The Lost World of Genesis One

January 4, 2010 in REVIEWS with 8 Comments

One of the books I read over my Christmas vacation was John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate—highly recommended for anyone unsatisfied with the major interpretations of Genesis 1: Young Earth Creationism and the Framework, Day-Age and Gap Theories.

For instance, Young Earth Creationism (YEC) had become increasingly problematic for me, as I read about the geological and astronomical evidence for an ancient universe and began to ponder the theological significance of living in a cosmos that was created 14 billion years before my arrival. Additionally, I did not see an exegetical necessity for a 6,000-year-old earth and found increasingly problematic YEC’s extreme attempts to reconcile scientific evidence with their biblical interpretation.

Although it is built on solid Ancient Near Eastern scholarship, Walton’s book is brief and highly accessible to the average reader. The core of his argument is this: The author of Genesis 1 was not attempting to argue that God created the material substance of the universe—his ancient readers would have all assumed this to be true. Instead, Genesis 1 is an account of God’s ordering and arranging the cosmos into a temple which would reflect His glory and from which He would rule. With this view, Walton argues, it is unimportant whether one believes the universe is 6,000 years old or 14 billion years old, because this is simply not what Genesis 1 is about.

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  • http://www.mikeandkaren.blogspot.com Michael McDonald

    Ah, if only there were an Ebook version

  • http://www.kellyandconnie.com Connie

    I like this train of thought!

  • Christopher

    What is sort of amazing is that you are allowing dozens of other sources to color your view of Scripture. The “geological and astronomical evidence for an ancient universe” that you speak of are only necessarily old if it took chance processes and random occurrences that long to create a homeostatic environment in which all that currently resides on earth could live. Why is it so difficult to believe that a limitless, creative being (i.e. God) could possibly create all that is in 6 days or 6 seconds if He so chose?

    It is an untenable position to start from science (or so-called sciences such as evolution), mingle it in with Scripture or allow it to presuppose things on God that are never stated, implied or supported by the Bible, and pretend that God’s Word is of paramount importance to you. If you say that the Bible is scientifically insufficient and therefore you can override the obvious interpretation of both Genesis 1 and 2 (the telescopic and microscopic accounts of creation), which are exegetically supported by the Hebrew syntax of the Scripture and have been assumed and held by believing Jews and Christians for literally thousands of years to mean 6 literal 24 hour days followed by a 24 hour period of rest, then what stops you from moving forward with dissecting other areas of Scripture you deem irrelevant or misunderstood according to your worldview? Where then is the truth of Scripture, other than in your mind and not in the Bible?

    I don’t want to appear or to be argumentative, but why would a Christian not read the Bible to BELIEVE it, and other books to consider them? I appreciate that John Walton is an excellent writer that attempts to support his theories with evidence, research and science, but at the end of the day, he is a man making guesses, educated or not. If you believe what the Bible represents about itself in 2 Timothy 3:16, and all Scripture is inspired and supplied by God, that means that Genesis is an eye-witness account of the beginning from the only reliable source, GOD HIMSELF. We can trust that He meant what He said and he said what He meant. Moses was not guessing, he was not borrowing from ancient-Near-eastern tradition, he was being directed by God to reveal truth, plain and simple. And no pseudosciences in the 21st Century make this any less true.

    I guess what I am saying is, according to Scripture, it is Faith, which is simply trusting God, that pleases him. SO these attempts to make God jive with science, or to make “sense” of His Word according to the latest scientific discoveries or journals or hypotheses are really attempts to overcome the “limitation” of BELIEF and FAITH. When I read the Bible, I do not check my brain at the door, turn off my logic or pretend that God is somehow saying things that make no common sense, but I do believe that God’s Word was supplied by an infinite creator who chose to be understood through His Word by His finite creatures, and I take the Scriptures at face value. I believe that the Bible is inerrant, infallible and inspired in its manuscripts and autographs and that it is the ONLY true revelation of God to man. And if it states something, I believe it. Period. As Romans 3:8 says, “Let God be true, and every man a liar” and if science disagrees with Scripture, it’s okay. Science can be wrong. Black people used to be “scientifically proven” to be inferior to whites. Hitler’s eugenics showed the eventual arrival and dominance of a master Aryan race scientifically. Aren’t you glad Science was proven WRONG in those areas? I am. And when it comes to the study of origins, science is yet again wrong. The Bible is right. Young Earth Creationists are right. Not because their science is always so flawless or their claims make the most sense (which they actually DO when compared to the unscientific theory or evolution), but because their claims most congruently and frequently line up with that of God’s Word. Do you realize that if 6 day creation is not true, Jesus lied when He affirmed it in Scripture? What does that do to the prospect of Salvation and the end of all things and how correct Jesus is about those if he can’t even get the facts straight about what happened in the beginning? Just something to think about.

  • Christopher

    **above should say Romans 3:4, not 3:8. Sry, mistyped :)

  • http://www.matthewdgreen.com Matt

    Christopher, you raise some good points. I would encourage you to pick up the book, because I can’t do it justice in a 200-word review. Here are a few comments I would offer in response to what you’ve written:

    First, neither Walton nor myself necessarily have a problem with God creating the world in six literal days. The question is this: Is that what Genesis 1 says, and is that what the original listeners/readers understood it to mean? This is the exegetical question that Walton attempts to answer, and he does not start from science to answer it. This is not an issue of faith. It is basic exegesis—the uncovering of what the text means and not attempting to make it answer questions that its original readers were not asking.

    Second, why would Moses not borrow concepts from Ancient Near Eastern traditions to describe the creation? Biblical authors from Genesis to Revelation use language and imagery familiar to their audiences in describing theological truths—from the sea monster imagery of Job to the agricultural parables of Jesus and the forensic language Paul uses to describe justification.

    Third, the Bible is not the only revelation of God to man. Although the Bible is the final revelation, He speaks through conscience and in general revelation through creation (e.g. Romans 1). Science is a tool God has given us to discern his activity in creation. If we observe the light from a star 1 million light years away, why is it wrong to attempt to reconcile this scientific observation of God’s revelation with the biblical account? If we analyze a fossil and determine it to be 30 million years old, why is it wrong to attempt to understand why God created rocks and stars that appear much older than 6,000 years?

    Ultimately, all these questions come down to how one does exegesis. Did God inspire Genesis 1 to defend his role as creator, to counter evolution or to attack other rather recent scientific theories or was he attempting to reveal something else that may not even be on the radar of modern readers? The goal of exegesis is to first determine what the text meant to its original audience and to work forward from there. Pure and simple, that is what Walton attempts to do.

  • http://briancrussell.net bman

    Chris: What about believing in a world that is BILLIONS of years old is against the Bible? In Genesis, it mentions six “days” and the word “days” is incredibly subjective because day requires light and dark, and the Sun wasn’t created until after a few days.

  • Christopher

    Matt and bman,

    I appreciate the goal of exegesis being to reveal both original audience and original intent. Having had to do just this for a few years in graduate and post-graduate work in primarily Greek and a little Hebrew, it impresses me that exegeting words such as “day” should maybe be a little more simple than Walton is making it in his studies. It is simple to say that the Hebrew word “yohm” that is translated day in Genesis 1:4ff (that is, evening and morning as well as an accompanying numerical modifier) ALWAYS means 24 hours in a literal day. There really aren’t any exceptions to this in ancient Hebrew Texts. When “yohm” is used in other contexts to describe periods of time (i.e. the Psalms and prophetic books mentioning the “day of the Lord” as a future event or period in time), there exists context and reasons to translate the word with a non-literal 24-hour day in mind. Exegesis done. You wouldn’t run to, say, 2 Peter 3:8 where a thousand years is “as a day” to the Lord and a day a thousand years, for exegetical purposes, this would be exegetically unsound. Different audiences, different languages, different words altogether, etc. And, bman, I believe, exegetically, that God had Moses relate time to the reader as they were familiar with it by the time of Genesis’ writings. On the fourth day of creation, God created the sun, moon, and all the universe(s) and said “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years,” in Genesis 1:14, so I believe that God actually applied what he said about the keeping of time retroactively to the previous days of creation. It seems in keeping with the text.

    I do understand your assertion that Moses would use terminology familiar to his audience to foster understanding of events in his writings, to get his points across, as Paul or Christ Himself would have. I am not saying that Moses did not use or appropriate language to describe the creation; what I am saying is that God was revealing truth, regardless of societal mores and norms of speech, and what exists in Scripture is an account of history, not an allegory or some malleable set of concepts wrapped in ANE speech and writings. God was telling the truth of what happened. (By the way, I actually do believe that in Job chapters 38-40, when God was speaking, that this was a literal occurrence and what he said concerning behemoth and leviathan was accurate and true. Even the fire-breathing part. So I don’t take that as simple imagery.) God, according to my understanding, limited as it is, set forth to give an explanation or account of the beginning of all things. This is not an apology deriding evolution or any other theory. It is a delineation of origins (the cosmos, time, animals, humans, sin, death, etc.), there is no great gesture by God via Moses to either exhaustively compose or define this in any more complicated language than He did. It is a succinct representation of God’s creative action. Contrarily, what the evolutionary theory and all of its complimentary “sciences” attempts to do is postulate an entirely different set of death-filled, random acts that hold no creative imperatives that would reveal God as a loving, competent or purposeful being.

    I’ll try to wrap this up (I am long winded, I know (and I love parentheses)hehe), is that I do want to address the idea that Scripture is not the only means of revelation God uses to convey truth to people. I know this to be true. As I typed earlier, I overemphasized the word “only” by putting it in all caps, but the next adjective that comes before revelation (true) is just as important there. Yes both nature and conscience are means through which God can reveal Himself to mankind. Romans 1, Job 12:8, and many other Scriptures point out that people can observe nature and see the hand of a Creator at work. And conscience is mentioned as a way to keep oneself honest in the sight of God and man. Here is the thing though: both conscience and nature are ridiculously limited in their ability to reveal TRUTH about God on their own. In fact, neither of these can accurately reveal who God is or his plan for mankind apart from the guidance of the Scriptures. General revelation (i.e. nature) has no salvific ability. In Romans, it shows man that there is a God, but leaves the man unredeemed, unregenerate and ultimately condemned when apart from the Scripture and the work of Christ revealed therein. Observing nature can even lead one to such philosophies as animism, naturalism, and other “isms” that take the observers farther and farther away from God. Conscience is even worse, it can be defiled (Titus 1:15), weak (1 Corinthians 8:10), or even seered so that doing wrong seems right (1 Timothy 4:2). When either of these inferior revelatory apparatuses are used in conjunction with Scripture, then they can be deemed trustworthy, but left to themselves or aided by other things (even the “scientific method”) these are dangerous ways to “know” anything about God at best. Divorced from special revelation (through the Bible and Jesus Christ/the Holy Spirit) these become a blunt instrument, and I am reminded of the old axiom about the use of a tool in the wrong hands.

    My point here is that starting outside of Scripture with (so-called) science is the ONLY way one gets to millions or billions of years as a basis for the model of Creation. Looking in the Bible, it seems implausible for Christians to extrapolate this time frame. This didn’t happen until the 19th Century, wonder what that means? (psst… has something to do with a dude named Darwin) A simple reliance on and reading of the Scriptures produces millennia, not more. When we analyze artifacts or evidence such as fossils, rocks or even the light from stars, we do it with presuppositions. Usually against the Bible. I see the stars, the fossils, the rocks the same way I do Adam at the end of Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2. I see them as being created with apparent age. That is to say, God did not creating seedlings, eggs, spermatozoa, and other building blocks of life, he created a set of biosystems able to reproduce themselves from the inception of each organism, plant, species, etc. If He created the sun and it lit upon the earth on the “DAY” that He created it, He didn’t sit around and wait the light-years it would take for a single ray to hit the earth, or wait for the warmth of the heat generated to travel here. It was here, He created it that way. Using methods of dating such as radiocarbon dating, cosmogenic or environmental isotopes, or other trusted methods of deriving age from supposed ancient artifacts is unsustainable at best, seeing as how some of these methods have been shown to date batteries from the 1970s to 60,000 years B.C.E. So be it stars, rocks, or whatever, at creation, apparent age ensued. That fits most readily with Scripture. There is not a thing wrong with asking questions that attempt to answer why God would create rocks that appear “billions” of years old, but to step away from the authority of the word of God to find the answer seems both counterintuitive and counterproductive, to me, at least. The reason people postulate huge amounts of time for all things to come into balance, is because they factor in chance and improbabilities and such variables that doesn’t exist in a perfectly planned, conceived, and created process like the one that is represented in the Bible when it says, God looked over everything and saw that it was Very Good.

  • Awakeinsiberia

    I am glad that you have been brave enough to bring this topic up Matt. I have not been brave enough to bring it up on my own blog.
    I am tired of people saying that they read Geneis “literally”. It is not a literal text, it is in an oral text. As such it is full of oral devices and ancient oral world view. For us to force our literal world view upon an oral text is very bad analysis of a text indeed.
    We can be guaranteed that when the stories of creation were composed the date of creation was not in the slightest bit part of the topic.

    In our oral telling of these stories to some Sakha people here in Siberia, we actually started with the creation story of the garden, Adam and Eve. We then moved on to the next story in the garden, when they disobeyed and ate the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Later we went back to the creation song in Genesis 1, where “everything God made was good.” It was quite a surprise to our friends that everything was good, as the world we live in is not good at all. They found the second two stories easier to understand.

    By the time we got round to the creation song about everything being good, they were ready to interact with this, as the other two stories had made sense to them. This is certainly what Genesis 1 is all about, contrasting the good and perfect Creator God from all the evil gods in the world around. (Not about when the universe was created.)