The Lost World of Genesis One (Part One)

In 2009, John Walton, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, wrote a very important book on interpreting Genesis 1 in regards to its Ancient Near-Eastern (ANE) background.  Do yourself a favor and go buy it.  Each book chapter is helpfully divided up into its own discrete thesis statement, and as it seems every three chapters cover complimentary theses, I thought it would be interesting to outline Walton's book three chapters at a time.  We won't be covering the whole book, as toward the end (after about proposition 13) his topics become more generalized in nature--about science and religion, metaphysics, etc. ...  But what I am truly interested in here is outlining his ANE interpretation of Genesis.  So lets begin with synopses of the first three theses!

Proposition One: Genesis 1 Is Ancient Cosmology

To many, this will perhaps read as a fairly banal statement--of course its ancient cosmology.  But the importance here should not be missed: "The Israelites received no revelation to update or modify their 'scientific' understanding of the cosmos." (14)

While Walton tries to remain fairly neutral regarding the debates that rage regarding Genesis, it is hard to see how this thesis could read as anything but a spectacular offensive against "literalist" readings that assume Genesis is offering an unassailable and timeless (because revealed) scientific cosmology.  The Israelites 

Did not know that stars were suns; they did not know that the earth was spherical and moving through space; they did not know that the sun was much farther away than the moon; or even further than birds flying in the air.  They believed that the sky was material (not vaporous), solid enough to support the residence of deity as well as hold back waters.  In these ways, and many others, they thought about the cosmos in much the same way that anyone in the ancient world thought, and not at all like anyone thinks today.  And God did not think it important to revise their thinking.

Here Walton offers a less contentions example than the creation narrative:

 In the ancient world people believe that the seat of intelligence, emotion, and personhood was in the internal organs, particularly the heart, but also the liver, the kidneys, and intestines.  Many Bible translations use the English word 'mind' when the Hebrew text refers to the entrails, showing the ways in which language and culture are interrelated.  In modern language we still refer to the heart metaphorically as the seat of emotions,  In the ancient world this was not metaphor, but physiology.  Yet we must notice that when God wanted to talk to the Israelites about their intellect, emotion, and will, he did not revise their ideas of physiology and feel compelled to reveal the function of the brain.  Instead, he adopted the terms of the culture to communicate in terms they understood. (16)

This analogy, Walton contends, holds for the Bible's cosmogenic beliefs as well.

Moreover, Walton points out that scripture is simply not interested in outlining an "interventionist" God who meddles in the "natural" course of things--precisely because there was no "natural course."  The Israelites, "along with everyone else," believed that every event, every act, "was the act of deity--every plant that grew, every baby born, every drop of rain and every climatic disaster was an act of God." (18)  As a result, "we should not expect anything in the Bible of the rest of the ANE to engage in the discussion of how God's level of creative activity relates to the 'natural' world ... The categories of 'natural' and 'supernatural' have no meaning to them ... The ancients would never dream of addressing how things might have come into being without God or what 'natural' processes He might have used." (18-19).  To juxtapose some "natural" mechanism as ruling out God's working, is thus an anachronistic imposition upon the text.

Proposition Two: Ancient Cosmology is Function Oriented.

Here is where things start to get a little brain-bending for us modern folk tending to read our own "commonsense" intuitions into the text.

In a discussion of origins we need to focus on the ontology of the cosmos.  What does it mean for the world or the cosmos (or the objects in it) to exist? ... When we speak of cosmic ontology these days, it can be seen that our culture views existence, and therefore meaning, in material terms. ... we consequently believe that to create something means to bring its material properties into existence.  Thus our discussions of origins tends to focus on material origins. (22-23)

For the ancient world, by contrast, Walton argues that things existed not by virtue of its material properties, but by virtue of its "having a function in an ordered system." (24)  And by this Walton does not mean an ordered system "in scientific terms, but an ordered system in human terms, that is, in relation to society and culture."

In this sort of functional ontology, "the sun does not exist by virtue of its material properties, or even its function as a burning ball of gas.  Rather it exists by virtue of the role that it has in its sphere of existence, particularly in the way that it functions for humankind and human society.  In theory, this way of thinking could result in something being included in the 'existent' category in a material way, but still considered in the non-existent category in functional terms.  In a functional ontology, to bring something into existence would require giving it function or a role in an ordered system, rather than giving it material properties." (24)

At this point Walton asks how we know this, and so spends the next several pages going over ANE sources like Egyptian Memphite theology, or Babylonian and Sumerian cosmogenic literature (26-32).  The takeaway here is:

Analysts of the ANE creation literature often observe that nothing material is actually made in these accounts.  This is an intriguing observation.  Scholars who have assumed that true acts of creation must by definition involve production of material objects are apparently baffled that all of these so-called creation texts have nothing of what these scholars would consider to be creative activities. ...The solution is to modify what we consider creation activities based on what we find in the literature. ... We find that people in the ANE did not think of creation in terms of making material things--instead everything is function oriented.  The gods are beginning their own operations and are making all of the elements of the cosmos operational.  Creation thus constituted bringing order to the cosmos from an originally nonfunctional condition. (33)

Here Walton's observation lines up with the general consensus view, as far as I can tell, that though creatio ex nihilo is a legitimate theological reading of Scripture, this is something that follows by inference, and is a somewhat later interpretation than what is contained in the text itself.

Proposition Three: "Create" (Hebrew bara) Concerns Functions

Walton rightly notes we cannot rest content with the implications of our English verb "create" when reading Genesis, for this imports false assumptions into the Hebrew verb.  Bara itself occurs fifty times in the Old Testament, and deity is always either the subject or the implied subject.  So here "create" cannot be meant generically; rather it is an act specifically within the prerogative of God. (38).  Walton lays out a chart (40-41) enumerating all 50 objects related to the verb in the Old Testament and notes that in each it is not easy to see that they relate to a "material" creation.  Rather they appear to demand a functional-creative interpretation.

What is the takeaway of all of this?  It is hinted at in the opening lines of Chapter 4 (to be looked at in more detail next post):

If existence in the Ancient world was best defined in functional terms rather than material ones, as suggested in previous chapters, and 'create' is the activity that brings that transition from nonexistence to existence, then 'creation' would also be a functional activity. (46)

In other words, Genesis is not focusing on the mechanics of design, or answering the "how" question regarding just how the first material instantiation of things came about (say, through evolution or otherwise) but on the purpose of things.  Genesis is not formulating Leibniz' question: Why not nothing? Why is there anything at all?  Rather Genesis is pointing out: wherefore this something, that is?  To what end?  As such, to read Genesis as somehow competing with current day cosmological theory is a giant category mistake regarding the actual questions the text is attempting to answer.  As one of my own Hebrew profs was fond of saying when we were translating Genesis: "You think you are reading about Creation.  You're wrong.  You are being introduced to God."