Creation Myths: The Hebrews
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Those words start off the Hebrew Creation Myth, which some believers take literally, others call a metaphor, while critics of Christianity blame it for everything from Patriarchy to Climate Change. It is probably the creation myth that is best known in the West, because it is recounted in Genesis, a Greek word that means “origin,” the first book in the Bible, which is still the most important book in the Western canon. It is the creation myth of the Jews and the Christians, and since Christianity is still the biggest religion in the world, it is the most widespread one and perhaps the most influential creation myth of them all. Although it is similar in some respects to other creation myths from the Near East, in other important ways it is radically different, and that is what I will look at in this post.
Some scholars claim that this creation myth was not written to tell Israelites how the world came to be, but rather how the world is now. Why these people think that when many of the other creation myths were specifically written to explain the creation of the world, I cannot say, but I do not agree with them.
So who wrote Genesis?
Most Jews, Christians, and Muslims will probably tell you that it was Moses, the most important Jewish prophet and the leader who led the Israelites out of Egypt. Jews call the first five books of the Bible, the Torah, but it is also known as the Pentateuch or “The five books of Moses.”
However, as early as the 4th century, the Christian writer Jerome who translated the Bible into Latin, a version that became known as the Vulgate and that became the official text of the Roman Catholic Church, reported that there were people around him who thought that Ezra, a priest and scribe who lived in Jerusalem around 400 B.C., was responsible for at least the final form of the Pentateuch.
A 19th-century German biblical scholar named Julius Wellhausen suggested that the text was cut and pasted together from several sources.
Today, scholars think that Genesis consists out of two accounts that come from different times and places in Hebrew history and that the first account is the most recent one because it uses the word Elohim to refer to God, which they attribute to a priestly writer who wrote it down after the Israelites returned from captivity in Babylonia around 530 B.C. In contrast, they think the older myth consists out of a redaction of two versions that use the word Yahweh for God, one version from the northern kingdom of Israel and one from the southern kingdom, dating from the time when Israel split into two nations after the reign of King Solomon, a king renowned for his wisdom and the son of David, arguably Israel’s greatest king, around 950 B.C.
Even though the two versions in Genesis differ significantly, they share the idea that there is only one God who created the world and He is the God of not just the Jews, but of all people, including you and me.
Even though the Israelites were surrounded by polytheistic people, that are people who believed in more than one god, they insisted that there is not many gods, but only one. They were not the first to spread the idea of only one God. Long before them the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt between 1353 and 1336 B.C., promoted this idea, but the Egyptians despised him for it.
Some scholars like David Sperling challenge the claim that the Israelites were always monotheists. Instead he argues that they were polytheistic, but that when they returned from exile in Babylon they rewrote their history to make it appear as if they were always monotheists. Make of that what you will.
Why would they do that?
Whatever is the truth, the fact remains that Hebrew monotheism formed the basis for the Judeo, Christian and Muslim belief in one, all-powerful God. That said, I would argue that the Muslims do not pray to the same god as the Christians and the Jews and it seems to me crystal clear that Islam does not impart the same set of moral values as the Judeo-Christian tradition does. Nevertheless, the concept of one all-powerful God became central to the Western world.
Because the second creation story is probably the oldest version, I suggest that we begin with that one. This version begins at Genesis 2, verse 4, and it goes like this:
God creates Adam out of dust, forming him with His own hands, and then breathes into his nostrils, bringing him to life, which is supposedly the first act of creation. We get a recipe for creating people:
Step one: form man from the dust of the earth
Step two: breathe life into him.
This implies that although a human being is made up of material, we also contain a divine element, the breath of God, inside us. The writer uses word play to show how we are connected to the earth. In Hebrew, the word for “earth” or “ground” is adamah, and the word for “human being” or “man” is adam.
The Egyptians also had a myth in which humans were created out of clay and straw on a potter’s wheel. When the person was complete, the goddess Hathor held up an Ankh to the human’s nose and mouth which caused the human being to begin to live. That is very similar to the Hebrew story.
God then plants a garden eastward in Eden. The word Eden might come from the Sumerian word Edinu, which means “steppe” or “plain.” This suggests that the Hebrews thought that the original Garden of Eden was east of Israel, somewhere in Mesopotamia. According to the myth four great rivers flow out of the Garden of Eden, one of which is the Euphrates River. It says:
“Now a river runs out of Eden to water the garden and from there splits off into four streams. The name of the first is Pishon, the one that winds through the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is goodly, bdellium is there, and lapis lazuli. And the name of the second river is Gihon, the one that winds through all the land of Cush. And the name of the third river is Tigris, the one that goes to the east of Ashur. And the fourth river is Euphrates.”
If you look on a map, you won’t find it. These are very confusing directions for the location of Eden, because no place fits it. Most Israelites reading the directions would realize how bizarre they are. Professor Robert D. Miller of the Catholic University of America argues that perhaps the point of the bizarre directions was to keep people from trying to find Eden. Perhaps it is meant to indicate that Eden is now nowhere.
Once the garden is planted, God puts Adam inside it and tells him to cultivate it, “to till it and tend it.” Although it was paradise, Adam was not meant to relax, lie around in a hang mat, and sip a Piña Colada. No. He had a job: to till the soil.
Some scholars suggest that this is an echo of the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, where the gods created humans to do the work that they did not want to do. These learned gentlemen and ladies suggest that God did not want to water his own plants, so he created Adam. Again, I will disagree. God did not need to make plants in a way that they needed water; He did not need to create work for Himself, and He could have just created the world in a way that did not require any work from Him to maintain it.
In the middle of the Garden of Eden there stands the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God warns Adam not to eat from it, on pain of death. After a while God decides that it is not good for Adam to be alone, so He creates animals and birds out of dust.
God “formed out of the soil all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name.”
In this way God invites Adam to take part in His divine project and He gives man a special place in His Creation as a mediator between the earthly and the divine. When Adam names the animals and the birds, he establishes a relationship with them. In ancient Israel naming was very important. They believed that when you give something a name you also decree its purpose and destiny with it. Keep that in mind when you name your child or your dog one day.
Again, this hearkens back to older creation myths. In the Babylonian creation stories, there is a god of wisdom named Enki who names plants, people, and regions and in this way he determines their purpose in the universe. When God gives that role to Adam it implies that we, humanity, have authority over the natural world. Even though Adam names all the animals, decreeing their purpose and destiny, none of them is an appropriate helper for him, so…
“The Lord God said, ‘It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.”
God then puts Adam into a deep sleep, takes out one of his ribs, and creates Eve from it. This can be seen as another occasion when a primal unity is divided into male and female. This makes one think of the story that the Greek philosopher Plato has Aristophanes tell in The Symposium, a Socratic dialogue, according to which humans were initially androgynous until Zeus, the most important Greek God, splits us apart, making us spend the rest of our lives to find our other half and put ourselves back together again, which is the way that Plato explains love.
Professor Miller points out, however, that the woman is not a clone of the man. No, instead she is similar in some ways and different in others. Anyone who knows women will heartily agree. You ladies sure are different in more ways than one.
When Adam awakens and sees Eve, he says:
“This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
The writer used a pun in Hebrew here. The word for man is Ish and the word for woman is Isha, which is also how you pronounce “her man.” The connection between these words reflects the close bond that is supposed to exist between male and female. Professor J.A. Jackson who teaches the Genesis story as literature at Hillsdale College, points out that Adam can only identify himself as ish, as man, through his relationship to another person, Eve. He emphasizes that our personhood depends upon our relationships with others: man is not complete unless we have a relationship with another human being. Originally we, men and women, were not supposed to be at odds with each other, but friends.
(I will just add here that since I am trying to improve my writing, I spend a lot of time on my own, writing, so perhaps I am not the world’s greatest expert on relationships, but one thing I learned is that it is better to be on your own than to waste your time with bad people. The company we keep affects our moral development, so we have to be picky and prudent about whom we hang out with. The same goes for reading: what we read affects our moral development, our moral development affects our actions and our actions ultimately lead to our destiny, so make sure that you spend your time in the company of edifying minds.
That is ultimately one of the most important lessons of the great Spanish novel Don Quixote. Alonso Quixano, the hero of the tale, spends a lot of his time reading romance novels and stories of the great derring-do of knights errant. Following their example, he sets out on knightly quests that get him into several dangerous situations during which he gets badly injured and where he is often lucky to survive. Towards the end of the book he starts to read more about the lives of saintly Christian men and woman and just before he dies, he laments that he did not spend more time reading about them instead of the war-mongering knights, because it would have led him to be a better man. It is a good lesson for us all. I add this because I am reading my way through this big book written by Miguel de Cervantes and it is chock-a-block full of wisdom. For those who value and seek it, you now know what to read next.)
The piece in Genesis goes on:
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”
This piece of writing was used for a long time during Jewish wedding ceremonies to celebrate the coming together of the man and the woman.
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It is a strong assertion of monogamy, even though polygamy was legal in ancient Israel and the kings often had many wives — just look at Solomon. Apparently he had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Heaven knows where he found time for all of them. For all his supposed wisdom, a woman eventually led him astray. The piece in Genesis implies that God intended the relationship between men and women to be monogamous.
(I have to point out that as far as we know there were no other women around so even if he wanted to have a harem, poor Adam had no choice but to put up with Eve. I hope she was a looker. Other versions of the Genesis story claim that he had a wife before Eve called Lilith, but she refused to obey him and fled into the garden. That is probably a corruption of the original story).
The interesting thing about this verse is that in ancient Israel, men did not leave their fathers and mothers. No, instead a woman left her father and mother and moved in with a man and his parents. One possible explanation is that the verse here refers to the man leaving his parents psychologically rather than their home to set up a new one with his lady like we do today. The writing goes on:
“But the two of them were naked, the man and his wife, yet they felt no shame.”
This is important because the ancient Jews thought it was very shameful to expose your genitals. The fact that Adam did not give a fig (pun intended) shows the ancient Hebrews how different life was in the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. The way things were, are very different from the way things are now.
In this respect the Hebrew creation myth is also unique, because no other ancient Near Eastern creation myth tells about humans who once lived in a different state than we do now. Every other creation myth explains how the world came to be, and that is supposedly as it was intended to be. According to the Israeli myth the way things are now is not the way God intended it to be. As we will see, it is our fault that it is not.
The disruption starts at the point where God set a limit for human beings. This is where a serpent enters the story, “the shrewdest of all the wild beasts the Lord God had made.”
Christianity and Judaism have traditionally seen the serpent here as the devil, Lucifer. The poet Milton has Satan go inside the serpent to seduce Eve in his epic poem Paradise Lost, a must-read for all of you.
However, Genesis 3 does not mention the devil or call the serpent Satan. Professor Miller argues that the serpent is not the villain of this story; we are. He proposes that the serpent might represent sorcery, illicit knowledge or wicked wisdom. The Hebrew word for serpent is nahash and it comes from the same root that means “divination.” Divination refers to attempts to gain knowledge of the future by magical means.
He also argues that the serpent in this story is not a snake because it does not go on its belly until the end of the story. According to him a snake that doesn’t go on its belly is a dragon. (That might be, but perhaps snakes initially had legs and because this serpent tempted Eve, God took their legs away). However, he goes on to say that when we compare the descriptions of what is called a Nahash in Isaiah 27, verse 1 or Amos 9, verse 3, the serpent is clearly a dragon.
In Isaiah 27, verse 1, it says:
“In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.”
I suppose the Hebrew version uses Nahash to talk about the dragon that is in the sea. (Maybe it refers to Cthulhu, the cosmic entity that the great American writer of weird fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, wrote about).
In Amos 9, verse 3, it says:
“Though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel,
there I will hunt them down and seize them.
Though they hide from my eyes at the bottom of the sea,
there I will command the serpent to bite them.”
Okay, I am sold on it. This idea of a serpent under the sea seems to be very, very old. The ancient Israelis used the dragon to symbolize evil. Clearly Adam and Eve are in danger in Paradise. Yet this dragon was “one of the beasts the Lord God had made,” so it was supposed to be obedient to humanity.
This animal, whatever it is, plays on our refusal to accept limitations, clearly a human weakness. It asks Eve if God really told them not to eat from any tree in the garden. She says:
“We may eat of the fruit of the other trees of the garden. It is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said: ‘You shall not eat of it or touch it, lest you die.’”
That is, however, not exactly what God said. God said nothing about touching the tree, so either Adam added that to the commandment of God when he told her about it, or she added to it out of her own. Either way, we are meant to see a problem already, but I bet this goes over the head of most modern-day readers.
The Midrash, which is traditional Jewish commentaries on scripture, suggests that when Eve misquoted God, she gave the serpent an opening and that the evil creature then pushed her against the tree. She realizes that she did not die, and this makes her call into question everything that God said.
The sly serpent then sways her with some dangerous half-truths. He says:
‘You are not going to die. God knows that as soon as you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God [or like gods], knowing good and evil.’
This is a half-lie. The serpent says that if they eat the fruit they won’t die, which is true since they won’t die immediately after eating the fruit, but it does mean that they will die eventually. The best lies always contain a kernel of truth, just enough to confuse you. The serpent also says that they will become like God, knowing good and evil, which is also true, because they will come to know good and evil, but they will never be fully like God.
The most important part of the serpent’s statement is that “God knows.” If God knows they won’t die but will gain these wonderful things, then it implies that God does not have their best interests at heart. The serpent suggests that God is their enemy without saying so explicitly.
Will she obey God and respect the limitation or do what the serpent said and reach beyond it? She sees that the fruit is “good,” so since she can already see what is good, all that remains for her to learn is what is evil.
Of course the woman eats the forbidden fruit. She gives three reasons for this sin: it’s good for eating, it’s a delight to the eyes, and it will make her wise. Only the third of those ideas came from the serpent and she came up with the other two reasons all by herself. This reflects our ability to rationalize our actions, no matter how bad they might be. We can always find a reason for doing bad things.
Eve gives Adam some of the fruit and he also eats it, fool that he was.
“And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed together fig leaves to make themselves loincloths.”
Since fig leaves do not make for very good covering, Professor Miller says that this was meant to be some dark humor put in by the writer.
Their eyes were opened, but it was not the great experience they thought it would be. Adam and Eve now knew good and evil, but at a terrible cost. Even though they did not die from the fruit immediately, eventually they and all the humans after them would have to deal with death. They did not become like God at all.
This sinful act disrupts the positive relationship that existed between mankind and God.
Some scholars see an echo of the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh here. In this epic poem, a wild creature named Enkidu grows up among the animals. A temple prostitute from the city of Uruk comes out and has sex with him for six nights and seven days. When Enkidu tries to return to the animals, they push him out. Because he had “tasted the forbidden fruit,” he was no longer welcome in “Eden.”
The courtesan then teaches Enkidu how to cut his hair and put oil in it, how to bathe, how to wear clothes, how to eat prepared food, and how to drink wine, all the refined arts of civilization. Once she has civilized him, she takes him into Uruk and he becomes the great friend and companion of Gilgamesh, the king.
Whenever Enkidu starts to doubt whether it was the right thing for him to become civilized and he yearns for the wild instead, the courtesan tells him:
“You have become wise, Enkidu, you have become like a god.”
This sounds a lot like the serpent telling Eve:
“…if you will eat, you will be as the gods, knowing good and evil.”
God affirms this when He says:
“Man is become one of us, to know good and evil.”
Presumably He is talking to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, for according to the Hebrew scripture there is only one God.
There is also a connection with death, because when Enkidu comes to the city, he realizes that he will die in a very different way than out in the wild. Eventually he gets sick, and as he dies, he curses the courtesan who took him out of the wilderness and brought him into civilization.
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Depending on how you interpret the story, Adam and Eve seem to only become aware of themselves as sexual beings after they have tasted the forbidden fruit and they only have sex after God cast them out of Eden. There is of course another more lewd interpretation, taking the snake to refer to Adam’s penis and the forbidden fruit that Adam tastes to be Eve’s vulva. According to this interpretation the entire fall is due to sex because Eve could not resist Adam’s phallus.
Whichever way is true, it seems that sex, civilization and death came together in the ancient Mesopotamian mind, which might have influenced the Hebrews.
In this Hebrew myth God becomes part of nature rather than to stand apart from it. He makes Adam with His own hands. God plants the garden Himself, conjuring up the comical image of God digging in the dirt, taking some plants out of pots and putting them in the soil, and then watering them with his watering can. God also takes walks in the evenings in this beautiful garden that He planted, He enjoys the fruits of His labor, and He shoots the breeze with Adam and Eve.
One such evening, when He comes to converse with them, God sees that they are wearing aprons made from fig leaves. He immediately realizes what they have done, so He asks:
“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree which I forbade you to eat from?”
Adam immediately blames Eve:
“It was the woman you gave to be with me who gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
He also blames God by pointing out that God gave him the woman. Eve in turn tries to pass the blame on to the serpent.
God is angry and disappointed so He curses the serpent and dooms the two humans. He says to the serpent:
“On your belly you will crawl and dust you will eat all the days of your life. I shall put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and hers. He will strike at your head and you will strike at his heel.”
This is the beginning of a long conflict between humanity and whatever it is that the serpent symbolizes, be it magic or evil, or something else.
God then turns to Eve and says:
“I shall harshen your toil in childbearing; in toil you will bear children. Your passion will be toward your husband, but he will be your master.”
Some scholars suggest that this is the start of patriarchy. It also implies that God intended for men and women to be equal partners and not for men to dominate women.
God tells Adam that it will require and immense amount of hard work to wrest a living from an Earth that will no longer co-operate with him, but resist him. Both men and women are henceforth afflicted with toil. Whereas God originally intended for humans to tend Earth, the relationship has now become much more damaged by our sin.
Of course, from then on humans will also die. God says:
“Dust you are … to dust you will return.”
Humans have made a hash of God’s intention, so in one sense God is ultimately the victim here.
Only then does Adam name Eve:
“The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of the living.”
Although this sounds pleasant, it implies that Adam owns her now and patriarchy is now firmly in place. In this way the myth explains why things are the way they are.
God says:
“The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; what if he now reaches out and takes fruit from the Tree of Life also, and eats of it and lives forever?”
Even though the humans now know what is good does not mean they will do what is good, so God banishes them from the Garden of Eden. According to Professor Jackson, God is not worried that Adam will become a competing god that will rival Him. This can be seen in the fact that God invited Adam to take part in the creation project. Instead, he sees it as an act of mercy when God casts them out of Eden. If they eat from the Tree of Life, the humans will live forever in the condition of shame, toil and patriarchy, which would be worse than death. By defying God, they created for themselves a hell out of paradise. So, by casting them out of Eden, God shows them mercy.
However, Dr Jackson points out that there is hope. By believing in Christ and by obeying God’s commandments we can still develop a relationship with God. C.S. Lewis, the great English writer of such books as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, and Mere Christianity, and arguably the greatest modern Christian apologist, thought that this was the whole purpose of life.
Before God kicks them out of Eden, He makes some clothes for them, bringing to mind the comical image of God sitting down and sowing their clothes together. Even though God shows mercy, this is a very bad ending.
“He drove him out and settled him to the east of the Garden of Eden.”
The word that the writer used for “drove out” is garesh, which can also mean “divorce,” emphasizing the disruption of relations caused by Adam and Eve. There are four kinds of relationships that pervade the pages of Genesis: the relationship between God and His creation, the relationship between God and humans, the relationship between humans with each other, and the relationship between humans and the creation. Initially everything was well until Adam and Eve disobeyed God. This upset their relationship with God, and in turn it upset the relationship between Adam and Eve and by extension the relationship between men and women and also between other human beings, which sets the stage for the whole sorry tale of human history that followed from there.
Professor Jackson says that what we can learn from this is that we can sustain our relationship with God by freely following His commandments, but when we refuse to trust God and follow them, it harms our relationship with Him. Jackson says that when God asks Adam, “Where are you?” it is a call to repentance. Exile from Eden is a divorce from God, a loss of His friendship, but God is long-suffering and He yearns for His creation to return to Him. This relationship is only restored when His son, Jesus Christ dies on the cross for our sins.
Some people ask what the purpose of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is, and how long humans could realistically resist the temptation to take a bite from its fruit? Good question. I argue that we can choose to be obedient.
The poet John Milton thought that when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit it allowed the human race to mature and grow up.
Since God created the humans to work in the Garden of Eden, how is this any different from other ancient Near Eastern creation myths, where the god supposedly created humanity to farm for and feed the gods?
According to this myth we are lords of creation and not slaves. We are meant to till the garden, but also to rule over the rest of God’s creation and to be his friend. That is very different from the Mesopotamian and Maya view of humans as slaves made to service and to be sacrificed to the gods. Those gods do not seek a personal relationship with us, nor do they care much about us. The Hebrew God seems to be the first one that cares about us and according to a theology course I took at Hillsdale College, even though He does not need anything from us, He made us so that He can help and serve us, which is the complete opposite of the Pagan religions that came before. That is what makes Him so extraordinary and what makes the Judeo-Christian tradition unique and so very, very valuable.
Was the serpent right because everything he predicted came true?
No. The serpent was only partially right in that Adam and Eve did not die immediately, but eventually they did. It was also wrong, because they did not become like gods. Sure, they now know the meaning of good and evil, but that does not make them gods. Some people can hardly keep their rooms clean, let alone create the universe. No, clearly the serpent lied.
Some megalomaniacs like George Soros, the Hungarian-American billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist who claims that he is a god, are delusional. Soros doesn’t come close to God. God’s majesty is perhaps best expressed in the book of Job, when Job questions God, and the Creator replies:
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? “Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
The answer is: nowhere. Soros cannot create squat.
The first creation story, which is the newest one of the two, is very different from the second one, but similar to creation myths from other ancient civilizations, most notably the Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths which both start with vast bodies of water. Like in those stories, this one starts on a vast, formless sea.
The Spirit of God moves over this expanse of water. Unlike in the other story, God is not in or part of nature in this version, but He stands apart from it. God stirs up this primal water and creation begins. He speaks things into existence without any opposition or hindrance. First, God says:
“Let there be light.”
And there was light.
Over the following day God creates the earth, the sea, and the sky. In the older myth God creates humans first, but in this story God creates them last as the crown of His creation. God gives us dominion over the creation. “Dominion” means responsibility, not domination or destruction. God appoints Adam to serve and protect His creation.
God created us in His image. In Genesis 1, verse 26 to 27 is says:
“Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”
The fact that God refers to “Us” has bothered some people. Who are “Us?” Does it refer to God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit or some other divine creatures?
Elohim, one of the names of God, is also a plural noun, so some people think it might just be a grammatical quirk of the original Hebrew which makes it a mystery to us.
Other scholars who are clearly not Christian suggest that it might be a throwback to older Mesopotamian creation myths in which the creation was always a team effort of a group of gods who played with clumps of clay to try and create the best creatures to serve them.
In the Hebrew myth we are created in the image of God, Imago Dei, which gives us much more dignity. It underpins the Christian idea of the dignity and value of all humans, which led to the idea of universal human rights and that we should treat each other well.
This makes me think of the time when His disciples asked Jesus:
“Master, which is the great commandment in the law?”
And Jesus replied:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
If more people took this to heart we would live in a much better world.
In Genesis God says that everything is good, including human beings. He puts His stamp of approval on creation. Later the Gnostics, a heretical sect that combined ancient ideas from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and perhaps even India, promoted the idea that the material world was created by an evil entity and not the true god, standing in stark contrast with the Jewish and thus also the Christian accounts of creation.
Some people think to be made in the image of God refers to something that we have that is similar to God, while others think it refers to something that humans do that is comparable to God. Perhaps it is both and more. Those who think that it refers to some quality we have speculate that it might refer to reason, because God has a rational mind and, at least to some extent, so do we.
(Although, we are not completely rational beings. That is the kind of interesting phenomena you discuss if you study philosophy.)
Others think it might refer to immortality. God is immortal, and Jews and Christians believe that humans are immortal too. In this way we are thus also like God. We are also not just animals, but like God, we have a spiritual side. They thus argue that we have reason, a spiritual side, and we are immortal, which reflects the nature of God, our Creator.
Those who think that being made in the image of God refers to something we do, say that like God we are meant to rule over the rest of His creation. I think it is all of these and more.
So is God male, female, or androgynous? In the scripture it says:
“And God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Some say this implies that a roomful of men does not give you an image of God and a roomful of women does not give you an image of God, but rather that you need both men and women combined, to give you a holistic image of God. Does God then have both masculine and feminine characteristics? Perhaps. Some heretics have claimed that God is androgynous and my Screenwriting professor, Professor Richard Walter, jokes that She is a woman, but who knows for sure? We will have to ascend into Heaven like the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri in his astonishing poem The Divine Comedy, and gaze upon the face of God to be certain.
The Hebrew word that’s translated as “image” is tselem and the word translated as “likeness” is demut. Demut means “shadow,” and a person’s shadow is like the person. It implies that a human is but a shadow of God. We have traits like Him, but we do not have them nearly to the extent as God does, not even close.
The word tselem means “idol” and the Israelites were not supposed to make them. However, scholars argue that the idol here is not a picture of a god or a statue of a god, but it refers to a place where a worshipper can encounter and truly worship that god. They thus say that when it says that humanity is the tselem of God, it means that if you want to relate to God, you should show sympathy to your fellow man.
Does the description of how God created humans in Genesis 1 imply that the sexes are equal?
I think so, but we have to remember that we are now living east of Eden, after the fall, so things are no longer the way they were supposed to be. That does not mean that we cannot try to make it as good as possible, but I don’t think we will create paradise before the second coming of Christ.
God tells Adam and Eve to be fruitful and to multiply, something that the West with its dwindling population rates should take to heart.
After creating the whole world in six days, God rests on the seventh day. In the Christian tradition, people are also supposed to rest on the seventh day, which aligns our action with God’s action.
Is the decree by God that humanity has dominion over the natural world the cause of today’s ecological disasters?
Some people point to the Genesis story as the cause of all the environmental disasters that we encounter today. They use that as a pretext to criticize Christianity and suggest that we would be better off if we change our religion to a form of Earth of Goddess worship and let the matriarchy take over. I disagree.
First, dominion does not mean that we should destroy the planet. It means that we should take care of it. God would not have given us that command if He did not mean it and I am not going to contradict God, the maker of the universe. He knows best.
Second, I think the ecological disasters are often exaggerated. Climate change is not an existential threat. As long as there has been an Earth, there have been ecological disasters. We just have to deal with it.
Third, these people assume that religion is man-made and that there is not any truth to it. They think it is something that we made up and that we can change it any way we want, instead of seeing it as a way in which we relate to God, the ultimate, the infinite, and the all-mighty Creator of all things who gave us this inclination to believe in Him. I think they are wrong. The whole story in Genesis might just be true, which is what C.S. Lewis, thought. As do I.
God made us lords of creation. To me it is a much better approach than those who “worship” nature, whether explicitly or implicitly, and those who want to put the Earth ahead of human welfare, those who think that humans are not above or more important than nature, but simply part of nature. There are some people on the dark side of the “Green Movement,” those who believe in a “Dark Green” religion, who even put nature ahead of humans and would happily see many people lose their lives and even have us go extinct if it is for the “benefit” of the planet. For them God did not create the world for us. Rather we should sacrifice ourselves for the world.
I am not one of those.
Some other world myths and religions don’t see humans as lords of creation, but consider birds and animals to be our “brothers and sisters.” They believe God is part of nature or that nature is god. Those people regard every rock, every bird, and every insect as sacred. This leads to a very different approach to nature, but modern people often forget how hard it can be to eke out an existence from nature and how dangerous nature can be. Nature is not our friend, and as someone who has spent considerable time in natural parks I can tell you that nature is not nice, but rather it is cold, unforgiving, and cruel, anything but Christian.
Whereas the Hebrew myth gives us carte blanche to do with nature as we see fit, some people want us to apologize to a buffalo before we kill it or ask forgiveness from a mountain before we blast a tunnel through it. I won’t go so far as to argue like some clergyman that the only reason that animals have life is to keep them fresh until we kill them, but I do believe we should use nature to the best of our advantage.
Apart from its moral message, the Genesis account of creation is also great literature. It is a seminal part of the Western canon and a masterpiece of writing which is still taught as a lesson in literature at some fine universities today. I had the good fortune to do a course on it from Hillsdale College and you should do so too. It is online and for free.
The writers made good use of poetic and rhetorical tools like anaphora. You can see it in the repeated use of the word “And” to start successive sentences in Genesis 1, verse 3 to 5:
“And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”
Those writers knew what they were doing. They were pure poets, man.
This myth is an ex nihilo story because God, an eternal being without beginning or end, an all-powerful creator with no limits and who exists alone in the void of space, creates the world “out of nothing.” We can see how powerful God is, because He just says the words and it happens. There are no limits to what God can do. Nothing is beyond Him and nothing can resist Him. This makes me think of a moment in The Divine Comedy, where Dante and the Roman poet Virgil are stuck in front of a city in hell because the demons refuse to open the gates for them. An angel from God nonchalantly marches into hell, walks over water, recalling Christ’s miracle of walking on water during the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and waves a wand which opens the door, emphasizing that it is impossible to resist the will of God.
Interestingly, there are many other creation myths from around the world were a god speaks the world into creation. The Hebrew myth is thus not unique in that respect.
Time starts only once God sets its indicators in place like the sun, the moon, the stars, and the seasons. However, unlike in other creation myths where the gods create the world through trial and error, God thought everything through and plans it all in advance before He creates the world in a logical and orderly fashion.
The Hebrew belief in a God that is unconstrained by circumstances, unconstrained by other gods, or even by history itself, a God that can do whatever He wants, whenever He wants, is one of the most important contributions to the world religions and mythology.
Already in that respect, Yahweh is greater than all the other gods that came before. He is the God of the West.
In His divine presence we can only stand in awe.
Glory be to God Almighty.
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Thank you.
If you want to do Professor Jackson’s excellent course on Genesis at Hillsdale College, you can do so here for free:
https://online.hillsdale.edu/landing/genesis
Bibliography
Koester, C.R. (2016). Reading Biblical Literature. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.
Miller, R.D. (2019). Understanding the Old Testament. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.
Taylor, B. (2009). Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. University of California Press. Berkeley
Voth, G.L. (2010) Myth in Human History. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.