The Stuff You Don't Know You Don't Know
NOTE: Apologies for the break in audio near the middle, had a technical glitch.
Key Points:
Don’t be an American tourist when it comes to the Biblical text. The Bible was written over two millennia ago half a world away. We cannot expect it to be speaking our language, following our customs, or valuing what we value. We have to come to the Bible on its own terms, letting it tell its own story, speak for itself, without requiring it to confirm our biases. The Bible is not ChatGPT. You’re not supposed to plug your questions into it and expect a simple three sentence proof text answer. The Bible is a story. Abridged summaries of stories always miss the bigger picture.
Many Christians come to Genesis with questions about the method of creation, length of the creation week, evolution, original sin, gender, marriage, and much more. Those are good, important questions, but they’re not the ones the text is trying to answer. Genesis was not written to answer the questions Christians in America a few thousand years later would have. It was written in response to the other Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) origin stories. Genesis is an origin story of the nation of Israel, written to respond to the origin stories of the nations around them. That means that we have to let those themes take the forefront.
Good Christians can differ on the issues we usually worry about and still be good Christians. This isn’t about who takes God more seriously; it’s about different ways that serious Christians understand the Scriptures under the leading of the Holy Spirit. We’ll cover those hot topics as we go, but our main focus will be on the story as the text presents it.
Key Words and Themes:
Remember from our discussion on heaven that the Hebrew word often translated “heaven” is plural (dual)—heavens. It means skies, the area above us. It is not automatically referring to the place we think of where God lives. Genesis 1:1 does not mean that God created heaven and the planet Earth. It means He created the skies and the land.
When you see the word “earth” in the Bible, don’t think globe. None of the ancients would have been imagining a globe when they talked about the earth. To them, our planet was more like a disk of land surrounded by waters below and waters above. “Earth” in the Bible does not mean the planet; it means land.
Large bodies of water (seas) in the ANE were frequently used to symbolize chaos. Even today, humanity has not tamed the sea; it’s chaotic, uncontrollable. That’s a problem when God is trying to bring order into His creation. Thus, the chaos sea becomes the first enemy in Scripture, the first foe God must tame in order to bring about His order. Chaos and order will become major themes throughout Scripture.
Good (Hebrew: tov) and evil (H: ra) are also key concepts, but they don’t necessarily mean moral good and evil in the way we normally think of it.
In the ancient world, something was considered good (tov) if it was fulfilling its created purpose well. Tov does not equal perfect. Tov is relative to whatever the purpose is. It is in reference to a purpose. God never said that creation was perfect. Something perfect doesn’t need to be improved on, but as we’ll find, the creation order of the Garden needed to be expanded across the whole world. The world is not perfect, but it is tov. There may not have been sin, but we never actually got to where we were supposed to be. The story of the Bible is not about perfection, fall, and restoration. It’s intent, missing that intent, and final fulfillment. Jesus actually brings what was never previously achieved. Thus, the first 11 chapters of Genesis describe, not a fall, but a fail. We did not fall from perfection. We failed to achieve all we were supposed to.
“It’s making a statement about functionality. The word can mean a lot of things, but it makes the most sense if it’s saying that something is meeting its divine purpose. It’s doing its job. Like if a pilot is going over the systems pre-flight and nods his head saying, “good, good, good” as he goes over each item. They’re not necessarily perfect without any flaws. They’re not necessarily even morally right. They’re serving their purpose to provide an orderly flight.” (from John Walton’s The Lost World of Adam and Eve)
Ra (evil) would then be the opposite of tov. It’s disorder, things not fulfilling their purpose. Ra in the Bible is not necessarily moral evil (though it can include that); it’s a general word for badness. For example, if I had to let someone know a family member passed away, that would be considered ra news, badwickedevil news. It’s not morally wrong; it’s just connected to the bad occurrence of something not being the way its supposed to be.
Adam is another key word in the beginning of Genesis. While we know it as the name of the first human, it’s also the Hebrew word for humanity. It’s not used grammatically as a proper name until Genesis 4:25. Until then, it’s up for debate in each occurrence whether the word is referring to humanity as a whole or the individual we usually call Adam. This will affect how we interpret certain verses in our study.
One of the most common themes in Scripture is that of the firstborn. In the ancient world, firstborn was a status. It was not just an adjective that means you were born first; it was a noun, a label. Girls were not usually considered the firstborn, even if they were born first. It was an official designation for the oldest son in a family who would become the patriarch of the family when his father passed away. While it’s not as common in modern American culture, many cultures today still give favored status to a firstborn son. From the very beginning, God has been turning that expectation on its head favoring the “secondborn,” the late comer to the story.
We’ll touch on temple/priestly themes that appear in the first couple chapters of Genesis. The tabernacle isn’t mentioned until the end of Exodus and the temple until 1 Kings, but the themes are present from the very beginning. Our purpose as God’s images is to be priests for Him, turning the world into His temple, a place where heaven and earth meet.
Genealogies—ah, Genesis 4, you will always be remembered as the first place where people question their through the Bible in a year plan. Who needs those long lists of names anyway, right? Actually, they serve a really important purpose in Genesis. Whenever you see “These are the generations of,” it’s the Hebrew word toledot. The toledot sections form transition points in Genesis. They serve as links between stories, signaling to you that the act of the play you’ve been reading is coming to a close and a new one is about to begin. Yes, they can be confusing and hard to read, but they are important. When we get to chapters 4 and 5, we’ll share some insights into finding the purpose and easter eggs within the genealogies.
ANE Creation Myths
The Bible does not try to answer your questions about the Creation week. That was not the purpose. The purpose was to show God’s redemptive plan in history. Genesis is written in contrast to other ancient origin myths. As such, it contains key themes that match the narratives of other ANE creation stories. This should not cause concern for us. It does not threaten the Bible. Comparing and contrasting the Bible with other ANE literature helps us to better understand the message of the Bible how the original audiences would have.
ANE origin stories often said the earth began through angry, chaotic gods bickering. Yet this story emphasizes a good and orderly God of love. Yahweh creates nonviolently and through the power of His words. Yahweh has no rivals and no “origin story.” Yahweh’s world is established through his creativity and results in goodness.
Waters were also the starting point for Egyptian cosmology, but in their story, the god Atum is birthed from the waters and then creates other gods. The water is seen as life-giving because of its central place in Egyptian life.
The Babylonian story also begins with water, but it is a much more violent story of the deep-water god and the above-water god creating other gods. Marduk tries to build a kingdom on land while the sea god tries to stop him, and Marduk rips the sea god open to create a firmament of waters above. Both of those stories also have wind splitting the waters above and below. In the Genesis story, the Spirit of God appears over the waters He is about to separate. The Hebrew word for spirit is the same word for breath and wind.
Here’s a few lines from the Egyptian Coffin Texts, one of their creation stories:
The waters speak
I am the Waters, unique, without second.
Atum speaks
That is where I evolved,
on the great occasion of my floating that happened to me.
I (Atum the creator) am the one who once evolved —
Circlet, who is in his egg.
I am the one who began therein, (in) the Waters.
See, the Flood is subtracted from me:
see, I am the remainder.
I made my body evolve through my own effectiveness.
I am the one who made me.
I built myself as I wished, according to my heart.
“The primeval creator is called ‘Atum’ who is equated with ‘Nun’ the unordered watery substance from which all thing emerged. This ‘non-creation’ was a chaotic watery condition devoid of elements or structures necessary for life, but it possessed the potential for development.
Atum began to evolve and differentiate himself from his watery incubation onto a primeval mound of dirt, which is symbolized as the proto-typical pyramid, and from there he began a process of self-development, or ‘creation.’ He generated the rest of the ‘Ennea’ (a cluster of 8 other deities) by self-impregnation: he swallows his own reproductive fluids and generates Shu (goddess of Air) and Tefnut (goddess of moisture), from whom come Nut (goddess of Sky) and Geb (god of earth). Atum took his role as the ‘eye’ of all creation, as the sun-god Re, and they all worked together in a form of ‘order’ called ma’‘at): the eternal divine order that undergirds all creation.” -TBP
Enuma-Elish is the “Babylonian Genesis or ‘the Combat myth.’ This ancient cuneiform tablet text adopted the Egyptian and Sumerian traditions of the primeval waters generating the pantheon of old deities, which are going to be taken over by a young upstart god named Marduk, patron god of Babylon. It begins with the ‘un-created’ state:
‘When on high no name was given to heaven,
Nor below was the netherworld called by name,
Primeval Apsu (deep abyss) was their progenitor,
And creator Tiamat (salty ocean) was she who bore them all,
They were mingling their waters together,
When no gods at all had been brought forth,
None called by names, none destinies ordained,
Then were the gods formed within these two...’
Eventually, the gods all develop with Ea and his son Marduk at the head of the pantheon. Tiamat threatens to take over with her chaos waters, and she becomes a giant sea dragon. Marduk battles and destroys her, using half her body to make the waters above and the waters below.” -TBP
Structure
The Biblical authors were masters of weaving complex literary easter eggs into their stories. Some of it gets really nerdy, so I’ll try not to sidetrack too much, but we’ll definitely touch on some. For instance, in Hebrew, there are 7 words in the first verse of the Bible. Verse 2 has 14 words (7x2). The Creation story actually continues into the first few verses of chapter 2, and go figure, Genesis 2:2 has 21 words (7x3) as it forms the capstone to the story.
While the creation account is full of significant sevens, God speaks 10 times, giving us yet another pattern to keep an eye out for. Thus, when we get to Exodus, we shouldn’t be surprised to find Ten Signs (plagues) and Ten Words (commandments).
The days of Creation parallel each other, offering several ways of pairing the days together. Days 1-3 focus on creating a place for life to thrive; days 4-6 are how God fills His Creation with new life. Days 1 and 4 deal with the skies. Days 2 and 5 deal with the space in between the skies and the land. Days 3 and 6 deal with the land. And of course Day 7 is the capstone on it all.
Recommended Resources:
(from easiestleast time-consuming to hardestmost time-consuming)
I recommend watching all three of these videos. They’re short and easily accessible on YouTube.
Book of Genesis Summary: A Complete Animated Overview (Part 1), The Bible Project YouTube video
The Book of Genesis - Part 1, TBP YT video
Genesis 1 Visual Commentary, TBP YT video
I recommend listening to at least one of these podcast series, especially any of the first 4 series. They’re available on any podcast app as well as The Bible Project’s app. On their app, you can search by series, making it easier to find.
Creation Series, 4 episode TBP podcast series
Image of God, 4 episode TBP podcast series
Heaven and Earth, 5 episode TBP podcast series
Ancient Cosmology, 8 episode TBP podcast series
Genesis Scroll, 9 episode TBP podcast series
Tree of Life, 10 episode TBP podcast series
Seventh- Day Rest-Sabbath, 14 episode TBP podcast series
The Paradigm, 14 episode TBP podcast series
These books aren’t exactly easy reads, but they are very helpful. I’d definitely recommend getting Alter’s translation and commentary.
Genesis: Translation And Commentary, Robert Alter book
The Lost World of Adam and Eve, John Walton book
Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible, Jared Byas and Peter Enns book
I recommend a lot of Bible Project’s material because it’s all free and very well-made. They have a section on their website called Classroom that offers college-level audit classes for free. The material is broken down into 20-40 minute lectures that are well worth the time. If you’re willing to watch around one class period each weekday, you can get through any of these classes in less than a few months.
Heaven and Earth, TBP 15 hr college audit class (be sure to download the Workbook and Instructor Notes)
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, TBP 15 hr college audit class
Adam to Noah, TBP 15 hr college audit class (be sure to download the session notes)