Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
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It’s been said that evolutionary atheists and evangelical creationists alike read the Bible with a crude literal-mindedness that fails to acknowledge the literary riches embedded in the text. The creation narrative of Genesis 1 is perhaps the prototypical case. Instead of interpreting it either as the purportedly factual exposition of events as they unfolded or as a primitive legend that’s simply not true, the reader is encouraged to regard the creation narrative as a “true myth.” What could it possibly mean, this seemingly oxymoronic notion of a “true myth”? Here are some possibilities; there may be more: 1. Genesis 1 fits within a literary genre of creation myths, but only Genesis 1 gets the story right.Many cultures have myths about gods who created the universe. These myths are types: approximations to a truth revealed in its fullness in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Tolkein and Lewis espouse True Myth interpretation 1 with respect to the Gospel, in which Jesus fulfills the widespread mythos of an incarnate God who dies and is resurrected. Presumably the reader can distinguish the True Myth from the other myths that get it only partially right. A True Myth that still contains elements that aren’t factually true presumably points toward its own future fulfillment in a “true” True Myth. To claim that the Biblical version of the Creation myth “gets it right” would seem to require independent verification; i.e., that there is some definitive standard of truth against which myths can be evaluated and compared for accuracy. What should be the source of mythic verification? If it’s historical and empirical evidence, then the Genesis 1 story doesn’t stack up very well. So far, science has not provided empirical evidence in support of a God-created material universe. Empirical verification of God’s involvement in the origins of the universe or of life is at best debatable. It seems that only those who already see the world theistically interpret the empirical evidence as consistent with God’s participation in the origins of things. Other Biblical texts affirm God as creator of the material world. Verification also comes through the community of believers in the Old Testament God. While Gnostics were skeptical about attributing the imperfect world to a perfect God, the Judeo-Christian mainstream has consistently affirmed God’s creatorliness. If consensus within the Judeo-Christian tradition is the arbiter, then how can we know whether the collective opinion is accurate? If God confirms the truth of Genesis 1 via what Calvin called sensus divinitatus – a kind of spiritual insight into truth bestowed by the Holy Spirit – then how are we to confirm that the source of this confirmatory insight really is God and not some other source of inspiration? So far Genesis 1 receives support as True Myth of type #1 only among those who already believe that God created the material world, and the origins of this theistic belief stem in no small part from Genesis 1 itself. There’s a kind of circularity or overdetermination at work here. 2. Genesis 1 is a myth that eventually proves to be verifiable as truth.The writer of Genesis 1 didn’t know how the universe began; he wrote a story to serve as a placeholder for the truth. However, the author’s imagination was moved in the right direction by the Holy Spirit. When the empirical facts about the origin of the universe finally become known, they will confirm the mythic narrative. Until all the data are in, the Holy Spirit testifies to the reader’s spirit that the narrative is factually true even if empirical evidence is incomplete or seemingly conflicts with the story as written. Interpretation 2 is probably best regarded as a subcategory of interpretation 1. It more explicitly demands empirical confirmation, which is perhaps the least persuasive argument in support of the accuracy of Genesis 1. 3. Genesis 1 is a myth whose truth is to be found in the moral and metaphysical lessons it teaches.A myth should be interpreted as an allegory or parable. The details of an allegory are largely metaphorical; they are important to the extent that they illustrate, dramatically and poetically, the “moral of the story.” The author may have chosen the mythic form in order to enhance the emotional and imaginative impact of the message on the reader. If the writer doesn’t explicitly distinguish the moral truth of the story from the allegorical details, then presumably it’s up to the reader to make the distinction. It also becomes necessary to interpret what the myth is a metaphor for. For example, Jesus’ parable of the sower isn’t really about sowing seeds; it’s about the Kingdom of God. If Genesis 1 is a kind of parable then maybe it isn’t really about creating the universe; it’s about, say, the power of elohim compared with other gods, or about man being similar to God. Also, if the writer doesn’t explicitly state whether a text is to be interpreted literally or mythically, then presumably it’s up to the reader to decide. The moral of a story is what the story means; it’s the interpretive framework for making sense of the facts of the story. The events in The Lord of the Rings aren’t true of our world; the characters don’t exist here. Within the story, the characters and events fit together in a meaningful way – evil can be seductive; you can delude yourself into thinking you’re saving the world when you’re really on a power trip; and so on. These lessons might generally hold true in our world as well, but it’s necessary to evaluate whether the lesson applies to particular instances. A moral or metaphysical lesson derived from a story is true interpretively, not factually; it’s a schema for making sense of facts. But even a robust, generally-applicable moral derived from a story doesn’t make the facts of the story any truer outside of the story. Evil can be seductive, and not just in Middle Earth, but that doesn’t mean that the One Ring exists in our world. Mythic truths are interpretations that make sense not just in the mythical world but also in our everyday world. “Frodo Baggins saved the world” isn’t a mythic truth. It’s a broad statement of fact about the mythical world of Middle Earth, but it’s not true at all in our world (as far as I’m aware). There may be interpretive truths that cross the threshold from the mythic world of Middle Earth into our world: good eventually triumphs over evil, even an insignificant individual who perseveres can accomplish heroic deeds, and so on. Similarly, if Genesis 1 is a mythic allegory, then “God created the heavens and the earth” is a broad statement of fact about the mythical world of Genesis 1, but it’s not necessarily a fact about our world. Still, there may be interpretive lessons that cross the threshold from the mythic world Genesis 1 into our world: try to create things that are “good” in and of themselves rather than just trying to please yourself or your customer; separating things from one another and naming them is a good way to organize one’s environment; etc. “‘Let there be light,’ says elohim; and there was light” – let’s say this verse from the Creation narrative illustrates the creative power of language. And it’s true: language often is powerful in our world. But just because the lesson derived from the myth is true doesn’t mean that the facts in the mythic story are true. The “real” elohim may never have said these words; light may not have come about through an act of elohimic creation; elohim might not even exist in our world. The interpretive truths derived from the creation of the mythic universe in Genesis 1 might have no implications whatever about how our particular universe came into existence. In conclusion regarding “True Myth” version #3, the Genesis 1 story might contain lessons, morals, and interpretations that are true of actual events in our world. The task of the exegete is to identify the lessons embedded in the text; the task of the person living in the world is to evaluate life situations in light of the lessons derived from Genesis 1. But if the narrative is a True Myth of type #3, then the factual events of the mythical world of Genesis 1 shouldn’t be expected to bear any more relationship to the events of the world we live in than do the factual events of Middle Earth. 4. Genesis 1 is a myth written by God.The Creation story isn’t meant to be taken as factually true. It’s true in the same way that a short story is true: it contains elements of character and setting and story that hang together inside the story itself, but the story has no factual reference to the “real world.” God is the storyteller of Genesis 1. The story doesn’t purport to explain how he “really” created the universe; it’s a story intended for our edification rather than our scientific enlightenment. The story is “true” in the sense that those who read it enter into a sort of literary communion with the Author who is the source of all truth. Meanwhile, what “really” happened in the beginning remains unrevealed. Perhaps God really did write Genesis 1, either directly or through inspiration. If so it would lend weight to the lessons the story conveys. But as in #3, even a really profound and robust lesson doesn’t make the details of the story factually true. So True Myth #4 is a kind of intensified version of #3. 5. Genesis 1 is part of an all-encompassing myth created by God that includes not just the Biblical text but also the “real world.”Genesis 1 isn’t to be interpreted in light of the real world; rather, the real world is to be interpreted in light of Genesis 1 and the rest of the revealed Canon. We live our lives inside a mythic reality outlined in the Scriptures. Our experiences can be interpreted only in light of the ongoing Judeo-Christian saga in which we too are characters. Empirical evidence is irrelevant because the divine saga and its truths are self-contained. Or, more strongly, even empirical evidence can be understood only within the interpretive context established by the mythic reality of the Bible. Karl Barth and Hans Frei espouse this position with respect to the “Jesus Myth.” There is no need to confirm the historic facts of Jesus’ life because the reality of Christ’s resurrection defines the truth of history itself. Empirical-historical reality isn’t the standard against which True Myth is evaluated; rather, the mythic reality is a standard that transcends or contains or gives shape to the material reality of facts and dates. The mythic truth receives its guarantee by the reality of the risen Christ, who in essence has absorbed the everyday world into his own mythic world. To apply True Myth version #5 to Genesis 1 it would be necessary to assert that Christ’s mythic reality extends all the way back through the Old Testament. The historical facts and empirical data aren’t important; what’s important is to live inside the mythic reality that includes the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and so on all the way through the New Testament. Christ and the disciples seem to do just that, embedding themselves and their culture inside the Biblical reality rather than the other way around. The challenge isn’t to verify the facts of the Genesis 1 story against the evidence. Genesis 1 is true by definition, as confirmed by the reality of the risen Christ who lives inside a Biblical reality that includes Genesis 1. The believer’s task is to understand the larger Biblical reality and to live with the risen Christ inside that overarching mythic truth. If material evidence seems to belie the textual evidence of Genesis 1, presumably the first recourse is to re-evaluate the material evidence in light of the text. True Myth #5 is a kind of holistic inerrancy position: the Bible describes a whole reality that isn’t to be picked apart and evaluated verse by verse. I find it hard to evaluate True Myth #5. I can imagine God writing a True Myth, and then writing me in as a character who lives inside that mythic world. For me to step outside the myth is to turn myself into a fantasy. I can imagine what it might be like to live inside a mythic reality, where everything makes sense relative to the facts of the mythic world rather than those of the everyday material world, which isn’t “really” the real world at all but an illusion. Once you make this mythic plunge then truth takes care of itself, because all truths, including empirical and historical ones, are subsumed in the overarching mythic reality. If you can find yourself entering inside this whole Biblical reality, there’s no longer any point of contact with people on the outside. They think they live in the real world, whereas in fact it’s a ghost world. What’s real and true for them is entirely different from what’s real and true for you. There is no basis for an independent evaluation of version #5 from the outside. Either you accept it and live it, or you don’t. Is this a clear and fair treatment of what a True Myth might be? Which of these interpretations makes the most sense in reading Scripture? Are there other, better interpretations of True Myth? |
Comments
Re: sources of truth about the Creator-God
I may not have understood what you mean by ‘true myth’; I do have a problem if the concept encourages disconnection from the outside world - the very nature of which is a primary source of engagement of the Judeao-Christian tradition.
Where do the truths asserted by the Judaeo-Christian tradition come from? Despite your own assertions, I do believe that the existence of one God who created the universe is ‘intuitively obvious’, without recourse to tradition or texts. A comparison of the three ‘theories’ of creation which you describe appears to me to point to the reasonableness of believing in a God who created everything there is. It cannot be ‘proved’, so in the end it involves a step of faith to believe this is so. But the step of faith rests on assessment of the evidence, and comparing this belief with the alternatives. It is likewise a step of faith to look at the evidence and assert that there is no God who created everything. But such an assertion is stepping beyond the bounds of empirical science - whose task is by its very nature not to seek evidence either for or against the existence of a supernatural deity in the workings of the natural world.
The bible, OT and NT, does not seek to provide proofs of God’s existence; such an assumption is taken as a first truth. But on the basis of that assumption, there is a great deal of evidence in the natural world, and yet more evidence in the particular historical narrative of intervention which the biblical texts present. Further, the narrative is a continuum which connests with the experience of believers today.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘speculative details’ of the author of the Genesis text. But for instance, a ‘speculative assumption’ of modern science is that processes which can be observed today hold good for all time and periods of history, including the origin of things. Theism asserts that God exists, and is involved in his creation. A dimension is introduced which is not subject to empirical science, though you would expect to find its imprint there.
I don’t subscribe to any theory of dating the universe; I simply observe that a 2.5/4 billion year old universe is the assumption of modern science, based on data which assumes that currently observable processes in the natural world hold good for all time. Actually, our understanding of currently observable processes is changing all the time.
An understanding of Genesis 1-3 holds good on different levels. It tells us a great deal about God and the nature of the world - order and design rather than randomness and chaos; an origin in such order and design which held good also for moral beings; an introduction of disorder which affected both moral beings and the natural world which was subsequent to the origin of things, and which remains the case today. If science does date the world at billions of years old, it is just as much a faith assumption to assert that naturalistic forces as we presently observe them held good then as it is to assert that a supernatural deity was the source of the origin of things, and that Genesis 1-2 give some idea of how this came about.
What science does not address is the phenomenon of self-awareness, our sense of moral obligation which overrides social conditioning or any kind of origin in environmental considerations, our intuitive sense of purpose which conflicts with our observation of tendencies within us and in the world around us, our search for resolution of these conflicts, the satisfying resolution which is to be found in the figure of Christ, both as a historical person and an on-going reality in people’s lives today.
Re: who is in the details?
I would take the existence of God as an a priori - perceived intuitively as true. I don’t see that the NT allows both for this and the inverse position - that God’s non-existence can also validly be perceived intuitively as true. The argument through Romans 1:18-32 seems to be that the knowledge of God is something that people train themselves out of - rather than something that is vouchsafed to some but not others.
There is plenty of evidence that challenges my belief in God - particularly the Judaeo-Christian God. I find the evidence that counterweighs this evidence to be more compelling, however. There is evidence in the natural world, but above all, the most compelling evidence is that provided by Christ, his death and resurrection, and especially the experience shared with those who become part of his renewed humanity.
There are all kinds of ways of looking at Genesis 1 - but I don’t see why the primeval conditions of the original creation should not have been different from conditions that have held sway subsequently - so that a six period creation should have been a supernatural act, or series of acts, while subsequent history settles down to conformity to more natural laws. I would add that the changes introduced by Adam’s disobedience also probably affected the natural world, but we have no detail about that in Genesis. So yes, I believe it’s possible to perceive historical truth through Genesis 1 & 2, but it is history presented in a mythical form, and with literary stylisation.
It sounds as if we agree then, in rejecting the True Myth explanation of Genesis 1-3. I wouldn’t want to spend a great deal of time and energy over explanations of Genesis 1-3, except to draw out the timeless truths, and to hold to a personal belief that somewhere in the mists of the mythical presentation, there is historical truth - that God created all that there is, including Adam, and that subsequently Adam fell through disobedience, which has affected us ever since. If God is a supernatural being, he can both override and work through natural laws.
Also, it seems to make sense, to me, to believe that something came from somewhere/someone, rather than believing that something came from nowhere - or it has always existed all by itself.
How do we find the time to indulge in all these wise cogitations?
Re: will the mists never part?
I don’t know whether this is another possibility to add to your five, but the Genesis account of creation seems to me to have some mythic/poetic qualities - such as repetitions, patterning, hints of symbolism. My own view is that the mythic qualities are a dressing-up of actual events, in contrast with other creation myths (Norse mythology, Greek mythology, Babylonian mythology etc) which are purely poetic accounts without historic basis - attempts to provide explanations of how things are by inventions of how things began.
I don’t know whether this is trying to sound wise by being obscure, or is obscurely saying what has already been said by more clearly by many others, or is simply wrapping illogic in mystic obscurity. It makes sense to me though, and avoids getting into debate with modernist thinking, which wants to subject anything that is said about origins to modernist scientific scrutiny. I simply don’t think Genesis is written in the terms of modernist science, or deals with issues that can be thrashed out in scientific debate - simply because there is too much primeval prehistoric supernatural activity going on, presented in poetic form.
Science should respect its own limitations. Didn’t Keats speak of ‘dull philosophy’ that would ‘unweave the rainbow, clip an angel’s wings’? Science does not, I think, possess instruments that can measure God or his supernatural actions. When it comes to the primeval prehistory of origins, it is just as reasonable to believe in a 6 day creation as in life emerging from primeval sludge over a few million years (a possibility as yet unreproduced in the laboratories of investigative science). No, it’s more reasonable.
1+2=
Genesis 1-3 is an integral part of Genesis, however one reads it historico-critically. There is certainly good literary evidence that different motifs have been woven together yet it is the whole that we have as one narrative that is so fascinating!
Perhaps tantalizing would be an even better word! What has been dawning on me with more and more force is how little we really know about what these chapters do and do not assert.
For example, there has been a lot of heated discussion about what the creation narrative says about equality and relatedly hierarchy. The problem comes to a head today in the relations between men and women in the church. Paul has added his bit of exegesis at various times almost as asides and this makes the hermeneutical exercise even more interesting. Overall though, in looking at these debates, one is struck by the amount of assumption about what the creation account says. Obviously each of us has constructed a favourite scenario that we then take pretty much to be fact without bothering to consult the source itself.
With the paucity of scientific information, and the obvious lack of knowledge about what Genesis has to say, it seems to me that as uncomfortable as it makes me feel, I will have to maintain a bit of agnosticism about how the two do or do not come together.
If I had to guess, I would take a stab at a mixture of 1 & 2 but guesswork does not really get us very far when we are trying to work out the practical implications of the creation account for life in and out of the church.
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Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
The “true myth” kind of idea is attractive, but I feel that by beginning with that question, we’re skipping a better beginning point. Or perhaps I’m at the beginning point.
When the text was written/compiled (also a nice discussion in itself), what was the intent of the author(s)/compiler(s)? In the seminary I went to, folk pushed for a literalist interpretation of the text, while acknowledging that there seemed to be an apologetic against the surrounding pagan cosmologies built-in to the order of creation, set in a clear poetic structure (at least for Genesis 1). Why the apologetic, and why the poetic style?
I am trying to get back to the same kind of thinking that seems to be behind much of the approach here: asking anew what the text could have meant for the author and to the recipients within the historical context within which it was written. But I’m very rusty at this, and am wondering if any others are interested in chasing this further (maybe as a separate thread?). I find that I’m hesitant to speculate about the “true myth” interpretation of the creation story until we’ve talked about how it fit into the lives of those who first heard and read it.
Genesis 1 - Any Possibilities?
I definitely prefer a literal reading where possible, certainly as the best place to start. With Genesis though one has a unique set of problems. Taking the text as it stands, as one connected and coherent narrative, the summary statement of Gen. 1:1 tells us the really important thing - everything was created by God. Thence we have a problem, language is meaningful when we know something of what is being referred to; ‘and the earth was without form’ now how would we go about understanding what that refers to?
As we go further we seem to approach more familiar ground, heavenly bodies, land separated from water, fish, birds and animals and finally man. But is this only an apparent familiarity. Did Adam and Eve resemble ‘modern’ mankind? How would we know?
It seems to me that the uncertainties involved are very great indeed…
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Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
Johndoyle,
I agree with most of the statements in your last post. I also question whether the original author/compiler of the text would have intended the story of creation as set out in Genesis 1 & 2 to be taken “mythically”. Do we have evidence that the Jewish nation (whether in the time of Moses or later) thought mythically? Did the Babylonians believe the story that Tiamat’s literal body was used to fashion heaven and earth? Do we have enough available data to make a fair judgement?
I’m not sure that I would want to set the idea of a polemic off against a “literal” retelling of the creation story, however. Why not both? It would seem to me that part of the grandeur of the creation story for the Jews was the fact that the one true God (seen as a separate entity) created everything. It would not seem odd to me to place tags in the text (such as the place of the sun and moon in the text), to reflect the largeness of this God. But I’m guessing here, not leaning on a detailed exegesis.
The question of P is certainly interesting. However, I think the way I would like to approach the text is not simply from the pericope level, but from the larger textual context. Somebody or somebodies, put the text together (no author is named), linking stories by similar formula’s and stretching certain catch phrases not only throughout Genesis, but throughout the Pentateuch. Regardless of the “original” intent of the pericope, I think we need to look at the intent of the compilation as a whole.
The Expositor’s Bible had a note that intrigued me (it’s about the only commentary I’ve got here…). The commentator (John Sailhamer) wrote about the fascination of the author with the eres, the land. He sees a link to the concept of inheriting the “land”, and thus with the inheritance of Abraham’s descendants, worked into the text as kind of typology (is that yet another mythological framework?). He further sees this linked with a kind of eschatology (“in the beginning” is a kind of primer to ask “what about the end?”). The story is literal, but packed with heavily weighted typological terminology. By the way, I’m not saying that I follow Sailhamer’s whole pitch, just that these points strike me as very possible indeed.
That kind of idea fits very well with Wright’s model, which sees the land and the end as major typological centerpieces in the continuing revelation of God to the Jews and later to the church. Genesis as an authentic history that helps, from the onset, to tell the story of God’s interactions with the humans to whom he entrusted the place.
Whether we are bound to take the story as factual (it is biblical history, and therefore must be factual history) is another question altogether. I for one would rather look for a hermeneutic that allows us to let the Genesis story stand on it’s own terms and hear it’s meaning for the original audience, while letting us not be bound to the specific pre-scientific worldview of ancient Israel.
Samlcarr’s question of whether Adam would have resembled us seems then to me more a question of our worldview being placed upon the text, than a question about the original intent of the text itself. Would the listener’s have thought of anything else than a human like themselves when they heard that God made “Adam” male and female? Did they think of earlier forms of homo sapiens (or homo erectus)? I am not discounting the point. I simply mean that this seems more a question of our hermeneutic, than a question of authorial intent. But I’m willing to hear evidence otherwise!
higher to lower
Actually I was thinking that the original author may have felt that the original ‘humamankind’ was a ‘higher’ being especially if one takes Genesis 2 into account. One clue is that the entire creation was vegetarian and man was a fruit eater (fuititarian?). Another clue is that the original man was asymetrical, he had an extra rib. The very literal reading also precludes the male pronoun for Adam. Adam was “both male and female”.
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Re: higher to lower
John Doyle,
As a matter of fact I had not seen your post when I wrote that, I had Russ’s response in mind and was on an interestingly parallel route to the one that you took!
With what we know of human and humanoid fossils, ancient history etc. our tendency now is to try to fit our view of archaeology into the Genesis account, and I have seen some surprisingly good ‘fits’ so created. I don’t think that that really does justice though, to the original author(s) and is hardly likely to come close to what they had in mind.
Prior to modernity, I think the universal view was that Adam was a ‘superior’ human being and that the fall has left us a lot lower than the angels. On a different tack, looking at the evidence that now exists, it can be read as a fall though that would give our paleontologists severe indigestion!
As Russ pointed out, the Babylonian and Canaanite mythologies probably do have something to contribute in helping to give us a picture of the worldview of those times, but just looking at our text it does seem to me that there is a significantly different story behind the writer(s) of Genesis and we just don’t have those sources to inform our explorations.
I think therefore that it is better to treat the Genesis account as sui generis and to keep our uncertainty uppermost when we are tempted to be most dogmatic about what Genesis does and does not mean for today.
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Re: higher to lower
Interesting idea about Adam being a “higher” form of man. I’ve never heard it before. Where does it come from?
My reference to Babylonian mythology was only meant to ask the question of how groups interpreted their creation stories in the broad sweep of the OT framework. It’s probably too general a question to really be answered, now that I think about it again. But it does seem to me that the Genesis creation does exist in a kind of league of it’s own. It certainly isn’t surrounded by the pomp and wild goings on of the gods, as most other cosmologies of that area of the world (at least the ones I’ve read) are.
About the extraordinary meaning of words in Genesis. I would think - again I haven’t done the exegesis on this, so it’s only a thought - that different words have different kinds of weight. The reference to the “greater light” and the “lesser light” may indeed have been a polemic. Perhaps “beginning” and “land” were also key words. Certainly if the text was written/redacted from the viewpoint of the whole of Genesis and the Pentateuch, then certainly the framework for thinking about the eschatological importance of Israel and the role of the land would certainly be in place. I’m not sure if this extra weight makes the words in the history less historical, at least from the author’s point of view, but only that they are invested with another level of discourse. In my view this would not be a secret discourse, but exactly one chosen to make the original readers go “hey! That’s there already!” This, I would think, follows the kind of line that is often used for explaining eschatology on this site. Key words and images, typologies, add theological depth to the description of an event. In this case I don’t think the author had to use extraordinary terms, as was often done with eschatological prophecy, but rather that some everyday terms may have carried extra weight.
This doesn’t solve the problem of the order of creation in Genesis. I’m still trying to understand the order as it is given - is this straightforward description (handed down by generations), and if so, why this order? The order is easier to understand from a polemcial perspective, as John pointed out, but still leaves us with some difficulties. But I at least don’t (yet) want to ask what the text can “mean” for us today, until the “what it meant for them” is more clear. Unfortunately, this moves far away from (far behind) the original intent in this thread, which was to look at the options and meanings of Genesis as a “true mythology”.
Do we need to delve into some serious exegesis here? Or can you give some tips for sources?
Re: higher to lower
Russ, you mentioned being rusty, well I never got started as far as original languages are concerned (a little greek but no hebrew/aramaic). Still, serious exegesis is what is called for if we really want to get into Genesis!
I’m prepared to muddle along and be corrected whenever needed by all the real scholars who will have oversight of our discussions here at OST - and thanks to all of you, that is a great feeling!
As far as the first humans being superior, that assumption is at least as old as the targums (like Pseudo Jonathan). in fact the suppositiion is that satan was so envious of these glorious creatures that he was driven to tempt Eve.
An interesting exegesis of the creation of mankind (The Living Breath of God and the Three Steps in Fashioning Humanity)
if the link doesn’t work it can be found at
http://www.goarch.org/en/ourfaith/articles/article9106.asp
Live to serve : Serve to live
biig mouthfulls
I agree with you that the hermeneutical issues are very important but it also strikes me that the lack of primary data may be adding its bit to the confusion. By getting into the text itself, we may find that some of the supposed options are not convincing or we may find that there is a need for other options to be proposed…
Probably, our text was ‘literal’ as opposed to being designed to be mythological/typological/allegorical to the original author(s), but the fact is that now we almost have to treat it as myth or at least as ‘story’, perhaps based on historically true happenings, but in a literary category other than ‘chronicle’.
Apart from early redactions there is also the question of later reconstruction, during the time of rabbinic ascendancy or after the exile, but perhaps even during the division of the kingdom, when political forces may have had a vested interest in promoting one reading over another…
A related fascinating exercise will be to try to delineate what we mean by history and how history does and does not coincide with the early chapters of Genesis.
In any case the text should be our starting point, the ‘raw data’ as it were, in the light of which the various hypotheses will finally need to be judged.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
Just a comment relating to john doyle’s most recent contribution: there is no evidence, is there, apart from academic speculation, of the existence or activity of JEPD redactors in the Genesis creation accounts or the Pentateuch as a whole, or of a late composition of the first creation account during the Babylonian period?
On the other hand there is evidence of the very high levels of accuracy in the transmission of oral and written tradition - the former calling on powers of memory which would be unheard of today.
I simply mention this because it is a feature of academic discussion (of which I accuse nobody on this site) that hypothesis can, almost without anyone noticing, transform itself into accepted wisdom. Somebody has pointed out, I think in relation to the JEPD compositional theory, that it depends on a very modern idea of the cutting and pasting of texts, which would have been alien and impractical to any middle eastern redactors in ancient times.
At this point, historical criticism as applied to textual critcism, which has its place, needs to work alongside some form of canon criticism or narrative criticism - which focus on ‘the final text’ (depending on whose version of canon criticism you go for).
Having said that, I don’t see how thorough exegesis (of the Genesis creation accounts, for instance) can proceed without some stab at how the texts were intended to be used - provided the hermeneutical guesswork is treated in a fairly provisional way.
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
Peter,
I agree with your assesment that the JEPD compositional theory is provisional. Even if one leaves elements of this behind, the idea that the pentateuch was put together at a much later date than is “traditionally” assumed, needs to weighed in the balance as carefully as any “traditional” interpretation of the authorship, intent and date.
I’m not sure if we can crystallize the various views into a single hermeneutical presentation, however. I think if we start by discussing the issues you and John have addressed, and including what how these views affect one’s basic hermeneutic (a discussion which has been running in the background of this discussion already), we might be able to proceed into an approach to the text that allows each to give imput from their own perspective. If we try to wear our hermeneutic on our sleaves, we’ll get farther along, I think.
Also agreement that if we talk about a redactive proces, for our purposes we have to primarily deal with the end product, however that came together. Earlier forms of the story/stories are of interest only as we can show a connection between the earlier story and the way the original audience would have heard it, and how that affected any later redactors. Whether any of this is actually possible with the creation stories, is a wild guess to me!
Sorry if I want to jump into exegesis too quickly here. The original discussion was about the nature of “True Myth”. Our hermeneutic (and it’s application) will tell much about how or if we view Genesis as a true myth.
For my part, I want to start an analysis of the creation stories with the question of what this version of the story as it’s penned was meant to communicate to it’s hearers/readers. How the original hearer/readers would have “heard” the story (and with what others stories floating around in their heads) is I think a very important question. But as you pointed out, this too is dependant on who we think that audience is, and what the intent of the author/redactor was.
I don’t yet have a set position on the point of authorship/dating/provenance. Nor do I feel like I’ve got a good grasp of the various possibilities (yet!). Maybe someone can give a sketch of various options to start the discussion moving in that direction.
Sam, I hope to check out your links tonight. Thanks for sending them through.
Re: Welcome future mythic voyagers
John Doyle,
The composition could indeed have been, and probably was, a very complex one for good story telling is a highly developed art that is always technical and so both difficult and rare. The fact that this ancient tale so fascinates speaks for itself. And there is a fallacy in assuming that we moderns and postmoderns are somehow more advanced, for in this field i suspect that we are quite backward. The ancients were certainly better versed and more sophisticated than we in the ‘simple’ art of narrative.
i would be very interested to get your personal take as a part of this conversation itself rather than having to wait for Sir Toby! For one thing, each one of us will have a slightly or even markedly different view on Genesis (that’s a bit obvious) and it is in the sharing of the interpretations that we can each broaden our perspectives on what the story could mean.
getting back to true myth, it’s quite probable that ‘the truth is in the story’ or as another put it in a more PoMo fashion “the truth is in the fiction”, but this is something that we will have to discover together as we go along. As Russ suggests, we could just try to be transparent about what hermeneutoc we are plumbing for as methodological diversity and differences of perspective are, I think, an essential requirement if we are to collectively search for that oh so elusive ‘truth’.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
John - something must have happened whilst I was engaged in one of my trappist reveries. I truly hadn’t realised that you had offered your own exegesis of Genesis 1. Do you think you could summarise it - for the sake of those like me who weren’t paying attention?
You do seem to refer frequently to pentateuchal redactors, ancient fragments and words that become imbued with significant meaning. I do see some rather self-conscious repetition of words like ‘blessing’ and ‘fruitful’ which migrate from Genesis 1 and attach themselves to the likes of Noah, Abraham, and the Israelites on entering the promised land. I don’t see this necessarily as the work of redactors. Could it not have been a conscious recapitulation of and response to existing oral accounts of Genesis 1 - or even, horrors, a divinely inspired recapitulation. (The words do appear in the context of what God was purported to have said to Noah, Abraham, Israel etc.)
I don’t see that words like ‘image’ are significantly repeated, and ‘light’ is a normal metaphor for moral or intellectual clarity as well as a physical phenomenon; it’s bound up in the very nature of the thing, isn’t it?
Anyway, I’d appreciate a bit of recapitulation from yourself if you could spare the effort. I can see that you are not too keen on the ‘true myth’ concept (never realised it came from Barth/Frei; there’s always something new to learn). I couldn’t see what your own line was - unless it was to do with these mysterious redactors. I feel another chapter of Sir Toby’s coming on: enter the redactors stage left.
Time for the next course?
Let’s get into it. I believe that our sharing of exegetical insights and individual hermeneutics will be enlightening. We may finally not enjoy a ‘new creation’ but certainly our understanding of Genesis will be a fitting main course.
I’m not entirely willing to give up on your original five categories either. Seems to me that my initial response was that there may well be some mythical element in my reading of Genesis today even though that may not have been so to the original author(s), hearers. The very fact that story telling is the most probable original route of transmission of the tale makes one wonder whether the original hearers may not also have received it so…
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Time for the next course?
John,
On your a,b and c assumptions about the kind of exegesis that we’d probably do here, I myself don’t think I could necessarily agree with b and c, either. And as for a, while I accept “literal” as a tag, by that I would mean trying to hear the text as it was meant to be heard in it’s orginal context. This gets into the issues of authorship and dating, but also the context of the original hearers (here comes Sitz im leben around the corner again). Words that we might consider weighted could have various implications for various audiences and periods of time. But I certainly would not in the initial phase to try to make the text consistent with the rest of the Bible. That in itself calls for a huge a priori assumption about what that consistency would entail; I for one only want to deal with that after we look at Genesis “as is” within the setting of the Pentateuch. I’m not saying that the relationship of Genesis to the rest of the text of the bible is not important, but only that it’s secondary to me. That’s the point at which I see the concept of “true myth” possibly peeking around the corner again, as one of the hermeneutical devices to transport the story into other times and settings.
In a previous post about the redaction of the text you wrote this:
Let’s assume that the redactors of the Pentateuch had access to archaic narrative fragments in either oral or written form. Let’s assume further that the redactors exercised restraint in modifying these ancient narratives while consciously integrating them into a coherent whole.
This would in my view be true regardless of the dating of any redaction. As far as I understand it, even Moses would have been a redactor as regards the creation narratives (Calvin, as you pointed out, certainly seemed to think so). What greatly interests me is the stylistic difference between the first and second creation accounts in Genesis. Granted, the second account is actually an account of the creation of man. But Genesis 1:1-2:3 seem lyrical and poetic to me. The lines, even as I read them in English (only begun to grind to through the Hebrew…) are measured. The story is structured it wat strikes me as a mimetic fashion. It may be redaction, but it is a beautiful piece of redaction. It makes me wonder if this is not a fairly solid pericope of oral tradition that was passed down. If that’s the case, then what we probably have in Genesis is nothing “new” for the audience of Genesis, but rather the formalization/condensation of the community’s beliefs about how the world came to be, and what this has to say about man, his place and ultimately, the community’s place in the world. This is how I would make sense of your statement that “a truly ancient creation narrative would have charted the course toward the future, would have set the trajectory for long strands of meaning, would have imbued certain words and phrases with primal potency.”
As of yet I have no set opinion as to who wrote Genesis, or when. When you mention the redactional process, when do you see this happening? How does the time period affect the impact of Genesis and the Pentateuch for the original audience? Why was the text produced when it was, and how was it important for the people at that time?
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
I didn’t read all the replies so I may be redundant here, but has anyone considered the author’s intent as to why the story was written. According to many theologians (I believe Greg Boyd among them). The author was not trying to write an accurate account of how things all started. The point was to write about what was important to the jewish people “hear o israel, the lord our god is one!”. This is a monotheistic manifesto in a world full of pantheistic myths about the origin of the cosmos. As such, as christians, we should hartitly embrace this literary crticism for all its worth since it sets up our faith and points us in the direction of the creator…which is pretty much all anything genesis 1-3 can really do. Unless you have a time machine and a camcorder to go back and see how “literal” the story is.
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
John doyle,
that’s a very interesting reading both from the perspective of potentialities becoming and from the aspect of active dialogue within the text. It does indeed add a different dimension when viewed as a conversation about revelation in action!
As dissident asks, one of the very acute questions is authorial intent, and I guess as we go into the text, we will have to come to some conclusions. However, one primary matter is the question of who God is. Is our text unequivocally monotheistic or could there be some other explanation for the plural form of elohim ?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
John,
Thanks for your read on Genesis 1. As Sam said, who Elohim is, is crucial. It’s hard not to read Genesis 1 without the Pentateuch, because at the end of the day this is how the story has come to us, as dissident mentioned.
If I try this, however, I tend to think of Elohim as a council of God/divine beings. What we hear as the voice of Elohim is either then the collective speaking as one, or the head honcho speaking for the group. What strikes me about this council, however, is the lack of bickering, fighting and reordering that goes on. In most other cosmologies I’ve read, there’s a fair amount of this before the gods finally get around to making the heavens and earth. So either the narrator wasn’t interested (or unaware) in what happened before, or this is a very different kind of divine council.
Whom is the council speaking to? If I follow the track above, I come up with two options: 1) it’s the head honcho speaking out for the rest of the council to hear; 2) it’s the council speaking as a collective, and creating by the power of it’s voice. But both of these scenarios assume that it’s real creating/reshaping that’s going on, and not simply a revelatory event.
I’ve heard a kind of variation on your idea before. The idea that it’s man who is being aided into sentience, perhaps at the end of a very, very long period of evolution. The distinction between the way I’ve heard it before and your story is that you make it a literal retelling (how Elohim “recreated” man, as man remembered it), whereas the version I’ve heard before treats Genesis 1 as a metaphorical retelling (back to True Myth again).
But where do you find your clues that it is proto-man to whom Elohim is speaking? When I read the text, at this point I don’t see it. In terms of treating the text as an interpretion of potentiality it’s intriguing, but I don’t see how the text itself leads us to this. Can you help me better understand your reasoning?
We’re still left with the question of who Elohim is. An unidentified divine being? Can you give some more insight into who you read Elohim to be within the context of Genesis 1?
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
John,
Thanks for the quick response.
I agree that the creation story lacks most of the elements present in the cosmologies of the civilizations surrounding Israel. Debates about literary dependance of Genesis 1-2 upon other sources tend to be inconclusive, mostly because there’s a lack of real evidence (as far as I can gather). There seem to be a few conceptual parallels (drawing on John Walton’s “Ancient Israelite Literature in its Cultural Context” here), but even there it’s darn near impossible to prove any dependance. The whole picture seems to make this creation story, regardless of how we interpret it, as something unique; more different than more like other cosmologies.
If I understand your explanation of the teacher-student role of elohim and man in Genesis, it’s based on the idea of exchange embedded in the text. Why doesn’t the text then make this plain? I want to give a further think (and a few good reads of the story), but I do wonder about this. Can’t the alteration be explained as a simple narrative style? That said, I find the interpretation intriguing, so I want to think about it some more.
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
I won’t say that I’m totally out of my depth following this conversation, but it’s getting close.
My observations are twofold.
Concerning the God/narrator statement/response counterpoint suggested by John - aren’t God’s statements part of the narrator’s narrative - ie God’s words as narrated by the narrator? In any case, I couldn’t see where it took us to divide the creation narrative in this way. (But I may not have been paying enough attention). Otherwise I do agree with John in his summary (and rejection) of the upper/lower register theory, as a way out of a literal six day creation ‘impasse’.
There is also an intriguing patterning of the six day creation narrative - which I don’t think has been alluded to by any of the contributions so far. This is that days 1, 2 and 3 correspond to days 4, 5 and 6. In other words:
Day 1 (Light) corresponds to Day 4 (lights)
Day 2 (Sky separating waters) corresponds to Day 5 (fish and birds)
Day 3 (land, vegetation) corresponds to Day 6 (living creatures)
I don’t think this advances any of the theories, except to highlight the orderliness and design built into the creation accounts, and therefore to be a feature of God/Elohim himself/themselves, and of his/their activities built into the subsequent historical narrative, albeit severely skewed by having to deal with a humanity committed to its own ends and not his.
This would also have the effect of emphasizing the trustworthiness of God - which is a key theme of the ensuing narrative. He acts in an orderly, not arbitrary way.
Incidentally, I don’t think Elohim is anywhere used of God except in the context of a singular being, is it?
Not waving but drowning
I suppose I’d go for the command/fulfilment interpretation of Genesis 1 - it seems the most obvious. I don’t see that there need be any difficulties with the sequencing of events if supernatural actions are assumed.
Nor need this conflict with the presumption of vast ages in evolutionary theory. It’s quite possible that a supernaturally fully formed creation was followed by the operation of natural laws within a lengthened time scale. Seems just as likely to me as life crawling by chance out of the primeval sludge.
It’s possible that the appearance of ageing arose out of the non-natural conditions that operated at an initial supernatural creation.
It’s possible that many assumptions based on observation of natural processes are incorrect, such as the assumption that ice ages obliterated the existence of giant kangaroos and marsupials in southern Australia. It is now assumed, according to a Daily Telegraph newspaper report, that the climate of Australia remained constant, and that man changed the environment, which had provided habitat for these now extinct creatures. What other sweeping generalisations about climate are incorrect?
And what’s a contributor like me to OST doing subscribing to that bastion of British conservatism and reaction, The Daily Telegraph? I don’t; it was at my parents’ house, where I was visiting on Saturday for my father’s 90th birthday.
The Fall and Genesis 1? Plenty of motifs linking Genesis 1 with other parts of the Pentateuch - though if you like, this is with the benefit of hindsight.
The steadfastness of God? It overarches the Pentateuch, even without which, Genesis 1 speaks by implication about the kind of God who undertook creation.
Elohim - a plural word, but always used in a singular sense, I think?
This is an interesting thread, but I was always much further out at sea than you thought, not waving but drowning.
time and sequence
The preliminary explorations have been fascinating!
There is a unique problem with Genesis 1 that will keep haunting us as we go along and this is the problem of chronicity. There are a number of places, like Proverbs and Job and even John’s prologue where we are given different glimpses of the beginning. It will be hard to not keep trying to read back from these texts into our Genesis account. I think that we have to assume that we have no older threads than the Genesis account itself, at least in our initial stages of study.
The relation of Genesis 1 to 1-3, then till Genesis 11, to the rest of the Genesis acount, and to the rest of the pentateuch will also be a fruitful area of study as there is a venerable tradition linking the pentateuch together as a unit.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
The Creation story may need to be read as a whole.Here Ill show you a sample between Gen 1 and Gen 2.
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night
2).4These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they, were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,1) 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
2)5And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.
2) 6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.
2) 7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
You will note that God creates man in both chapter. The concept between the two are the same. Also day can mean eon.also spelled eon or æon, means “age,” “forever,”
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
Freespirit,
Granted that the two creation narratives need to be looked at as a whole. Eventually one needs to look at them, as Peter mentioned in his bit above, within the larger context of the Pentateuch as a whole. But we’ve started with Genesis 1, as there are clear stylistic and thematic differences between the two stories.
Peter,
I tend to think that the various themes that you mention can be incorporated into the story, especially given the fact that we’re looking at what is a piece of constructed narrative. Someone, Moses or whoever, at whatever time within the history of Israel, set the story down in writing. The themes you mention are absolutely correct, I think, as they are real themes within the Pentateuch. This, I think is part of freespirit’s point. Earlier we’ve mentioned looking at Genesis 1 as a polemic against pagan cosmologies. From that perspective, the singleness (and singlemindedness) of Elohim is even more telling. It also makes “sense” of the placing of the Sun and moon on day four, and the apparent throw away line “and he made the stars also” (or are we to read that with an exclamation mark in mind?). I’m attracted also by the possible eschatological/teleological theme running in the background of the story, but am not yet certain how strong that is loose from the rest of the Pentateuch. And there’s of course the theme of six days themselves, and the importance of the sabbath within the mindset of the Pentateuch.
I suspect that many of these themes can be incorporated into the underlying layers of Genesis, and this within the various constructs of how the narrative actually works, as John says: “The question is how to interpret this oscillation: command and fulfillment, upper and lower register, teacher and student”. For each of these I think we need to go back to the basic question of which story line the original listeners/readers would have “heard” when they encountered the story. I suspect that that will always remain a fair bit of guesswork, in which again we will need to refer to the rest of the Pentateuch.
John,
I’m still reading Kline, and hope to look at a few other bits that summarize various views. What I wonder when I read your construct is whether there are linguistic/structural clues that it’s a teacher/student kind of relationship. I’ve glanced at Kline’s defense of the opening phrase of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” He argues that the sentence cannot be a summary statement, after which comes the details, but that it must point to creative activity before the “creation” detailed in the remainder of the chapter. I find his usage of Proverbs 8:22-23 in this regard unconvincing, as I think one could successfully argue that the persona Wisdom in Proverbs is a fictitious persona constructed for the sake of the argument concerning the virtues of wisdom. And, like you and Peter, I’m uncomfortable with the separation of the universe into the seen and unseen realms. And I simply don’t understand why Day 4 is an “upper” register in his construct, as the place of the Sun and Moon (in the expanse of the sky) would seem to me to be far more lower register (the visible) than upper. “The heavens” are to him the invisible dwelling of God and the angels, and distinguished the from the sky, which is made from the murky, yucky stuff of those primordial waters in verse 6.
If I read your construct right, I’m not sure we could call it a true creation story, however. It’s rather a revelation about the created order, given to homo sapiens. Man is, if I understand you, not being given a strictly historical account of creation, but an iterative insight into how creation is structured. Is this your equivalent of the black rectangle in 2001: A Space Odyssey? (Great book and movie, by the way). The obvious advantage is that we’re off the hook with science, but it moves us back into what dissident stated: “The author was not trying to write an accurate account of how things all started,” at least not the things of creation. The story is perhaps a literal account of revelations from God, which man (the first pair, a group, the whole of mankind alive at that point in time?) received, but not an account of creation itself. In this sense it parallels, perhaps, the view that Genesis is a polemic, structured to teach the truth about Elohim/Yahweh in the midst of the surrounding pagan cultures. So yours teaches the truth about creation’s order, but not necessarily about the order of creation. Or am I being too black and white here?
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
I haven’t been to the OST site in a while and I’m sorry I missed this post and am late getting in the discussion.
I think option #3 is the best choice of the 5 but still isn’t exactly on target. I think any time you read a myth like the Genesis stories or even things in the NT you make a mistake if you try to ask the question “What does this story tell me about reality?”. You can only ask the question “What does this story tell me about how its authors (and possibly its audience) thought about reality?”.
I think the Genesis myths tell us a great deal about what it’s authors thought about reality which could be summarized as - mankind tends to make self destructive decisions at our own peril. I would argue that this is a very TRUE statement, so I would agree that this is a “true myth” because my experience along with thousands of documented cases since this one have also shown this truth to be “true”. There are other truths about reality that are in the story as well, but this is clearly the main truth. It also comments about mankinds issues with nakedness, honesty, painful childbirth, difficulties with survival, etc.
I feel certain that the story tellers (possibly over centruies) started with the idea of “man is self destructive in his quest for knowledge and power” and then worked out a story to illustrate the point. The myth is a critique of mans current status and situation and is NOT meant to accurately tell history. However it is the most ”true” story ever told. Crediting God with the story paints an insulting picture of God and it is also an insult to the creative ability of its authors by assuming they were incapable of creating such a fine true myth.
Trying to discern facts about the creation of the world from the Genesis myth is like trying to learn about the behavior of swine from reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It makes no sense and misses the point.
Danutz http://danutz.blogspot.com
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
Re: reading from inside the story
I like the way you summarise and synthesise the arguments, John. But doesn’t your own summary position, that “God creates a conscious awareness of the material universe” hit the same buffers of conflict with the “book of science” as any other literal understanding of Genesis? Isn’t the creation of a conscious awareness of what happened at creation saying the same thing as a description of what happened at creation - as described in Genesis 1? The issue remains a creation, in the sequence in which it is described, as opposed to a naturalistic development of life over the aeons, from the simpler forms to the more complex, without external divine assistance.
I personally have more problems with the latter than I do with the former, as explanations of the origins of life. I don’t find that a purely metaphoric understanding of Genesis 1 resolves anything. Somewhere, there remains the question: where did the universe come from, and how reasonable is it to suppose that a divine being had any role in its formation? Mine is a ‘faith’ understanding, but then all understandings rest on a considerable element of faith, just as they all appeal to evidence on which to support their conclusions.
I have therefore provided another view, which is not quite included in your summary, that extraordinary supernatural forces were at work in the initial literal six day creation, but that these were followed by naturalistic developments. This does, of course, have its problems - such as conflict with the evolutionary view that man appeared at the end of an evolutionary process. But it does reconcile other pieces of evidence which stand at variance with the evolutionary view, such as the discovery of creatures which were supposed to have died out millions of years ago, according to the fossil record, at the beginnings of the evolutionary chain - such as the coelacanth, and that peculiar shark creature looking like an eel with its mouth open, which we all saw captured on camera several days ago, a creature supposed to have died out 20 million years ago. In other words, what business do such creatures have being around today, when they should have evolved into something else - like all other well behaved members of species?
I think, too, when we are talking about events which by modern science’s reckoning happened some 4.5 billion years ago, naturalistic science is at the very limits of what can be asserted with any confidence. Science of all kinds, physical and natural, has been shown up as spectacularly wrong in the last hundred years, and this despite the use of ‘science’ to disprove the so-called supertsitions of Christian tradition.
Creation, sin, death and evolution
If somebody knows how to access it, there was a discussion along these lines between erlenmeyer and eric boehmer some time back (about two years ago).
Re: open possibilities
John,
I agree with Peter that you’ve done an excellent job (again) of summarizing the issues. Agreement too that the text can easily bear more than one interpretation. Earlier is this thread, someone mentioned the near impossibility of getting back to the roots of Genesis: what did it exactly mean back then?
About possible strands for moving forward: I’m interested in looking at structural/linguistic/contextual arguments for various views of Genesis 1. If we outline how various interpretations reading the various parts of the text, we also have a means for evaluating the interpretation in the context of Genesis 1-3 and beyond. This stays basically at the level of “what does the text mean” within the context of the scriptures, and the worldview(s) operating there.
On the other hand, looking at the (dis)unity of the first three chapters, certainly with a view to how the scientific community views human origins and failings, could be quite interesting. This moves to the level of “what does the text mean” to us informed by the findings of contemporary science.
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
I have tried to do my own synthesis of Genesis and Science and the result has been interesting but there are some rather large methodological problems with this enterprise and it always remains a ‘just so’ sort of speculation.
The story that science propagates itself is filled with many gaps. These gaps are places where many have tried to ‘squeeze God in’ and we know where that leads, but the gaps in the science story are nevertheless glaring and very much underexplored territory at least popularly.
One example is our atmosphere, it happens to be very rich in Oxygen. This is a fatal problem for the production of life, or at least for any of science’s current hypotheses on how life could have formed. An essential requirement right now, is a reducing environment (i.e. O2 is out). What’s fascinating here is that science does its own little bit of handwaving as the earth was supposedly originally reducing (no O2) but along came life and plant life in particular and that was so successful at photosynthesis that this resulted in O2 production and lo and behold the atmosphere became oxidising! Well…
Looking at Venus and Mars (on either side of us in our trips round the sun) we find that they have oxidising atmospheres. if one looks at volcano output, no surprises - oxidising, but then that original (reducing) atmosphere, last I heard, was supposed to have come from degassing from earth’s interior - i.e. volcanoes.
Now that is just one example and one which strongly supports a theory of Godly intervention, for so far science cannot imagine life evolving in the presence of abundant oxygen.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Golly!
Golly!
Physical death prior to the fall, to allow for evolution?
Maybe. But physical death associated with sin (as its consequence) is something Jesus was said to have overcome through his resurrection. (The resurrection was not just spiritual but physical defeat of death).
Could there have been a non-judicial first death , with only the second death (Revelation 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8 etc.) being judicial? Or does the appearance of the second death make the first death judicial also?
Can a non-judicial death be unravelled from a judicial death - which came in after the fall?
This is all too complex for me. It’s getting very speculative. I retreat into my semi-literal interpretation of Genesis 1. I still don’t have any particular anxieties about the conflict between this and macro-evolutionary theory. But then that’s not my problem. I just enjoy taking random potshots from the sidelines.
Re: Golly!
I’m all for getting into the text and regret any diversionary moves! My point was that science is not ‘finished’ with its theoretical problems and these will indeed continue to provide fodder for thousands of scientists for some generations to come. Then there’s always the very real possibility of another paradigm coming in to shake everything up again and which will necessitate further mental gymnastics to fit our good olde Genesis account in with whatever the latest scientific fad may be.
Of course, the corollary is that we are not any closer to being ‘finished’ with our exegetical and theological endeavors either. So one unfinished process interacts with another unfinished process in a most unsatisfactory manner! How deliciously PoMo can things get…
I have always thought it quite possible that the original creation was nothing like what we are now so avidly dissecting in our laboratories, certainly there seems to be little scope of scientifically explorable parallels in a world without entropy (read disorder) so if thermodynamics was different, so fundamentally was everything else in the creation.
Back to the text!
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
I haven’t read the entire thread, but I have skimmed and I did a few searches and I haven’t seen anyone talking about this as of yet. Regarding even the concept of the Gensis account as myth, I think John 1:1 is significant., in that we see Christ in the beginning as logos and not as mythos [muthos].
I realize that this thread is about the “true myth” concept itself, but thought I would throw this log onto the fire as well.
Thanks,Charles Churchill
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain, or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
flashback
If the creation of the whole universe were to be squeezed (say by time lapse) into just a few minutes of video and the ages to the present were roughly divided into six scenes separated by fades to black, what would it look like? If there were a narration to accompany the clip, would that resemble what we now have as Genesis? The whole of creation in around 800 words…
Scene one : Nothing followed by a rushing, roiling, stormy confusion.
Scene two : Galaxies and individual stars coalesce and eventually start to produce light.
Scene three : Planetary discs form and individual planets emerge.
Scene four : Life is produced of myriad forms that quickly start to resemble species that we recognise - fish, birds, land animals.
Scene five : Mankind appears and begins to conquer the world.
Scene six : Mankind totally dominates the planet and starts to both self destruct and to destroy earth.
Live to serve : Serve to live
One mankind or two?
The setting of the fall and the beginning of human history is placed within a highly summarised view of beginnings. The principle Actor is God Himself initiating creation and culminating that creation with the Garden of Eden.
In the accounts of mankind’s creation, one primary question that arises is : Were there two creations of man? i.e. The creation of mankind in Gen 1: 26-31 could be a separate event from that in Gen 2: 7-8 & 20-25, making the second account a second story, or is the second account a more detailed look at what was stated very briefly in the first setting?
I tend to prefer the first hypothesis, humankind was created and then two people are separately made and placed in a garden within the the earth, the second account then is the conversion of a barren tract of land somewhere on earth into a garden of plenty that sits within the silently larger context … but my textual support for this is slim. What’s most convincing is the contrasting sequences - while Gen 1 has plants, fish, birds and animals appearing before mankind, in Gen 2 man (specifically one individual human) is created first, then the trees (v9), beasts and birds (v19), and finally, in a grand culmination, the female human and simultaneously the male human!
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Whither Job?
Certainly the tone as well as the structure of the two accounts is markedly different. Perhaps this signifies two very ancient historical sources maybe coming from two different Hebrew roots? Both are acurately reported and specifically not forced into harmony. We can respect that and allow the facts to encourage us to dig a bit ‘below the surface’ as it were, without feeling a necessity to do a more modern bit of harmonization.
I’m trying very hard to not think of anything archaeological or paleontological but it’s the case of pink elephants popping up all over the place… and then there’s Job, so there may even be 3 ancient histories to consider.
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Re: Northern Kingdom and Southern Kingdom
ELOHISTIC.
Order of Creation:
First—Water.
Second—Land.
Third—Vegetation.
Fourth—Animals.
Fifth—Mankind; male and female.
In this story male and female man are created simultaneously, both alike, in the image of the gods, after animals have been called into existence
Here, joint dominion over the earth is given to woman and man, without limit or prohibition.
Everything, without exception, is pronounced "very good."
Man and woman are told that "every plant bearing seed upon the face of the earth and every tree… "To you it shall be for meat." They are thus given perfect freedom
Man and woman are given special dominion over all the animals-" every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."
YAHOISTIC.
Order of Creation:
First—Land.
Second—Water.
Third—Male Man, only.
Fourth—Vegetation
Fifth—Animals.
Sixth—Woman.
In this story male man is sculptured out of clay, before any animals are created, and before female man has been constructed.
Here, woman is punished with subjection to man for breaking a prohibitory law.
There is a tree of evil, whose fruit, is said by Yahweh to cause sudden death, but which does not do so, as Adam lived 930 years after eating it.
Man is told there is one tree of which he must not eat, "for in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die."
An animal, a "creeping thing," is given dominion over man and woman, and proves himself to be truthful . (Compare Genesis chapter 2, verse 17, with chapter 3, verses 4 and 22.)
It will be of interest to note during the breakup of the northern tribes and Judah.The northern tribes followed the Elohim (The Suns or Sons)and Judah the WORD.Also that the Bible was written backwards as a his-story and not forwards as we go.The books we have now are not 7000 years old.
recreating myth
Sitting round the campfire after relishing the roasted meat of the day’s hunt, and the Old Man approaches as dessert (choice nuts and some gathered fruit artfully arranged in the communal pot) is passed round… Smoke swirls as I chew thoughtfully and await the song-story that he always begins with. The drums begin to beat : IN THE BEGINNING! I am quite certain that I can’t actually get into the minds of the original authors or even receive the narrative in a way similar to the original audiences. Some things of great importance are critically missing! Wonder, anticipation, the figures and STORY that will play through my mind stimulated by the recitation, perhaps a little different each day, evolving and drawing my world together, telling me who and what I am, was, and will be, empowering me to live in this community meaningfully, and providing the framework for my identity as an integral part of those who live the visions with me each day that we share/renew together each night. Myth, to be effective, needs deep roots in my mental makeup. My thinking should be based on the foundational stories in an essential but subliminal way. But, it’s not so. Instead, I find the ‘wrong’ myths occupying that ‘root and soil’ area - mostly junk science and ‘history’ from my school days along with a fair mix of unrelated stories that have no lasting value or integrative capacity! Was the story alive after stone carved it into clay? Or, did it bypass this both in Mesopotamia and then in Egypt by being told and retold around the herdspeople’s campfires all the way to the hill country when David-jonathan, and then a millennia later, Jesus, John, and Saul were young? Perhaps I can start with thinking back just this 2 millennia in trying to get an NT perspective. At least there are hints in the NT as to how the Genesis accounts were viewed which may prove helpful. Of course the fact that I am much at sea with getting the NT context right doesn’t help much but, ever the optimist… As John Doyle pointed out, one major source is Paul. Romans 1 - God created the world and reveals Himself in His creation while mankind as a whole “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images”. Romans 5 - Sin entered through one man and (with the loss of righteousness) death reigns . In spite of the law, righteousness was not restored. By one man’s righteousness and sacrifice now righteousness and therefore life, is available as a free gift of God’s grace.
Romans 6 has dying and rising through baptism and the concept that our binding now assures our resurrection with Christ.
Romans 8 (I find the Romans 7 hypothesis a stretch) the body is dead but the spirit is alive. The creation groans awaiting the ‘revealing of the sons of God’. The creation was ‘subjected to futility’ and ‘the bondage of corruption’ deliberately by God ‘in hope’! Eschatologically our adoption as sons is also awaited eagerly not only by us but by creation itself and the (eventual?) fulfilment will be glorious all around.
Paul is freely using contemporary concepts in remarkably new ways but the important point for me is that his interpretation of the ‘new Adam’ rests solidly on standard understandings of how sin enterred and corrupted the good creation through the original Adam. Instead of the Jewish understanding of the salvific value of the law/covenants, Paul has Jesus and the new covenant in His blood.
One implication of Paul’s reading of Genesis is that functionally and spiritually the creation has undergone a massive change and is bound within that reduced and achingly imperfect form until the eschaton.
the same old story?
John, I agree that my assumptions are hermeneutically suspect especially as far as the stability of the understanding of the Genesis story over such a vast time and across so many changes in culture/language/location over that time. I would suspect that major changes in interpretation-understanding would at the very least have been evident under Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Palestinian, United Kingdom, Divided Kingdom, Exile, 2nd Temple, Greek influence and finally Roman occupation! The only element of constancy over this vast period of time would have been that the Genesis accounts are always taken as the foundational mythic constant within which the covenants and law are integrated to give us the longstanding characteristics of Judaism.
With Paul, he is indeed breaking a lot of new ground, yet the major component is that Jesus has replaced, or better superceded, the earlier reliance on law-covenant. Apart from this ‘apical change’, the mythic foundation remains intact and with the old Adam - new Adam perspective, in many ways these foundations are reinforced! Paul is in fact following Jesus own approach in that He was quite willing to let the creation stand over the law as primary and therefore authoritative!
Live to serve : Serve to live
back to 2nd base
God’s ecosystem.
Genesis, the story of beginnings. Poetic and mythic in proportion but carrying that unmistakable ‘ring of truth’ that draws us back to this story over and over again. Genesis 1 is the story of the making of the world as a complete ecosystem including the creation of mankind. God in Genesis 2 then sets up a garden, a very special garden, containing representatives of all the species that He has made so far but especially plants that are beautiful and produce fruits and seeds that are edible, and God gives the garden into the charge of Humankind’s first representative both to work it and to keep it safe.
Perhaps the sequence of events in the formation of Eden can yield some interesting possibilities. We see God first making or forming Adam (seemingly here in unisex mode) and then, having Adam nearby, God plants the garden. Adam is therefore ‘taught’ the art of horticulture. Then God brings in the animals that Adam is to name, perhaps also including here some lessons in husbandry? Finally God ‘divides’ Adam into male and female, thus completing His forming process, lays down a condition, and then becomes an absentee landlord!
The four rivers are very interesting because they do seem to help to somewhat fix the era and place of this part of the story. Most interesting is the last of the four, for while the first three lands are described as being elsewhere, the last is just named, from which we may assume that it is already very familiar. The third river’s land is also somewhat familiar, perhaps neighboring. So Eden itself is somewhere near the source of the Euphrates (Perath) and the narrator(s) are somewhere near the Euphrates itself and not too far from the Tigris. This is assuming that we can identify these rivers with any precision. Further geographical speculations could be made about the second named river, the Gihon which ‘encompasses’ Ethiopia. It’s just possible that if the roots of this tale really are very ancient, the Red Sea would have formed a narrower rift, perhaps with a river in its base, and seeming to surround Ethiopia. Or, we may even be dealing with even more ancient traditions that hark back to a time when the rivers were different on the earth…in which case placing the tale anywhere near the Levant is itself risky!
What follows in Genesis 3 is the story of How Mankind broke that first commandment and died. The advent of death and whether there was death beforehand or not is of course a matter of great contention as indeed is the very nature of the ‘muwth’ itself.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: back to 2nd base
Certainly John, those who have a belief in the truth of the text will see this truth as somewhat self-evident! I was not really thinking along those lines when I wrote that there is a ‘ring of truth’ to the story of Genesis, rather that the elements of this story are very easy for a reader to understand and be empathetic to as somehow bringing out for the reader who and what we in fact are and why we are the way that we are, elements that I think were of central importance to the authors as to so many generations of those who have heard and passed it on.
Empirical and scientific are categories that one would find hard to reconcile with any mythical story. It is also worth asking whether a scientific approach inherently is in any way a superior approach to truth than say a wisdom centred approach would be. While the myth does not ’ testify to its own truthfulness’ it does indeed assume it, don’t you think?
Before coming to that very interesting question of death, I am struck by a particular feature of the command that God lays down. Again taking the context as God having appointed Adam as the ‘caretaker and horticulturist’ of His garden, I wonder whether God is not doing what many an owner does - tell His gardener that, “it’s all yours to do with as you have been instructed. But there’s this bit that I want for myself. The fruit of this tree is mine, you are not to do anything with or to it, I’ll take care of this bit myself”.
I find that in India, when we have absentee landlords (very common), and the land has been essentially handed over to the tillers, it is normal for the tiller to enjoy, by prior agreement, X proportion of the fruits of his labour but some types of crop or produce are exclusively reserved for the owner. He will periodically send someonge over at the appropriate times of the year to take away what has been reserved for him.
Could such an arrangement have been at the heart of the prohibition as far as the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is concerned?
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God's own country
It was a thought that tickled me too. The assertion of Genesis seems to be that Adam was never an owner whether in or out of Eden. The perpetual steward perhaps, but one thing that definitely changes is that instead of not having to worry about where the next meal will come from, Adam has been cast out into an ecosystem where he will have to compete for food even with thorny scrubs!
I see this understanding of ‘ownership vs. stewardship’ as issues that were alive and implicit still at the time of Jesus, with Jesus consistently pointing back to the original situation in Genesis as the ideal. But that’s being diachronic again.
For ancient agrarian civilisations, the king’s garden is a familiar theme, a place where no one else is allowed except for the favoured caretaker. The king will take his leisure there as and when he pleases. This in no way diminishes the fact that he anyway owns everything else in the kingdom too.
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The promise of death
If we have been somewhat successful in placing Genesis 2 somewhere in the ANE, possibly in ‘the land between the rivers’, God’s claim over the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ is the owner’s claim and the penalty is primarily a breaking of a covenant agreement for which the penalty becomes “on pain of death”.
But this reading is much disputed. Some point out that death did not immediately result and this has been taken as perhaps ‘it was an empty threat’ and so the serpent was right all along. Some question whether death itself was known beforehand, making the penalty for disobedience somewhat lacking in bite.
Our text however, assumes that God’s words were understood, so death must already have been a known reality. Still, physical death did not immediately ensue instead what did happen is that man is cast out of Eden and given a much harder furrow to plough.
I wonder whether the story in fact could contain a much more sophisticated analysis of the meaning of ‘life’ and subsequently of death too? For, man was created for the purpose of taking care of God’s garden in a balanced, productive and purposeful environment. To be then forced to adapt to a different and much tougher environs where one has to spend most of one’s time and effort in just staying alive, with little left over for creativity or even fitting-in meaningfully as an important part of the overall order of the system is certainly a type of living death. Certainly this is part of the understanding of life after the fall that is analysed so beautifully in Ecclesiastes, Job and a number of the Psalms.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Assuming society
John, one of the basic problems with the Genesis story is that in the story itself, society has not previously existed. I keep trying to place the story within something that I imagine ‘must have been’ its original cultural millieu. This is a very interesting and itself a very sophisticated creation, if the authors did create this story!
As a reader, I find it very difficult to imagine myself in Adam’s place! A society of three or perhaps four (if one counts the serpent) and without antecedents - no history, no education and no enculturation.
Now, that brings up another interesting thought, were there very intelligent creatures other than God and man in God’s original creation? The role of the serpent is too often assumed to be anything other than that of a real conversation taking place between two intelligent beings. Eve certainly has no difficulty in communicating with, understanding and even in believing what the serpent has to say to her.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
Genesis 1 seems to be a straightforward narrative about a historic event. The story is of a piece with the rest of the Bible as it has come down to us (discrepancies with the second Creation narrative of Gen. 2-3 notwithstanding). The reason we’ve explored alternative interpretations is that the story doesn’t fit inside the “book of nature” as written by modern empirical science. There are three basic strategies for resolving the discrepancies: either natural science is wrong, or the text is wrong, or the traditional ways of reading the narrative are wrong. In this post we’ve been exploring the third way.
I agree with the basic thrust of this paragraph; there is a third way to read the texts. But I agree with danutz and something close to option three.
The problem I have is, contrary to what I was taught growing up in conservative Evangelical circles, this is not a straightforward narrative about an historic(al?) event. It is historic in the sense that God did indeed create the world. But there really isn’t a single rational “how” God did so in the entire text. In fact, according to classwork I’ve done on the Pentateuch, “the text is begging us not to read it this way,” (as literal history). There are complex and beautiful number games going on involving sets of three, seven, etc. Most mainstream scholars theorize that it was in fact a reworking of the Enuma Elish to emphasize, correctly say the Jews and Christians, the utter supremacy of Yhwh over all powers that controlled the waters, the sun, the moon, etc. Fertility does not come from the earth itself, but is a gift to the earth from God. And human beings, rather than being created from Tiamat’s entrails as slaves to the gods, are in their gender and biology the image of God, co creators and stewards of a good (rather than dualistic and chaotic) creation.
The “problems” between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, especially regarding the literal sequence of the creation, should alert us to the error—if I can use so strong a word—of attempting to derive a literal interpretation. I am one who believes that Genesis 1-11, in particular, are extensive re-workings of stories already circulating in the ANE. My own position makes me somewhat uncomfortable, because many of my brothers and sisters who are to my theological left don’t start talking about history in the Biblical narratives until you get to the reign of David and Solomon. I believe passionately that there is a huge historical core at the heart of the canon, but the “happenedness” of Genesis 1-3, at least, is not needed to derive truths that still hold as historically true because we experience them day to day (for example, alienation between people and God, what we call the Fall).
I read a scholar yesterday who said that if Genesis isn’t literally true, people have no reason to become Christians. And I hope it’s clear by now that I absolutely believe that to be false.
My two cents; thanks for reading!
In peace,
Rob
was it or was it not?
Rob,
certainly a reworking of other ANE myths is a part of the rich possibilities that our Genesis story may involve. What we do know of the times and cultural roots of our stories is really very little. Job would perhaps contain more definite links to enuma/tiamat. Genesis 1 and 2 both use elohim for God (though in slightly different ways) perhaps indicating some Canaanite linkage. Apart from this though, other common themes such as validating the political-priestly leadership and laying down enculturating principles are very remarkably missing from our stories. They have a different mythic role to play and I guess we have been working first with the text as it stands to try to find the clues that may be there. The list of factors that set Genesis apart is often more of a negative list; not this, not that either… and in effect such a comparitive reading can be very enlightening!
Most of what I have seen of the numerological and metaphorical analyses are highly speculative and also remarkably variable depending on whom one is reading and the particular bit of esoteric knowledge that they claim to have in hand. So, I tend to take such studies in ‘arcane’ meanings with a pinch of salt!
Anyhow, thanks for your two cents and I can only hope you have a pocketful of change to share with us!
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: was Adam created immortal?
Quote: Is it relevant, or perhaps even authoritative, to consult the Talmud — or, even better, a living orthodox Rabbi who is a carrier of the ancient tradition, of the Oral Torah?
Response: With respect, it may be relevant, but it cannot be authoritative in the same way as the text itself. I always feel a little suspicious when there is any kind of tradition that cannot be accessed by the "average person" - it smacks more than a little of Gnostic heresy. The relevance happens, though, because texts are interpreted in community. Communal understanding, in my opinion, is different then exegeting the text. The oral tradition (be it Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and even Fundamentalist) can be wrong and must be adjusted by the text itself. How would one go about proving that oral Torah predates the written? Or better, how would one go about proving that the content of the oral Torah is different then the written? I suppose it might come down to faith, and I don't have faith in Tradition as a reliable interpreter of the sacred text.
In peace,
Rob
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
"Genesis 1:1 is so overlaid with interpretations that the text itself almost disappears."
This comment was recently made by the original author of this post and it is startlingly true! Nonetheless, I’d love to see this discussion continue not just because there have been some new ideas proposed but also because the text itself has been allowed to speak.
After quite a bit of brewing, one thing that is clear is that there are big differences between the accounts of Gen 1:1 - 2:3 and what follows from Gen 2:4. My reason for dividing what seems to be a continuous narrative at this juncture is that this is about where ‘Elohim’ is replaced with ‘Yhovah Elohim’.
As has been remarked before, the settings and the very style also differ. Now, I’m of the opinion that the fashioner(s) of Genesis knew and appreciated the contrasts and still, quite deliberately wove the two accounts into one less-than-harmonious whole.
Perhaps there was an oral component that originally accompanied the written parts that explained how everything fit together and why, but we certainly don’t have such a context to refer to.
To some extent, the problems are minimised if the second narrative is not considered as an alternative to the first. Is it possible that the second narrative can be understood to refer to the creation of the garden, rather than of the whole earth? For such a reading to flow, Gen 2:4-5 could be considered a bridge that summarises what has gone before and makes us think ahead to a (portion of the?) land - ‘erets - that can not yet support vegetation for it has no means of regularly receiving water!
An additional possibility is that the 2nd account is meant to be read as an interpolation into the first account which functions to explain what happened after God created man, but I find this less than convincing.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
A different type of theism is present in the Genesis accounts to whatever is known of the cultures and religions of the rest of the ANE. The account starting at Gen 2:4 is no less negatively fascinating as there is only ‘Yhovah Elohim’.
Wikipedia tells me that there are 109 entries for ‘weather gods’ and the second account begins with God’s modification of ‘the land’s’ weather by causing a heavy dew (or something like it but not apparently rain!). I am more inclined to see this land as being a portion of undeveloped land located within the world that has already been created and populated.
But, in any case, as has been noted before in this string, the other deities are prominent in their absence. The absence of deities is not just a curiosity but also points to this people (the owners of this true myth) having a significantly different economy and political structure, for in all other ANE cultures that have been studied, the gods, their temples and the economies that they helped the rulers to regulate and tax were a very significant part of the structure of the particular society. So, if it’s missing then what replaces it? More particularly too the purpose of the story is not to promote one god over against all others. There are no others!
Live to serve : Serve to live
Polytheism or collaboration?
The easy way to deal with these fascinating plurals/singulars and mixtures of both is to say that they are a leftover from some ‘other’ oral tradition or a product of some fairly indiscriminate mixing of stories that originally were quite separate. As far as I know, there is no solid evidence for this, and in fact when backed up on the question of textual (source/form) evidence for any oral tradition it must be admitted that there is little enough definitely there to point to!
Indications of trinitarianism or the use of a royal we here are for those who prefer to be unbiblically diachronic!
The fact remains that in the first acount it is Elohim and in the second Yhovah Elohim and while these could have ‘originally’ been alternates in a pantheon, or alternate names for the same God, or different tales from different places, this author makes no other attempt here to distinguish them. In our text of Genesis, with its continuity of narrative, the natural reading is that we are dealing with only one God, and perhaps with one or more ‘companions’ whose nature and purpose are left unspecified.
An interesting speculation is that the plural could also be an inclusive one. Perhaps, parts of the ‘act’ of creation were collaborative, with that already created then participating on what is to come. In this case the ‘we’ is an inclusive one and implies that all of the creation is consciously involved with God in this particular massive collaboration that finally produces ‘man’.
It is also very interesting that the singular and plural pronouns with Elohim (in Gen 1) do both occur and this could either signal that sometimes one of the Elohim were acting and sometimes two or more OR that sometimes the only Elohim (one God with a plural name but with a singular masculine pronoun - ‘he’) is acting and sometimes (plural preposition - ‘we’) when the one Elohim chooses the collabortive route, though it should be said that the word form elohim is itself a plural construction…
Could there be other possibilities too?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
I am rather disappointed that not one person pointed out my nasty gaff in calling pronouns "prepositions". Luckily I was given enough time to spot that bit of stupidity and still be able to edit it out!
That aside, in Genesis 2:18f we have this fascinating passage where God again creates/forms "out of the ground" all the beasts of the wilderness and birds of the skies and brings them to Adam for examination, to see if they would be a "help meet" for this protohuman. God’s relationship to the creatures is interesting. God has formed them but God does not name them. That job is left to the protohuman Adam and it stands in contrast to the planting of the garden where God took the lead (perhaps with Adam alongside to learn?). Here Adam is to decide on the taxonomy and as God brings each creature to Adam (a fascinating exercise in itself) Adam names and fails to find his fitting helper.
Adam is anesthetised and after a bit of complicated surgery and what looks to be very advanced cloning cum genetic engineering, God produces out of Adam a meet help for Adam and she is recognised as such by Adam who ecstatically proclaims her to be "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh" and Woman. this is followed by a rather strange but lyrical statement (the author is unacknowledged) about leaving and cleaving and in a reversal of what has just happened, the two will again become one flesh!.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
In Genesis 2 we have the story of Eden, the creation of man, the creation of woman and finally the two fittingly coming together. In Genesis 3 we have the story of what then went tragically wrong.
The story of the fall again seems to flow uninterrupted from the account of the creation of mankind, but does it? There are important differences in the handling of the narrative in Gen 3, with more pronounced poetic structuring, parallelisms and with important differences introduced in the characters, especially the character of Yhovah Elohim.
God has been the creator, the doer who envisions and makes things happen. God started in Gen 2 to notice a problem without immediately proposing an answer, but nonetheless, in Gen 2, God does know the answer and provides it in his own time.
In Gen 3 we see God not proposing to know in any detail what has actually occurred. In fact God prefers to infer what has happened by asking for information and evaluation the answers that are given.
It is also implied that mankind was not the only form of life that had been created with intelligence and language. In fact the serpent is noted to be the most cunning (subtil in the KJV) of all the creatures and when God curses, or execrates the serpent, God demotes the serpent to being lower than the dumbest of beasts (bhemah) again implying that there are both dumb and linguistically capable beasts.
In Gen 2, woman is the crowning glory of God’s creative work. In Gen 3 she is the cause of all sorts of trouble.
I’m not all that sure what to make of these differences but it is a distinct possibility that in Gen 3 one or more new sources are being woven into the narrative by the author(s).
In the final analysis as far as Gen 3 is concerned, there are no heroes. Adam turns out to be one who no longer seems to have the ability to think clearly. Eve is just as easily beguiled.
Even God comes out looking more bemused than commandingly in charge while a shaddow is cast on the veracity both of God’s assertions and promises. But the story now also throws into focus the fact that God is very much like an absentee landlord. He invested and created a garden, trained a gardener and saw to it that the gardener could function effectively by providing the meet help that Adam so badly needed.
God gives instructions including what Adam can take a share of and what not to touch. Then God apparently disappears until God is ‘heard’ (v8) and this is a fascinating verse! God calls out to Adam, and the implication is that God expected Adam to know that the Lord God has come and to be in attendance, perhaps even making his report?
One of the key results is reversal. Adam is from the ground, so God makes the cooperation between the ground and Adam into a difficult thing. In the case of the Woman, she is from Adam and while in the original state she was Adam’s completion and Adam had longed for her, now the Woman is to be the one doing the longing!
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 2-3
Reading this story literally, one wonders when and why God became a non-corporeal being.
I seem to recall from many years ago in my OT overview course in college being told that the word used to name G-d in chapters 2 and 3 changes just when Adam and Eve are thrown from the garden. That it was a change from a very present kind of word (what you’re describing here, a physically local G-d) to a “way up there” kind of word (G-d in heaven). This was stressed as an important aspect of the consequences of The Fall. That human beings were removed from their very direct, face to face relationship with G-d to an indirect relationship with a non-present G-d.
Maybe someone who knows the non-translated texts better could comment, as my memory could be flawed on this point.
~jhimm
—
nothing lasts.
nothing is finished.
nothing is perfect.
Re: you will surely die
As wih the bulk of our previous explorations, it does seem that the questions outnumber the answers! In retrospect, I think back to how glibly certain I was that I understood what the creation was all about and what it signified for my faith and my beliefs, and I realise that I was wrong, and wrong, and wrong again!
It’s also frightening to think of how much unquestioned theological speculation had been tied up in my mind on a very ‘surface’ reading of this fascinatingly deep and complex text. And we haven’t really tangled with some of the BIG questions yet: Gender and gender relationships, sin, satan, and incidental stuff like what is man, now fallen, and the potential for relationship with God - and other men, and what does all this point us towards, if anything???
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: you will surely die
Some infer Adam died a “spiritual” death the day he ate from the tree, i.e. the day he was separated from God (examples of death used figuratively include: Mat 8:22; Col 2:13; 1Jn 3:14;). It seems to me the people who advocate this position are reading modern Christian ideas back into an ancient Israelite text. I’m not so sure how much Scripture backs up the common views about “spiritual death” in the first place. The idea seems a bit modern to me. I would appreciate it if Andrew or anyone else could share their opinion about this.
Spiritual death scriptural or not, I think we need to take Genesis 2:17 with a grain of salt. I would say the passage hyperbolically expresses the inevitability of Adam and Eve’s death in the event they eat from the tree thereby sinning against God. Support for this interpretation can be taken from the similar use of the phrases of Genesis 2:17 in the story of Solomon and Shimei:
“And the king sent and called for Shimei, and said unto him, Build thee an house in Jerusalem, and dwell there, and go not forth thence any whither. For it shall be, that on the day thou goest out, and passest over the brook Kidron, thou shalt know for certain that thou shalt surely die: thy blood shall be upon thine own head” (1Ki 2:36-37).
Shimei in fact does leave Jerusalem but does not die that very day; he goes in search of his runaway slaves in Gath and upon returning to Jerusalem from Gath he is summoned by Solomon and summarily executed (1 Kings 2:39-46). Without the benefit of hindsight for the reader, Solomon’s warning is if Shimei leaves Jerusalem he will secure his own death. Neither Adam or Shimei die on the day they are told they will die on, but both seal their fates and ensure their eventual untimely deaths.
I’m not sure if the combination of the imperfect and infinitive absolute form of the Hebrew verb muth, literally “dying you shall die,” should be taken into consideration. Did God mean Adam and Eve would begin dying the day they ate from the tree? I’m not sure. It seems the combination of the imperfect and infinitive absolute form of the verb is employed just for emphasis as it is elsewhere. I’m no expert with Hebrew, Greek, or even grammar in general, so maybe Andrew can comment on this.
Re: you will surely die
2.17 …except the tree fo the knoweldge of good and evil. You are not to eat from it, because on the day that you eat from it, it will become certain that you will die.
3.19 …til you return from the ground—for you were taken out of it; you are dust and you will return to dust
from the Complete Jewish Bible (David H. Stern, 1998)
On the day that Adam disobeyed the command not to eat.. it became certain that he would return to the dust from which he came. The dust was originally given life; on the day of disobedience a curse was pronounced that ensured that the life (breath) would be taken from the dust again—this is still what happens at the point of death—the ‘curse of death’ is fulfilled.
For what it’s worth, (and I note from the tetelestai thread that the agreement of others is in danger of being held as not worth much these days!) I agree with enarchy (and I understand from previous discussions that Andrew advocates a similar position), that the idea of "spiritual death" as commonly touted or understood is not particularly sustainable from Scripture.
shalom! - john (eternalpurpose.org.uk)
Re: you will surely die
I first would like to comment on my first post. Now that I think about it, there does seem to be marginal support for a doctrine of “spiritual death,” but considering it is so marginal (or maybe I’m wrong about that?), I don’t think it should be read into Genesis. I think we need to avoid reading (modern?) Christian ideas back into Jewish texts, but try to the do the opposite: read Jewish texts into Christianity; I think this is what Andrew has hinted at before. A good example of “spiritual death” (but maybe that is not the best phrase to describe it) can be found in the parable of the prodigal son.
John said,
Whether Yahweh meant that man would on that day become mortal, or become aware of his mortality, or forfeit eternal life, or suffer separation from God, the text requires us to take Yahweh’s word figuratively.
I don’t think it requires us to read his words figuratively. Jesus has said that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. Do we take that to be an ultimate truth? I don’t think so. Do we come up with absurd theories about what figurative truth that may have or something? I hope not. In the case of Genesis, I think we need to take YHWH’s words for what they are: hyperbolic. Perhaps he said Adam would die on that “day” to make his threat all the more serious.
On the other hand, perhaps the author of Genesis wrote “day” for a specific reason. Would he not have caught the apparent contradiction (if contradiction is the best word to describe it) and took the word out? Could he be trying to tell us something? What have Rabbis interpreted it as in the past? Perhaps these are things we should look into.
Re: you will surely die
Just a quick note on "day" in these passages. The interpretation of YOM has been a major bone of contention with the Creationist camp insisting that "day" always means only a 24 hour period and others pointing out that Gen 2:4 "in the day" summarises the whole of the creation effort and that the sun itself (that one would expect to be a necessary ingredient for 24 hours to come into effect) is not created till the fourth day.
If the author(s) has deliberately made chronology into a secondary matter, then "the day" here could indeed be meant figuratively, indefinitely, or even prospectively.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: you will surely die
One possibility is that the fruit of the tree of knowledge itself is somehow physiologically poisonous but then in the design of the garden itself in Gen 2:9 we are told that "the Lord God made to spring up every
tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life
was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil."
In God’s injunction the "surely eat" and "surely die" are examples of emphatic Hebrew construction by repetition i.e. literally ‘eat, eat’ and ‘die die’.
Regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil this and the ‘tree of life’ have both sprung up in the centre of the garden. No prohibition is attached to eating the fruit of the tree of life.
The immediate effect of eating the ‘forbidden fruit’ is a moral self consciousness and one that is not related to any objective reality. They are ashamed of themselves because they now perceive themselves as naked, and somehow that’s wrong, they are incomplete in themselves. Their inherent sufficiency in their being created good and being one is now disturbed. They are suddenly concerned with how they will be perceived by others, and perhaps even each other?
Could this be the equivalent of death? If so, it has indeed happened in that same day and whether they then eat of the tree of life or not they will always be ashamed of themselves as long as they both shall live.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: you will surely die
John
I noted your comment upon my earlier comment—you thought it had some merit, I think perhaps in connection with the idea that Adam would return to dust.
However, I note you did not seem to comment upon—and comments made since then seem to overlook—the idea also contained in that post that "in that day it will become certain that you will die."
2.17 …except the tree fo the knoweldge of good and evil. You are not to eat from it, because on the day that you eat from it, it will become certain that you will die.
3.19 …til you return from the ground—for you were taken out of it; you are dust and you will return to dust
from the Complete Jewish Bible (David H. Stern, 1998)
I.e., it is the "making certain" to which "on the day" refers.
Accordingly, on the day that Adam’s eats (disobeys) it becomes certain that he will die because that is the day on which the curse of death ("you will return to dust") is pronounced. The curse makes it certain and happens on the day Adam eats.
Thus, the original threat / promise is completely fulfilled: on the day you eat, it will become certain you will die. He eats. The curse is pronounced. It is now certain that Adam will die. Later, he dies.
[The implication is that there was another option: that Adam would not die, ever. This possibility is perhaps to be associated with the Tree of Life.
However, as well as being cursed regarding ‘death,’ Adam is also cursed in terms of working by the sweat of his brow etc. He is also barred from the garden, specifically because, it seems to my reading of the text, because this might allow him to live forever—cheating the curse of death?…but doing so in a way that would leave him in a perpetual state of being under the "work" curse and in a form of relationship with God associated with guilt etc. Moreover, the following narratives of Genesis suggest that something graver than awareness of nakedness, eventual death and guilt has entered: a form of wickedness has entered the heart of humanity…
It seems to me that all of these issues are eventually addressed in the new covenant, under the Messiah, who offers both Eternal Life (equivalent to the tree of Life) and the Sabbath Rest from working in our own strength—ie. delivered from the curse aspect of working. Not that we don’t work, but that work, for those under the new covenant has a new, hitherto denied aspect and Holiness—a deliverance from the sinful nature.
However, these are asides and my apologies if you’ve been over that ground. I’ve not read the whole thread, and am only now following the discussion via google reader, which has been interesting.]
shalom! - john (eternalpurpose.org.uk)
Re: you will surely die
What about this: Before eating the fruit Adam and Eve didn’t just have immortal bodies; they had living bodies, bodies that didn’t feel pain or exertion, godlike bodies. Immediately after eating the fruit they found themselves trapped in dead bodies.
I don’t think Adam and Eve had immortal bodies or godlike bodies to begin with.
“And the LORD God formed man of he dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen 2:7).
Paul draws a contrast between the soulish (psychikos) and spiritual (pneumatikos) body (1Co 15:44). He says the human is first sown (i.e. created or born) as a psychikos body. He even goes as far to contrast the first Adam as a soul (psychēn) and the last Adam as a life-giving spirit (pneuma zōopoioun).
So it seems Adam was created mortal, dying, but did not know it until after the Fall. This begs the question: when was God going to give Adam access to the tree of life had he not sinned (i.e. how long was God going to wait)? Was it’s really God’s intention for Adam to remain in his pre-fall state? Or was God’s intention for Adam to screw up? After the fall, Adam is said to have become like God, to know good and evil (Gen 3:22). Could this tie in with Paul’s statement that, “[T]he creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom 8:21-22). Was Adam ever a child of God? Was he ever “like him [Jesus]” (1Jn 3:2)? If anything, it seems like Adam was less like God prior to the Fall than after. Maybe these questions can’t and shouldn’t be answered.
Re: you will surely die
However, I note you did not seem to comment upon—and comments made since then seem to overlook—the idea also contained in that post that “in that day it will become certain that you will die.”
The “become certain” bit is an inference into the text, right? Do you think that inference can be drawn from the Hebrew?
Re: you will surely die
According to the Bible story Adam did not literally die on the literal day he ate the forbidden fruit. Enarchay says “I don’t think it requires us to read his words figuratively.” He then says that God may have been speaking hyperbolically. But hyperbole is a figure of speech, isn’t it? “If you don’t get your homeword done mom is going to kill you.” Hyperbolic is not literal.
I don’t know what I was thinking.
Re: you will surely die
John Doyle,
self-awareness is characteristic of a fully sentient being feels a bit strange to me. The text seems to say that this self consciousness, the whole idea of self and other is the most obvious sign of being wrong, of having wrong in relationships.
The main reason for God making Eve was so that mankind could be completed by the oneness that was then a reality. So, while Adam and Eve are two separate sentient beings, they are one and are also not conscious that they are imperfect in their otherness to God. The idea of not being one is first subtly proposed by the serpent in introducing the possibility that God may not have told the whole truth about something that really would be good. Adam and Eve are together when they eat the forbidden fruit.
Finally, while being deceived may have been Eve’s fault it is Adam who is cursed and the ground along with him. Collectively it was Adam and the Ground, but now, the ground becomes AN OTHER, a rival and a hindrance.
We are conscious of our otherness and this consciousness is a reflection of the reality that we are not one either with each other or with the very world that has birthed us.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Gender, sexuality and all that stuff.
Did the author(s) of the early chapters of Genesis intend their stories to teach on stuff like the nature of God, and mankind? Were they explaining what they had observed? Were they proposing a theory that significantly modified the prevailing opinion? Did they expect their work to be understood literally, say as a historical and scientific reality now being summarised for convenience, or were they aiming more at an enthralling story that wove together varying elements of truth and poetry with greater emphasis on literary truth but without great emphasis on literal truth?
There is not much that can be pointed to of a polemical nature up to Genesis 4. It also seems to be interesting that the originally different origins of the base stories can be discerned even after thousands of years of transmission and finally translation into so many foreign languages. Had they desired to homogenise the narratives it would have been a simple matter to accomplish.
Yet, with all of our uncertainties, we continue to allegorise, typologise, and theologise on these enticing few sentences as if we knew what the stories both meant and mean.
For better or for worse we would like Genesis to tell us who and what we are.
‘Adam’ is a transliteration of the Hebrew and means something like ‘out of the ground’, and by implication, from the colour of rich reddish earth, ‘ruddy’. Initially there is no indication of Adam’s gender. In Gen 1:26 we have :"Let us make [Adam] man in our image …" and shortly afer this in 1:27 "…male and female created he them".
As an aside it is also interesting that the stress on "after our likeness" precedes the dominion statement in 1:26 implying that it is as God’s representatives and in God’s stead that the idea of dominion is stated and this dominion is a joint dominion of the male and female together ("them").
In Genesis 2 the suspense on the gender status of the first Adam is maintained until after the formation of Eve. It is not good, declares God, for Adam to be alone. This implies to me that while thus far God has been there with Adam, now God will no longer be around and Adam will be left alone.
Then comes a startling statement in Gen 2:18 of what God intends Adam’s helper to be. This is where the KJV first has ‘help meet’ and what it actually seems to mean is a helper "to go ahead of’, or to put it bluntly, ‘to lead’ Adam. God proceeds to form ‘out of the ground’ various potential helpers but none of them is found entirely suitable to help and lead Adam. Note also that the word translated ‘help’ is in all other instances in the OT used to denote God’s own help to various people.
The ‘out of the ground’ is again interesting for the logic here seems to be that in order to find a suitable helper, the helper should come from the same base material from which Adam was formed.
God then stops trying to form a helper from the ground and instead turns to a potentially even more suitable base material, Adam. So, Adam is put to sleep. Eve is formed from a "rib" actually something angular or side oriented, and the flesh is ‘closed up’ (definitely impying surgery) and the Lord God here uses a new word, related to building up, for now from this ‘piece’ of Adam, Eve is built.
If anything is to be learned from this narrative, it is that Eve was in all ways created at least equal to Adam and is there perhaps even an implication of superior purpose and design?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 - Contrasting Natures of God
A number of contributors to this thread have speculated that there may have been a number of different stories that have been utilised and transformed into the present Genesis narrative. What I have been thinking about for quite a while now, is that the authors and the ones who actually finally put things together into something like the story that now unfolds for us, are really very smart people. They knew what they were doing. There was nothing mechanical about the welding together processes, nor about what resulted!
In Genesis 1, we have GOD, Elohim who speaks and in speaking calls forth and thus creates. God does this in successive and altogether logical stages. God acts decisively, and God acts masterfully, to accomplish everything that God sets out to do - and it is done, and it is good.
Then on the 6th day, God creates mankind, male and female in his image…gives mankind dominion, and then RESTS.
In Genesis 2 God (The LORD GOD) comes in a different guise altogether - perhaps as the absentee landlord, or occasional visitor. The garden has been left to mankind to enjoy and to tend. God does not know what is going on. God is not in control. God’s wiretapping services have also been turned off, there are no hidden monitors and there are no spies. After finding out what the situation is and the outline of the major events of significance, again, God acts, but not to take control! God instead acts to limit the damage, and apparently then leaves. When next we encounter God, it is in the story of the next generation…
Is it only us that see the drastic change between Elohim in Gen 1 and YHWH Elohim in Gen 2? Would not the original authors/redactors/editors have been as sensitive to the contrast? Could it even be deliberate?
A retiring God. A God who is "taking rest". An abdicating God. A self-limiting God. A God who believes in freedom and in allowing mankind to make mistakes. The apparently omnipotent God who voluntarily leaves, having delegated the authority to mankind - whatever be the consequences…
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 - Contrasting Natures of God
A collective God is a possibility in which case Elohim (all together) is the powerful, the all high, the creator etc. while YHWH Elohim is naturally expected to be limited because of individuality. It’s a distinct possibility though I’m not that convinced. The impression that I get for Eden is that mankind is kicked out while Eden is basically then abandoned. But, I can’t say exactly why I have that impression…
Certainly the power is actually expressed as verbalisation in Gen 1 but in Gen 2 God silently invites Adam to undertake the specific task assigning names. There is also, I think a more than incidental connection between God’s breath, God’s calling outs, and God’s breathing in of human life to a bit of formed dirt.
The naming ‘ceremony’ is itself very interesting. It looks as though the spontaneous identifications that Adam produces are themselves the indicators primarily of the presence of "helpmeetness". Both God and Adam can tell by the quality of each expressed first impression, whether the helpmeet has been found. The assignation of specific names to the creatures is then an incidental benefit.
"THIS IS fleshofmyflesh"
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
I just discovered the discussion about Genesis and have found it very interesting and fun to follow.I only found these articles on nov.3 I have not read all of the comments as it is 70 pages long.
I would like to make some comments on all the questions submitted,but that will take sometime to accomplish.
Although my observations may not follow the “TRUE MYTH” theme
it does vary from the traditional thinking.
Before I start I would like to say I believe we should read the whole Bible as mention in the 28th chapter of Isaiah “precept upon precept line upon line here a little and there a little.Also remember our Bible is a translation and we should
go to the original language for clarification.
It seems that something happen between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2.
Verse 1 seems to be just an statement that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth period.In verse 2 states the earth was without form and void. acording to some the word was should be translated became,even if we leave it as “was”does not mean it was created in that state.
The 45th chapter of Isaiah verse 18 reads “For this saith the LORD that created the heavens ;GOD Himself that formed the earth and made it;HE hath established it,He created it not in vain,He formed it to be inhabited :I am the LORD;and there is none else.
The words “in vain” in this verse is the Hebrew word tohu which is the same Hebrew word that was translated as “without form”in Genesis1:2.This seems to show that something must have happened to the earth between the time
GOD created the earth and Genesis 1:2
buddy nov. 10 2007
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
A number of scholars agree with what Buddy says above including the famous bible translator Dr. James Moffatt who takes the first part as a clause and not as an independent statement: "When God began to form the universe, the world was void and vacant,
darkness lay over the abyss; but the spirit of God was hovering over
the waters, …" Whatever one makes of the "Gap Theory" it is certain that there are a lot of uncertainties in our efforts to translate without confusion.
Live to serve : Serve to live
To Dominate and to Subjugate?
What did God really create? Did God provide a framework within which things would automatically allign themselves and perpetuate themselves without a need for supervision or adjustment? Or, did the creation envision, demand continuous fiddling or even radical reorderings?
Questions like these lead to answers that will determine our ideas of government, our ethic, and our eschaology!
If one takes God’s mandate to man as a form of stewardship, where God ultimately retains ownership but appoints Mankind to organise and to order within limitations and according to the overall plan that remains God’s then our interaction with the creation will be of a milder type.
Some have argued that God calls on us to be dominating, to wrest power and control and to actively subjugate all of nature with the ultimate goal of making nature Mankind’s servant in all things. Here, God has given a mandate and now effectively leaves Man to follow through according to Man’s wishes, desires and needs. God may have a preferred ethic but that is not a particularly significant factor in how Man is to function.
Such are the larger implications for how we understand first God’s soliloquy
From Gen 1:26`… Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them
rule (radah) over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the heavens, and over
cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that is
creeping on the earth.’
and then the instruction itself: Gen 1:28-30 And God blesseth them, and God saith to them, `Be fruitful (parah), and multiply (rabah), and fill (male’) the earth, and subdue (kabash) it, and rule (radah) over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the heavens, and over every living thing that is creeping upon the earth.’ And God saith, `Lo, I have given to you (nathan) every herb sowing seed, which [is] upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which [is] the fruit of a tree sowing seed, to you it is for food (‘oklah); and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the heavens, and to every creeping thing on the earth, in which [is] breath of life, every green herb [is] for food:’ and it is so. (YLT).
When we take a ‘lexical’ approach to figuring out these key words one is struck by the fact that important resources like BDB and Strong’s derive the meanings of these words from an agrarian context. Radah and kabash in particular invoke ideas of pacing out, treading down fields in preparation for planting. Images like these are probably diachronic to the origins of our stories and especially so if the garden images from Gen 2 are taken as the major setting (hotly disputed).
It’s worth keeping in mind that if the origins are the forests and thence the gardens/orchards (as implied in Gen 2) then the implications for our stewardship are perhaps different.
One might also recall here that the Cain and Abel story (post fall) could well be Targumic and set the stage for our understanding of what precedes. Cain, after his banishment, seems to take the stronger view of dominion and proceeds to build a city…
What then is to be our creative work? What will God’s kingdom be like… a city (Mat 5:14) or a garden (Mk 12:1 f) ?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: To Dominate and to Subjugate?
One problem with the Genesis myths in all later interpretation is that they become somehow tied up with Israel’s nationalistic agendas. A similar process takes place with the Abrahamic covenants only on a markedly greater scale than with Genesis. Here is a remarkable fact about what the Genesis myths are not - they are NOT in any sense political. The stories in fact give very little purchase to ideas of nationhood or of national identity being linkable to favor or blessing from God. Most certain of all, Adam and Eve were not proto-Jews!
It takes some pretty involved and deft reinterpretation to make the Genesis myths an uneasy part of the Jewish national story and a very great leap of the imagination to tie them to the New Jerusalem of later prophecy.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Option 6: One has to break the egg...
As I was composing this particular soliloquy it struck me that we have played rather fast and loose with John Doyle’s original purpose which was to place the various mythic options clearly before us in order for us to evaluate and perhaps identify which of the 5 choices would be most apropo.
In the process of then digging into the early chapters of Genesis, many and rich insights have been gained. But, I am still at a bit of a loss as to which of the five is closest to what I believe to be true. I must admit again to being enamoured of features from each of the options and this is confusing indeed.
I have also been toying with a sixth option ad that is that the true myth is a product of an ancient but still ongoing dialogue between God and man, in which it is not always altogether obvious as to which parts are God’s and which are mostly man’s.
Using the Genesis accounts as basic, if I were to have attempted to make a separation, perhaps I would begin with the characterisations within each story. Perhaps there is a true myth, but is it possibly obfuscated by peculiarities that particularise the story within a given context that is now almost wholly lost to us? In which case, it may be possible that we would need to first ignore, or even to subtract from, the story in order to approach what ‘essential’ truth is hidden within.
Are we perhaps not seeing the woods for the trees?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
This attempt to see Genesis from a more ancient perspective has been fascinating. In fact it has been a real eye-opener for me. I always knew that I was making too many assumptions as I blithely read along, but I had no idea at all of how many possibilities lurk within the confines of these few hundred words.
The first few chapters of Genesis are full of meaning - yet, at the same time so effortlessly capable of jumping such huge cultural and linguistic barriers that I am left wondering. How much of the meaning that I perceive would have also been in the minds of the authors or of the first readers/hearers of this the foremost Mother of all Myths? How much of this meaning is purely a creation of my own?
John Doyle’s own startling reading provides enough fodder for thought in itself. One can only hope that he will get round to publishing all of that in the book form that it so badly deserves!
Still, even though this has proved to be a long discussion, I have no sense that we have done other than scratch the surface of the mystery that is the True Myth of the genesis of our world and of ourselves.
Perhaps the richness of the Genesis story is that while we can dig into it in search of wisdom, we ALWAYS quite fail to subvert the account for our own political or cultural ownership. It is in fact the superb universality of the myth that invites each and every person to find therein their own grounding - and at the same time gently reminds us that our own particularities and little cultural pride is quite misplaced within the vision of a God who both cares for every part of her creation and who still gives us the freedom to disobey; a God who is never nationalistic; the God of justice who deals with each individual according to their own actions, and a God who while allowing us to make our mistakes will not abandon us however nasty, stupid, idiotic and unikonic we have been.
As always I overlay my own theology, and as always after putting forward my best foot, that foot is still stuck firmly in my own mouth.
Oh well, and a forgiving God too!
Live to serve : Serve to live
Pandora's Box of deadly utopias
There is a very long tradition that identifies ‘sin’ as a product of a loss of innocence. Somehow this explanation has alweays raised more questions in my mind than what it seems to offer as a solution to the mystery of the origin "original sin".
The story is then retold like this. Adam and Eve were innocent. They did not know that there was right and wrong. These two beings therefore existed in a sort of a naive and amoral world where apparently neither was work toilsome nor in fact was relationship either. Nature and mankind were cooperative and nature naturally was mankind’s ally. Along came a serpent, one that had yet not evolved to a legless state, and this serpent introduced mankind to subterfuge, to the existence of lies, to hidden truths and mysteries too awe inspiring (so beautifully depicted by Blake) for such innocent minds to comprehend. In eating the ‘forbidden’ fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve chose to forego their innocence.
Pandora’s box, the hidden mystery of hidden knowledge proved to be too great a temptation. Once initiated there was no going back. One cannot unknow what one has discovered. One cannot eliminate reality nor even the memory of reality. Tainted by knowledge, mankind feel out of innocence and out of grace into a state of ‘worldly’ enslavement.
Nature ceased to cooperate, and paradise was lost.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Eden pushed back a few thousand years?
The sophistication of human religious thought and practice just moved back a few millennia with the discovery of a really ancient worship site in Turkey.
Some quotes from the article:
“The level of importance here is that of the pyramids in Giza, or Stonehenge,”
"To put this finding in perspective, until the discovery of Göbekli
Tepe, arguably the oldest temple excavated was at Eridu, in Iraq, which
dates to 5000 BC."
“What we have here is an expression of religion in a very stylized way
that is not repeated anywhere else in the world,” he says. “We see that
religion was existing in the early neolithic period in a way that we
didn’t expect. Only religion could be responsible for what we see here."
"From Göbekli Tepe, the flat and arid Mesopotamian plain stretches south
toward the nearby Syrian border, a thin haze floating above it. Around
the site, the landscape is treeless and rocky. But it wasn’t always
like this, Schmidt says. When hunter-gatherers lived here, he explains,
fruit trees and wild grasses grew in abundance, and there were more
than enough animals to hunt. With its carvings celebrating the
abundance of the surrounding countryside and the freedom of hunting
life, was Göbekli Tepe actually a memorial to what was slowly becoming
a paradise lost?
Schmidt is reticent about linking his work to the Adam and Eve story,
worried it will be lumped together with such quasi-Biblical
archaeological pursuits as the search for Noah’s ark and, well, the
Garden of Eden. Various theories have situated paradise on at least
three continents. But Sanliurfa, the closest city to the dig … is already happily
promoting Göbekli Tepe as the birthplace of civilization — and home to
Adam and Eve"
Any thoughts?
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Eden pushed back a few thousand years?
Sites like Gobleki Tepe, and many others being studied in Turkey now, have deeply puzzled the archaeologists. I’ve read some rather fantastic tales built on various bits of this information.
What is clear is that these are hunting societies and startlingly they seem to have had very advanced thoughts on religion even though they had not yet got round to building permanent towns. In other words, the temples predate any other signs of ‘architecture’ and these are temples built by hunters, NOT farming communities. These peoples (whoever they were) had not even gotten round to doing pottery yet!
So, as in Genesis, the forest/garden comes first, though Eden seems to push us even further back to before there was a need to hunt, i.e. Adam and Eve were gatherers. It is God who apparently teaches them to hunt. Other questions naturally arise as the Genesis account indicates that the altars came first and then farming/herding which in turn preceded towns and this may now be thought an accurate remembrance.
One random thought is that our ability to think, to philosophise, to worship, and to imagine, is in no way limited by our technology! One wonders whether the inverse may be true too; too much technology may be eroding our brains. Perhaps Adam and Eve were a lot smarter than we give them credit for being, and perhaps even a lot more sophisticated in their beliefs than "modern" humans…
Live to serve : Serve to live
Re: Genesis 1 as "True Myth": 5 Possibilities
Fascinating reading. To some extent, I would like to combine all five possibilities. I take Genesis 1-3 as descriptions of how things began - but not as explanations which will satisfy the current state of modern, empirical science. To enter that particular debate seems to me to be as misconceived as it is futile. I tend to think empirical science is on the very margins of what can be called science when it makes assertions about what happened 2.5 - 4 billion years ago. It becomes just as much of a faith exercise to say that life began through self-generated causes as it is to say that life began because God created it. In the last century, many of the certainties that governed science were overturned, and I’m sure this will continue into the future.
It’s therefore, for me, a statement of faith to say that I believe in a God who created the world in an orderly fashion, and that the created world was in itself a good place, with life that was created inherently good, as opposed to a chaotic place where life was governed by inherently amoral or evil forces (as seen in other creation stories). The Genesis account is mythical as opposed to scientific in the modern sense of the word, but for me, it is myth which does have a historical basis. That isn’t a contradiction, but it is a statement of faith. Like the scientific explanation, there is a good deal of evidence to support this view - but not all the evidence will satisfy the current explanations of empirical science.
I don’t take the view that Genesis, or the Christian faith, rests within a self-contained mythical view of life disconnected from life as it may actually be - outside its own mythical world. I don’t see anywhere that we are expected to believe in such a disconnected belief system. Rather the opposite, the Christian faith arose because it contended with historical realities, on an international and personal level, and the bible sets out the history of the unique, particular and historical way in which God sought to contend with those realities - reaching their climactic conclusion in Christ.
The Christian faith does provide a belief system which understands the world in a particular way, but it’s not mythical in the sense of being disconnected from reality. Rather, it chimes very much with the way things are, and provides a satisfying way of addressing those realities from within the perspective which it brings.
And now for the seven seals and the eighth scroll?