Genesis for Everyone, Part 1

Chapters 1-16

John Goldingay

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781611641332
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Commento della Bibbia

Following on the heels of the successful New Testament for Everyone commentaries by acclaimed scholar and author N. T. Wright, Westminster John Knox is pleased to announce the first volumes in the all new Old Testament for Everyone Bible commentary series.

John Goldingay, an internationally respected Old Testament scholar, authors this ambitious series, treating every passage of Scripture from Genesis to Malachi, addressing the texts in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply and concisely. Perfect for daily devotions, Sunday school prep, or brief visits with the Bible, the Old Testament for Everyone series is an excellent resource for the modern lay reader.

The book of Genesis is a lively read featuring familiar biblical tales such as the creation of the world, Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit, Noah and the flood, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, the Tower of Babel, and Sodom and Gomorrah. While readers may know the facts of these stories, Goldingay's work will instill in them a deeper understanding of their spiritual and theological significance. True to the For Everyone series' goal, Goldingay writes in a thoroughly accessible and engaging style with chapter titles such as "Friday Lunchtime, " "Bigamy, Music, Technology, Murder, " "Babylon becomes Babble-on, " "Stuff Happens, " and "Two Guys Who Need Their Heads Banged Together."

GENESIS 1:1
In the Beginning

¹In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Our son and daughter-in-law were showing us photographs of our two grandchildren. In one of them, the two children were sitting in the back of the car looking very solemn. “I think we had just had the birds-and-the-bees talk,” our son explained. Where do we come from? Somehow knowing where we come from helps us understand who we are. So where we come from is an important question that is not only true of us as individuals. In the United States, a foreigner is struck by the heat attaching to questions about the origin of humanity and the origin of the world itself. Did we evolve in a purely natural way, or did we come into being through a process in which God was involved?

I was once told that a first rule of creative writing is “Write a gripping opening line.” The first verse in the Bible is a gripping opening line. One could spend quite some time standing in awe before it.

“In the beginning. …” Genesis is not talking about the absolute beginning, whatever that was; I guess there wasn’t one, because God had no beginning. It’s talking about the beginning of the world. The standard Jewish translation of this opening verse is “When God began to create the heavens and the earth”; that avoids giving the impression that Genesis is talking about the absolute beginning. It doesn’t pretend to know what God was doing before the beginning of the world. The early African theologian Augustine raises this question and passes on the jocular reply he once heard that God was preparing hell for people who pry too deep. This idea was a bit too facetious for Augustine, though not for the Reformation theologian Martin Luther, who liked the remark. But in a way that jocular reply does mesh with Augustine’s own comment: “I do not know what I do not know.” Genesis also isn’t interested in satisfying our curiosity about the beginning of other supernatural beings such as the angels or about the “fall of Satan.” Genesis does not tell us. What we do not know we do not know. Genesis focuses resolutely on the beginning of the world and of humanity.

“In the beginning God….” Who is this God? The Bible assumes everyone knows the basics about God, what Paul calls God’s eternal power and divine nature (Romans 1:20). It does not dream of trying to prove God’s existence. It would reckon that trying to prove God’s existence is as odd as trying to prove our own existence. It takes God and God’s basic characteristics for granted. Genesis will also assume that Israelites, for whom this account of creation was originally written, do know a lot more than those basics because they have known God’s involvement with them as a people. They know about Abraham, the exodus, God’s revelation at Sinai, and so on. At the same time, introducing God in this way at the beginning of the story without saying anything about who God is, is a bit like introducing a character in a movie. We don’t know the character when he or she first appears. The unfolding story will reveal who the character is, and Genesis 1 will do that. By the time we get to the end of Genesis 1, we will know quite a bit about God. By the end of Genesis as a whole, we will know a lot more.

“In the beginning God created….” Create is a gripping verb in this gripping first line. In the Old Testament, only God “creates.” Perhaps if Israelites talked about artistic creativity, they used this verb, but it doesn’t appear in the Old Testament in that connection. Only God creates. Creating involves exercising an extraordinary, effortless sovereignty in order to bring something into being. The verb draws attention to the amazing nature of what God does, bringing something into being against all the odds.

There is something else about the way the Old Testament talks about God’s creating. We think of creation as essentially something God did way back at the beginning, though we may also think of God’s creating us as individuals or creating each flower and tree (what is sometimes called God’s “continuous creation”). Israel, too, sees creation as something God does in its own life as well as something God did at the beginning, but it sees God’s creative activity in its own life differently from the way we do. It sees that creative activity in a situation like the exile, when the Babylonians could seem to have brought Israel’s existence to an end. In the Old Testament, God’s creativeness is not a regular, ongoing activity like continuous creation but something extraordinary, as the creation back at the beginning was extraordinary. In the context of the exile, God makes a commitment to transforming the people and transforming the land, and Israel sees this as an act of new creation. Isaiah 41:20 then looks forward to people recognizing that “the hand of Yahweh has done this, the holy one of Israel has created it.” Extraordinary, sovereign, re-creative acts in Israel’s experience are acts of creation. So when people heard this creation story in Genesis, as well as telling them about something God did way back then, it affirmed for them that God could be their creator now.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Other Middle Eastern peoples in Israel’s day had their own creation stories that overlap with Genesis (and other peoples have their creation stories), and a century ago people talked about Genesis 1 being “based on” these other Middle Eastern stories. It does look as if the authors of Genesis knew one or other of these stories, but the differences between them are more striking than the similarities. If anything, Genesis was setting itself over against those other accounts of creation: “You know what your neighbors say about creation? Well now I will tell you the real truth.” These other peoples believed there were lots of gods, and in practice the Israelites themselves often persisted in the same way of thinking (again, peoples in other parts of the world have thought the same, and some still do). Those other creation stories saw the world coming into existence through cooperation between the various gods, or it involved conflict among them; the world comes into being as a result of arguments and fights among the gods. Genesis 1 tells Israelites that actually it came into being as a result of the cool, planned, systematic activity of the one God so that “the heavens and the earth” are one “cosmos,” one coherent whole. Other peoples’ creation stories began with the coming into being of the gods themselves, whose own persons emerged from raw material that somehow already existed. We have already noted that Genesis doesn’t talk about God coming into existence. If God came into existence, the person who came into existence wouldn’t really be God.

So verse 1 is the headline to the creation story. The rest of the chapter gives us the details of how God went about the creation.

GENESIS 1:2–5
Sunday

²Now the earth was an empty waste, with darkness over the face of the deep, and God’s breath sweeping over the face of the water. ³But God said, “Light!” And light came into being. ⁴God saw that light was good, and God separated light and darkness. ⁵God called the light “day”; the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening and morning, day one.

I have heard one or two people describe how they make records, and I have come to realize that there are two different approaches. Some people have worked it all out systematically before they go anywhere near a recording studio. They know how many songs they need; they know the sort of songs they want to write; they use regular formats such as verses that each have four sections of eight bars; they write all the words and afterwards compose the tunes to go with them; and then they go into the studio and record the album straight through in two days. Other people book three months in the studio, go in with little clue what they will do, and proceed in serendipitous fashion, trying riffs and trading licks and experimenting with key changes and making up rhymes as they go. Both approaches can produce great records. In Genesis 2 we will find that God operates the second way. In Genesis 1, God operates the first way. The process of creation is very systematic and ordered.

When Genesis begins to describe the details of this process, spelling out the headline, it starts with the background, the earth as an empty, unformed waste. An artist does not create out of nothing; the achievement of creation involves an extraordinary contrast between the raw material that was in existence before the artist set to work (for instance, a mere lump of clay) and what then comes into being. In Genesis, the opening to the detailed story with its reference to the unformed waste is not concerned with how the unformed waste came into being. It is not concerned with whether “creation” implies “creation out of nothing.” When the story of creation starts, it assumes the existence of some raw material. If anyone were to ask where the raw material came from, the answer would certainly be “from God, of course.” But that is not the story’s preoccupation. It is more interested in the miraculous transformation from empty waste to formed cosmos.

When this creation drama was read in the exile, this would be really good news to the people in the audience. Their own life had turned into empty waste. It was enveloped in darkness. They had fallen over the edge of the abyss. The light had gone out in their lives as a community. The events they had gone through could seem to show that the Babylonians were right. The Babylonian gods had defeated the God of Israel. “The light has gone out,” said Pandit Nehru, the first prime minister of India, when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated just after Gandhi’s vision had been realized and India had achieved independence. The same image has been applied to Europe in the First World War and in the Second. The light went out. So it was for the Israelites who were transported to Babylon, and also for those left behind in Jerusalem. Genesis portrays creation as the bringing of order out of formlessness and light from darkness. In a situation like the exile, maybe the creator God could be people’s hope? When Jerusalem had been destroyed and many of its people had been taken into exile, it was as if the hot wind of God’s breath had withered them (Isaiah 40:7). The creation story reminds them that God can transform such a situation.

How did God transform formless waste at creation? Maybe the Genesis reference to God’s breath is the beginning of an answer, because “God’s breath” could also refer to God’s spirit in a positive way. The word for spirit is also the word for breath and for wind, and the Old Testament sometimes implies a link between these. Spirit suggests dynamic power; God’s spirit suggests God’s dynamic power. The wind in its forcefulness with its capacity to fell mighty trees is an embodiment of the powerful spirit of God. Breath is essential to life; where there is no breath, there is no life. And life comes from God. So human breath and even animal breath is an offshoot of God’s breath. And the divine breath that withered could also be the divine breath that brings new life.

More certainly, the answer to the question of how God brought about a transformation from waste to cosmos is that God simply spoke. “God said ‘Light!’—and light came into being.” There is a decisive power about God’s word. God is like the movie director who demands “Light!” and light shines out. God, too, only has to say a word and something happens. Or God is like a magician snapping a finger, and something extraordinary happens. Bringing things into being at creation was quite effortless and met with no opposition. God just spoke, and it came about.

Even technologically sophisticated Western countries experience power failures from time to time, and when that happens, it can be frightening. I once had a crazy boss who decided to turn off the headlights in his car when he was driving down a straight highway late at night when no one else was around; he wanted to see how dark it was. The answer is, very dark. When you are in total darkness and then the lights come on, it is a wondrous relief and transformation. At the beginning, God said “Light!” and the lights came on.

When something thus comes into being, God is inclined to stand back and look at it with satisfaction and be rather pleased, like a human being at the end of a good day’s work. “That’s good,” God would say. Mother Teresa made it her life’s work to do something beautiful for God. If we ourselves seek to do that, we are responding to the fact that creation meant that God was doing something beautiful in its own right and for us.

Thus day one, the first Sunday, comes to an end (Hebrew does not have special words for the days of the week, words such as Sunday and Monday; it simply refers to them as “the First Day,” “the Second Day,” and so on). Why do “evening and morning” come in that order, which looks odd to Western thinking? Perhaps it is because it corresponds to the sequence of darkness and light in the chapter. In the Old Testament, festive occasions such as the Sabbath begin in the evening, as they still do for Jews.

GENESIS 1:6–19
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

⁶God said, “A dome in the middle of the water to separate water from water!” ⁷And God made the dome and separated the water under the dome and the water above the dome. So it came to be. ⁸God called the dome “heavens.” And there was evening and morning, a second day.

⁹God said, “The water under the heavens is to gather into one place so that the dry land may appear!” So it came to be. ¹⁰God called the dry land “earth”; the gathering of water he called “seas.” God saw that it was good. ¹¹God said, “The earth is to put forth vegetation: plants producing seed, fruit trees making fruit according to their species, with their seed in them, on the earth!” So it came to be. ¹²The earth brought forth vegetation, plants producing seed according to their species, and trees making fruit with their seed in them according to their species. God saw that it was good. ¹³And there was evening and morning, a third day.

¹⁴God said, “Lights in the dome of the heavens to separate day and night! They will be for signs and occasions and days and years, ¹⁵and will be lights in the dome of the heavens to give light on the earth!” So it came to be. ¹⁶God made the two big lights (the bigger light to rule the day and the smaller light to rule the night) and the stars. ¹⁷God put them in the dome of the heavens to give light on the earth, ¹⁸to rule over the day and the night, and to separate light and darkness. God saw that it was good. ¹⁹And there was evening and morning, a fourth day.

At the weekend my wife and I like to have lunch by the ocean, and while doing so we watch the surf hurling itself at the beach. No matter how hard giant waves batter the beach, they will never climb the rocks to where we sit, still less the mountains that arise just across the coastal highway. Relatively small-scale floods can imperil parts of the land, but in principle God has firmly established the boundary between sea and land. (Admittedly humanity itself might be able to frustrate God’s work here, as we can often frustrate God’s work, and global warming is a way we could do it, though this would more likely involve our destroying the oceanfront by causing wildfires to come down the mountains than by a tsunami climbing up them.)

Genesis reassures Israel that God indeed established a boundary between the water in the sky and the water below, and a boundary between sea and land. It does not describe the dome coming into being as if by magic, in the way the light did. That is not its only way of describing how God brings things into being. God again makes a declaration but then acts to bring that word into effect. God “makes” the dome, like a superhuman structural engineer building the dome of a giant sports arena, except that this dome is subject to no years of delay and no costly overruns. The dome appears within the day, as instantly as if it did come into existence by magic. Imagine a speeded-up film of a big construction project.

The function of a dome is to keep the weather out. This dome divides the water in the sky (from where the rain comes) and the water below it (the seas), earth’s atmosphere being in between. It is as if the sky is what it looks like, a solid vault in the heavens, like a colander with sliders that can either cover the holes (so the weather is fine) or expose them (so it rains). As God puts the dome in place, the macrostructure of the world is coming into being. Of course the sky isn’t really solid, and maybe Israelites realized that. We don’t have to be literalist in interpreting a picture.

There are lots of repetitions in this story, such as “God said” and “so it came to be.” Some draw attention to key facts about the way God made the world, such as God’s creating by speaking and the ease with which things came about in response to God’s word. But the Old Testament is not formulaic in the way it uses repetition. So in connection with day two, the lack of reference to God’s noting that the dome was good does not imply God thought there was something wrong with it. It’s just that Genesis likes variation with its repetition. Maybe this keeps the audience on its toes.

On Tuesday, once again God speaks, then speaks again, and each time—poof—the thing happens. We picture the sea, which had covered the entire land mass, retreating from much of it, so that land itself emerges. God speaks once more and speaks into existence the world of plants and fruit trees. God orders that they have the means of production within them. Elsewhere the Old Testament can portray God being personally involved in bringing into being each individual mango and each head of garlic, but in Genesis 1 the picture is of God requiring plants to have the capacity to reproduce themselves. It is another indication that there is some orderliness about the nature of creation. Suppose you could never know whether the tree that produced apples last ye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Genesis 1:1 In the Beginning
• Genesis 1:2–5 Sunday
• Genesis 1:6–19 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
• Genesis 1:20–25 Thursday, Friday Morning
• Genesis 1:26 Friday Lunchtime
• Genesis 1:27–30 Friday Afternoon
• Genesis 1:31–2:3 Saturday
• Genesis 2:4a The Creation Story as a Historical Parable
• Genesis 2:4b–7 To Put It Another Way …
• Genesis 2:8–14 Human Beings as Gardeners
• Genesis 2:15–20 A Strange Prohibition and a Surprising Experiment
• Genesis 2:21–25 This Is It!
• Genesis 3:1–3 Creation Asserts Itself
• Genesis 3:4–13 Where Are You?
• Genesis 3:14–16a The Pain of Motherhood
• Genesis 3:16b To Love and to Cherish, to Desire and to Dominate
• Genesis 3:17–22 Work Becomes Toil
• Genesis 3:23–24 The Expulsion and Its Consequences
• Genesis 4:1–5a The First Family, the First Worship, the First Acceptance, the First Rejection
• Genesis 4:5b–9 Why Did It Happen to Me?
• Genesis 4:10–13 Blood Cries Out
• Genesis 4:14–17 The Mark of Cain Contents
• Genesis 4:18–22 Bigamy, Music, Technology, Murder
• Genesis 4:23–26 A New Start
• Genesis 5:1–20 Then He Died
• Genesis 5:21–32 The Audacity of Hope
• Genesis 6:1–4 The Peak of Rebellion
• Genesis 6:5–8 Grace Found Noah
• Genesis 6:9–22 Filled with Violence
• Genesis 7:1–24 And God Shut Him In
• Genesis 8:1–21a But God Remembered Noah
• Genesis 8:21b–9:4 Never Again
• Genesis 9:5–13 A Life for a Life
• Genesis 9:14–25 I Trace the Rainbow through the Rain
• Genesis 9:26–10:20 The Nations
• Genesis 10:21–11:2 A Journey and a Settlement
• Genesis 11:3–7 The God Who Intervenes
• Genesis 11:8–30 Babylon Becomes Babble-on
• Genesis 11:31–12:2a Get Yourself Outta Here
• Genesis 12:2b To Be a Blessing
• Genesis 12:3–6a So Abraham Went
• Genesis 12:6b–10 Stuff Happens
• Genesis 12:11–20 One Thing Leads to Another
• Genesis 13:1–13 How to Be a Peacemaker
• Genesis 13:14–18 An Implausible Promise
• Genesis 14:1–13 And a Time for War
• Genesis 14:14–18 What Do You Need to Know?
• Genesis 14:19–24 Blessing and Tithing
• Genesis 15:1–6a Do Not Be Afraid
• Genesis 15:6b–7 I Don’t Sweat
• Genesis 15:8–15 How Do You Know?
• Genesis 15:16–21 On Being Fair to the Peoples of Canaan
• Genesis 16:1–4a On Not Being Able to Have a Baby
• Genesis 16:4b–7 The Complications of Surrogacy
• Genesis 16:8–16 Better with Abraham and Sarah than in Egypt
• Glossary