Paying Attention To The Sky

1921 Latin Bible Illustration

Continuing with a series of reading selections from Walter Brueggemann’s An Introduction to the Old Testament…

The materials in Genesis 1-11 constitute an especially rich theological resource in. the Old Testament and are at the same time a particularly problematic section of the text. In their final, canonical form, these chapters function to frame the more concrete “historical” materials of the Old Testament in a cosmic perspective and, in sum, they constitute a brief theological “history of the world.” As such, they provide the complex, problematic environment in which Israel’s faith and life are to be understood.

Two long-standing critical problems need to be noted at the outset. First, it is evident that these materials have been appropriated by Israel from older, well-developed cultures. In some cases, we have available parallel texts that are older and which evidence the antecedents to the biblical texts. These texts, moreover, have been formed, used, and transmitted in the great cultic centers of major political powers. They functioned in those contexts, surely liturgically, as founding statements for society, authorizing, legitimating, and ordering certain modes of social relationships and certain forms of social power.

For a long period, since Hermann Gunkel, scholars have referred to these materials, both in the Old Testament and in their cultural antecedents as “myths.” The usage of that term does not imply “falsehood,” as the term might be taken popularly. Rather, after the manner of Joseph Campbell, the term refers to founding poetic narratives that provide the basic self-understanding of a society and its raison d’être, foundational formulations of elemental reality that are to be regularly reiterated in liturgical form in order to reinforce claims of legitimacy for the ordering of society.

The poetic narratives characteristically portray great founding events in which “the gods” are the key actors and the actions undertaken are primordial in that they precede any concrete historical data. The Old Testament clearly emerged in a cultural world where founding myths were commonly shared from one society to another. It is evident that Israel readily participated in that common cultural heritage and made use of the same narrative materials as were used in other parts of that common culture.

Second, as elsewhere in Pentateuchal studies, scholars have been able to detect several strands of tradition that, in the terms set by Julius Wellhausen, are recognized as the hypothetical Priestly (P) and Yahwist (J) sources (Wellhausen 1994). The entwining of these two interpretive strands operates in two quite distinct ways in this material. On the one hand, in the creation materials the two strands are kept distinct from each other, each complete in itself, so that Genesis 1:1-2:4a is assigned to the P source and Genesis 2:4b-3:24 to J.

The two creation traditions stand alongside each other, each with its own integrity. On the other hand, in the extended flood narrative of Genesis 6:5-9:17, the two strands are interwoven into a remarkable literary coherence with Genesis 6:5-8; 7:1-12; 8:20-22 forming the basis of J and 6:9-22; 7:13-16; 8:14-19; 9:l-17a the primary articulation of P. It is not necessary for us to delineate the two traditions in detail. It is enough to recognize that the final form of the text is complex, the outcome of a long-term traditioning process wherein different interpretive moments and perspectives rearticulated the ancient memory in terms usable in different contexts.

The prehistory of these canonically shaped chapters in terms of (a) antecedent materials and (b) diversity of sources of tradition is well established and is not in dispute. That prehistory while interesting, is not especially important for theological interpretation of the final form of the text beyond the important awareness that biblical literature did not exist in a cultural vacuum, but in lively engagement with its context.

The materials of these chapters are rich and varied and, no doubt, come from a variety of sources. The easiest distinction to make is between narrative and genealogy. The genealogies are present in chapters 5, 10, and 11. They reflect kinship groups as a way of establishing rootage and legitimacy. It is clear, however, that these genealogies are not to be taken simply as reportage on kinship, but that kinship is used in them metaphorically to characterize many other relationships, social, political, and religious.

Thus “kinship” is a way of speaking about networks of power, legitimacy, and loyalty. In some phases of scholarship these genealogies were unfortunately misunderstood when taken with uncritical literalness, when in fact they are reflective of many serious and defining relationships that are not those of either family or kin. The shockingly long life spans assigned to ancestors in chapter 5, moreover, strikes us as fantastic. When those ages are compared with the older sources, such as the Sumerian King List, it is evident that Israel’s version of these genealogies is sobered and drawn more closely to lived reality; as the life spans are radically shortened in Israelite versions.

The narratives of these chapters include a variety of materials, some of which have not been especially important for subsequent interpretive reflection. Some materials are “aetiologies,” that is, stories told in order to explain the cause or origin of something extant in culture (see Gen 4:17-25; 9:18-28). The brief narrative of Genesis 6:1-4, which seems to reflect a mythical tradition left in its quite primitive form, became, in a later time, a rich source of speculative reflection, but that reflection was not much connected to the normative traditioning of the faith community.

Primary accent in theological interpretation has been placed especially upon the creation texts of Genesis 1:1-2 :4a and Genesis 2 :4b-2 5 with its related narrative in 3:1-24, the narrative of Cain and Abel (4:1-16), the great flood narrative (6:5-9:17), and the account of the Tower of Babel (11:1-9). Each of these narratives reflects older ancient Near Eastern traditions, so that it is impossible to ask questions about “historicity.” Rather, these materials may better be understood as complex, artistic attempts to articulate the most elemental presuppositions of life and faith in Israel, attempts that understood the world in a Yahwistic way. The end result of the interpretative process is a text that provided an imaginative context for the emergence of Israel in the midst of older cultural claims, visions, and affirmations.

The key issue in reading these texts according to the central traditions of church interpretation is to see that the canonizing process of editing and traditioning has taken old materials and transposed them by their arrangement into something of a theological coherence that is able to state theological affirmations and claims that were not intrinsic to the antecedent materials themselves. It is useful to recognize and know something of the antecedent materials; the character of the antecedent materials, however, is not primary in the theological interpretation of the church. Rather interest for such interpretation focuses upon the materials as they have been transposed into a coherent and intentional theological statement, a coherence that is clear in its main lines, even though the transposition has not fully and everywhere succeeded in overcoming all the markings of the earlier versions of the materials.

We may suggest that the materials have been shaped in order to make the following statements possible:

1. The two creation narratives, in very different modes, articulate that the world (“heaven and earth”) belongs to God, is formed and willed by God, is blessed by God with abundance, is to be cared for by the human creatures who are deeply empowered by God, but who are seriously restrained by God. The creation narratives are an affirmation of the goodness of the world intended by God (see below).
2. The narratives of Genesis 3:1-24 and 4:1-16, immediately after the affirmation of creation, attest to the profound problematic that is inherent in creation. Creation is said to be recalcitrant and resistant to God’s good intention for the world. This deep, elemental disorder, narratively instigated by the serpent and rooted in disobedience, is enacted as human violence; it is, moreover, reinforced by the odd distortion reported in 6:1-4 wherein the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” entangle inappropriately.
3. The flood narrative sits at the center of this material as the great disruption of creation. The waters of the flood are understood to be the great primordial power of chaos that now endangers life on the earth at the behest of the creator God. That is, the chaotic waters are here not opposed to the will of the creator, but are an instrument of the will of the creator. It is a remarkable and deeply freighted (vocab: Be laden or burdened with: “each word was freighted with anger.”) moment when God is “sorry” for creation and resolves to “blot out” human beings, thus promptly proposing to abrogate the initial endowment of human creatures in the creation story (Gen 6:6-7).
   ‘While the flood itself is an assertion of God’s wholesale judgment against creation, the biblical narrative is primarily interested in the “exception” of Noah, “a righteous man.” With his family Noah becomes the survivor of the flood and the first of the new humanity that appears post flood and, according to Genesis 9:6, is still “in the image of God” (on which see 1:26; 5:1-2). Thus the deep disruption of the flood is not a total disruption. The flood narrative, for all of the destruction that it articulates, culminates in the divine promise that guarantees the working of creation in life-giving ways (8:22), and the divine promise of covenantal faithfulness toward the creation for all time to come (9:15-I 7).
4. The narrative material ends in the narrative of 11:1-9, a final statement of human arrogance that challenges God, and that evokes God’s harsh response. The four “narratives of contradiction”-Genesis 3, 4, 6:5-9:17, and 11: 1-9—articulate a steadily intensifying recalcitrance against the will of the Creator that each time evokes God’s harsh response (Miles 1995, 128-46). The generous will of the Creator will not finally be mocked and will not be overcome by creaturely recalcitrance.
   For all of that narrative assertion of resistance to the Creator God, it is to be observed that, alongside a response of anger from God toward the disobedient, in these narratives God also acts graciously and protectively to curb the destructiveness enacted and evoked by the human creatures. Thus after the harsh judgment on the man and woman, God clothes the two of them in order to cover over their newly felt shame (Gen 3:21). After the expulsion of Cain, the murderer, God marks Cain in order to protect him from murder in turn (4:15). As noted, the destructive force of the flood willed by God is unexpectedly concluded with divine promises (8:22; 9:8-17).
   This sequence of narratives ends stunningly with the concluding judgment of 11:1-9 without a compensatory counterpoint from God. As Gerhard von Rad has seen, it is as though the entire narrative complex is designed so that the reading community of faith is left waiting for the appearance of Israel into the world, an appearance accomplished by Abraham and his barren wife Sarah (Gen 11:30; 12:1-3) (von Rad 1966, 67).
   The sum of these narrative parts constitutes a remarkable theological statement. What may have been various “myths of origin” is now transposed into a theological statement of divine judgment and divine rescue, rescue and judgment being the defining categories for the God of Israel and for God’s impingement upon the world in which Israel lives. In that transposed form, then, this material is no longer interested in “origins” and in the sort of generic religious questions that are endlessly fascinating. Now, rather, the text is an attestation to the main themes of Israel’s faith in God.
   Having noticed that judgment and rescue form the focal points for God’s presence and activity in this material, it is important to recognize that while God readily enacts both judgment and rescue in completely free ways, alongside this theological pairing the sum of the material attests as well to the recurring disobedience, arrogance, and violence that profoundly contradict God’s way in the text.
   The capacity to state in this (for Israel) “originary text” this elemental recalcitrance is an astonishing interpretive achievement. Thus the eleven chapters, taken all together, attest that the will and purpose of the Creator God is sovereign, but that sovereignty is deeply and categorically under assault from the outset. This assertion draws close indeed to the lived reality of the world, then and now, in which it is unmistakably clear that creation is in contradiction.
   This way of beginning the Bible, moreover, by appeal to creation, prepared the way for the primal drama of the Bible, namely, redescription or the restoration and mending of a scarred, broken creation to the intent of the Creator. These chapters thus make a fundamental theological affirmation, but they also prepare the way for what is to come. In God’s own way God negates recalcitrant power present in creation to bring human creatures to obedience that makes the world livable. It is to be noted that the canonical traditions managed to make this claim precisely by the utilization of older, “mythic” materials that in their antecedent functions were remote from such claims and affirmations.