In the Beginning...(Genesis 1:1-2:4a)

In the beginning, the very beginning, the only thing that was was God's presence with whatever the material of chaos was, and it was God's breath, both blown and spoken, that began the transformation into the universe we know.

This is the first of two creation stories, which the redactors (editors) of the Bible have deemed complimentary to each other, first a poem about how Creator God came to order the universe out of the will of God's overflowing love, the second a myth about why the world, and especially human beings, fall short of an ideal that dwells within our abilities to imagine. As we'll be talking about myth as we read further in the Old Testament about times and characters who are pre-historical, let's remember that myth is, in the words of John Polkinghorne (who is both a physicist and a priest), "not a fairy story but a truth so deep that only story can convey it." (Testing Scripture: A Scientist Explores the Bible, p. 23)

Although this story is first in the Bible, it was written later than the story of Adam and Eve, probably in the time of the Babylonian Exile (586-536 BCE), when the Jewish people had been hauled off by their mortal enemies and were struggling to hold onto the essentials of their faith while unable to worship by sacrificing animals at the Temple in Jerusalem. As God creates everything that God creates, the culmination is not only human beings, male and female, in the image of God, but the Sabbath, the day on which God rested in perfect relationship with all creation. The day God took to delight in the work of God's hands. Sabbath is the point of the story.

We all know the problems this story has caused because some people take it literally. Actually, the fundamentalist interpretation of it is a modern phenomenon. Until quite recently people were perfectly content to accept such stories as metaphorical and deeply symbolic. Polkinghorne writes, "The sad irony of so-called 'creationism,' based on a fundamentalist biblical literalism, is that in fact it abuses the very text that it seeks to respect, missing the point of what is written by mistaking its genre...It is a theological text whose principal purpose is to assert that nothing exists except through the will of God." (p. 22) Genesis was never meant to be a scientific treatise. It, like the rest of the Bible, is an expression of faith as experienced by the human writers who testified to their experience of God.

Genesis 2:4b-3:24, the story of Adam, Eve, the forbidden fruit, and the serpent, comes from an indeterminate date and historical context. It is considered to be part of the Yahwist tradition, which precedes the Priestly, the location of the first creation story. Just a few things about this story -- The first human being is neither male nor female, simply 'earthling' as adam means from the earth. When the woman is created, that is when he becomes male. Clearly God loves these little creatures, even after they have transgressed the only law they were given. They were asked to care for the garden, so they worked from the beginning, but even when they are cast out, God makes them little fur clothes and sends them into a world of abundance.

What they do to get in trouble is to listen to a voice that is not God's and to choose to follow their own desires rather than trust in God's grace. The story is not an account of a historical event, but rather a reflection on how people are. In the Jewish tradition there is no such term as 'the Fall.' Within the garden the people are unconscious, but people are conscious, able to distinguish between good and evil, and not always predisposed to choose the good. This story sets the scene for the whole rest of the Old Testament, in which the Jewish people again and again choose to follow their own wills rather than to obey the single foundational commandment of God, to worship only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.