Thoughts on "The Meaning of Creation"

Hyers doesn't shy away from the fact that the first two chapters of Genesis contradict each other, if read literally. This is a point that is kind of problematic for Biblical literalists. His answer is that if you read it in the original Hebrew, you see that there's a lot of metaphorical language, and some decidedly non-standard language. For instance, the sun and moon are referred to with Hebrew words meaning "the greater light" and "the lesser light" rather than by their standard Hebrew names, because their original Hebrew names share etymologies with the names of pagan deities. The purpose of each creation story, particularly the first one, is to distinguish their belief system from that of neighboring tribes.  This reading makes a lot of sense if you consider how much of the Old Testament is about conflict between Israel and neighboring peoples!

So the first chapter of Genesis has parallels with the creation stories of the pagan Babylonians, except that words for the natural world are stripped of supernatural connotations. Divinity is found not in the vast pantheons of warring deities and nature spirits that pagans worshiped, but in one creator God who stands above all of nature. The natural world is the work of a creator, not the dwelling place of numerous deities with their own domains and constant conflicts. The account of the creator is fit into the rubric of six days of work and one day of rest to make analogies with the lives of people on earth, God's children whose intellectual and emotional capacities are images of the greater intelligence and love in their intelligent creator.

The parallels with pagan accounts, and the stripping of pagan details, is deliberate, as the first chapter of Genesis dates to the Babylonian exile, and was a reminder to the people of Israel that they must resist the temptations of pagan society. Whenever they look upon the splendors of their neighbors' cities, they must remember that the world that they see is not the world of a pagan pantheon but a single God. The world is indeed a fine place, and full of wonders, but those wonders come from Yahweh.

Hyers argues that the metaphorical nature of Genesis was apparent to the audience. I don't know Hebrew, so I can't judge the validity of his claim, but I can note this: If there's anyone who's engaged in serious scholarly analysis and debate over the Book of Genesis, it's the rabbis, who have a deep literature of commentary and analysis (e.g. the Talmud). And we almost never see Jews protesting evolution at school board meetings.  Yes, it's a big country with lots of people, I'm sure that somewhere out there a rabbi is railing against biology textbooks, but you just never see as much of it. In fact, at the risk of stereotyping, Jewish families seem to prefer preparing their kids to study science rather than preparing them to protest against science textbooks. Granted, many Jewish scientists are secular, but plenty are religious, yet we rarely hear them complain about evolution and cosmology.  It's almost as though people who engage in careful study of the Old Testament in the original language, along with ages of commentary written by the society that the book was originally aimed at, are able to appreciate the metaphorical nature of the text, and find spiritual meaning and fulfillment in it because of rather than in spite of the metaphorical language.

Perhaps the most interesting point made by Hyers is this: In offering a metaphorical cosmology purged of paganism, the rabbis who compiled the Book of Genesis from older oral traditions separated the material from the divine. In many pagan traditions, spirits are everywhere in nature. But if the world was made by a creator above, then the material world is subject to a single divine plan, rather than a contest between numerous nature spirits. That mindset leaves room for a world governed by physical law, and it can be traced to the first chapters of the Bible.

Of course, reading Hyers' analysis as a persuasive rebuke to creationism requires consideration of what the focus of religious belief is. For a modern Christian, the text that they engage with is not the Hebrew original, but the English translation. And these translations didn't get printed yesterday. They have their own centuries of tradition built up around them. Expecting a Biblical literalist to prefer a theology professor's linguistic and historical arguments over the traditions of their own families and communities may be a bit much for some. Reading the King James Version is as much a tradition for many Christian families as Hebrew School is for many Jewish families. And what is the Old Testament if not an account of a people maintaining their faith and traditions in a world of challenges from alien tribes?

However, Hyers' approach does provide one possible answer, though he hasn't stated it quite as I'm about to: If we read Genesis in historical context, then we are engaging not with a timeline but with a community going through great trials, both material and spiritual. The Old Testament is a book of people holding to faith through trials of all sorts, and finding strength in their faith and community. For that matter, many of Paul's letters in the New Testament are advice to new communities going through trials in their formation. If we read Genesis in this context, as a microcosm of the Bible's great themes, we have the opportunity to encounter through words and stories the faith challenges of people who worship the same God as us. Surely there's comfort, strength, and insight in that.