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Genesis creation narrative

January 07, 2023

"Genesis 1" redirects here. For other uses, see Genesis 1 (disambiguation).

The Genesis creation narrative is the creation myth[a] of both Judaism and Christianity.[1] The narrative is made up of two stories, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first, Elohim (the Hebrew generic word for God) creates the heavens and the Earth in six days, then rests on, blesses, and sanctifies the seventh (i.e. the Biblical Sabbath). In the second story God (now referred to by the personal name Yahweh) creates Adam, the first man, from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden. There he is given dominion over the animals. Eve, the first woman, is created from Adam’s rib as his companion.

The Hebrew creation narrative borrowed themes from Mesopotamian mythology, but adapted them to their unique belief in one God.[2] The first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch (the series of five books which begins with Genesis and ends with Deuteronomy) is thought to have been composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE (the Jahwist source) and was later expanded by other authors (the Priestly source) into a work very like Genesis as known today.[3] The two sources can be identified in the creation narrative: Priestly and Jahwistic.[4] The combined narrative is a critique of the Mesopotamian theology of creation: Genesis affirms monotheism and denies polytheism.[5] Robert Alter described the combined narrative as "compelling in its archetypal character, its adaptation of myth to monotheistic ends".[6]

Scholarly writings frequently refer to Genesis as myth, for while the author of Genesis 1–11 "demythologised" his narrative by removing the Babylonian myths and those elements which did not fit with his own faith, it remains a myth in the sense of being a story of origins.[7]

Composition

 
Cuneiform tablet with the Atra-Hasis Epic in the British Museum

Sources

See also: Documentary hypothesis, Textual variants in the Hebrew Bible § Genesis 1, and Textual variants in the Hebrew Bible § Genesis 2

Although tradition attributes Genesis to Moses, biblical scholars hold that it, together with the following four books (making up what Jews call the Torah and biblical scholars call the Pentateuch), is "a composite work, the product of many hands and periods."[8] A common hypothesis among biblical scholars today is that the first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch was composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE (the Jahwist source), and that this was later expanded by the addition of various narratives and laws (the Priestly source) into a work very like the one existing today.[3]

As for the historical background which led to the creation of the narrative itself, a theory which has gained considerable interest, although still controversial, is "Persian imperial authorisation". This proposes that the Persians, after their conquest of Babylon in 538 BCE, agreed to grant Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire, but required the local authorities to produce a single law code accepted by the entire community. It further proposes that there were two powerful groups in the community – the priestly families who controlled the Temple, and the landowning families who made up the "elders" – and that these two groups were in conflict over many issues, and that each had its own "history of origins", but the Persian promise of greatly increased local autonomy for all provided a powerful incentive to cooperate in producing a single text.[9]

Structure

The creation narrative is made up of two stories, roughly equivalent to the two first chapters of the Book of Genesis[10] (there are no chapter divisions in the original Hebrew text; see Chapters and verses of the Bible). The first account (Genesis 1:1–2:3) employs a repetitious structure of divine fiat and fulfillment, then the statement "And there was evening and there was morning, the [xth] day," for each of the six days of creation. In each of the first three days there is an act of division: day one divides the darkness from light, day two the "waters above" from the "waters below", and day three the sea from the land. In each of the next three days these divisions are populated: day four populates the darkness and light with Sun, Moon and stars; day five populates seas and skies with fish and fowl; and finally land-based creatures and mankind populate the land.[11]

Consistency was evidently not seen as essential to storytelling in ancient Near Eastern literature.[12] The overlapping stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are contradictory but also complementary, with the first (the Priestly story) concerned with the creation of the entire cosmos while the second (the Yahwist story) focuses on man as moral agent and cultivator of his environment.[10] The highly regimented seven-day narrative of Genesis 1 features an omnipotent God who creates a god-resembling humanity, while the one-day creation of Genesis 2 uses a simple linear narrative, a God who can fail as well as succeed, and a humanity which is not god-like but is punished for attempting to become god-like.[13] Even the order and method of creation differs.[13] "Together, this combination of parallel character and contrasting profile point to the different origin of materials in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, however elegantly they have now been combined."[14]

The primary accounts in each chapter are joined by a literary bridge at Genesis 2:4, "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created." This echoes the first line of Genesis 1, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", and is reversed in the next phrase, "...in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens". This verse is one of ten "generations" (Hebrew: תולדות toledot) phrases used throughout Genesis, which provide a literary structure to the book.[15] They normally function as headings to what comes after, but the position of this, the first of the series, has been the subject of much debate.[16]

Mesopotamian influence

See also: Panbabylonism
 
Marduk, god of Babylon, destroying Tiamat, the dragon of primeval chaos

Comparative mythology provides historical and cross-cultural perspectives for Jewish mythology. Both sources behind the Genesis creation narrative borrowed themes from Mesopotamian mythology,[17][18] but adapted them to their belief in one God,[2] establishing a monotheistic creation in opposition to the polytheistic creation myth of ancient Israel's neighbors.[19][20]

Genesis 1–11 as a whole is imbued with Mesopotamian myths.[17][21] Genesis 1 bears both striking differences from and striking similarities to Babylon's national creation myth, the Enuma Elish.[18] On the side of similarities, both begin from a stage of chaotic waters before anything is created, in both a fixed dome-shaped "firmament" divides these waters from the habitable Earth, and both conclude with the creation of a human called "man" and the building of a temple for the god (in Genesis 1, this temple is the entire cosmos).[22] On the side of contrasts, Genesis 1 is monotheistic; it makes no attempt to account for the origins of God, and there is no trace of the resistance to the reduction of chaos to order (Greek: theomachy, lit. "God-fighting"), all of which mark the Mesopotamian creation accounts.[2] Still, Genesis 1 bears similarities to the Baal Cycle of Israel's neighbor, Ugarit.[23]

The Enuma Elish has also left traces on Genesis 2. Both begin with a series of statements of what did not exist at the moment when creation began; the Enuma Elish has a spring (in the sea) as the point where creation begins, paralleling the spring (on the land – Genesis 2 is notable for being a "dry" creation story) in Genesis 2:6 that "watered the whole face of the ground"; in both myths, Yahweh/the gods first create a man to serve him/them, then animals and vegetation. At the same time, and as with Genesis 1, the Jewish version has drastically changed its Babylonian model: Eve, for example, seems to fill the role of a mother goddess when, in Genesis 4:1, she says that she has "created a man with Yahweh", but she is not a divine being like her Babylonian counterpart.[24]

Genesis 2 has close parallels with a second Mesopotamian myth, the Atra-Hasis epic – parallels that in fact extend throughout Genesis 2–11, from the Creation to the Flood and its aftermath. The two share numerous plot-details (e.g. the divine garden and the role of the first man in the garden, the creation of the man from a mixture of earth and divine substance, the chance of immortality, etc.), and have a similar overall theme: the gradual clarification of man's relationship with God(s) and animals.[25]

Creation by word and creation by combat

The narratives in Genesis 1 and 2 were not the only creation myths in ancient Israel, and the complete biblical evidence suggests two contrasting models.[26] The first is the "logos" (meaning speech) model, where a supreme God "speaks" dormant matter into existence. The second is the "agon" (meaning struggle or combat) model, in which it is God's victory in battle over the monsters of the sea that mark his sovereignty and might.[27] Genesis 1 is an example of creation by speech, while Psalm 74 and Isaiah 51 are examples of the "agon" mythology, recalling a Canaanite myth in which God creates the world by vanquishing the water deities: "Awake, awake! ... It was you that hacked Rahab in pieces, that pierced the Dragon! It was you that dried up the Sea, the waters of the great Deep, that made the abysses of the Sea a road that the redeemed might walk..."[28]

First narrative: Genesis 1:1–2:3

 
The Ancient of Days by William Blake (Copy D, 1794)

Background

See also: Creatio ex nihilo

The cosmos created in Genesis 1 bears a striking resemblance to the Tabernacle in Exodus 35–40, which was the prototype of the Temple in Jerusalem and the focus of priestly worship of Yahweh; for this reason, and because other Middle Eastern creation stories also climax with the construction of a temple/house for the creator-god, Genesis 1 can be interpreted as a description of the construction of the cosmos as God's house, for which the Temple in Jerusalem served as the earthly representative.[29]

The word bara is translated as "created" in English, but the concept it embodied was not the same as the modern term: in the world of the ancient Near East, the gods demonstrated their power over the world not by creating matter but by fixing destinies, so that the essence of the bara which God performs in Genesis concerns bringing "heaven and earth" (a set phrase meaning "everything") into existence by organising and assigning roles and functions.[30]

The use of numbers in ancient texts was often numerological rather than factual – that is, the numbers were used because they held some symbolic value to the author.[31] The number seven, denoting divine completion, permeates Genesis 1: verse 1:1 consists of seven words, verse 1:2 of fourteen, and 2:1–3 has 35 words (5×7); Elohim is mentioned 35 times, "heaven/firmament" and "earth" 21 times each, and the phrases "and it was so" and "God saw that it was good" occur 7 times each.[32]

Among commentators, symbolic interpretation of the numbers may coexist with factual interpretations.[33] Numerologically significant patterns of repeated words and phrases are termed "Hebraic meter". They begin in the creation narrative and continue through the book of Genesis.[33]

Pre-creation: Genesis 1:1–2

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.[34]

Although the opening phrase of Genesis 1:1 is commonly translated in English as above, the Hebrew is ambiguous, and can be translated at least three ways:

  1. as a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning ("In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.");
  2. as a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating ("When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was untamed and shapeless."); and
  3. essentially similar to the second version but taking all of Genesis 1:2 as background information ("When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth – the earth being untamed and shapeless... – God said, Let there be light!").[35]

The second seems to be the meaning intended by the original Priestly author: the verb bara is used only of God (people do not engage in bara), and it concerns the assignment of roles, as in the creation of the first people as "male and female" (i.e., it allocates them sexes): in other words, the power of God is being shown not by the creation of matter but by the fixing of destinies.[30]

The heavens and the earth is a set phrase meaning "everything", i.e., the cosmos. This was made up of three levels, the habitable earth in the middle, the heavens above, and an underworld below, all surrounded by a watery "ocean" of chaos as the Babylonian Tiamat.[36] The Earth itself was a flat disc, surrounded by mountains or sea. Above it was the firmament, a transparent but solid dome resting on the mountains, allowing men to see the blue of the waters above, with "windows" to allow the rain to enter, and containing the Sun, Moon and stars. The waters extended below the Earth, which rested on pillars sunk in the waters, and in the underworld was Sheol, the abode of the dead.[37]

The opening of Genesis 1 continues: "And the earth was formless and void..." The phrase "formless and void" is a translation of the Hebrew tohu wa-bohu, (Hebrew: תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ), chaos, the condition that bara, ordering, remedies.[38] Tohu by itself means "emptiness, futility"; it is used to describe the desert wilderness; bohu has no known meaning and was apparently coined to rhyme with and reinforce tohu.[39] The phrase appears also in Jeremiah 4:23 where the prophet warns Israel that rebellion against God will lead to the return of darkness and chaos, "as if the earth had been 'uncreated'".[40]

The opening of Genesis 1 concludes with a statement that "darkness was on the face of the deep" (Hebrew: תְהוֹם tehôm), [the] "darkness" and the "deep" being two of the three elements of the chaos represented in tohu wa-bohu (the third is the "formless earth"). In the Enuma Elish, the "deep" is personified as the goddess Tiamat, the enemy of Marduk;[38] here it is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world, later to be released during the Deluge, when "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth" from the waters beneath the earth and from the "windows" of the sky.[41]

The ruach of God moves over the face of the deep before creation begins. Ruach (רוּחַ) has the meanings "wind, spirit, breath", and elohim can mean "great" as well as "god": the ruach elohim may therefore mean the "wind/breath of God" (the storm-wind is God's breath in Psalms 18:16 and elsewhere, and the wind of God returns in the Flood story as the means by which God restores the Earth), or God's "spirit", a concept which is somewhat vague in the Hebrew Bible, or it may simply signify a great storm-wind.[42]

Six days of Creation: Genesis 1:3–2:3

 
The first day of creation, by Jean Colombe from the Heures de Louis de Laval [fr]
 
The Creation – Bible Historiale (c. 1411)

God's first act was the creation of undifferentiated light; dark and light were then separated into night and day, their order (evening before morning) signifying that this was the liturgical day; and then the Sun, Moon and stars were created to mark the proper times for the festivals of the week and year. Only when this is done does God create man and woman and the means to sustain them (plants and animals). At the end of the sixth day, when creation is complete, the world is a cosmic temple in which the role of humanity is the worship of God. This parallels Mesopotamian myth (the Enuma Elish) and also echoes chapter 38 of the Book of Job, where God recalls how the stars, the "sons of God", sang when the corner-stone of creation was laid.[43]

First day

3 And God said: 'Let there be light.' And there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.[44]

Day 1 begins with the creation of light. God creates by spoken command and names the elements of the world as he creates them. In the ancient Near East the act of naming was bound up with the act of creating: thus in Egyptian literature the creator god pronounced the names of everything, and the Enûma Elish begins at the point where nothing has yet been named.[45] God's creation by speech also suggests that he is being compared to a king, who has merely to speak for things to happen.[46]

Second day

6 And God said: 'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.' 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.[47]

Rāqîa, the word translated as firmament, is from rāqa', the verb used for the act of beating metal into thin plates.[48] Created on the second day of creation and populated by luminaries on the fourth, it is a solid dome which separates the Earth below from the heavens and their waters above, as in Egyptian and Mesopotamian belief of the same time.[49] In Genesis 1:17 the stars are set in the raqia'; in Babylonian myth the heavens were made of various precious stones (compare Exodus 24:10 where the elders of Israel see God on the sapphire floor of heaven), with the stars engraved in their surface.[50]

Third day

And God said: 'Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.' And it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas; and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said: 'Let the earth put forth grass, herb yielding seed, and fruit-tree bearing fruit after its kind, wherein is the seed thereof, upon the earth.' And it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after its kind; and God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning, a third day.[51]

On the third day, the waters withdraw, creating a ring of ocean surrounding a single circular continent.[52] By the end of the third day God has created a foundational environment of light, heavens, seas and earth.[53] The three levels of the cosmos are next populated in the same order in which they were created – heavens, sea, earth.

God does not create or make trees and plants, but instead commands the earth to produce them. The underlying theological meaning seems to be that God has given the previously barren earth the ability to produce vegetation, and it now does so at his command. "According to (one's) kind" appears to look forward to the laws found later in the Pentateuch, which lay great stress on holiness through separation.[54]

Fourth day

14 And God said: 'Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.' And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; and the stars. 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.[55]

On Day Four the language of "ruling" is introduced: the heavenly bodies will "govern" day and night and mark seasons and years and days (a matter of crucial importance to the Priestly authors, as the three pilgrimage festivals were organised around the cycles of both the Sun and Moon, in a lunisolar calendar that could have either 12 or 13 months.);[56] later, man will be created to rule over the whole of creation as God's regent. God puts "lights" in the firmament to "rule over" the day and the night.[57] Specifically, God creates the "greater light," the "lesser light," and the stars. According to Victor Hamilton, most scholars agree that the choice of "greater light" and "lesser light", rather than the more explicit "Sun" and "Moon", is anti-mythological rhetoric intended to contradict widespread contemporary beliefs that the Sun and the Moon were deities themselves.[58]

Fifth day

And God said: 'Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.' 21 And God created the great sea-monsters, and every living creature that creepeth, wherewith the waters swarmed, after its kind, and every winged fowl after its kind; and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying: 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.' 23 And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.[59]

In the Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythologies, the creator-god has to do battle with the sea-monsters before he can make heaven and earth; in Genesis 1:21, the word tannin, sometimes translated as "sea monsters" or "great creatures", parallels the named chaos-monsters Rahab and Leviathan from Psalm 74:13, and Isaiah 27:1, and Isaiah 51:9, but there is no hint (in Genesis) of combat, and the tannin are simply creatures created by God.[60]

Sixth day

 
The Creation of the Animals (1506–1511), by Grão Vasco

24 And God said: 'Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind.' And it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and the cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the ground after its kind; and God saw that it was good.

26 And God said: 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.' 27 And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. 28 And God blessed them; and God said unto them: 'Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.' 29 And God said: 'Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed--to you it shall be for food; 30 and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is a living soul, [I have given] every green herb for food.' And it was so.31 And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.[61]

When in Genesis 1:26 God says "Let us make man", the Hebrew word used is adam; in this form it is a generic noun, "mankind", and does not imply that this creation is male. After this first mention the word always appears as ha-adam, "the man", but as Genesis 1:27 shows ("So God created man in his [own] image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."), the word is still not exclusively male.[62]

Man was created in the "image of God". The meaning of this is unclear: suggestions include:

  1. Having the spiritual qualities of God such as intellect, will, etc.;
  2. Having the physical form of God;
  3. A combination of these two;
  4. Being God's counterpart on Earth and able to enter into a relationship with him;
  5. Being God's representative or viceroy on Earth.[63]

The fact that God says "Let us make man..." has given rise to several theories, of which the two most important are that "us" is majestic plural,[64] or that it reflects a setting in a divine council with God enthroned as king and proposing the creation of mankind to the lesser divine beings.[65]

God tells the animals and humans that he has given them "the green plants for food" – creation is to be vegetarian. Only later, after the Flood, is man given permission to eat flesh. The Priestly author of Genesis appears to look back to an ideal past in which mankind lived at peace both with itself and with the animal kingdom, and which could be re-achieved through a proper sacrificial life in harmony with God.[66]

Upon completion, God sees that "every thing that He had made ... was very good" (Genesis 1:31). This implies that the materials that existed before the Creation ("tohu wa-bohu," "darkness," "tehom") were not "very good." Israel Knohl hypothesized that the Priestly source set up this dichotomy to mitigate the problem of evil.[67]

Seventh day: divine rest

And the heaven and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had made; and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made. 3 And God blessed the seventh day, and hallowed it; because that in it He rested from all His work which God in creating had made.[68]

Creation is followed by rest. In ancient Near Eastern literature the divine rest is achieved in a temple as a result of having brought order to chaos. Rest is both disengagement, as the work of creation is finished, but also engagement, as the deity is now present in his temple to maintain a secure and ordered cosmos.[69] Compare with Exodus 20:8–20:11: "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the LORD thy GOD, in it thou shalt not do any manner of work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day; wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it."

Second narrative: Genesis 2:4–2:25

 
Seventh Day of Creation, from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel

Genesis 2–3, the Garden of Eden story, was probably authored around 500 BCE as "a discourse on ideals in life, the danger in human glory, and the fundamentally ambiguous nature of humanity – especially human mental faculties".[70] The Garden in which the action takes place lies on the mythological border between the human and the divine worlds, probably on the far side of the cosmic ocean near the rim of the world; following a conventional ancient Near Eastern concept, the Eden river first forms that ocean and then divides into four rivers which run from the four corners of the earth towards its centre.[70] It opens "in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens", a set introduction similar to those found in Babylonian myths.[71] Before the man is created the earth is a barren waste watered by an ’êḏ (אד‎); Genesis 2:6 the King James Version translated this as "mist", following Jewish practice, but since the mid-20th century Hebraists have generally accepted that the real meaning is "spring of underground water".[72]

In Genesis 1 the characteristic word for God's activity is bara, "created"; in Genesis 2 the word used when he creates the man is yatsar (ייצר‎ yîṣer), meaning "fashioned", a word used in contexts such as a potter fashioning a pot from clay.[73] God breathes his own breath into the clay and it becomes nephesh (נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎), a word meaning "life", "vitality", "the living personality"; man shares nephesh with all creatures, but the text describes this life-giving act by God only in relation to man.[74]

Eden, where God puts his Garden of Eden, comes from a root meaning "fertility": the first man is to work in God's miraculously fertile garden.[75] The "tree of life" is a motif from Mesopotamian myth: in the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 1800 BCE) the hero is given a plant whose name is "man becomes young in old age", but a serpent steals the plant from him.[76][77] There has been much scholarly discussion about the type of knowledge given by the second tree. Suggestions include: human qualities, sexual consciousness, ethical knowledge, or universal knowledge; with the last being the most widely accepted.[78] In Eden, mankind has a choice between wisdom and life, and chooses the first, although God intended them for the second.[79]

The mythic Eden and its rivers may represent the real Jerusalem, the Temple and the Promised Land. Eden may represent the divine garden on Zion, the mountain of God, which was also Jerusalem; while the real Gihon was a spring outside the city (mirroring the spring which waters Eden); and the imagery of the Garden, with its serpent and cherubs, has been seen as a reflection of the real images of the Solomonic Temple with its copper serpent (the nehushtan) and guardian cherubs.[80] Genesis 2 is the only place in the Bible where Eden appears as a geographic location: elsewhere (notably in the Book of Ezekiel) it is a mythological place located on the holy Mountain of God, with echoes of a Mesopotamian myth of the king as a primordial man placed in a divine garden to guard the tree of life.[81]

"Good and evil" is a merism, in this case meaning simply "everything", but it may also have a moral connotation. When God forbids the man to eat from the tree of knowledge he says that if he does so he is "doomed to die": the Hebrew behind this is in the form used in the Bible for issuing death sentences.[82]

 
The Creation by Lucas Cranach, 1534

The first woman is created out of one of Adam's ribs to be ezer kenegdo (עזר כנגדו‎ ‘êzer kəneḡdō)[83] – a term notably difficult to translate – to the man. Kəneḡdō means "alongside, opposite, a counterpart to him", and ‘êzer means active intervention on behalf of the other person.[84] God's naming of the elements of the cosmos in Genesis 1 illustrated his authority over creation; now the man's naming of the animals (and of Woman) illustrates Adam's authority within creation.[85]

The woman is called ishah (אשה‎ ’iš-šāh), "Woman", with an explanation that this is because she was taken from ish (אִישׁ‎ ’îš), meaning "man";[83] the two words are not in fact connected.[citation needed] Later, after the story of the Garden is complete, she receives a name: Ḥawwāh (חוה ‎, Eve). This means "living" in Hebrew, from a root that can also mean "snake".[86] Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer connects Eve's creation to the ancient Sumerian myth of Enki, who was healed by the goddess Nin-ti, "the Lady of the rib"; this became "the Lady who makes live" via a pun on the word ti, which means both "rib" and "to make live" in Sumerian.[87] The Hebrew word traditionally translated "rib" in English can also mean "side", "chamber", or "beam".[88] A long-standing exegetical tradition holds that the use of a rib from man's side emphasizes that both man and woman have equal dignity, for woman was created from the same material as man, shaped and given life by the same processes.[89]

Creationism and the genre of the creation narrative

 
Eden (Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1472–1553)

The meaning to be derived from the Genesis creation narrative will depend on the reader's understanding of its genre, the literary "type" to which it belongs (e.g., scientific cosmology, creation myth, or historical saga).[90] According to Biblical scholar Francis Andersen, misunderstanding the genre of the text—meaning the intention of the author(s) and the culture within which they wrote—will result in a misreading.[91] Reformed evangelical scholar Bruce Waltke cautions against one such misreading: the "woodenly literal" approach, which leads to "creation science", but also to such "implausible interpretations" as the "gap theory", the presumption of a "young earth", and the denial of evolution.[92] As scholar of Jewish studies, Jon D. Levenson, puts it:

How much history lies behind the story of Genesis? Because the action of the primeval story is not represented as taking place on the plane of ordinary human history and has so many affinities with ancient mythology, it is very far-fetched to speak of its narratives as historical at all."[93]

Another scholar, Conrad Hyers, summed up the same thought by writing, "A literalist interpretation of the Genesis accounts is inappropriate, misleading, and unworkable [because] it presupposes and insists upon a kind of literature and intention that is not there."[94]

Whatever else it may be, Genesis 1 is "story", since it features character and characterization, a narrator, and dramatic tension expressed through a series of incidents arranged in time.[95] The Priestly author of Genesis 1 had to confront two major difficulties. First, there is the fact that since only God exists at this point, no-one was available to be the narrator; the storyteller solved this by introducing an unobtrusive "third person narrator".[96] Second, there was the problem of conflict: conflict is necessary to arouse the reader's interest in the story, yet with nothing else existing, neither a chaos-monster nor another god, there cannot be any conflict. This was solved by creating a very minimal tension: God is opposed by nothingness itself, the blank of the world "without form and void."[96] Telling the story in this way was a deliberate choice: there are a number of creation stories in the Bible, but they tend to be told in the first person, by Wisdom, the instrument by which God created the world; the choice of an omniscient third-person narrator in the Genesis narrative allows the storyteller to create the impression that everything is being told and nothing held back.[97]

One can also regard Genesis as "historylike", "part of a broader spectrum of originally anonymous, history-like ancient Near Eastern narratives."[98] Scholarly writings frequently refer to Genesis as myth, but there is no agreement on how to define "myth", and so while Brevard Childs famously suggested that the author of Genesis 1–11 "demythologised" his narrative, meaning that he removed from his sources (the Babylonian myths) those elements which did not fit with his own faith, others can say it is entirely mythical.[7]

Genesis 1–2 reflects ancient ideas about science: in the words of E.A. Speiser, "on the subject of creation biblical tradition aligned itself with the traditional tenets of Babylonian science."[99] The opening words of Genesis 1, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth", sum up the author(s) belief that Yahweh, the god of Israel, was solely responsible for creation and had no rivals.[100] Later Jewish thinkers, adopting ideas from Greek philosophy, concluded that God's Wisdom, Word and Spirit penetrated all things and gave them unity.[101] Christianity in turn adopted these ideas and identified Jesus with the creative word: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).[102] When the Jews came into contact with Greek thought, there followed a major reinterpretation of the underlying cosmology of the Genesis narrative. The biblical authors conceived the cosmos as a flat disc-shaped Earth in the centre, an underworld for the dead below, and heaven above.[103] Below the Earth were the "waters of chaos", the cosmic sea, home to mythic monsters defeated and slain by God; in Exodus 20:4, God warns against making an image "of anything that is in the waters under the earth".[100] There were also waters above the Earth, and so the raqia (firmament), a solid bowl, was necessary to keep them from flooding the world.[104] During the Hellenistic period this was largely replaced by a more "scientific" model as imagined by Greek philosophers, according to which the Earth was a sphere at the centre of concentric shells of celestial spheres containing the Sun, Moon, stars and planets.[103]

The idea that God created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) has become central today to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism – indeed, the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides felt it was the only concept that the three religions shared[105] – yet it is not found directly in Genesis, nor in the entire Hebrew Bible.[106] The Priestly authors of Genesis 1 were concerned not with the origins of matter (the material which God formed into the habitable cosmos), but with assigning roles so that the Cosmos should function.[30] This was still the situation in the early 2nd century AD, although early Christian scholars were beginning to see a tension between the idea of world-formation and the omnipotence of God; by the beginning of the 3rd century this tension was resolved, world-formation was overcome, and creation ex nihilo had become a fundamental tenet of Christian theology.[107]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The term myth is used here in its academic sense, meaning "a traditional story consisting of events that are ostensibly historical, though often supernatural, explaining the origins of a cultural practice or natural phenomenon." It is not being used to mean "something that is false".

Citations

  1. ^ Leeming & Leeming 2004, p. 113.
  2. ^ a b c Sarna 1997, p. 50.
  3. ^ a b Davies 2007, p. 37.
  4. ^ Bandstra 2008, p. 37.
  5. ^ Wenham 2003b, p. 37.
  6. ^ Alter 2004, p. xii.
  7. ^ a b Hamilton 1990, pp. 57–58.
  8. ^ Speiser 1964, p. xxi.
  9. ^ Ska 2006, pp. 169, 217–18.
  10. ^ a b Alter 1981, p. 141.
  11. ^ Ruiten 2000, pp. 9–10.
  12. ^ Levenson 2004, p. 9 "One aspect of narrative in Genesis that requires special attention is its high tolerance for different versions of the same event, a well-known feature of ancient Near Eastern literature, from earliest times through rabbinic midrash. ... This could not have happened if the existence of variation were seen as a serious defect or if rigid consistency were deemed essential to effective storytelling."
  13. ^ a b Carr 1996, pp. 62–64.
  14. ^ Carr 1996, p. 64.
  15. ^ Cross 1973, pp. 301ff.
  16. ^ Thomas 2011, pp. 27–28.
  17. ^ a b Lambert 1965.
  18. ^ a b Levenson 2004, p. 9.
  19. ^ Leeming 2004.
  20. ^ Smith 2001.
  21. ^ Kutsko 2000, p. 62, quoting J. Maxwell Miller.
  22. ^ McDermott 2002, pp. 25–27.
  23. ^ Mark Smith; Wayne Pitard (2008). The Ugaritic Baal Cycle: Volume II. Introduction with Text, Translation and Commentary of KTU/CAT 1.3–1.4. Brill. p. 615. ISBN 978-90-474-4232-5.
  24. ^ Van Seters 1992, pp. 122–24.
  25. ^ Carr 1996, p. 242-248.
  26. ^ Dolansky 2016.
  27. ^ Fishbane 2003, pp. 34–35.
  28. ^ Hutton 2007, p. 274.
  29. ^ Levenson 2004, p. 13.
  30. ^ a b c Walton 2006, p. 183.
  31. ^ Hyers 1984, p. 74.
  32. ^ Wenham 1987, p. 6.
  33. ^ a b Overn 2017, p. 119.
  34. ^ Genesis 1:1–1:2
  35. ^ Bandstra 2008, pp. 38–39.
  36. ^ Spence 2010, p. 72.
  37. ^ Knight 1990, pp. 175–76.
  38. ^ a b Walton 2001.
  39. ^ Alter 2004, p. 17.
  40. ^ Thompson 1980, p. 230.
  41. ^ Wenham 2003a, p. 29.
  42. ^ Blenkinsopp 2011, pp. 33–34.
  43. ^ Blenkinsopp 2011, pp. 21–22.
  44. ^ Genesis 1:3–1:5
  45. ^ Walton 2003, p. 158.
  46. ^ Bandstra 2008, p. 39.
  47. ^ Genesis 1:6–1:8
  48. ^ Hamilton 1990, p. 122.
  49. ^ Seeley 1991, p. 227.
  50. ^ Walton 2003, pp. 158–59.
  51. ^ Genesis 1:9–1:13
  52. ^ Seeley 1997, p. 236.
  53. ^ Bandstra 2008, p. 41.
  54. ^ Kissling 2004, p. 106.
  55. ^ Genesis 1:14–1:19
  56. ^ Bandstra 2008, pp. 41–42.
  57. ^ Walsh 2001, p. 37 (fn.5).
  58. ^ Hamilton 1990, p. 127.
  59. ^ Genesis 1:20–1:23
  60. ^ Walton 2003, p. 160.
  61. ^ Genesis 1:24–31
  62. ^ Alter 2004, pp. 18–19, 21.
  63. ^ Kvam et al. 1999, p. 24.
  64. ^ Davidson 1973, p. 24.
  65. ^ Levenson 2004, p. 14.
  66. ^ Rogerson 1991, pp. 19ff.
  67. ^ Knohl 2003, p. 13.
  68. ^ Genesis 2:1–2:3
  69. ^ Walton 2006, pp. 157–58.
  70. ^ a b Stordalen 2000, pp. 473–74.
  71. ^ Van Seters 1998, p. 22.
  72. ^ Andersen 1987, pp. 137–40.
  73. ^ Alter 2004, pp. 20, 22.
  74. ^ Davidson 1973, p. 31.
  75. ^ Levenson 2004, p. 15.
  76. ^ Davidson 1973, p. 29.
  77. ^ Levenson 2004, p. 9 "The story of Adam and Eve's sin in the garden of Eden (2.25–3.24) displays similarities with Gilgamesh, an epic poem that tells how its hero lost the opportunity for immortality and came to terms with his humanity. ... the biblical narrator has adapted the Mesopotamian forerunner to Israelite theology."
  78. ^ Kooij 2010, p. 17.
  79. ^ Propp 1990, p. 193.
  80. ^ Stordalen 2000, pp. 307–10.
  81. ^ Davidson 1973, p. 33.
  82. ^ Alter 2004, p. 21.
  83. ^ a b Galambush 2000, p. 436.
  84. ^ Alter 2004, p. 22.
  85. ^ Turner 2009, p. 20.
  86. ^ Hastings 2003, p. 607.
  87. ^ Kramer 1963, p. 149.
  88. ^ Jacobs 2007, p. 37.
  89. ^ Hugenberger 1988, p. 184.
  90. ^ Wood 1990, pp. 323–24.
  91. ^ Andersen 1987, p. 142.
  92. ^ Waltke 1991, pp. 6–9.
  93. ^ Levenson 2004, p. 11.
  94. ^ Hyers 1984, p. 28.
  95. ^ Cotter 2003, pp. 5–9.
  96. ^ a b Cotter 2003, p. 7.
  97. ^ Cotter 2003, p. 8.
  98. ^ Carr 1996, p. 21."In summary, rather than creating a fully new text after the manner of a modern novelist or even a modern historian, ancient authors of historylike narratives like Gilgamesh or Genesis would often build their text out of earlier traditions. [...] Seen within this perspective, Genesis is part of a broader spectrum of originally anonymous, history-like ancient Near Eastern narratives."
  99. ^ Seidman 2010, p. 166.
  100. ^ a b Wright 2002, p. 53.
  101. ^ Kaiser 1997, p. 28.
  102. ^ Parrish 1990, pp. 183–84.
  103. ^ a b Aune 2003, p. 119.
  104. ^ Ryken et al 1998, p. 170
  105. ^ Soskice 2010, p. 24.
  106. ^ Nebe 2002, p. 119.
  107. ^ May 2004, p. 179.

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External links

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Creation according to Genesis.

Biblical texts

  • Chapter 1 Chapter 2 (Hebrew-English text, translated according to the JPS 1917 Edition)
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 (Hebrew–English text, with Rashi's commentary. The translation is the authoritative Judaica Press version, edited by Rabbi A.J. Rosenberg.)
  • Chapter 1 6 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine Chapter 2 4 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine (New American Bible)
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 2 (King James Version)
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 2 (Revised Standard Version)
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 2 (New Living Translation)
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 2 (New American Standard Bible)
  • Chapter 1 Chapter 2 (New International Version (UK))

Mesopotamian texts

  • "Enuma Elish", at Encyclopedia of the Orient Summary of Enuma Elish with links to full text.
  • ETCSL – Text and translation of the Eridu Genesis () (The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oxford)
  • "Epic of Gilgamesh" (summary) 30 December 2005 at the Wayback Machine
  • British Museum: Cuneiform tablet from Sippar with the story of Atra-Hasis

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January 07, 2023
genesis, creation, narrative, genesis, redirects, here, other, uses, genesis, disambiguation, creation, myth, both, judaism, christianity, narrative, made, stories, roughly, equivalent, first, chapters, book, genesis, first, elohim, hebrew, generic, word, crea. Genesis 1 redirects here For other uses see Genesis 1 disambiguation The Genesis creation narrative is the creation myth a of both Judaism and Christianity 1 The narrative is made up of two stories roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis In the first Elohim the Hebrew generic word for God creates the heavens and the Earth in six days then rests on blesses and sanctifies the seventh i e the Biblical Sabbath In the second story God now referred to by the personal name Yahweh creates Adam the first man from dust and places him in the Garden of Eden There he is given dominion over the animals Eve the first woman is created from Adam s rib as his companion The Hebrew creation narrative borrowed themes from Mesopotamian mythology but adapted them to their unique belief in one God 2 The first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch the series of five books which begins with Genesis and ends with Deuteronomy is thought to have been composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE the Jahwist source and was later expanded by other authors the Priestly source into a work very like Genesis as known today 3 The two sources can be identified in the creation narrative Priestly and Jahwistic 4 The combined narrative is a critique of the Mesopotamian theology of creation Genesis affirms monotheism and denies polytheism 5 Robert Alter described the combined narrative as compelling in its archetypal character its adaptation of myth to monotheistic ends 6 Scholarly writings frequently refer to Genesis as myth for while the author of Genesis 1 11 demythologised his narrative by removing the Babylonian myths and those elements which did not fit with his own faith it remains a myth in the sense of being a story of origins 7 Contents 1 Composition 1 1 Sources 1 2 Structure 1 3 Mesopotamian influence 1 4 Creation by word and creation by combat 2 First narrative Genesis 1 1 2 3 2 1 Background 2 2 Pre creation Genesis 1 1 2 2 3 Six days of Creation Genesis 1 3 2 3 2 3 1 First day 2 3 2 Second day 2 3 3 Third day 2 3 4 Fourth day 2 3 5 Fifth day 2 3 6 Sixth day 2 4 Seventh day divine rest 3 Second narrative Genesis 2 4 2 25 4 Creationism and the genre of the creation narrative 5 See also 6 Notes 7 Citations 8 References 9 External links 9 1 Biblical texts 9 2 Mesopotamian texts 9 3 Related linksComposition Edit Cuneiform tablet with the Atra Hasis Epic in the British Museum Sources Edit See also Documentary hypothesis Textual variants in the Hebrew Bible Genesis 1 and Textual variants in the Hebrew Bible Genesis 2 Although tradition attributes Genesis to Moses biblical scholars hold that it together with the following four books making up what Jews call the Torah and biblical scholars call the Pentateuch is a composite work the product of many hands and periods 8 A common hypothesis among biblical scholars today is that the first major comprehensive draft of the Pentateuch was composed in the late 7th or the 6th century BCE the Jahwist source and that this was later expanded by the addition of various narratives and laws the Priestly source into a work very like the one existing today 3 As for the historical background which led to the creation of the narrative itself a theory which has gained considerable interest although still controversial is Persian imperial authorisation This proposes that the Persians after their conquest of Babylon in 538 BCE agreed to grant Jerusalem a large measure of local autonomy within the empire but required the local authorities to produce a single law code accepted by the entire community It further proposes that there were two powerful groups in the community the priestly families who controlled the Temple and the landowning families who made up the elders and that these two groups were in conflict over many issues and that each had its own history of origins but the Persian promise of greatly increased local autonomy for all provided a powerful incentive to cooperate in producing a single text 9 Structure Edit The creation narrative is made up of two stories roughly equivalent to the two first chapters of the Book of Genesis 10 there are no chapter divisions in the original Hebrew text see Chapters and verses of the Bible The first account Genesis 1 1 2 3 employs a repetitious structure of divine fiat and fulfillment then the statement And there was evening and there was morning the xth day for each of the six days of creation In each of the first three days there is an act of division day one divides the darkness from light day two the waters above from the waters below and day three the sea from the land In each of the next three days these divisions are populated day four populates the darkness and light with Sun Moon and stars day five populates seas and skies with fish and fowl and finally land based creatures and mankind populate the land 11 Consistency was evidently not seen as essential to storytelling in ancient Near Eastern literature 12 The overlapping stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are contradictory but also complementary with the first the Priestly story concerned with the creation of the entire cosmos while the second the Yahwist story focuses on man as moral agent and cultivator of his environment 10 The highly regimented seven day narrative of Genesis 1 features an omnipotent God who creates a god resembling humanity while the one day creation of Genesis 2 uses a simple linear narrative a God who can fail as well as succeed and a humanity which is not god like but is punished for attempting to become god like 13 Even the order and method of creation differs 13 Together this combination of parallel character and contrasting profile point to the different origin of materials in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 however elegantly they have now been combined 14 The primary accounts in each chapter are joined by a literary bridge at Genesis 2 4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created This echoes the first line of Genesis 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth and is reversed in the next phrase in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens This verse is one of ten generations Hebrew תולדות toledot phrases used throughout Genesis which provide a literary structure to the book 15 They normally function as headings to what comes after but the position of this the first of the series has been the subject of much debate 16 Mesopotamian influence Edit See also Panbabylonism Marduk god of Babylon destroying Tiamat the dragon of primeval chaos Comparative mythology provides historical and cross cultural perspectives for Jewish mythology Both sources behind the Genesis creation narrative borrowed themes from Mesopotamian mythology 17 18 but adapted them to their belief in one God 2 establishing a monotheistic creation in opposition to the polytheistic creation myth of ancient Israel s neighbors 19 20 Genesis 1 11 as a whole is imbued with Mesopotamian myths 17 21 Genesis 1 bears both striking differences from and striking similarities to Babylon s national creation myth the Enuma Elish 18 On the side of similarities both begin from a stage of chaotic waters before anything is created in both a fixed dome shaped firmament divides these waters from the habitable Earth and both conclude with the creation of a human called man and the building of a temple for the god in Genesis 1 this temple is the entire cosmos 22 On the side of contrasts Genesis 1 is monotheistic it makes no attempt to account for the origins of God and there is no trace of the resistance to the reduction of chaos to order Greek theomachy lit God fighting all of which mark the Mesopotamian creation accounts 2 Still Genesis 1 bears similarities to the Baal Cycle of Israel s neighbor Ugarit 23 The Enuma Elish has also left traces on Genesis 2 Both begin with a series of statements of what did not exist at the moment when creation began the Enuma Elish has a spring in the sea as the point where creation begins paralleling the spring on the land Genesis 2 is notable for being a dry creation story in Genesis 2 6 that watered the whole face of the ground in both myths Yahweh the gods first create a man to serve him them then animals and vegetation At the same time and as with Genesis 1 the Jewish version has drastically changed its Babylonian model Eve for example seems to fill the role of a mother goddess when in Genesis 4 1 she says that she has created a man with Yahweh but she is not a divine being like her Babylonian counterpart 24 Genesis 2 has close parallels with a second Mesopotamian myth the Atra Hasis epic parallels that in fact extend throughout Genesis 2 11 from the Creation to the Flood and its aftermath The two share numerous plot details e g the divine garden and the role of the first man in the garden the creation of the man from a mixture of earth and divine substance the chance of immortality etc and have a similar overall theme the gradual clarification of man s relationship with God s and animals 25 Creation by word and creation by combat Edit The narratives in Genesis 1 and 2 were not the only creation myths in ancient Israel and the complete biblical evidence suggests two contrasting models 26 The first is the logos meaning speech model where a supreme God speaks dormant matter into existence The second is the agon meaning struggle or combat model in which it is God s victory in battle over the monsters of the sea that mark his sovereignty and might 27 Genesis 1 is an example of creation by speech while Psalm 74 and Isaiah 51 are examples of the agon mythology recalling a Canaanite myth in which God creates the world by vanquishing the water deities Awake awake It was you that hacked Rahab in pieces that pierced the Dragon It was you that dried up the Sea the waters of the great Deep that made the abysses of the Sea a road that the redeemed might walk 28 First narrative Genesis 1 1 2 3 Edit The Ancient of Days by William Blake Copy D 1794 Background Edit See also Creatio ex nihilo The cosmos created in Genesis 1 bears a striking resemblance to the Tabernacle in Exodus 35 40 which was the prototype of the Temple in Jerusalem and the focus of priestly worship of Yahweh for this reason and because other Middle Eastern creation stories also climax with the construction of a temple house for the creator god Genesis 1 can be interpreted as a description of the construction of the cosmos as God s house for which the Temple in Jerusalem served as the earthly representative 29 The word bara is translated as created in English but the concept it embodied was not the same as the modern term in the world of the ancient Near East the gods demonstrated their power over the world not by creating matter but by fixing destinies so that the essence of the bara which God performs in Genesis concerns bringing heaven and earth a set phrase meaning everything into existence by organising and assigning roles and functions 30 The use of numbers in ancient texts was often numerological rather than factual that is the numbers were used because they held some symbolic value to the author 31 The number seven denoting divine completion permeates Genesis 1 verse 1 1 consists of seven words verse 1 2 of fourteen and 2 1 3 has 35 words 5 7 Elohim is mentioned 35 times heaven firmament and earth 21 times each and the phrases and it was so and God saw that it was good occur 7 times each 32 Among commentators symbolic interpretation of the numbers may coexist with factual interpretations 33 Numerologically significant patterns of repeated words and phrases are termed Hebraic meter They begin in the creation narrative and continue through the book of Genesis 33 Pre creation Genesis 1 1 2 Edit 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth 2 And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters 34 Although the opening phrase of Genesis 1 1 is commonly translated in English as above the Hebrew is ambiguous and can be translated at least three ways as a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth as a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth the earth was untamed and shapeless and essentially similar to the second version but taking all of Genesis 1 2 as background information When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth the earth being untamed and shapeless God said Let there be light 35 The second seems to be the meaning intended by the original Priestly author the verb bara is used only of God people do not engage in bara and it concerns the assignment of roles as in the creation of the first people as male and female i e it allocates them sexes in other words the power of God is being shown not by the creation of matter but by the fixing of destinies 30 The heavens and the earth is a set phrase meaning everything i e the cosmos This was made up of three levels the habitable earth in the middle the heavens above and an underworld below all surrounded by a watery ocean of chaos as the Babylonian Tiamat 36 The Earth itself was a flat disc surrounded by mountains or sea Above it was the firmament a transparent but solid dome resting on the mountains allowing men to see the blue of the waters above with windows to allow the rain to enter and containing the Sun Moon and stars The waters extended below the Earth which rested on pillars sunk in the waters and in the underworld was Sheol the abode of the dead 37 The opening of Genesis 1 continues And the earth was formless and void The phrase formless and void is a translation of the Hebrew tohu wa bohu Hebrew ת הו ו ב הו chaos the condition that bara ordering remedies 38 Tohu by itself means emptiness futility it is used to describe the desert wilderness bohu has no known meaning and was apparently coined to rhyme with and reinforce tohu 39 The phrase appears also in Jeremiah 4 23 where the prophet warns Israel that rebellion against God will lead to the return of darkness and chaos as if the earth had been uncreated 40 The opening of Genesis 1 concludes with a statement that darkness was on the face of the deep Hebrew ת הו ם tehom the darkness and the deep being two of the three elements of the chaos represented in tohu wa bohu the third is the formless earth In the Enuma Elish the deep is personified as the goddess Tiamat the enemy of Marduk 38 here it is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world later to be released during the Deluge when all the fountains of the great deep burst forth from the waters beneath the earth and from the windows of the sky 41 The ruach of God moves over the face of the deep before creation begins Ruach רו ח has the meanings wind spirit breath and elohim can mean great as well as god the ruach elohim may therefore mean the wind breath of God the storm wind is God s breath in Psalms 18 16 and elsewhere and the wind of God returns in the Flood story as the means by which God restores the Earth or God s spirit a concept which is somewhat vague in the Hebrew Bible or it may simply signify a great storm wind 42 Six days of Creation Genesis 1 3 2 3 Edit The first day of creation by Jean Colombe from the Heures de Louis de Laval fr The Creation Bible Historiale c 1411 God s first act was the creation of undifferentiated light dark and light were then separated into night and day their order evening before morning signifying that this was the liturgical day and then the Sun Moon and stars were created to mark the proper times for the festivals of the week and year Only when this is done does God create man and woman and the means to sustain them plants and animals At the end of the sixth day when creation is complete the world is a cosmic temple in which the role of humanity is the worship of God This parallels Mesopotamian myth the Enuma Elish and also echoes chapter 38 of the Book of Job where God recalls how the stars the sons of God sang when the corner stone of creation was laid 43 First day Edit 3 And God said Let there be light And there was light 4 And God saw the light that it was good and God divided the light from the darkness 5 And God called the light Day and the darkness He called Night And there was evening and there was morning one day 44 Day 1 begins with the creation of light God creates by spoken command and names the elements of the world as he creates them In the ancient Near East the act of naming was bound up with the act of creating thus in Egyptian literature the creator god pronounced the names of everything and the Enuma Elish begins at the point where nothing has yet been named 45 God s creation by speech also suggests that he is being compared to a king who has merely to speak for things to happen 46 Second day Edit 6 And God said Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters 7 And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament and it was so 8 And God called the firmament Heaven And there was evening and there was morning a second day 47 Raqia the word translated as firmament is from raqa the verb used for the act of beating metal into thin plates 48 Created on the second day of creation and populated by luminaries on the fourth it is a solid dome which separates the Earth below from the heavens and their waters above as in Egyptian and Mesopotamian belief of the same time 49 In Genesis 1 17 the stars are set in the raqia in Babylonian myth the heavens were made of various precious stones compare Exodus 24 10 where the elders of Israel see God on the sapphire floor of heaven with the stars engraved in their surface 50 Third day Edit And God said Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear And it was so 10 And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering together of the waters called He Seas and God saw that it was good 11 And God said Let the earth put forth grass herb yielding seed and fruit tree bearing fruit after its kind wherein is the seed thereof upon the earth And it was so 12 And the earth brought forth grass herb yielding seed after its kind and tree bearing fruit wherein is the seed thereof after its kind and God saw that it was good 13 And there was evening and there was morning a third day 51 On the third day the waters withdraw creating a ring of ocean surrounding a single circular continent 52 By the end of the third day God has created a foundational environment of light heavens seas and earth 53 The three levels of the cosmos are next populated in the same order in which they were created heavens sea earth God does not create or make trees and plants but instead commands the earth to produce them The underlying theological meaning seems to be that God has given the previously barren earth the ability to produce vegetation and it now does so at his command According to one s kind appears to look forward to the laws found later in the Pentateuch which lay great stress on holiness through separation 54 Fourth day Edit 14 And God said Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years 15 and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth And it was so 16 And God made the two great lights the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night and the stars 17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth 18 and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness and God saw that it was good 19 And there was evening and there was morning a fourth day 55 On Day Four the language of ruling is introduced the heavenly bodies will govern day and night and mark seasons and years and days a matter of crucial importance to the Priestly authors as the three pilgrimage festivals were organised around the cycles of both the Sun and Moon in a lunisolar calendar that could have either 12 or 13 months 56 later man will be created to rule over the whole of creation as God s regent God puts lights in the firmament to rule over the day and the night 57 Specifically God creates the greater light the lesser light and the stars According to Victor Hamilton most scholars agree that the choice of greater light and lesser light rather than the more explicit Sun and Moon is anti mythological rhetoric intended to contradict widespread contemporary beliefs that the Sun and the Moon were deities themselves 58 Fifth day Edit And God said Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven 21 And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that creepeth wherewith the waters swarmed after its kind and every winged fowl after its kind and God saw that it was good 22 And God blessed them saying Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let fowl multiply in the earth 23 And there was evening and there was morning a fifth day 59 In the Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythologies the creator god has to do battle with the sea monsters before he can make heaven and earth in Genesis 1 21 the word tannin sometimes translated as sea monsters or great creatures parallels the named chaos monsters Rahab and Leviathan from Psalm 74 13 and Isaiah 27 1 and Isaiah 51 9 but there is no hint in Genesis of combat and the tannin are simply creatures created by God 60 Sixth day Edit The Creation of the Animals 1506 1511 by Grao Vasco 24 And God said Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth after its kind And it was so 25 And God made the beast of the earth after its kind and the cattle after their kind and every thing that creepeth upon the ground after its kind and God saw that it was good 26 And God said Let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth 27 And God created man in His own image in the image of God created He him male and female created He them 28 And God blessed them and God said unto them Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that creepeth upon the earth 29 And God said Behold I have given you every herb yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed to you it shall be for food 30 and to every beast of the earth and to every fowl of the air and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth wherein there is a living soul I have given every green herb for food And it was so 31 And God saw every thing that He had made and behold it was very good And there was evening and there was morning the sixth day 61 When in Genesis 1 26 God says Let us make man the Hebrew word used is adam in this form it is a generic noun mankind and does not imply that this creation is male After this first mention the word always appears as ha adam the man but as Genesis 1 27 shows So God created man in his own image in the image of God created he him male and female created he them the word is still not exclusively male 62 Man was created in the image of God The meaning of this is unclear suggestions include Having the spiritual qualities of God such as intellect will etc Having the physical form of God A combination of these two Being God s counterpart on Earth and able to enter into a relationship with him Being God s representative or viceroy on Earth 63 The fact that God says Let us make man has given rise to several theories of which the two most important are that us is majestic plural 64 or that it reflects a setting in a divine council with God enthroned as king and proposing the creation of mankind to the lesser divine beings 65 God tells the animals and humans that he has given them the green plants for food creation is to be vegetarian Only later after the Flood is man given permission to eat flesh The Priestly author of Genesis appears to look back to an ideal past in which mankind lived at peace both with itself and with the animal kingdom and which could be re achieved through a proper sacrificial life in harmony with God 66 Upon completion God sees that every thing that He had made was very good Genesis 1 31 This implies that the materials that existed before the Creation tohu wa bohu darkness tehom were not very good Israel Knohl hypothesized that the Priestly source set up this dichotomy to mitigate the problem of evil 67 Seventh day divine rest Edit And the heaven and the earth were finished and all the host of them 2 And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had made and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made 3 And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it because that in it He rested from all His work which God in creating had made 68 Creation is followed by rest In ancient Near Eastern literature the divine rest is achieved in a temple as a result of having brought order to chaos Rest is both disengagement as the work of creation is finished but also engagement as the deity is now present in his temple to maintain a secure and ordered cosmos 69 Compare with Exodus 20 8 20 11 Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work but the seventh day is a sabbath unto the LORD thy GOD in it thou shalt not do any manner of work thou nor thy son nor thy daughter nor thy man servant nor thy maid servant nor thy cattle nor thy stranger that is within thy gates for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth the sea and all that in them is and rested on the seventh day wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it Second narrative Genesis 2 4 2 25 Edit Seventh Day of Creation from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle by Hartmann Schedel Genesis 2 3 the Garden of Eden story was probably authored around 500 BCE as a discourse on ideals in life the danger in human glory and the fundamentally ambiguous nature of humanity especially human mental faculties 70 The Garden in which the action takes place lies on the mythological border between the human and the divine worlds probably on the far side of the cosmic ocean near the rim of the world following a conventional ancient Near Eastern concept the Eden river first forms that ocean and then divides into four rivers which run from the four corners of the earth towards its centre 70 It opens in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens a set introduction similar to those found in Babylonian myths 71 Before the man is created the earth is a barren waste watered by an eḏ אד Genesis 2 6 the King James Version translated this as mist following Jewish practice but since the mid 20th century Hebraists have generally accepted that the real meaning is spring of underground water 72 In Genesis 1 the characteristic word for God s activity is bara created in Genesis 2 the word used when he creates the man is yatsar ייצר yiṣer meaning fashioned a word used in contexts such as a potter fashioning a pot from clay 73 God breathes his own breath into the clay and it becomes nephesh נ פ ש a word meaning life vitality the living personality man shares nephesh with all creatures but the text describes this life giving act by God only in relation to man 74 Eden where God puts his Garden of Eden comes from a root meaning fertility the first man is to work in God s miraculously fertile garden 75 The tree of life is a motif from Mesopotamian myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh c 1800 BCE the hero is given a plant whose name is man becomes young in old age but a serpent steals the plant from him 76 77 There has been much scholarly discussion about the type of knowledge given by the second tree Suggestions include human qualities sexual consciousness ethical knowledge or universal knowledge with the last being the most widely accepted 78 In Eden mankind has a choice between wisdom and life and chooses the first although God intended them for the second 79 The mythic Eden and its rivers may represent the real Jerusalem the Temple and the Promised Land Eden may represent the divine garden on Zion the mountain of God which was also Jerusalem while the real Gihon was a spring outside the city mirroring the spring which waters Eden and the imagery of the Garden with its serpent and cherubs has been seen as a reflection of the real images of the Solomonic Temple with its copper serpent the nehushtan and guardian cherubs 80 Genesis 2 is the only place in the Bible where Eden appears as a geographic location elsewhere notably in the Book of Ezekiel it is a mythological place located on the holy Mountain of God with echoes of a Mesopotamian myth of the king as a primordial man placed in a divine garden to guard the tree of life 81 Good and evil is a merism in this case meaning simply everything but it may also have a moral connotation When God forbids the man to eat from the tree of knowledge he says that if he does so he is doomed to die the Hebrew behind this is in the form used in the Bible for issuing death sentences 82 The Creation by Lucas Cranach 1534 The first woman is created out of one of Adam s ribs to be ezer kenegdo עזר כנגדו ezer keneḡdō 83 a term notably difficult to translate to the man Keneḡdō means alongside opposite a counterpart to him and ezer means active intervention on behalf of the other person 84 God s naming of the elements of the cosmos in Genesis 1 illustrated his authority over creation now the man s naming of the animals and of Woman illustrates Adam s authority within creation 85 The woman is called ishah אשה is sah Woman with an explanation that this is because she was taken from ish א יש is meaning man 83 the two words are not in fact connected citation needed Later after the story of the Garden is complete she receives a name Ḥawwah חוה Eve This means living in Hebrew from a root that can also mean snake 86 Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer connects Eve s creation to the ancient Sumerian myth of Enki who was healed by the goddess Nin ti the Lady of the rib this became the Lady who makes live via a pun on the word ti which means both rib and to make live in Sumerian 87 The Hebrew word traditionally translated rib in English can also mean side chamber or beam 88 A long standing exegetical tradition holds that the use of a rib from man s side emphasizes that both man and woman have equal dignity for woman was created from the same material as man shaped and given life by the same processes 89 Creationism and the genre of the creation narrative Edit Eden Lucas Cranach the Elder 1472 1553 The meaning to be derived from the Genesis creation narrative will depend on the reader s understanding of its genre the literary type to which it belongs e g scientific cosmology creation myth or historical saga 90 According to Biblical scholar Francis Andersen misunderstanding the genre of the text meaning the intention of the author s and the culture within which they wrote will result in a misreading 91 Reformed evangelical scholar Bruce Waltke cautions against one such misreading the woodenly literal approach which leads to creation science but also to such implausible interpretations as the gap theory the presumption of a young earth and the denial of evolution 92 As scholar of Jewish studies Jon D Levenson puts it How much history lies behind the story of Genesis Because the action of the primeval story is not represented as taking place on the plane of ordinary human history and has so many affinities with ancient mythology it is very far fetched to speak of its narratives as historical at all 93 Another scholar Conrad Hyers summed up the same thought by writing A literalist interpretation of the Genesis accounts is inappropriate misleading and unworkable because it presupposes and insists upon a kind of literature and intention that is not there 94 Whatever else it may be Genesis 1 is story since it features character and characterization a narrator and dramatic tension expressed through a series of incidents arranged in time 95 The Priestly author of Genesis 1 had to confront two major difficulties First there is the fact that since only God exists at this point no one was available to be the narrator the storyteller solved this by introducing an unobtrusive third person narrator 96 Second there was the problem of conflict conflict is necessary to arouse the reader s interest in the story yet with nothing else existing neither a chaos monster nor another god there cannot be any conflict This was solved by creating a very minimal tension God is opposed by nothingness itself the blank of the world without form and void 96 Telling the story in this way was a deliberate choice there are a number of creation stories in the Bible but they tend to be told in the first person by Wisdom the instrument by which God created the world the choice of an omniscient third person narrator in the Genesis narrative allows the storyteller to create the impression that everything is being told and nothing held back 97 One can also regard Genesis as historylike part of a broader spectrum of originally anonymous history like ancient Near Eastern narratives 98 Scholarly writings frequently refer to Genesis as myth but there is no agreement on how to define myth and so while Brevard Childs famously suggested that the author of Genesis 1 11 demythologised his narrative meaning that he removed from his sources the Babylonian myths those elements which did not fit with his own faith others can say it is entirely mythical 7 Genesis 1 2 reflects ancient ideas about science in the words of E A Speiser on the subject of creation biblical tradition aligned itself with the traditional tenets of Babylonian science 99 The opening words of Genesis 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth sum up the author s belief that Yahweh the god of Israel was solely responsible for creation and had no rivals 100 Later Jewish thinkers adopting ideas from Greek philosophy concluded that God s Wisdom Word and Spirit penetrated all things and gave them unity 101 Christianity in turn adopted these ideas and identified Jesus with the creative word In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God John 1 1 102 When the Jews came into contact with Greek thought there followed a major reinterpretation of the underlying cosmology of the Genesis narrative The biblical authors conceived the cosmos as a flat disc shaped Earth in the centre an underworld for the dead below and heaven above 103 Below the Earth were the waters of chaos the cosmic sea home to mythic monsters defeated and slain by God in Exodus 20 4 God warns against making an image of anything that is in the waters under the earth 100 There were also waters above the Earth and so the raqia firmament a solid bowl was necessary to keep them from flooding the world 104 During the Hellenistic period this was largely replaced by a more scientific model as imagined by Greek philosophers according to which the Earth was a sphere at the centre of concentric shells of celestial spheres containing the Sun Moon stars and planets 103 The idea that God created the world out of nothing creatio ex nihilo has become central today to Islam Christianity and Judaism indeed the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides felt it was the only concept that the three religions shared 105 yet it is not found directly in Genesis nor in the entire Hebrew Bible 106 The Priestly authors of Genesis 1 were concerned not with the origins of matter the material which God formed into the habitable cosmos but with assigning roles so that the Cosmos should function 30 This was still the situation in the early 2nd century AD although early Christian scholars were beginning to see a tension between the idea of world formation and the omnipotence of God by the beginning of the 3rd century this tension was resolved world formation was overcome and creation ex nihilo had become a fundamental tenet of Christian theology 107 See also EditAdapa Anno Mundi Apollo 8 Genesis reading Atra hasis epic Allegorical interpretations of Genesis Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament Babylonian mythology Biblical chronology Biblical cosmology Biblical criticism Christian mythology Creation disambiguation Creation evolution controversy Creation mandate Cultural mandate Enuma Elis Genesis flood narrative Hexameron Islamic creation narrative Jewish mythology List of creation myths Mesopotamian mythology Ningishzida Primeval history Religion and mythology Sanamahi creation myth Sumerian creation myth Sumerian literature Tower of Babel Tree of the knowledge of good and evilNotes Edit The term myth is used here in its academic sense meaning a traditional story consisting of events that are ostensibly historical though often supernatural explaining the origins of a cultural practice or natural phenomenon It is not being used to mean something that is false Citations Edit Leeming amp Leeming 2004 p 113 a b c Sarna 1997 p 50 a b Davies 2007 p 37 Bandstra 2008 p 37 Wenham 2003b p 37 Alter 2004 p xii a b Hamilton 1990 pp 57 58 Speiser 1964 p xxi Ska 2006 pp 169 217 18 a b Alter 1981 p 141 Ruiten 2000 pp 9 10 Levenson 2004 p 9 One aspect of narrative in Genesis that requires special attention is its high tolerance for different versions of the same event a well known feature of ancient Near Eastern literature from earliest times through rabbinic midrash This could not have happened if the existence of variation were seen as a serious defect or if rigid consistency were deemed essential to effective storytelling a b Carr 1996 pp 62 64 Carr 1996 p 64 Cross 1973 pp 301ff Thomas 2011 pp 27 28 a b Lambert 1965 a b Levenson 2004 p 9 Leeming 2004 Smith 2001 Kutsko 2000 p 62 quoting J Maxwell Miller McDermott 2002 pp 25 27 Mark Smith Wayne Pitard 2008 The Ugaritic Baal Cycle Volume II Introduction with Text Translation and Commentary of KTU CAT 1 3 1 4 Brill p 615 ISBN 978 90 474 4232 5 Van Seters 1992 pp 122 24 Carr 1996 p 242 248 Dolansky 2016 Fishbane 2003 pp 34 35 Hutton 2007 p 274 Levenson 2004 p 13 a b c Walton 2006 p 183 Hyers 1984 p 74 Wenham 1987 p 6 a b Overn 2017 p 119 Genesis 1 1 1 2 Bandstra 2008 pp 38 39 Spence 2010 p 72 Knight 1990 pp 175 76 a b Walton 2001 Alter 2004 p 17 Thompson 1980 p 230 Wenham 2003a p 29 Blenkinsopp 2011 pp 33 34 Blenkinsopp 2011 pp 21 22 Genesis 1 3 1 5 Walton 2003 p 158 Bandstra 2008 p 39 Genesis 1 6 1 8 Hamilton 1990 p 122 Seeley 1991 p 227 Walton 2003 pp 158 59 Genesis 1 9 1 13 Seeley 1997 p 236 Bandstra 2008 p 41 Kissling 2004 p 106 Genesis 1 14 1 19 Bandstra 2008 pp 41 42 Walsh 2001 p 37 fn 5 Hamilton 1990 p 127 Genesis 1 20 1 23 Walton 2003 p 160 Genesis 1 24 31 Alter 2004 pp 18 19 21 Kvam et al 1999 p 24 Davidson 1973 p 24 Levenson 2004 p 14 Rogerson 1991 pp 19ff Knohl 2003 p 13 Genesis 2 1 2 3 Walton 2006 pp 157 58 a b Stordalen 2000 pp 473 74 Van Seters 1998 p 22 Andersen 1987 pp 137 40 Alter 2004 pp 20 22 Davidson 1973 p 31 Levenson 2004 p 15 Davidson 1973 p 29 Levenson 2004 p 9 The story of Adam and Eve s sin in the garden of Eden 2 25 3 24 displays similarities with Gilgamesh an epic poem that tells how its hero lost the opportunity for immortality and came to terms with his humanity the biblical narrator has adapted the Mesopotamian forerunner to Israelite theology Kooij 2010 p 17 Propp 1990 p 193 Stordalen 2000 pp 307 10 Davidson 1973 p 33 Alter 2004 p 21 a b Galambush 2000 p 436 Alter 2004 p 22 Turner 2009 p 20 Hastings 2003 p 607 Kramer 1963 p 149 Jacobs 2007 p 37 Hugenberger 1988 p 184 Wood 1990 pp 323 24 Andersen 1987 p 142 Waltke 1991 pp 6 9 Levenson 2004 p 11 Hyers 1984 p 28 Cotter 2003 pp 5 9 a b Cotter 2003 p 7 Cotter 2003 p 8 Carr 1996 p 21 In summary rather than creating a fully new text after the manner of a modern novelist or even a modern historian ancient authors of historylike narratives like Gilgamesh or Genesis would often build their text out of earlier traditions Seen within this perspective Genesis is part of a broader spectrum of originally anonymous history like ancient Near Eastern narratives Seidman 2010 p 166 a b Wright 2002 p 53 Kaiser 1997 p 28 Parrish 1990 pp 183 84 a b Aune 2003 p 119 Ryken et al 1998 p 170 Soskice 2010 p 24 Nebe 2002 p 119 May 2004 p 179 References EditAlter Robert 1981 The Art of Biblical narrative Basic Books ISBN 978 0 465 00427 0 Alter Robert 2004 The Five Books of Moses W W Norton amp Company ISBN 0 393 33393 0 Andersen Francis I 1987 On Reading Genesis 1 3 In O Connor Michael Patrick Freedman David Noel eds Backgrounds for the Bible Eisenbrauns ISBN 978 0 931464 30 0 Aune David E 2003 Cosmology Westminster Dictionary of the New Testament and Early Christian Literature Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 978 0 664 21917 8 Bandstra Barry L 2008 Reading the Old Testament An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible Wadsworth Publishing Company p 576 ISBN 978 0 495 39105 0 Blenkinsopp Joseph 2011 Creation Un Creation Re Creation A Discursive Commentary on Genesis 1 11 T amp T Clarke International ISBN 978 0 567 37287 1 Bouteneff Peter C 2008 Beginnings Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narrative Grand Rapids Michigan Baker Academic ISBN 978 0 8010 3233 2 Brettler Mark Zvi 2005 How To Read the Bible Jewish Publication Society ISBN 978 0 8276 1001 9 Brueggemann Walter 1982 Genesis 1 1 2 4 Interpretation of Genesis Westminster John Knox Press p 382 ISBN 978 0 8042 3101 5 Carr David M 1996 Reading the Fractures in Genesis Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 0 664 22071 1 Carr David M 2011 The Garden of Eden Story An Introduction to the Old Testament John Wiley amp Sons ISBN 978 1 4443 5623 6 Cotter David W 2003 Genesis Liturgical Press ISBN 978 0 8146 5040 0 Cross Frank Moore 1973 The Priestly Work Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel Harvard University Press p 394 ISBN 0 674 09176 0 Dalley Stephanie 2000 Myths from Mesopotamia Creation the Flood Gilgamesh and Others Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 283589 5 Davidson Robert 1973 Genesis 1 11 Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 09760 4 Davies G I 2007 Introduction to the Pentateuch In Barton John Muddiman John eds Oxford Bible Commentary Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 927718 6 Dolansky Shawna 2016 The Multiple Truths of Myths Biblical Archaeology Review 42 1 18 60 Fishbane Michael 2003 Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking Oxford University Press ISBN 0 19 826733 9 Friedman Richard Elliott 2003 The Bible with Sources Revealed HarperCollins ISBN 978 0 06 195129 9 Galambush Julie 2000 Eve In Freedman David Noel Myers Allen C eds Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible Grand Rapids Mich William B Eerdmans Publishing Co ISBN 978 9 0535 6503 2 Ginzberg Louis 1909 The Legends of the Jews PDF Jewish Publication Society p 695 Graves Robert Patai Raphael 1986 Hebrew Myths The Book of Genesis Random House ISBN 978 0 7953 3715 4 Hamilton Victor P 1990 The Book of Genesis Chapters 1 17 New International Commentary on the Old Testament NICOT Grand Rapids William B Eerdmans Publishing Company p 540 ISBN 0 8028 2521 4 Hastings James 2003 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Part 10 Kessinger Publishing ISBN 978 0 7661 3682 3 Heidel Alexander 1963 Babylonian Genesis 2nd ed Chicago University Press ISBN 0 226 32399 4 Heidel Alexander 1963 The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels 2nd Revised ed Chicago University Press ISBN 0 226 32398 6 Hugenberger G P 1988 Rib In Bromiley Geoffrey W ed The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Volume 4 Eerdmans ISBN 978 0 8028 3784 4 Hutton Jeremy 2007 Isaiah 51 9 11 and the Rhetorical Appropriation and Subversion of Hostile Theologies Journal of Biblical Literature Society of Biblical Literature 126 2 271 303 doi 10 2307 27638435 JSTOR 27638435 Hyers Conrad 1984 The Meaning of Creation Genesis and Modern Science Westminster John Knox ISBN 978 0 8042 0125 4 Jacobs Mignon R 2007 Gender Power and Persuasion The Genesis Narratives and Contemporary Perspectives Baker Academic ISBN 978 0 8010 2706 2 Janzen David 2004 The Social Meanings of Sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible A Study of Four Writings Walter de Gruyter Publisher ISBN 978 3 11 018158 6 Kaiser Christopher B 1997 Creational Theology and the History of Physical Science Brill ISBN 90 04 10669 3 Kaplan Aryeh 2002 Hashem Elokim Mixing Mercy with Justice The Aryeh Kaplan Reader The Gift He Left Behind Mesorah Publication Ltd p 224 ISBN 0 89906 173 7 Retrieved 29 December 2010 Keel Othmar 1997 The Symbolism of the Biblical World Eisenbrauns ISBN 978 1 57506 014 9 King Leonard 2010 Enuma Elish The Seven Tablets of Creation The Babylonian and Assyrian Legends Concerning the Creation of the World and of Mankind Cosimo Inc Kissling Paul 2004 Genesis Volume 1 College Press ISBN 978 0 89900 875 2 Knight Douglas A 1990 Cosmology In Watson E Mills ed Mercer Dictionary of the Bible Mercer University Press ISBN 978 0 86554 373 7 Knohl Israel 2003 The Divine Symphony The Bible s Many Voices Jewish Publication Society ISBN 978 0 8276 1018 7 Kooij Arie van der 2010 The Story of Paradise in the Light of Mesopotamian Culture and Literature In Dell Katherine J Davies Graham Koh Yee Von eds Genesis Isaiah and Psalms Brill ISBN 978 90 04 18231 8 Kramer Samuel Noah 1956 History Begins at Sumer Thirty Nine Firsts in Recorded History Kramer Samuel Noah 1963 The Sumerians Their History Culture and Character University of Chicago Press ISBN 0 226 45238 7 Kugler Robert Hartin Patrick 2009 An Introduction to the Bible Eerdmans ISBN 978 0 8028 4636 5 Kutsko John F 2000 Between Heaven and Earth Divine Presence and Absence in the Book of Ezekiel Eisenbrauns ISBN 978 1 57506 041 5 Kvam Kristen E Schearing Linda S Ziegler Valarie H eds 1999 Eve and Adam Jewish Christian and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender Indiana University Press p 515 ISBN 0 253 21271 5 Lambert W G 1965 A New Look at the Babylonian Background of Genesis The Journal of Theological Studies Vol 16 no 2 pp 287 300 JSTOR 23959032 Leeming David A 2010 Creation Myths of the World An Encyclopedia Vol 1 ABC CLIO ISBN 978 1 59884 174 9 Leeming David A 2004 Biblical creation The Oxford Companion to World Mythology Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 515669 0 Retrieved 5 May 2010 Leeming David A Leeming Margaret 2004 A Dictionary of Creation Myths Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 510275 8 Levenson Jon D 2004 Genesis Introduction and Annotations In Berlin Adele Brettler Marc Zvi eds The Jewish study Bible Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 529751 5 Louth Andrew 2001 Introduction In Andrew Louth ed Genesis 1 11 InterVarsity Press ISBN 978 0 8308 1471 8 May Gerhard 2004 Creatio Ex Nihilo English trans of 1994 ed T amp T Clarke International ISBN 978 0 567 08356 2 McDermott John J 2002 Reading the Pentateuch A Historical Introduction Paulist Press ISBN 978 0 8091 4082 4 McMullin Ernin 2010 Creation Ex Nihilo Early History In Burrell David B Cogliati Carlo Soskice Janet M Stoeger William R eds Creation and the God of Abraham Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 1 139 49078 8 Nebe Gottfried 2002 Creation in Paul s Theology In Hoffman Yair Reventlow Henning Graf eds Creation in Jewish and Christian Tradition Sheffield Academic Press ISBN 978 0 567 57393 3 Overn William March 2017 Review Repetition in the Bible PDF Lutheran Synod Quarterly 57 1 Parrish V Steven 1990 Creation In Watson E Mills ed Mercer Dictionary of the Bible Mercer University Press ISBN 978 0 86554 373 7 Penchansky David November 2005 Twilight of the Gods Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible U S Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 0 664 22885 2 Propp W H 1990 Eden Sketches In Propp W H Halpern Baruch Freedman D N eds The Hebrew Bible and its Interpreters Eisenbrauns ISBN 978 0 931464 52 2 Ruiten Jacques T A G M 2000 Primaeval History Interpreted Brill ISBN 90 04 11658 3 Rogerson John William 1991 Genesis 1 11 T amp T Clark ISBN 978 0 567 08338 8 Sarna Nahum M 1997 The Mists of Time Genesis I II In Feyerick Ada ed Genesis World of Myths and Patriarchs New York NYU Press p 560 ISBN 0 8147 2668 2 Ryken Leland Wilhoit Jim Longman Tremper Duriez Colin Penney Douglas Reid Daniel G eds 1998 Cosmology Dictionary of Biblical Imagery InterVarsity Press ISBN 978 0 8308 6733 2 Sawyer John F A 1992 The Image of God the Wisdom of Serpents and the Knowledge of Good and Evil In Paul Morris Deborah Sawyer ed A Walk in the Garden Biblical Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden Sheffield Academic Press Press ISBN 978 0 567 02447 3 Schwartz Howard Loebel Fried Caren Ginsburg Elliot K 2007 Tree of Souls The Mythology of Judaism Oxford University Press p 704 ISBN 978 0 19 535870 4 Seidman Naomi 2010 Translation In Ronald Hendel ed Reading Genesis Ten Methods Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 521 51861 1 Seeley Paul H 1991 The Firmament and the Water Above The Meaning of Raqia in Genesis 1 6 8 PDF Westminster Theological Journal Westminster Theological Seminary 53 227 40 Archived from the original PDF on 5 March 2009 Retrieved 11 December 2007 Seeley Paul H 1997 The Geographical Meaning of Earth and Seas in Genesis 1 10 PDF Westminster Theological Journal Westminster Theological Seminary 59 231 55 Archived from the original PDF on 16 October 2020 Retrieved 11 December 2007 Ska Jean Louis 2006 Introduction to Reading the Pentateuch Eisenbrauns ISBN 978 1 57506 122 1 Smith Mark S October 2002 The Early History of God Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel 2nd ed William B Eerdmans Publishing Co ISBN 0 8028 3972 X Smith Mark S November 2001 The Origins of Biblical Monotheism Israel s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts New ed Oxford University Press USA ISBN 0 19 516768 6 Soskice Janet M 2010 Creatio ex nihilo its Jewish and Christian foundations In Burrell David B Cogliati Carlo Soskice Janet M Stoeger William R eds Creation and the God of Abraham Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 1 139 49078 8 Speiser Ephraim Avigdor 1964 Genesis Doubleday Spence Lewis 2010 1916 Myths and Legends of Babylonia and Assyria Cosimo Inc p 72 ISBN 978 1 61640 464 2 Stenhouse John 2000 Genesis and Science In Gary B Ferngren ed The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition An Encyclopedia New York London Garland Publishing Inc p 76 ISBN 0 8153 1656 9 Stagg Evelyn and Frank 1978 Genesis and Science Woman in the World of Jesus Philadelphia Pennsylvania Westminster Press p 135 ISBN 0 664 24195 6 Stordalen Terje 2000 Echoes of Eden Peeters ISBN 978 90 429 0854 3 Thomas Matthew A 2011 These Are the Generations Identity Covenant and the Toledot Formula T amp T Clark Continuum ISBN 978 0 567 48764 3 Thompson J A 1980 Jeremiah New International Commentary on the Old Testament 2nd ed Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Company p 831 ISBN 0 8028 2530 3 J A Thompson Jeremiah Tsumura David Toshio 2005 Creation And Destruction A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament Eisenbrauns ISBN 978 1 57506 106 1 Turner Laurence A 2009 Genesis Sheffield Phoenix Press ISBN 978 1 906055 65 3 Van Seters John 1998 The Pentateuch In McKenzie Steven L Graham M Patrick eds The Hebrew Bible Today An Introduction to Critical Issues Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 978 0 664 25652 4 Van Seters John 1992 Prologue to History The Yahwist As Historian in Genesis New International Commentary on the Old Testament Westminster John Knox Press ISBN 0 664 22179 3 Walsh Jerome T 2001 Style and Structure in Biblical Hebrew Narrative Liturgical Press ISBN 978 0 8146 5897 0 Waltke Bruce 1991 The Literary Genre of Genesis Chapter One PDF Crux Westminster Theological Seminary 27 4 Archived from the original PDF on 29 April 2014 Walton John H 2006 Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible Baker Academic ISBN 0 8010 2750 0 Walton John H 2003 Creation In T Desmond Alexander David Weston Baker ed Dictionary of the Old Testament Pentateuch InterVarsity Press ISBN 978 0 8308 1781 8 Walton John H 2001 Genesis Zondervan ISBN 978 0 310 86620 6 Walton John H Matthews Victor H Chavalas Mark W 2000 Genesis The IVP Bible Background Commentary Old Testament InterVarsity Press ISBN 978 0 8308 1419 0 Wenham Gordon 2003a Exploring the Old Testament A Guide to the Pentateuch Exploring the Bible Series Vol 1 IVP Academic p 223 Wenham Gordon 2003b Genesis In Dunn James Douglas Grant Rogerson J John William eds Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible Eerdmans ISBN 978 0 8028 3711 0 Wenham Gordon 1987 Genesis 1 15 Vol 1 and 2 Texas Word Books ISBN 0 8499 0200 2 Whybray R N 2001 Genesis In John Barton ed Oxford Bible Commentary Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 875500 5 Wood Ralpth C 1990 Genre Concept of In Watson E Mills ed Mercer Dictionary of the Bible Mercer University Press ISBN 978 0 86554 373 7 Wright J Edward 2002 The Early History of Heaven Oxford University Press ISBN 978 0 19 534849 1 Wylen Stephen M 2005 Chapter 6 Midrash The Seventy Faces of Torah The Jewish way of Reading the Sacred Scriptures Paulist Press p 256 ISBN 0 8091 4179 5 External links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Creation according to Genesis Biblical texts Edit Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Hebrew English text translated according to the JPS 1917 Edition Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Hebrew English text with Rashi s commentary The translation is the authoritative Judaica Press version edited by Rabbi A J Rosenberg Chapter 1 Archived 6 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine Chapter 2 Archived 4 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine New American Bible Chapter 1 Chapter 2 King James Version Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Revised Standard Version Chapter 1 Chapter 2 New Living Translation Chapter 1 Chapter 2 New American Standard Bible Chapter 1 Chapter 2 New International Version UK Mesopotamian texts Edit Enuma Elish at Encyclopedia of the Orient Summary of Enuma Elish with links to full text ETCSL Text and translation of the Eridu Genesis alternate site The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature Oxford Epic of Gilgamesh summary Archived 30 December 2005 at the Wayback Machine British Museum Cuneiform tablet from Sippar with the story of Atra HasisRelated links Edit Human Timeline Interactive Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History August 2016 Portals Bible Christianity Evolutionary biology Islam Judaism Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Genesis creation narrative amp 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