Genesis 1 (continued)

The society in which the book of Genesis was composed did not (and does not) bear any resemblance to that of the United States or to Western European nations--indeed, the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is thorougly Middle Eastern in character, tone, and temperament . . . a point which seems to have become lost on seminarians, church leaders, and the grass roots elements of what has been ubiquitously termed "America's religious right."

The culture in which the Bible was first produced was a culture without mass literacy, without individualism, and without the concepts of economics that we would normally classify under "capitalism." The Torah, in particular, is written in such a way as to suggest that, rather than a composite of two groups of authors, it must have originated first as a series of oral compositions passed down from generation to generation in story or song form. Hence, the books that compose the Torah, particularly the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, are themselves collections of materials that were originally recited from memory by the ancient Israeli priests.

I would recommend that anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of the nature and character of the texts which we collectively call the Old Testament (or the Hebrew Bible) read Eric A. Havelock's Preface to Plato. His thesis is that the Iliad and the Odyssey, while traditionally attributed to the genius of an anonymous poet referred to in later Greek literature as "Homer," was in fact the equivalent of a modern encyclopedia--a repository of cultural information that was originally recited by the Greek high priests in song and rhythmic utterance. Using the frequency of particular words and phrases in the text, which are often repeated, Havelock argues that both the Iliad and Odyssey must have been great songs that were recited, in part or in their entirity, during religious festivals or community events, then written down when it became expedient for priests to have something more permanent than human memory to use as a base for their recitations.

Havelock's argument is convincing, particularly as it covers the development of a society that, at the time in which these two epics were composed, was largely illiterate--and I think the same logic also applies to the Hebrew Bible, particularly since many verses in the Torah, the Wisdom literature, and the books of the Prophets urge the listener to "keep the word of God" on his "mouth." Indeed, the bulk of the Old Testament is not written for readers but for listeners, as is clear in verses from Isaiah such as "They will hear but not understand," and even verses from the New Testament such as the injunction from James to be "doers of the word" rather than "hearers."

Reading silently--the mode which we normally associate with the act of reading--was uncommon before the advent of mass publication via the printing press. In ancient times, when the New Testament was read at all, it was read aloud--to an audience without the benefit of microphones, labor saving devices, or modes of transportation more effecient than the horse or the human foot. We must also keep in mind that the community of people to whom these texts would have been read would have been Middle Eastern, not European, with values more similar to the precepts of traditional Arabian societies than to anything we would notice as "Western" or even "American." We often, in our zeal to preserve some vestige of spiritual ferment in a postmodern matrix that is rapidly decaying, fail to consider this basic point, and in order to have even a minimal appreciation of what God was attempting to accomplish in the creation of Israel, it is important for us to move beyond concepts of culture mired in a 21st century industrial/information complex which the writers of the Bible would at the very least have found alien, if not utterly antithetical, to their core values.

With that in mind, Genesis 1 becomes, not a record or an account, but a repository of cultural information and priorities in song--and at its core, Genesis 1 is a relentless eulogy of order. Its stanzas, its metrics, and its word choice are intended to convey the impression of a God who exacts a degree of unparalleled stability and peace out of darkest chaos. Its structure, moreover, firmly places God in the position of preeminence, preexistence, and pretemporality.

Verse 1 inaugurates the story of God's interaction with the human race in bold terms:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

This, in the text, is the equivalent of an overture--the preamble of everything not only contained in this chapter but in the entire Torah. The next 4 verses serve as the first of 6 stanzas in a song that encapsulates every aspect of Israelis' understandings of God and his purposes in this world:

The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good--and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And there was evening, and there was morning, one day.

God's establishment of highly defined borders--"light" and "dark"--pervades every subsequent stanza in this narrative:

Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse--and it was so. God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.

Then God said, "Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear," and it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters he called seas--and God saw that it was good. Then God said, "Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them," and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind--and God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, a third day.

Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years--and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth," and it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also. God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness--and God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

The rhythmic pattern begun in stanza 3/day 3 continues in the following stanza:

Then God said, "Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens." God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind--and God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." There was evening and there was morning, a fifth day

And at the beginning of stanza 6/day 6 as well:

Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind," and it was so. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind--and God saw that it was good.

Here, however, the song takes a completely different direction:

Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him--male and female He created them.

These last 2 verses, verses 26 and 27, do not correspond to the rhythmic formulas of either the previous stanzas or of this one--they are, in character, more like the first verse of Genesis 1, which serves as a declaration or "stop." The point of this song, after all, is God's relationship with humankind, not merely God's creation of the Earth, and those who recited and memorized these verses must have been keenly aware of this fact as they spoke these words. It is not enough that human beings are given dominion over every living thing on the Earth that God has created, but in the rhythm of the statement "God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him--male and female He created them," the act of stamping the "image" of God onto the first man and woman is celebrated in both lyric and cadence--echoing the very first verse of the Bible:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

These two "stops" or breaks in the rhythmic utterance of the Earth's creation represent an important link--doubtless obvious in the minds of its original hearers, even if on an unconscious level--between God's dominion and humankind's subject position to God. In the image of God we are created--in other words, we have core attributes that are evocative of the attributes of God--but we are not God ourselves.

This is a concept that would have been far more acceptable to a culture such as those that existed in the Middle East 4000 years ago than it is to postmodern American or Western Europeans today. People without electricity, without running water, without the ability to contact family and friends long distance except through the undertaking of arduous, often dangerous, journeys . . . these people would have had a far more concrete understanding of the relationship between human beings and their God, a God on whom they depended for rain, for good harvests, and for protection from their enemies. This understanding, unfortunately, is virtually impossible for a person mired in the multimedia, materialism, and mechanical smoothness of the 21st century "first world" to imagine, let alone adopt, without severe changes in the way he or she approaches technology, ideas, and other people. It is for this reason that scholarship on the Bible, and on the verses I have here focused my attention in this blog entry, increasingly misses the point.

For example

God blessed them--and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth." Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed--it shall be food for you--and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food," and it was so.

was not understood to represent a carte blanche from God for human beings to commit rampant acts of destruction upon the Earth in the name of "development" or "domestication." It was, instead, understood by ancient Israelis to signify a relationship of harmony between human beings and the rest of God's creation--Israelis, after all, were well aware that eating meat was not healthy, either for their own bodies or for the survival of the animals on which they depended for clothing, sacrifices, and milk.

Genesis 1 ends with the following verse, which also ends stanza 6/day 6:

God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Note that day 6/stanza 6 represents an interruption in the rhythm of the song--it is a suggestion in the minds of the listeners that humanity's introduction to the creation constituted an interruption in the order of God. Nothing in Genesis 1 states explicitly that human sin brought disease, pain, and chaos to the world God intended to be a paradise, but Hebrew children who memorized this chapter at home would certainly have been aware of something un-utopian in its structure. Human beings, having been given characteristics evocative of God, are placed in direct subjection to God--having authority over all the plants and animals of the Earth but not final authority.

It is perhaps at this point in their recitation that ancient Israeli priests understood, more keenly than a human heart can express in words, the tragedy of the story that is recounted in Genesis 2 and 3 . . .