The Message of Genesis 1–11

By David J. Atkinson

Where do we come from? What is our purpose? The key to how and why we are is found in the early chapters of Genesis. In The Message of Genesis 1–11, David Atkinson explores how the first eleven chapters serve as an overture to the rest of the Bible. They evoke wonder as God is portrayed in his creative power and beauty. They reveal God's loving mercy and salvation, even in his terrible judgment of those who turn from him and despoil the harmony of creation. With vivid insight, this Bible Speaks Today commentary illuminates how the meaning of Genesis is still resonant today—helping us understand both the greatness and the tragic flaw inherent in human beings. Although it was written thousands of years ago, the message of Genesis is one of timely urgency for the modern world: we are responsible participants in God's creation who must, like Noah, confront the possibility of global catastrophe. Part of the beloved Bible Speaks Today series, The Message of Genesis 1–11 offers an insightful, readable exposition of the biblical text and thought-provoking discussion of how its meaning relates to contemporary life. Used by students and teachers around the world, The Bible Speaks Today commentaries are ideal for those studying or preaching the Bible and anyone who wants to delve deeper into the text. This beautifully redesigned edition has also been sensitively updated with more current references and the NRSV Bible text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Release date: Jan 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781514004524

David J. Atkinson

David J. Atkinson is honorary assistant bishop in the Diocese of Southwark, and formerly Suffragan Bishop of Thetford in the Diocese of Norwich. He is also the author of the volumes on Ruth, Job, and Proverbs in The Bible Speaks Today series of commentaries.

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Genesis 1:1 – 2:3

1. Majesty and mystery

1. Majesty

The poem of beauty and grandeur which forms the opening chapter of our Bibles is a hymn of praise to the majesty of God the Creator. That is not to say that it was necessarily written as a hymn of worship; rather, that countless believers through the ages have found that this chapter evokes praise. Through its structured harmonies our hearts are tuned to the music of the heavens, and our minds are lifted to contemplate God as the source and sustainer of all that is. This chapter invites us to bow in humility before his creative Word. It shows us our own place within the panorama of God’s purposes for the whole of his creation.

Here there is majesty. The writer’s heart and mind are moved in praise to God, in whose purposes lie the secrets of this world. Like the psalmist who worships the King all-glorious above, we are caught up into this writer’s doxology:

Bless the

Lord

, O my soul.

O Lord

my God, you are very great.

You are clothed with honour and majesty,

wrapped in light as with a garment.

You stretch out the heavens like a tent,

you set the beams of your chambers on the waters,

you make the clouds your chariot,

you ride on the wings of the wind,

you make the winds your messengers,

fire and flame your ministers.

(Ps. 104:1–4)

The explicit setting for much of chapters 1 to 11 of Genesis is the land of Mesopotamia. Genesis 2:10–14, for example, is set in an area close to the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, the area that came to be known as Babylon and that we now know as Iraq. Genesis 11:1–9 refers to the land of Shinar, another name for the same area. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that the themes of Genesis 1 – 11 in general, and the pattern of the poem of Genesis 1 in particular, are very similar in some ways to Mesopotamian creation stories. The Epic of Atrahasis, for example, written in about 1600 bc, tells a story of the creation of the world, and moves from it to an account of a great flood. A much later Babylonian work, the Enuma Elish, also has an account of the creation.

The Enuma Elish begins with the divine spirit and with a primeval chaos. Its main purpose is to glorify the chief Babylonian god, Marduk, who defeats the watery chaos monster, Tiamat. Light emanates from the gods, and then the firmament, dry land, luminaries and eventually humankind are created. The gods then rest and celebrate. Such stories may well, of course, have been known to the people of God. But despite some similarities, how very different from the Mesopotamian myths is the creation poem of Genesis 1. Gordon Wenham writes: ‘The author of Genesis 1 . . . shows that he was aware of other cosmologies, and that he wrote not in dependence on them so much as in deliberate rejection of them.’

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Whereas the Enuma Elish talks about many gods, Genesis proclaims a majestic monotheism: there is one God. Whereas in the Babylonian stories the divine spirit and cosmic matter exist side by side from eternity, Genesis proclaims God’s majestic distinction from everything else which in sovereign power he creates, and which depends on him for its existence. Whereas in Near Eastern mythology the sun, moon, stars and sea monsters are seen as powerful gods, Genesis tells us that they are merely creatures. (Genesis even avoids the usual Hebrew words for ‘sun’ and ‘moon’, perhaps in case they could be misconstrued as deities, and talks simply about the greater and lesser lights.) Whereas in the Mesopotamian myths light emanates from the gods, in the Genesis narrative, God creates light by the power of his word. So, although Genesis shares with the Babylonian stories a similar pattern, its theological message is very different. Genesis 1 sings the praise of the majestic Creator of all. It speaks of his life-giving power. It also gives a profound significance to human life. Whereas in the Middle Eastern myths human beings seem to have only a walk-on part – they are there to supply the gods with food – in Genesis 1 the creation of human life is a high point in the narrative. It is God who provides food for men and women.

One can imagine what a rock of stability this chapter would have provided for the people of God when faced with the lure of pagan myths around them. Exiles of the people of God during their time in Babylon, for example, may have been tempted to fall in with the ideas of their conquerors. Genesis 1 calls them back to the worship of the one sovereign majestic Lord, who, in the transcendent freedom of his creative Word, is the source of all things, all life, all creatures, all people.

In the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Or as the psalmist put it:

O Lord

, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures . . .

May the glory of the

Lord

endure for ever;

may the

Lord

rejoice in his works.

(Ps. 104:24, 31)

There is majesty here, and there is mystery also.

2. Mystery

In contrast to Genesis chapters 2 and 3, where the tone is more intimate, the context more homely, and the centre of attention is on human relationships, Genesis 1 stands detached in rugged simplicity and grandeur – as majestically distant as the glorious mountain ranges of the Rockies stand in comparison with my back garden. And as the Rockies convey to their observers a sense of awesome mystery, so Genesis 1 preserves and points us to the mysteries of creation. There is much about the world we live in which we do not and cannot understand. The writer does not attempt, or want, to explain creation. With reverence, he wants to catch us up into its wonder. He is not concerned with the question ‘How did God do it?’ He would not, I think, have been terribly interested in our debates about the timescale of evolution, or the physics of the beginning of the universe. Those are not the questions he is asking. And when we ourselves bring such questions to the text, we are disappointed. We perhaps want to know how it is that the sun and moon (14–16) are created after the light (3). The writer is not so stupid as to be unaware that there is a problem. He leaves us with the mystery. He simply tells us without explanation that the divine light is not dependent on the luminaries of the sun and moon. Why are we not told that God created the waters, but just that his Spirit is moving over them (2)? Did God create the darkness as well as the light (4)? We want to know. The author does not say. Surely deliberately, he does not get into such ‘How to’ questions. He is concerned with something else. He is safeguarding and proclaiming something of the unsearchable mystery of God. We mistake the purpose of this chapter if we expect it to answer all the questions we, with the benefit of modern science, want to ask about creation. ‘Creation’, in any case, does not come within the domain of science: it is not a scientific category. Whatever science may propose concerning the origin of the universe and the Big Bang, many thousand million years ago, no scientific result could establish whether or not this was ‘Creation’.

As we shall see, there is no reason to find conflict between the theology of this chapter and the important tasks of scientific research. Some of the themes of this chapter undergird and inspire the very possibility of science. But there are necessarily limits to what science can observe and quantify. And we must learn from this author not only that some of our questions may for ever, this side of heaven, remain unanswered, but also to allow ourselves to be caught up into creation’s wonder and mystery.

Faith moves beyond empirical knowledge. In this chapter we are brought in touch with a faith which holds on to us when the world around us is mysterious and uncertain. In a sense, faith is what God gives us to hold us in our uncertainties. That, too, has been a source of strength to the people of God throughout their history. How strengthening must the power of this chapter have been to them when they were tempted to believe that God had abandoned them, when they could discern no meaning or purpose in their predicament, when, for example, weeping by the waters of Babylon (Ps. 137:1), they had given up hope of ever seeing home again, and when they found it all too easy to believe the taunts of their accusers, ‘What does your faith in God amount to now?’ There is a faith that will hold you even in the dark, if it is a faith in God the Creator of all. He is the source of your life. You, too, have a place within his creative purposes. Let the deep faith of this Genesis author lift your heart and mind again to the majesty and mystery of God.

3. Order and contingence: the assumptions of science

All of us from our earliest days are delighted with patterns. We make patterns in the sand, we look for patterns in the stars. We find delight in crystals and snowflakes, in number series and repeated pictures on wallpaper. Science exists because of patterns. It is a way of searching for and giving expression to the regular patterns we believe that nature follows.

One of the most striking features of Genesis 1 is its pattern. The story is structured around the theme of one week of six days leading to a seventh. The regular refrain moves the story along: there was evening and there was morning. The gradually increasing complexity of what God creates, beginning with the formless empty waste (2) and ending with human beings, male and female in his image (27), gives a sense of deepening order and meticulous structure. God is bringing order and form into his world. Indeed, the pattern of days illustrates the progression from ‘preparation to accomplishment’ (Griffith Thomas) or from ‘form to fullness’ (cf. D. Kidner).

The story is told as three stages of ‘separation’.

1. In Day 1, God separates the light from the dark (4). We can set this in parallel with Day 4, in which God makes the light-bearers, the sun and the moon, to rule over the day and the night (16–18).

2. In Day 2, God separates the waters of the firmament of the heavens from the waters under the heavens (7). This can be set in parallel with Day 5, in which God makes the birds to fly across the heavens (20) and the sea monsters and fish to swarm in the seas (21).

3. In Day 3, God separates the dry earth from the seas and gives fertile vegetation. This can be set in parallel with Day 6, in which God makes animals, domestic and wild, to inhabit the earth, and human beings, male and female, to have dominion over all other living creatures.

The first three days set the context; the parallel last three days bring it to life. Three sets of separations; three sets of ‘rulers’.

The author is concerned with order, and with pattern. He is also concerned with putting things in categories. He describes the vegetation and the animals in groups (‘each according to its kind’, 11, 12; cf. 21, 25 [Revised Standard Version]). The principle of reproductive fertility is built into creation itself, as we see in verses 11–12 where the plants are said to yield seed, and fruit trees have fruit in which is their seed. We see it also in verse 22, where God’s blessing enables animal reproduction. This author is interested also in the purposes of the created order: the sun and moon to rule (18); human beings to have dominion (26).

Here is a mind that is not far from the interests of science. Indeed, the whole enterprise of science rests precisely on the assumption of an ordered world in which pattern can be discovered and categories established. The ordered rationality of the created world, deriving from the transcendent rationality of the creative Word, is a basic assumption – not usually expressed in those terms – of natural science. There would be no science at all without an ordered world.

Alongside order, we must also speak of contingence. By that we mean: things do not have to be the way they are. If the order of the world were a necessary order that could be uncovered by logical reasoning from a philosopher’s armchair, there would be no science. But the world’s order is contingent. God could have made it otherwise. And to find out the way it is, we have to investigate it. We need to explore. It is the contingence of the world’s order, dependent on God and derived from God, that underlies the inescapable need for experiment and discovery. It drives the scientist out of his or her armchair and into the laboratory.

Genesis 1, then, emphasizes here the transcendence of the Creator, and the implication that the ‘natural’ order of the world is a dependent, derived and contingent order. Far from conflicting with science, therefore, the theological stance of the author of this chapter provides insight into two of the basic conditions on which the scientific enterprise depends: order and contingence.

A third condition, without which there could be no science, is that our human minds can, at least partly, understand the world outside them. There is a correspondence between the rational minds of human beings and the rational order of the physical world.

Arthur Peacocke in his book Science and the Christian Experiment writes this:

The realization that our minds can find the world intelligible, and the implication this has that an explanation for the world process is to be found in mental rather than purely material categories, has been for many scientists who are theists . . . an essential turning point in their thinking. Why should science work at all? That it does so points strongly to a principle of rationality, to an interpretation of the cosmos in terms of mind as its most significant feature. Any thinking which takes science seriously must, it seems to me, start from this . . . There is clearly a kinship between the mind of man and the cosmos which is real, and which any account of the cosmos cannot ignore.

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Peacocke is asking: Why should science work at all? His answer is that the ordered world which we observe and the ordering processes of our scientific minds are both part of the same world. There is a Mind behind the world order and from which our thinking processes derive. The fact that science works seems to Peacocke (and to many others) to support the view that God’s existence makes sense.

The correspondence between our minds and the world we observe is part of the expression of ‘God’s image’, to the meaning of which we shall turn our attention a little later.

4. God created

a. Out of nothing

In the beginning, we are told, God created (1a). The Hebrew word bārāʾ, translated ‘create’, always has God as its subject when it occurs in the Old Testament. The writer of Genesis 1 sometimes uses a different word (translated ‘made’). Thus God made (ʿāśâ) the firmament (7); God made the two great lights (16); God made the beasts of the earth (25). But alongside this there is the more special word reserved for the sort of creating God does – the word bārāʾ. In Genesis 1:1 – 2:3 it is used six times: God created the heavens and the earth (1:1); God created the great sea monsters (1:21); (three times) God created humankind as male and female (1:27); and God rested from all his work which he had done in creation (2:3).

Although the word bārāʾ when used elsewhere in the Old Testament does not necessarily mean creation out of nothing, that is certainly the implication here. Wenham writes: ‘there is a stress on the artist’s freedom and power’, and he goes on to quote W. H. Schmidt saying that bārāʾ preserves the idea of ‘God’s effortless, totally free and unbound creating, his sovereignty’.

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We have here God’s transcendent freedom to bring into being things that do not exist. In contrast to the Babylonian idea that matter existed alongside God from eternity, it seems likely that the Genesis author wants to stress that God created all that is out of nothing. There is nothing that coexists eternally with God. Is not this the story that other biblical writers tell?

In the Old Testament, for instance, the psalmist calls on all the heavens, sun, moon and stars to praise the Lord, ‘for he commanded and they were created’ (Ps. 148:5), and in Proverbs 8, the wisdom of God – the principle of all creation – was there ‘before the beginning of the earth’ (Prov. 8:22–27). In the New Testament that creative wisdom of God is embodied in the incarnate Word of God of whom it is said:

Without him not one thing came into being.

(John 1:3)

All things have been created through him and for him.

(Col. 1:16)

From him and through him and to him are all things.

(Rom. 11:36)

The worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.

(Heb. 11:3)

It is important to see that what God creates is something distinct from himself. This chapter has no place for pantheism – the idea that ‘God’ is another name for ‘everything’. It is true that God ‘indwells’ the world, and the world has its being ‘in God’, but God remains God, and in transcendent distinction from what he has made.

It is important also to notice that elsewhere in the Bible, the word bārāʾ is used in the context of salvation. The unique word for God’s creative activity is much more commonly used of his liberating and saving actions in history (cf. Isa. 43:1ff.). The God who makes things is the God who also makes things new (Isa. 43:19). The God who we see in Genesis 1 is the Creator of all, we learn from a broader biblical picture is also the redeemer, sustainer, re-creator, and the one who brings all things to completion. God’s creative activity in history is not only the preservation of what he has made; it is a continuous, creative engagement with his world, leading it forward to its future glory.

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b. ‘The heavens and the earth’

God created the heavens and the earth (1b) – or as the Nicene Creed puts it: ‘all that is, seen and unseen’. The phrase ‘heaven and earth’ describes everything that is not God – it means, first of all, totality. But it may be that in this separation of all that is into heavens and earth, the unseen and the seen, we are here, as elsewhere in the Bible, being reminded that there is within creation a lower, visible, earthly reality and a higher, invisible and heavenly reality. And God is Creator of all.

‘Heaven’ sometimes stands for the sky. More often, ‘heaven’ refers to a higher world, of angels, of God’s throne, of God’s glory. Heaven is ‘God’s place’. So, in speaking of the ‘heavens’ as well as the ‘earth’ (humanity’s place), Genesis is reminding us that creation is ‘open to God’. God’s creation is not a closed system of natural causes; it is an ‘open system’. There may be much within the created world which we cannot sense, cannot weigh and measure, cannot put in a test tube; there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy; but the Lord God made them all. There is a created spiritual world, just as there is a created material world. And as Deuteronomy 29:29 reminds us, ‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children for ever.’

Perhaps this was in Chesterton’s mind when Syme asks,

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If only we could get round in front . . .

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But sometimes glimpses of the ‘front’ can be seen: there are glimpses of heaven from earth. In his book A Rumor of Angels, Peter Berger uses the lovely phrase ‘signals of transcendence’.

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He means that there are pointers within the world of ‘earth’ to the hidden things of ‘heaven’. We need to be open to seeing such signals of transcendence, glimpses of heavenly glory, in our world and in ourselves and in one another. For all that is made, heaven and earth, comes from the hand of God. In our world which overemphasizes material and ‘earthly’ values, which so often understands human life only in terms of material factors such as body chemistry or economic cost effectiveness, we need to remember that we are creatures of a God who made the heavens as well as the earth. Our world is open to him.

But more than that: the ‘heavens’ and the ‘earth’ can and will come together. ‘Heaven’ can reach down to earth, and the things of earth will be caught up into the place of God. And it is in our humanity that they meet: the place where, in God’s purposes, heaven and earth are united. As the