Reading Genesis, page 2
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Abraham was, at the time of “an horror of great darkness” and a terrible dream, a wanderer with no heir and no country and no certain place to bury his dead. He did have the singular attention of God, who confronted him again and again with promises, blessings with the force of demands. There is nothing conditional about them, though Abraham’s “belief” makes him suitable to receive them. He leaves his father’s house and, with his family, goes to a distant country the Lord has promised him and his descendants, and where he cannot stay because there is famine. To an observer his life might look like the life of any pastoralist, this stranger drifting through the countryside, looking for grazing for his herds. By epic standards there is a very great quiet around the dealings of God with Abraham. Though Abraham is engrossed inwardly in an awareness of God that will indeed make him the father of nations, and though God’s intense awareness of Abraham is essential to all that follows, the surface of the commonplace is broken only a few times in the course of this very immediate and radically asymmetrical companionship— as good a word as any, since the Lord, as a stranger, has accepted, no doubt enjoyed, Abraham’s hospitality. They have broken bread together. It might be true that Abraham’s conception of God is limited by his having lived in a world of multitudes of gods with special and limited powers—nature, tribal, and household gods. But the conception of God in the text, in the telling, understands Him as the God of history. By means of landless and childless Abram, his name until God renames him Abraham, “a father of many nations,” He will bless all the families of the earth. It should be noted that this is a very sweet promise, a credit to Him Who makes it and him who is moved by it. I know of nothing in any way comparable. The very great tact with which God enters the human world through Abraham, respecting its expectations, is entirely consistent with the centrality He has given humankind in His Creation.
As an interpretation of his people’s history cast back on patriarchal times, Abram’s dream vision makes authoritative an understanding of the slavery and wandering of the Hebrew tribes as divinely intended and providential. The darkness of the dream and the weirdness of its occasion make clear that grief and cruelty are foretold in it. No reason for them is given. On its face the bondage in Egypt is neither a reward nor a punishment. It is a long moment in providential history, not to be explained in other terms. In any case, the blackness of darkness is never minimized. Over time, the biblical narrative inverts the apparent meaning of the suffering of many generations, no slight thing. Grueling misfortune prepares for singular favor, difficult favor, whose main product and proof might be the narratives that record and interpret this history. The narrative introduces the idea of divine purpose, relative to humankind, its intention to be realized over vast stretches of time. This is an understanding of God and humanity that has no equivalent in other literatures, God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations. The character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention. So the problem of evil is not solved but is instead infinitely complicated. When Jesus says of his executioners “They know not what they do,” we can appreciate how very radically his words understate the case. If the same were said of the mythic progenitors of human history, Adam and Eve, or of the splitters of the atom, the creators of antibiotics, and all the rest of us, the truth of these words would overwhelm our power to conceive.
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Skeptical interpretations of religion tend to treat it as a primitive attempt to explain things that reason and science would in the course of time make a true and sufficient account of. Say Babylonia believed that the world had suffered a great inundation meant to destroy the human race because the gods found human beings irksome. Who knows what belief is, even when it is culturally and ritually instilled through ages and when there is no competing vision available? But these epics might have taken authority from the fact that they describe a melancholy form of dynamic equilibrium. The gods, faint with hunger, once decided it was more practical to limit human population by assigning a spirit to steal infants from their mothers’ laps than to destroy them wholesale. (This according to a variant of the epic called Atra-Hasis.) They would have “explained” infant mortality. How many infants died when Pharaoh, like a god of Babylon, set about reducing the number of Hebrews in Egypt by destroying their infants? We know only that the infant Moses lived. Babylonian myth rationalized the deaths of children by supposing the gods to be indifferent to human sorrow and hostile to human life, insofar as it exceeded the numbers the gods found useful to themselves. In stark contrast, the Hebrew myth explains nothing. Or it offers two explanations that seem incompatible on their face. One is the wickedness of Pharaoh. The other, simultaneous with it, is the will and intent of God. This crime, this sorrow, is simply among the first things that must happen in order for the darkest part of Abram’s dream to be fulfilled and the extraordinary promise made to his descendants to be realized.
There are in effect two forms of fatalism in play. A Babylonian might console herself with the thought that the gods must do as they must do. On these terms a kind of stability has been reached between gods and humankind. A Hebrew could say that her God had a great purpose unfolding in time, far too vast in its workings to be readily described as providential, except in faith. The very remarkable belief of these ancient Hebrews that God loved the world and valued humankind persisted among them through every difficulty. It gave them the conception of time as open-ended from a mortal point of view but utterly purposive, shaped by a divine intention for which a thousand years are like a day when it is past. Time is implicated in the idea of covenant or promise. Destiny will be fulfilled, loyalty will be maintained, into a future unlike all the misery and happiness that must intervene between now and then. Within this great certainty little can be assumed.
Genesis acknowledges a crucial variable that is not present in the Babylonian epics—human culpability. To have been too noisy is more anodyne, even, than to have tasted an apple. But Adam and Eve disobeyed, doubted, tried to deceive. These are all complex acts of will. The old Christian theologies spoke of felix culpa, the fortunate fall. This is in effect another name for human agency, responsibility, even freedom. If we could do only those things God wills, we would not be truly free, though to discern the will of God and act on it is freedom. Our human nature as fallen and our human nature as divine have a dynamic, asymptotic relation with each other, meeting at infinity, perhaps. In any case, the centrality of humankind in the creation myth of Genesis is from the beginning an immeasurable elevation of status, made meaningful in the fact of our interacting with God even at the level of sacred history. This is unique to the Bible and central to both Testaments. Could Moses really have refused to return to Egypt? Might Judas have refused to betray Jesus, who knew he must be betrayed? All this is related to the fact that the Bible does not exist to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with a respect and restraint that resists conclusion.
This irresolvable question regarding the origin and meaning of human actions persists in crucial contexts throughout both Testaments. Yes, Moses could have refused to return to Egypt because he was a wanted man there and he did not yet know this God who was laying claim to him; but no, in that Moses was crucial to the unfolding of history. Could Pilate have spared Jesus his death on a cross? Yes, in that we recognize his experience of reluctant choice, and in that the drama of the moment is palpable in the accounts made of it; no, because the event of Jesus’s death would be, again, epochal. It is the centrality of humankind, exceptional among the myths of neighboring cultures, that draws down this order of attention to the great mystery of the origins and meaning of individual actions, and the meaning of individual lives. If questions arise about my illustrating points about the Hebrew Bible with instances from the New Testament, I think it is relevant to interpretation that this aspect of the older text is sustained in the newer one despite all the time and cultural change that stands between them, and that it is in both cases unique among comparable literatures. For my purposes here, the recurrence of the question in moments of greatest significance demonstrates the loyalty of both traditions to the setting of human experience against and within cosmic history, one unfathomable, the other qualitatively unlike anything we know. When they are seen to occur together, much may be apprehended, but nothing is explained. Ecclesiastes makes the point elegantly: “I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it. He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” The engrossing beauty of the vanishing present exists within the knowledge that “whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it.”
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The matter of the universality of the meaning of Abraham’s life is touched on after a surprisingly untypical tale of his rescuing and restoring the wealth of some kings, and his nephew Lot, as well, who have been raided and abducted by other kings. On his return he is met by Melchizedek, king of Salem, who is priest of El Elyon, God Most High, “possessor of heaven and earth.” This mysterious figure brings out bread and wine and blesses Abram in the name of his god—or of God. Abram gives this priest a tenth of what he has recovered and says he has sworn to “the LORD, the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth,” that he will keep nothing for himself. The word Lord replaces the name YHWH in translation, so it could be that Abram is claiming for God the attributes Melchizedek has claimed for El Elyon, the highest god in the Canaanite pantheon. But Abram seems to have accepted the priest’s blessing, his bread and wine. And he has given him a tithe.
The implication is that Melchizedek, who can only be thought of as pagan, is indeed a priest of God. The recurrence of this figure in Scripture supports this reading. Melchizedek appears again, strange as ever, in Psalm 110, which is a messianic psalm of David, quoted by Jesus as such. That is, it is taken in Jewish, then Christian tradition to anticipate the Messiah, who will be, in the words of the psalm, “a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.” So tradition affirms the special, though mysterious, importance of this encounter between Abram, whose relationship with God would seem to make him the one non-pagan in the world at the time, and this priest of El Elyon, a god who, in Canaanite texts, is not more godlike than the other figures in the Babylonian pantheon. Abram responds to Melchizedek in a way that grants him the kind of respect priesthood implicitly claims.
It is interesting that the matter of the worship of false gods does not arise in the story of Abraham, where it might seem to have come up almost inevitably. I will once more scandalize scholarly norms by looking to the New Testament for help in understanding this. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul offers an account of the origins of paganism. He says of the Lord, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” But of idolators: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.” Paul goes on to denounce sexual practices he, as a Jew, associates with paganism. Historical Christianity has tended to seize upon prohibitions and condemnations to the neglect of matters of greater importance. In seeing paganism as a declined form of an original and potentially universal knowledge of God, Paul is granting it a degree of truth. In the same way, he speaks to the Athenians about an altar, among the many objects of their worship, inscribed “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.” He tells them, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” The apostle is seizing on one possible, slight departure from the city’s robust expressions of polytheism to make an account of a God unknowable in pagan terms. “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.” Men should seek after God,
Though he be not far from every one of us:
For in him we live, and move, and have our being;
As certain also of our own poets have said,
“For we are also his offspring.”
A fundamental universalism is clearly a consequence of the conception of God as one. The question is whether and how Genesis acknowledges this.
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“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” One might expect that the writer or writers of this grandest poem would have declared YHWH, Yahweh, the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to be the Creator of all that is. But the word that appears is Elohim, a plural form of El, a common word meaning god, which is also the name of the highest Canaanite god, El Elyon.
When I think there was a day when a human hand first wrote those words, I am filled with awe. This sentence is a masterpiece of compression. It approximates as closely as words allow the instantaneous realization of an intent, the bringing into being of the diversity of things that make up the world of fundamental human experience. The Enuma Elish begins with an account of the gods in their generations emerging into a preexisting state of unbeing. Hesiod’s Theogony, a much later work that had authority as an inspired text among the ancient Greeks, also begins with the begetting of gods, though without the interesting Babylonian pause over the question of what preceded them. In the Hebrew narrative, Creation is unified by the recurrent phrase “and it was so,” evoking again the sense of the instantaneous efficacy of God’s will, a sense of the marvelous particularity of each enrichment of the living world, and also a kind of reverent amazement on the part of the unimaginable knower, in effect observer, of this emergence of being out of a formless void. It is the world we know—the sun giving light to the earth, sea creatures swarming, birds in flight across the heavens—all seen in their wondrous singularity, yet made one in the seven iterations of the word good. The poem at the end of the book of Job tells us that, at Creation, “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.” If this seems not strictly monotheistic, the poem sets itself the problem of evoking Creation, new and replete with divine intention, the highest, most perfect consciousness and awareness filling everything, dealt with here by letting the stars sing. To isolate the mind of God, to think of Him as limited by even the loftiest of His attributes, is surely an error, an anthropomorphism. At the same time, by the grace of God, we know something of this joy.
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We may consider that good-ness was created together with everything that is called good, since the narrative allows us nothing but the world as it emerges, nothing to which comparison can be made, no antecedents and no context. Contemporary cosmology is comparable in its reticence. Something happened, once, so far as we can tell, that eventuated and continues to eventuate in Being as we know it and do not know it, as we will and will not know it, all its consequences borne along in time, which may be, as Einstein said, our most persistent illusion. The vast cosmos was infinitesimal at its origins, presumably a particle, but this might be supposition, an aid to the imagination, which finds true Nothing inconceivable.
The history of the relationship of science and religion teaches that the two are best kept apart, even when points of comparison between them are not trivial. Religion is ancient, and science, presented as one side in a controversy with religion, is antique. It is one of the mysteries of human experience that ancient has and deserves a positive valence while antique is distinctly invidious. Since the middle of the nineteenth century Darwin has anchored what has been offered, typically by nonscientists, as the position of science in opposition to religion. Their version of evolutionary theory is antique, a fossil rationalism. The very great complexity and mutability of the gene and all that pertains to it is somehow discounted by them in defense of a simple model of causality, an explanation of everything so forthright as to displace all mystifications.
To propose a divine actor in any account of things is widely assumed to be ignorant, childish, primitive. This might be fair, the judgment true and deserved, if the theist view that divine origins have implanted a sacredness in existence could be disproved, and if theism were barren of great thought, high aesthetic achievement, humane influence. Atheism is a relatively minor element in world culture, so its contributions are harder to assess. History offers a very mixed testimony, for example, on whether religion promotes civilization or impedes and distorts its advance. Having the bleak advantage of living in a period when the natural order and the social order are fraying together, and the metaphysical side of religion, the very conception of the sacred, has vanished like the atmosphere of a lifeless planet, it is fair to wonder what depended on what and urgent to discover how the fracturing of reality as we have known it can be stopped or slowed.
In the first Creation narrative in Genesis 1:1 to 2:4 nothing is causally related to anything else. The reserve of the first Creation narrative in maintaining a perfect silence about what might have happened or existed before “the beginning” sets it apart from myth and invites comparison to scientific cosmology. In ancient Near Eastern myth there is an elsewhere, a habitation of the gods where they feast and sleep and make war on one another. Foolish, vulnerable, self-centered, these were the gods of sophisticated and influential civilizations. They were well suited to accounting by their vast power and their utter fecklessness for the disasters that plague human life.
