Johnson / Beldman Universal Story

Genesis 1-11
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68359-072-9
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten

Reihe: Transformative Word

The opening chapters of Genesis tell the story of how humans relate to the world-and to God. Genesis 1-11 is a parade of humanity's stories intertwined with the most intriguing subjects wrestled with today: the beginning of the cosmos, the nature of humanity, family, sex, deceit, death, murder, mass murder, ecology, agriculture, urbanization, and more. In The Universal Story, Dru Johnson shows how Genesis 1-11 is written in a way that informs the rest of biblical history-including the exodus, the kings of Israel, the exile, the Gospels, and early church. Genesis 1-11 presents a story of humanity that seeks to explain the background of every human endeavor. It is the universal story-the story of stories-because it is a story about how all of these things came to be the way the Hebrews understood them to be. These bizarre and ancient stories frame the story of God and His plan for earth and humanity.

Dru Johnson (Ph.D. University of Saint Andrews-Scotland) is an associate professor of biblical and theological studies at The King's College in New York City. He currently serves as the co-chair for the Hebrew Bible and Philosophy program unit in the Society of Biblical Literature. He teaches regularly in Western Kenya in a school for rural pastors and is currently ordained in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Johnson, Dru

Beldman, David

Leseproben

3

THE LINEAGE OF THE UNIVERSE (GENESIS 1:1–2:4)

I like to picture stories in terms of camera angles. If I were to make a film of a story, where would I put the camera and at what would it be pointing? As we read the opening words of Genesis, it’s difficult to find an angle capable of capturing what the text is saying. Where are we standing and what are we looking at? Is this story told from God’s-eye-view or a spectator’s? Having the correct camera angle presumes that Genesis 1:1–2:4 is a story being told by a narrator. Yet that might be the wrong category for this kind of account, which itself tells us to what category it belongs. Genesis 1:1–2:4 could also be described as a genealogy according to the epilogue: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, in the day they were caused to be created …” (2:1–4).1

Genesis begins with a kind of genealogy because this description of humanity’s lineage is directly related to the story told in the rest of Genesis. All the things mentioned in the lineage will become characters in the story. All of the blessings and commissions by God will become part of the plot points in the story of humanity.

GENEALOGIES ARE LINES, NOT TREES As we will see in Genesis, genealogies don’t merely show family relationships. They are unlike the genealogies popular today where people attempt to exhaustively trace their lineage by figuring out everyone in their family tree. Those genealogies tend to expand horizontally, showing intermarriage, children, nationality, and even occupations. Rather, the genealogies in Genesis show the lineage of persons—literally, the line of people we will follow—in order to connect those people to the story being told. The persons excluded from the lineage might be left out because they do not play a role in the story.

Despite this, the account of the lineage of the universe remains a bit short for our tastes. To be fair, the creation of the universe could have all been said even more simply (e.g., Who made it? God made it.). Or, if it were meant to be pure metaphor, it could have been said with a greater sense of poetry. Job’s account of creation certainly captures a more lyrical take on the inauguration of the universe (Job 38–39). Yet beyond the lineage of things created, there is so much more we want Genesis to tell us about creation in its details. Scholars and non-scholars alike puzzle over the brevity of the creation account:

The arithmetic of Genesis is surprising. Only two chapters are devoted to the subject of creation and one to the entrance of sin into the human race. By contrast, thirteen chapters are given to Abraham, ten chapters to Jacob, twelve chapters to Joseph.… We face, then, the phenomenon of twelve chapters for Joseph, and two for the theme of creation. Can one man be six times more important than the world?2

Though Genesis 1 does not give us much to go on in terms of breadth, what it does tell us is preciously instructive for our reading of Scripture on the whole.

What Is Going on in Genesis 1:1–2:4?

Quite simply, the two most striking features of Genesis 1 are the role of God in creation and the climax of creation in humanity’s relation to the rest of creation. Much has been debated about the days of creation or the physical universe being described, but these debates must be tempered with the emphasis of this text on lineage. God, who is unique for several reasons, belongs to a category of one. All of creation described in this genealogy of the universe, on the other hand, belongs to different category. Essentially, unlike the creation accounts from ancient Near Eastern societies surrounding Israel, there are only two types of things in the universe: a Creator and created things. This is often referred to as the Creator-creation distinction.

God the Creator

Who is this God that we find in Genesis? God goes by several names and titles in the Old Testament. The most generic Hebrew term for any kind of god is the word el. Hence, Yahweh is the el (i.e., the god) of the Israelites and Dagon is the el of the Philistines (Judg 16:23). Starting in Genesis 2:5, God is referred to as “the LORD.” “The LORD,” in all capital letters is the English translator’s way of showing readers that the name of God—pronounced something like “Yahweh”—is the actual term used in the Bible. When we see “the LORD,” we are supposed to know that it actually reads “Yahweh” in the Hebrew, God’s personal name that functions like our personal names. Like the names Chuck, Bob, and Clarissa, God has a personal name that is changed to the title “the LORD” in many modern translations.

Yahweh or YHWH3 is a name that plays on the word “to be” (hayah), a name that was famously revealed to Moses at the burning bush: “I will be who I will be” (ehyeh asher ehyeh; Exod 4:14).4 So what is this name, exclusively revealed to Moses, doing in Genesis? The simple answer to that assumes that the later name is applied to the earlier texts. Just as later location names (e.g., “as far as Dan,” Gen 14:14)5 were applied to more ancient stories, the assumption inherent in the text was that some minor editing was standard to make the text comprehensible to later audiences. However, the question of editing older stories is not a modern discovery, as ancient readers were aware of these edits as well.

In Genesis 1 and throughout most of the Old Testament, the most common term for God is the plural word elohim, which literally means “gods.” An -im or -ot ending on a Hebrew noun makes it plural, like -s or -es endings on English nouns. Hence, Genesis 1:1 could be woodenly translated, “In the beginning, gods he created the heavens and the earth.” But the verb is clearly masculine singular: “He created.” The use of elohim for a singular god is odd, but it fits the conventions of the day. Phoenicians also used the plural to refer to a singular god, so it’s not unheard of. In the Old Testament, elohim can also refer to earthly rulers (Psalm 82:1, 6), statues of gods (Gen 31:30), and heavenly beings/angels (Psalm 8:5). Though referring to the God of Israel as elohim does not grammatically add up, the term is used throughout the Old Testament as a moniker for the God of Israel and plainly as a masculine singular noun.

THE IMAGE OF GOD What is the “image of God”? If we restrict ourselves to the text only, the image of God is at least, but not limited to, the following: 1.The image of God is not patterned after another animal of our kind (Gen 1:24, 27) 2.The image of God includes something essential to being male and female and family makers (Gen 1:27, 28) 3.The image of God relates to our role of tending to animals and the earth (Gen 1:28, 29)

Why all these details about God’s name and titles? At the very opening of this story of stories, we have a singular god referred to as “gods” who then goes on to talk to himself in the plural—“Let us create humanity in our image.”

If God is fundamentally community, as the doctrine of the Trinity later asserts, then the image of God might also reflect that community. While we cannot say that the Trinity is being taught from Genesis 1 alone, the question of God himself being a community is strongly implied in this very first account of Scripture. Setting aside whether or not elohim is a plural noun, God speaks to himself in the plural, both before and after the failure of humanity (Gen 1:26–27; 3:22).

God is community, but God is also the Creator. This might seem obvious to us, but it’s a much stronger claim than we might imagine. In this lineage of the universe found in Genesis 1 there are basically two types of things: creators and created things. God is the only thing that is a Creator and everything else is created. This fact alone makes Genesis 1 unlike all other ancient Near Eastern accounts of creation, where those portrayals focus on the genealogy of the gods themselves.6

Here in Genesis 1, God just is. Unlike the gods found throughout the Fertile Crescent, God’s genealogy is never discussed in the Bible. God does not come from anyone or anything. Unlike everything else in the cosmos, God has no lineage. Moreover, God creates and he is the only one that “creates.” The word “create” (bara) is reserved almost exclusively for God in the Old Testament. Humans never create. We can make, fashion, form, shape, or build things, but we cannot create anything according to Scripture. Only God is the subject of the verb “create” (bara) in the Bible.8 When we say that God is the Creator, we are reinforcing both the description of a God who has no origin story, a God who is somehow a community and an individual, and a God who creates. These three distinctives display God’s one-of-a-kind attributes if we considered nothing else outside of Genesis 1.

ENUMA ELISH, BABYLONIAN CREATION STORY, TABLET 1, CA. 1000–1600 B.C.E. When above the heaven had not (yet) been named, (And)...