Saturday, January 21, 2012

Genesis in Context


It is easy to underestimate how much cultural context colors our understanding, particularly for those who have not had significant interactions with other cultures.  This can be seen in modern reactions to how Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn describes African Americans.  Although considered by many as a masterpiece of American literature, the book has from time to time been the target of efforts to remove it from libraries or school curriculum, in part for its use of the N word to describe African-Americans.  In twenty first century American society that word is widely understood to carry a lot of derogatory connotations and we rightly oppose its use in almost all circumstances.  But Huckleberry Finn is not a product of twenty first century American, but nineteenth century society, a time when the N word was widely used to describe African Americans, who were often viewed as inferior to whites, perhaps even sub-human.  The irony is that Huckleberry Finn takes a stand against that attitude.  Although a number of characters treat Jim, the runaway slave, as little more than an animal, an important theme of the book is Huckleberry’s growing realization that Jim is a person just like him and the growing bond between them.  The author portrays Jim having a more noble character than many of the white people who populate the story.  The book refutes the foundation on which were built the racist attitudes of his day.  To demand that Huckleberry Finn conform to modern ideas of politically correct language detracts from the more important message the author is making.

The importance of understanding the cultural context is even more important when it comes to Genesis.  Genesis is not a modern work.  It was written several millennia ago in a Middle Eastern society thoroughly surrounded by a pagan world view.  It shares a number of elements with the contemporary Egyptian, Sumerian and Chaldean creation myths.  These include the world starting in a dark, watery chaos, the sky is something like a dome (the “firmament”) placed above the earth, humans formed from mud/dust/clay, plants and animals created in current forms, and a time scale far shorter and more recent than modern understanding.  But there are also radical differences that would not have been missed by the original audience.  Rather than a pantheon of gods and goddesses, each with their own area of power, emerging from the primeval waters or (often incestuous) procreation, there is a single, all-powerful God who wills the world itself into being.  Creation of different parts of the world happens not through haphazard processes including rivalries, murder and sexual liaisons, but through an orderly, intentional, fundamentally good process.  Sun, moon, earth, sky and sea are portrayed as inanimate objects, not deities; the author of Genesis declines to even dignify the sun and moon with names.  Humans are not afterthoughts, a result of rivalry between different gods, or made to be slaves of the gods.  Rather they are created in God’s image as sub-rulers of the world in a special relationship with Him.  Genesis’s view of the natural world and humanity’s relationship with it—much closer to the modern understanding its contemporaries in many respects—is unprecedented in the ancient world.  In contrast to both contemporary and modern accounts of origins, Genesis offers very little information of the mechanisms through which things came to be; the description of God forming the man and breathing into his nostrils in Genesis 2:7 is about the most detail offered.  Compare that to pages after pages or even books of describing the activities of pagan gods or the formation of galaxies and geological formations.  This lack of detail about the mechanisms suggests to me shrewd planning by a divine author anticipating how understanding of the physical world would change with time; descriptions of the mechanisms by which we now believe the world came into being would have been incomprehensible to the original audience, and those which they would have found reasonable would be nonsense to the modern mind.  The way Genesis seems anticipate modern understanding of the inanimate, orderly nature of the physical world, workings of natural processes, and humanity’s power over the Earth, convinces me that Genesis is a result of divine revelation.  In its historical and literary context, Genesis serves as a powerful refutation of the pagan world view and a foundation for teaching God’s people how to live in covenant relationship with him and the world.  To demand that it serve as a scientific text teaching us how and when the world came into being detracts from the far more important message the author is making.

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