Reclaiming Genesis 1-3 from Biblical Literalism and Secular Humanism
By Charles Kiker
My cousin Donald McKinney was a West Texas cotton farmer. Our families were close-knit. In 2008, my older brother and I got word that Donald had gone the way of all flesh, and we decided to go to Big Spring for Donald’s funeral. After the funeral, there was a family dinner, and I sat at table next to Donald’s grandson Matt Foss. Matt confided in me, “Grandad told me that he takes the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” I responded, “Your Grandad was a wise man.”
New Testament scholar Frank Stagg often told his students, “To literalize is to trivialize.” Cotton farmer Donald McKinney never heard of Frank Stagg, but they had a lot in common.
In company with West Texas cotton farmer Donald McKinney and New Testament scholar Frank Stagg, I take the stories in Genesis 1-3 too seriously to trivialize them by literalizing them.
Biblical stories do not require historical accuracy or literal facticity to be profoundly true. We will encounter stories in the first chapters of Genesis that cannot be historical, as we understand history, or factual, as we understand fact, and can still be profoundly true, as we understand truth. The story tellers who gave us Genesis were people of their own time. But let us understand that we too are creatures of our own time, and that our understandings of history, fact and truth may be misunderstandings in a different time.
Genesis 1:1-2:4a is the first of two creation accounts in Genesis. Most scholars who take the documentary hypothesis seriously–and I do–ascribe Genesis 1:1-2:4a to the priestly (P) strand of the Pentateuch. The date for P is probably early post-exilic, circa 500 BCE.
I read Genesis 1:1-2:4a as a creation poem followed by a celebration of seventh day rest. The first word in Genesis is the same as the title for the book: b’raysheeth, commonly translated, “in the beginning.” That is a good, but unfortunate translation for our historical context because it is so easily heard as indicating chronological calendar time. Is the universe six thousand, six million, six billion, or maybe sixty billion years old? A biblical inerrantist acknowledges that while scientifically the world appears to be old, as a theologian he believes it’s somewhere around 6,000 years old. Another inerrantist says that Bishop Ussher’s dating of creation at 4004 BCE was probably right, if you allow a 25-year more or less margin of error!
Someone else was more precise: October 10, 4004 BCE, at 10:00 o’clock in the morning. We will not learn the date of creation from Genesis. Nor should we try. The word b’raysheeth is derived from the Hebrew word rosh. It can refer to head, or top or first. The Greek word used to translate it in the Septuagint is arkhe, from which we get “arch” as in archbishop, archdiocese. The first words in the Septuagint are, translated to English, “In arkhe God made. . . .”
A book from a couple of decades ago is titled “How Does a Poem Mean?” Not “what” but “how?” How does Genesis 1:1-2:4a mean? How I hear the first word in the Bible is as the title of a creation poem. I paraphrase it Now Hear This. How I hear verse one is as the subject line for the poem: “God created the heavens and the earth.” The following verses describe the earth as an utter chaos, concrete nothingness and deep, deep darkness with a category six hurricane howling over the waters. Concrete nothingness; utter darkness on the face of the deep, and the ruach Elohim (mighty wind) over the waters. Utter chaos; utter darkness; God speaks, “Let light come!” And light came, and God saw that the light was good. God called the light “day,” and the darkness “night.” Then the first refrain, “And there was evening, and there was morning, one day.”
This refrain is repeated at the end of each of the six days of creation. Fact and story collide. How can there be a 24-hour day, as literal six-day creation folks understand the story, before the sun is created? And how can there be light before the sun? Light comes to utter darkness, and God calls the light good. “God saw that it was good” is a secondary refrain, uttered seven times in the six days of creation.
The darkness is not banished, but it is no longer in charge. Each of the six days of creation begins with darkness. Every day starts with darkness, but ends with light. Good news indeed!
The following lines are this author’s effort to condense and paraphrase the Hebrew poetry of Genesis 1:2-5 into English verse:
NOW HEAR THIS
Earth was just a jumbled mess of concrete nothingness.
And darkest darkness, nothing less, in the depths of the abyss.
Then God invited Light to counteract that darkest Night.
God understood that Light was good.
Light was Day. God named it so.
Yes, there was dark; but there was light
On that first day.
On the second day, God deals with the watery chaos by making a
firmament, a metal dome above in the midst of the waters to separate the
waters above from the waters below, “and there was evening, and there
was morning, a second day.”
And the waters under the heavens were gathered into one place so
that there was dry land. “And God saw that it was good.” In accordance
with God’s speech the earth brought forth vegetation.
And there was evening, and there was morning, a third day.
Fact as we know and understand fact collides head on with a story in a creation poem. But there is profound truth in this story. God is dealing with the waters of the Great Deep. Darkness, and the deep—God is dealing with both!
We advance to the fourth day, and physical light as we know light. There’s the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. And they are for signs and for seasons, and for days and for years. There’s no trace of divinity in the heavenly light-givers. And God made the stars. And the stars do not make us what we are. And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day. God permitted the waters to bring forth all kinds of sea life, and birds of the air, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. . . . And there was evening, and there was morning, a fifth day. On day six, the earth brings forth land animals, Then, as described in Genesis 1:26-31, God created humankind in God’s own image and in God’s likeness. In the poetic cadence of KJV (verse 27), “So God created man in his own image. In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Gerhard von Rad, (Old Testament Theology, p. 145) suggests that Israel did not regard God anthropomorphically, but regarded man theomorphically. God gave humankind dominion over creation. Humans were to be God’s stewards over the creation. And notice that in the secondary refrain, God pronounced the creation VERY good. And there was evening, and there was morning, a sixth day. Darkness vs. light and chaos vs. order provide the theme for the six days of creation in Genesis!. “There was evening, and there was morning” for days one through six. “Yes, there was darkness, but there was light.” For six days; but there was a seventh day. The work is complete; now God can rest.
Where is the refrain? Could it be that our Priestly Poet forgot it? Or just didn’t need it? Or is it that there is no ending to this seventh day? We will return to these questions after we view the second creation account in the remainder of chapter 2, and the “fall” in chapter 3. Creation and “Fall” in Genesis chapters 2 and 3 There are obvious differences, even conflict between the Creation Poem of Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a and the Story of Eden in Genesis 2:4b – 2:25.
There are different names for God: Elohim in the Creation Poem; and YHWH Elohim in 2:4b-25. The sequence of creation is different. In chapter 2:4b ff it is land, man, vegetation, animals, woman. In the first account it is light, firmament, vegetation, heavenly lights, sea creatures; land creatures, humankind.
The climates are different: too much water vs. not enough water. The accounts are markedly different in style. Gen. 2:4b-3:3:24 is widely considered to be from the J (yahwist) strand of the Pentateuch. J is earlier than P (priestly). J might be as early as David. P is after the 586 BCE exile. In J, YHWH is widely used as the divine name. After chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, the YHWH Elohim combination is extremely rare in the Hebrew Bible.
The beginning of the Story of Eden is very much like Gen 1:1, the beginning of the creation poem, except Elohim is now YHWH Elohim. There’s no rain; the ground is watered by a mist or by rising ground water. YHWH Elohim, formed man, adham, from the dust of the ground (adh’mah), and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being [nephesh hayah in Hebrew], the same term used for living animals in Gen. 1:20, 23-24. A human corpse is a dead nephesh muth in Lev. 21:11 and Num 6:6.
When I was six months old, a whooping cough epidemic was ravaging the Valley View community. I got it and was having a bad coughing spell. Mother tried to call the doctor on the wall-mounted crank telephone and bumped my head on the cabinet. I changed from coughing to crying, and lost my breath. I was about to be a dead nephesh. Crawford Crane, a nomad from South Carolina, had taken up residence at our house. He witnessed all this and said, “Give me that baby!” He took me in his arms and gave me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation long before medical people knew anything about it. I got my breath back, and from that day Mr. Crane claimed me as his boy.
After all, he had given breath of life back to me. He got old age dementia and was sent to the insane asylum in Wichita Falls. Almost everybody sent there died there. Mr. Crane did. They sent his body back to Tulia for burial. I attended his funeral at First Baptist Church there as a little boy.
I told this story at the breakfast table, and my son-in-law, Alan Bean, asked me, “Does Mr. Crane still have a claim on you?” I said, “Probably.” When Somebody #1 gives Somebody #2 the breath of life, Somebody #1 has some kind of claim on Somebody #2. YHWH Elohim has a claim on adham! We are all adham. YHWH Elohim made the trees in the garden, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
There follows a description of a river flowing out of the garden. It’s large enough to water the garden and still branch into four streams watering the known world. This river calls to mind the river of Ezekiel 47, flowing out of the Temple down to the Dead Sea, making it a fresh water lake, and reminds us of the river in Revelation 22 that nourishes the tree of life whose leaves are for the healing of the ethnoi. Ethnic healing, not ethnic cleansing!
After the digression about the rivers, the narrator turns back to adham, and puts him in the garden to “till it and to keep it.” YHWH Elohim gave definite instructions about the trees in the garden. The man may eat the fruit of any of the trees of the garden, except for the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; “in the day you eat of it, you shall die.” We’ll come back to this at the end of chapter 3. But YHWH Elohim noticed that adham was lonely and needed a helper; so out of the ground, the same stuff the man is made of, YHWH Elohim formed the animals and brought them to adham to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called a nephesh hayah was what it was.
A faithful member of the Arco church had a big sheep ranch. We took our eight-year-old granddaughter out to see the sheep. She wondered aloud about the origin of sheep. “They’re sheep,” the rancher said, “just like God made them.” He knew his Bible well.
But back to the story: Out of all those creatures, there was no helpmate for the man. So, YHWH Elohim anesthetized adham, removed a rib, and made the rib into a woman. And when Adam came out from under, YHWH Elohim brought her to him to see what he thought. He thought it was great! “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” Adam said, “I’ll call her Ishah since she came from Ish.” The narrator adds that they were unashamedly naked. At least for the time being.
Enter the serpent, the most subtle of all the wild animals that Yahweh Elohim had made. And the serpent struck up a conversation with the woman. “Did God say that you should not eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The serpent uses a Hebrew expression of incredulity, “Did God really say . . .?” sowing a seed of doubt in the mind of the woman.
The serpent is not yet a snake as we know snakes. He is not ha satan, the adversary among the heavenly beings in the prologue to the Book of Job. He is not among the sons of God who took a liking to the daughters of men in Genesis 6:1-4. Our concern is more with what the serpent says than with who he is. And what he says is in the form of a distorted question, “Did God really say?”
The woman responded to the serpent that they could eat of any of the trees except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and added that they could not touch it on penalty of death. The serpent sneered, “You will not die. Elohim knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like Elohim, knowing good and evil. The woman gets bad press for adding the prohibition of touching the tree. But any knowledge the woman had about the forbidden tree had to come from another source. She was still a rib in the man’s side when the prohibition was given.
She was persuaded. She believed the serpent. So, she ate, and gave the man a bite. Then they realized they were naked, and clothed themselves with fig leaf aprons. They had grown beyond childhood, and they didn’t die!
But, remember the end of chapter two? They were unashamedly naked. No longer so! Then, they heard the sound of YHWH Elohim walking in the garden. And they tried to hide. But they could not hide from YHWH Elohim, who said. “Where are you, adham?”
“I heard you walking in the garden, and I was naked and afraid, so I tried to hide.”
“Who told you that you were naked? Have you been eating the fruit of that tree that I told you not to eat?”
“That woman that you gave me gave me some of the fruit, and I ate.” It’s the woman’s fault, and ultimately it’s God’s fault.
Now it’s time to question the woman. And she shifts the blame. “The serpent tricked me; it’s his fault.”
The defendants are guilty. Now it’s sentencing time. The serpent is no longer upright but goes on his belly; he will eat the dust from which he was made; there will be enmity between the serpent and the woman’s descendants. This enmity goes back to pre-history but not forward to eternity. In Isaiah’s vision of the Peaceable Kingdom, “The nursing child will play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den (Isaiah 11:8, NRSV).
And Ishah will suffer the pangs of childbirth. And her desire is for her man, who will rule over her. Patriarchy already? And as for Adahm, the ground adh’mah from which he was taken grows thorns and thistles and by the sweat of his brow he will eke out a living from it. “. . . you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:19 NRSV).
And, Longfellow to the contrary, that was spoken of the nephesh. Now adham names his wife Eve, and we have Adam and Eve, and YHWH Elohim made garments of skin for them. Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil . . .” (verse 22).
We have heard that before in verse five, the serpent speaking to the woman, “God [elohim] knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God knowing good and evil.” YHWH Elohim says that what the serpent said would happen has happened.
When I pointed this out in a lay ministry training program in Idaho, one of the students became very upset. “God and the devil cannot agree,” he said angrily. “Your argument is not with me,” I said, “but with the Bible.”
The narrator continues:
“. . . and now, he might reach out his hand, and take also
from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”–therefore [YHWH
Elohim] sent him forth from the garden of Eden . . . and at the
east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword
flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life (Gen
3:22b-24 NRSV).
We’ve dealt with stories that are neither historical nor factual, but profoundly true. We are still east of Eden. And if we go with the narrator to the story of Cain and Abel, we will be yet farther east of Eden.
To conclude this essay, let’s go back to the seventh day in the priestly poem of creation.
We’ve seen six days of creation, each day concluding with the refrain, “And there was evening and there was morning.” The refrain is absent for the seventh day. I can’t imagine that the artistic priestly poet forgot it. Or, that he thought it was unimportant. I hear the loud voice of the absence of the refrain as a statement of eschatological hope. He chose hope over the bitterness of the post exilic psalmist:
Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock! Psalm 137:7-9 (NRSV)
Let’s put ourselves in the place of that poet. Let’s think the unthinkable, that constitutional protections have disappeared, that there is an absolute autocracy reaching from the White House down to down to the courthouse. In such a scenario, the leaders of inclusive and justice-seeking churches that dare speak truth to power could be incarcerated, or worse. And the edifices of such churches could be torn down, down to their foundations, while their Edomite Christian
Nationalist cousins cheer on the devastation. Hate could grow strong and mock the song of “Peace on Earth, good will to all.”
The priestly poet of creation knew about the exile, and Adam and Eve and the serpent, and the flood, and the tower of Babel. He chose hope over hate. He had not heard what we have heard: the Good News of the New Jerusalem on earth, where the gates to the city are open by day, and there is no night there! (Revelation 22:25). But John the Revelator did know the creation poem! We should not read the vision of the New Jerusalem as “pie in the sky when we die by and by,” but as a vision of hope born of faith, in the midst of despair born of persecution.
May we, whatever the darkness and chaos around us, hang on to hope! And all God’s people said . . .
Charles Kiker is a retired ABCUSA minister and educator. He earned the BA degree from Wayland Baptist College (now university) and the PhD from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife Patricia live in Arlington, TX with their daughter and son-in-law, Nancy and Alan Bean. They are members of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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