1) God creates the Earth, until then an unformed void on “the surface of the deep,” and his spirit “hovers over the face of the waters.” The language of Genesis’ opening verses is beautiful. Its creation imagery would make striking computer animation. Notice God’s character; at this point of the text only a spirit creating by speech. Language, in plot and context, is the driving force of creation (see my essay in Luna Negra’s Spring 2009 issue).
2) In separating darkness from light, an image suggesting a great flash, one may think this supports the Big Bang theory. Robin Williams in his Live on Broadway stand-up routine asks, “Couldn’t this be a metaphor for the Big Bang?” Then, in a hillbilly voice, while miming flicking a light switch, answers, “No, God just went click.” At first reading, the order of creation appears to mimic scientific findings. Yet, upon closer inspection, Genesis reinforces an Earth-centered universe: God creates the Earth (which already has water), light, sky, land, vegetation, and then the Sun, Moon, and stars.
3) God as “He, Father,” etc. In English, the pronoun is “he.” The Hebrew pronoun, however, is sexless. Here we see how original languages suffer mistranslations and how the original text becomes skewed with patriarchal dogma. Yet, that still leaves us with the problem of such words as “Father.” Well, in the time of the Pentateuch’s composition, the man/woman duality was balanced in worship. Archeologists have found evidence that women were venerated in ancient Judaism since they bore life. The ancient view was God, the spirit of creation, was the father, and Earth, the fertile womb of life, the mother, and both were worshipped since one cannot exist with the other (hints of ying and yang). The ancients might have had more balanced gender roles than we believed, with the universe and mankind needing both the sperm (God) and the egg (Earth) for life to continue. That is, however, until men took over religious authority and treated women’s bodies as sinful since they “tempted” men, the logic of which escapes me since that suggests men are the weaker sex being that their wills cannot resist temptation.
4) “Man created in God’s image.” God as a human being? Again, not so, as the Hebrew intent was not to describe God’s physicality, but his nature. By man being created in God’s image and likeness, man has the emotions of God. He has the ability to create. Of note, is God’s speech as he creates man: “in our image, in our likeness.” Who is “our?” Realize God does not say “my.” This suggests more than one spiritual interest in man’s creation. Ancients believed the heavens were filled with incorporeal beings, a sort of mystical football team with infinite numbers, possessing infinite powers. I suggest a modern interpretation: God could be the universe itself, “our” the matter of our bodies—protons, neutrons, etc.—the stardust through which we began.
Fundamentalists preach Genesis’ first chapters as literal truth. They claim the world is 6,000 years old, that we walked with dinosaurs. They want to deny science, ignore history. More importantly, they want to be right. Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens tell us to dismiss Genesis as child’s play (although in his writings Hitchens says religious texts should be venerated as crucial steps in mankind’s artistic development and should not be forgotten). They want to be right, too. Each side misses a key facet: human nature. We will always question our purpose on Earth. For good or bad, we always want meaning. Eradicating this desire would extinguish a hefty part of man’s spirit for discovery, especially for the layman.
I propose we land somewhere in the middle. Appreciate Genesis as a story, one of the great imaginative leaps in human history. Don’t deny its authors credit for attempting to answer the ultimate mystery: “How did we get here and why?” Appreciate its beautiful language, history, and its attempts at ratifying a cohesive philosophy for ancient desert farmers. Realize it is a stepping stone that led us to today’s discoveries. Don’t believe it literally, but if you must, don’t lord it over those who wish to believe different than you. Most of all, however, for those of us who don’t “believe” as we should, do not dismiss Genesis’ artistic qualities because of its political, social, and scientific, misapplications. There is too much history to miss out on.
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