Birthpangs and Blessings

A Commentary on the Book of Genesis

Clare Amos

• Publisher: Sacristy Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781789591941
• eBook ISBN: 9781789591965
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Recent trends in Old Testament studies have radically changed the way we look at the first book of the Bible. This commentary takes account of these developments—acknowledging that traditional source-critical theories need to be re-evaluated, seeking to explore the book holistically, and taking account of its qualities as a 'story'. Clare Amos draws upon her extensive knowledge of the modern Middle East, its peoples, its religions and its problems, to provide new insights into some of the challenges which Genesis offers for faith and life today. Birthpangs and Blessings offers new insights into the spirituality of the Bible, the voyage of mutual discovery between God and humanity, a recurrent theme of this important biblical book.

The story of beginnings

1:1–6:8

As we begin to read Genesis 1:1–6:8, we find ourselves listening to a song of creation. It is as though the writers of these chapters are part of a choir singing the song, standing in a line with others behind and in front of them. They borrow images and themes from other creation narratives in the Ancient Middle East, in particular from the Babylonian geographical milieu. But even though Genesis transforms much of what is received, we are still allowed to hear echoes of earlier viewpoints, both Israelite and non-Israelite. Sometimes as in Genesis 1:1–2:4a these echoes are muted; at other points, as with the cherubim of Genesis 3:22 or the strange story of the sons of the gods in Genesis 6:1–4, they can ring loudly or even discordantly in our ears.

The early chapters of Genesis provide a model for those in every age who are prepared to deepen their own faith by listening to the sounds that other religious traditions can sing. The attitude they contain also acts as an implicit critique to those who would treat these pages as an absolute and unqualified statement of how the world scientifically came into being. For if you seek to read them flatly, on the one prosaic level, you are not really hearing the subtle orchestra of tones that empower them. Genesis will be a book in which the need for “true” listening will be very important. These chapters offer us the overture.

The song of the seven days

1:1–2:4a

This magnificent chapter was deliberately composed as a prologue to the book of Genesis. It is also significant that it has come to introduce the Old Testament and the whole of the Bible. It is the intended starting point of the biblical story. It is deliberately placed before what is apparently an alternative account of creation in Genesis 2:4b–3:24.

Whoever wrote the measured and solemn “liturgical” prose of Genesis 1 was fully aware of what was to come next. They knew that the picture offered of the story of Eden to be in the next chapter was coloured very differently. But they chose to give us first what we have received in Genesis 1.

It is likely that Genesis 1:1–2:4a and 2:4b–3:24 stem from different hands, possibly writing several centuries apart, and that this can help us explain the different style and feel of the two accounts. But the authors of Genesis 1 purposefully gave us this first chapter with its contrasting feel, not because they were careless or unaware of surface inconsistencies.

The creation of the world and of human beings within it includes paradox, and by setting Genesis 1 alongside Genesis 2 we are being reminded of this. We are both in the “image of God” (whatever that may mean, see p. 60) and of “the dust of the earth”. It is the glory and the tragedy of the human condition that this is so. By beginning Genesis with these two contrasting pictures, the authors of Genesis have set out the vision that Psalm 8:4–5 expressed in a brief poetic couplet: “What are human beings, that you are mindful of them . . . Yet you have made them a little lower than God.”

When we read Genesis 1:1–2:4a, we can imagine that we are standing in a vast cathedral. Soaring above us are the heavens and their luminaries. Around us the walls are coloured with pictures of the varieties of plant and animal creation. There is an ethereal choir humming almost wordlessly, and there is a voice which, as so often in a cathedral, you cannot see, declaiming solemnly, chanting creation into being.

It is no accident that such a picture might spring to mind. The authors of this passage inhabited a world in which cathedrals—or rather temples, their ancient equivalent—were at the heart of religious, intellectual, cultural and economic life. It is possible that this chapter was originally written for use in temple worship. It is prose which stands on the borders of poetry and liturgy. We know that other ancient creation stories were closely linked to worship. Such stories told of the activities of the gods, and temple liturgies offered the place and the time for human beings to come into contact with the divine and be blessed.

Those who composed Genesis 1 probably knew the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, which formed part of the temple liturgy in Babylon, though they also offer a challenge to it. Creation stories, such as Enuma Elish, were primarily interested in the past in order to understand and sustain the present. “Order” was what was desired: order over against the chaos and unpredictability of much of ancient life. People in the ancient world were confronted with the turbulence of the annual floods of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers which could be both life-giving and death-dealing, with impotence in the face of most human illnesses, with the fragile veneer which constituted stable civilization. Kings and temples had key roles in society to act as the guarantors of longed-for order. Reciting creation stories was also a way of bringing about stability, their telling reinforcing the “order” of the present and dreaming hopes for the future into being.

So too those who authored Genesis 1 were concerned to portray or even help to create an ordered cosmos. We can debate their precise geographical and chronological context. Because of their connection with the world of priests they are often referred to as “P”. Writing either in an exilic, or more likely post-exilic, context, they were very aware of what a chaotic experience the exile had been: cherished theological and political traditions had been challenged, the people’s very existence had been called into question. Some of the ways in which this concern for “order” (and specifically the priestly view of “order”) is expressed in Genesis 1 include:

• A fascination with numbers and number patterns, linked to the way that numbers form part of the fabric of the regular pattern of human life and of the structure of the universe. The numbers ten (ten fingers), seven (the traditional seven planets) and three were regarded as key elements of life. The number two also had a particular importance, because it was the natural product of “dividing”.
• A concern that different features of the universe should be “separated” from each other. The very word “separate” used in this chapter is characteristic of priestly vocabulary. It was a key task of priests to ensure that different elements with different qualities should be kept apart (e.g. the clean/unclean, the holy/common), and so God as creator is being described in priestly terms. The process of separation is good—creation proceeds by the recognition and naming of opposites, which in turn enables new forms of existence to take shape.
• The complementary patterning of the six days in which creation takes place in two sets of three.
• The structuring of time and the narrative to emphasize the importance of the Sabbath day.
• The interest in genealogies hinted at in 2:4a and which runs through the book of Genesis will also be a symptom of these authors’ quest for “order”. Genealogies help to link people to their roots, particularly rootless people who have experienced exile, or are in diaspora. They can also help to ensure that only the right kind of people are chosen for a role: for example, priests needed to prove their fitness by tracing their ancestry. The time of Ezra and Nehemiah in the post-exilic period saw great interest in genealogies, in order to ensure ethnic purity.

And yet despite this desire for an “ordered” world, both Genesis 1:1–2:4a itself, and the rest of Genesis, will help to subvert it. The neat patterns of numbers and words will almost work—but not quite; the outsiders, who one would not expect to be cherished if purity is paramount, will not only be allowed a place in the story, but become fundamental to it. Such is the God of Genesis, who will insist on being allowed to work in some surprising and unexpected ways.

1:1–2 In the beginning There is no end to the beginning of Genesis. The book begins with a conundrum. How should we translate the first Hebrew phrase bere’shit which does not actually include the word “the” before “beginning”? The NRSV seeks to reflect this by making this first verse with its verb “created” subordinate to verses 2–3 rather than treating verse 1 as a separate sentence, which is what is suggested in older translations such as the Authorized (“King James”) Version, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void . . . ”

Underlying this debate about language is an important theological issue. What is the grammar of creation? Is God here creating everything absolutely out of nothingness, ex nihilo, or is God’s creation rather the bringing of form and order to an already existing chaotic morass? Was there already an earth, in the shape of a “formless void”, before God began the process of creation that is being described here? The Enuma Elish, for example, speaks of creation in such a manner. The squelchy sea-monster Tiamat is torn apart to provide the raw material out of which the god Marduk fashions the world and its creatures. The “deep” (Hebrew: tehom) that is covered by darkness (1:2) may well be a word deliberately chosen to remind us of the Babylonian Tiamat, so are our writers of Genesis also thinking of creation in similar terms, even though the fierce conflict between the gods which is part of the Mesopotamian myth is totally absent from Genesis? This is what the NRSV is seeking to convey by subordinating verse 1 to verse 2 as it does. However, it is arguable that such a translation fails to do complete justice to the way that the authors of Genesis wanted to frame the whole of creation as taking place within the power and providence of God. God needs to be more than the subject in a subordinate clause! The traditional translation offered by the Authorized Version preserves an ambiguity about the exact process and timing of creation, which may well be what the original authors intended.

Indeed, one way of understanding verse 1 might be as a prologue summary to the rest of this chapter, rather as Genesis 1 is itself a prologue for the rest of the book. We are metaphorically standing outside our world and its creation—looking at it from a distance, as did those Apollo 8 astronauts as they circumnavigated the moon in December 1968. But the telescope that we are peering through in this chapter collapses time as well as space. Can we properly speak of the beginning before time itself has begun (“time” will not be created until Days One and Four)? Perhaps that is the reason why “the” is absent in the Hebrew text, though the limitations of English do not fully allow us to reflect this. And perhaps it is a rather than the beginning precisely because it is the start of a process that will be ongoing. We are being offered a perspective on the ultimate goal of creation—as well as its development. In the New Testament, John 5:17 draws on this part of Genesis to reflect that creation is not yet complete—for the father is working still.

It may well be that the “formless void” and “deep” were believed to exist in some fashion before the word of God spoke to it and shaped it. And yet, did it ever really exist apart from God? For even before God spoke, a “wind” from God hovered over the chaos. The NRSV translation “swept” does not quite capture the continuous sense of the underlying Hebrew participle which somehow takes us out of time. The Hebrew word ruah can mean “wind”, “spirit” and “breath”. It expresses and sums up the force of life. It can be intensely personal spirit—or impersonal power. Yet even if we picture what is happening as a mighty wind swirling like a storm on the surface of the planet, it is still an intended sign that God is and always has been intimately involved with all that is, whether good or evil.

Perhaps those who composed this chapter wanted to begin their story with a mystery. There certainly will be others to come. The God we meet in the first verses of Genesis both transcends the created universe, and yet also eternally cherishes it, sweeping or hovering over it like a mother bird (cf. Deuteronomy 32:11—which uses the same Hebrew word, though there translated as “hovers” to describe the Lord’s care for his people). The participle translated as “swept” is expressed in a feminine form, reflecting the grammatical gender of the Hebrew ruah. Eventually the feminine gender of ruah will influence understanding of the nature of God, especially in the Christian tradition.

It is paradoxical but important both to say that God created ex nihilo and to acknowledge God as working with and through chaos. The one affirms that nothing in the universe is outside the will and power of God. The other is a reminder that God can bring good out of whatever mess human beings and the created order find themselves in.

The language of the beginning of Genesis is echoed at various points in the New Testament. Most clearly in John 1:1–18 but also in Colossians 1:15–20, and probably in the use of the word “beginning” in Mark 1:1 and the description of the “first” of Jesus’ signs in John 2:11. When the word beginning occurs in several of these New Testament examples, it is clear that what is meant is a process rather than a particular point in time. May not this be helpful as we reflect on that mysterious “beginning” at the start of Genesis 1:1? For all the emphasis of the words that will be used to describe the completion of creation (2:1–3), this account encourages us to look to the future rather than cast our eyes solely on the past.

God created The world as we now know it owes its shape to God. “Create” (Hebrew: bara’) in the Old Testament is a word that is only ever used with God as its subject. It has been deliberately chosen by the author of this chapter to affirm God’s absolute responsibility for the entire created universe, and it will appear a significant seven times in the narrative up to 2:4a. The word which is used for God, ’elohim, itself reminds us of God’s universality. This is a generic word for “God” rather than the name of Israel’s own special deity. In many creation stories in the Ancient Middle East, there was a focus on the author’s own people or particular god. But that nationalistic element is largely missing from this account. So too is any real sense of struggle between God and other divine figures, which is remarkable when Genesis 1 is compared with other texts such as Enuma Elish, which link creation to a heavenly war. It is also suggestive that the word ’elohim is formally plural, even though it normally appears in the Hebrew Bible accompanied by a singular verb. It teases us straightaway to begin to reflect on God’s unity—and God’s plurality. Genesis 1 offers a majestic monotheistic vision, which shames us when so often our conception of God still seems unashamedly tribal. Yet there is also a plurality in unity of the divine which will be hinted at in 1:2 and 1:26 and act as a reminder that we cannot easily grasp this God (’elohim), either intellectually or as a convenient divine talisman.

Formless void It is difficult to capture the sound play of the Hebrew words tohu wabohu although the translation offered by the Revised English Bible, “vast waste”, is a good effort. Probably a lifeless, dark and moonless desert is envisaged. In the next moment, the picture of chaos switches to a vast “deep” or watery abyss. In the verses that follow, this “formless void” and “deep” and the “darkness” will not be consigned in their turn to non-existence or destruction; instead, they will form part of God’s new and emerging order. The “darkness” will be named as “night” and help to structure the boundaries of time; the “deep” will become “seas”, eventually teeming with life.

1:3–5 God said Something that will happen a perfect ten times in the course of this creation account. God creates through his word. In Old Testament thinking, words were powerful, had a concrete reality to them and could effect what they spoke about. The words of prophets were feared, precisely because if they predicted doom there was an inevitability about it happening. Yet like Isaiah 44:26; 55:10–11, this chapter suggests that the proven power of God’s words can also be an effective source of hope. If God can speak and everything come into being, then the corollary is that God’s word is surely powerful enough to redeem and restore.

We too know God through his words, words are an essential part o...

Table of contents

• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• The story of beginnings (1:1–6:8)
• The story of the flood—and its aftermath (6:9–11:26)
• The story of Abraham (11:27–25:18)
• The story of Jacob (25:19–36:43)
• The story of Joseph and his brothers (37:1–50:26)
• Notes