For Us, but Not to Us

Essays on Creation, Covenant, and Context in Honor of John H. Walton

Adam E. Miglio, Caryn A. Reeder, Joshua T. Walton, Kenneth C. Way

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532693731
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

John H. Walton is a significant voice in Old Testament studies, who has influenced many scholars in this field as well as others. This volume is an acknowledgment from his students of Walton's role as a teacher, scholar, and mentor. Each essay is offered by scholars (and former students) working in a range of fields--from Old and New Testament studies to archaeology and theology. They are offered as a testimony and tribute to Walton's prolific career."

Part 1

Creation

1

Sense of a Beginning

The Role of Beginnings in the Israelite Historical Résumés

Aubrey Buster

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

—George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

It is with great pleasure that I dedicate this essay to John Walton, who has spent much of his career helping us think better about beginnings, the beginning of the Bible, and its relationship to the beginning of the cosmos. For this, the guild owes him a great debt of gratitude. As for me personally, however, I would like to thank him primarily for his role as a teacher. It was in John’s classes that I learned the thrill of discovery that came with a carefully and consistently applied method, and it was his class on Genesis that led to my first serious interest in pursuing a career in biblical studies.

Introduction

One of the primary difficulties of teaching introductory courses in Hebrew Bible is deciding how to cover an immense amount of material in the course of a single semester. Usually, this results in a “book-a-day” approach, with some minor prophets grouped together. A frequent exception to this general rule, however, is the book of Genesis, to which I have discovered I need to give two or even three days, double or triple the time given to even biblical books of a similar length, such as Jeremiah or Isaiah. This is not because the book of Genesis is inherently more complex or more theologically important than any other book in the canon. It is simply because my students have significantly more pre-conceptions about what is contained in this book, its opening eleven chapters in particular. If they have come from a faith tradition that emphasizes the regular reading of scripture, many of them have started (and re-started) their “Bible in a Year” reading plans at this point. Sunday school classes begin here. Debates concerning the relationship between the beginning of a sacred book and the beginning of “everything” begin here.

My students are not alone in this. Beginnings in general play an outsized role in remembering. It is easier for most students from the United States to remember the first president than to list those who follow. Figures who are attached to the “beginnings” of things tend to attract cultural mythologies that are often difficult to debunk. It is common knowledge at this point in our history that Christopher Columbus did not discover America. Yet as a figure associated with the “beginning” of a colonized North America, Columbus has come to stand for more than simply a man who did or did not undertake a series of actions that we are free to celebrate or condemn.1 Moving beyond history, this quirk of human memory extends to the opening lines of literary works outside of the Bible. As literary scholar Peter Rabinowitz quips, “if you ask someone familiar with Pride and Prejudice to quote a line from the novel, the odds are that you will get the opening sentence.”2

Beginnings also play an important role in biblical studies. Much of scholarship on the Hebrew Bible focuses, not on the narrative beginnings of biblical books, but on constructing proposals for their origins, defined in terms of authorship or in terms of the most original component pieces of each respective biblical text. Simply put, beginnings matter. Because of their importance, they are also usually culturally established. If you ask a Jew or a Christian to name the “beginning” of the Bible, they would likely respond with Gen 1:1. But if you asked an ancient Israelite to tell the beginning of their story, what image or event would come to mind? This is, of course, an impossible question to answer. We cannot conduct a Pew survey of ancient Israelites in this regard. What we do have is a remarkable array of texts in the Hebrew Bible that preserve performances of schematic versions of Israel’s history. We cannot be entirely sure whether the performances preserved in our Bible represent “common knowledge” ...