In my book Chasing an Elusive God (to be published
soon) I make the point that the ordinary reader of the Bible can to some extent
be his or her own biblical critic. It is not necessary to know all the latest
theories of the scholars: the scholars themselves have difficulty keeping up
with each other. What is important is a curious, questioning approach to the Bible: not assuming it
means what we have been taught it means, but seeing it as it is, and noticing
the oddities, the inconsistencies, the ‘seams’ where different things have been
stitched together.
One of the
first things academic Bible students learn about the first five books of the Bible
(the Pentateuch) is that they were not written by Moses, but consist of four
strands written at different times, and known as J, E, D and P. This theory,
though scholars differ about the details, is still fairly generally accepted
more than 130 years after it was first formulated by Julius Wellhausen.
Ordinary readers cannot be expected to know which passages belong to which of
these strands. Scholars still disagree about it, and about how and when they
each came into being. What I suggest, however, is that the ordinary
non-scholarly reader can find fascinating insights simply by noticing that
there are differences and thinking about them.
The same
principle applies to the historical background of the Bible writings. Most
people who read the Bible have some vague idea of the historical and cultural
background, but nobody knows all the facts: they are constantly being modified
by archaeology and often disputed between different scholars. However, it can
be interesting and fruitful simply to read a passage of the Bible and think
about what sort of person wrote it, or what sort of community produced it, and
in what sort of situation. Hints of this can be found just by studying the
passage itself and stopping to think about anything in it that looks odd.
Here is my
attempt to do this with the first chapter of Genesis (strictly speaking, Genesis
1:1 – 2:3 – the chapter division is odd here). I cannot pretend not to be
influenced by the odd things I have picked up from scholarly commentaries, but I am trying as far
as possible to stick to what any reasonably intelligent readers could work out
for themselves.
Some people
still take this as a literal, factual account of the creation of the world. One
of the strongest arguments against this is that it talks of God creating day
and night on the first day but not creating the sun till the fourth day!
But even if
we do not attempt to take the story literally, this is still puzzling. Assuming
this was an imaginative account of creation based on the state of human
knowledge at that time, it would surely have been obvious even then that the
alternation of night and day has something to do with the sun: day begins when
the sun rises and night comes when it sets. Not only is this a common-sense
perception, but at the time when this story was probably written the
Babylonians and others already had a very sophisticated understanding of the
movements of the sun, moon, stars and planets.
The obvious
implication is that this story was never meant
to be a literal account of creation at all. Its writer was fully aware that
there could be no day and night without the sun. If we look more carefully at
the pattern of six days, and what happened on each day, we find that the order
is not chronological but thematic.
The story
begins with chaos: ‘the earth was a formless void’. It describes how God sorted
out the chaos, separating the spheres and putting them in their proper place,
and then fills them. So it works out as follows:
Day 1: God
creates the separate spheres of light and darkness.
Day 2: God
sorts out the waters, making the separate spheres of sea and sky.
Day 3: God
sorts out the earth, separating the dry land from the sea and making the land
bring forth vegetation.
Having told
how God created these spheres, the account then returns to each of them to fill
in the details.
Day 4: Within
his creation of light God creates the sun, moon and stars. Their function is ‘to
rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the
darkness’ (v 18, repeating the words of vs 4-5).
Day 5: God
gives his attention to the sphere of water, the sea and the sky: he fills the
sea with sea creatures and the sky with birds.
Day 6: God
then deals with the dry land, filling it with animals and reptiles, and
then creating human beings.
From this
pattern it emerges that the account of the second half of the week is meant to
fill in the details that were not mentioned in the first half. This has nothing
to do with the order in which things were created, only with ‘order’ in the
sense of arrangement and tidiness.
There are a
few other odd things in this passage that make us stop and think. For instance,
why does it refer to ‘the greater light’ and ‘the lesser light’ rather than
using the obvious words ‘sun’ and ‘moon’? The most likely answer is that these
expressions are meant to drive home the point that the sun and the moon are not
gods, as most people thought at that time, but merely created things like
everything else. Something similar
probably lies behind the reference to ‘the great sea monsters’ (v 21). If we
were asked what creatures live in the sea, our first thought would not be
whales nor things like the Loch Ness Monster, but fish: so why do the ‘monsters’
feature so prominently in this account? Probably because most of the creation
myths of that time talked of the sea as a great monster that had to be subdued
in order for dry land and human life to exist. This story points out that
whatever monsters there may be in the sea they were simply creatures put there
by the one and only Creator God.Another oddity is that the creation of human beings, represented here as the crown and climax of God’s work, does not have a day to itself. Is this a way of saying that, important as we human beings are, we are not in a category completely separate from the rest of the animals? This is an important theme of the Bible: the tension between the dignity of human beings and the infinite superiority of God. Though God loves us and gives us ‘dominion’ we are still creatures just like all the others.
Two other
themes that are important to this story are probably related: the repeated
reference to God seeing that his creation is good, and the Sabbath rest on the
seventh day. It is as if God sets the example to us human beings. Work is
essential: it is part of what we are. But it is not everything. Along with our
work we need the leisure to appreciate and enjoy the fruits of it. Seven is a
number that symbolises perfection. Work
is the major part of life, but rest is the crown that makes it complete. It is
also evident that for whoever wrote this passage the Sabbath was very
important. Its institution is the climax of the whole story.
At this
point we find the first obvious ‘seam’ in the Bible. After a formal statement,
‘These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were
created’, we read ‘In the day that the LORD
God made the earth and the heavens’… : the beginning of another, very different
story. 