Re: On Paleotheology

01/04/2008; 01/07/2008


Genesis 1;2

Reading Genesis from "the beginning" for the first time is seriously trippy, like watching a David Lynch film. According to my initial reading from the New Revised Standard Version, God did not create everything out of nothing as is commonly described. This account is a story about someone creating the "heavens and the earth," but not the water. The earth itself before it's "creation" was a "formless void." My interpretation of this English phrase is that the earth, that is the dusty land mass upon which we build our homes, did not exist at all. However, at this same moment, "a wind from God swept over the face of the waters." So, in the beginning, there was water! Water was certainly the only matter or object of visual import to be made visible by light, on the first day.

For me, the second day is probably the most interesting part of chapter 1. The entirety of creation, including the earth, the air, and all heavenly bodies (stars and planets), is contained within a dome that God opens between the waters above and the waters below. I believe that our earth is a sphere that revolves around the sun as part of a larger solar system. The limits of our universe are still inscrutable to the human eye and telescope. The implication of Genesis chapter one, when harmonized with our contemporary cosmology (namely our understanding of outer space), is that our cosmos does not go on forever. Rather, beyond the limits of our universe there is water that, in the beginning, touched the water of our own oceans, lakes, precipitation, faucets, toilets, and our own bodies. For this reason, I would think that water and all that it touches should be considered as sacred, for it is our surest and most primordial link to other living beings and to a world beyond our own.
The other thing that I noticed about this story is that in what I will call "the first account," God brings about creation simply by uttering subjunctive statements, such as "let there be light." In each of six days, God speaks a different phrase starting with "let there . . ." followed by the precipitous appearance of a new reality. If I try to make sense of this story as a human story, since we cannot avoid the notion that we are assigning human traits to God, the best thing that I can come up with is that we are glimpsing inside someone's imagination. Only inside our imaginations can we encounter a field in which discursive thoughts are spontaneously manifested into physical phenomena. Genesis chapter one sets the stage for a conception of our present day reality as being contained within the dream sequence of a person named, "God." As many of us have certainly mused since childhood, perhaps we are figments of someone's imagination. In Genesis chapter 1, that someone is none other than God.

But who is this person? If we consider the impact of Hebrew grammar on the subject of our story, "God," we must first observe that the term for God used here, 'elohiym", can be translated with a plural number and by some estimation could be translated as "gods." This word is sometimes translated plural and sometimes singular, according to Strong's Concordance. If the subject of this story is indeed plural, it behaves within the narrative unlike most other groups of persons with which I am familiar. For even if the many gods are at work in creation, they speak with one single voice. If there were any consensus process happening behind the scenes in the story, it is not revealed to the reader. Reading between the lines, I would imagine that the conversation around the table of the council of the gods went something like this:

god Goldenstein: It's time to create the cosmos. I think we should start by creating light and separating it from the darkness.

god Amoako: You've been saying that all day. I think we should start by creating heat and separating it from the cold. As they say, "smoke comes before fire."

god Davidson: Johnson, there's nothing much to see out here, so why do we need light? And Smith, I'll show you a sweet tai chi workout to improve your circulation. Plus we could save energy simply by wearing more layers. I think we should go ahead and create fish. A: the water is already here and B: we should start with tuna because it is the chicken of the sea.

god Yamaguchi: Is food all you think about?

god Johnson: Larry? Curly? Are you two finished? We don't have all day for your brilliant arguments. There's only one way to settle this . . .

[god Goldenstein wins a paper-rock-scissors tournament]

gods in unison: "Let there be light."

The point of this silly exercise is to illustrate that the 'elohiym of Genesis 1, whether plural or singular-grammatically speaking, is portrayed as one mind.
On the sixth day, God makes every kind of animal as well as humankind, both male and female. God gives humankind "dominion" over the rest of the animals and creepy-crawlies of the earth, after all, they are the ones created in God's own likeness. I could only speculate as to what specific aspects of likeness humankind shares with God. God explicitly gives the edible vegetation and fruits to humankind for food, and every green plant for the food of the animals. God's permission to humankind to take the flesh of animals as food is conspicuously absent. Why, if animals and humans were given the fruits and vegetation to eat, do animals and humans eat one another's flesh?
Besides making statements that affect spontaneous creation, God also uses words to bless creation. God only blesses three times in Genesis 1. God blesses the animals of the sea and birds together, telling them to "be fruitful and multiply." And God blesses humankind, telling them also to "be fruitful and multiply," adding, "fill the earth and subdue it." God also blesses the seventh day and makes it holy, "because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation."

In chapter 2 starting in verse 4, we meet someone named "the Lord God." I don't know what continuity I am supposed to draw between the story of the Garden of Eden and the story of the seven days of creation found in chapter 1. The story of the Garden of Eden is set "in the day when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up." Am I to draw a distinction between the plants and herbs of the field from the vegetation that God created on the third day? If not, we must be in an independent story, since chapter 2 would in that case place the creation of Adam before the sprouting of vegetation (an incongruity with chapter 1). Even if we do read chapter 2 as a flashback to day 6, the form of the story is obviously different. Maybe we are meant to see these two chapters as a collection or canon of insights into the creation. The Lord God of Genesis chapter 2 I imagine to be a giant person, striding over mighty rivers, planting huge trees by hand, and stooping to mold Adam out of dirt and breathe into his lungs, animating the clay miniature by some divine magic. Cradling this groggy Tom Thumb in his hands, the Lord God places Adam in the Garden of Eden like a child putting her doll into the context of a newly constructed play set. But a lone man in a garden is an extremely boring playtime scenario, even with the man's moral dilemma whether to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The Lord God formed many strangely shaped playmates for the man, but finally the woman was found to be a suitable counterpart as she was the only one found to be "flesh of my flesh." When he is with her, Adam has possession of his missing rib, both physically and emotionally. This story serves to explain why men and women still pair up today.

Adam