Chaos from the Ancient World to Early Modernity

Formations of the Formless

Andreas Höfele, Christoph Levin, Reinhard Müller, Björn Quiring, Andreas Höfele, Christoph Levin, Reinhard Müller, Björn Quiring

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110653984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Critique et interprétation bibliques

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society and threatens to undo them both.

From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar 'formations of the formless'.

Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern 'chaos theories' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.

Paradise Established

The Foundation of Kosmos versus Chaos
according to Genesis 1 – 3

Christoph Levin

1 The Unity of Two Creation Accounts

Biblical scholars are in agreement that the book of Genesis opens with two different reports of how the world was created. Ever since Jean Astruc published his Conjectures in 1753, the source-critical distinction between Gen 1:1 – 2:4a and Gen 2:4b–3:24 has come to be first gradually and then generally accepted.¹ In the 19^th century, scholars were concerned to establish which of the two versions was the older, and it was almost a kind of second revolution when it turned out that the first report was the younger.² Today, this is the common opinion, though that does not mean that all debate has ceased.

This consensus makes it easy to forget that for most of its history the first three chapters of the bible were read as parts of a coherent report. The redactors who created the current order held the same view when they combined the two sources into a single account.³ The two reports are joined by the linking verse Gen 2:4b: “In the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens.” For its content, this circumstantial clause relies on the first creation account, since only that one is explicitly concerned with the creation of earth and heavens. Syntactically, however, the clause belongs to the following text, with which it also shares the combined name of God Yhwh ʾ^ælohîm, which has always been the most noticeable difference between the two accounts. The relative dating given applies to the second report. It is placed in a temporal relation to the first, namely that of concurrence. The line “In the day that Yahweh God made the earth and the heavens” means that the events of the second account unfurled at the same time as the first account. From the very beginning, one thus finds the same solution devout readers of the bible continue to adduce in response to the problem that the bible contains two consecutive creation accounts: both are part of a single account – only the viewpoint has changed.

In this view, Gen 1 describes the framework of creation as a whole, while Gen 2 adds a number of particulars. This interpretation is so palatable also because there are almost no overlaps in content between the two accounts. Only two real repetitions stand out: The creation of man is reported in both 1:27 and 2:7, the creation of land animals in both 1:25 and 2:19. But these could be resolved: The sentence in 2:7b “Thus man became a living being” is an elaborating comment and résumé that uses næfæš ḥayyāh “living being” to refer back to the first account where this term is frequent (1:20, 21, 24, 30). On this reading, 1:27 reports that man was created “in the image of God”, while 2:7a adds how God did this in practice: “Yahweh God formed man from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”

In the case of the creation of animals, the link is created by their naming: In the first account, the act of naming is part of the pattern of creation for the first three acts: day, night, heavens, land and sea are all given their names. For the other works of creation, this element is absent. In 2:20 the second account reports that man named the animals God gave to him. A remark in 2:19b relates these two things to one another, as is visible in the emphasis on the fact that this time man is the one giving the names: “and whatever the man called every living being (næfæš ḥayyāh) that was its name.” These editorial additions in 2:4b, 7b and 19b allowed the second account to be read as a continuation of the first.

If we read the two creation accounts as a unit, we immediately notice what is common to both of them: the central and completely uncontested role of the One and Only God. In Gen 1 this god creates the world through his command without any kind of counterpart coming into play, and also in Gen 2 he is the only subject. Unchallenged, he puts his works into action as both potter and gardener. This focus on the One God connects the two biblical accounts all the more, in that it serves to set them apart from most of the creation myths current in the cultural and religious environs of Israel.⁴ These generally reflect the contradictory experiences of the world familiar to us all, by having competing supernatural forces that can, with some simplification, be broken down to an antagonistic relationship between cosmos and chaos. If the cosmos is created by the One and Only God, however, the chaotic status quo ante that necessarily must have existed becomes something intangible. The almost monotheistic perspective we encounter in the biblical creation accounts is undoubtedly of later date. Though this does not preclude the existence of traditional models, the search for them thus has to operate within narrow confines.

2 The Original Shape of the Account Gen 1:1 – 2:4a

Recently, it has become common again to read Gen 1 as well as Gen 2 – 3 as essentially coherent texts. The obvious irregularities are explained by pointing to the tradition used by the authors.⁵ This is a severe misunderstanding. It demonstrably overestimates the capabilities of human memory and neglects the genre of these texts, large parts of which are of an interpretive nature. While one must agree with Hermann Gunkel that “The world is not constituted only of people who write books and who copy them,”⁶ the scriptorium of the Temple of Jerusalem in the Persian and Hellenistic era, where the biblical texts were curated and at least in part created, was a truly literary world indeed.⁷

Already in the late 18^th century, modern biblical scholars recognized that the subdivision of the first creation account into six days was a later addition.⁸ Although this observation was instigated by the argument that the establishment of the Jewish Sabbath did not fit the mythical narrative one suspected behind the creation account,⁹ it was nevertheless accurate. The most obvious reason in its favour is that the creation of the cosmos consists of eight steps. Furthermore, the closing remark in 2:1 presupposes that the cosmos is complete with the creation of man: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.” In 2:2, however, the act of creation ends only with God’s rest on the seventh day. This incongruence already irritated ancient translators.¹⁰ That the ordering of the world culminates in the Sabbath being established, or conversely, that the Sabbath is established to reflect on creation, is a profound and theologically logical thought, but it remains out of place here. Originally, the only temporal determination of the process lay in the very first word of the record: b^ereʾšît “in the beginning.” What is now squeezed into six days all happened simply “in the beginning.”

Another literary level that we can identify is the act of creation being tied to the word of God. This motif is theologically extremely significant, as we can see, for instance, from the impact it had upon the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word” (John 1:1). It is rooted in the experience that the prophets’ message of doom came true with the conquest of Jerusalem.¹¹ The need to deal with this traumatic experience was what produced the insight that God’s word is supremely powerful, which ultimately signifies nothing less than the comprehensive causality of God’s word for all that happens in history as well as for all beings that exist in nature. As such, all the eight works of God in Gen 1 are prefaced with God’s command: “Let there be” (or similar). All of existence obeys this command with its being: “And it was so.” This relationship of command and obedience simultaneously establishes a norm: As everything that exists obeys God’s mandate with its being one can say “that it was good.”

The triad of command, execution and sanction is not always complete however. The sixth work, the creation of fish and birds, lacks the execution clause “And it was so.”¹² In the case of man, the execution clause appears only right at the end and refers less to the act of creation than to the benediction (V. 28 – 30). The sanction “God saw that it was good” is missing when the heavens are created. And after the creation of man, it is applied to creation as a whole (V. 31). Already the ancient textual tradition attempted to mend these inconsistencies. More serious, however, is that God himself executes the commands he gives. The scheme of command and execution only makes sense when the waters are gathered in order to let the land appear (V. 9), and when the plant life is being created: “God said: Let the earth put forth vegetation.¹³ […] And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation” (V. 11 – 12). In all other cases, God himself is the agent. Strictly speaking, the command should thus be a self-encouraging cohortative, which indeed occurs on one single occasion, namely when man is created: “Let us make man in our image. […] And God created man in his image” (V. 26 – 27). In addition, the details of command and deed do not always agree. In the case of the first work, for instance, God separates light from darkness, but the command concerns the creation of light.

If we remove all statements that add the creation by God’s word to the account, we are left with the following original form:

(1:1) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (2) The earth was without form and void. […] (4b) Then God separated the light from the darkness. (5) And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. […] (7) And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. […] (8) And God called the firmament Heaven. […] (9*)¹⁴ And the waters under the heavens were gathered together into its places, and the dry land appeared. (10) God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. […] (12) The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. […] (16) And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. (17) And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth. […] (21) And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. […] (25) And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. […] (27) And God created man in his image. […] (2:1) Thus the heavens and the earth were finish...