Theological Bible Commentary

Gail R. O'Day, David L. Petersen

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781611640304
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Most one-volume Bible commentaries focus on standard scholarly issues, answering questions such as, who wrote the book? who was addressed? and how is the book structured? In contrast, this is the first one-volume commentary to emphasize theological questions: what does each biblical book say about God? how does the book describe God and portray God's actions? and who is God in these biblical books? This volume meets the need for a resource that puts the best of scholarship in conversation with the theological claims of the biblical text.

The Old Testament

Genesis

Theodore Hiebert

INTRODUCTION

No biblical book is more important for theology and ethics than the book of Genesis. It contains the foundational narratives, images, and concepts in Western religions about the nature of God, of human identity, of religious life and community, and of the world as a whole. Its ideas play a central role in some of the most controversial debates in modern culture: about the origins of the universe and of human life, about human responsibility for the environment, about the proper relation between the sexes and sexual identity itself, about ethnicity and race, and about land and politics in the Middle East. It is thus a book whose theological and ethical perspectives are of interest not just for personal edification and reflection but because they continue to influence the shape of society today.

A significant reason for the lasting power of Genesis’s ideas is that Genesis is about origins. Origin stories are always more about the present than they are about the past. Origins determine essence and define character. The way in which something is made establishes its nature for all time. When a culture tells stories of its beginnings, it is telling stories about itself, about who it is and what it was meant to be. So the readers of Genesis, just as its storytellers, have always seen themselves in its stories and characters, and their understandings of these stories have played a major part in their own definitions of God, themselves, and the world. But Genesis is not only about origins; it is itself the starting point of Western religious thought. Standing as it does at the beginning of our religious history, its ways of thinking have ever since determined the modes of thought, set the rules of engagement, and drawn the parameters for religious reflection and experience. It is now nearly impossible to think theologically or to act ethically without being influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the ideas of Genesis. This makes it immensely important to continually examine and reexamine the theological and ethical perspectives of the book itself.

Until the modern era of biblical studies, interpreters read Genesis as a flat story, with a single author and point of view; and when they encountered inconsistencies they did their best to explain them as apparent discrepancies, which could with care be harmonized into one seamless narrative and theological perspective. Some modern scholars still prefer to deal with the final form of Genesis as a single literary whole, but most now regard the book as a compilation of different Israelite traditions with different origins, settings, and perspectives. The consequence of reading Genesis as a compilation of traditions means that Genesis does not present us with a single theological or ethical perspective; rather, it contains multiple perspectives from Israelite life and experience. This fact itself is a theological issue, since it raises the question whether theological and ethical reflection is best served by a single honored point of view or by multiple voices with different perspectives that have gained respect.

The theological and ethical studies that follow take as their starting point the broadly held view in contemporary biblical studies that the book of Genesis is a compilation of various Israelite traditions. While there is continuous debate about how to identify and divide these traditions, the classic position is that they may be identified with one or another of three great schools or authors. The oldest, the Yahwist (J), preserves Israel’s earliest accounts of itself and presents these accounts from the perspective of Israel as an agrarian society during the Davidic monarchy. The Elohist (E) preserves alternative ancient traditions that appear to reflect the interests of the northern rather than the southern kingdom. The Priestly Writer (P) is the latest, working after the monarchy during the Babylonian exile or the postexilic period to record his traditions—though they may in themselves be more ancient—and to combine them with J and E to produce the book of Genesis we have today. P presents his traditions of Israel’s beginnings from the perspective of Israel in exile as a religious community centered in ritual and worship. Thus in this commentary I describe the theologies of Genesis rather than the theology of Genesis, but I do so in such a way that those who prefer to read Genesis as a single narrative may still profit from these observations.

Until the modern era of biblical studies, interpreters also read Genesis as if it were written in and to their own worlds. They effectively collapsed the eras of the writer and the reader and therefore deemphasized the differences between the social and cultural realities of the biblical world and of their own. One of the most important contributions of the modern historical approach to biblical studies has been to clarify the concrete details of life—social, cultural, political, religious—in antiquity and to show how different ancient society was from society today. The profound insights into divine and human reality in Genesis still communicate to the modern reader across such a cultural divide, but at the same time these insights are cloaked in the cultural realities of the world from which they come. To understand the theological and ethical perspectives of Genesis, and to reflect upon them with critical respect, their ancient cultural context must always be recognized and given careful thought and assessment.

COMMENTARY

Creation (Gen. 1–3)

The book of Genesis contains two distinct accounts of creation, the story of creation in seven days attributed to the Priestly Writer (1:1–2:4a) and the story of creation in the garden of Eden attributed to the Yahwist (2:4b–3:24). The aim of the Priestly account is to present the universe as a perfectly ordered sacred structure. This account is designed with two literary patterns, one in time and one in space, both of which have religious purposes. The temporal pattern, which describes creation in seven days, divides time into ordinary time, the period of six working days, and sacred time, the seventh day of rest. It informs the reader that the temporal rhythms of the universe are centered in sacred time, most basically the Sabbath. The spatial pattern superimposed on this temporal pattern divides the six days of creation into two panels of three days each. On the first three days the realms of light and darkness, sky and waters, and land and vegetation are created (1:3–13), and on the second three days these realms are populated with stars and planets, birds and sea creatures, and land animals and humans (1:14–31). All of creation in this pattern flows from the top down, revealing to the reader a universe that is a perfect hierarchy with God at its apex. Sacred time and space were especially important for Israel’s priesthood and its supervision of Israel’s rituals and worship throughout biblical history, but they were particularly crucial in exile when Israel had to reconstruct an identity apart from its land and political institutions.

The Yahwist’s account of creation, while deeply religious in its own way, is not so much interested in the origins of sacred time and space but in the origins of the society, economy, and culture of ancient Israel. Its focal point is not heaven but earth, in particular the domestic world of the Israelite farming family. In this account God begins creation by fashioning the first human from arable soil (2:7), and God assigns humanity to cultivate that soil (2:15), thereby explaining Israel’s character as an agrarian society in which nearly every Israelite family practiced subsistence agriculture. God’s climactic creative act, after producing plants and animals from the same arable soil, is to form a second human from the first, thereby establishing the sexes, marriage, and the family as the foundational unit in a kinship society and as the primary source of production in an agrarian economy (2:21–24). Such social and economic realities characterized the Yahwist’s audience and, indeed, all Israelites throughout biblical history.

The character of God. Priestly and Yahwistic creation traditions present contrasting portraits of God that are normative for these traditions throughout Genesis and that have become crucial aspects of God’s nature in later theology. The Priestly Writer emphasizes God’s sovereignty: God resides in heaven at the pinnacle of the universe’s hierarchy, issues commands to bring the world into being, and creates a world perfectly ordered in time and space. The Yahwist, on the other hand, emphasizes God’s human traits: God shapes the first human from the soil (2:7), experiments in order to produce a true partner for the human being (2:18–25), walks in the garden (3:8), converses with people (3:9–13), and—if we take the text at face value—does not know everything (3:9–11). These contrasting images of God have been combined in classic theology in the claim that God is both transcendent, that is, distant and completely other than human, and immanent, that is, accessible and in close relationship with humans and human experience.

While both characteristics of God are usually combined in any particular modern theology, one or the other, depending on the theologian’s context, community, and contemporary challenges, is invariably emphasized, as they were by the Priestly Writer and the Yahwist. The Priestly Writer’s image of a transcendent God is related to his hierarchical conception of reality and to his self-understanding of his priestly role in that hierarchy, as the mediator of God’s presence to Israel through ritual and worship and as the intercessor for Israel to God. The Priestly Writer’s sense of God’s transcendence could only have been heightened by the tragedy of the exile, in which Israel’s religious leaders—including the great prophet of the exile, Second Isaiah—sought hope not in the ordinary securities of life, which had disappeared, but in the power of the sovereign creator of the universe. The Yahwist’s more accessible and anthropomorphic conception of God, on the other hand, is related to the more popular expressions of religious life and worship in the familial and kinship social settings that characterize life in the Yahwist’s epic traditions. In the Yahwist’s narratives, contact with God is not confined to priestly mediation but is more varied and immediate: God appears in various places, to different kinds of people, and in many forms and manifestations.

The origins of the universe, I: Making or ordering? One of the most influential theological claims made about the biblical view of creation is that God created the universe out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). This claim rests on the judgment that Gen. 1:1 starts with a prepositional phrase: “In the beginning God made the heavens and the earth.” A clear statement about God creating out of nothing, however, appears for the first time only in the first centuries BCE and CE among both Jewish (2 Macc. 7:28; 2 Enoch 24:2) and Christian interpreters (Rom. 4:17; Heb. 11:3), years after the composition of the sixth-century Priestly creation story. This belief that God preexisted the universe and all of its matter obviously emphasizes God’s transcendence and power, and thus it reflects in some respects P’s own sense of God’s sovereignty. At the same time, it gives P’s own conceptions of God’s sovereignty a new and different meaning.

In the ancient Near East and in the Bible, creation was viewed not as making matter but as ordering chaos. According to this viewpoint, the world began when God gained control of primordial chaos—usually represented as untamed water—and imposed upon it the orders of the universe, standing guard to restrain the primordial chaotic forces and ensure the lasting triumph of order (Enuma Elish, ANET, 60–72; Pss. 74:12–17; 89:6–15). This view of creation appears to be the actual Priestly view, if we read Gen. 1:1, as many scholars now prefer to do, as a subordinate clause introducing the primordial waters of chaos: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth being a formless void with darkness on the surface of the deep and the wind of God sweeping over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’” Many creation accounts in the Bible and ancient Near East begin with just such a subordinate clause (Enuma Elish, ANET, 60–72; Gen. 2:4b; 5:1). Such a conception sees God’s sovereignty not in the absolute origins of matter, a theological issue in which the authors of Genesis do not seem to be interested, but in the establishment and preservation of the orders upon which the universe and human life depend. While not addressing the issue of ultimate origins, the Priestly conception of creation is a dynamic understanding of God’s sovereign power in creation, since it focuses not only on the beginning of creation but upon God’s continuing work to sustain and preserve it.

The origins of the universe, II: Creation and evolution. The debate between creation and evolution is one of the most divisive cultural controversies in the United States, especially as it bears on the teaching of science in the public school curriculum. The debate began in 1859 with Charles Darwin’s classic argument for evolution in Origin of Species, reached a high point in 1925 when John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in a Dayton, Tennessee, high school, and shows no signs of abating, due to the continuing efforts of supporters of creationism and its stepchild, intelligent design. A poll in 2005 found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that creationism should be taught alongside evolution in public schools, while just over a third favor replacing evolution with creation.

This debate is only the latest stage in a very old dispute, going back to the early church fathers and rabbis, about the proper way to understand the Bible when its picture of the universe differs from science’s picture. But it has become particularly intense after the major scientific discoveries that challenged the human-centered character of the biblical universe: Copernicus’s thesis that decentered the earth, geologist’s findings about the earth’s vast age, and Darwin’s theory of the evolution of life on earth. In these conflicts, theologians have taken one of two approaches: that the Bible is the enduring standard to which science must conform or that the Bible’s picture may be accommodated to new scientific viewpoints.

The basic difficulty of the first approach, represented today by creationists who take the Bible as a scientific standard, is best illustrated by the Copernican revolution in the seventeenth century. Because Copernicus and his disciple Galileo contradicted the plain meaning of Scripture that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun moved around it, the church condemned their teachings that the earth is a planet revolving around a motionless central sun. This crisis in the authority of Scripture took Christians a long time to resolve. It took two hundred years before the church removed Galileo’s books from its list of prohibited books. This was a hard lesson to learn, but the church finally recognized that some aspects of biblical cosmology, in this case the earth as the center of the universe, could no longer be taken as adequate scientific descriptions in light of new discoveries.

If we are to learn from this lesson in the church’s history, we must acknowledge that the accounts of creation in Gen. 1–3 are based on an ancient cosmology that is not only earth centered but that contains many other features no longer accepted by contemporary scientists or by the general public. In the Priestly creation story, for example, the earth is fashioned as the center of the universe before the heavenly bodies are formed to move above it (1:9–19). Furthermore, the earth is stationed between two great reservoirs of water, one held back by the dome of the sky and the other resting below in which the earth’s pillars are sunk to keep it stable (Gen. 1:6–10; 1 Sam. 2:8). The earth itself appears as a flat plain with boundaries marking its edges (Job 28:24), with either a square shape divided into quadrants with corners (Isa. 11:12) or a circular shape (Job 26:10). In all of these respects, biblical authors—the Priestly Writer, the Yahwist, the psalmists, and others who describe creation—accepted a view of the universe common in the Mediterranean world in the first millennium BCE but superseded by subsequent scientific advances.

Knowing this, we are in a position to better understand the relation between the Bible and modern science. Biblical creation accounts reflect the view of the universe accepted at the time of their composition as the best explanation of natural phenomena. In this regard they share with modern science a key concern: the aim to describe the structure of the universe and account for its origins in terms that made sense of the world as humans observed it (in antiquity without technological assistance, of course). At the same time, biblical accounts differ from contemporary science in two important ways. First, as we have just seen, the view of the universe reflected in biblical creation accounts is an ancient one that has been superseded by later scientific discoveries. Thus, while biblical conceptions include “scientific” observations and conclusions, these are part of the history of science and cannot be used as modern scientific standards. Second, biblical accounts not only describe the origins of natural phenomena, but also explain the origins of cultural (agriculture, family) and religious (Sabbath) realities. Thus biblical accounts do not limit themselves to the explanation of natural phenomena within a closed materialistic system, as do contemporary scientific theories, but they provide a holistic account of beginnings in which natural, cultural, and religious beginnings are integrated into a common story.

Recognizing the difficulties with taking the Bible as the enduring standard to which science must conform, we must consider the merits of the opposite approach, that is, accommodating biblical accounts to new scientific viewpoints. The two most popular attempts of this kind are both attractive on the surface but also problematic upon further analysis. One of these approaches takes the biblical creation accounts to be ultimately compatible with modern science if read properly. For example, if we take the seven days of Gen. 1 as figurative expressions for epochs, we get aro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• The Old Testament
• The New Testament