Creation and Doxology

The Beginning and End of God's Good World

Gerald L. Hiestand, Todd Wilson, Gerald L. Hiestand, Todd Wilson, Todd A Wilson

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780830853861
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830874033
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The doctrine of creation is crucial to the Christian faith, but it has often been maligned, misinterpreted, or ignored.

Some, such as pagan philosophers and Gnostics, have tended to denigrate the goodness of the material world. More recently, new questions have emerged regarding human origins in light of the Darwinian account of evolution. What does it mean today to both affirm the goodness of God's creation and anticipate the new creation?

The Center for Pastor Theologians (CPT) seeks to assist pastors in the study and production of biblical and theological scholarship for the theological renewal of the church and the ecclesial renewal of theology. Based on the third annual CPT conference, this volume bringstogether the reflections of church leaders, academic theologians, and scientists on the importance—and the many dimensions—of the doctrine of creation.

Contributors engage with Scripture and scientific theory, draw on examples from church history, and delve into current issues in contemporary culture in order to help Christians understand the beginning and ending of God's good creation.

Based on annual CPT conferences, the volumes in the Center for Pastor Theologians series bring together the reflections of pastors and theologians who desire to make ongoing contributions to the wider scholarly community for the renewal of both theology and the church.

Part One

The DOCTRINE of
CREATION EXPRESSED

1

Reading Genesis 1 with the
Fourth Commandment

The Creation Week as a Calendar Narrative

MICHAEL LEFEBVRE

ONE OF THE EARLIEST COMMENTARIES on the creation week is the fourth commandment:1 “Six days you shall labor, . . . but the seventh is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. . . . For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, . . . and rested on the seventh day” (Ex 20:9-11).2 This commandment interprets the creation week as a pattern for Israel’s labor and rest.

In recent decades, attention has focused on the creation week’s historical character. Is it descriptive history, describing how creation actually happened? Or is it poetic? How does the creation narrative relate to the narrative told by evolutionary science? These discussions tend to focus on the six days.3 But if there is one point of consensus through history, it is the text’s primary concern with the seventh day as enshrined in the fourth commandment.

The Sabbath was not the only holy day in Israel. Israel had numerous festivals, many of which have associated narratives. How might the other calendar narratives in the Pentateuch offer insights to help assess the creation week? This essay will explore this question, beginning with the calendar employed in the Genesis flood narrative.4

DATES IN THE FLOOD NARRATIVE

Flood stories were widespread in the ancient world. One distinctive of the biblical flood account is its use of dates. There are five dates in the Genesis flood narrative. This is remarkable, since those are the only dates in the entire book of Genesis.

Typically in ancient literature, an event’s timing was indicated by relating it to another event, not by using dates. Timeline dating—plotting events on a transcendent timeline with dates—is common today, but ancient texts used event sequencing, temporally marking an event by relating it to other events.5 Note the following examples in Genesis: “To Seth also a son was born. . . . At that time people began to call upon the name of the LORD” (Gen 4:26); “When man began to multiply on the face of the land . . . , the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive” (Gen 6:1-2); “After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram” (Gen 15:1). Throughout Genesis, event sequencing is used. But five dates appear in the flood narrative (and nowhere else in the entire book of Genesis):

1. 1. “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth” (Gen 7:11).
2. 2. “In the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat” (Gen 8:4).
3. 3. “And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen” (Gen 8:5).
4. 4. “In the six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried from off the earth” (Gen 8:13).
5. 5. “In the second month, on the twenty-seventh day of the month, the earth had dried out” (Gen 8:14).

Table 1. Dates in the flood narrative

An important insight emerges when these dates are plotted against the festival calendar of Israel (see table 1). Three of the five fall directly on Mosaic festival dates. The only exceptions are the first and last, which nonetheless fall at the midpoint of Israel’s grain-harvest festivals. All five dates appear to be “scheduled” with reference to Israel’s festivals. A survey of each date illuminates this relationship.

1. The beginning of the flood (Gen 7:11). The flood’s beginning date (2/17) is at the center of Israel’s grain festivals. The early spring festivals—Passover, Unleavened Bread, and Firstfruits (1/14–21)—began the barley harvest. The Feast of Weeks in late spring marked the wheat harvest. During a good harvest year in Israel, the rains ended by springtime.6 A thunderstorm during the grain harvest endangered crops and was regarded as a sign of judgment, as illustrated by the words of Samuel: “Is it not wheat harvest today? I will call upon the LORD, that he may send thunder and rain. And you shall know and see that your wickedness is great” (1 Sam 12:17; cf. Ex 9:31-32; Prov 26:1). Dating the start of the deluge in the middle of Israel’s grain harvest adds to its ominous character.

2. The ark’s landing (Gen 8:4). “The ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat” on the seventeenth day of the seventh month (Gen 8:4). In later Israel, this date would fall during the Feast of Booths. Moses appointed that festival to commemorate Israel’s safe passage through the wilderness to the Promised Land (Lev 23:39-43; Num 2:1-34). Similarly, Noah’s date marked his safe journey through a watery “wilderness,” arriving at Mount Ararat (cf. 1 Kings 6:1).

3. When mountaintops became visible (Gen 8:5). Noah had his first sight of land on 10/1, three months after the ark’s landing (7/17) and three months before the waters were gone (1/1). At that point, Noah saw the mountaintops and sent out birds “to see if the waters had subsided” (Gen 8:8) and whether foliage was growing again (Gen 8:11). In later Israel, that same date was a new-moon day in between Israel’s festival years. The previous festival year ended with the Feast of Booths (7/15–22), and the next began on New Year’s Day (1/1). The interim was Israel’s rainy season, when Hebrew farmers planted for the new year and watched to see whether God would give them bounty the next year. Noah’s hopeful glimpse of land and the plucking of its first leaves fit well with Israel’s experience at that same season.

4. When the waters were gone (Gen 8:13). By New Year’s Day (1/1) the waters were gone. New Year’s Day is a natural “new beginnings” point. By highlighting this date for the end of the flood, later Israelites would celebrate the new year remembering how Noah “removed the covering of the ark and looked” (Gen 8:13) and saw a new beginning granted in God’s grace.

5. When the ground was dry (Gen 8:14). The ground was completely dry on 2/27. The significance of the flood’s beginning in the heart of the grain harvest has already been noted. The same applies to its conclusion on a date one year and an even ten days after. If the storm’s beginning during the harvest was a sign of judgment on that year’s plantings, the restoration of dry ground during the harvest marked the return of normal agricultural order and bounty.

These correspondences suggest that the alignment between the five dated flood events and later Israel’s festival calendar is not coincidental. Noah’s flood was retold in a manner that related his “exodus” to Israel’s festival worship and agricultural labors. If this reading is correct, one might still ask whether Noah’s flood actually took place along these dates, or whether these dates were added anachronistically. One further feature indicates these are not dates recorded from observation but are a literary construction: the flood narrative uses schematic, thirty-day months rather than actual varying-length months. This is prima facie evidence of a constructed (rather than observed) timeline.

In ancient lands, the length of a month was based on lunar observations. The old month (lit., “moon,” ḥōdeš) continued until the first sliver of the next moon appeared. That sighting marked the first day of the new month/new moon.7 Actual months therefore varied in length, roughly evenly, between twenty-nine or thirty days.8 However, this uncertainty posed a problem for drafting legal texts or making economic projections. Therefore, “a schematic 360-day year . . . [of twelve] consecutive 30-day months” was used for economic calculations and legal texts.9 Descriptive texts based on observations reported months varying between twenty-nine and thirty days. But legal texts composed for future instruction invoked schematic, thirty-day months.

The flood narrative uses schematic, thirty-day months. The five months between the beginning of the flood (on 2/17) and the ark’s resting on Mount Ararat (on 7/17) are rendered as 150 days (Gen 7:24; 8:3), being five months of thirty days each. Two or three of those months would have been twenty-nine days in length if observational data were employed, giving a count of 147 or 148 days. A length of 150 days would not be possible. The flood dates, therefore, cannot be based on observations but have the form of a legal construction.

This conclusion is not to suggest a problem in the Genesis account. On the contrary, it is hard to imagine the author would overlook such a simple calculation if an appearance of journalistic description were intended. This conclusion indicates that we are dealing with a legal text by design, rather than an observational record. The use of aesthetically balanced dates and numbers throughout the passage, such as 7s, 10s, 40s, 150, along with the use of schematic months, indicates the constructed nature of this narrative’s dates for a legal (rather than journalistic) purpose. It is therefore proposed that the flood account is an agricultural and festival calendar in narrative form: a calendar narrative.

This function for the flood narrative is comparable to the contemporary practice of telling Jesus’ birth story on December 25. Churches do so, not to assert that Jesus was actually born on that date, but to inform Christian observances on that date. Similarly, the flood narrative re-maps the events of Noah’s deluge to the calendar of later Israel’s agricultural labors and harvest festivals for its instructional value. The plausibility of this argument is strengthened when the same features are noted in the Pentateuch’s exodus narratives.

DATES IN THE EXODUS NARRATIVE

Like Genesis, Exodus uses event sequencing, not timeline dating. No dates occur in Exodus until Passover night (Ex 12). Then five dates suddenly appear in rapid succession (Ex 12:1–13:16), and eleven more follow at later points of Israel’s journey (in Exodus–Deuteronomy). Like the flood dates, these sixteen exodus dates align with key dates on Israel’s festival calendar (see table 2).

Table 2. Dates in the exodus narrative

A full examination of these exodus dates and their festival correspondences is not possible in this essay, although such an assessment has been provided elsewhere.10 Since the exodus is the presenting narrative of Israel’s calendar, it should not be surprising to find significant correspondences. But a further question follows: Are the exodus narrative dates based on the observed timing of original events, or are these dates added to create festival alignments? Several lines of evidence point to the latter conclusion.11

For example, Exodus repeatedly tells us that Sinai was a “three days’ journey” from Egypt (Ex 3:18; 5:3; 8:27). However, nearly three months separate the date Israel is said to have left Egypt (Num 33:3) and the date of their reported arrival at Mount Sinai (Ex 19:1). Various efforts have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: In Praise of Beauty: The Native Connection Between Creation and Doxology: Gerald Hiestand and Todd Wilson
• Part One: The Doctrine of Creation Expressed
• Part Two: The Doctrine of Creation Explored
• Part Three: The Doctrine of Creation Practiced
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Creation and Doxology
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright