Genesis Quest

By Barry Verdi

Are the stories in Genesis fact, myth, legend, the word of God, philosophy, or something else?

Through time, what people think or remember about Genesis has become a mixture of fact and fable. For example, if you were to ask someone what fruit Adam and Eve were tempted by, most people might say, "An apple." If you were to ask w

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Jul 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648951282

Barry Verdi

Barry Verdi is an Anglican priest, pastor emeritus of a congregation of over six thousand. He is an active member of a Reformed Jewish congregation and has served as a member of the board and vice president of the congregation. He is a former adjunct professor of communications and philosophy at California State University, San Jose. He is the author of Theological Concepts in the Plays of Tennessee Williams and The Park, a one-act play.

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Dedication

To the many students whose questions, responses, and concepts about Genesis led to the composition of this text, and with gratitude to Dr. Kellenberger, Bishop Borsh, and Rabbi Sobel who encouraged its publication.

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

Prologue: Principles Of Social Interaction

Part OneThe Six Primal Principles And Secondary Concepts Of The Primal Tradition

Introduction To The Concepts

The First Principle: God/Creation

The Second Principle: The Knowledge Of Good And Evil

The Third Principle: Sharing

The Fourth Principle: Mercy

The Fifth Principle: Saving Life

The Sixth Principle: Communicating

Secondary Concepts Of The Primal Tradition

The Concept Of Space And Time

The Concept Of Order

The Concept Of Choice

The Concept Of Nonviolence

The Concept Of Generational Progression, Dynasties, And Expanding Populations

Pluralism And A Unifying Theory

Part Two: The Principles And The Patriarch Abraham

The Stories Begin (Gen.12:1-12:8)

The First Story, Abram In Egypt (Gen.12:10-13:1)

The Second Story: Abram And Lot (Gen13:2-18)

The Third Story: Chedorlaomer, The Kings, And Abram (Gen.14:1-16)

The Fourth Story: The Valley Of The Kings (Gen. 14:17-24)

The Fifth Story: A Promise And Ritual Process (Gen.15:1-21)

The Sixth Story: Abram, The Wife, Maid, Angel, And Son, Ishmael (Gen.16:1-16)

The Seventh Story: Becoming Abraham, Circumcision And The Covenant (Gen.17:1-27)

The Eighth Story, Part One: The Angels, The Meal, And The Laughter (Gen.18:1-15)

The Eighth Story, Part Two: The Agreement (Gen. 18:16-33)

The Ninth Story: Sodom And Gomorrah (Gen.19:1-38)

The Tenth Story, Part One: Abraham And Abimelech (Gen. 20:1-18)

The Tenth Story, Part Two: Abraham, Abimelech And The Birth Of Isaac (Gen. 21:1-34)

The Eleventh Story: The Akedah Or The Binding Of Isaac (Gen. 22:1-24)

The Twelfth Story: The Death And Burial Of Sarah (Gen. 23:1-20)

The Thirteenth Story: Abraham Is Old, He Arranges A Wife For Isaac, Marries Keturah, Has Children And Dies (Gen. 24:1-25:18)

Epilogue

Bibliography

Foreword

Genesis Quest is an effort to find the spiritual beginning in prehistory upon which communal living in relation to God rests. Genesis is the first book in both the Christian Bible and the Jewish Bible and has been appealed to by both religious traditions as a source of doctrine. Verdi’s approach is very different. His concern is not with religious doctrine or theology. It is with, in his words, the building blocks provided by six fundamental principles in Genesis.

Though they are building blocks in being foundational to communal human relations, these principles are also organic or polymorphic in their growth and multiple applications in different cultural settings. Verdi’s philosophy is polysingular in its appreciation of this diversity alongside its recognition of an original and unvarying meaning of the principles. The first principle is God/Creation. The second is The Knowledge of Good and Evil. And the remaining four are Sharing, Mercy, Saving Life, and Communicating. Each has a moral import, as may be most evident for the five that follow God/Creation. But none is formulated as a traditional moral principle. Each has moral import in the broad sense that each tells us how to live meaningfully. The first does this in that as we seek God we seek meaning and purpose. But really all the principles do this, as they are found in the oral traditions from which Genesis arises, for each is based in and expresses the human spirit in its relation to God. All, as Verdi puts it, are principles of righteousness, and a person who lives by these six principles, is a righteous person.

In the first part of Genesis Quest the six principles are given a detailed presentation, along with a number of secondary concepts such as choice and non-violence, which closely relate to the six principles. In the second part of the book Verdi draws out of Genesis thirteen stories about Abraham in which Abraham contends with, assimilates, and lives by the six principles. Verdi does not clarify the six principles by tracing their logical implication. Instead he uses these Abrahamic stories to present the multidimensionality of the principles.

The book’s subtitle is A Philosophical Examination of Social Interaction. It is a philosophical examination in not being beholden to any religious tradition. Verdi, who is an Episcopal priest, has seminary and philosophical training and has engaged in a lifelong study of the Hebrew Bible, nourished by his own Jewish background. In this book, however, though he draws upon his deep knowledge of the Bible and of both Christian and Jewish traditions, his approach is philosophical, as opposed to either distinctly Christian or Jewish. His focus and concern, as his subtitle indicates, is with social interaction, human interaction. His quest is to present the guiding principles of human interaction that he finds in Genesis predating the emergence of either Judaism or Christianity as codified doctrinal religions. The six God-related principles he identifies in Genesis have informed both the Jewish and Christian traditions, but they have also had a broader influence. He names both Abraham and Jesus as persons who have lived a principled life, but he also named Socrates.

Ultimately Verdi’s concern is with the human spirit as it seeks the soul of our communal life. Verdi’s polysingular understanding of the six principles of Genesis is itself a quest for a renewed understanding of ancient oral traditions as well as a continuous participation in those principles.

James Kellenberger,

Professor of Philosophy Emeritus

California State University, Northridge

Introduction

What people often think or read about Genesis is a mixture of fact and fable. Ask someone what fruit Adam and Eve ate, almost always people say, An apple. Fact? No, artistic imagination. So too, much of what we learn about Genesis are layers of ideas, veneers of progressive interpretations that have evolved through thousands of years and need to be stripped away. The idea of Eve eating an apple is easily stripped away, but the concept of Eve as the first, the original, mother of humankind is embraced by many persons. As a result, the reality of humankind’s evolutionary development casts shadows of doubt among other persons as to the initial meaning of the creation stories and redirects attention to the perpetual feud between creationists and evolutionists. The purpose of the Genesis Quest is to present a philosophical examination that uncovers the ideas, principles, formed in Genesis and thus reveal their initial intent. The philosophy itself is termed polysingular; its purpose is to establish a unifying theory that enables a wide range of specific interpretations in various cultural traditions of the original unvarying singular principles of Genesis to coexist, yet retain their own potential of being understood and acted upon in different ways.

Multiple conflicts of opinions and teachings represent some of the factors that have submerged the initial intent of the stories of Genesis beneath veneers of progressive interpretations. We recognize such a progression in relation to the significance of blood. Consider the following: For Cain, Abel’s blood cries out to me. For Noah it is You shall not eat flesh with its life; that is its blood. Only I can require the blood of man. For Abraham it is the blood that is shed when you circumcise the flesh. For Moses it is The blood shall be a sign for you and when I see the blood, I will pass over. For the people attending a Passover dinner, Haggadah, it is the drop of blood (wine) that is spilt in the ceremonial home liturgy. For the Temple priests it is the blood that is poured out between the horns of the altar. For the people attending Mass it is when the priest consecrates the wine saying, the blood of Christ which is poured out for you. But then the blood of Christ is consumed when a person drinks from the cup and the variations of teachings regarding the consecrated elements include: Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation, Memorial, Real Presence, or none of the former. Thus people in different times and places, or committed to different teachings, are all put into opposition, whereas the initial significance of blood in Genesis is its representation of the life of a creature, knowledge of who is my brother, and that only God can require (or take) that life.

The Genesis Quest is a polysingular philosophy that is not aligned with any one culture or tradition, but rather brings into focus multiple viewpoints and perspectives of human thinking to help persons discover an original intent in Genesis that is often obscured by a kaleidoscope of opinions, teachings, doctrines, and dogmas. Think again about Adam and Eve. Many people, and certainly various doctrines and dogmas, will consider them as real persons. The words that indicate these names, however, actually mean Man and Life. Was the original intent to declare absolutely that Adam and Eve were the first two persons, or was it that Man and Life awakened to their own existence and discovered a spirit that gave them a sense of unity with the heavens they could see and a symbiotic bond with the plants and animals and earth on which they lived? The reality is that the first chapters of Genesis are not about a man or a woman or original sin, but humankinds struggle to discover the soul of our communal life.

Hidden within the first eleven chapters of Genesis is an oral tradition, a prehistory that established an ancient philosophy, six principles of human interaction, rather than the foundation of an organized religion. Organized religion can no longer be represented by a single family tree; it is more like an orchard of multiple trees and fruits, which in itself is reflective of the trees in Eden. The polysingular philosophy requires recognition of the multiple viewpoints and perspectives that have developed within the spiritual and secular realm in order to understand how and why they developed and thus understand how and why initial concepts have come to be applied in multiple ways and settings. The question is how can one achieve a unified understanding of any one concept or principle that can be applied in multiple ways and within multiple settings? One might say: to see the orchard as growing from a singular seed.

How is this viewpoint of polysingularity accomplished? Part one of the Genesis Quest delineates six principles as ideas told in stories that were passed on and enhanced in generational progression for thousands of years prior to any known written history. The six principles that evolve in the first eleven chapters are God/Creation, knowledge of good and evil, sharing, mercy, saving life, and communicating. These principles are not the rules of men, laws of nations, or dogmatic certainties of any established religion or doctrine; rather they were conceived as building blocks which people must live by in order to become civilized, to become what it means to be human. These principles, together with secondary concepts of space and time, order, choice, nonviolence, and generational progression, constitute the core of a polysingular interpretation that encompasses multiple viewpoints of secularism and spiritualism.

Part Two, chapters twelve through twenty five, reveal the flowering of that prehistory and application of the principles in the life of a man named Abraham. The stories of Abraham reveal the way he lived by these principles in a complex world of multiple points of view, emerging kingdoms and cultures. By Abraham’s time the descendants of remembered ancestors lived in an increasingly diverse world of human expansion. The primal principles exhibited in the life of Abraham were not an either/or, but required the discovery of how to live and apply these principles in a world with others who did not share the same beliefs. The challenge to live by one’s principles in a diverse world of multiple beliefs and practices is applicable throughout the Book of Genesis. Further complications arise when we realize that there are words in Genesis that have become names, or that their original meaning has shifted or changed. The result is that our understanding or application of primal concepts has shifted, or been lost, in the process of progressive interpretations.

What we come to understand as we progress through the stories of Abraham is that the primal principles of Genesis are ideas formulated prior to the ever evolving theological, philosophical, and scientific teachings that constitute the layers of veneer that have been applied to a few basic ideas that began to be taught thousands of years ago. The purpose of a polysingular philosophy of human interaction is to help us recognize a comprehensive balance of perspectives as expressed in a wide range of philosophical and spiritual ideals. Polysingular, the many as one, is discussed throughout the text from a variety of perspectives. The reader should not expect a single definition, but take into consideration that an objective of the Genesis Quest is to bring multiple viewpoints and interpretations into a harmony of original intent.

The multiple spiritual movements, philosophies, scientific revelations, and rules of law that govern our common era evolved through time, but in the beginning of our becoming human only a few basic concepts came to the fore. These concepts laid a foundation of principles with the potential power to discover a spirit that bonds people in a manner that serves the self interest of all persons, creatures, and the earth on which we live. Thus recognition of original intent within the canonized text is necessary to establish a common ground of understanding regarding the beginning of humankinds struggle to find a unified theory of social interaction, not withstanding one’s cultural, religious, or secular preferences or beliefs. The canonized text, however, in its multiple translations, languages, and cultural venues may, in itself, contribute to difficulties in establishing a common ground of understanding.

As one will discover in the Genesis Quest, the choice of rendering words from the Hebrew or Greek will have differences in every translation and every language. The Hebrew and Greek words in this text are transliterations, that is, they are written in corresponding characters of the English language. Also, a variety of possible translations are written and explained when the significance of an original intent is being sought. The translations in the Genesis Quest come primarily from the Revised Standard Version, Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1952. My translations of the Hebrew and Greek texts, as indicated, are taken from several sources: The Torah, published and copyrighted 1962, 1967, by the Jewish Publication Society and published by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, New York, 1981. The Interlinear Hebrew-Aramaic Old Testament, Vol. 1-3, Jay P. Green, Sr., General Editor, Hendrickson Publishers, 2nd Edition, 1985. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English, Hendrickson Publishers, Sixth Printing February 1997. Chapter and verse(s) of Scriptural quotes, as applicable, are indicated throughout the text. It is recommended, however, that the reader look up quotes in the translation the reader uses to compare possible variations. Some readers may also find it helpful to use one of the many parallel Bibles that have a range of two or more translations in parallel columns. Finally, if you have Questions or Comments, connect at: [e-mail]

Prologue:

Principles Of Social Interaction

Genesis is a philosophy of the human spirit looking for the soul of our communal life. Long ago in a garden called Eden, the human mind began to probe the mystery of our existence. Primal oral traditions evolved, woven into a pattern of intuitive insights so ancient, we no longer remember the source and misconstrue the concept. For example, ask someone, What was the fruit Adam and Eve ate? Almost always, people will respond, An apple. Ask, What color was the apple? Almost always people will say, Red. Few persons will name the fruit, that is, the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This brief example is intended to help us understand that common ideas are often misconceptions of general thought.

Before theology, before scholars, before the formal standards of elite higher education, there was the human mind, clear, clean, unspoiled in a pristine paradise beneath the stars, Eden, the paradise of our dreams. Within this paradise, the seeds of learning were planted. The principles of human reasoning were sown. Concepts of human relationships were nourished and the foundation of social interaction began to grow. The human being discovered himself and chose a name: Adam, Eve, meaning Man and Life.

The stories in the Book of Genesis are of a time before religion, before dogmas and doctrines, before law, before all the trappings of developed civilized societies. The scholastic quest to understand and interpret Genesis has, through the ages, constructed a virtual Everest of tomes and commentaries that form our individual perspectives that may ally us, or separate us, from established philosophies or groups of organized religion. Genesis is a seed that is as much the essence of a philosophy of social interaction, as it is a foundation of religious perception. This seed, as all seeds, has grown and mutated into a vast variety of interpretative disciplines that both unite and divide all who encounter them. The soul of our communal life is sown in the ideas told in an antiquarian age, ideas that represent the beginning, the genesis, of a philosophy intended to unify the human spirit in a world of pluralistic concepts.

Philosophy is an art form in the sense that it paints pictures of ideas, not for profit or esteem, but rather as an extension of one’s thought in relationship to the concepts and conditions of one’s moment in time. In our moment in time, philosophy has a wide range of meanings and applications. A person may like some philosophical ideas and reject others. An idea may anger or excite, cause joy or sorrow, fear or valor, tears or laughter. The ideas of philosophers, both ancient and modern, have permeated the religious development of our world. The ideas of spiritualists have permeated the intellectual development of our world. The culmination of all these ideas and sentiments of interpretation have fed the multiple streams of conscious human interaction that now exist in our contemporary world of the twenty-first century. In the era of human existence, when reasoning and concepts of social interaction were forming, there was no differentiation of philosophies as reflected in the evolution of Western academic and intellectual thought, or the philosophical spiritualism of the Orient and Western Mystics. The principles set forth in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are a prolegomena of ideas establishing a philosophy of social interaction conceived within a spiritual mind.

Now we begin to set forth the initial principles found in Genesis. Ask yourself: What do I remember about Genesis? What stories? What details? Anything? Take a moment to reflect. This is important as most persons, even those who have never read Genesis, have some sense of something within its contents. This is a moment to solicit a response of thought. The responses most often given in class by students, in random order, are as follows: Adam and Eve. Noah’s Ark. Creation. They ate an apple. They were naked. It rained. They put animals in a boat. Two of each kind.

Adam and Eve are almost always remembered, and why not? They are after all popular characters in the world of marketing. Through the years, we have seen the couple in many television and billboard advertisements, usually in a garden, generally behind a bush, often with a snake somewhere in the frame. The subliminal image stays with us while meanings and details elude us, as with the question above: What was the fruit Adam and Eve ate? Biblical scholars will sometimes say that profound truths lay beneath the biblical myths. And so they do. Yet myth is more than an old story. Myth is also the spin that has been applied and accepted within the ranks of storytellers, scholars, and the public. Sometimes the spin supersedes the original myth, hence: the red apple.

At some point in the development of the human mind and human interaction, various principles of personal conduct and social behavior were conceptualized and conveyed through stories. The stories were passed on from one generation to the next, and the underlying concepts began to take root. The stories, along with their meaning and significance would develop into a variety of concepts or triads, such as: a) Principles, Morals, Ethics, b) Body, Mind, Spirit, c) Kingdom, Power, Glory, d) Sentiment (feelings), Experience, Reason, e) Philosophy, Theology, Cosmology, f) Sex, Politics, and Religion. These concepts evolved long before the schools and vocabularies of formal education. Listen to the voice of a philosopher living in Alexandria two thousand years ago:

…the earliest men easily and spontaneously obeyed the unwritten principle of Legislation before any one of the particular laws were written down at all. So that a man may very properly say, that the written laws are nothing more than a memorial of the life of the ancients, tracing back in an antiquarian spirit the actions and reasoning which they adopted; for these first men, without ever having been followers or pupils of any one, and without ever having been taught by preceptors what they ought to do, or say… (Philo: On Abraham 1:5)

Our present time has formalized these ancient precepts. Essentially, what we call principles, ethics, and morals are words relating the same sense of concepts. Ethics is not one set of values and morals another set of values. In the contemporary world of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, however, a shift in the way we use the words, ethics and morals, has occurred. Concepts relating to morals and ethics among philosophers and theologians from Moses and the Greeks, and on to the present, vary. Generally speaking, ethics is used as a word representing good or proper conduct or behavior from a secular perspective that reflects established civil law and social manners. Morals is used as a word representing good or proper conduct or behavior from a faith based perspective that reflects religious law and appropriate social conduct. In either case, individuals and societies act out of habit or choice. Thus, in the development of principles for social interaction some will follow the moral course, as Philo wrote, without ever having been taught, while others will struggle with the choices of right living compounded in the extensions of ethical behavior expressed in a rule of law.

In Genesis, the first principle is the source of existence: "When yhwh made the heavens and earth… (Gen. 2:4) and When Elohim created the heavens and the earth" (Gen.1:1). What follows are a series of evolving concepts of principles that grow out of the minds of people who heard the voice of the Creator. Thus, the first principle is a concept of the source of existence and the subsequent principles are concepts of human response.

A principle is based, or rooted, solely in an idea, a concept of an intangible belief that is not predicated on an established law, religious precept, civil code, social custom, scientific evidence, or any other concrete factor outside the mind of persons who profess and/or act upon it as a matter of principle. In addition, it must be remembered that a principle may be related to positive or negative action; it may be a principle called good by one person, or bad by another person.

The ancient spirit of action and reasoning set forth in Genesis initiates a series of principles rooted in positive concepts intended to guide the human family into the future. Altogether, these principles reflect the potential for positive and negative action through the assimilation of knowledge, specifically the delineation of the knowledge of good and evil. What we call morals, ethics, laws, justice and manners are extensions of an initiating process of principles. The application of principles has led to the evolving and establishment of organized religion and civil states. The dilemma of our society is an inability to view the multiplicity of religious expression and civil authority as a unified harmony of a singular human family. Yet this is the foundation upon which the principles within the stories of Genesis evolved.

Part One

The Six Primal Principles And Secondary Concepts Of The Primal Tradition

The Six Primal Principles

Introduction To The Concepts

The first eleven chapters of Genesis establish six principles for personal and social interaction. Our general understanding of a principle is that it represents the source or origin of an idea that evolves into a fundamental law or truth. Another understanding of a principle is in relationship to science as the operative cause of a natural action such as the principle of cell division, or other scientific law that explains a natural action. Of course, we also think of a person of principle, someone of integrity who adheres to a fundamental concept such as justice, liberty, or freedom.

The origin of principles, or a specific principle, is in itself a concept to be questioned. Thus, the very idea of a principle as the source or origin of a fundamental law or truth based on a judgment of human action or character automatically falls into speculation. Who determines when a concept is a principle? How is it decided that one principle is superior to another, or constitutes some inherent virtue, or lack of virtue? The very idea of a word or concept associated with human society and representative of a virtuous truth is the first step in declaring the meaning of the word as a principle. Or, to put it another way, the concept of any principle is formed when a mental theory of what constitutes virtuous or destructive behavior within the human society is formulated.

All ideas and theories at the point of origin are the logos, the expression of thought that propels the intangible concepts of the human mind to be manifest. In terms of the principles in Genesis, the person or place of origin is not important; what is important is the significance that the principles were conceived, remembered, organized in an oral tradition, and passed on from generation to generation. Further, these principles became integrated into the continually developing life and social structure of the people who clung to them throughout the ages.

The evolution of a principle, as the evolution of life, whether that of humankind collectively, or our own individual development from womb to tomb, is not a stagnate process; not something that begins and ends precisely as it started. The principles in Genesis evolved into extended theories which then became laws, ordinances, statues, and courts of justice, as well as theologies, doctrines, dogmas and prejudicial conflicts. There are the laws of human nature. There are the laws of legislative authority. There are the laws of science. There are the laws of Old Testament Scripture, traditionally six hundred thirteen. Then, regarding the Old Testament laws, there follows the Pauline concept that the strength of sin is the law (1 Cor. 15:56); but then, that concept comes at the end of a long stretch and integrates into other concepts that confuse the original idea or initial principles from which the entire process began. Thus, it is not the developmental process of becoming a principle that is important; rather it is the purpose or origin from which the initial principle was formed that is significant in entering the Genesis quest.

The primal principles of Genesis are in themselves the beginning. The multiple sources