There probably is no more famous beginning than “In the beginning.” The Bible starts with a great and apparently cosmic claim: that there actually was a beginning; that the world and time don't just go around in circles or go on forever in all directions. But to open the Bible at its first book and to read with even moderate attention is to confront an inevitable question: at which beginning do we begin? Even the most rudimentary examination of Genesis quickly discovers not one but two beginnings; or is that two versions of the same beginning?
In Genesis 1 verse 1 we read: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” an opening assertion followed by the famous six days of creation, culminating in the apparently simultaneous creation of male and female humanity, and followed by the Shabbat, God's Sabbath day of rest. Then, turn the page, and in Genesis 2 verse 4 we read: “In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.” This “second start” is followed by the apparently sequential fashioning first of the Man from the earth and then of the Woman from the Man, in all of their naked, unashamed glory – and all in a “day.”
So naturally, a few questions arise, especially for the modern, uninitiated reader. First, why do we find the story of creation told twice? Isn't once enough? And second, why do these double accounts of the beginning appear to differ in apparently significant ways? If it's a question of multiple viewpoints, then how do we understand their relation to each other? Is this a case of seeing wall‐eyed through conflicting lenses, like a pair of poorly made glasses? Or is it a case of seeing stereoscopically through complementary lenses, with depth of field, for roundness, solidity, and perspective? In other words, in Genesis 1 and 2, are we seeing double, or are we seeing whole?
1.1 Seeing Deep and Whole: Stereoscopic Vision
In the Preface we noted the unique value of approaching the Bible through the conscious study of literary forms – with questions that focus on genre, characterization, figurative language, poetic and narrative structure, and the varied imaginative traditions that provided the contexts for composing its many books. In Chapters 2 and 5 we will discuss this perennial question of narrative doubling in Genesis more fully, but here such doubling can serve to illustrate the practical value of a specifically literary approach to reading the Bible. For what literary study attempts to do, first of all, is to discover a text on something like its own terms, and in the case of the Hebrew Bible, that means learning something about the imaginative equipment of an ancient Hebrew. “Reading like a Hebrew” means asking how the Bible's writers and editors chose structural and figurative devices to address their audiences' expectations and cultural habits of mind.
So, for instance, a literary approach to the twice‐told opening of Genesis seeks useful context by turning to instances of doubling elsewhere, and nowhere is such doubling more frequent than in the lyric poetry of the Psalms. The Psalms, for all of their apparently absolute proclamations, also display a high degree of deliberate repetition, contrast, and embellishment. No doubt the Psalms begin with a passage expressing a single, unequivocal viewpoint, without complication or qualification:
“Blessed is the man,” writes the anonymous composer of Psalm 1,
Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly,
Nor stands in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
(1–2)
Here is one hallmark of the ancient Hebrew imagination emphatically on display – that is, the inclination to draw bright lines between right and wrong, good and evil, and especially between the righteous and the ungodly, and then to sanction these judgments in the name of one almighty God.
In fact, after the psalmist continues for a few more verses elaborating the rewards of the righteous and the miseries of the wicked, he sums up their likely futures in starkly absolute terms: “For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, / But the way of the ungodly shall perish” (6). Very clearly here, the way of blessing is the way of the Law, of walking according to the revealed will of a covenant God. To depart from that way – to “stand in the path of sinners,” or to “sit in the seat of the scornful” – is the way to destruction. So the one righteous way would appear to be single rather than double: keep the Sabbath holy, avoid forbidden foods like pork and shellfish, commit no murder, and touch not your neighbor's wife – nor shall you look at her. Keep the Law, in all points great and small, or bid your blessing goodbye.
So far, you may well ask what light this passage sheds on the contrasting perspectives of Genesis 1 and 2. The light is this: while Psalm 1, like Genesis 1, would seem to settle matters, it doesn't. In fact, we soon discover that there's plenty of room in the Psalms for other angles and for second opinions. If it's quintessentially Hebrew to lay down the Law once and for all, it's also quintessentially Hebrew to say, with Tevye the Jewish dairyman from the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof, “On the other hand …” And the other hand for Psalm 1 is found, for instance, in Psalm 32, which is attributed to a formerly righteous man, King David, who now has killed his neighbor in order to take his neighbor's wife, and is starting to groan for it: “Blessed is the man,” David also begins – but how differently Blessed than the straight arrow of Psalm 1:
Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven,
Whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man to whom the LORD does not impute iniquity,
And in whose spirit there is no deceit.
(1–2)
Like Johnny Cash's inmate in Folsom Prison, who “shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die,” David the psalmist had known better, had known the Law, but broke it anyway.
Yet in Psalm 32 David imagines the possibility that the Lawgiver God still has a soft spot for lawbreakers, and that the “ex‐righteous” can somehow become righteous again. So he ends this psalm by celebrating his recovered righteousness, as if it were a kind of recovered virginity.
Here then we see a second hallmark of the ancient Hebrew imagination clearly on display: if the Hebrews were inclined to draw bright lines separating the sheep from the goats, they also often crossed those lines and identified with the goats. If the Hebrew scriptures proclaim the absolute laws of an unchanging God, they also portray a God of second thoughts and second opinions, a Deity capable not only of monologue but of dialogue, and of compassion. In Chapter 3, we will consider the Psalms in greater depth, but even a quick look at the Psalms shows that the Hebrew desire for a second opinion, for alternate viewpoints and other hands, appears not only among and between poems, but is woven into the very fabric of Hebrew poetry itself, in the pervasive device of parallelism.
It's here that the Psalms' usefulness as context for the doubling in Genesis becomes clearer. Modern readers naturally ask, “Why can't the psalmists say anything just once? Why do they always have to repeat themselves?” And, true enough, the most distinguishing mark of biblical poetry, the genius of its structure, is its insistent line‐by‐line repetition, its parallelism. Parallelism is a kind of doubling, and is defined by Webster's Dictionary as “recurrent syntactical similarities introduced for dramatic or rhetorical effect.” Put more simply, Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme words, as English or French or Italian poets often do; Hebrew poetry rhymes ideas. Sometimes this “idea rhyming” is simply for emphasis, sometimes for contrast, and sometimes for development and embellishment. To put it another way, the biblical poets knew that there's only so much you can see with one eye, so they prefer two; and, perhaps paradoxically, when we look at the world through two eyes, we can see life in three dimensions.
One need only poke a random finger into the Psalms to find a dozen examples of such “three‐dimensional” poetry on every page. For instance, there's Psalm 19 (here in the New Revised Standard translation), which echoes the cosmic creation language of Genesis 1, and appropriately glitters with varied parallelisms:
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
And the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
Their voice is not heard;
Yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
(1–4)
To analyze these verses is to see how the parallelisms work to deepen, enrich, challenge, and complement each other: “The heavens are telling the glory of G...
