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For
in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and
all that is in them...
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Volume 3, Number 1 January / February 1998
A bimonthly newsletter of the Creation Research Society.
This Web version of Creation Matters lacks the "Creation Calendar" as well as photos and special announcements found only in the print version. The latter is automatically sent to members of the CRS along with the peer-reviewed CRS Quarterly.
Contents:
The Creation Story: History, Myth, Hymn
or Saga?
The Firing Line Debate
The
Creation Story: History, Myth, Hymn or Saga?
by Aila Annala
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Genesis (Number 2, page 15, 1997), the magazine of the Swedish creation organization, Foreningen GENESIS. This English translation is reprinted here with permission.
Very few people, Christian as well as non-Christian, take the first chapters in Genesis as a historical description of real events in the beginning. Most people have never reflected on the creation story, and if someone asks them about it, many will just try to avoid the question. The reason for this can be found in the strong influence of the mass media upon the people, and in what they have been taught in the public schools - very one-sided evolutionary ideas.
It is a common opinion that the creation story of Genesis is a myth, a hymn, or a saga, written down by primitive people a long time ago. Modern research, it is thought, has "proved" that their ideas are irrelevant for those of us who today "know better." Anyway, if we wish to argue for a Creator's existence, then we should just read into Scripture an evolutionary process that took place during billions of years (theistic evolution). In this way we can read the creation story as a hymn to the one who led the evolutionary process. But, is that really the way we ought to understand the creation story in the first chapters of Genesis?
My purpose is to show that the creation story can - and must - be taken as a historical description of the events in the beginning, as it stands. Using a linguistic approach, I am going to point out some details that give us evidence for a literal reading of the text.
Some definitions of terms: history, myth, hymn, and saga
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines history as a "continuous methodical record of important or public events," and myth as "traditional narrative usually involving supernatural and fancied persons." Myth may be based on history, while saga is a more fancied, often heroic narrative that does not need to have any historical roots. Yet, myth and saga are often used as synonyms.
Hymn does not need to be defined — we all know what it means in our culture. But in the case of the creation story, it is often used synonymously with myth; i.e., as a poetic presentation of some kind of a creation process. This is why I have chosen the order of the terms above. I am going to discuss myth and hymn more or less as one complex. Saga is, by definition, something that I want to leave without any further discussion.
The literary style
Anyone who reads the Genesis story in Hebrew will find out quite soon that it is prose - a historical description of the beginnings. Something very typical for Hebrew prose are the many waw-consecutive forms in the beginning of the sentences (the repeated "ands" in the beginning of the sentences in many English translations). To make the creation story into a hymn is as difficult as trying to sing a couple of pages from a modern history book.
Surely, there are hymns in the Bible that are written in order to sing to the glory of the Creator-God; poems, such as Ps. 104, where we find such expressions as "the foundations of the earth" (v. 5) and "the rising of the sun" (v. 22). But let us keep in mind that we still use this kind of nonscientific language, sometimes even in very scientific contexts. Yes, there are poems and hymns in the Bible that are written in order to give the glory to the Creator, but the creation story does not belong to that category. It is prose.
There is no reason for taking the creation story as a myth or hymn, although there are many liberal theologians who try to do so. There are many non-mythological elements; e.g., the sun and moon are not called by their names, but are referred to only as lights. Other people by that time worshiped them as gods. I believe that the original writer of the creation story (whether it was Adam or someone later) wanted to make sure that these celestial bodies were regarded as just lights and not gods.
The German theologian Gerhard von Rad writes in his commentary on Genesis (s 47 f, 63) that Gen. 1-2 is a doctrine, not myth or saga.
- "Nothing is here by chance; everything must be considered carefully, deliberately, and precisely. It is false, therefore, to reckon here even occasionally with archaic and half-mythological rudiments, which one considers venerable, to be sure, but theologically and conceptually less binding. What is said here is intended to hold true entirely and exactly as it stands. There is no trace of the hymnic element in the language, nor is anything said that needs to be understood symbolically or whose deeper meaning has to be deciphered."
von Rad also warns modern Bible students against reading their own problems concerning faith and knowledge into the text. These words come from one of the most respected Old Testament scholars of our time. According to him, from a hermeneutical point of view, the creation story is a doctrine.
What about all the other interpretations then...?
Alternative (non-literal) interpretations started to appear as late as the 17th and 18th centuries, when rationalism and empiricism began to make an impact in the intellectual world, but reached prominence by the end of the 18th century. Until that time the Jewish-Christian tradition had continued to read the creation story literally, with just a few exceptions.
Let us look at some of these exceptions. There is a kind of gap theory (i.e., a gap of time is postulated, between the first two verses in the creation story, wherein the celestial bodies and the earth are thought to have been created far earlier than that which is presented in verse 2 and the remainder of the creation account). This idea appears in some Jewish legends, in the writings of Filon (a Jewish philosopher at the time of Christ who was influenced by hellenistic philosophers), in the aramaic Targum Onkelos (first century A.D.), and later on (11th and 12th centuries) in the writings of the Jewish Rashi and Ibn-Ezra. The modern gap theory appeared at the end of the 18th century. J.C. Rosenmuller and others were at that time trying to make a synthesis between the creation story and the new geological hypothesis concerning the age of the earth.
Soon the straightforward theistic evolution became widely accepted among theologians. It was thought that the evolutionary process was God's method of creation. Scientific speculations were fully accepted, and the creation story of the Bible was to be understood in the light of them.
The authenticity of the creation story
In the theological world, the literary criticism and the historical method (which holds that the Bible should be read as any other literature) were formulated to fit scientific theories. Until that time the most prominent theologians, the church fathers, the reformers, etc., had believed that the Genesis story should be understood mainly in the literal sense.
The literary criticism and the historical method have, during the past two centuries, presented ideas that the creation story of Genesis is derived from other, older myths, and the authors have collected information from sources outside the Bible, such as the Babylonian creation story Enuma Elish (about 900 B.C.), in which the god Marduk is struggling with the sea-goddess Tiamat about the lordship of the universe.
Since Tiamat is quite close to the Hebrew tehom, "deep" in Gen. 1:2, some scholars believe that the Bible has borrowed material from the Babylonians. Yet, the similarity is only linguistic, and there is no reason to see any dependence between the two stories. The Hebrew tehom, which we often translate "deep," means simply "wave," "a great quantity of water," "ocean," "sea," "gulf," "abyss." In other creation myths one can often read about a struggle between gods, but in the Genesis story there is no trace of anything one would expect if Genesis were taken from the Babylonian epic.
It should be mentioned that the Genesis story has more similarities to older creation myths from 3000-2000 B.C. (such as the Sumerian myths) than to these younger myths. In the old myths the struggle motive is often missing. In one of the Egyptian myths (from ca. 2700 B.C.) we find the interesting similarity to the biblical account that the creation was performed by the spoken word, and that the creator god was "satisfied" with his work (about the same as "God saw that it was good" in Genesis).
The fact is that one can make many comparisons between the biblical creation story and other creation stories, and see both similarities and differences. All these stories bear a witness of creation in the beginning. Yet, the question remains: which one of these stories is the original one? All these stories come from the same geographical area. The fact that the universe was created by a Creator-God seems to have been a common tradition, and then later on somebody wrote it down. So we got different accounts. Only the biblical story is free from mythological elements that are so common in the other stories. Our conclusion should be that the creation story in Genesis is the authentic, trustworthy account of the beginnings.
Here we also have to note the traditional Christian view on inspiration of the Bible. If we believe that God himself inspired all that the biblical writers tell us, then we cannot think that he would have given us some half-truths and false information, whether the question is about the beginnings or anything else.
The unity of the story
The literary critics have tried to see two different stories in Gen. chapters 1 and 2, the first occurring in Gen. 1:1-2:4a, and the second from Gen. 2:4b onwards. This reasoning is due to differences in the literary style, in the chronological order, and in the use of God's name, Jehovah, in the "second" story. What can be said about this?
There is no reason to try to split up the creation account. The Hebrew text is one unit. The reason for the differences in style and vocabulary can be as simple as that the writer just changed them depending on what he was writing about. Any writer has the right to do so.
The differences may also be explained by the fact that the "second" story is complementary to the "first" one, which is a chronological presentation of the acts of the creation. In the "second" story the writer concentrates on the creation of man. That is why the use of the personal name of God, Jehovah Elohim (Lord God, instead of just Elohim, God) is natural here — it was the name which God later used to present himself to mankind.
In the "first" story, vegetation was created on the third day and man on the sixth, while in the "second" story it seems that man already existed when God created vegetation. But according to Gen. 2:5, there was no vegetation because there was no water for its growth. Yet, verse 6 tells of water coming from the earth to water the ground, which may imply that there was some vegetation growing on the earth. Verse 7 tells about the creation of man. And then God planted a garden, verse 8, using the plants that he already had created.
Another example of the supposed chronological problems in chapter 2 is that man seems to have been created before animals. We have already seen that chapter 2 concentrates on man, and I believe that we have to allow the writer to go back to some details in his story, without repeating the chronological order any more. He has already given that order in the first chapter.
The use of tenses in the modern translations may sometimes give a wrong picture of the chronological order in the original Hebrew. In the Hebrew text it is not possible to distinguish between the past tenses (did, have/had done). For instance, Gen. 2:19: "Now the Lord formed/had formed..." In the light of the chronology of chapter 1, "had formed" is of course to be preferred.
In chapter 2 the writer simply goes back to some details that he wants to bring up again, and I cannot see why we should not allow him to do so without questioning the chronology. It has also sometimes been pointed out that in chapter 1 the light was created before the light sources, the celestial bodies. This is something that we modern people find hard to understand. But for the ancients, it was natural to think of light as a substance in itself, not dependent upon material sources; the light was something divine (which explains why the heavenly bodies were often worshiped as gods). In the Genesis story the celestial bodies were just given the task to mediate the light that already existed; their purpose was to be "lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night..., to serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years... and... be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth" (Gen. 1:14,15 NIV).
Creation of the universe, out of nothing
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" could also be translated: "In the beginning God created everything." The Hebrews usually expressed totality by naming the opposites, in this case heaven and earth. This becomes very clear in the Sabbath commandment in Ex. 20:11 (NIV): "For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them..." Everything was created during the creation week, out of nothing, by the word of God. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made... For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm." (Ps. 33:6,9 NIV)
Everything was created instantaneously by the word of the Creator. No evolutionary processes are possible. How long ago the creation happened, I am not going to discuss here, since the Genesis story itself does not give us that information. The Bible does not give any evidence for millions or billions of years. The evidence is quite impressive that the creation is fairly young.
Mature creation out of nothing has as its natural consequence an apparent age. If you accept that the biblical story describes a mature creation, then you have to reckon an apparent age. Compare, for example, Jesus’ changing of water into wine, which was "good" (i.e., it was old).
The Hebrew verb for create, bara, can only have God as its subject. Only God can create; i.e., command things and beings into existence. Bara, create, is an absolutely unique verb, with an absolutely unique subject, God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth and everything.
Were the days really days?
A whole universe in six literal days? Is it possible? Or, is it possible
that the days represent longer periods of time?
The Hebrew word for day, yom, is used both literally
and symbolically in the Bible. In Gen. 1-2 we have to understand yom as
literal, 24-hour days, for the following reasons:
- The creation days are delimited by the evening and morning, both of which always mean literal evening and morning.
- The first day, yom ehad, is, in fact, not called the first day in the Hebrew text, but "day one" or "one day." We could talk about a "proto-day," a day that was to be the measure of all the coming days. It was not possible to use the order "first" yet, since there had not been any day before. It was not until after this "proto-day" that one could start talking about the second day, third day, and so on.
- Together with an attribute expressing order (e.g., the second, the third, etc.), yom is only used literally.
- If the days were intended to represent longer periods of time, then why did the writer not use the word dor, which means a period of time and can be used in different contexts, instead of yom?
Our conclusion must be that there is nothing, either in the Genesis story or in other biblical texts, that gives evidence for any understanding of the creation days other than that of literal, 24-hour days.
Another interesting question is of course: from where did the 7-day week come? Mankind has in all times and all cultures had some kind of week. The time period of the week does not depend on the heavenly bodies or other natural phenomena as do other times periods (days, months, years). Why? From where does the week come if not from the original creation week of Genesis?
The New Testament and the Genesis story
Jesus, while talking about marriage and divorce, says: "Haven't you read... that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female...?" (Matt. 19:4, NIV) Then he quotes Gen. 1:27 and 2:24. "The beginning" refers, of course, back to the creation week; the Bible does not know any other beginning. Jesus fully believed in the creation account of Genesis.
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews (1:10, NIV) quotes the book of Psalms: "In the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands." This shows that he also believed in the Genesis account.
Paul and Barnabas express their faith in God as the Creator of everything (Acts 14:15, NIV): "Men, why are you doing all this? We, too, are only men, human like you. We are bringing you good news, telling you to turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them."
Revelation 14 describes three angels, warning of the coming judgment, and in verse 7 we read the following message: "Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water." (NIV) The latter part of this quotation is a short form of the Sabbath commandment in Exodus 20:11 and shows the writer's belief in the 6-day creation.
The New Testament, and the Bible as a whole, make it clear, time and time again, that God is the Creator of everything, and that he did it in six days, as it says in the first chapters in Genesis. Nowhere can we find any evidence for any other understanding of the creation story than what it really says, a mature creation in six literal days.
Conclusion
We have seen that the creation story in Genesis 1 and 2 became widely questioned first in the late 18th century, as a result of the development of the natural sciences and the skeptical rationalism. By that time theologians began to read mythological elements into the biblical text and take the creation story as a kind of praise, a hymn to the Creator, or as a saga. Today most people in Europe have been taught this kind of thinking.
We have seen that there is no reason to question the creation story in Genesis. It stands there as a true history of the beginnings. It is not to be interpreted but to be read and believed as it stands.
The Hebrew text is prose, and neither the story itself nor other Bible texts leave room for any understandings other than what it says. The story is one unit, a description of God's creative acts. The literal creation week with its literal 24-hour days, the creation out of nothing, and many other details give strong evidence that the story of Genesis provides a unique insight into something that is possible only for an almighty God.
There are many other creation stories all around the world, with similarities to and differences from the Biblical story, and they all bear witness to a Creator-God. Many of these stories have been corrupted during the millennia, but they do have a common source, mankind’s collective memories of the creation of the universe. My conviction is that the creation story of Genesis is the original, historical, and trustworthy account of how the universe came to be. There are neither theological nor scientific reasons that can force us to take the Genesis story as archaic and untrustworthy.
The creation story is the foundation of the rest of the Bible. Human history began with the completed creation. Then sin came into God's good creation and destroyed it. But God did not leave man alone in his sinful condition. His plan for fallen man is salvation through Jesus Christ. Because of Calvary and the empty tomb mankind can look forward to the new creation. Then we are going to see with our own eyes how God makes everything new (Rev. 21:1-5), a new creation, out of nothing, as the prophet Isaiah describes it (65:17, NIV): "Behold, I will create [bara in the Hebrew text again] new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind."
Literature
Eriksson, Gsta, "Urhistoriens struktur", Genesis no. 1, 1991
Erlandsson, Seth, Vrldshistoriens frsta dagar (Biblicums smÂskrifter) no. 12, 1983
Fields, Weston W., Unformed and Unfilled, Presbyterian and Reformed Publ. Co., 1978
Kaiser, Christopher, Creation and the History of Science, Marshall Pickering, W. B. Eerdmans Publ. Co., 1991
Morris, Henry M., The Genesis Record, Baker Book House, 1976
Pritchard, James B., The Ancient Near East, vol. 1, An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Princeton University Press, 1973
von Rad, Gerhard, Genesis (The Old Testament Library) SCM Press Ltd., 1972
Aila Annala has studied at Newbold College in England and at the Universities of Uppsala and Lund in Sweden. She has the Swedish "theol. Kand." degree from Uppsala (which is similar to M. Div.), with additional studies in Semitic languages from Lund. She lives in Sweden, working in team-ministry with her husband, and is an active member of the Swedish creation society "Genesis." Aila provided this English translation.
The
Firing Line Debate
by Ashby L. Camp, J.D., M.Div.
As I feared, the debate (see sidebar) suffered greatly from the vagueness of the proposition under consideration: Evolutionists should acknowledge creation. The two sides were, for the most part, addressing separate issues.
The pro-evolution side (Lynn, Scott, Miller, and Ruse) addressed whether the theory of descent with modification from a common ancestor is a convincing explanation for the history of life on Earth. They were not interested in debating whether God was involved in that process or was a necessary ingredient in the explanation. Indeed, there was an apparent difference of opinion between them on that point.
Barry Lynn clearly believed that God employed descent with modification and, more specifically, that He employed Darwinism as His means of creating. However, Lynn was vague about just how deeply God was involved in the process. I wish someone had clearly pinned him down on whether he believed the Darwinian explanation of existence required God in order to be viable.
Eugenie Scott wanted to separate the thesis of descent with modification from the Darwinian explanation. Of course, she had no other theory to put in its place, but she was trying to say that "evolution" simply means descent with modification, and that Darwinian theory is but one possible explanation of "evolution" (albeit the only game in town at this point). She agreed that science proper could make no statement about whether an intelligence was somehow involved in the process, but her personal view was that an intelligence was not necessary to the explanation. In other words, she thinks everything can be explained naturally, but she is willing to admit that science cannot prove the noninvolvement of a designer.
I wish someone had clearly exposed that she believed existence can be adequately explained in terms of purely natural processes and then pressed her to provide naturalistic explanations for the clear features of design. I think the weakness of her practical naturalism would thereby have been exposed (but I realize this format was not really a good one for pinning someone down).
Kenneth Miller and Michael Ruse did not let on if they felt there was any room for the involvement of an intelligence (unless one counts Miller's comment that he shares a faith with Buckley). Their whole point was that the Darwinian theory is convincing and is the only possible explanation for natural history.
The only one from the pro-design side (Buckley, Johnson, Behe, and Berlinski) who really contested the viability of the Darwinian explanation was Berlinski. He argued that the gaps in the fossil record were inconsistent with the theory. I think he was a bit shocked at the level of the debate. He seemed to me to be expecting a more dispassionate, truth-seeking exchange and was surprised by the level of gamesmanship and advocacy. He could not get a straight answer to the simplest of questions (e.g., what is your estimate of how many morphological changes would be needed to convert a dog-like mammal into a whale?) and could not get agreement on seemingly obvious facts (e.g., a discontinuous fossil record is inconsistent with the predictions of Darwinism).
I was disappointed that Berlinski conceded the late-reptile to mammal transition. I realize this is conventional wisdom in the scientific community, but it is far from proven. Johnson's point that the alleged transitional forms are found where the fossil evidence is slightest, and thus where room for evolutionist interpretation is greatest, was probably lost.
Behe's basic point was that life provides evidence of design, but I don't think he effectively pressed that home to those who insisted a designer was unnecessary. Rather, his point was muffled by the reply that the designer could have accomplished his design through descent with modification. Behe would agree with that, because he is unwilling in the scientific arena to argue anything about the designer or his methods, but he would not agree with Scott, Ruse, and Miller that his examples of design can be explained by a blind, undirected process. Behe was nervous (which is understandable) and definitely got taken off his game.
In that regard, Miller came off to me as a condescending showman, but I can see why the evolutionists saw him as their hero. He, obviously skilled in the tactics of this kind of debate format, was able to create an impression that he had really shown something. His ploy with the mousetrap was shameless. Not only did it not disprove the irreducible complexity of a mousetrap, since the trap still had all the necessary functions. But even if he had been successful, the mousetrap is simply an illustration of a concept that cannot be denied; i.e., that some systems cannot be reduced in complexity and still function. This was nothing but smoke blown grandiosely to divert the layman from the power of Behe's point. (This is the same Miller who has shown himself to be careless or unscrupulous in several dealings with Dr. Gish. See, Duane Gish, Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics [El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1995], pp. 88-94).
Johnson's (and Buckley's) basic point was the philosophical side of Behe's coin, namely that naturalism is a philosophical rather than a scientific conviction. In other words, science proper has no basis for ruling out the possibility of a designer. This is important, but it loses its edge in a debate where the opposing team (Lynn and Scott) concedes the matter and then proceeds to argue that all of life evolved from a common ancestor. In that case, the focus needs to shift to the merits of that claim.
What we really had here was a confusing and unsatisfying mixture of at least two separate debates: (1) "Can our existence be adequately explained by purely natural processes (i.e., without the input of a designer)?" and (2) "Did all living things descend naturally from a single common ancestor?" This muddle made the debate very difficult to score. Of course, they all either mocked or ran from the third issue; namely "Is the biblical account of creation compatible with scientific data?" That was discouraging, but I still think the airing of the debate will be a net positive. I suspect the lasting effect will be to help legitimize the questioning of the reigning dogma.
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