Evolving Thoughts

Creationists and literalists like to talk about the book of Genesis as if it were a science textbook, which they can interpret to find anything that science has independently discovered unless they don't like it, such as evolution.

A while back, I got to thinking, "What sort of world would it be if Genesis were right?" And so I started casually reading it from time to time as if the final editor of Genesis actually meant the things he allows the text to say. This is the first in an intermittent and occasional series.

Now it is clear that Genesis is a redaction (a fancy word for edited text) of three or more prior traditions, and in particular that Genesis 1-3 is a mishmash (or do we say mashup these days?) of these traditions, but I'm not concerned with what those prior storytellers may have thought, but with what the redactor, sometimes called R, after the return from Exile in Babylon, thought the world was like in putting together the received text, or something very like it.

So the text is to be read as if there were no other texts, especially of the New Testament, to modify our interpretation. Let's begin. A cautionary note: I have no Hebrew, so I rely on this interlinear text and links.

The first sentence is "When the gods [Elohim, a plural form] began to create the sky and the earth, the earth was unshaped and empty, and there was darkness over the deep, and the spirit of the gods fluttered over the waters." OK, I'm doing some interpretive reporting here. "Elohim" could mean "gods", or it could mean "powers" or it could be, and probably is, a periphrasis for the deity of Israel, at least in P's mind. And "fluttering" is taken from the verb "ra-hhaph". It calls into mind the plastic bag scene in American Beauty.

But it's clear that the author here, who is the Priestly author, c700BCE, after the return from Exile in Babylon, thought that the waters and the deep were eternal, or at least pre-existing. No creatio ex nihilo here. God does what other deities of the time are reported as doing - he divides what already exists into sky and land, and God's spirit flutters like a bird over it.

Then the magical words are spoken - "let there be light!" and God creates (bara, which I am given to understand means, etymologically, to cut or slash) a division between light and dark. The first division is into that which is light and that which is dark. Then God creates a division along temporal lines - light and dark will alternate to form days. The text is clear - the "days" of Genesis are actual days formed by alternating illumination, and it precedes the sun, the earth, and even the sky.

So in this world, days and nights are something basic, not caused by the sun. What do we have so far? We have a world of deep water, with an obvious surface (or else how does the spirit of God flutter over it?). As Woody Allen said, there's still nothing there [but water], but it is now more easy to see, and we have some idea of passing time.

A passing note: about the time this text is redacted (late fifth C BCE) there is a movement in Asia Minor, now Turkey, known as the Milesian School in which philosophical accounts of the nature of the universe treat the world as primarily composed on some single element. The founder, Thales, thought that it was water, so it looks to me as if the ruling view of the ancient near east (ANE) was that water (tihom, in Hebrew, and tiamat, in the Enuma Elish) was the primordial element (arche in Greek) of unformed matter.

So, by the end of day one, the watery chaos is illuminated and day is created. In the second day, however, God (or gods) separates the waters with a solid firmament that forms the sky (the heavens). Now we have a world that is surrounded by water, with a space made by a solid firmament. The firmament gets called "heaven" or "sky". The term used for firmament apparently has the etymology of "hammered out", like a bronze sheet. So the firmament is a sheet that separates the waters above and the waters below.

This universe isn't looking very much like our own, is it? in fact the firmament is the crucial stumbling block throughout Christian, and to a lesser extent Jewish, exegesis of Genesis, according to Catholic theologian Stanley Jaki. But there the firmament is... solid and dividing waters above and waters below. The universe is thus a water volume with a hard dome covering a flat earth.

Unlike the surrounding ANE mythologies (like the Egyptian equivalent of the Genesis cosmology shown in the image), Genesis doesn't personify the elements and objects of the universe, nor does it require that the universe is built from the parts of prior personal gods. Elohim here is a craftsman, taking pre-existent material and shaping it. The next step is to shape some land...

So in what we now call verse 9, Elohim says "the waters under the firmament be gathered to one side, and let dry land appear". The text doesn't say from what dry land is made - it's as if dry land is the negation of the waters, and simply removing the waters leaves land. Elohim obviously likes this arrangement - for after naming land and sea, He sees that it is good, which presumably He didn't know beforehand.

So the cosmos is thus: water, surrounding a hard dome, with water beneath it gathered to one side, leaving dry land. It is by implication flat. There's no stars or sun yet, but there's light, and day and night.

The physics of such a universe are also of interest. Obviously things fall down because that's what things do. The universe has only one direction of fall. The existence of the waters above the firmament and beneath the land are important for the later flood story, of course.

Now we get to the interesting stuff: living kinds. I'll deal with them next post...