Genesis for Everyone, Part 1: Chapters 1-16

describing.

INTRODUCTION

As far as Jesus and the New Testament writers were concerned, the Jewish Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament were the Scriptures. In saying that, I cut corners a bit, as the New Testament never gives us a list of these Scriptures, but the body of Scriptures that the Jewish people accept is as near as we can get to identifying the collection that Jesus and the New Testament writers would have worked with. The church also came to accept some extra books, the Apocrypha or deuterocanonical writings, but for the purposes of this series that seeks to expound the Old Testament for everyone, by the Old Testament we mean the Scriptures accepted by the Jewish community.

They were not old in the sense of antiquated or out-of-date; I sometimes like to refer to them as the First Testament rather than the Old Testament, to make that point. For Jesus and the New Testament writers, they were a living resource for understanding God, God’s ways in the world, and God’s ways with us. They were useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person who belongs to God can be proficient, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). They were for everyone, in fact. So it’s strange that Christians don’t read them very much. My aim in these volumes is to help you do that.

My hesitation is that you may read me instead of the Scriptures. Don’t do that. I like the fact that this series includes the section of biblical text that’s under discussion. Don’t skip over it. In the end, that’s the bit that matters.

An Outline of the Old Testament

The Jewish community often refers to these Scriptures as the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. While the Old Testament comprises the same books, it has them in a different order:

Genesis to Kings: A story that runs from the creation of the world to the exile of Judeans to Babylon.

Chronicles to Esther: A second version of this story, continuing it into the years after the exile.

Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs: Some poetic books.

Isaiah to Malachi: The teaching of some prophets.

Here is an outline of the history that lies at the background of the books (I give no dates for events in Genesis, which involves too much guesswork.)

Genesis

Like most of the Bible, Genesis is anonymous; it doesn’t tell us who wrote it. The King James Bible calls it the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, but there’s nothing in the book to suggest Moses wrote it. Indeed, there are quite a few things that indicate he did not. For instance, it refers to the Chaldeans and the Philistines, who were not around in Moses’ day.

The King James Bible did not invent the idea of linking the first five books in the Bible with Moses; it was around by Jesus’ time, and the New Testament presupposes that link. But it is doubtful whether people simply meant to imply Moses actually wrote the books. There were other books and traditions from their own day that people associated with Moses even though they knew these came from their own day. So calling something Mosaic is maybe a way of saying, We take this as the kind of thing Moses would approve.

None of these opening five books is really a work on its own, complete in itself, and that applies to Genesis. They are a bit like the five seasons of a TV series, each ending with a cliffhanger to make sure you come back for the next one. For instance, the promises God makes to Abraham get fulfilled partly within Genesis itself, but the book ends with the family of Jacob in the wrong country because of a famine, and it is the book of Joshua that eventually relates how God fulfilled the promise to give the Israelites the country of Canaan. Indeed, Genesis is actually part of a gargantuan story that runs right through to the books of Samuel and Kings. We know it comes to an end then because turning over the page takes us to a kind of spinoff, a new version of the entire story, in First Chronicles. So Genesis to Kings tells a story that takes us from creation via the promise to Israel’s ancestors; the exodus; the meeting with God at Sinai; the people’s arrival in Canaan; the dramas of the book of Judges; the achievements of Saul, David, and Solomon; and then the division and decline that ends up with many of the people of Judah transported to Babylon.

As we have it, then, this huge story belongs in the period after the last events it records, the exile of Judean people to Babylon in 587 BC. These events form the end of the story that Genesis begins. On the assumption that it was completed reasonably soon after that, its final authors and its first audience lived in Babylon or lived under Babylonian domination. Realizing that it was written then sometimes helps us see things in its story.

I say completed and final authors because I don’t assume it was written from scratch then; but strenuous effort to work out the stages whereby it reached the form in which we have it has not produced any consensus on the process whereby this happened. So it’s best not to fret about the question. But the way the story extends from the beginning of the world to the end of the Judean state does invite us to read the beginning in light of the end, as is the case with any story, and this sometimes helps us to notice points about the story that we might otherwise miss and to avoid misunderstanding points that would otherwise be puzzling. In addition, it is often helpful to imagine the story being told or read to people in the preceding centuries.

Genesis itself is really a two-part work, though the two parts are linked. Part 1, Genesis 1–11, starts by unfolding the broadest possible canvas for the picture the artist is going to paint. It concerns itself with the origins of the world and humanity and the way God related to them back at the beginning. But it then shows how things went wrong. It thereby sets the scene for the account of how God set about putting them right, which begins in Genesis 12–50. So it provides us with some account of what we and the world were designed to be as well as some account of what the world is and what we are.

For Genesis for Everyone, though, giving one volume to Genesis 1–11 and one to Genesis 12–50 would have made for an uneven split. So this first volume goes on into the beginning of the story of God’s putting things right. An advantage of making the split in this way is to remind us that these two parts do belong together.

GENESIS 1:1

In the Beginning

Our son and daughter-in-law were showing us photographs of our two grandchildren. In one of them, the two children were sitting in the back of the car looking very solemn. I think we had just had the birds-and-the-bees talk, our son explained. Where do we come from? Somehow knowing where we come from helps us understand who we are. So where we come from is an important question that is not only true of us as individuals. In the United States, a foreigner is struck by the heat attaching to questions about the origin of humanity and the origin of the world itself. Did we evolve in a purely natural way, or did we come into being through a process in which God was involved?

I was once told that a first rule of creative writing is Write a gripping opening line. The first verse in the Bible is a gripping opening line. One could spend quite some time standing in awe before it.

In the beginning. … Genesis is not talking about the absolute beginning, whatever that was; I guess there wasn’t one, because God had no beginning. It’s talking about the beginning of the world. The standard Jewish translation of this opening verse is When God began to create the heavens and the earth; that avoids giving the impression that Genesis is talking about the absolute beginning. It doesn’t pretend to know what God was doing before the beginning of the world. The early African theologian Augustine raises this question and passes on the jocular reply he once heard that God was preparing hell for people who pry too deep. This idea was a bit too facetious for Augustine, though not for the Reformation theologian Martin Luther, who liked the remark. But in a way that jocular reply does mesh with Augustine’s own comment: I do not know what I do not know. Genesis also isn’t interested in satisfying our curiosity about the beginning of other supernatural beings such as the angels or about the fall of Satan. Genesis does not tell us. What we do not know we do not know. Genesis focuses resolutely on the beginning of the world and of humanity.

In the beginning God…. Who is this God? The Bible assumes everyone knows the basics about God, what Paul calls God’s eternal power and divine nature (Romans 1:20). It does not dream of trying to prove God’s existence. It would reckon that trying to prove God’s existence is as odd as trying to prove our own existence. It takes God and God’s basic characteristics for granted. Genesis will also assume that Israelites, for whom this account of creation was originally written, do know a lot more than those basics because they have known God’s involvement with them as a people. They know about Abraham, the exodus, God’s revelation at Sinai, and so on. At the same time, introducing God in this way at the beginning of the story without saying anything about who God is, is a bit like introducing a character in a movie. We don’t know the character when he or she first appears. The unfolding story will reveal who the character is, and Genesis 1 will do that. By the time we get to the end of Genesis 1, we will know quite a bit about God. By the end of Genesis as a whole, we will know a lot more.

In the beginning God created…. Create is a gripping verb in this gripping first line. In the Old Testament, only God creates. Perhaps if Israelites talked about artistic creativity, they used this verb, but it doesn’t appear in the Old Testament in that connection. Only God creates. Creating involves exercising an extraordinary, effortless sovereignty in order to bring something into being. The verb draws attention to the amazing nature of what God does, bringing something into being against all the odds.

There is something else about the way the Old Testament talks about God’s creating. We think of creation as essentially something God did way back at the beginning, though we may also think of God’s creating us as individuals or creating each flower and tree (what is sometimes called God’s continuous creation). Israel, too, sees creation as something God does in its own life as well as something God did at the beginning, but it sees God’s creative activity in its own life differently from the way we do. It sees that creative activity in a situation like the exile, when the Babylonians could seem to have brought Israel’s existence to an end. In the Old Testament, God’s creativeness is not a regular, ongoing activity like continuous creation but something extraordinary, as the creation back at the beginning was extraordinary. In the context of the exile, God makes a commitment to transforming the people and transforming the land, and Israel sees this as an act of new creation. Isaiah 41:20 then looks forward to people recognizing that "the hand of Yahweh has done this, the holy one of Israel has created it." Extraordinary, sovereign, re-creative acts in Israel’s experience are acts of creation. So when people heard this creation story in Genesis, as well as telling them about something God did way back then, it affirmed for them that God could be their creator now.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Other Middle Eastern peoples in Israel’s day had their own creation stories that overlap with Genesis (and other peoples have their creation stories), and a century ago people talked about Genesis 1 being based on these other Middle Eastern stories. It does look as if the authors of Genesis knew one or other of these stories, but the differences between them are more striking than the similarities. If anything, Genesis was setting itself over against those other accounts of creation: You know what your neighbors say about creation? Well now I will tell you the real truth. These other peoples believed there were lots of gods, and in practice the Israelites themselves often persisted in the same way of thinking (again, peoples in other parts of the world have thought the same, and some still do). Those other creation stories saw the world coming into existence through cooperation between the various gods, or it involved conflict among them; the world comes into being as a result of arguments and fights among the gods. Genesis 1 tells Israelites that actually it came into being as a result of the cool, planned, systematic activity of the one God so that the heavens and the earth are one cosmos, one coherent whole. Other peoples’ creation stories began with the coming into being of the gods themselves, whose own persons emerged from raw material that somehow already existed. We have already noted that Genesis doesn’t talk about God coming into existence. If God came into existence, the person who came into existence wouldn’t really be God.

So verse 1 is the headline to the creation story. The rest of the chapter gives us the details of how God went about the creation.

GENESIS 1:2–5

Sunday

I have heard one or two people describe how they make records, and I have come to realize that there are two different approaches. Some people have worked it all out systematically before they go anywhere near a recording studio. They know how many songs they need; they know the sort of songs they want to write; they use regular formats such as verses that each have four sections of eight bars; they write all the words and afterwards compose the tunes to go with them; and then they go into the studio and record the album straight through in two days. Other people book three months in the studio, go in with little clue what they will do, and proceed in serendipitous fashion, trying riffs and trading licks and experimenting with key changes and making up rhymes as they go. Both approaches can produce great records. In Genesis 2 we will find that God operates the second way. In Genesis 1, God operates the first way. The process of creation is very systematic and ordered.

When Genesis begins to describe the details of this process, spelling out the headline, it starts with the background, the earth as an empty, unformed waste. An artist does not create out of nothing; the achievement of creation involves an extraordinary contrast between the raw material that was in existence before the artist set to work (for instance, a mere lump of clay) and what then comes into being. In Genesis, the opening to the detailed story with its reference to the unformed waste is not concerned with how the unformed waste came into being. It is not concerned with whether creation implies creation out of nothing. When the story of creation starts, it assumes the existence of some raw material. If anyone were to ask where the raw material came from, the answer would certainly be from God, of course. But that is not the story’s preoccupation. It is more interested in the miraculous transformation from empty waste to formed cosmos.

When this creation drama was read in the exile, this would be really good news to the people in the audience. Their own life had turned into empty waste. It was enveloped in darkness. They had fallen over the edge of the abyss. The light had gone out in their lives as a community. The events they had gone through could seem to show that the Babylonians were right. The Babylonian gods had defeated the God of Israel. The light has gone out, said Pandit Nehru, the first prime minister of India, when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated just after Gandhi’s vision had been realized and India had achieved independence. The same image has been applied to Europe in the First World War and in the Second. The light went out. So it was for the Israelites who were transported to Babylon, and also for those left behind in Jerusalem. Genesis portrays creation as the bringing of order out of formlessness and light from darkness. In a situation like the exile, maybe the creator God could be people’s hope? When Jerusalem had been destroyed and many of its people had been taken into exile, it was as if the hot wind of God’s breath had withered them (Isaiah 40:7). The creation story reminds them that God can transform such a situation.

How did God transform formless waste at creation? Maybe the Genesis reference to God’s breath is the beginning of an answer, because God’s breath could also refer to God’s spirit in a positive way. The word for spirit is also the word for breath and for wind, and the Old Testament sometimes implies a link between these. Spirit suggests dynamic power; God’s spirit suggests God’s dynamic power. The wind in its forcefulness with its capacity to fell mighty trees is an embodiment of the powerful spirit of God. Breath is essential to life; where there is no breath, there is no life. And life comes from God. So human breath and even animal breath is an offshoot of God’s breath. And the divine breath that withered could also be the divine breath that brings new life.

More certainly, the answer to the question of how God brought about a transformation from waste to cosmos is that God simply spoke. God said ‘Light!’—and light came into being. There is a decisive power about God’s word. God is like the movie director who demands Light! and light shines out. God, too, only has to say a word and something happens. Or God is like a magician snapping a finger, and something extraordinary happens. Bringing things into being at creation was quite effortless and met with no opposition. God just spoke, and it came about.

Even technologically sophisticated Western countries experience power failures from time to time, and when that happens, it can be frightening. I once had a crazy boss who decided to turn off the headlights in his car when he was driving down a straight highway late at night when no one else was around; he wanted to see how dark it was. The answer is, very dark. When you are in total darkness and then the lights come on, it is a wondrous relief and transformation. At the beginning, God said Light! and the lights came on.

When something thus comes into being, God is inclined to stand back and look at it with satisfaction and be rather pleased, like a human being at the end of a good day’s work. That’s good, God would say. Mother Teresa made it her life’s work to do something beautiful for God. If we ourselves seek to do that, we are responding to the fact that creation meant that God was doing something beautiful in its own right and for us.

Thus day one, the first Sunday, comes to an end (Hebrew does not have special words for the days of the week, words such as Sunday and Monday; it simply refers to them as the First Day, the Second Day, and so on). Why do evening and morning come in that order, which looks odd to Western thinking? Perhaps it is because it corresponds to the sequence of darkness and light in the chapter. In the Old Testament, festive occasions such as the Sabbath begin in the evening, as they still do for Jews.

GENESIS 1:6–19

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

At the weekend my wife and I like to have lunch by the ocean, and while doing so we watch the surf hurling itself at the beach. No matter how hard giant waves batter the beach, they will never climb the rocks to where we sit, still less the mountains that arise just across the coastal highway. Relatively small-scale floods can imperil parts of the land, but in principle God has firmly established the boundary between sea and land. (Admittedly humanity itself might be able to frustrate God’s work here, as we can often frustrate God’s work, and global warming is a way we could do it, though this would more likely involve our destroying