There is one further point before we turn to the stories themselves. Namely, though we typically begin reading the Bible with the first chapters of Genesis, they are not where ancient Israel first began telling her story. The creation stories were written relatively late. Israel as a people came into existence with the exodus from Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE. At the earliest, Israel told a story of creation some three hundred years later. As we shall see in the next chapter, the story of the exodus, the covenant, and the gift of the promised land is Israel’s primal narrative and foundational story. In short, Israel told the story of the exodus and God’s creation of her as a people long before she told the story of God’s creation of the world.
Two Stories of Creation
The first three chapters of Genesis contain two stories of creation, written about four hundred years apart. The first one, Genesis 1.1–2.3, was probably written in the 500s BCE. Commonly called the “priestly” or “P” story, it is part of a larger block of material extending through the Pentateuch and reflecting priestly and ritual concerns. The second one was written earlier. It begins in Genesis 2.4 and continues through the end of chapter 3. Perhaps written in the 900s BCE, it is commonly called the “Yahwist” or “J” creation story, because the author uses “Yahweh” as the name of God.10
The Yahwist story is also part of a larger narrative account of Israel’s origins that extends throughout much of the Pentateuch.11 The two stories are quite different.
The P Story
The P story (and the Bible as a whole) begins with the earth as “a formless void.” In the primeval darkness, the wind (or Spirit) of God moves over the primordial waters:
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.12
Then God creates the universe in six days. In a literary structure repeated for each day of creation, the story begins with the creation of light:
Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness God called Night. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first day.13
In rapid succession, the rest of the universe is created. On day two, God creates the dome of the sky (the “firmament”), separating the primordial waters above the sky from those below. On day three, God creates dry land, the seas, and vegetation. On day four, lights are placed in the dome of the sky: sun, moon, and stars.14 On day five, God creates sea life and birds. Finally, on day six, God creates land creatures, concluding with the simultaneous creation of man and woman: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness. . . . So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’ ”15
There are interesting correlations between what God creates on each of the first three days and what God creates on each of the second three days. A “domain” is created and then populated:
Day one: light Day four: sun, moon, and stars
Day two: waters and the sky Day five: sea life and birds
Day three: dry land Day six: land creatures
Then, we are told, on the seventh day God rests, thereby blessing and hallowing that day as the sabbath.
The J Story
The J creation story begins in Genesis 2.4. It focuses on the creation of humankind and barely treats the creation of the world. It does not mention the creation of light, or firmament, or sun, moon, and stars, or sea creatures. Rather, it begins with the creation of humankind, of adham, a Hebrew word meaning “humankind” and often translated “man.” The creation of adham is the climax of the very long sentence with which the story begins:
In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed adham from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and adham became a living being.16
The P story portrays humankind as the climax of creation by having people created last, after everything else. The J story gives humankind priority by having people created first, before vegetation and animals. In the P story, humans as male and female are created simultaneously; in J, the creation of woman comes later.
To provide adham with a place to live, God plants the Garden of Eden and gives adham permission to eat of all of its trees, except one: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”17
Then God creates companions for adham: “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that adham should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ ” God creates every beast of the field, and every bird of the air, and brings them to adham. But none of them meets the need: “There was not found a helper fit for adham.” So God puts adham to sleep and forms woman out of one of his ribs. No longer alone, adham exclaims, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”18
Into this paradise comes a talking snake. The serpent tempts the primeval couple to eat from the forbidden tree, “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” He promises them that if they do, they “will be like God, knowing good and evil.” They accept the serpent’s invitation, and their lives change dramatically. Now aware of their nakedness, they make loincloths out of fig leaves. Of more serious consequence, they are afraid and hide themselves from God. Punishment follows. The woman, now named Eve, is sentenced to pain in childbearing and subjugation to her husband. The man, now named Adam, is sentenced to the toil and sweat of raising food from an earth filled with thorns and thistles. Both are exiled from the Garden of Eden. The story concludes with Adam and Eve living “east of Eden,” the garden’s entrance guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. Life in paradise is over.19
To return to our two key questions: Why did the people of ancient Israel tell these stories, and why did they tell them this way? One answer sometimes given is that these stories functioned as primitive science: ancient Israel did not know how the world came into existence, and so she created these stories in order to explain how things came to be. But there is much more going on here than a prescientific explanation of origins. To state my central claim in advance, Israel told these stories to express her deepest convictions about God and the world, and about what is often called “human nature”—that is, what we are like, and what our lives “east of Eden” are like.
Before treating more fully the first of these key questions, I begin with the second question: Why did ancient Israel tell the stories this way?
Reading the P Story through a Historical Lens
Historical study helps us to understand why ancient Israel told these stories in the way that she did. As already noted, the P story was most likely written in the 500s BCE. To connect this to ancient Israel’s history, the Jewish people went into exile in Babylon after the Babylonian Empire conquered their homeland and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The exile lasted almost fifty years, until 539 BCE, when a small number of Jews returned to a Jerusalem in ruins and began the task of rebuilding a Jewish homeland under the domination of a new imperial power, Persia. Thus, the P story of creation was written during or shortly after the exile.
The Six-Day Creation
Because the Jews were sharply reduced in numbers during this period of history, distinctive practices as a means of sustaining their identity as a people became vitally important. Among these practices was the observance of the sabbath (the seventh day of the week) as a day of rest. Though sabbath observance predated the exile, it became even more important during and after the exile. So why does creation take
six days in the P story? To make the point that even God observes the sabbath. Rather than being intended as a literal account of how long creation took, the six-day creation story was meant to reinforce the importance of the sabbath.
The Ancient Cosmology
The word “cosmology” refers to one’s image or “map” of the cosmos or universe. In common with Babylonian and other ancient Middle Eastern cosmologies, the ancient Israelites thought of the earth as the center of the universe. Above the earth was the dome of the sky, called the “firmament” in many English translations. This understanding is reflected in the P story. On the second day of creation, God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. . . . And God called the dome Sky.” On the fourth day, God created the sun, moon, and stars and “set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.”20
What seems like a strange notion to us today actually coincides well with human experience. The sky looks like a dome over our heads. On it are mounted the sun, moon, and stars, and it rotates around us. Moreover, the notion that there is water above the dome of the sky also reflects experience: water comes from the sky as rain and snow. Thus, as the flood begins in the time of Noah, we are told, “The fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the firmament were opened.”21 Far from providing us with an understanding of the universe that can be reconciled with modern or postmodern science, the cosmology of the P creation story simply reflects the way ancient Israel thought things were. Israel told the story this way because she thought of the universe this way. Thus it is Israel’s story of creation, not God’s story of creation.
The Literary Form of the P Story
The P story of creation was likely adapted from an ancient Israelite liturgy or hymn of praise to God. Its use of repeating phrases suggests refrains such as are found in hymns and liturgies. Each of the following is repeated seven times:
“God said, ‘Let there be . . .’ ”
“And it was so.”
“And God saw that it was good.”
“There was evening and there was morning . . .” is repeated after each day of creation. Moreover, the six days of creation suggest six stanzas. If a liturgy does lie behind the first chapter of Genesis, we should imagine it being sung or chanted, perhaps antiphonally with a cantor and one or more choirs.
The recognition that the P story is likely to have been a hymn or liturgy has an immediate implication: we do not expect hymns to provide accurate factual information. When Christians sing the hymn “Jesus shall reign where’re the sun does its successive journeys run,” we are not saying that we believe the sun goes around the earth. The language of hymns is the language of poetry, metaphor, and praise. Creation cannot be described, but it can be sung.22
Indeed, Genesis 1 has been described as a “doxology.” The roots of that word mean “words of, or about, glory.” A doxology is a hymn of praise, as the most familiar English doxology reminds us: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise God all creatures here below.” Thus the book of Genesis and the Bible as a whole begin with a hymn of praise to God as creator. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate beginning.
The Proclamation of Israel’s God as Creator
The origin of the P story in the time after the Babylonian conquest adds one more dimension of meaning. In antiquity, when a nation was decisively conquered by another nation, it was commonly thought that the god (or gods) of the victorious nation had defeated the god of the vanquished nation, exposing that god as inferior or perhaps as no god at all. To many—Babylonians and Jews alike—it looked during the exile as if the gods of imperial Babylon had triumphed over the God of Israel.
In this setting, the opening line and the central claim of the P creation story defiantly assert that the God of Israel is the creator of heaven and earth—of all that is. It proclaims the lordship of Israel’s God over against the lordship of Babylon and its gods. The story affirms a “counter-world,” an alternative world to the world of empire.23 This affirmation is, as we shall see, a theme that runs throughout the Bible from beginning to end.
Reading the J Story through a Historical Lens
Just as the P story is illuminated by setting it in its historical context, so also is the J story of creation.
The Symbolic Meaning of Names
The author of the J story uses names in such a way as to suggest that they are symbolic. Adam is not a proper name in ancient Hebrew; no other person in the Bible is named Adam. Rather, Adam is the Hebrew adham, which (as already noted) is a common noun meaning “humankind.” Indeed, the term involves a play on words: adham comes from the Hebrew word adhamah, which means “ground” or “dust.” In other words, the first human is a “dust-creature.” We are made of dust, made from the earth. Moreover, because this word means “humankind,” its use suggests that the author is thinking not of a specific human but of Everyman (to borrow the name of the well-known medieval morality play). The author is telling the story not of a particular person but of “everyone.”
So also the name Eve is not a proper name in Hebrew. It means “mother of all living.” “Garden of Eden” also has a symbolic meaning: it means “garden of delights” (and, by extension, paradise). Living in a semiarid climate, the ancient Hebrews pictured paradise as a green and bountiful garden filled with streams of flowing water.
Connections to Israel’s History
There are a number of suggestive parallels between the narrative flow of the J story and Israel’s history. Like adham, ancient Israel was created in a dry land (through the covenant with God in the Sinai desert). Like adham, ancient Israel was given a green and pleasant land in which to live. As in the case of adham, a prohibition came with the covenant and gift of the land, with the threat of expulsion if the prohibition was violated. And, more speculatively, the tempter is a serpent, a common symbol of Canaanite fertility religion, which was the primary temptation to infidelity to God that Israel faced in the land. The J story may thus have a prophetic edge to it: if Israel abandons the covenant of faith-fulness to Yahweh, she faces expulsion and exile from the land/garden that God had given to her.24
Reading the Creation Stories through a Metaphorical Lens
Now that we have seen some of the historical reasons why Israel told the creation stories as she did, we turn to a reading of these chapters as metaphorical narratives. A metaphorical (and thus nonliteral) approach to these stories is not new. In the third century, a Christian biblical scholar named Origen, commonly seen along with St. Augustine as one of the two most brilliant theologians of the early church, wrote:
What intelligent person can imagine that there was a first day, then a second and third day, evening and morning, without the sun, the moon, and the stars? [Sun, moon, and stars are created on the fourth day.] And that the first day—if it makes sense to call it such—existed even without a sky? [The sky is created on the second day.] Who is foolish enough to believe that, like a human gardener, God planted a garden in Eden in the East and placed in it a tree of life, visible and physical, so that by biting into its fruit one would obtain life? And that by eating from another tree, one would come to know good and evil? And when it is said that God walked in the garden in the evening and that Adam hid himself behind a tree, I cannot imagine that anyone will doubt that these details point symbolically to spiritual meanings by using a historical narrative which did not literally happen.25
The Creation Stories as Myths
As we begin to address the question of why Israel told these stories, it is important to realize that the Genesis stories of creation are myths. That term needs careful explanation, because it has been virtually ruined by its most common modern use. In popular language, “myth” is a dismissive term. To call something a myth is to dismiss it: one need not take it seriously. A myth is seen as a mistaken belief, a falsehood.
But the term means something very different in the study of religion. Myths are not explanatio
ns. Myths are not primitive science. Myths are not mistaken beliefs. Rather, myths are metaphorical narratives about the relation between this world and the sacred. Myths typically speak about the beginning and ending of the world, its origin and destiny, in relation to God. Myths use nonliteral language; in this sense, they do not narrate facts. But myths are necessary if we are to speak at all about the world’s origin and destiny in God. We have no other language for such matters.
The difference between the common dismissive use of the word “myth” and its meaning in the study of religion is pointed to in the title of a book written by Mircea Eliade, one of the greatest scholars of religion in the twentieth century: Myth and Reality.26 In the modern world, myth and reality are commonly seen as opposites: we speak of myth or reality. Eliade’s point is the opposite: myth and reality go together, myth being the language for talking about what is ultimately real. For Eliade, myths are true, even though not literally true.
To cite another definition: “Myth is a form of poetry which transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth.”27 To echo what I said about metaphor in the previous chapter, myth is poetry plus, not science minus.
In Christian thought, the Genesis stories of creation have been an exceedingly rich mine of mythological and theological meanings. They treat the great themes of God as creator, the God-world relationship, the nature of reality, human nature, and the character of human existence. As we explore these themes, we will use conceptual language to clarify the meanings of Israel’s myths of the beginnings.
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