God the Creator: The Old Testament and the World God Is Making

By Ben C. Ollenburger

Christians today are focused on two important creation topics: how the world came to be and how we should care for it. A highly respected Old Testament theologian recommends that before discussing these questions, we focus on God the Creator and God's ongoing work in creation. We should explore what the Bible tells us and let the text set the agenda for our reflections.

Combining his storytelling gift with rigorous biblical exegesis and deep reflection, Ben Ollenburger describes the action of God the Creator as presented throughout the Old Testament. He shows how creation is about more than origins. It is about God acting against the hostile forces of chaos that can be historical, political, and military. About how God created a well-ordered world, and how human transgression ruptures God's relationship with humans and threatens creation. About how God responds as Creator to those threats by disturbing and reordering the disorder, bringing about what God intended--a world ordered in the social, political, and natural realms that is characterized by the justice, righteousness, and peace required for human flourishing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781493440115

Ben C. Ollenburger

Ben C. Ollenburger (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) is professor emeritus of biblical theology at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) in Elkhart, Indiana, where he has taught since 1987. Prior to AMBS, he taught for seven years at Princeton Theological Seminary. Ollenburger has written or edited numerous books, including Old Testament Theology: Flowering and Future and the New Interpreter's Bible commentary on Zechariah.

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"Ollenburger has crafted an attentive portrait of God the Creator throughout the Old Testament, demonstrating that God’s creative acts are not limited to origins. Rather, in freedom and love, God continues to maintain and sustain life, even through acts that disorder a false, life-threatening ‘order.’ Written with the wisdom of an accomplished teacher, scholar, and storyteller, this book will deeply enrich the theological imaginations of its readers."

—Andrea D. Saner, Eastern Mennonite University

"God the Creator is an exemplary account of doing biblical theology. Ollenburger creatively constructs a mosaic of the diverse views of what the Bible says about God the Creator. This eloquently written study overflows with thought-provoking insights gleaned from an impressive array of biblical texts. The fruits of the study stem from Ollenburger’s hermeneutical wisdom, which combines literary sensibilities, historical knowledge, and theological imagination. God the Creator, whom Ollenburger animates within the biblical traditions, is dynamic, sovereign, and relational. The expansive understanding of God the Creator that is convincingly argued for in this book calls on faith communities to reflect on the implications of their belief in a God who established, sustains, and repairs this cosmos."

—Safwat Marzouk, Union Presbyterian Seminary

This long-anticipated volume represents the distillation of a lifetime of exegetical reflection on the theology of creation in the Hebrew Bible. Ollenburger draws on a wealth of insight and engagement with generations of students and colleagues. But it is ultimately the wit and wisdom of the master theologian himself that marks these pages as a classic in the making. Covering every genre of relevant Old Testament literature, this book demonstrates the ubiquity and profoundly formative nature of creation theology—from ancient Near Eastern prototypes to apocalyptic texts and beyond. Ollenburger traces a creation that is ongoing and reveals something of the heart and soul of the God of creation.

—Paul Keim, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

Ollenburger synthesizes and expands his career-long investigation of biblical concepts of creation. On display are the author’s finest characteristics: keen attention to primary texts, breadth and depth of scriptural engagement, restraint of other scholars’ overstatements, and the rare gifts of clarity and accessibility. Taking the Creator God as its touchstone, this book articulates a concise biblical theology: an assessment of divine-human interaction within the framework of the world’s nature and structure. It comes most highly recommended.

—C. Clifton Black, Princeton Theological Seminary

"God the Creator is the magnum opus of a mature scholar and teacher, the loving product of years of study, teaching, and reflection. Ollenburger focuses on multifaceted ways that Old Testament and some New Testament texts portray God in the mode of Creator. He discusses forms of interpretation, reads passages closely, and uncovers nuances of language in a way that yields biblical theology of poetic power. This book is a must-read for seminarians, ecologists, pastors, church groups, and anyone seeking an encounter with the Creator God."

—Kathleen M. O’Connor, Columbia Theological Seminary (emerita)

While much attention now rightly centers on how the Bible might speak to the precariousness of our ecosystems, this insightful work instead focuses on God as Creator. Exploring passages across the Old Testament before offering a brief look at Second Temple Jewish literature and the New Testament, Ollenburger spotlights the Creator’s involvements since the beginning of all things and the responses of the faithful. A careful, informed study from a master theologian. A well-written gem.

—M. Daniel Carroll R. (Rodas), Wheaton College and Graduate School

Ollenburger skillfully weaves together the Bible’s diverse portrayals of God as the maker of the cosmos. Combining scholarly acumen with inviting prose, Ollenburger serves as a trustworthy and engaging tour guide for specialists and laypeople alike. The book deeply engages the most famous creation stories in Genesis as well as lesser-known creation texts from prophetic, wisdom, and apocalyptic literature found in the Bible and beyond. In the introduction, Ollenburger laments the lack of a systematic work on God as Creator; this book capably begins to fill that void.

—Jackie Wyse-Rhodes, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary

© 2023 by Ben C. Ollenburger

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-4011-5

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are the author’s translation.

Scripture quotations labeled CEB are from the Common English Bible. © Copyright 2011 by the Common English Bible. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations labeled RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946, 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

To Janice Wiebe Ollenburger—the sunshine

Contents

Cover

Endorsements    i

Title Page    iii

Copyright    iv

Dedication    v

Acknowledgments     ix

Abbreviations     xi

Introduction     1

1. God’s World at Peace: Genesis 1     13

2. From Virtually Nothing to the Garden of God: Genesis 2     33

3. From God’s Peaceful Garden to Peace Divinely Disturbed: Genesis 3:1–11:9     49

4. In Primeval Days: Creation Texts before the Bible     67

5. Who Is the King of Glory?: God the Creator in the Psalms     83

6. The LORD by Wisdom Founded the Earth: God the Creator in Wisdom Literature     105

7. Royal Theology: God the Creator in Isaiah     125

8. Who Treads on the Heights of the Earth: God the Creator in the Prophets after Isaiah     145

9. Rearranging the World: God the Creator in Zechariah and Daniel     165

10. God the Creator beyond the Old Testament     185

Bibliography     201

Scripture Index     221

Subject Index     233

Back Cover    242

Acknowledgments

This book’s long gestation began with my dissertation on Zion theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and developed further in a course on war and peace in the Old Testament and in exegesis courses on Genesis and Isaiah. To my students in those seminars and courses at Princeton Seminary long ago, and to more recent students at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, I remain grateful. The insights and questions, often unanticipated, of generations of students contributed to my learning and, profoundly, to my joy in teaching. For them I acknowledge much gratitude.

The impetus to gather and present material related to the title and subject of this book came first from invitations to offer lectures in Japan at the Tokyo Anabaptist Center, Tokyo Biblical Seminary, Waseda University, and Kobe Lutheran Theological Seminary. The generosity of those who hosted my family and me in Japan and the stimulating theological conversations with pastors, faculty members, and students live in memory. I acknowledge in particular the pastors who came from Korea to Tokyo—they were expecting Stanley Hauerwas—and endured interpretation from English to Japanese to Korean. While the chapters of this book do not resemble those lectures of more than two decades past, they share a genetic connection I am pleased to acknowledge.

Heather Bunce of Great Lakes Christian College provided wise counsel and constant encouragement, along with editorial help on several chapters. I owe her many thanks.

Janice Wiebe Ollenburger, truly a woman of valor, an artist, a creator—to her this book is dedicated.

Abbreviations

General

Scripture Versions

Pseudepigrapha/Deuterocanonical Works

Secondary Sources

Introduction

In 1925 the already-famous attorney Clarence Darrow of Chicago joined a team of lawyers defending John T. Scopes against charges brought against him by the state of Tennessee. The state was prosecuting Scopes, a high school teacher, for violating a Tennessee law that prohibited anyone teaching the theory of evolution in its schools, a prohibition Scopes acknowledged violating. Assisting the prosecution as associate counsel was William Jennings Bryan, twice a presidential candidate and a renowned public speaker. Newspaper accounts at the time, and the oratorical skills of Bryan, helped ensure that people would remember this as the Scopes monkey trial.

Darrow and his client, the defendant Scopes, lost at trial. While the legal issue turned on whether Scopes should suffer legal sanctions for violating Tennessee’s laws, Darrow called Bryan to the stand as an expert witness and managed to put the Bible itself on trial. Under vigorous questioning from Darrow, Bryan professed to believe whatever the Bible says, including what it might say about creation. Darrow, in his turn, ridiculed literal belief in what the Bible says about creation. But what does the Bible say about creation? And what might it mean to read the biblical texts about creation literally? Addressing these questions will help in introducing this book and its title. Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan will appear again below, by the way.

The question What does the Bible say about creation? may seem simple, but answering it can become complicated. It is not merely pedantic to ask a further question: What do we mean by creation? Contemporary references to creation tend to have in mind nature or the natural world and typically have as their context a concern for that world, our world, or the environment. A few decades ago, when I was a college student—when Elvis Presley and all four Beatles were alive and Richard Nixon was president of the United States—we learned to talk about ecology. We learned to think about ecology because we had become aware that the natural world is in fact a fragile system—an ecosystem considerably endangered by our exploitation of it and of its resources, including exploitation of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. More recently, it has become common in Christian circles to speak of creation care, bringing the natural world under the category of (God’s) creation and recognizing an obligation to care for that world, for this earth . . . to care for the natural world as God’s creation. For example, in 2018 Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan A. Moo published a textbook titled Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World. I have no objection at all to this understanding of creation. I have conducted courses on creation care. And I have no criticism of the authors—both well-credentialed and respected scholars—or their book; I would have adopted it as a textbook had I not retired from teaching the year it was published. I cite it simply as an authoritative example of the prevalent identification of creation with the natural world—the earth that God created.

While I will have occasion to refer to the natural world in the chapters that follow, my focus will be elsewhere: my focus will be on God the Creator, as the book’s title implies. To be more precise and more accurate, my focus will be on what the biblical texts, and primarily texts from the Old Testament (more on this term below), say about God the Creator: how they depict or portray God acting as Creator in different ways and to various ends. These differences and this variety, which will be on display in this book’s ten chapters, add another degree of complexity to the question What does the Bible say about creation?—and also to the question "What do we mean by creation?"

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan seem to have assumed that Genesis 1 and 2 exhaust what the Bible says about creation. But the Bible’s rendering of God the Creator is too rich and complex to be limited to those two chapters. Much of that rendering—depicting God acting as Creator—is in verse, in poetry, pressing to the limit the resources of the Hebrew language in the service of artistic imagination and expression in praise and lament, urgent appeal and instruction in wisdom. Genesis 1 amounts to narrative poetry, a kind of litany, but its liturgical cadences of God creating differ almost violently from the thundering poetry of God the Creator’s speeches in Job. In both Genesis 1 and Job 38–41, the natural world figures crucially, and in both texts, God speaks (or, in Genesis, is reported as speaking and acting) as the Creator. In Job, the creatures in God’s created world are wild, dangerous, and beautiful, and sometimes beyond controlling. In the world of God’s creation there be dragons. Genesis 1 describes God "creating [bara’] the great dragons" (v. 21), dragons exhorted to praise the Lord in Psalm 148:7. Psalm 74:13, by contrast, describes God smashing the dragons’ heads primordially on behalf of God’s created order and against forces inimical, hostile to it (vv. 12–14). These and other poetic and prophetic texts and the prose narratives in Genesis 2–11 on which this book will focus yield no systematic description of God the Creator—an indication, perhaps, that they offer authentic testimony to their dynamic subject.

The diverse ways in which God acts as Creator in texts of differing genres complicate any answer to a second question in the argument between Darrow and Bryan: What would it mean to read these texts literally? Debates about, and sometimes insistence on, literal versus figurative, allegorical, or symbolic interpretation have a long history. My first theological or hermeneutical argument—at perhaps ten years old—was with my father, a minister, over this issue. He insisted that we must interpret the Bible literally. As evidence to the contrary, I offered Psalm 6:6, which in the KJV (i.e., for us then, the Bible) reads, I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. No one can cry so much that their tears literally make their bed swim; that was my argument to my father, who chuckled. Even staunch literalists recognize that metaphors abound in the Bible—which is richly populated with poetry—especially in the Old Testament’s references or allusions to God the Creator.

Poets, including biblical ones, sometimes refer to a heart of stone (e.g., Job 41:24; Ezek. 11:19; William Butler Yeats, Easter 1916, stanza 4). Neither biblical nor other poets ask us to think of a rock-hard human heart, individual or corporate, in terms of mineral qualities, igneous or sedimentary. We recognize poetic references to hearts of stone, wind with wings, God with chariots, and God as a rock (Pss. 18:2; 19:14; Hab. 1:12). We know that these are metaphors, even if (like almost everyone else) we cannot offer a clear definition of metaphor. And we have a good sense of what these images, these metaphorical statements, signify. We know, more or less, how to take them. So, for example, we understand that biblical texts describing God as a rock urge us to understand God as, at least, solid, reliable, and unfailing—as worthy of trust. This interpretive skill does not come to us magically or from extensive knowledge of geology. It comes to us, rather, by way of reading—by way of reading the Bible, from which we may gain a new appreciation of rocks.1

Discussion and debate about literal reading and interpretation began many centuries before my conversation with my father. Early in the fifth century CE, Augustine (354–430), the bishop of Hippo in North Africa, published a commentary titled On Genesis Literally Interpreted. In this commentary on Genesis 1–3, Augustine understands the creation story with only occasional appeal to allegory, while reading Genesis within the framework of Christian belief. Commenting on the creation of light in Genesis 1:3, for example, Augustine suggests that this has to do with illuminating the minds of the angels (On Genesis Literally Interpreted 4.21). What Augustine meant by literal was, thus, far from simplistic. For Augustine, a literal interpretation must speak truthfully of God, which meant that it must accord with convictions at the heart of Christian faith. In another work, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine writes that when we find something in Scripture that, understood literally, does not contribute to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, then it must be figurative (3.10.14). Centuries later, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), while agreeing with Augustine, added something that seems almost modern. The literal sense, Thomas writes in his Summa Theologiae, is what the author intends. That interpretation of a work should be guided or determined by the author’s intention(s) became controversial some decades ago. But Thomas regarded Scripture as a categorically different kind of work whose author is God (I-II, q.10, a.1). Thomas knew, of course, that people in all their humanity composed the biblical texts, but he joined long Christian tradition in insisting that, in the interpretation of Scripture, the author whose intention matters most is God. But how would someone, or some community, go about discovering what God’s intention might be? Perhaps in something like the way we would come to understand what God is our rock and other metaphors signify—by locating them within other identifying descriptions of God in (the whole of) Scripture.2

In focusing on God the Creator, the chapters that follow in this book will employ a simpler understanding of literal in relation to the interpretation of biblical texts: they will assume that God is the subject of those acts that the texts ascribe to God, and they will seek to describe those acts within the framework of (or the world within) those texts. This does not entail embracing the notion of God as the author of Scripture, but neither does it stand in tension with it. In any event, in a book—this one—professing to be about God the Creator, the author of the whole cosmos, belief that God is somehow the author of Scripture hardly seems daring.3

In his remarks at the conclusion of the Scopes trial, the presiding judge, John Raulston, expressed his own distaste for the arguments between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. He suggested that their debate was so misplaced as to ignore both the character and the value of the Bible. In the course of his remarks, he described the Bible as a waybill to the other world.4 Judge Raulston’s terms seem quaint so many years after the trial, and we would demur from his comparison of the Bible to a set of shipping instructions. But he was not entirely mistaken in associating the Bible with an other world. Not many years before the Scopes trial, a young pastor in Switzerland spoke of the strange new world within the Bible. That pastor, Karl Barth, meant that the Bible presents us with a world in which the chief consideration is . . . the doings of God.5 The Bible presents us with a world of God’s creation: God creating the heavens and the earth and all that is in them.

We know that there are very many things in the heavens and in the earth—more things than we could possibly name, more than we could even imagine. All of these things somehow fit together—not always in complete harmony and not without conflict, but they do fit together and work together within a universe, a cosmos, a word I used above. Our English word universe combines two Latin terms: unus, meaning one, and vertere, meaning to change (into). Our universe is an unimaginable number of things turned into, formed into, one whole: a universe, or in Greek, a cosmos. A cosmos is not just a whole collection of things. In fact, the word in Greek means an orderly arrangement, or a just order. A cosmos, a world, is an ordered whole, beautifully arranged. It is things in order, and not in any order but in good order: things as they should be, a just order. In the Old Testament, order—things as they should be—has a natural meaning; we could think of this as the world working as it should work, supporting and nurturing life, including human life. But in the Old Testament, order also has a moral meaning and a political one: think of this as things as they should be among people and among nations. This, too, is part of the ordered world, the cosmos, working as it should work. And in the Bible, of course, this should substitutes for as God intends or as pleases or delights God—as God desires (Isa. 46:10). God acts as Creator to establish, sustain, and on occasion repair that order: a dynamic, life-enabling order that can properly go by the name creation.

In part because of the conjunction of these three dimensions of order into one—that is, as creation—my expansive attribution to God of the office Creator will elicit disagreement from scholars whose definition of creator is more restrictive.6 In cultures and societies in ancient Israel’s environment—and perhaps within ancient Israel itself—responsibilities and credits could be distributed and negotiated within a (sometimes competitive) community of deities. Psalm 82 may reflect this in Israel’s case, as also Deuteronomy 32:8–9, differently. The Bible acknowledges other deities, other gods, but its texts do not apportion the formation of the world and the defense or repair of its order—or the creation, judgment, and restoration of a people—to other than the one Creator. In the Old Testament, God’s creating is not limited to origins, much less to absolute origins.7 God created—the Hebrew verb is bara’—the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1), and also the north and the south (Ps. 89:12) and the ends of the earth (Isa. 40:28). But God also promises to create (bara’) a well-watered and fruitful way in the wilderness for God’s own return and the return of Israel from Babylon (Isa. 41:18–20), the same Israel that God created (Isa. 43:1; Mal. 2:10)—all who are called by God’s name (Isa. 43:7). Indeed, the objects of God’s actions as Creator are quite comprehensive, including light and darkness, well-being (shalom) and calamity, and salvation (45:7–8). The future itself—Israel’s future in particular—is and will be God’s creation (48:5–7). The Old Testament’s own attribution of Creator to God seems to be as expansive as possible. The point was made by Eusebius of Caesarea (293–339 CE): Such is the theology of the Hebrews, which first teaches that all things were constituted by a creative word of God, and then goes on to teach that the entire universe was not left abandoned . . . but that it is governed by the providence of God unto eternity, since God is not only creator and maker of all, but also savior, governor, king and chieftain, watching over sun and moon and stars and the entire heaven and world throughout the ages.8

Remarks on the Chapters That Follow

That God created the heavens and the earth is the Bible’s opening affirmation in Genesis 1. And God’s creating continues in Genesis 2, which initiates a narrative that continues in Genesis 3 and beyond. Because of the importance of Genesis 1 and 2–3 in the Bible’s presentation and in contemporary understanding of God as Creator, and because of crucial, contested issues in the interpretation of these chapters, I have devoted a chapter each to Genesis 1, 2, and 3–11. The style and scope of Genesis 1 (1:1–2:3, to be precise) differ markedly from those of the chapters that follow. Its frame, in 1:1 and 2:1–3, mark it as a completed unit of text: the litany of creation was concluded (1:31), so God rested (2:3). Genesis 2:4 not only begins a new creation story but creates the possibility of drama by introducing characters, agents, all of whom God created: a man, a woman, and a serpent. The latter two agents converse about what God said and, according to the serpent, about God’s actual purpose concealed under what God said. The narrative beginning in Genesis 2 continues without interruption through Genesis 4 and has echoes especially in 6:1–4, preceding the flood narrative, and in 11:1–9, the tower of Babel story. These accounts narrate the possibility and actuality of creation-threatening rivalry with God, and God’s action in defense of creation.

While the Bible’s first verse says that God created the world, its second verse describes something prior to, or in the midst of, or in the way of—obstructing—the creation of a cosmos: the earth as tohu wabohu (Gen. 1:2), which sounds menacing. In Genesis, God does only verbal battle with the menace (1:3). But the creation and flood accounts in Genesis have as their wider milieu texts from Mesopotamia and Egypt that narrate the world’s creation and a great flood. In chapter 4, for example, I briefly describe Enuma Elish, in which the deity Marduk does engage a menacing force in battle. In some literature from Israel’s neighborhood (Syria) poetic texts tell of a deity’s battle with the menacing Sea and a sea monster, Leviathan (lotan), and the dragon. These narrative-poetry texts from the ancient city of Ugarit, in a language closely related to the biblical languages of Hebrew and Aramaic, feature deities and powers whose names also appear in the Bible.

The discussion of literature from Israel’s environment provides context for chapter 5 on the Psalms. There the Sea itself is menacing, personified as Leviathan or Rahab—a force hostile to creation that God vanquishes in defense of it. God’s undeniably violent action against the Sea, Leviathan, and the dragon in defense of creation, recalled in retrospect (Ps. 74:12), was at the same time an appeal to God to act again as Creator on behalf of Zion and God’s people. In Psalm 89, Babylon’s destruction of Jerusalem and desecration of the temple seem to call into question God’s faithfulness or power, power celebrated in the memory of God’s calming of the sea and crushing of its monster, Rahab. God’s action in securing the order of the world was the grounds for God’s promises of enduring faithfulness to David and David’s house. In the Psalms (for example, Ps. 77) God’s action as Creator has both cosmic or primordial dimensions (prevailing over the Sea and the deep) and historical ones, reminiscent of God’s deliverance of Israel in the exodus. But the Sea does not uniformly appear as a hostile power in the Psalms, and neither does Leviathan. God did need to put the waters in their place, Psalm 104 says, but then God could enjoy watching Leviathan play in the sea.

The Psalms are profound and beautiful poetry. Genesis 1–11 is narrative prose, but it is poetic in its own way. The term poetry comes from a Greek word, poieō, which means to make or to create. God is the Creator, of course, and thus the supreme poet. It should not surprise us that God chooses poetry, literary artistry, as a biblical mode of divine self-expression. Poets, including biblical ones, make things—they create—with words. Israel’s poets lived in a world full of gods, and those poets, divinely inspired no doubt, took up this world into their poetry and employed it in testimony and in appeal to God the Creator.

Leviathan also makes an appearance in Job, within the broad and strained category of Israel’s Wisdom literature, the subject of chapter 6. God the Creator is certainly in focus in Job, whose protagonist