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| The Creation of the World, Antonio Canova, 1821-22 Photo Gipsoteca, Possagno via WSJ |
GENESIS 1:1-31
We just considered the fact that the writers of Genesis retold the creation stories of other nations, correcting them to present the right view of God. So let's look at the biggest way they did this, by pointing out that God, uniquely among other creation stories, creates out of nothing.
This really opened my eyes, from the very beginning of Genesis. For one thing, I don't think we moderns give God enough credit. We just take it for granted because "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is so familiar. But really stop and think about it. Heavens to Betsy! All this around us, created out of nothing!
This series first ran in 2004 and 2005. I'm refreshing it as I go. For links to the whole study, go to the Genesis Index. For more about the resources used, go here.Genesis begins not just with the beginning of something, but with the beginning of everything. Its first verse uses a word for which there is no equivalent in any other ancient language. The word is bara'. It means not just to make but to create, not just to re-form something new out of something old, but to create something wholly new that was simply not there before. Only God can create, for creation in the literal sense (out of nothing) requires infinite power, since there is an infinite gap between nothing and something. Startling as it may seem, no other people ever had creation stories in the true sense of the word, only formation stories. The Jewish notion of creation is a radically distinctive notion in the history of human thought. When Jewish theologians like Philo and later Christian theologians (who learned it from the Jews) told the Greeks about it, they were often ridiculed.
God did not create out of nothing. "Creation" is a Greek principle, which the Hebrews did not have. In Hebrew,vthe word for "created" is *barà* which means "gave shape" as when you work clay; you work clay, but you did not create it. If you read carefully, there was chaos in the abyss, meaning "things were in a chaotic disarray". So they existed.
ReplyDeleteThe authors of Genesis did not witness creation, they shaped the Sumerian-Akkaduc-Assyrian-Babylonian story to fit the requirements of *their* priestly class.
It's all there, it's written.
Yes indeed about the shaping of the stories — but I think you are not giving enough weight to this bit of my post: "We just considered the fact that the writers of Genesis retold the creation stories of other nations, correcting them to present the right view of God." In the correcting, they are telling the fuller truth of God's actions.
DeleteRobert Alter in his masterful translation calls it "welter and waste" and says that the Hebrew "tohu wabohu" occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I tried to approximate in English by alliteration. 'Tohu' by itself means 'emptiness' or 'futility,' and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert."
In the context of the entry above "tohu" and emptiness can also mean "nothing."
Interesting. You may know that the "desert" in the Scriptures, OT and NT alike, do not mean "sand dunes" like we see in the Sahara, but "wasteland" or "empty, uninhabited and uncultivated land". This is evident to anyone who's been to the Holy Land. So, the "chaos in the void below" matches the description of "a vast, unpopulated, uncultivated wasteland"; quite the opposite of "nothing".
DeleteLast, the Sumerian lore of Creation predates and written form of Genesis by quite a few thousand years; indeed, there was no Creation, no Nephilim, no Noah and the Flood in "Genesis" before the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities.
Hi Maurizio - if you read the Alter quote carefully, you will see that "desert" is not being associated with the use in the first chapter of Genesis. It is merely an example of how it is used in some other contexts.
DeleteI will mention here that, although Genesis is NOT about science, now that we have further context of our own taken from science, we may consider the Big Bang theory which is now widely considered to be the best available explanation. It was developed by a Catholic priest, by the way. So we may think about the material generated by the Big Bang. That indeed may be the "welter and waste" which is poetically and imaginatively referred to. Which then leads us to the question of where the Big Bang and all its materials came from. The Catholic answer is that it was generated and created by God. So we are back to nothing before the welter and waste.
Also, I want to mention AGAIN "that the writers of Genesis retold the creation stories of other nations, correcting them to present the right view of God." Just as we tell and retell history and stories, looking at them from our own point of view, this is what the ancient Hebrews did with the other cultures' origin stories. And, just as those other cultures' stories were oral for a long time before they were written down, so were the Genesis stories. There was Creation, Nephilim, Noah and the Flood. It just wasn't written down yet.
Please do go read the previous post to this one which also talks about other cultures and the Genesis story.
I was quoting Alter above and got my quotation marks confused — but you can see where his comments take over.
ReplyDelete