Hebrew Creation Voices

I've been following a blog over the holiday period entitled Evolutionary Christianity.  An interesting number of contributors including well known names such as Ian Lawton, John Shelby Spong, Gretta Vosper, Matthew Fox, John Cobb, Ian McLaren and Bruce Sanguin. Thought I'd post some of my musings on the biblical creation accounts.  Hope you enjoy them ...

A feature and beauty of the Hebrew sacred texts is the different voices that have been captured in the canon.  These voices derive from different eras, different cultural backgrounds, and different traditions.  Most people, to whatever degree of literalness or metaphor, generally acknowledge there is a creation story that derives from the book of Genesis which seeks to establish how the world began.  Yet there are perhaps just as many people who are unaware, be it from mistranslation, naïve ignorance, or even a deliberate choice to disregard what is written, that the Hebrew scriptures do not simply relate one single story of creation but many, from which I would like to consider four.

These four are found in Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Psalm 104 and Job 36 – 41.  While each story essentially assumes a transcendent deity as the source of creation, the details of the stories change in each retelling.  Some are more descriptive, some are more ordered and all use metaphorical language to convey meaning.  We are unaware of the exact time period from which each story derives or in which era the stories were transcribed, but it is generally agreed by most Hebrew scholars that the Psalm and Job accounts preceded Genesis 2, which in turn preceded Genesis 1.  This places the Genesis 1 account, in all probability, as the final one to be written but I will consider them in the order in which they appear in the Hebrew canon.

Genesis 1, the ‘six-day’ story, and often also called the Elohist account because it uses the word Elohim for God, is a chronological list of creative acts that is orderly and highlights the celebration of the Sabbath.  Skies, land and sea are created, plants are created, animals are created, and finally male and female after which the creator rests.  The account is comparatively brief, with very little detail and it bears the hallmarks of a ‘tidying-up’ of previous traditions.  It presents a voice of order – a voice that is recognisable in the phrase, ‘the earth was formless and void’ but Elohim gave it order and ‘it was good.’

Genesis 2, from verse 4 onwards, gives us another account of creation where the focus is on explaining the predicament of human life and death.  This is often called the Yahwist account because throughout this story the name Yahweh is used for God not just Elohim.  It reflects another, and perhaps older, tradition.  The account is more ‘hands-on’ and the creation order differs from that given in Genesis 1.  Man is created, a garden planted, animals created as a possible mate for man, and then woman.  Yahweh touches, breathes, talks, walks and interacts with his creation in a highly metaphorical manner.  It explains the moral dilemmas that were the day-to-day experiences of men and women.  It is a voice of explanation.

Although the book of Job appears next in our Christian Old Testaments, the Hebrew canon lists Psalms first.  Psalm 104 is a creation hymn of praise.  It follows the stylistic parallelism of Hebrew poetry and has thematic similarities with other Ancient Near Eastern creation hymns such as the Egyptian Great Hymn to Aten.  Psalm 104 is a voice in praise of the creator.  Its poetic voice envisages a transcendent God to whom nature is subordinate.  It includes metaphorical details of Yahweh’s creative acts such as in the separation of the waters and seas from dry land …

You set the earth on its foundations,

so that it shall never be shaken.

You cover it with the deep as with a garment;

the waters stood above the mountains.

At your rebuke they flee;

at the sound of your thunder

they take to flight.

They rose up to the mountains,

ran down to the valleys

to the place that you appointed for them.

You set a boundary that they may not pass,

so that they might not again cover the earth.

Our final voice, found in Job 36 from about verse 24 to the end of Job 41, is a wonderfully poetic and metaphorical description of God’s creative interaction with the world.  In this account, and one of the reasons why it is presumed to have derived from an early and more general tradition, the word for God is El – the shortest and simplest form.  In Job, El is depicted as the one who ‘draws up drops of water which the skies pour down’.  El’s voice is that of thunder, and ice results from his breath.  He lays the cornerstone of the earth and places the stars in place to sing.  An example of its beautifully poetic metaphor is found in Job 38 – the birthing of the sea and the creation of dawn,

Who shut in the sea with doors

    when it burst out from the womb?

When I made the clouds its garment

    and thick darkness its swaddling band,

        and prescribed bounds for it,

            and set bars and doors, and said,

‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,

    and here shall your proud waves

        be stopped?’

Have you commanded the morning

    since your days began,

and caused the dawn to know its place,

    so that it might take hold of the

        skirts of the earth

and the wicked be shaken out of it?

It is changed like clay under the seal,

    and it is dyed like a garment.

The account in Job has no specific order and begins with cosmic elements, moves to meteorological phenomena and ends with animals and birds.  Job’s creation story instills a sense of awe, mystery and a pre-scientific understanding in the face of the unknown.  Its purpose was to convince Job of God’s sovereignty and man’s futility in seeking to know God’s mind.  The creation voice, which is at times attributed to Yahweh, is a voice of wisdom that expresses the notion that the knowledge of the creation of the world is inaccessible to men.  We see and experience the result, but not the act, nor the agent.

So, how are we to understand and respond to these differing creation voices?  The Hebrew canon presents a variety of voices, each valid in its own terms, though each incomplete, and while the individual voices are imperfect in this sense, they can contribute with – rather than against – the others towards a fuller understanding of the whole.  We can therefore learn from each voice. 

- The voice of order gives its hearers a confidence that behind the chaos there is as Einstein suggested, ‘a God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists.’ 

- The voice of explanation enables its hearers to find a purpose for their existence and the paradoxes of life and death. 

- The voice of praise allows its hearers to express wonder when a sunset steals their breath or a newborn baby leaves them speechless. 

- The voice of wisdom leads its hearers to concede that the knowledge of the creation of the world is inaccessible to them. 

The diversity of voices in these creation stories gives us an appreciation that what is written in the Hebrew sacred texts was never intended to be taken as a literal description of that about which we can never be certain.  If we wish to consider a particular voice as literal, we then have to choose that poetic voice over the others.  However, we can acknowledge that creation may not have actually happened this way or that, but still recognise that the metaphorical creation voices ring true.