The Beginning and the End

Rereading Genesis’s Stories and Revelation's Visions

Michael W. Pahl

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608999279
  9781498213233
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890324
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Have you ever wondered if there might be more to Genesis than fodder for anti-evolutionism? Or have you ever thought, "Revelation has to be more than simply a roadmap for the future of the Middle East"? You're not alone. In The Beginning and the End Michael Pahl surveys the opening chapters of Genesis and the concluding chapters of Revelation, taking seriously both their historical and literary features as ancient texts and their theological purposes as inspired Scripture. The result is a reading of the first and last books of the Bible that sketches out, from beginning to end, a story of God, humanity, and all creation--a grand narrative in which we are placed in the middle, and which calls us to live in a particular way as our identity and our values are shaped in light of our origins and our destiny.

In the Beginning . . .

No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.

– native american proverb

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.

– george bernard shaw (1856–1950)

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.

– anais nin (1903–1977)

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.

– charles dickens (1812–1870)

If you want to know the end, look at the beginning.

– african proverb

Reading Ancient Origins Stories

Once upon a time . . .

Only four words. Yet these four words, placed at the beginning of a story, are evocative. They set the stage for a story of a princess and a prince, a story of mysterious magic and true love, a story ending with equally evocative words: and they all lived happily ever after.

If you are a native English speaker raised in a Western society, chances are you will immediately know the genre: it is a particular kind of folk tale commonly called a fairy tale, made popular by a wave of animated Disney films over the past century. Not only that, but you will know exactly what to do with this story, how to interpret it. You would not take the opening “once upon a time” literally, as if the narrated events really did happen at a particular time and place in human history. Nor would you put much stock in the final “and they all lived happily ever after”; if you thought about the words at all, you might smile ruefully to yourself, since “happily ever after” is so rare in real life. Rather, you would read the story as a fictional tale intended to entertain or, at most, to reinforce certain social values—the importance of making good moral choices, maybe, or perhaps a societal ideal of romantic love.

But we can look a little deeper. How does truth work in such a story? The fairy tale is not “true” in the sense that it accurately relates events that happened in human history. But the fairy tale does have its own kind of truth: like all texts, its truth is related to its purpose. As we have just noted, a fairy tale is supposed to entertain, or perhaps to support certain social ideals. If the fairy tale does indeed provide the promised entertainment, then in a very pragmatic sense it can be said to be “true.” More significantly, if the values it reinforces are in fact good and useful within the particular society in which the tale is told, then in a more profound sense it can also be said to be “true.”

We can push these reflections even further. How do you know these things? How do you know that this story is a fairy tale—that it did not actually happen, that it should not be taken literally, that it is intended for entertainment or social reinforcement? Again, if you are a native English speaker raised in a Western society chances are you know all this intuitively. Sure, you may have formally studied fairy tales at some point, but quite likely you picked up on most of this already as a child, even if you could not have expressed these ideas at that time in quite this way. If, however, you are not a native English speaker raised in a Western society, you would have to learn about fairy tales in order to make good sense of them.

All this is related to what is perhaps the most crucial key for interpreting any text, whether ancient or modern, secular or sacred. That interpretive key is understanding the text’s genre, or the kind of literature it is.

A genre is like an implied contract, an unwritten agreement, between the author and the reader of a text. The genre establishes a framework, certain conventional guidelines or constraints, for creating and understanding the text. The author of a text works within the conventions of that particular genre, perhaps stretching those guidelines in some new directions, but still in a way that is recognizably that genre. She will indicate the genre through a variety of means—none explicit (the author will not start off announcing, “This is a fairy tale”), but rather implicit: through characteristic words or phrases or topics or themes, or through such features as the piece’s style or length or structure. Once you recognize the genre—whether intuitively or through careful determination—you are better equipped to interpret the text, to discern whatever truth (or even goodness or beauty) it may convey.

So you will interpret a history textbook differently than a historical novel, even if they speak of the same historical setting. You will read a newspaper editorial differently than a front-page report, even if they are on the same topic. A Shakespearean sonnet will make a very different impression on you than a vehicle’s mechanical manual, even if you really love that car. And you will understand and experience the truth of a cookbook in a very different way than you would the truth of a chemistry textbook, even if they describe the same chemical processes.

But if you miss the text’s genre, you will miss the text’s purpose, and that can get you into all sorts of trouble. Woe to those who mistake historical fiction for a history textbook! (Remember The DaVinci Code?)

•

Genesis is certainly not a modern folk tale or fairy tale, but what is the genre of Genesis? If you were a librarian 2,200 years ago in the ancient library of Alexandria in Egypt, where would you put your newly acquired scrolls of Genesis? Should it be placed alongside the Greek histories of Thucydides, or with the fables of Aesop, or perhaps beside the narrative geographical sketches of Patrocles?

If you were that ancient librarian, more than likely you would place Genesis alongside writings known today as Enuma Elish and Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh, primeval stories from ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, essentially where modern-day Iraq is, and extending up into Syria. Babylonia was the most prominent of the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms at least as it relates to ancient Israel. Ancient Egypt itself had similar primeval stories inscribed on stone walls and coffins (making it a little hard to fit them into Alexandria’s library!), but these stories were later copied and collected together with other religious writings in what is known as the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts. All these primeval stories could be called “etiological narratives”; that is, they depict in story form “why things are the way they are,” describing the nature and function and purpose of common realities in the storyteller’s lived experience (realities such as deities, religious worship, human beings, ethnic groups, languages, and so on) by telling a story of the origins of those realities. A more specific type of these etiologies is a “cosmogony,” an account of the origins of the earth and life on earth from the perspective of the storyteller or her community.

Ancient etiologies and cosmogonies such as Enuma Elish and the stories in the Pyramid Texts were not so much concerned with the precise when and how of these origins, or whether the stories happened in history exactly as described—though undoubtedly many ancient Babylonians and Egyptians believed the world had been made just as their stories said. Rather, these stories functioned at a deeper level to shape the worldview of these peoples by answering the who and the what and the why of human existence in the world: Who are the gods? What is the world? Who are human beings? Why do human beings exist? What is our purpose related to the gods and the world and one another? What (if anything) is wrong with the world? How (if at all) can things be made right? This is in fact the way truth works in such ancient etiologies. Enuma Elish, for example, reinforced some important values for ancient Babylonian culture: that the gods are personalized manifestations of nature, strong but capricious; that the natural world is therefore powerful but indifferent toward the fate of human beings; that human beings were created to serve the mightiest god, Marduk, by appropriate temple ritual; that human beings can function as servants of Marduk to stem the tide of chaos in the natural world; and so on.

Genesis, then, is an ancient Israelite etiology, and the creation stories of Genesis 1–2 are more particularly ancient Israelite cosmogonies. In fact, these Genesis creation stories resemble the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian stories of origins in many respects. This should be expected considering that these two cultures—one directly to the northeast and the other directly to the southwest of Israel—were extremely influential in every other way on ancient Israelite society. As the geographical bridge between these two regions, Israel could not help but breathe the same cultural air as Babylon and Egypt. So, for example, the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian language of “image” used for filial, royal representation is reflected in Genesis 1, and the Babylonian picture of human beings created out of clay mixed with the divine essence is paralleled in Genesis 2. Also, for example, these ancient origins stories think of creation in terms of cosmic order being brought out of primeval chaos, a notion shared by the first creation story of Genesis. More specifically, these ancient cosmogonies are very concerned to demonstrate that this created order has a strongly religious element, and even that a crucial focus of this order is a temple built to the god or gods in which ordered religious practices must be performed to bring about order within broader society and the world. This idea is also shared by the Genesis creation stories, with all creation ordered and filled to be God’s temple—as we will explore in the next chapter.

But the Genesis creation stories do not simply parrot the older stories of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Rather, while they share certain motifs and language with these other stories, the stories of Genesis boldly present themselves as the alternative to all other origins stories, describing the one true God, his work in the world, and his purpose for humanity and the created order. Thus, for example, these Genesis stories are unapologetically monotheistic, describing only one true God as opposed to the many gods and goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And so also these Genesis stories emphasize God’s distinctiveness related to nature: unlike the Babylonian and Egyptian concept of the gods as personalized forces of nature (such as the sky and sea and land), Genesis 1 emphasizes that God created these natural features, that these forces of nature are not God but are rather created things under God’s sovereign control.

We will explore more of this in the coming chapters, but for now this brief introduction to the striking similarities and profound differences between Genesis and other ancient etiologies underscores the kinds of questions Genesis was intended to answer—or, one could say, the way truth works in these Genesis stories. As an ancient etiology (including ancient cosmogonies), Genesis was not written to respond to questions of precisely when or how everything came to exist. Like those in surrounding cultures, undoubtedly there were many ancient Israelites who believed everything came into existence just as their creation stories described—but this is not the point of these stories. The first creation story of Genesis 1, for example, uses the pattern of seven “days” as an organizing principle for describing the ordering of God’s cosmic temple (reflecting the weekly rhythms of ancient Israelite life, with six days of work and one day of worship-rest), but we should take just as seriously the second Genesis creation story using the language of a single “day” to encompass all God’s creative work (“In the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven,” 2:4). Each statement is intended to make a deeply theological point, a point related to the questions Genesis was intended to answer, questions of who and what and why.

One important indication that we are on the right track in seeing these as the key questions these stories are intended to answer is that later biblical texts glance back at these foundational origins stories to answer precisely these questions, and not others. The Christian Scriptures are filled with references to these stories—quotations, allusions, echoes—and none of these later Scriptures employ the first stories of Genesis to describe exactly when or how creation came about. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” the psalmist affirms (Psalm 19:1). Israel should know “from the beginning” that God “sits enthroned above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22); indeed, God declares, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be? Has not my hand made all these things, and so they came into being?” (Isaiah 66:1–2). “Since the creation of the world,” Paul says, “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly se...

Table of contents

• The Beginning and the End
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Beginnings and Endings and Where to Find Them
• Part 1: In the Beginning . . .
• Part 2: In the End, a New Beginning . . .
• For Further Reading
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index