. Copernicus before Galileo was the first to suggest the earth revolved around the sun. His theories did not cause the stir that Galileo did. Having improved on the invention of the telescope, Galileo began to observe the course of the planets. The Church at the time, of course, reasoned that the heavens revolved around the earth by way of a highly literal reading of the creation narrative. What really stirred the pot was when Galileo – a mathematician and astronomer – suggested that the Church was reading her Bible wrong. There was simply no way to reconcile what he was observing with what the Church was teaching. So Galileo suggested a different way of reading: The descriptions in the creation story use language in such a way to describe how things appear to the unaided eye. The big word we would use in the classroom for this is ‘phenomenological language’. To simplify our understanding, just note how we use terms like ‘sunrise’ and ‘moonlight’. We know that the sun does not ‘rise’ and the moon does not have its own ‘light’ – but we describe the phenomena this way just the same. Galileo suggested this was a better way of reading these stories in the Bible. The Church was not pleased. “Uh, we have people here, good sir, to consider things like how we read our Bible. You are what, a mathematician? And you would propose to instruct us in how to read the Bible? Uh… you stick to your telescope and whatever it is you do with it… As for the Bible? We got this…” Fortunately or unfortunately – it depends on one’s perspective – when it came to social skills and political acumen Galileo was two weeks shy of a full moon. He publicly asserted his claim that the only way to reconcile the Bible with his observations was to read the language of the creation story as ‘phenomenological’ language. It is only when we put the more recent ‘fundamentalist/modernist controversies’ in this context that we can fully grapple with the questions that surround the creation story. The first of these questions is the use of the word ‘day’ (‘yom’ in Hebrew) and the related matter of chronology. In our next chapter we will see that ‘day’ is used in a broader sense (the “day the LORD God made heaven and earth…”). And if we were to survey all of the Hebrew Bible we would find even broader usages like ‘the day of the LORD’ which are not necessarily tied to a sunrise and sunset. This is ‘lexicography’ – the study of the usage of a word and how that usage suggests a constellation of meaning. This study of the word for ‘day’ allows meanings which are not tied to a sunrise and sunset. But the story says clearly “and there was morning, and there was evening…” so does this not require we take it literally as seven 24-hour days? The ‘phenomenological’ use of language helps us answer this question. With the structure of the story drawing us in to the fourth day, we have to wrestle with the implications of this literalism. God says “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens…” If we are to be strictly literal, the “lesser light to govern the night” must mean the moon has its own light. We know this not to be true, of course. But as ‘phenomenological’ language in the ancient ear it makes perfect sense.

Other strictly literal readings of the creation story suggest there is an expanse of water past the outer boundary of the universe. While it cannot be decisively refuted until we somehow observe past that outer boundary, if we return once again to marvel at the expanse of ‘the waters below’ and allow the rain to pool into one palm – remembering here that the reader would know nothing of the ‘water cycle’ – the ‘phenomenological’ reading of ‘the waters above’ simply makes far more sense in the ear of the ancient person who lives in fear of the inscrutable sky god who conspires with some other capricious deity to send a storm to destroy his crops. This, then, allows us to see the seven days of creation as a storytelling device rather than a literal chronology. That, in turn, allows us to pay attention to the story rather than getting wrapped up controversies utterly meaningless to how the ancient hearer or reader would have experienced the story. And in paying attention to the story and how it develops the main character – God – we learn of His intentions and motives. We begin to get to know Him – which is the whole point of the story and which prepares us for what comes next.

The Image of God Instead of casting a wide net around thousands of years of study, I’d prefer to keep us within the narratives of the Hebrew Bible – and the Torah (the first five books) particularly. When we come to Exodus (and repeated later in Deuteronomy – which literally means “second law”) we will read of the rescue of Israel from Egypt and of the giving of the Law in the Ten Commandments. There is some divergence in terms of how the commands are grouped into ten. The commandment “You shall not make for yourself an [image], or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth…” is part of the first commandment in some accounts and the second in others. It uses the same Hebrew words for “image” and “likeness” used in the creation story. (I placed “image” in brackets above because I am using the New American Standard Bible which uses “idol” here for the Hebrew word otherwise translated “image” in the creation story.) There has been some debate over whether there is any difference between the “image” of God and the “likeness” of God in the creation story. But here it would be very hard to explain how any difference would make sense in the commandment. It seems clear in the commandment that these are synonyms, so I take ‘likeness’ to be a synonym to ‘image’ in the creation story as well. This means, of course, that I think our understanding of the creation story has to be formed by our understanding of the commandment. If we look at the history of world religions – with their images – we might be forgiven for asking of the commandment: “Well, why not? Other religions have them. Why not us?” In the seminary classroom we like to entertain ourselves with exquisitely nuanced senses of what God is like which, of course, cannot be captured by our lowly images. It is attractive to think that our musings are that important to the proper understanding of the Bible. It is humbling – again, we come before the expanse of the sea or of the sky and see how small we are – to entertain the likelihood that we’re not all that. The answer just might be quite simple and not even require one know how to read… much less have a seminary degree.

Why not fashion for ourselves these images? Well, because God has already done it for us. If you want to know what God is like, you do not create a statue for your fireplace mantle. You go to your neighbor’s tent (for the ancient nomad) or next door (for us) and say hello. This, then, means that we are to see in ourselves the image of God and seek to present that to the world in which we live. That God intends mankind and the animals to thrive together seems obvious when we allow the creation story to be a story. To be His image, though, must then mean to present the same intentions. This also means we are to see in each other the same image of God. That God intends to provide for the good of mankind seems obvious – again - when we allow the creation story to be a story. Our intentions toward each other (both for their good and bad) are then inescapably an expression of our intentions toward God. I believe this will prove to be the very foundation on which our understanding of the entire book of Genesis should be built. God will be the main character throughout these stories. And the conflict will always be some form of contention between His intentions and motives and those of others. That conflict will threaten the very existence of the earth itself. It will later threaten the fulfillment of a Promise. In that conflict we will get to know our Creator as one who always seeks to reconcile us to His good intentions and motives. We will also get to know ourselves – both in how we cooperate with His intentions and how we oppose them. And only then we will fully understand God’s judgment. It will expose for us how we tend to oppose God’s intentions – which are good. And it will call us to reconcile our motives and intentions to His.

Questions for Group Discussion 1. If you can relate to feeling small before the ocean or sky, what other things about the natural word leave you in a state of wonder? Instead of discussing broadly what this might suggest to you that God is like, discuss specifically how what leaves you in a state of wonder suggests to you what God’s intentions might be? 2. What is your perception in light of the evening news of the environmental movement? After considering this, now consider carefully how the first and second blessings in the creation story are similar and how they are different. How do these blessings evoke God’s intentions? How does this change or challenge your view of environmentalism? 3. Think specifically now of how you ‘use’ your immediate environment. Think also of being the ‘image of God’ in the natural world. Are there things you can change in your use of the environment that might better reflect that image? 4. Lastly, think of the people you interact with every day: family members, coworkers, maybe even the people who have joined you in discussing these questions. Your intentions toward them are a reflection of your intentions toward God. How does this challenge you in your social interactions?