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Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
What kind of text is Genesis 1?
Before anyone argues about the days, they have already decided what sort of writing this is. Most of the fight starts there.
Genesis 1:1-2:3, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: is Genesis 1 a report of events in order, a picture built to teach, or something the ancient world would have recognized that we have lost the feel for? The surgeon and the builder both describe the same hospital. The builder tells you what went up first. The surgeon tells you the theatre is on the second floor with wards above and below. Neither is wrong, and neither is lying. You have to know which one is talking before you can tell whether he got it right.
Genesis 1 reads like narrative. It also repeats its refrains like a song, groups its material in sixes and sevens, and God is the only one who acts in it. Every reading of the days, the light, the sun and Adam is built on a prior decision about what kind of text this is, and that decision is usually made without being said out loud.
The chapter runs on the ordinary Hebrew narrative verb form that moves a story forward, one event after another. It does not use the two-line parallelism that marks Hebrew poetry. It does use heavy repetition: God said, let there be, it was so, God saw that it was good, evening and morning. Collins, quoted by Lennox, calls it a narrative but an unusual one, because of the unique events, the lack of other actors and the highly patterned way of telling it.
Lennox follows E. J. Young: prose narrative describing a succession of events, written in exalted, semi-poetic language that makes it memorable without making it poetry. He takes Genesis 1 to 11 as talking about actual things, events, places and people, and he warns against separating theology from history. He grants that the text comes from the ancient Near East and cannot be read as a modern Western document, but holds that its central statements can be understood in any century if read properly.
Walton's first proposition is that Genesis 1 is ancient cosmology. The Israelites received no revelation to update their picture of the cosmos: a solid sky holding back waters, thinking done with the heart and the entrails. God communicated in their terms rather than correcting their science. On Walton's count there is not a single passage in the Bible that gives Israel a science beyond its own culture. So reading Genesis 1 for modern scientific content, which he calls concordism, misreads the genre before it reads a word.
The framework reading, traced by Lennox to Clement and Augustine, treats the days as a literary structure with a logical rather than a chronological order. Wenham, quoted by Lennox, calls the six-day scheme one of several devices in the chapter for expressing order, alongside the repeated formulae, the grouping in tens and sevens, and the matching panels.
Lennox has to explain the features that do not behave like ordinary narrative, above all three days with evening and morning before there is a sun. Walton has to show that recognizing the chapter as ancient cosmology rules out any interest in the material world, not just modern science. Each one concedes part of the other's point and stops at a different place.
Not a choice between true and false. Both poles hold that Genesis 1 is inspired and true. The disagreement is about what kind of truth it is telling.
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World: The Beginning According to Genesis and Science, 10th anniversary ed. (Zondervan Reflective, 2021), ch. 3 and appendix A
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (IVP Academic, 2009), proposition 1
- C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4 (P&R, 2006), as quoted in Lennox, appendix A
- Gordon Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word, 1987), as quoted in Lennox, ch. 3
