Atheist Bible Study 1: Genesis

[SteveII]

You can't study Genesis 1 without textual criticism:

To understand what scholars are talking about when they discuss the "J" or "E" or "P" Text of Genesis, it helps if we look closely at the first two chapters of Genesis*, which illustrate the subject. If we note some textual oddities first, it becomes easier to see how scholars formulated the ideas of the J, E, and P text.

To begin, when textual criticism and its systematic techniques for analyzing ancient manuscripts first became available in the 18th and 19th centuries (and even earlier in nonscholarly readings from the Renaissance) many readers noticed some odd details in the book we call Genesis. The first part of Genesis (1:1-2:3) differed from the later parts (Genesis 2:4-3:23) in interesting ways.

(1) First, each of these two sections of Genesis contains a different introduction for the creation story. Genesis 1:1 launches with the eloquent and imminently quotable, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

The text reaches its conclusion in Genesis 2:1, where the narrative voice announces, "Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array." Finis. The end. However, a second introduction appears in Genesis 2:4: "This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth . . . ." This initially seems a little redundant--at least on the surface of things. It seems to suggest a second creation story rather than one alone.

(2) The sections also differ in genre. One is written in poetry and the other is written in prose. Genesis 1:1-2:3 is a poetic text. It is metered, and probably the writer(s) intended for it to be sung as a hymnic chant. Rhyme is not all that important in Hebrew poetry, but Hebrew poems commonly use repetition, chiasmus, parallelism, and other rhetorical schemes and tropes. The Genesis 1 text uses "high style" and those artistic devices common to Hebrew poetry--especially catachresis, anaphora, and parallelism. To indicate these artistic qualities here, most NIV translations reproduce the text with hanging indentation to mark the poetic structure. Each section begins with an anaphora: "And God said . . ." Each section ends with epistrophe: "And there was evening, and there was morning--the . . . day." Likewise, after the first two days, we have the artistic repetition of the phrase "And God saw that it was good," leading up to a final crescendo, "and it was very good" in Genesis 1:31. This structure is high poetry in the best Hebrew style.

Contrast that with the material following. Genesis 2:4-3:23 is a non-poetic text. It is written in prose rather than in poetic lines--no meter. It does not use anaphora and parallelism the same way as that first section. To indicate the non-poetic nature of the text here, most NIV translations break the text into paragraphs. In terms of literary devices, the primary schemes and tropes are puns providing Hebrew folk etymologies. For instance, the narrative voice tells us that humanity (the Hebrew word adam) is called adam because God made him from adamah (ground or dust). The folk etymology provides an etiology explaining why the word for "woman" in Hebrew sounds so much like the Hebrew word for "man."

(3) Partly because of the difference between poetic devices and puns, and partly because of changes in diction, the tone of each passage is quite different. In the Genesis 1 passage, the diction is grandiose--designed to emphasize the majesty and the ordered nature of creation. In Genesis 2:4 and following, the tone becomes more familiar--more "folksy" and simple. We have moved away from the grandeur of the heavens where a disembodied Spirit of God hovers over the dark waters to a smaller setting--the muck and dirt of a single garden where we find God shaping men out of mud and where animals like the serpent can talk in the best beast fable tradition.

(4) Fourth, Genesis 1:1-2:3 treats the matter of creation differently than in Genesis 2:4 and following passages. In Genesis 1:27, God simultaneously creates multiple men and women on the sixth day, and he does so by speaking:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [Note the plural forms indicated by the object pronouns them in the top and bottom passages]

Contrast this bit with the section following Genesis 2:4, where we read a different creation account: "And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7). Here, rather than an abstract and transcendental deity that speaks humanity effortlessly into existence, we have a God who works in the dirt and sculpts a single male human from the earth, rather than one who commands the land itself to produce living creatures. God, as described in this passage, uses a form of divine C.P.R. to instill his holy essence in humanity. To create woman, rather than making several different men simultaneously with several different women, God in Genesis 2:21-22 extracts a rib from Adam and fashions Eve out of this body part--but without breathing his essence directly into her.**

The acts of creation characterize God differently in each section, suggesting a different perspective or attitude towards God. In Genesis 1:-2:1, the Spirit of God need not exert himself to create the cosmos--only talk. He is an abstract, remote, omnipotent, and grandiose God hovering over the dark waters. Creation is effortless.

When we get to Genesis 2:2, however, we have a God that can grow tired and needs rest: "so on the seventh day, he rested from all his work." Rather than presenting the remote and omnipotent deity appearing in Genesis 1, this section of Genesis depicts a God who needs helpers like Adam to tend his creation. This depiction characterizes God in a more earthy, physical manner. Instead of speaking Eden into being, he plants the garden (Gen 2:8). Additionally, he feels sympathy for lonely humanity (Hebrew adam), so he builds him a helper (Gen. 2:20-21). This God takes walks in the shade of the garden (but he only goes for walks when the day is cool, as Genesis 2:8 tells us--apparently to avoid the hot weather?). Furthermore, the text characterizes God as limited in perception rather than omniscient. When Adam and Eve hide from God, God can't seem to locate them, so God calls out to them to reveal themselves (Genesis 3:9). It's a striking difference in the narrative voice and in characterization.

(5) The sequence of what gets created when appears to be slightly different in each account. In Genesis 1:1-2:3, the sequence is as follows:

Day One: Light or "Day" is separated from Darkness or "Night." We have an evening and a morning pass by (though the sun and moon are not yet created, nor solid ground to be a revolving earth).
Day Two: An expanse or barrier (the firmament) is made to separate and hold apart the "waters above" and the "waters below." Another evening and another morning pass.
Day Three: God separates the "waters below" from dry land. The "waters above" are still left in place somewhere above the firmament. On the same day, God commands the land to produce vegetation including both seed-bearing trees and plants (though the sun is not yet created for photosynthesis). Another evening and another morning passes.
Day Four: The sun, the moon, and the stars are created. Another evening and another morning pass.
Day Five: Aquatic creatures and birds are created. Another evening and another morning pass.
Day Six: Terrestrial creatures are created--including livestock and "all the creatures that move along the ground." Then God makes humans. Another evening and another morning pass.
Day Seven: God rests from his labors.

This account above from Genesis 1:1-2:3 contains elements very similar to Mesopotamian creation stories found in The Epic of Gilgamesh and other texts. It takes ideas of the firmament common in both Egyptian and Mesopotamian cosmology, but it restructures the creation so that it is the work of a single deity rather than a combined effort of several gods in conflict. Like the Egyptian and Mesopotamian creation stories common in the 8th century BCE, it assumes a chaotic watery darkness as the primal state of the cosmos.

https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/Genesis_texts.html

This is only half. The other half is just as interesting.