Nov
2013

On Being Earthlings, Part 3

 

When the LORD planted a garden for the earthling Adam to inhabit and enjoy, it was filled with every kind of fruit tree known.  But two special trees were also planted there, whose like we have never seen.

One was called the Tree of Life.  The idea of a tree whose fruit gives life is very old, and widespread.

The Greek gods fed on ambrosia, the food of the gods that gave them immortality.

Among the Norse gods, the goddess Idun tended the tree whose fruit gave them immortality.

In what is arguably the oldest story in the world, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero’s quest for eternal life leads him to dive to the bottom of the underworld ocean and pluck a plant that grows there, called Oldster Becomes A Young Man.  But before he can eat it, the plant is snatched by a snake, which then sheds its skin and crawls away, renewed!  Just so, as long as Eve and Adam live in Eden, they have access to the fruit of the tree of life–meaning that they will never die.

But there is also another tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  It, too, is placed in the middle of the garden of Eden.  Concerning this tree, God says:

Eat your fill from all of the garden’s trees; but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat from it, you will die! (Gen 2:16-17).

This command foreshadows the next major movement in this ancient story of beginnings, sometimes called the story of the fall.  This week and next, we will reflect on this ancient story.

When my son Sean was only three, I once found him crouched on the floor, giggling, his hands covering his face.  Foolish parent that I was, I asked him, “What are you doing, Sean?”  Patiently, he explained to me, “I am hiding, Daddy.  I am hiding inside my eyes!”

So he was–and so, indeed, are we all.  In fact, this may sum up the human condition more succinctly than any other statement I have ever read.  We are, all of us, hiding inside our eyes.  I cannot really know what you are thinking or feeling, nor do you have any way of knowing, exactly, what is happening in my mind.  I have no access behind your eyes, save what you give me, and you have no access behind mine, save what I allow.  All of us, to some extent, are hiding behind our eyes.

Genesis 3:1-10 reminds us that we have been hiding for a long time.  The man and the woman were made to stroll at their ease through the garden, walking beside the Lord in the cool of the day.  Yet, they wind up hiding in the thickets, afraid of God and of one another. Though made to live before God in harmony with the earth and with each other, they crouch in the thickets, clasping the leaves and branches around themselves in a vain attempt to cover their nakedness.  What happened to us?  How did God’s good creation come to such a pass?

The text tells us that, just as a snake foiled Gilgamesh in his quest for immortality,  it was a snake who first suggested to the first couple that the garden was anything less than paradise.  “Did God really say,” it asks, “that you shouldn’t eat from any tree in the garden?” (Gen 3:1).  The woman answers,

We may eat the fruit of the garden’s trees but not the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. God said, ‘Don’t eat from it, and don’t touch it, or you will die’ (Gen 3:2-3).

This, of course, is not literally what God said. The woman applies God’s words in a way that insures obedience to them: if we do not even touch the tree, then we certainly won’t eat from it!  This way of interpreting and applying God’s commands is a typical feature of rabbinic teaching: the rabbis call it “building a hedge around the Torah.”  In this story, the woman acts as the first rabbi–or, for Protestant readers, the first preacher–in history!

The serpent’s scorn at Eve’s pious response  is palpable: “You won’t die! God knows that on the day you eat from it, you will see clearly and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:4-5).  

The woman sees the forbidden tree now in a different light: “The woman saw that the tree was beautiful with delicious food and that the tree would provide wisdom” (Gen 3:6).  So the woman and the man both eat, and at that moment they know that they are naked.  Overcome with shame and horror, they run away and hide–as we have been hiding ever since.

A pun in the Hebrew makes a striking parallel between the serpent’s craftiness (expressed by ‘arum) and Adam and Eve’s nakedness (Hebrew ‘arom).   The CEB reads, “The snake was the most intelligent [my emphasis: Hebrew ‘arum] of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made” (Gen 3:1).  The NRSV has “crafty,”  while the old King James Version reads “subtil.”  Sly and sophisticated, the snake knows secrets the man and woman do not know–or at least, so he claims!  Adam and Eve are seduced by this proffered knowledge, enticed by the snaky self-confidence of the serpent.  They eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.  But, rather than being filled with godlike wisdom and self-possession, rather than becoming crafty (‘arum) like the serpent, they become shamefully aware of their nakedness (‘arom).

The serpent’s promise still entices us.  We long for that crafty sophistication, that appearance of  knowledge!  But grasping for that prize, we are confronted with our own shallowness and emptiness.  Seeking superiority, we instead find ourselves exposed, vulnerable, naked.  No wonder we run away, to hide in the dark places of our mind, behind our eyes.

Some of us are better at hiding than others.  Like Richard Cory in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem (the basis of the song “Richard Cory” by Simon and Garfunkel), we may be able to conceal from everyone else the fear, the inadequacy, the emptiness we feel.  We may even be able to communicate such snaky sophistication that others will think of us, as the crowd did of Cory:

In fine, we thought that he was everything,

         To make us wish that we were in his place.

Yet Richard Cory could not escape his own self-loathing, and “one calm summer night,/ Went home, and put a bullet through his head.”  Some of us are better at hiding than others.  But we cannot hide from ourselves–and we cannot hide from God.

Surely, it is no mere chance that the first question asked of humanity by Deity is, “Where are you?”  God comes looking for us, in the briars and brambles of the garden’s thickets, not to drag our shame into the open, not to expose our nakedness and vulnerability, but to restore us.

When he was a small boy, my son Sean was not good at hiding.  When we played hide and seek, as soon as I would begin to look for him, calling “Where’s Sean? Where’s Sean?”, he would cry out, “Here I am, Daddy!  I am hiding behind the couch!”, or “I am hiding under this blanket!”  Then again, perhaps Sean knew that the point of hide and seek is being found: not remaining, cold and alone, in our hiding places. 

Brothers and sisters, God is looking for us.  That is why God comes to us in Jesus, as one of us, living a life and dying a death like ours.  In Jesus God comes right into the thickets and brambles of our despair, right into the darkness behind our eyes, calling as in Eden, calling still, “Where are you?” God grant us the wisdom of children, and the courage to stand where we are, casting off our pretense of sophisticated self-sufficiency, and to cry out, “Here I am!”  God is looking for you.  Get found!

AFTERWORD

In the wake of the unprecedented devastation wrought in the Philippines by Super Typhoon (a storm so vast it needed a different designation!) Haiyan, UMCOR is already at work, bringing food, medical help, and aid in rebuilding.  Watch this video, and send your contributions to UMCOR here.  Every cent you contribute goes directly to aid.

 

Nov
2013

Who Am I?

FORWARD:

I had intended this week to continue reflecting on the second creation story in Genesis.  But it is All Saints Day as I write this, and at the top of my mind and in my heart today are two dear friends who have died in recent days.  One is my brother in United Methodist ministry Bob Higginbotham, assistant to the Bishop and a leader in the Western Pennsylvania Conference.

The other is Bob Kelley, beloved New Testament professor emeritus from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, who I got to know through PTS trustees meetings and alumni gatherings.

May light perpetual shine upon you, my brothers!

I could not let this All Saints Day pass without mourning their passing, celebrating their lives, and remembering the great significance of this day, which reminds us all of the great communion to which we belong in the body of Christ: the Church Triumphant, spread across time and space and eternity.

I am preaching this Sunday at Calvert Memorial Presbyterian Church in Etna, PA, at the invitation of their pastor and my former student, P.J. Pfeuffer.  Here is the sermon I am working on for that day, in celebration of all the saints–including us!  The texts are Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18 and Ephesians 1:11-23.  The title is, “Who Am I?”

Thursday was Hallowe’en, and I was blessed to see many small ones (and many not so small, including my students and colleagues!) in their disguises. The fun in large part, of course, is not knowing (or in any case pretending not to know) who the other person is.  As I greeted these fairy princesses and firemen and fearsome pirates, I kept remembering a Hallowe’en LONG ago, when I turned to the small vampire in the back seat of my car and asked, “Are you Dracula?”  His answer was swift and unequivocal: “No. I am just me—Anthony.”

Holding fast to our personal integrity–that is, knowing and being who we are–is a constant challenge.  But, what if we don’t know who we are?

One September day in 2001, Emily (not her real name), a 33-year-old Texas woman, got in her car to go to work. “There’s a freeway here in Dallas and I began driving up the freeway,” she recalls.  “I got up to Denton … and that’s the last thing I remember.”

The next thing she knew, it was 600 miles and 10 hours later: “It was about 3:30 in the morning when I realized I was just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.”  Emily checked into a motel.  Then, “When I woke up the next morning, I sat up and I didn’t recognize the room,” she said. “I didn’t recognize the bag that was sitting on the chair, or the clothes that were lying over the chair. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I didn’t know my name.”

This is a terrifying story!  But sadly, it may be our story, too.  Do we know who we are, today?  Last Sunday was Reformation Sunday, and Friday–the day after All-Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en–was All-Saints Day.  This is a good time, then, to remind ourselves of who we are, and of who Christ has called us to be.

Our passage from Daniel 7 is a great Hallowe’en text–chock full of monsters!  But the text is not really about the beasts, which represent the earthly powers arrayed against God’s people.  The focus is on

 one like a human being
coming with the heavenly clouds. . . .

Rule, glory, and kingship were given to him;all peoples, nations, and languages will serve him.

His rule is an everlasting one—
it will never pass away!—
his kingship is indestructible (Dan 7:13-14).

Later faithful readers thought of Jesus when they read these words, and of the promise of his coming again in glory.  But as our passage this morning reminds us, Daniel is told that the Human One, who stands in such sharp contrast to the four beasts, represents “the holy ones of the Most High,” who “will receive the kingship. They will hold the kingship securely forever and always” (Dan 7:18).  We are the ones to whom this victory is promised.  The community of the faithful will stand long after all the beastly forces of this world are spent.  We will reign as kings and queens in God’s glory, forever!

The writer of Ephesians, too, urges us repeatedly to know, and to claim, our identity. His prayer for all who read this letter is that they would remember who they are:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, will give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation that makes God known to you. I pray that the eyes of your heart will have enough light to see what is the hope of God’s call, what is the richness of God’s glorious inheritance among believers, and what is the overwhelming greatness of God’s power that is working among us believers (Eph 1:17-19).

Brother and sisters, do we know who we are?  The resurrection power of Jesus is unleashed among us!  Eternal life is our inheritance!  The Holy Spirit is the sign and seal of our union with God in Christ.  Indeed, we are the culmination of what God has been up to since the dawn of creation:

God put everything under Christ’s feet and made him head of everything in the church, which is his body. His body, the church, is the fullness of Christ, who fills everything in every way (Eph 1:22-23).

Nowhere in Scripture do we find a higher view of the church than this–but the question that matters this morning is, is this our view?  Do we know that we are his body, “the fullness of Christ, who fills everything in every way?”  Do we remember who we are?

It took Emily more than a year to recover her memory.  Doctors call what happened to her a dissociative fugue, likely caused by stress (Emily’s husband was a drug addict and suicidal, and they had just had a new baby).  “You know, I lost 33 years,” she said. “And I had to slowly regain that back. And it is precious to me. And I’ve done as much as I can and everything I can to build on that.”

How can we recover our memory, brothers and sisters?  It will take more than some new program, or a slogan, or even an exciting and creative new pastor!  Our identity derives from God, who made us a people when we were no people.  If we have lost ourselves, God alone can restore us.  May our prayer this morning be the prayer of the writer of Ephesians: that God would give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation, opening the eyes of our hearts to see ourselves as the loved, forgiven, transformed and empowered people that God has made us!

Happy All-Saints Day!

 

 

 

 

 

Oct
2013

On Being Earthlings, Part Two

Last week, we saw how in Genesis 2 the LORD fashions the human, ‘adam, from the ground, then plants a garden in Eden as a place for the human to inhabit and enjoy.  But something is missing: the human is alone.  So the LORD God sets out to make “a helper that is perfect for him” (Gen 2:18; Hebrew ‘ezer kenegedo).  The animals, fashioned from the ground as the human was, are wonderful, but they do not fit the bill: 

The human named all the livestock, all the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals. But a helper perfect for him was nowhere to be found (Gen 2:20).

Now comes an absolutely remarkable story.   Most of the world’s peoples tell stories about the creation of humanity, but there are precious few stories about the creation of woman. The account in Genesis 2 is almost unique in world religious traditions.

First, “the LORD God put the human into a deep and heavy sleep, and took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh over it” (Gen 2:21).  Many, perhaps most, texts render this passage as the CEB does, translating the Hebrew tselah as “rib.” But tselah can also mean something like the side of a hill, or one of the two leaves of a double door–in which case, this may be a more major surgery than it at first seems!  From this piece of Adam’s very stuff, the LORD fashions the woman, and introduces her to Adam. 

When Adam meets her, what does he say? Not, “Here is somebody who can pick up my socks!”  Not “Here is somebody who can take dictation,”  or, “Here is somebody who can do the washing up.”  I love the NRSV here:

This at last is bone of my bones
    and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
    for out of Man this one was taken (Gen 2:23).

Can we hear the joy, the delight in these few lines?  At last!  At last I am not alone!  Here is someone who is like me, and yet not like me; someone with whom I can be in relationship.

Noted preacher and Bible scholar Renita Weems puts it very well: “What do I think when I hear the phrase — ‘bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh?’ This is the first love song a man ever sang to a woman.”  

Adam then says, “this one shall be called Woman [‘ishah in Hebrew], for out of Man [Hebrew ‘ish] she was taken.” The English translations can’t quite capture what is happening here. Up to this point in the story, the human has only been called ‘adam, meaning “human.”  The very sound of the name reminds us that we humans are earthlings, made from the earth–‘adam from ‘adamah  (Hebrew for “ground,” or “earth”).

With the creation of woman, terms involving sexuality are introduced for the first time in this story: not only ‘ishah, woman, but also ‘ish, man.

In her now-classic article “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread,”  Phyllis Trible proposed that the creation of woman is actually the creation of man too–that sexuality only comes into the story at this point.  Since gender was an important part of humanity in ancient Israel, I am not convinced that the ancient storytellers would have understood Adam in this way.  Still, Trible raises an intriguing critique of the many misreadings of this story, which understand its point to be that the woman is created after the man, and so is subordinate to him.  This story is not about subordination at all, but about mutuality–as its next scene makes crystal clear.

In ancient Israel’s traditions, this second creation account functions in many ways as an etiological narrative: that is, it explains the way things are in the world we know by reference to the way that things began. We will see this in greater depth next week, in Genesis 3. But already here in Genesis 2, the ancient tradition tackles a puzzling feature of every human society.  What is it about the attraction between woman and man that overcomes every other loyalty, even commitments to tribe or clan?

Theatre and Dance Department presents 'Romeo and Juliet' this weekend |  Newsroom

 

Long before Shakespeare ever wrote about Juliet and Romeo’s love, undeterred by the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, the ancient writers knew that the attraction between a woman and a man could explode every other loyalty. Why is that?  This story remembers that they were, originally, one–until the LORD caused a deep sleep to come upon Adam, whacked off a part of his very being, and fashioned an ‘ezer kenegedo. Made from the same stuff, they are drawn to come together and be one flesh again.  As this chapter draws to a close, the narrator tells us:

This is the reason that a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife, and they become one flesh (Gen 2:24).

Genesis tells us of the first love story in the world.

AFTERWORD

The Bible Guy wishes everyone a blessed All-Saints Day!  The night before November 1, once called Samhain, was a night of terror to my Celtic forebears, when the restless dead were believed to walk.  But when the Celts embraced Christianity, this became instead the night before All-Hallows Day–All-Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en.  How appropriate that this became a night to celebrate the promise of Christ’s resurrection, now enjoyed by those believers who have gone before us.  What a delight that Hallowe’en today is a night when children go through our neighborhoods for treats–a night of joy, and laughter!

Oct
2013

On Being Earthlings

 

A close reading of the opening chapters of Genesis reveals not one creation account but two. Over the last four weeks, we have spent a considerable amount of time looking closely at the first of those two accounts, Genesis 1:1–2:4a, in which we find depicted an ordered, carefully structured world.

Beginning this week, we are turning our attention to the second account, in Genesis 2:4b-25.  This story begins much as the first account did, only in inverted order: instead of “When God began to create the heavens and the earth”   (Gen 1:1), the second account opens, “On the day the LORD God made earth and sky” (Gen 2:4b).

This story assumes that earth and the sky have already been made by the LORD–off-stage, as it were–so their creation is not explicitly described. They are the setting for our drama, already in place when our story begins.  

This first moment is described in terms of its potential: what has not yet happened, but soon will.  Our story begins

before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew, because the Lord God hadn’t yet sent rain on the earth and there was still no human being to farm the fertile land (Gen 2:5).

The world is imagined as a dry, empty plain: potentially fertile, but at the moment, barren. Then, the Lord acts. This barren field, never yet touched by rain, is moistened by a stream that bubbles up from under the ground.

Remember the ancient Near Eastern world view held that the world floated on the waters below, with the waters above held back by the solid bowl of the sky.

Now, the LORD God permits the waters below the earth to bubble up and moisten the ground, making mud.  With this mud the LORD performs the first explicitly described act of creation in this account: 

the LORD God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life (Gen 2:7).

The verb here translated “formed” is the Hebrew word yatsarYatsar is what potters do.

The LORD fashions the human the way a potter fashions a pot on the wheel, the way a sculptor fashions a statue from a bit of clay.  In this story, we are formed by the LORD’s fingers, intimately and personally.

The Hebrew word for “human” is ‘adam, from which we get the proper name, “Adam.”  The word the CEB translates as “fertile land” is ‘adamah.  Our story plays with these similar-sounding words.  Adam is the mud man, fashioned from the fertile land: the human made from the humus, the earthling made from the earth.

The phrase rendered “came to life” in the CEB of Gen 2:7 is more familiarly rendered in the KJV “became a living soul.”  The expression is in Hebrew nephesh khayah that is, a living nephesh. Though nephesh is sometimes translated as “soul,” it never means some separate, supernatural part of the self.  Its basic meaning has to do with breath; in fact, it can sometimes mean something as narrow and specific as “throat.”  Most commonly, nephesh means “self.”  So ‘adam becomes, as the NRSV reads here, “a living being.”  

Having formed Adam, the Lord then begins to make everything else for Adam.  Unlike Genesis 1, where plants were created before humanity, at the end of Day 3, in this account the first expressly described creative act of God is the creation of the human. There are no plants until the LORD God plants a garden as the human’s home (Gen 2:8). 

Eden was not only a place for Adam to live, providing shelter and food. Genesis 2:9 says that “every beautiful tree” grew there.  The LORD God has provided food for Adam’s body, and beauty to enrich Adam’s life.  Further, our text declares,

The LORD God took the human and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it (Gen 2:15).

Adam is given fruitful and fulfilling work to do: his life in the garden has a purpose.  What more could Adam possibly need or want?

Genesis 1:1–2:4a is not really a narrative.  It is a carefully structured list.  Narrative after all is not just one thing after another!  Narrative presupposes a plot, and plots are driven by conflict: problems to be solved, obstacles to be overcome.  Up to this point in Genesis (reading the two accounts in sequence, as they appear in our Bibles), God has declared everything good: no conflict has appeared.  But now, in this second account, a problem emerges:

Then the Lord God said, “It’s not good that the human is alone (Gen 2:18).

For the first time, something is “not good.”  Adam is not truly alone, of course: the Lord is there too in the garden.  But there is no being like Adam. The LORD decides, “I will make him a helper that is perfect for him” (Gen 2:18).  The Hebrew is ‘ezer kenegedo, a difficult and ambiguous phrase.  The word ‘ezer means “helper,” which we could misunderstand to mean something like “assistant.”  But if we flip through the Hebrew Bible to find out how this word is used, we discover that the one most commonly referred to as ‘ezer is God.  So this isn’t a term of subordination!

The expression kenegedo can be taken apart, piece by piece. In Hebrew, ke means “as” or “like.”  Neged means “next to,” “alongside of,” or sometimes “opposite.” The o at the end means “him.”   So: kenegedo means “like and yet unlike him,” or “corresponding to him.” The King James Version famously renders this phrase as “an help meet [that is, “fitting” or “suitable”] for him.” The CEB has “a helper that is perfect for him.”   I really like what the NRSV does here: “a helper as his partner.”  This is not a quest to find an assistant or a subordinate, someone less than  Adam.  Adam is alone: the quest is to find a being that will be like and yet unlike Adam, with whom Adam can be in relationship.

So the LORD goes back to the drawing board–or more accurately, back to the mud pile.

So the Lord God formed from the fertile land all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky and brought them to the human to see what he would name them. The human gave each living being its name (Gen 2:19)

We have heard the key Hebrew words in this verse before. Like Adam, the human, the animals are formed (Hebrew yatsar) as a potter forms the clay: fashioned by the LORD with an artist’s hands. Also like Adam, the animals are made from “the fertile land”: Hebrew ‘adamah.  Just as Adam is called nephesh khayah, a “living being,” so are the animals.

Something fascinating is going on in this narrative of creation. While in Genesis 1, humanity is set apart from the rest of creation in multiple ways, in Genesis 2 we are joined to the earth from which we are made.  This does not mean that Genesis 2:4b-25 devalues or demeans humanity–far from it!  The human is the first thing made and everything else is made for Adam or because of Adam. Further, human dignity is clear in Adam being given the responsibility of naming the animals.

But nonetheless, there is also a clear relationship binding humanity to the rest of the created world. We are earthlings, made from and inseparably related to the earth–an idea consonant with the science of ecology.

Returning to our narrative, it is clear that the creation of the animals does not solve the problem!

The human named all the livestock, all the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals. But a helper perfect for him was nowhere to be found (Gen 2:20).

I love my cat, but the relationship that I can have with that wild little alien mind, looking up at me through those bright eyes, is sharply limited.

Though the animals are wonderful, none of them is an ‘ezer kenegedo.  The LORD realizes that it isn’t enough just to go back to the ‘adamah from which ‘adam had been made. An ‘ezer kenegedo will have to be fashioned, not from the soil as Adam was fashioned, but from Adam’s very being.

 

Oct
2013

What a Wonderful World! Part 4

In Genesis 1:1–2:4a, creation is imagined as taking place in the span of a single week, with the seventh day, the Sabbath, as a day of rest. Humans are created at the end of the sixth day, making us the last creatures that God makes.  In this first creation account, we are the climax of creation.

The text sets the creation of human beings apart from the rest of creation in several ways.  First, Gen 1:26 says, “Then God said, “Let us make humanity.”  What do we do with the plural here?  To whom is God speaking? Christian readers have sometimes found in this verse a reflection of the Trinity, so that the Father here addresses the Son and the Holy Spirit.

But the ancient priests of Israel would not have thought about God in those terms.  Parallels with other stories of creation in the ancient Near East reveal that the best way to understand this text in its historical context is as referring to a council of heavenly beings.

In the Enuma elish, creation is an act of committee.  The gods elected Marduk as their king and champion, to defeat the chaos monster Tiamat.  But once she was dead, the other gods joined with Marduk in the creation of the world.

Ea, the god of wisdom, counseled Marduk on a special aspect of this work: the creation of people.  According to the Babylonian creation story, “savage-man” was fashioned as a slave race, to serve the gods.

While the view of human being and of God is very different in Genesis 1 than in the Enuma elish, the simplest way to understand the plural in Genesis 1:26 is that here too the Creator is addressing a council of heavenly beings.  Still, faith in the incomparable God once again causes Israel to take a different stance than its neighbors. In Genesis, the council is decidedly in the background: God neither asks the council’s permission, nor seeks its aid. Indeed, God has not said “let us” before; only the creation of human being involves the council at all. Perhaps the council is mentioned here primarily to set human beings apart from the rest of creation.

Rather than the traditional KJV reading, “Let us make man,” the CEB has ““Let us make humanity” (Gen 1:26).   This is not political correctness: it is a matter of accurate translation. In Hebrew, the word for “man” is ish. But that is not the word that is used here. In Genesis 1:26, God decides to create ‘adam, which means “humanity.”

Human being, already distinguished by the mention of the divine council, is further distinguished by something not mentioned.  There are “kinds” of everything else in creation: plants, birds, fish, and animals (Gen 1:11-12, 21, 24-25).  However, there are no “kinds” of people.

This is not because the ancient Israelites were ignorant of other races and cultures: Palestine was a crossroads of ancient civilizations. The Israelites were fully aware of Africans and Asians, people of varying ethnicities, speaking a host of languages.  Yet Israel does not distinguish among these races and nations, as though some are more human than others.  Instead, there is just ‘adam: one single human family. It is a remarkable confession, rejecting every form of racism and jingoistic nationalism.

It is particularly important that we translate ‘adam correctly, because Genesis 1:27 goes on very plainly to state:

God created humanity in God’s own image,
        in the divine image God created them,
            male and female God created them.

Masculinity and femininity, maleness and femaleness, are each reflections of God-likeness in this verse. There is no hierarchy of the sexes here; no basis for placing women under men.

To be sure Israel’s traditions were not always equal to this insight. Yet here it is, at the very beginning of the Bible!  Sexism, like racism, is denied any place in the priestly view of God’s ordered world.  Further, to say that maleness and femaleness are both representations of “God-likeness” is also to say that God is neither male nor female—or more accurately, that both masculinity and femininity reflect aspects of God.  While the dominant images of God in the male-centered culture of ancient Israel were masculine, one of the dominant features of Israel’s theology from early on was an absolute refusal to make an image of God: the point being that no image can adequately express God’s being.  Further, there are texts which depict God in feminine terms–specifically, as midwife (Ps 22:9-10) and as mother (Hos 11:1-4). The God of Scripture is not a big man in the sky!

Returning to Genesis 1:26, the most distinctive aspect of human being in this account is our God-likeness:

Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us” (Gen 1:26).

The more familiar language of the King James reads, “in our image, after our likeness.”  What might it mean that we are made in the likeness (Hebrew demut) and image (Hebrew tselem) of God?

Insight may come from a mid-ninth century B. C. memorial inscription found on a statue at Tell Fekheriyeh, in which these words also appear.

This old Aramaic text describes the statue as the “likeness” and “image” of Hadad-yis’i, governor of Guzan in the Assyrian empire.  This could simply mean that the statue looks like him (as the CEB “to resemble us” in Gen 1:26 suggests).  But since this is a funerary inscription, it more likely means that this image represents Hadad-yis’i: it calls the governor to mind, even though he is no longer physically present.

The Hebrew words demut, (“likeness”) and tselem (“image, statue”) found in Genesis 1 could also relate to the idea of representation.  Just as his memorial statue preserves the memory of Hadad-yis’i, calling him to our minds even today, millennia after his death, so looking into the face of another human being calls God to mind.

By saying that humans bear God’s image, the priests are saying something about God, as well as something about humanity.  Our passage understands God in personal terms. This is another a remarkable step out of the mythic background of the ancient Near East.  The gods of the nations were embodiments of natural forces or powers.  Baal was the thunderstorm,

Asherah was motherhood,

and Ishtar was raw sensuality.

But in Genesis 1:26, the priests of Israel say that God’s likeness is seen in humanity, and implicitly (since that likeness is shown in “male and female”), in relationships.

The rest of the Bible, it could be said, pursues the question, “How can we be in relationship with God?”  Right at the start, we have a clue in our very humanity.  Our own longing for relationship, for connection with one another, tells us something of God’s love for us.

Genesis 1:26 goes on to define what being created in the image of God means in greater detail:

Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.”

Presumably, the image and likeness of God in human being is related to “taking charge” (Hebrew radah) over the rest of creation. In sharp contrast to the Enuma elish, in which humans are a slave race, in Genesis 1 we are honored as the lords and ladies of creation! Under God’s divine lordship as the ruler of the cosmos, we are appointed as regents, governing in God’s stead.  Humans stand in for God in material reality, concretely representing God’s rule.

Our passage goes on to affirm,

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.” (Gen 1:28).

Unfortunately, in the history of our faith, believers often have understood mastering the earth to mean abusing the earth: we are free to use the world, and even to use it up, as we see fit.

But it is apparent that this is not the intention of Genesis 1.  Consider God’s continual assessment of the world God is making: “God saw how good it was” (Gen 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Finally, when the work of creation was done, “God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good.” (Gen 1:31).

The goodness of creation does not depend on its utility for human beings: God calls the world good before we show up at the end of Day Six! The creation is good because God calls it good, quite apart from whether or not we can use it.  As in Psalm 104, where God’s presence is affirmed in all the world, even down in the depths with Leviathan where no human can live, Genesis 1:1—2:4a affirms God’s valuation of the world in and for itself.  If we exercise our dominion properly, we too will recognize the wonder, beauty and inherent goodness of the world that God has made, and exercise our responsibility as proper stewards of the earth.

The absence of conflict and the emphasis upon order in Genesis 1 leads to a rather intriguing conclusion.  In Genesis 1:29-30, God says,

“I now give to you [that is, humanity] the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food.  To all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food.”  

According to this text, God’s original will was for all creatures, humans and animals alike, to be vegetarian!  Permission to eat meat is not given, in the priests’ understanding, until after the great flood (see Gen 9:1-7).  As the priests imagine it, God’s dream is that the world be, like Hicks’ “Peaceable Kingdom,” a place of peace and beauty, where nothing has to die for something else to live.

This harmonious order extends past the actual work of creation. In Genesis 2:1-2, we read,

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that God had done, and God rested on the seventh day from all the work that God had done. (NRSV)

What a marvelous image! God rests, trusting the world that God has made enough to let it go.  God not only rests, but sanctifies the day of rest: “God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all the work of creation.” (Gen 2:3). Through Sabbath rest, human beings are given another way to be like God.

As we have seen, the six days of creation stand in parallel to one another: the light on day one to the lights on day four; the sky dome separating the waters on day two to the birds in the air and the fish in the water on day five; the creation of dry land and plants on day three to the creation of animals and humans, to live on the land and eat the plants, on day six.   The seventh day alone stands apart, without parallel, as the climax of creation. In this priestly depiction of reality, Sabbath is part of the structure of the universe. The sacredness of the seventh day is woven into the warp and woof of creation.

The structure of reality in Genesis 1:1—2:4a is very like architecture, with the six days arranged in parallel, like the columns of a building:

Day 1: Light                            Day 4: Lights

Day 2: Sky dome                    Day 5: Birds and fish

Day 3: Dry land                      Day 6: Land animals

Plants                                      Humanity

Day 7: Sabbath

In ancient Palestine and Syria, temples were built on a long room design: an entrance with a vestibule opened into a long main room with pillars.  At the back of the temple would often be a separate room, the Most Holy Place.  In Phoenician and Canaanite temples, that room held the image of the god. In the temple of Israel in Jerusalem, the inner room held God’s footstool, the Ark of the Covenant, above which God was invisibly enthroned.

The Most Holy Place, where the Ark was kept, became the place of the LORD’s special, particular presence.  If the six days of creation correspond to the main room, then Sabbath, the day apart without parallel, would be the Most Holy Place, where the Divine can be encountered.  Keep in mind, though, that in the priestly worldview God’s image is found in human beings. It is when we look in the eyes of another human being that we come closest to understanding who God is.

In Genesis 1:1—2:4a, the priests describe the world as a carefully and intricately ordered place: a temple built in time.  The symmetry and elegance of this world invite us to contemplate the wisdom and majesty of its creator, who imposes order upon chaos.  Does the world make sense?  The priests of ancient Israel affirm that it does.  Our God gives meaning to our world, and to our lives.

 

Oct
2013

What a Wonderful World! Part 3

AncientOfDays-The_WilliamBlake_1794

Last week, we saw how the priestly account of creation in Genesis 1:1–2:4a proceeds in a careful, orderly fashion, with the first three days each paralleled by one of the second three days, in sequence.  So, the creation of light on Day One (Gen 1:1-5) is paralleled on Day Four by the creation of the lights in the sky: the sun, moon, and stars (Gen 1:14-19).

On Day Two, God created the dome of the heavens, separating the waters above from the waters below and creating within the dome an open space. On Day Five, which parallels Day Two, God populates the air with birds, and the waters with fish and other creatures that live in the water (Gen 1:20-23).

Again, as on Day Three, the world is invited by God to take part in its own coming into being: “God said, ‘Let the waters swarm with living things, and let birds fly above the earth up in the dome of the sky’” (Gen 1:20).

God invites the water to bring forth living creatures, much as the plants had emerged from the earth.  Since biologists theorize that life on earth began in the oceans, some have suggested that the Genesis account is, after all, scientifically accurate.  Indeed, since according to 2 Peter 3:8 “with the Lord a single day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a single day”(see also Ps 90:4), it is sometimes suggested that each day in Genesis 1 may actually represent thousands or millions of years in our time.

This approach doesn’t work, however.  The sequence described for the emergence of life in this chapter doesn’t fit the fossil record: for example, birds did not actually appear before land animals, but rather are descended from dinosaurs.

Further, the text says, again and again, “There was evening and there was morning”: the priests are imagining ordinary, twenty-four-hour days.  This is important, as the sabbatical focus of Genesis 1:1–2:4a only works if we are talking about a sequence of seven days.

This means that we cannot shoehorn this story into our scientific world view –which is only a problem if believe that the Bible must be factual in order to be true.  But since Genesis presents two different accounts in its opening chapters, it is already clear that the text will not permit us to read it as a literal, factual account of beginnings.  This is not a scientific account, but a confession about God, and God’s relationship to our world.

Still,  the idea that God calls upon the waters to bring forth fish is consistent with the theory of evolution: the fundamental concept in modern biology.  For Israel’s ancient priests, as we saw in our discussion of Day Three, God creates in part by empowering the world to participate in its own creation, and enables the world to sustain itself.  This line of thought is consonant with the attempts by biologists to understand the emergence of life in natural terms, while still recognizing God as creator.

Among the living creatures now swarming the seas, Genesis 1:21 tells us, are “the great sea animals” (CEB; the NRSV reads “the great sea monsters”).  In Hebrew, the word is tanninim, which means dragons: the monsters of the abyss.

In the Babylonian creation epic the Enuma Elish, the sea monster Tiamat is the enemy that the creator god Marduk must defeat in order to make the world.  But according to Israel’s priests, if there is a dragon in the sea, then God must have made it!

In Psalm 104, a beautiful psalm of creation, the sea monster (here called Leviathan) is marvelously and whimsically described:

And then there’s the sea, wide and deep,
    with its countless creatures—
    living things both small and large.
There go the ships on it,
    and Leviathan, which you made, plays in it! (Ps 104:35-26).

The dragon delights in its watery world, just as God delights in all that God creates.  Rather than the uncreated adversary of the Divine, the sea monster is one of the living things with which the waters swarm–just another fish, if a whopping big one!

This brings us to Day Six.  Just as on Day Three God performed two creative acts (the land emerged from the water, and God invited the earth to bring forth plants), so Day Six features two creative acts of God.  First, the animals are made, to live on the land and eat the plants:

 God said, “Let the earth produce every kind of living thing: livestock, crawling things, and wildlife.” And that’s what happened (Gen 1:24). 

Once more, the world is invited to participate in its own creation. Just as on Day Three the earth brought forth plants, and as on Day Four the waters brought forth living creatures, so now at God’s invitation the earth brings forth living creatures.

In keeping with the ordered priestly worldview, the land animals are divided into three classes. First are the behemah, or domestic animals: the sheep, goats, and cattle that share the human world.

Last are the chayyat ha’arets (more usually called chayyat hassadeh, which the King James translates literally as “the beasts of the field”): that is, the wild animals, belonging to the wilderness.

In between these two major classes of animals are the remes: the creeping things—creatures with either too many legs or not enough, which seem to pop up everywhere. 

Now, the entire world is inhabited, with lights on the sky dome, fish in the seas, birds in the air, and animals filling every niche of the dry land.

But only with God’s second act on this sixth day is the population of the world complete.  Last of all, as the climax and pinnacle of creation, God creates humanity:

Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth” (Gen 1:26).

This is a difficult and complex verse, worth taking some time to umpack.  We will consider the creation of humanity, and finish our discussion of Genesis 1:1–2:4a, next week.

AFTERWORD:

All season long, it has been a joy to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates play baseball.   Now, with their decisive victory over the Cincinnati Reds, the Bible Guy is foolishly pleased to report that the Pirates are in contention for the National League pennant, and the World Series.  After 20 years without a winning season, let alone a playoff shot, it is most definitely time!  LET’S GO BUCS!!!

Sep
2013

What a Wonderful World! Part 2

Last week, we discussed the first two days of creation as depicting the beginning of time and space.  The separation of light from darkness (Day One) and the waters above from waters below (Day Two) is followed on Day Three by a third act of separation:

God said, “Let the waters under the sky come together into one place so that the dry land can appear.” And that’s what happened (Gen 1:9, CEB).

The land emerges from the water: picture a flat disc of land floating on the waters below, with the waters above held back by the dome.

Of, course, this is not our world view!  We know that, just as the sky is not a solid bowl overhead, the earth is not a disk floating on the waters below, but a sphere, drifting through empty space.

Still, Genesis 1:9 presents a commonsensical worldview. I know there is water up there, beyond the sky, because sometimes it comes down, as rain.  I know there is water down there, under the earth, because sometimes it bubbles up, in springs and streams, and if I dig at the right place, I may hit it!

Day Three involves two distinct acts of creation. After calling forth the dry land from the waters, God empowers the emerging world to take part in its own coming into being:

God said, “Let the earth grow plant life: plants yielding seeds and fruit trees bearing fruit with seeds inside it, each according to its kind throughout the earth.” And that’s what happened (Gen 1:11).

God invites the earth to participate in its own creation, by putting forth (literally, sprouting) green plants.  Further, the plants themselves, each bearing “fruit with seeds inside it,” hold within them the possibility of continuing God’s creation, carrying life forward into the future.  God creates a world capable of continuous regeneration.

Just as a consonance can be observed between God’s creation of space-time and contemporary physics, surely we can see here a consonance between God empowering the world to bring forth life and contemporary biology.

Biologists strive to understand the emergence and development of life in naturalistic terms, just as an engineer designing a dam or an astronomer calculating the orbit of a planet strives to make predictions based on observable, natural laws.  Genesis 1:11 is not biology.  Israel’s ancient priests knew nothing of DNA or mitochondria or the evolution of species.  Their description of creation proceeds from their idea of God, not from investigation into the world’s workings.  However, their insight that God empowers God’s world for self-creation, and invites its participation in its own coming into being, lends support to the biologist’s quest for understanding.

With the separation of land from water and the emergence of the plants, we might say that geography comes into being. Three days into creation, we have a world that we can recognize: sky overhead, seas, lakes, rivers, forests, savannas, deserts, mountains, plains. But though this is recognizably the place where we live, we do not live there yet.  In fact, no one lives there!  It is still empty. But in the next three days, God populates this world–beginning with its empty sky.

In the ordered priestly conception of Genesis 1:1—2:4a, each of the second three days in sequence is parallel to one of the first three days, in sequence.  So, while on Day One God created light (Hebrew ‘or), on Day Four (first of the second three days, paralleling day one; cf. Gen 1:14-19), God creates the me’orot: that is, the lights. A big light now rules the sky at day, while a little light and a generous scattering of tiny lights adorn the heavens at night. The previously blank dome of the heavens is now “populated” with lights.

From our twenty-first century scientific and technological perspective, this makes no sense at all!  We know that we live on a ball spinning in space. When our side of the ball turns toward the sun, we experience what seems to us to be the sunrise. As the ball turns, we experience what seems from our perspective to be the sun moving across the sky. When our side of the ball moves into the shadow on the far side, so that we face away from the sun, we experience night.

How, then, could three days have gone by, and the sun come into being only now, on the fourth day?  The simple answer is that, while we know the reasons for night and day, the people who wrote this text did not. From their perspective, light and darkness, day and night, were direct creations of the Divine.  The sun, the moon, and the stars were lights, fixed to the dome of the sky. Their motion marked the passage of the days and nights and the sequence of the seasons (see Gen 1:14), but they did not cause them.

By contrast, in the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma elish, the sun and moon are gods, and the constellations are the astral images of the gods.  The Babylonians invented astrology based on this idea.  If you understand the motion of the heavens, you know what the gods are doing, and can plan your own life accordingly.

But Genesis 1:14-19 simply calls the heavenly bodies “lights.”  They are objects, not persons! For the priests in Genesis 1, the sun is not a god, the moon is not a god, the stars are not gods and goddesses; all are merely lights in the sky.  By concentrating divinity solely in God, Genesis 1 disenchants the world.  The storm, the earthquake, fire, and fertility are not gods and goddesses, but natural forces. Objects in the world are simply objects.

In many ways, we do not, and cannot, share the worldview of this text.  Our earth is not a flat disk; our sky is not a solid dome; we know that the sun, moon, and stars are not lights fastened to the sky.  The disenchantment of the world described in Genesis 1:14-19, however, makes our scientific and technological world possible.

As long as I believe in an enchanted world, a world haunted by gods and demons in which every rock, stone or tree is possessed by a spirit, I can neither formulate laws to render the behavior of my world meaningful, nor make predictions based on those laws.  The interaction of objects in the world will be due to the capricious decisions that those various spirits might make in their interactions with one another.

But once I understand that the sun is an object, like a lamp; that the moon and the stars too are lights—in short, once my world is disenchanted—I can attempt to understand the interrelationships among the objects in the world. By observation and experiment, I can begin to formulate hypotheses and test them; I can make predictions about what my world will do. The ancient Israelite priests who wrote Genesis 1 were not scientists, but the step that they took in Genesis 1:14-19 makes science happen.

 

Sep
2013

What a Wonderful World!

716px-Edward_Hicks_-_Peaceable_Kingdom

From 1820 until his death in 1849, the Quaker preacher and artist Edward Hicks painted about a hundred different depictions of this same scene—likely you have seen one or more of them.  In each painting, children stand unafraid among lions, wolves, and bears, accompanied by sheep and cattle.  Every face, human and animal, gazes calmly out of the canvas, meeting our eyes in serene invitation.  To each painting, Hicks gave the same title: “The Peaceable Kingdom.”  

Hicks’ imagery is drawn directly from the prophet Isaiah:

The wolf will live with the lamb,
    and the leopard will lie down with the young goat;
    the calf and the young lion will feed together,
    and a little child will lead them (Isa 11:6).

But Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom, charmingly reflected in Hicks’ paintings, is itself drawn from Genesis 1:29-30 (CEB):

Then God said, “I now give to you all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. To all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food.” And that’s what happened.

Genesis 1:1—2:4a depicts a peaceful, ordered world, in which conflict has no place.  But as we have seen, that ordered world emerges out of disorder: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters” (Gen 1:1-2).

storm at sea

Before creation, there was chaos: imagined here as formless, shapeless water.  Israel shared this notion of the world emerging out of watery chaos with its ancient neighbors.

enumaelish

The Babylonian creation epic Enuma elish opens with these words:

When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught by primordial Apsu, their begetter
(And) Mummu-Tiamat, who bore them all.

In Akkadian, the language of the Babylonians, apsu refers to the waters under the earth, the fresh water reservoir out of which all streams and springs emerge. Our word “abyss” comes (by way of the Greek abyssos) from this Akkadian root: apsu is the deep, the fresh-water abyss. The counterpart to the male Apsu is the female Tiamat, which in Akkadian means “salt water.”  Tiamat is, quite literally, the sea monster.

According to the Enuma Elish, out of this merging of fresh water and salt water, the union of Apsu and Tiamat, the gods were born. Soon thereafter, their father Apsu tired of the gods and decided to destroy them. But the gods found out about Apsu’s plan, and advised by Ea, the god of wisdom, they killed their father.  In wrath their mother, Tiamat, swore to destroy her children. Tiamat is imagined as a dragon: an invulnerable serpent thing armored with scales. The gods realize that they cannot prevail against her separately, and so they elect one of their number as king over the gods, and pour all of their power into that one chosen champion.  Marduk, patron god of Babylon, was elected king and, suffused with the power of the other gods, succeeded in confronting and defeating the monster of chaos.

marduk and tiamat

But Genesis 1 imagines the beginning in a very different way. Here, there is no combat. Chaos has no will to oppose to God’s. 

In serene, sovereign majesty God speaks the universe into existence: “God said, “Let there be light.” And so light appeared.” (Gen 1:3).

The creation of light is described as an act of separation: “God separated the light from the darkness” (Gen 1:4).  As Claus Westermann (Genesis: A Practical Commentary, trans. David Green [Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1987], pp. 8-9) observed, the first three days of creation all involve acts of separation: light from darkness; waters above from waters below; dry land from water. The Hebrew word used here, hibdil, is important in priestly vocabulary.  One of the primary tasks of priests in ancient Israel was to teach their people to keep the holy separate from the common, the clean from the unclean (Lev 10:10).  As separation (hibdil) was a priestly concept in ancient Israel, it seems likely that we are dealing in Genesis 1:1—2:4a with a priestly worldview.

God not only separates the light from the darkness, but also gives them both familiar, and significant, names:

God named the light Day and the darkness Night.  There was evening and there was morning: the first day (Gen 1:5).

It is not that God created light on the first day, then, but rather that by creating light and separating it from the darkness, God created the first day.  To put this another way, God brings time into being.

Now that there has been a first day, there can be a second, and a third, and a fourth, and so on, through all the days that will follow.  With the creation of light, the cosmic clock begins ticking.  In this priestly composition, God stands outside of time itself, and calls it into being.

Day two is also an act of separation:

God said, “Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate the waters from each other.”  God made the dome and separated the waters under the dome from the waters above the dome. And it happened in that way.  God named the dome Sky.  There was evening and there was morning: the second day (Gen 1:6-8).

The Hebrew word for the sky dome is raqiya’, which means literally “something beaten out:” much as, in the ancient world, a bronze bowl was beaten out of a sheet of bronze.

The King James translation “firmament” captures this notion very well. The sky is a solid object!  God takes this dome and inserts it into the waters of chaos, much as we might plop a bowl upside-down into the sink while washing the dishes. Of course, when you take a bowl and stick it in the water, a bubble of air can be trapped inside. Just so, when God inserts the sky dome into the waters of chaos, there is water is above the dome and water below, but inside the dome there is an open space where creation can take place.

In the Enuma Elish, after Marduk defeated Tiamat,

Then the lord paused to view her dead body,

That he might divide the form and do artful works.

He split her like a shellfish into two parts:

Half of her he set up as a covering for heaven,

Pulled down the bar and posted guards.

He bade them to allow not her waters to escape.

While the connection between Genesis 1:6-8 and the Enuma elish is apparent, there is also a clear distinction between the worldview of Israel’s priests and that of ancient Babylon.  The violence in the account of creation through primordial combat is entirely absent from Genesis 1.  God simply speaks an ordered world into being!

If day one, with the creation of light and the separation of light from darkness, marked the creation of time, day two marks the creation of space. Now there is up and down, right and left, back and forth. Order is beginning to emerge out of the chaos.

The notion that time and space have a beginning is certainly not obvious.  Many world religions and philosophies assert that the universe has always existed, and indeed until the mid-twentieth century, this was the common assumption of science as well.  But Genesis 1 asserts that God stands outside of both time and space, and calls them into being.

The priestly assertion that space and time have a beginning is consonant with the insights of contemporary physics.  Based on observations of the expansion of the universe, astrophysicists extrapolate backwards to a moment when our universe was compacted into a point, called a singularity.  Observation and measurement of a residual background radiation, detectable in every direction, suggests that our universe exploded out of that singularity in what is prosaically referred to as the “Big Bang.”

With that cataclysmic explosion, space came into being.  Our universe is not expanding into something; rather, space comes into being as the universe expands.  This concept is difficult enough to grasp. 

However, Einstein demonstrated that time is not an absolute quantity apart from space, but is itself a “direction” or dimension, related to movement through space: the faster we go, the slower time passes.  This is why contemporary physics refers not to space and time, but to space-time.  The Big Bang marks, then, not only the beginning of space, but the beginning of time as well.   As Israel’s ancient priests affirmed, there was indeed a first day.

This does not mean that the priests were doing science.  After all, we know that the sky is not, and has never been, a solid bowl!  Still, the consonance between contemporary cosmology’s discovery of a beginning to space-time and the theological assertion in Genesis 1 that God created time and space shows that these two ways of understanding our world are not at odds with one another.  Christians need not choose between science and faith; nor do we need to invent our own uniquely Christian ways of doing science, in competition with “secular” science. Points of consonance such as the Big Bang remind us that there is after all one world, described by science and faith alike, which we all inhabit and attempt to understand.

Next week we will continue to consider the beauty of creation as presented in the first chapters of Genesis, beginning with the third day.

 

Sep
2013

Which Creation?

Close readers of Scripture recognized early on that God creates woman twice in the opening chapters of Genesis.  The first creation of woman is described in Genesis 1:27 (CEB):

God created humanity [Hebrew ‘adam] in God’s own image,
        in the divine image God created them,
            male and female God created them.

The second account of the creation of woman is the familiar story of Eve in Genesis 2:21-23, where God causes a deep sleep to come upon Adam, performs major surgery, crafts the woman from the man’s flesh, and brings her to him.

Traditional Jewish interpreters made sense of this tension by proposing that God created not one but two wives for Adam.  According to Jewish legend, the first wife, whose creation is described in Genesis 1, was called Lilith.

 

The legend says that Lilith was beautiful, but willful and vain, refusing to submit to the authority either of God or of Adam.  So, she was booted out of the garden.

God then created Eve: a second, presumably more pliant wife, made from Adam’s own stuff – hence, the story of the creation of woman in Genesis 2.  As for Lilith, she became a creature of the night: a seductress who tempts holy men in their dreams and gives birth to demons and monsters.

Though the story of Lilith is of course a legend, it points us to the tension within these chapters: clearly, something odd is going on in the opening pages of Genesis!

Genesis 1 begins, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters” (Gen 1:1-2).  The phrase “the heavens and the earth” is repeated in Genesis 2:4a, in what sounds like a summary statement:  “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”   Immediately after this apparent summary, we read, “On the day the LORD God made earth and sky . . .” (Gen 2:4b)—the same expression, but flipped on its head.  Another account of beginnings appears to follow (Gen 2:4b-25).

Is it possible, then, that in the first two chapters of Genesis we have two distinct accounts of creation, one in Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a and a second in Genesis 2:4b—25?  For millennia, we have read the text as though Genesis presented us with a single account of beginnings: one creation story.  But could it be that we have not one creation story, but two?

We can assess this idea, and explore how these texts relate to one another, by posing to these two passages a series of questions.

First, How is the Divine addressed in each passage?  In the English translation of Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a, the creator is called simply “God.”

The Hebrew word is ‘elohim, which literally means “gods.”  In Hebrew, however, the plural can be a way of indicating majesty.  So, while ‘elohim does mean “gods” sometimes, it is commonly used as shorthand for “God of gods” or “God above all gods.”  In Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a, this is consistently the way the divine creator is addressed.

But in Genesis 2:4b—25, we find not only “God” (again, ‘elohim), but also the expression “LORD,” in all capitals.  That is the way that most English translations represent the personal Name of God, YHWH.

Like the repetition of “the heavens and the earth” bracketing 1:1—2:4a, the two different names used for the Divine in our passages are suggestive.  But we can push further to ask about the “stuff” of creation: What does the Creator make things out of?

This may seem an odd question.  Haven’t we been taught that God creates out of nothing?  Later Jewish and Christian theologians and philosophers talk about creation in this way because of their high view of God. If God is indeed God, then God is not an object in the world of time and space: certainly, then, God must have called all that is into being. Therefore, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians alike talk about Creatio ex nihilo: that is, God creating the world “out of nothing.”   

However, that is not what Genesis 1—2 is about. The question posed by these chapters is not, “Where did the world come from?” Ancient people really did not care how the world began.

What they wanted, and needed, to know was something more immediate and pressing: is there a meaningful order to reality?  Can I plant my crops and know that the rain will fall, the sun will rise, the seed will sprout and germinate, and the harvest will come?

Ancient people knew all about solstices and equinoxes.  Though they did not understand how this happened, they were fully aware that every year, when the autumnal equinox rolls around, the day and the night are of equal length (hence, “equinox:” that is, “equal night”).  But every night after that the nights get longer and longer, and every day after that the days get shorter and shorter, until finally we come to the winter solstice: the longest night and shortest day of the year.

Every human culture in the world recognizes the equinoxes and the solstices, and for a very important reason. After all, how can we know that this time around, the nights won’t just keep getting longer and longer and longer until everything is swallowed up in night? How can we know that this time around the air won’t just continue to get colder and colder and colder until everything is swallowed up in an endless winter of darkness and death?

Can we be certain that the wheel will turn and that the cycle will continue?  In short: does the world make sense?

The opening verses of Genesis record, ““When God began to create the heavens and the earth— the earth was without shape or form” (Hebrew tohu wabohu; Gen 1:1-2).  This “formless void” (the NRSV rendering of the verse) is further described as “the deep sea” (Hebrew tehom) and “the waters” (Hebrew hammayim; Gen 1:2).  In Genesis 1:1-2, then, the state of things when God began creating was chaos, without order or pattern, represented as tossing, shifting, formless water.

Picture yourself floating in the ocean.  There is no land in sight.  It is night: the sky is overcast, so that there is no moon and no starlight.  All you can see, all you can imagine, is the endless rise and fall of the water, the tossing of the waves, and the wind blowing over the deep. That is the way Israel’s ancient priests imagined the beginning of things.

It all begins with shapeless, formless water.  But God imposes order on that chaos. The implicit question in Genesis 1, then, is not, how did the world begin, but rather, does the world make sense?  God establishes order and meaning in place of disorder and meaninglessness.

When we turn to Genesis 2, we find a different image.  Here the heavens and the earth are presupposed; God has already created them, offstage.  This account begins, “On the day the LORD God made earth and sky—before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew, because the LORD God hadn’t yet sent rain on the earth and there was still no human being to farm the fertile land. . .” (Gen 2:4b-5).  Here, the earth is like a dry field, with nothing growing and no rain. 

But God permits water to bubble up from beneath the earth, and moisten the surface of the ground (Gen 2:6).  What happens next is the chemical reaction that every two year old learns: water plus dirt equals mud. 

Out of the mud, the LORD begins to create: “the LORD God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life.” (Gen 2:7).  The LORD God forms the human (Hebrew ‘adam) out of “the fertile land” (Hebrew ‘adamah).  Similarly, the LORD forms “all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky” out of the ground (Gen 2:19).  The Hebrew term ‘adamah, means “soil” or “arable land:” ground you can till and plant (“fertile land,” as the CEB renders it).  The very close similarity in sound between Adam, the human, and ‘adamah, the soil, is no accident: Hebrew loves puns!  Adam is the mud man, formed from the ground.  So while Genesis 1:1-2:4a begins with water, in Genesis 2:4b-25 the LORD forms the human and the animals from the ground.

This leads us directly into a third question to pose to these two passages: How does the Divine create?  In Genesis 1:3, we read, “God said, ‘Let there be light.’”

Again in verse 6, we read, “God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the middle of the waters to separate the waters from each other.’”  This pattern continues throughout the chapter (compare Gen 1:9, 11, 14, 20, 24). In this passage, clearly, God speaks the world into being.

But when we turn to Genesis 2:4b-25, we find a different way of thinking about the means by which the Lord creates.  In Genesis 2:7, the Lord God formed the human from the ground. 

Likewise in 2:19, “the LORD God formed from the fertile land all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky”  The verb translated “formed” in the CEB is the Hebrew word yatsar: the term used for what a potter does (see Jeremiah 18:11). 

In Genesis 2, the LORD is like a potter, forming the human, the animals, and the birds from the ground: getting the Divine hands dirty, and fashioning intimately and directly what the LORD creates.

The fourth and final question we will pose to these two passages is, What is the order of creation?  The first thing that God makes in Genesis 1 is light (Gen 1:3-5). God calls light into being by pronouncing its name: God says, “Let there be light”—in Hebrew, yehi ‘or; that is, “Light, be!”—and light is.

Genesis 1:1—2:4a imagines creation as taking place over the span of a single week.  Light is created on Day One, and everything else that comes into being is made over the course of six days.  The last creative act of God, performed at the end of the sixth day, is the creation of human beings (Gen 1:26-31).  In Genesis 1:1—2:4a, humanity is the climax of creation.

However, if Day Six marks the climax of creation, Day Seven is its culmination: the Sabbath, the day of rest, of worship, and of study. In Genesis 2:1-4a, even God rests on the Sabbath day!   According to Genesis 1:1—2:4a, then, creation itself has a sabbatical logic.  Sabbath is part of the structure of reality, woven into the warp and woof of the cosmos.

Now consider the sequence of creation imagined in Genesis 2:4b-25. Here, the first expressly described creative act of the LORD is the forming of the human.  We are expressly told that this took place, “On the day the LORD God made earth and sky,” and “before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew” (Gen 2:4b-5).  In Genesis 2:5, then, we are expressly told that there were no plants when the human was created.

In Genesis 1, plants are created at the end of Day Three, while humans are created at the end of Day Six.  But in Genesis 2, plants are created later, as the story unfolds, for the human: the LORD God plants a garden in Eden in order to provide food, a place of dwelling, and meaningful work (Gen 2:8-15).

Although the human seems to have in the garden everything required for life, something more after all is necessary: “Then the LORD God said, “It’s not good that the human is alone. I will make him a helper that is perfect for him [Hebrew ‘ezer kenegedo]” (Gen 2:18). The LORD at first sets out to make an ‘ezer kenegedo for the human,  “a helper that is perfect for him,”  by going back to the drawing board–or more accurately, to the mud pile!  “So the LORD God formed from the fertile land all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky and brought them to the human to see what he would name them. The human gave each living being its name” (Gen 2:19).  By giving the animals their names, the human completed their creation.

In Genesis 1, birds and fish are created on Day Five (Gen 1:20-23).  The land animals, both the wild and domestic animals and the “crawling things” (the Hebrew remes refers to those things that either have too many legs or not enough: what we used to call “creepy crawlies” when I was a boy), are made on the morning of Day Six (Gen 1:24-25).  Humans are made at the end of the sixth day, as the climax of creation.  But in Genesis 2, the human is created before the animals.  Indeed the animals, like the plants, are created for the human, in the quest to find an ‘ezer kenegedo.

But none of the animals can fill the role of ‘ezer kenegedo: “a helper that is perfect for him.”  The human is still alone.  Recognizing that more extreme action is called for,

the LORD God put the human into a deep and heavy sleep, and took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh over it. With the rib taken from the human, the LORD God fashioned a woman and brought her to the human being (Gen 2:21-22).

When he sees her, the delighted man says,

This one finally is bone from my bones
        and flesh from my flesh.
She will be called a woman [Hebrew ‘ishah]
        because from a man [Hebrew ‘ish] she was taken (Gen 2:23).

The creation of humanity brackets Genesis 2: God’s first creative act is to fashion the human (Hebrew ‘adam) from the ground, and God’s last creative act is to fashion the woman (Hebrew ‘ishah) from the man (Hebrew ‘ish).

When we listen closely and carefully to Genesis 1 and 2, it becomes evident that we really are looking not at one story of creation, but at two. One account, in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, imagines creation over the span of a single week.  God speaks the world into being, and humanity is the climax of creation, the last thing made.  In the second, in Genesis 2:4b-25, the LORD fashions the human, and fashions the animals and birds, forming them like a potter, from the soil.  The human is the first thing that the LORD makes; everything else is made for the human. The creation of humanity, male and female, brackets the story: the man as the first creative act of the LORD God, the woman as the last.

If we try to collapse these two passages into a single account, the text resists us.  One common attempt to harmonize the passages is to suggest that Genesis 2:4b-25 is a detailed expansion of the thumbnail description of Day Six from Genesis 1.  But even setting aside the different ways of referring to the creator and the different ways of describing God’s creative activity in these chapters, the sequence does not work: Genesis 2 explicitly says that there were no plants when the human was made, and that the animals were made after the human.  Collapsing the stories doesn’t solve our problems; it only creates different problems.

If we come to Genesis 1–2 seeking answers to our questions about how the world began, we will go away frustrated. Since there are two different, distinct, and separate accounts of creation in these chapters, they cannot both be factual depictions of how the world began.  If I say, “I believe the Genesis creation account,” the next question must be, “Which creation: the first account, or the second?”  But of course, we don’t have the leisure of choosing one or the other: there they both are, right at the front of our Bibles, presented to us in our canonical text of Genesis.  The biblical text itself will not let us read Genesis 1–2 as a factual account of the beginning of the world.

Once we understand that Genesis 1:1—2:4a and 2:4b-25 are two different stories, however, we can consider how they relate to one another positively and creatively: not through some kind of artificial harmonization, but by seeing how these two accounts echo and resonate with one another.

William Carl, president of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, is a gifted preacher and a trained musician who understands the value of dissonance, in music and in Scripture.  When music is all consonance, Carl observes, it is boring, even irritating (think of the sugary bubble-gum pop songs that, in spite of yourself, stick in your head and drive you up the wall)!  Good composers know that to create texture, you need discord to enrich and accentuate the harmonies. It is surely no accident that right at the very beginning of Scripture we find not only consonance, but also dissonance: two different ways of thinking about who God is; two different ways of thinking about our world and about who we are.

 

 

 

Sep
2013

Remembering the Sabbath

In Genesis 2:1-3, the Sabbath is the climax of creation.  The first six days of God’s creation unfold in Genesis 1 in a carefully ordered, three by three pattern. Day One (1:3-5), the creation of light (Hebrew ‘or) parallels Day Four (1:14-19), the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, called lights (Hebrew me’orot) in the sky.  Day Two, the creation of the sky dome, leaving the waters of the sea under the heavens (1:6-8), parallels Day Five, when God creates birds to fly in the air and fish to swim in the sea (1:20-23).  God’s two creative acts on Day Three, the creation of dry land (1:9-10) and the creation of plants (1:11-13) parallel God’s two acts 0n Day Six: the creation of land animals, both wild and domestic (1:24-25), and the creation of human beings (1:26-31).  Day Seven thus stands apart, as a day without parallel.

We could conclude from this structure that the Sabbath comes after creation is finished (see Exod 20:11).  The Samaritan Pentateuch (a version of the first five books of the Bible used by the Samaritans), the Greek Septuagint, and the Syriac all say that God completed God’s work on the sixth day, a reading that the CEB follows (see Genesis 2:2).  But I believe that it is better to stay with the Hebrew text here, as the NRSV does, and to see the Sabbath as the day when creation is completed.  For the priests who wrote Genesis 2:1-3, Sabbath was part of the very structure of reality, woven into the warp and woof of the cosmos.

When God creates the world in Genesis 1, God calls into being something new: something that is not God.  Some religions have seen the world itself as divine.

Indeed, the Semitic words for Sun,

Moon,

and even the stars

were also the names of gods and goddesses–which is likely why those terms are not used in Genesis 1:14-19.  The priests of ancient Israel insisted that the world is authentically distinct and separate from God.  The sun and moon are not gods, and the stars are not goddesses.  They are merely lights in the sky.  This is a long way from astronomy, but the “disenchantment” of the natural world that it represents would make science possible.

As theologian and particle physicist John Polkinghorne observes, in Genesis 1 God endows the universe “with the power of true becoming” (The Faith of a Physicist [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994], 81): that is, God enables the world to participate in its own creation!  So, the earth brings forth plant (1:11) and animal life (1:24), and the waters bring forth “swarms of living creatures” (1:20).  This too is a long way from biology, but it is a view of the world consistent with the ideas of evolution and genetics.  Further, provision is made for the continual recreation and renewal of God’s world (1:11-12, 22, 28), so that it can sustain itself.

Calling an autonomous universe into being “involves divine acceptance of the risk of the existence of the other” (Polkinghorne, 81).  But the God of Genesis is not anxious or controlling.  God loves the world God makes!  Again and again through the first six days, God celebrates the beauty and wholeness of God’s world, calling the creation “good” (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).  Then, on the seventh day, God stops working, and rests: a profound expression of confidence in the world that God has made.  God trusts God’s creation enough to declare it finished, and to rest.

The renowned Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann affirms,

The day of cessation from work declares that God’s creation is, at root, an unanxious environment for life that is not defined by energetic productivity or self-preoccupied consumption, but is defined by the peaceableness that has confidence in the reliability of the world as God’s creation without excessive exertion on the part of God or of humankind (An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination [Louisville: Westminster-John Knox, 2003], 35-36).

Creation is not abandoned by God, and left to its own devices.  The God of Genesis is certainly not the clockmaker god of the Deists, who sets the universe running and then departs.

But neither is the God we meet in Genesis some cosmic puppet master, the lone real actor in the cosmic drama. Genesis 2:1-3 affirms rather that God rests, and in love and confidence lets the world go.

John Wesley, who urged his preachers never to be “triflingly employed,” has a great deal to answer for!  “Letting go” is especially hard for clergy.  Resting seems lazy and unproductive–and certainly, in the church there is always more to do!  But our feverish need to be busy may show, not zeal for our Father’s business, but anxiety!   Our drive to be involved in everything may actually reflect our desire to be in control.

Our obsession with effectiveness and efficiency, however, is neither effective nor efficient!  Our most productive periods often come when we are not working, when in stillness and calm we open ourselves to new insights, through the moving of the Spirit–when we follow God’s example, and embrace Sabbath rest.

Genesis 2:3 declares that “God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it.”  In Exodus 20:8-11, God’s rest, together with God’s blessing on and sanctification of that rest, is the reason that we are to remember and sanctify the Sabbath day.

Still today, pious Jews chant Genesis 2:1-3 before praying the kiddush, the prayer over wine to sanctify the Sabbath.  Sabbath observance has long been a distinguishing mark of people Israel–which is why Jesus’ apparent disregard of the Sabbath brought such a strong response from the religious leaders of his day.  But Jesus’ insistence on healing on the Sabbath shows, not disrespect for the Sabbath, but a desire to reclaim the Sabbath.  Jesus said,

The Sabbath was created for humans; humans weren’t created for the Sabbath. This is why the Human One is Lord even over the Sabbath    (Mark 2:27-28).  

What better time to set people free than the seventh day, when God completed God’s creation, and celebrated by setting the world free?

AFTERWORD:

The Bible Guy welcomes the incoming class of students to Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and also welcomes a great crop of new faculty!  Pray for us, please, as together we pursue Christ’s call!