The Joining of Adam and Eve by Heironymous Bosch, c. 1510
A popular evangelical ministry purports to answer most critical questioning of Scripture and Christianity through the book of Genesis. Their claim, as an apologetics ministry, is that the ancient book of Genesis contains answers to modern questions about “creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.”1 While I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong to look to Genesis for answers to cosmological questions, indeed, Genesis deals with cosmological things, I disagree with the methods the ministry uses to come to the conclusions they do. They are also quite dogmatic and are not shy in stating that if a person does not adhere to their interpretations and opinions of what (they claim) Genesis says, they’re inconsistent and do not trust God’s word. I don’t want to debate, at least not here, their conclusions, but rather I want to claim that their approach to Genesis is flawed. They and other ministries like them want to pull answers from Genesis, whereas what I believe Genesis is doing is teaching us how to ask good questions and how to approach our questions about cosmology (the study of the universe), reality, and life.
Don’t get me wrong. I do think Genesis does provide answers to some of these questions, particularly some of big existential questions—How did the universe begin? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there so much bad/evil in the world? Why is there so much good/beauty? But Genesis is also specially dealing with the history of a specific group, the people of Israel, and their beginnings. The genesis of other nations and peoples is told, certainly, but even then they’re all put into relation to Israel, “Blessed by Yahweh my God be Shem [ancestor of Israel], and let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth, and let him live in the tents of Shem…” (Gen. 9:26-27a). Israel, otherwise known as Jacob, was the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham, the descendent of Shem, the son of Noah, the descendant of Adam.
What is Genesis About?
Genesis is a book of beginnings, certainly, but it is a book that (re)imagines those beginnings in relation the people of Israel and God’s purposes within Israel. In an earlier post, I talked about how the Old Testament was given its final editorial form after Judah’s exile in Babylon. Consequently, much of what is going on in Genesis reflects the issues of a people in exile, and the ideological “language” in which Genesis is written is the language of exile and wandering. Adam and Eve are exiled from the Garden. Abraham is exiled from Ur and wanders around the Promised Land. Jacob is exiled from his family because of poor decisions and later he and his family are exiled in Egypt. Joseph, too, is exiled from his family and into Egypt. Humanity is exiled from the land of Shinar where the Tower of Babel was being built. The theme of exile and return shows up pretty frequently.
Creation, as a theme, is not relegated to the first two chapters of the book, but shows up four times at least. This happens in cycles of un-creation and recreation. First, is Genesis 1:1-2:3. The second is found after the un-creation of the world in the Flood (Gen. 8:1-9:17). Then again after the the scattering (think of chaos) at the Tower of Babel with the call of Abraham (cf. Gen. 12). Finally, there’s a small picture of the descent into chaotic un-creation with the destruction of Sodom (Gen. 19). This last one is part of the third, in that the Abraham chapters are the story of God recreating the world through Abraham and his descendants. Un-creation and recreation show up again throughout the OT as well, as in the un-creation of Egypt and the deliverance of Israel as recreation. The theme also shows up in the NT, with un-creation type things happening at the crucifixion (cf. Matt. 27:51-54) and Jesus’ resurrection as new creation (cf. John 20:22).
To be a bit more direct and clear with my point, what I am saying is that Genesis is not about the creation of the universe. It has a creation story or two,2 but it is primarily about how God came about calling the people of Israel. There are cosmic principles and cosmic reverberations in Genesis, the choosing of Israel is, in fact, not only for Israel’s sake but for the redemption/recreation of the world, but it is not primarily about cosmology. The point is not, then, to say that the universe was created in six, twenty-four hour periods, but rather to say that this God, Elohim in the first chapter, Yahweh in the second and third chapters, is the Creator of the heavens and the earth, of all that is visible and invisible. For the original readers, the point is that it is Yahweh Elohim and not Marduk, the chief god of the Babylonians, who created the world and that this is a world of harmony.
The creation stories of many, if not all, Mesopotamian and Near Eastern cultures (and many ancient cultures outside those areas) involve great battles between deities or greta bloodshed that results in the creation of the world. Genesis tells a different story. Genesis envisions a God who created purely out of a desire to create, and the Creation he makes is formed in harmony with itself. It is given the original blessing of life and co-creation among its many inhabitants, which includes humanity. Conflict and war is written into the cosmological imagination of the ancient world, whereas the Hebrew idea sees shalom, peace, and harmony written into the very fabric of creation.
It’s Never About One Thing
Genesis is never telling just one story. Rather, it is weaving many stories and ideas together to paint a picture of the Creator, the world as he created it, the world as it stands, and the people he chose to redeem it. Genesis is always about humanity, and it is also always about Israel, and it is always about the world in which he placed his image bearers. Adam and Eve literally mean “Human” and “Life” in Hebrew, so Adam and Eve represent humanity and the human condition, but they also represent Israel. Genesis 1 gives a rather orderly and patterned account of creation, but it’s about how God created different realms and populates them with his co-creators, from plants to animals to humans. It’s also imbues reality with a priestly worldview, with the cosmos being divided and placed in their proper domains in order to create the sacred mountain-garden-temple where humanity and God dwell together. Genesis 2, on the other hand, while also about creation, is not concerned with the creation process, but rather with the relationship of humanity with the rest of creation and the relationship of the man and the woman. Genesis 2 leads more directly and naturally into the rest of the book than Genesis 1.
We often think that the creation of man and woman, and the man’s poem at the end of the chapter (Gen. 2:23, “She, at last, is bone from my bones, and flesh from my flesh…”) is the point of the chapter. Indeed, it is a point, and maybe the most obvious point, but there is a lot more going on in the chapter than just the creation of the man and woman. What, then, is Genesis 2 trying to say? In order to begin to understand that, we have to s l o w down and pay attention to what is being said. In slowing down we are saying no to trying to “get to the point,” we are also not trying to figure out what we are “supposed to do” with the information. These aren’t fables, they’re not moral teachings. This is mythology,3 which author Julia Watson defines as the “interpretation of sacred stories which deal with various aspects of the human condition, and express the beliefs and values held by a certain culture.”4 As we begin to read s l o w l y we begin to notice things, funny things, interesting things, things that don’t quite make sense, and a hundred other little things that give us pause. For instance, why is the Garden planted “in Eden, in the east” (Gen. 2:8)? What does the word “Eden” mean? Why, when God decides that “it is not good for the man to be alone, did he make the entire animal kingdom before he made Eve? Why, when God made Eve, did he take one of Adam’s ribs to do so?
The Creation accounts (Gen. 1:1-2:3 and 2:4-245) are not really about how God created the world or humanity. They are teaching us something about the nature of that creative act, Creation itself, about us, and about our relationship to Creation and to the Creator. In order to discern what Scripture is saying, we have to slow down and hear, to intently listen, and a really wonderful way to do that is to ask questions.
Learning To Ask Questions
I chose The Joining of Adam and Eve by Heironymous Bosch as the art for this piece because of how strange Bosch’s work is. If you only look at the human figures, Adam, Eve, and the Creator (who looks like Jesus), the story is very familiar, and is exactly what we would expect of a painting of Adam and Eve from the early Renaissance. But there is a lot happening around the figures. When you take even a moment to pause and really look at the animals and many of the trees, you start to see that they’re all quite strange. Dragons and unicorns drink from the upper lake to the left while a duck of some kind reads a book in the foreground. The mountains are building like, and what even is that thing in the center!? The more you look at Bosch’s painting, the more you ask, “Huh?”
Genesis isn’t strange in quite the same way as the painting above, but it is strange, and the there are some interesting resonances between the painting and Genesis. What I hope to do in this post is open your eyes to all the weirdness in Genesis. If at the end of chapter 2, all you leave with is that God created the world in “six literal days of 24 hours each,” or that Adam named every animal, you’ve missed the point almost entirely and you might as well believe in the Big Bang and evolution. Why? Because the approach that leads to the scientific idea of the Big Bang and evolution is the same approach that reads the Creation accounts and comes to the conclusions above. It’s the approach that takes the evidence and comes to conclusions that can only be justified by the evidence. It’s a very Western approach to the text and to evidence. And I think Moses would be very unhappy with that reading.
Asking questions of the thing that don’t make sense (“Why is the order of creation different in Genesis 2 than it is in Genesis 1?”) will in turn teach us how to ask questions about the things that at first make sense. Why, exactly, did God form humanity from soil? It’s a humble approach to Scripture because it is born from the assumption that we don’t actually know what we’re talking about, that we don’t really understand God or the world, and that if we’re going to know anything, it must be given to us. It must be a gift.
It also keeps the story interesting and fascinating. There’s so much we miss out on because we think we already know the story. When we read, we don’t read, we don’t listen. Genesis, and the Old Testament besides, was intentionally written to spark questions and curiosity, to get you to slow down and stop in certain places because you think you know what’s going on, but you really don’t know what’s going on. That’s part of what makes Genesis and the OT so beautiful. This literature is intentionally designed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to be meditation literature. In other words, Genesis was not written to give you answers, it was written to make you ask questions, to return to the stories over and over again so that you can hear again what they’re teaching us about ourselves, about life, and about God. It breathes life into our experience of the Bible and can lead us in growing in holiness and the way of Jesus. Holiness is, after all, not merely about what we do but about who we are in and how we live our lives as who we are.
I encourage you to go back to Genesis 1, 2, and beyond and notice the strange and the weird, the stuff that makes you go, “Huh?” Pause on those moments and ask questions. Finally, you’re not asking questions to the text itself, and you’re not asking yourself for answers to the questions. Instead, you are asking the Holy Spirit. In some ways, you’re not even asking the Spirit for answers, but to speak to you about your questions and the stories that spur them. In a word, what you’re doing is prayer. Praying with Scripture is as ancient a tradition as the Bible itself. Prayer, i.e. a dialogical relationship with God, is necessary to understand Scripture, to have wisdom, and is why ancient theologians maintained that a person could not be a theologian if they were not a person of prayer. It is the Spirit who inspired the writing of Scripture, and it must be the Spirit who inspires the reading and understanding of it as well.
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https://answersingenesis.org/
I am of the opinion, with many other confession scholars besides, that Genesis 2 and 3 are are second creation story set along side of the first creation story in Genesis 1. The point is not to contradict, but to fill out meaning and purpose, rather than to tell us how it happened.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it a million times more, using the word “mythology” doesn’t necessitate I mean fake, fictional, or that “it didn’t happen.” Mythology, as I am about to say in quoting Julia Watson, is a method of telling “sacred stories” in order for us to remember where we come from and who we are, and in the case of Genesis, from whom we come.
Julia Watson, Lo-Tek Design by Radical Indigenism (Cologne: Taschen, 2020), 17.
Although, the whole narrative is actually from 2:4-4:26, furthering my point that the stories are never just about one thing.