Chapter 2. Lord and World: Creation: Genesis 1-2 (Part 1. Creation, Order Out of Chaos) (Song of the Vineyard: The Old Testament) (Napier, B.D.)

Anyone acquainted with political life, even merely as observer, knows how viciously a public figure may be maligned by his own words lifted out of context. The treacherous device of damning by out-of-context quotation has served in the past and unhappily continues to serve effectively un the disastrous defamation of persons in public life.

One commonly hears it said, with a shrug, "You can prove anything in the Bible." And in a sense this comment is true: interpret the biblical verse or the brief narrative or in a couple of instances even the Old Testament book in isolation and it becomes in meaning something totally different from what was clearly its intent in context.

This is pointedly true of the whole Genesis story. Source critics see here the same three primary strata of tradition - J, F, and P - which we have already seen in Exodus; but we will do well to remind ourselves again that these symbols represent by and large the collection and arrangement of smaller units of oral and/or written material some of which, at least, were already long in existence. There can be no doubt that what we identify in the Tetrateuch (Genesis-Numbers) as P employs and incorporates in the fifth century some material as old or possibly older than J. And J in the tenth century may well have had as a primary source an earlier effort to bring together coherently a wide assortment of stories deemed to have significant bearing on the life of the people Israel.²Certainly individual units in the J corpus had been in existence for centuries before they were integrated; and beyond any doubt these units were often strikingly modified in meaning in the context of the J work.

We must always interpret the part in the light of the whole. We will read the whole book of Genesis in the context of the faith of the people of Israel - a people who, as we have seen, deem their life to be the gift of Yahweh and their destiny the subject of his Word. And the varied components of the present book of Genesis we will read as for the most part purposively and meaningfully related to the whole work.

In briefest outline, Genesis falls into two parts. The pivotal point is chapter 12, the call of Abraham - at once the climax and interpretive key to the first eleven chapters, and the opening, thematic scene of the second division of Genesis, chapters 12-50. The J work no doubt supplied Genesis with its earliest outline and its profound theological bearing. But the form of this remarkable introduction to the life of the people of Israel remained fluid from the tenth century to the fifth century and the final Genesis story may with all justification be termed a meditation on history. It is as such both an informed and an informing introduction; which is simply to say that like any good introduction, it is informed by that which it introduces and is therefore also informative to that which it seeks to present meaningfully.

The first section, 1-11, intends to set the particular story of Israel against the background of all creation and in the midst of universal human existence. It has commonly been termed the "primeval history," but this overemphasizes the quality of "wasness." The faith of Israel, the interpretation of her historical life in Yahwism, inevitably poses the question: If the Word of Yahweh thus creates, shapes, and informs our life, if the life of Yahweh thus impinges effectively upon human history, what is his relationship, and ours, to the wide world? In the first two chapters of Genesis Israel affirms in two totally different ways that all order in the universe is both introduced and maintained by Yahweh, and that the meaning of human existence, and indeed of all lower forms of life, derives solely from him. Creation is the control of chaos and the gift and support of meaning. It always is, however much we may say it was.

Chapters 3-11, to which we will turn in the next section, demonstrate in full context the intention to affirm in faith that all men (not excepting Israel, obviously) contend, in one way or another, from one false presumption or another, that order and meaning are not thus created and sustained, but are subject to man's arbitrary manipulation. This results in a state of existence intolerable both for man and God - a state of existence into which Yahweh introduces his Word through Abraham and Israel for the restoration of creation. "In you all the families of the earth will be blessed" (12:3 RSV margin).

Israel's Yahwism was from the beginning in tension or even sometimes in bitter conflict with the widespread indigenous fertility cults of Canaan. Local sanctuaries abounded enshrining the male deity, Ba'al, and often his consort, 'Asherah (later and elsewhere. Astarte, Ishtar, etc.). Fertility rites, practiced in the interests of securing fertility and productivity both human and natural, involved cultic prostitution - the sex act performed with cult personnel to bring efficacious union with the deity and the consequent guarantee of fertility of field and body.

Against this widely prevailing understanding of the "creation faith" we suspect that in Yahwistic circles the very term "creation" may have been a dirty word and that the development and discussion of Israel's creation faith was suppressed as part of the long, anguished struggle against religious syncretism and the loss of the distinctly moral-ethical-historical character of the Yahweh faith. It is in any case a fact that Israel's creation faith - certainly a basic element of the structure of Yahwism from early times - receives scant specific mention (apart from the J story of Gen. 2:4b ff.) until relatively late, and no absolutely unqualified elaboration and application until the latter part of the sixth century (in Isa. 40-66), when also, at the earliest, the creation story of Genesis 1 became a part of the accepted cultic instructional idiom.

For this is what it is. The style is strongly didactic. A few phrases occur repeatedly: And God said, and God saw, and God called, and God made, and God created, and God blessed. The story is a precisely ordered piece, with each of its six creative acts rounded out with the same refrain: and there was evening, and there was morning, one day, a second day, a third day, etc. (in ancient Israel as in the practice of Judaism now the course of a day is marked from evening to evening). No word is anywhere wasted, no phrase ill conceived, unpondered. And the climax? It is the verification of the Sabbath institution, the ultimate authorization:

So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.³(2:3)

Yet this story's origin is emphatically not full-blown out of the demands of a revitalized cultic-religious program centered in the rebuilt city and temple of Jerusalem in the closing years of the sixth century. The story had its dim beginnings and it betrays its distant involvement in an ancient myth of creation out of the Near and Middle East which survived in various forms but best and most fully in the Babylonian Enuma Elish (a title derived from its opening words, "When on high ).⁴Here chaos is represented in the goddess Tiamat, a name perhaps echoed in the Hebrew word for "deep" tehom (1:2). Creation is effected when the god Marduk-Bel, with the assistance of lesser gods, carves up Tiamat's carcass to form from it the earth and its arching canopy, the firmament. Neither the Hebrew nor the Akkadian (Babylonian).accounts envisage creation out of nothing, since in both creation results from the radical transformation of a prior chaos.

But gone from the Hebrew account is any suggestion of "biological" relationship between chaos and God. Gone is the long gory struggle. Gone is the stupendous effort of Tiamat's defeat. Genesis 1 does preserve the notion of creation by work in the frequent use of the verb "make" and the thrice-repeated verb "create" (of "the heavens and the earth," v. 1; of "every living creature that moves," v. 21; and of man, v. 27). But the measure of the story's theological refinement is nowhere more conspicuous than in its confident, if subtle, superimposition of creation by Word - the Word which, effortlessly spoken, effortlessly calls into being that which was not. "'Let there be light!' And there was light."

Not creatio ex nihilo but creation conceived in terms analogous to Israel's own creation. Israel was prior to the call of Moses, but she was chaos. She was without order, meaningless. She was in the onomatopoetic phrase of verse 2, tohu vavohu, "formless and void." God called her into being (not from nonbeing but from "antibeing"⁵) by his Word. So, analogously, Israel understands and articulates her faith in the world's and man's creation: all that now exists is brought into being by Yahweh and his 'Word out of chaos and continues in non-chaotic existence only in and by the creating-sustaining Yahweh. Creation, in Israel and the world, is continuous. In the faith of Israel the story of creation always is.

The origins, background, and history of the second creation story remain obscure. It was apparently available to the J work in the tenth century and was there appropriated to J's uses as the opening chapter of the corpus. It became stabilized, so to speak, very early and therefore displays a spontaneity, charm, and naivete which contrast sharply with the preceding story. The ordered sequence of Genesis 1, the specific citing of the range and depth of creation, the refined theological concept of creation by Word, and any institutionally motivated purpose (Sabbath)-all this is absent. There is concurrence that Yahweh God (2:4b ff.; but "God," 'Elohim alone, in 1:1 ff.) worked "in the beginning" (1:1), that is, "in the day that Yahweh God made earth and the heavens" (2:4b) from pre-existent matter - chaos (an earth formless, void, engulfed in darkness, 1:2) or, and this is part of the concurrence, an earth utterly barren, a sterile world (2:5). Both stories understand creation as essentially transformation. The thought of ancient Israel is always characterized by the nonspeculative. One rarely encounters in the Old Testament any disposition to probe beyond time, concrete existence, matter, and history. There is even syntactical concurrence: the two stories open with sentences similarly structured:

When God began to create [RSV margin] the heavens and the earth, [when] the earth was without form and void, . . .then God said. . .

In the day that Yahweh God made the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth, . . . then the Lord God formed man. . .

But perhaps the most fundamental contrast is also here apparent: the J story proceeds at once to the creation of man (literally, "formation" for this story does not use the word "create ). The language is raw, earthy, concrete, and pictorially three dimensional. Here it is not the conceptual "created . . . in the image of 'Elohim" (1:27) but the graphic "formed (moulded) of dust from the ground." And this lifeless but shaped mass of clay is now animated by Yahweh's breath, the breath of life, blown without benefit of any intermediate devices into the cold clay nostrils of the sculptor's figure.

Here is a primitive, even crude etiology (a creation myth explaining present, persistent phenomena of existence). This was its intentional meaning in the centuries of its circulation before J employed it. As such, it is interesting as one in the growing collections of ancient mythologies, but it is now irrelevant, if not also aesthetically and theologically unpalatable. But we must ask after the story's J-meaning, its Israel-meaning. What intentional interpretation is imparted to the story contextually? How does the J-work understand the story? Why do Israel's traditionists through the centuries retain the story and hold it inseparably joined in the unit Genesis 1-2 and the larger unit Genesis 1-11?

The quality of naivete is capable of great depth and subtlety. The present intention of the story is to give expression to what J and all true Yahwists in Israel deemed to be the essence of the relationship, not as in Genesis I between God and all creation, but pointedly and existentially, between Yahweh and man. The one essential, universal datum of man's life is his immediate, direct, total dependence on Yahweh. Yahweh gives him form out of the formless ground. Yahweh imparts life to the lifeless form. Yahweh gives the productive environment in which his life is set with only the one condition (symbolized in the story in the forbidden tree) that men acknowledge his status as creature by observing this single restriction to his freedom imposed by the creator. Aside from this, his autonomy is complete and includes full jurisdiction over all lesser creatures, as is testified to in his naming these creatures and so assuming toward them the superior and controlling relationship of the namer to the named.

And this creation-faith is articulated in Israel always in terms analogous to the exodus experience of formation out of the lifeless ground of Egyptian slavery, animation by Yahweh's breath and Word in escape, and autonomy, unqualified save by the creator-creature relationship, in Canaan's productive environment.

An etiological story out of the common fund of Middle Eastern mythologies becomes in the context of Israel's life and faith profoundly theological. Thus, not once but twice in the opening lines of Israel's long, intimate story she declares her faith that her story, which is to follow, is inseparably related to the world's story; that the world and her own role in it have meaning only in the proposition that the earth and all who dwell in it are Yahweh's; and that the stuff of chaos rendered unchaotic by the creative power of Yahweh alone nevertheless resides in all, restrained only by the living God and his living Word.