These remarks deal with Proto-Genesis -- that is, the opening section of the book of Genesis, the first eleven chapters, which form a natural self-contained unit, up to the call of Abraham.
I must warn the reader that, whereas in my earlier essays on the New Testament I tried to confine myself to the ascertainable facts with a minimum of interpretation, I shall here write some things that are frankly speculative.
I shall be going over some of this material several times, offering different interpretations or approaches. And I shall begin with a brief survey of the section, mentioning one theme that I think runs through it.
The author is, I think, less concerned to write a history of ancient events than to deal with the problem of evil. Jews, Christians, and Moslems believe that God made the world, and that God is completely good. This naturally raises the question, "Why, then, is the world not completely good?" For many religions, this question is no problem. The Greeks, for example, did not believe that Zeus created the world. Their myths describe the birth of Zeus into a world that was already under way. On their view, the world is not created, it is just there. No one made it, and no one is responsible for its not being an altogether satisfactory place. Why should it be? Even if the gods had created the world, one would not expect it to be completely good, because the gods are not completely good, either. Much of Greek mythology deals with their quarrels, their deceiving and betraying of one another. If we turn instead to a religion like Hinduism, we find again that evil is not a difficulty. In Hindu thought, the world is not regarded as a creation of God. (Let me specify that Hindu thought comes in many varieties, and that I am here talking about one fairly common Hindu approach rather than *THE* Hindu approach, as if there were only one.) Rather, God and the universe are the same thing looked at in two different ways. Everything that exists, whether good or bad, is an aspect of God. Thus God does not side with good against evil. Now as an introduction to Hinduism, that last paragraph is, of course, thoroughly inadequate. But I was not setting out to explain Hinduism, any more than I was Greek mythology. My point is, rather, that the writer of Genesis holds a position that we have heard so often that we tend to take it for granted. If a Westerner believes in God, he regards it as obvious that God is good and that God created the world. If he does not believe in God, he tends to assume that if there were a God, He would be good and would have created the world. I heard an atheist say recently, "I am not at all worried about going to Hell for being an atheist, because if I am mistaken, and there is a God after all, He won't send me to hell for an honest mistake. That wouldn't be fair!" He was utterly taken aback when someone asked him, "If you don't think that there is a God, then why are you so sure that if there is one, He is fair?" The point is that we all do take a certain concept of God for granted, even those who reject the concept. And this may conceal from us the fact that the ancient Hebrews were really going out on a limb, were really making a startling innovation, when they undertook the twin beliefs in God as Creator and God as Good.
But if you believe in God as Creator and God as Good, then you have the questions about evil to deal with, and on the view that I am here presenting, the opening section of Genesis is a series of replies in story form to a series of questions by a critic.
The critic begins by asking, "Why is there evil in the world?" Our author replies that it didn't start out evil. God made the world, and God is good, and so the world that He made was good. You will note in the first chapter the refrain, over and over, "God made such-and-such, and saw that it was good," ending with, "God looked at all that He had made, and behold, it was very good!" How then does there come to be evil in the world? Because men had a choice between obeying God and disobeying Him, and chose to disobey. Because obedience to God makes men happy and disobedience makes them unhappy. On the Genesis view, the root of evil is simply man's rebellion against, and consequent alienation from, God.
The critic says: "But what I am interested in is social justice. What does God have to do with that?"
Our author replies that justice to one's neighbor rests on repect for him as someone whom God has created and endowed with rights, someone who has value because God made him and values him. Where belief in God and respect for His creation is absent, there is no rational basis for the concept of social justice. Adam and Eve's first son is Cain, who murders his brother. The first result of enmity between man and God is enmity between man and man.
Now the critic objects: "But God doesn't have to stand by and watch everything fall apart. Why doesn't He do something? Why doesn't He kill all the bad people and leave the world a decent place for the rest of us?" The story of Noah and the Flood is an answer to that question. According to the story, God looked over the earth and found only eight good people, Noah and his wife, their three sons and their wives. He saved them in the Ark, while the flood waters drowned all the rest. And that is a first point for the critic to think about. He presumably wants God to rate everyone on a moral scale of goodness and then make the cut-off point just below him and his friends. But why should God do that? If he is out to eliminate evil from the world, why should he not do a thorough job of it and eliminate the slightly bad as well as the thoroughly bad, leaving only the really good people behind? It is like suggesting that we improve the health of the human race by killing or sterilizing everyone with hereditary defects or bad genes. Where do you draw the line? Instead of improving the human race slightly by eliminating the ten per cent most unfit, why not improve it considerably by eliminating the ninety per cent most unfit? Better not back this program unless you have a gold medal from the last Olympics. And by the same token, better not urge God to destroy all the bad people in this world unless your own record for good deeds is pretty impressive. And now back to the Flood story.
When the flood was over and Noah left the ark, the first thing he did was to build an altar and give thanks to God for his deliverance. The next thing he did was to get drunk. And that brings us to a second point for the critic to think about. One purge doesn't do it. A few years after the flood, wickedness was just as widespread as before. As long as men have freedom to choose, keeping them on the right road by intervening means continual intervention on God's part, which means no real choice at all on man's part. A mother whose children are messy cannot solve the problem by cleaning their room once. She must either accept the idea of cleaning it every day forever, or nagging them into cleaning it every day for ever, or giving them a choice and letting the room be messy when they choose not to clean it. After the flood, we are told, God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign that he would never again destroy the human race with a flood. In a sense, the flood is the story of an experiment that failed. God tried cleaning the world up with one big swoosh of a cosmic bucket, looked at the result and said, "Well, that didn't work. I won't try that again." (To avoid misunderstanding, let me specify that I am not supposing that God tried an experiment and got results He was not expecting, but rather that the most educational way of explaining that a certain type of solution would not work is to tell a story about its being tried and not working.)
I take it that the point of the flood story is that a one-shot solution is not the answer. Problems have a way of recurring. It may seem like a simple and obvious point, but it is by no means obvious, even with the benefit of experience. It is so easy for people to believe that if only the problem of the moment were somehow taken care of, everything from then on would be plain sailing. Just a few years ago, when we were in the midst of the Watergate mess, many people spoke and wrote as though Nixon were the root of all the world's problems, and if only he were out of public life, everything would be fine. We were reminded that he had been involved in the Hiss case, that he had been denouncing Communism even before McCarthy. It followed that he was responsible for McCarthyism, for the Cold War, for Korea and Vietnam and everything bad that had happened to this country since the late Forties. And since few people's political memories go back before the late Forties, it was easy to conclude that all evils whatever were due to Nixon's presence in Washington. Again, during the Vietnam War, I heard a number of speakers declare that the War was not just our most pressing national problem, but our ONLY national problem. It was the cause of poverty--Johnson's Great Society Program had gotten sidetracked because the money that would otherwise have gone to the War on Poverty was going instead to the War in Vietnam. It was the cause of racism, because as long as we needed black youths as cannon fodder, we would resist thinking of them as first class citizens. It was the destruction of all academic standards, for no teacher was going to flunk a student, no matter what he did, if it would mean his getting killed in Vietnam. It was the cause of crime, because by fighting in Vietnam we were implicitly condoning murder, rape, robbery, and everything else, and people couldn't be blamed if they did what society condoned. It was the cause of the alienation of our youth. It was the cause of the drug problem, because the stuff was easy to get in Vietnam and 90 per cent of returning soldiers were junkies. It was the cause of venereal disease and associated evils for the same reason. In short, there was no evil in America for which the Vietnam War was not the simple and straightforward explanation. In the early Sixties, before Vietnam bacame the Number One Issue, it was said by many people that racism was at the root of all social problems in the United States. Before that, during the Second World War, it was the standard belief that once the war had been won, we would have lasting peace and no more problems. The possibility that the allies of that war might disagree or quarrel among themselves was, in many quarters, simply never contemplated. Hitler was the sole obstacle between us and the earthly paradise. Going back still further, it was my pleasure to read, some time ago, an article written before the United States enacted Prohibition. The writer was enthusiastic about the prospect of a nation without alcohol, and explained that alcohol was at the root of all our other problems. Friction between the races, for example, was caused entirely by the inherited inability of certain peoples to drink even small amounts of liquor without becoming violent. With no liquor around, they would be well-behaved, and there would no longer be any reason for anyone to dislike them. That poverty, irreligion, unemployment, cruelty to women, children, and dumb beasts, are all caused by liquor was of course too obvious to require even a brief argument. Once he had thrown in traffic fatalities and general ill health, it was clear to him that it would be a waste of time to think about any social reforms other than prohibition, and that once we had achieved that single reform, the only social problem remaining would be finding jobs for all the suddenly unemployed judges, policemen, jailers, doctors, and undertakers. My point is not that people were mistaken in the reforms they wanted. Sometimes they were not. The mistake lay in assuming that if only we would all rally round for one great act of reform, all our problems would be gone forever, and we would all live happily ever after. The writer of Genesis knew better. To anyone who, in the middle of the Second World War, had said, "If God cares about the world, why doesn't he kill off Hitler and the other troublemakers with a few well-placed thunderbolts and make the world a happy place to live in?" his reply is, "That wouldn't work." Or rather, because he is a storyteller, his reply is, "Let me show you why that wouldn't work. Once upon a time there was a man named Noah...."
Next, the critic says: "The real problems that people face are those posed by the forces of a largely hostile Nature, and the solution to our problems lies, not in a return to religion or whatever, but in scientific and technical advances, in learning how to control the forces of Nature, to combat disease, famine, overpopulation, and all the other ills that our primitive ancestors were faced with. Once we have the appropriate scientific know-how, mankind will have no more problems." To this, our writer replies with the story of the Tower of Babel. After the Flood, people began to multiply again and to say, "That flood nearly wiped us out. We must take precautions against that sort of thing hereafter. Let us get organized and build a tower that will be higher than any future flood." Technology, you see, protecting them against natural disasters. Only it didn't work. As they began to build the tower, they found that they could no longer communicate with each other, that they were all speaking different languages. And so the project was abandoned, and the peoples were scattered abroad on the face of the earth. Reading this, we may say, "Yes, that is how it goes. When a culture reaches a certain level of complexity, people cannot communicate. Those trained in the sciences have no common ground, no experience or frame of reference shared with those trained in the liberal arts. C.P. Snow was right about the two cultures, except that he thought there were only two. It is not just that scientists cannot talk to playwrights. Biochemists cannot talk to biophysicists." Or we may say, "When a society begins to develop economically, we have the formation of economic classes. There is no longer such a thing as the common good, because what is in the interest of one class is contrary to the interest of another class. Marx was right. The first step beyond a primitive economy makes class conflict inevitable." Or we may say, "C.S. Lewis (in his book THE ABOLITION OF MAN) was right. Every advance that gives mankind more power over nature also gives some men increased power over other men with nature as the instrument." The writer of Genesis gives no detailed analysis. He simply says, "Organizing society for a concerted attack on its problems doesn't seem to work quite the way you might expect."
At this point the critic gives up and says: "Well, then, if none of these are the answer, what is the answer? Can anything be done about the mess the human race has gotten itself into? What, if anything, has God done or does God propose to do about it?" Beginning with the twelfth chapter of Genesis, the writer gives his answer. According to him, God took one small tribe of shepherds, and spent the next few centuries hammering into them the notion that He was the ruler of the universe, that He was just and demanded justice and right conduct from men, and that He had laid upon their tribe the special duty of bearing witness to Him before the world. The rest of the book of Genesis, and in fact the rest of the Bible, is an account of what followed from that -- what you might call a description of the hammering process from the point of view of the hammered. Now the idea of God's choosing one people as His special instrument is distasteful to many people. That a people should regard themselves as special seems insufferably arrogant. But history has vindicated the claim. More than half the people of the world believe that there is one God, that He created the world, and that He is good. And practically all the people who so believe got the idea, by one historical route or another, from the ancient Hebrews. If God exists, if He wants us to believe in Him, and if He has taken steps to encourage that belief, it looks very much as if what happened to the ancient Hebrews was one of the steps. And that brings us to the concept of a prophet and the concept of the community of believers, and to the whole history of Judaism and Christianity and Islam. But instead of going into that, I propose to stop here for the moment and remind you of what we have covered so far. I have suggested that the opening section of Genesis is an analysis of the problem of evil, a series of answers to a series of questions that a critic might ask about evil, about man's disobedience and God's response.
Now I should like to comment in more detail on the first chapter of Genesis and the first three-and-a-half verses of the second chapter. Taken together, these form a natural unit often referred to as the Creation Hymn. I am going to suggest four different ways of understanding this hymn, and I ask you to note that they are not incompatible. Holding one does not exclude holding some or all of the others. Not to keep you in suspense, I will tell you at once that the four ways are: (1) The Creation Hymn as a song of praise to the Creator, (2) The Creation Hymn as an assertion of monotheism as against the polytheism of the surrounding nations, in particular the Mesopotamian culture from which Abraham and his family had emerged, (3) The Creation Hymn as a factually accurate account of the origin and development of the universe, substantially as currently described in standard scientific textbooks, (4) The Creation Hymn as a factually accurate account of the origin and development of the universe, emphatically not as currently described in standard scientific textbooks.
First, I suggest that the Creation Hymn is simply an assertion that God is -- and praise to Him as -- the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. When a mother tells her child, "God made the world," she does not stop there. She goes on to say, "He made the trees and the flowers, the birds and the butterflies, the hills and the valleys, the sun and moon and stars." For the intellect, the shorter statement would be enough. But the imagination demands the longer statement. Hence the Creation Hymn.
Calling it a Hymn is significant. It has six stanzas and a conclusion, with a highly parallel structure. If we think of the sun, moon, and stars as swimming in the realm of light more or less as fish in the ocean, as being, by a poetic fiction, "light animals" as birds and fish are air and water animals, then the six stanzas represent God on the six days as creating:
1 Light............4 Light Animals 2 Air and Water....5 Air and Water Animals 3 Land.............6 Land Animals.
Notice also the typical stanza structure. "God said, Let there be X, and there was X. God saw that X was good. God divided X from its opposite. God named X and its opposite. And there was evening and and there was morning, the Nth day." The structure is not completely uniform. But it is there. Clearly what we have here is a poem, probably intended to be sung or chanted. Since this essay is largely a response to someone's asking me, "You don't really think that the world was created in six days, do you?" I might remark here that a songwriter has, by common consent, a little more leeway with factual details than a historian is supposed to take. A few years ago there was a popular song entitled "The Battle of New Orleans," of which the chorus ran,
"We fired our guns and the British kept a-coming, There wasn't quite so many as there was a while ago. We fired once more and they began a-running, Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico."
Clearly it would be inexcusable for a historian to tell us that the Battle of New Orleans was over after two rifle volleys, and equally clearly, it would be picky to complain because the songwriter suggests that it was.
So we see that one way of understanding this chapter is to say simply that it is a hymn in praise of God the Creator, and that we are not supposed to nitpick over the details or worry about whether they are scientifically accurate. To do so is to misunderstand completely what the hymn is about.
Next I propose to consider a second way of understanding the hymn, a more complicated way, and in order to introduce it, I must first say something about the Mesopotamian mythology as accepted, with variations, by the successive cultures that occupied the Tigris-Euphrates basin before the Persian conquest. The seven planets were identified with seven gods. You understand that these are planets in terms of the belief that the earth stands still in the middle of the system and everything in the sky revolves around it. Besides the stars, which always keep the same position relative to each other, and besides occasional appearances like meteors and comets, the sky has seven objects visible to the naked eye which appear to move against the background of the fixed stars, and these were known to the ancients as the seven planets. In order of what was supposed to be their distance from the earth, these are the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The belief in the seven planets circling the earth in that order survived from the time of ancient Mesopotamian civilization well into the seventeenth century (it was taught at Harvard, side by side with the newer Copernican view), and has greatly influenced Western literature and thought. But here we are concerned only with the fact that the Mesopotamians associated the planets with seven of their gods, and also with the seven days of the week. The Romans, although a seven-day week was not part of their normal calendar, borrowed the scheme for astrological purposes, and from them it spread throughout Europe, as shown in the naming of days.
English French Spanish Planets Akkadian
Sunday dimanche domingo Sun Shamash Monday lundi lunes Moon Shin Tuesday mardi martes Mars Nergal Wednesday mercredi miercoles Mercury Nabu Thursday jeudi jueves Jupiter(Jove) Marduk Friday vendredi viernes Venus Ishtar Saturday samedi sabado Saturn Ninurta
In the attached table, if you compare the English names in the first column with the name of the planets (which are also mostly names of Roman gods) in the fourth column, you can see the connection quite nicely with Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but with the other four days there has been an attempt to replace each Roman god by the most similar Teutonic god, which obscures the pattern. In the second and third columns, you see the French and Spanish names for the days of the week, and you can perhaps see the resemblance to the names of the planets, at least for the middle five days. (Sunday and Saturday have come to be known as the Lord's Day and the Sabbath respectively, and so the resemblance is not there.) The order of assigning the days is not arbitrary. If you start with the second day and list every second day for a fortnight, you will obtain the list: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. This is the order of the planets from the earth outward in the Ptolomaic system. This association of the planets with the days of the week was part of the common culture for Chaucer in the fourteenth century, as is shown by this fragment from the Knight's Tale:
Just like a Friday morning, truth to tell, Shining one moment and then raining fast. So changey Venus loves to overcast The hearts of all her folk; she, like her day, Friday, is changeable, and so are they. Seldom is Friday like the rest of the week. (Geoffrey Chaucer, THE CANTERBURY TALES, Nevill Coghill, trans., Penguin Paperbacks, Baltimore, 1952, p. 66)
So then, we have a planetary deity associated with each of the days of the week. And if we consider what the ancients believed about each of these deities, we shall find evidence that the author of the Creation Hymn had these deities in mind when he wrote, and that he was setting out to claim, on behalf of the one God, the glory that the pagans offered to the various planets.
The first day is sacred to Shamesh, the sun. Clearly the sun god will be thought of as the giver of light. But the Hebrew writer says, "No, it is not Shamesh who gives light. It is the Lord who is the Creator and Giver of light. Praised be His Name!"
The second day is sacred to Shin, the moon. The association of the moon with air and water is less obvious than that of the sun with light, but is nonetheless found in many cultures. The moon, the closest of the planets, is often thought to be in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and to affect the weather. A ring around the moon means a storm coming. Also, of course, the moon causes the tides, the constantly shifting boundary between the realm of water and the realm of air. But the Hebrew writer says, "No, it is not Shin who controls the tides. It is the Lord who says to the waters: thus far you shall come and no farther. It is not Shin whom you must ask for good weather. It is the Lord who sends rain or drought, cool breezes or sirocco, as He wills. Praised be His Name!"
The third day is sacred to Nergal, or Mars. Nergal eventually becomes a god of war, but he does not start out as one. Originally he is a forest god, a god of vegetation, a personified tree. His name means "he who comes up out of the earth." A parallel development is found in Roman mythology, where Mars, who ends up as a war god, started out as a forest god. And so we find that on the third day, the Lord made the earth bring forth trees and green herbs. It is not Nergal, says our writer, whom we have to thank for earth and vegetation. They are the gifts of the Lord. "Thou visitest the earth and blessest it. Thou makest it very plenteous. The hills rejoice on every side, and the valleys stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing." This is the Lord's doing. Praised be His Name!
The fourth day is sacred to Nabu, or Mercury. Nabu is the god of scribes, of writing and record-keeping. He is the inventor of the calendar. And so we find that on the fourth day, God set the sun and moon in the sky and said, "Let them mark the set times--the days and the years." You will note that they are called simply the greater and the lesser light, rather than the sun and the moon. The Hebrew word for the sun is "shamesh", which is also the name of the Mesopotamian sun god, whom the writer is pointedly ignoring. And indeed, throughout the entire Bible, the writers do not refer to any day of the week, except the Sabbath, by name. It is always simply the N'th day of the week. (Those of you who are familiar with Teutonic mythology may be wondering, "Why do we call this day Wednesday? How did Wotan come to be identified with Mercury, rather than with Jupiter?" The reason is that Wotan invented runes, invented writing and record keeping and the calendar. This identifies him with Nabu, who did likewise, the connection being made through Mercury, who is the patron of merchants, and so of records and so on.) It is not Nabu, our writer assures us, who made the calendar. It is the Lord who ordains the seasons, the set times, the days and the years. A thousand years in His sight are like yesterday when it is passed, or like a watch in the night. "Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thy fingers. They will perish, but Thou remainest. They will all grow old like a garment, like a mantle Thou wilt roll them up, and they shall be changed, but Thou art from everlasting, and Thy years shall not fail." In His hand are the living and the dead, the past, the present, the future, and all eternity. Praised be His Name!
The fifth day is sacred to Marduk, or Jupiter, and since he is the ruler of the gods it is a bit difficult to pick out just one thing as his chief characteristic. But birds are created on the fifth day, and I believe that the eagle was sacred to Marduk, as it certainly was to Jupiter. And if we had to say just one thing about Marduk, it would surely be that he achieved his position as ruler of the gods by fighting and killing the great sea monster, the dragon Tiamat, or Leviathan. And according to Genesis, it is on the fifth day that God created the great whales, the great sea monsters. Notice that God as here portrayed is on a level far above that of Marduk. The sea monsters are not His enemies, His rivals for power, something that He must struggle against. They are no threat to Him at all. He zapped them into existence with a word, and He can zap them out again any time He pleases (see Psalm 104:24-26; Psalm 74:12-17; Isaiah 27:1). He is not a god, one power among many. He is God, the Creator, and all things are subject to Him. Praised be His Name!
The sixth day is the day of Ishtar, or Venus, the goddess of love and fertility and reproduction. On this day God made the land animals, including man. A biologist may object that sex is not confined to the land animals, but is shared by the birds and fishes, and even the trees and green herbs of the third day. But to most people, then as now, the sexuality of plants and fish, perhaps even of birds, is not as blatant as that of mammals, and Ishtar tended to be associated mostly with flesh, as opposed to fish and fowl. But Ishtar is an illusion, a mockery. It is the Lord Who sets the solitary in families, and makes the barren woman to be a joyful mother of children. It is He Who has blessed both men and beasts, commanding them to be fruitful and multiply. It is the Lord Who made all cretures, great and small. "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast established; what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou dost care for him? ... Thou hast given him dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passes along the paths of the sea. O Lord our God, how excellent is Thy Name in all the earth!"
The final day is that of Ninurta, or Saturn, and it is hard to say much about him directly, because the Mesopotamians did not write very much about him. He is mentioned occasionally in connection with agriculture, and with wells, brooks, springs, and fountains, and with the underworld, the cold dark realm under the earth where the springs and fountains originate. He seems to be in some sense a sinister figure, possibly in origin a god of death. His day, the seventh day, is unlucky, and the nineteenth day of the month is doubly unlucky. (It is counted as the forty-ninth day of the previous month, and the seven times seven means especially bad luck.) On the nineteenth, no contracts were signed, no business was transacted, no one went out of his house unnecessarily, no one began any undertaking of any sort. The day was cursed. And the seventh day of the week was likewise unlucky, although less so. If the Hebrews got their Sabbath observance from the Mesopotamians, it is truly remarkable what they did with it. It remained a day on which people did not do anything. But it was no longer an unlucky day, a cursed day. Rather, it was a day that God had blessed, a day for rejoicing, for taking one's ease and contemplating the accomplishments of the previous week, as God contemplated His Creation on the Sabbath. After the Exodus, we find the Jews speaking of the Sabbath not only as a commemoration of God's rest after the creation, but also as a commemoration of their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. I spoke of the Sabbath as the day on which God contemplated his work of the previous six days. But perhaps that misses the point. Although God is known to us primarily as the Creator of the world, it is not to be supposed that all of creation, all of space and time, FILLS the Divine Mind. That would be the error of the very young child, who supposes that his mother lives only to care for him and to make him happy, and cannot conceive of her as a person in her own right, who has many other interests as well. In the account of the Sabbath, we are reminded that the six days, which show God creating the world and acting upon it, are not all there is to God, that He can get along perfectly well without the world, that it is not in the least necessary to Him, and that He is God-in-Himself as well as God-as-Creator. And so we have the institution of the Sabbath. It is fitting that man should spend his days in working, playing and sleeping, eating and drinking, building, farming, and otherwise exercising dominion over the creation that God has entrusted to him. In a sense, it is primarily through the created world that we meet God, primarily through our work that we glorify Him. But it is also fitting that on one day a week we should devote ourselves primarily to meeting God, not through the created order but as He is in Himself.
At the risk of repeating some things I have said elsewhere, I should like to expand a little on the connection between Ninurta (Saturn) and the Sabbath.
As noted in the preceding section, Ninurta is largely unknown to the modern reader, but Saturn less so, and as you will already have noticed, the Greek and Roman deities, named after the same planets as the Mesopotamian ones, tend to have much of the same character. Now Saturn is an ambiguous sort of personage. On the one hand, he is a bit sinister. Whereas a jovial temperament is cheerful one, that of a man at ease with himself and the world, a saturnine temperament is thoughtful, contemplative, dour, morose, gloomy, dismal. The metal associated with Saturn is lead. Our figure of Father Time, with his scythe and his hourglass, goes back to Saturn. He is the same as the Greek god Kronos. ("Kronos" and "Chronos" are spelled with a Kappa and a Chi respectively, but the connection Kronos and Time is found in Cicero's DE NATURA DEORUM and I assume is much older.) Kronos, or Saturn, was the father of Zeus, or Jupiter. He achieved power by overthrowing his father, and attempted to kill all his children, because he was afraid that one of them might overthow him. He failed to kill Jupiter, who overthrew him. So he is a bad family man, and wanders the earth, a shadow, unhappy and dispossessed, carrying his sickle (scythes had not been invented yet).
Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all his sons away.
Referring again to the Knight's Tale, we have two references to Saturn. The first:
Fortune has given us this adversity, Some wicked planetary dispensation, Some Saturn's trick or evil constellation has given us this.... (p. 54)
The second:
... said old Saturn, "My heavenly orbit marks so wide a pattern It has more power than anyone can know; In the wan sea I drown and overthrow, Mine is the prisoner in the darkling pit, Mine are both neck and noose that strangles it, Mine the rebellion of the serfs astir, The murmurings, the secret poisoner; And I do vengeance, I send punishment, And when I am in LEO it is sent. Mine is the ruin of the lofty hall, The falling down of tower and of wall On carpenter and mason, I their killer. 'Twas I slew Samson when he shook the pillar; Mine are the maladies that kill with cold, The dark deceits, the stratagems of old; A look from me will father pestilence...." (p. 91)
But there is another side to him. The sickle is not only a weapon, but also an agricultural implement. And at the beginning of the world, when Saturn ruled, there was a Golden Age, an age of peace, prosperity, and universal happiness. And eventually, Saturn will return to power, and then everything will be happy and peaceful once more. Vergil, writing a few years before the birth of Christ, assured us in his famous Fourth Eclogue that the new Age of Saturn is just around the corner. Saturn will return, the Virgin will return, the child will be born, and war will cease, the sheep will no longer fear the wolf, the earth will produce crops in abundance, and all will be well. At the end of December the Romans celebrated the feast of the Saturnalia, a looking backward and forward to the age of Saturn. During the week of the Saturnalia, slaves were freed from their customary labors. They dressed up in their masters' clothes and sat at table with their masters, or else their masters waited on them. When Saturn returned, slavery would be abolished, both because men would be as brothers and because there would be no work to do. Life would be one perpetual holiday. The Feast of the Saturnalia, as you know, was displaced by the feast of Christmas, and many of the incidental customs of the feast were taken over. The church has been reproached for this, sometimes by cults such as the Watchtower Society (also called the Witnesses, the JW's) and the Worldwide Church of God (the Armstrong people, the ones who put out the magazine "The Plain Truth"), and sometimes by groups that are in some sense in the Church, such as the Puritans. Avowed non-Christians join the chorus, and everyone agrees that the church, by celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25th, is cynically compromising with the pagans, and allowing them to keep all the aspects of paganism that they find attractive, provided only that they will agree to call themselves and their pagan customs Christian. But surely a Christian ought to say that in looking forward to a time when God would intervene to set things right, the pagans were on the right track, and that it was not compromising at all to say to them, "You are right about what the coming king is going to do. You have just got his name wrong." It is a serious mistake to suppose that if you are a Christian you must believe that all other religions are simply and straightforwardly the work of the devil, that they are wrong in every possible way from beginning to end. Naturally, where Christianity and Buddhism, for example, have incompatible beliefs, a Christian believes that Christianity is right and Buddhism wrong. That is what is meant by being a Christian rather than a Buddhist. But that leaves him free to notice and rejoice in the similarities as well as being firm about the differences. Some of you may have read the book, THE PEACE CHILD, by Don Richardson (Regal Books, 1975 -- condensed in Reader's Digest sometime in 1974). It describes a missionary's use of the existing beliefs of a New Guinea (Irian Jaya) tribe as a vehicle through which he was able to make the gospel meaningful to them. I will not try to summarize the book, but I urge you to read it. The mention of Saturn brings up another matter of potential interest. The Roman historian Tacitus says somewhere (I am sorry, I do not have the footnote) that Saturn is the god of the Jews. I do not believe that he elaborates. Now this may be a simple inference from the fact that the Jews kept sacred the Sabbath, which Tacitus would know as Saturn's day. Or, considering Saturn's gloomy temperament, it may have been a casual anti-Jewish wisecrack. Or it may have been a reference to the Jewish expectation of a Golden Age to come, when the Messiah arrives. But it may also have referred to the assigning of the planets to different countries, in which scheme Saturn seems to have been assigned to Palestine. We also find an assignment of the signs of the zodiac to various countries, in which Pisces was the sign of Palestine. But Saturn also stood for the golden age to come, and so did Pisces. As the earth wobbles on its axis through a 25,000-year cycle, each of the signs of the zodiac contains the vernal equinox for a little over 2,000 years. The exact moment of transition is a matter of opinion, since the boundaries between the constellations are not clearly marked. But about the time of the birth of Christ, the Age of Pisces was just beginning, just as, in our own time (give or take a few centuries, depending on which astrologer you believe) we have the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. And each age is naturally expected to be golden. So, when astrologers in 7 BC observed a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces, they quite naturally concluded that the King who is to reign over the coming Golden Age was about to be born in Palestine, and went to Jerusalem, saying, "Where is he that is born King of the Jews, for we have seen his star in the dawn, and have come to pay him homage." Jupiter moves through the zodiac at about 30 degrees per year (and so makes a complete circuit of the zodiac about once in 12 years). Saturn moves through the zodiac at about 12 degrees per year (and so makes the complete circuit about once in 30 years). once every thirty years (12 degrees per year). Hence Jupiter is overtaking Saturn at about 18 degrees per year (and so passes Saturn about every 20 years--actually every 19.87 years). About one in six of these conjunctions (but not every sixth one on a regular schedule) is a triple conjunction--meaning that Jupiter pulls ahead of Saturn, then falls behind, and then pulls ahead, so that they are neck-and-neck three times. Approximately one conjunction in twelve occurs in the constellation Pisces. Therefore we have a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces about once every 1440 years. The belief that this was in fact the sign of the Messiah was found among Jews well into the Middle Ages. Maimonides in the twelfth century denounces it, as he does all astrology, but he indicates that the belief (both in astrology in general and in the conjunction as a sign of the Messiah in particular) is widespread in Jewish circles. Abrabanel, a Jewish writer of the fifteenth century, calculated that this conjunction would occur in 1464, and that it would mark the coming of the Messiah. He also calculated (mistakenly) that the last time it had occurred was in 1395 BC, which he reckoned to be just before the birth of Moses. No medieval Jewish writer seems to have realized that there was a conjunction just before the birth of Jesus.
The Second Interpretation of the Creation Hymn as just outlined is based on lining up, side by side, in two parallel columns as it were, the events assigned to the seven days of the week in Genesis and the characters of the planetary deities associated with those same days in Mesopotamian mythology. Given the correspondence, how are we to explain it?
One possible answer is that the correspondence has been read into the data rather than found in them -- that the characters of the days and the characters of the gods are both sufficiently plastic so that it is not surprising that they can be pressed into some kind of fit. One of my students says:
If Jupiter-Marduk were associated with Friday rather than Thursday, you would argue that this is appropriate, because Marduk is the king of the gods, and it is on Friday, according to Genesis, that Man, the pinnacle and crown of creation, is created. If Nergal and Ninurta were reversed, you would have no difficulty in arguing that Ninurta, the god of wells, is a patron of agriculture and appropriate for the Third Day, while Nergal, the god of war, is therefore the god of death (and, by extension, of sleep and inaction) and appropriate for a day on which one avoids action. You have the moon associated with the tides, and this is plausible. But you could just as easily have associated the moon with Day Three and vegetation, pointing out the custom of planting crops according to the phases of the moon. You could have associated the moon with Day Four and the calendar, particularly in the Mesopotamian culture where the lunar month was standard. You could have associated the moon with Day Six and reproduction, pointing out that the menstrual cycle coincides with the lunar month.
I am not convinced. Associating the sun with light, for example, is hardly an arbitrary matching. I invite the reader to take the seven days of Genesis, and the seven planetary gods, as described by me or as described by any reference work of his choosing, and attempt to construct the best, the most appropriate, matching up of gods with days. (I am asking, not for a pairing that can be defended, but for one that the reader honestly feels is at least as natural, as appropriate, as the one I have offered.) If his pairing has, say, N gods associated with the same days of the week as my pairing, then the following table will show him the probability that the list of days and the list of gods would dovetail so well by chance.
N p(N) 0 1.000000000000000 1 0.632142857142857 2 0.264087301587302 3 0.080753968253968 4 0.018253968253968 5 0.004365079365079 6 0.000198412698413 7 0.000198412698413
(It is the classic envelope-stuffing problem. If a secretary has seven letters and seven envelopes, and stuffs the letters into the envelopes without looking, what is the probability p(N) that at least N of the seven letters will be correctly sent? How large does N have to be before we conclude that the secretary must have peeked?)
Actually, putting it in these terms is misleading, since the relevant questions are not of the form: "Given that one item on the Genesis list is Light and that one item on the Babylon list is the Sun, what is the probability that these would end up by chance in the same slot (out of seven possible slots)?" Obviously the answer to that is: "One seventh!" But the question is rather: "Given that the one list contains the sun, what is the probability that the other list would contain (in any of its seven slots, never mind the same slot) something so appropriate as light. Unfortunately the answer to the second question cannot be so neatly calculated. But I should be disposed to doubt the sincerity of anyone who claimed that he judged this probability to be as high as one-seventh. And similarly for the other days.
A second explanation, other than co-incidence, is that the derivation is in the other direction. Fundamentalist Christians often complain that, when a resemblance is found between some story in the Bible and some pagan story, many critics simply assume that the Bible story must have been borrowed from the pagan story and not vice versa, even when they have no tangible evidence to support the assumption. The point is well taken. Why could the mythology not derive from the Genesis story? Let me suggest one reason. The Genesis writer, as already noted, does not say that God made the sun and the moon. He calls them the greater light and the lesser light. Now surely it is simpler and more natural to say "sun" and "moon" when that is what you mean. Why does the author take the long way around? The only reason I can think of is that "shamash," the name of the sun, is also the name of the Babylonian sun god, and that the writer does not want to mention "shamash" at all, because his purpose is to affirm the One God, Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, and in the process to deny the multiple gods of the heathen, whom he will not name or explicitly recognize even to deny them. Can anyone give me a better reason?
I have suggested that the Creation Hymn ought to be interpreted as an affirmation of monotheism against the polytheism that Abraham left behind in Ur of the Chaldees and in Haran when he went out from his country and his kindred and his father's house to answer God's call. Having graduated from high school with Erle Leichty, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the world's greatest living authorities on the Sumerian language and culture, I naturally sent him a rough draft of this paper and invited his comments. He said (in substance):
I am afraid it won't fly. You have been reading popular books on the history of the Fertile Crescent, books that fail to make the necessary distinctions between the different cultures and beliefs that flourished there at different times. The identification of the planets with the days of the week is a very late development, not found before the seventh century BC, at a time when Genesis was already written. Better forget it.
Ouch, that hurts! Clearly, the Creation Hymn cannot have been written as a rebuttal to a religious position that did not yet exist. So why do I not take his advice and simply forget the theory? Largely because I am basing it on a paragraph in a lecture I heard many years ago by the late (he died in 1971) Professor William Foxwell Albright of Johns Hopkins, author of *FROM THE STONE AGE TO CHRISTIANITY* and *THE ARCHAELOGY OF PALESTINE*, co-editor of *THE ANCHOR BIBLE*, first scholar to pronounce the Dead Sea Scrolls genuine, and one of the few people I would back against Professor Leichty on a question about the ancient Middle East. Unfortunately, I cannot now ask him to explain the basis for his original statement, nor whether in expanding that statement I have also distorted it. I suppose the thing to do is to write or visit the Archaeology Department at Johns Hopkins and try to find a colleague with whom he may have discussed the matter at length.
So what are the possibilities? Professor Leichty says that there are no instances of assigning planets and their associated deities to days of the week in any documents surviving from before the seventh century. I would not have the gall to dispute this with him. But even a dilettante like myself has noticed that the seventh century BC marked a great resurgence of antiquarian interest and studies. I quote the following from Werner Keller's THE BIBLE AS HISTORY (Bantam paperback revised edition, 1982, pp 320-322), a popular book on the history of the Fertile Crescent.
From Egypt to the lands on the Euphrates and the Tigris... monarchs look back to the great symbols of their glorious past. ... Pharaoh Necho and Pharaoh Nepries made great efforts to reconquer Syria and Palestine. The Old Kingdom with its "campaigns against Asia" became the ideal of the 26th dynasty [663-525 BC]. ... Painters and sculptors copied the works of their great predecessors. Names of Pharaohs of the third millennium were engraved on new scarabs. Ancient official titles and court titles were revived, the civil service was, as it were, antiquarianised. The same thing happened on the Mediterranean coast in Phoenicia. ... Sanchuniathon, the priest, wrote the history of Phoenicia. He was commissioned by a king to copy old inscriptions and texts which Philo of Byblos was to use much later as the source for his history. With Ashurbanipal [669-626 BC] the Assyrian Empire reached the zenith of its power. ... Collecting old books was his hobby and he had the biggest library in the ancient world. On his instructions the repositories of old temples were ransacked in a search for lost documents. His scribes made copies of thousands of tablets from the reign of the great Sargon I (2350 BC). The hobby of his brother Shamash-Shumukin of Babylon went even further. He had the events of his day written up in the ancient language of Sumeria. Nebuchadnezzar too [605-562 BC], the last great ruler on the throne of Babylon, was afflicted with this longing for old forgotten far-off things. His court chroniclers had to compose inscriptions in Old Babylonian, which nobody could either speak or read. ... Nabonidus [555-538 BC] may well have been the first archaeologist in the world. This monarch, the last of the Babylonian rulers, caused ruined shrines and temples to be excavated, onld inscriptions to be deciphered and translated....
In short, the period in question was one not of creativity but of nostalgia, not of the birth of new ideas, but of the resuscitation of old ones. Accordingly, if we find an idea suddenly appearing in seventh or sixth century neo-Babylonian writings, (such as a one-to-one correspondence betweeen the seven planets and the seven days of the week) it is less likely to be a genuine innovation than it is to be a revival of an old idea from an earlier Mesopotamian civilization, say Akkadian, or even Sumerian. (How about that! I guess I have more gall than I thought.)
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WAY 3: THE CREATION HYMN AND THE BIG BANG
Now I turn to a third interpretation of the Creation Hymn. I first encountered it in a book called, GOD, THE ATOM, AND THE UNIVERSE, by James Reid (Contemporary Evangelical Perspectives, Zondervaan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, 1968). I have since encountered similar approaches in books called MAN FIRST, THEN ADAM (Erwin Ginsburgh, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1975), and CLUES TO CREATION IN GENESIS (sorry, I don't remember the author), and THE GENESIS ANSWER (William Lee Stokes, geologist and author of two geological textbooks, Prentice Hall, 1984). These authors disagree with each other and with me on details of interpretation.
I suggest that the Hymn is an accurate scientific description of the origins of the Universe, but that the writer is hampered by the lack of a scientific vocabulary in ancient Hebrew. Let me illustrate the problem.
Suppose you were asked to write an account of electricity or radio waves in a language that had no words for such things. You might simply introduce the words from another language, but suppose you are not allowed to do that, and not allowed to make up words arbitrarily, deciding, for example, to say "snarf" whenever you meant electricity. What would you do? Well, you would probably end up doing what people faced with this problem have always done -- you would use an existing word for a more or less similar or analogous concept. Thus, I spoke of "electricity or radio waves." The English word "waves" refers (in its basic, literal meaning) to ripples moving over a water surface, and these more or less suggest the way that radio waves propagate. The word "radio" borrows the concept of radiation from heat. People had already noticed that a fire in the middle of a campsite gave out warmth in all directions, just as the spokes of a wheel go out in all directions from the hub, and since their word for a spoke of a wheel was "radius", they said that the fire was radiating heat in all directions, and that gives the scientist a handy word for the way in which his antenna sends out signals in all directions. As for "electricity," the ancient Greeks noticed that if you rubbed an amber rod with a piece of woolen cloth or fur and then held it close to some bits of papyrus, it would attract them, and it you held it close to the hair on your arms, it would attract the hair and produce a peculiar sensation more or less like tickling. They needed a name for this, so they called it "amber-ish-ness," or "electricity" ("electron" being their word for amber). In each case, we have a scientific concept being represented by a word or adaptation of a word from the pre-scientific vocabulary, a word that means something similar or something related or something that is a suitable analogy or metaphor for the scientific concept that we want to talk about. On the other hand, a listener might miss the point and go away grumbling that he had asked a perfectly straightforward question about where the music was coming from when there were no musicians in sight, and had been answered with some gibberish about amber and ripples and wheel spokes.
Now back to the previous question, but this time phrased slightly differently. Suppose that you are Moses (I will use the name of the traditional author, just as I would say "Homer" instead of continuing to refer to "the author(s) of the ILIAD," without seeking to enter into the controversy about who the author actually was), and that God has shown you in a vision the origin of the universe. You now understand the Big Bang theory, and the evolution of the galaxies and the solar system, as thoroughly as if you had been reading SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN all your life. Unfortunately, the only language you speak is ancient Hebrew, which has no words for the concepts in your mind. How do you go about expressing them? You wing it.
(FIRST DAY)
You want to say: "In the beginning, God created space and matter." How are you going to express the idea of space? Pointing to the vast abyss of Outer Space is as good a way as any. But the ancient Hebrews did not call it Outer Space. They called it the heavens. How are you going to express the idea of matter? Ancient Hebrew has no word meaning, "whatever occupies space and has mass (or weight, or inertia)," but if you want to convey the general idea of matter, of "stuff," of material, of something tangible, something that can be felt, and also the idea of the raw material out of which things can be shaped, what conveys this idea better than a handful of clay, of earth? So you take your pen and write: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."
You want to say: "The primeval cosmic egg was so densely packed that the matter in it was totally without structure. There were no atoms, or even any electrons and protons. The matter there existed as pure, formless energy. No structure there, and nothing there that we would call matter as we know it." You take up your pen and write, "Now the earth was without form, and without content."
You want to say: "The cosmic egg was almost like a black hole. So dense was it, and so intense its gravitational field, that not even light rays could escape from it." You write: "And there was darkness over the face of the deep."
You want to say: "And electromagnetic forces of unimaginable intensity flickered over the surface of the plasma." You write: "And an awesome wind swept over the face of the waters." You want to say: "But as the egg slowly expanded, it became less dense, and so radiation was able to escape from its surface. You write: "And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light."
Now you have a problem. You want to convey the idea that time is passing, that you are describing a process that takes place in serial stages. Before your vision, you thought of time in terms of days, months, and years. But concepts of time based on the motions of the earth, moon, and sun seem grotesquely inappropriate when discussing events before the formation of the solar system, and besides, you have just been given an insight into the essence of what time is all about. Entropy! The second law of thermodynamics. Heat flows from warmer objects to cooler ones. Thus, the distribution of energy throughout the universe is becoming more and more uniform, more and more random, and this is what distinguishes the past from the future. One can define the later of two times to be the time at which the entropy (the randomness of distribution of energy) is greater. And how does one put the notion of entropy in simple, non-techical language? Well, it is the decrease in the level of energy intensity where that level is high (like the cooling down from the heat of the day that we experience in the evening), resulting in an increase in the level of energy intensity in another place where the level is low (like the warming up from the chill of the night that we experience in the morning). You want to say: "And entropy increased, and time passed, and that was Act One of the great cosmic drama which I was privileged to witness." You write: "And there was evening and morning, the first day."
(SECOND DAY)
You want to say: "And now the egg was exploding and the plasma was no longer a single glob, but separate pieces with space between them." You write: "And God said, 'Let there be a separation in the waters, dividing waters from waters.' And it was so." You want to say: "At first there had been only plasma, and then subatomic particles, and then atoms of hydrogen, and then some helium. But now, as the universe expanded, atoms of hydrogen and helium were combining and condensing into atoms of the heavy elements, into oxygen, carbon, silicon, sulphur, iron -- elements that form the basis for solid matter as we know it, for sand and soil and the like." You write: "And God said, 'Let the waters be gathered together, and let the dry land appear.'"
(THIRD DAY)
And so the narrative continues. Moses is now talking about the third day, and he goes on to write that on the third day God created vegetation, and on the fourth day he set the sun and moon in the sky. This has been a considerable embarassment to people who wished to reconcile the Genesis account with the later pronouncements of science, and who accordingly had trouble with the notion that the earth existed, complete with plant life, before the sun. (Since the statement is not that the sun and moon were created on the fourth day, but only that they were placed in the sky on that day, it was possible to argue that the earth had previously had a thick cloud cover that let through enough sunlight for for the plants, but kept the sun, moon and stars from being visible in the sky. However, the paucity of independent evidence for such a cover made this hypothesis a strictly defensive maneuver.) However, we can see that their problem is that they were assuming that the reference was to plant life on this planet. There is an increasingly respectable body of scientific opinion holding that the first plant life originated in the form of chlorophyll-bearing micro-organisms in the dust-clouds of interstellar space, and not on this (or any other) planet at all. You may study this theory in the books "Lifecloud" and "Evolution from Space," by Sir Fred Hoyle, FRS, the astronomer, and also in the book "Life Itself," by Sir Francis Crick, FRS, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. If they are right, we may conclude that Moses is here describing the development of chlorophyll-based life in primeval dust-clouds, after the formation of the heavy elements, but before the formation of the solar system.
(FOURTH DAY)
On Day Four, according to our account, God set two great lights in the sky to give light on the earth and to mark the times, the days and years, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. (It adds, as an afterthought, that he made the stars also.) It is almost universally assumed that this means the sun and moon as we know them. But that presents a difficulty. On our theory, Moses begins the Creation Hymn, not by talking about this planet, as is generally supposed, but by talking about the physical universe as a whole. Somewhere, he makes the GT (the Great Transition) from global cosmology to local cosmology -- the solar system and this planet. If we suppose that the GT occurs here, with a reference to the creation of the sun and the moon, we would surely expect a reference to the creation of the earth as well. It may be small and insignificant, but it is home, and besides, the moon is even smaller and more insignificant. One hypothesis is that Moses made a point of omitting any explicit reference to the creation of this planet in order to teach us humility -- to impress upon us that from the Divine perspective the earth is only a detail in the cosmos. A second hypothesis is that there is a gap in our text. Suppose that Moses originally wrote something about the creation of the earth under Day Four. A later copyist, not aware that "earth" in verse one was intended to mean "matter," would have said to himself,
"Moses already spoke of the creation of the earth in his first sentence, and he has been talking about oceans and continents and vegetation since then. Obviously this reference to the creation of the earth on Day Four doesn't belong here. Some stupid copyist must have put it in because he thought it belonged with the account of the creating of the sun and moon. I will mend matters by taking it out again."
I am fully aware that it is not sound scholarship to assume an error in the text wherever such an assumption is convenient, but it is another matter if you can see a specific reason why an error is likely to have occurred at that place. A third hypothesis is that Moses has not yet made the Great Transition, but is still talking global cosmology. It has been suggested that the greater and lesser lights are simply cosmic regions of greater and lesser levels of energy concentration, and that the reference to their marking the seasons is a way of saying that entropy is the measure and the definition of time. But that would be a general observation about the laws of physics at any time, and it seems odd to include it as if it were an event in what has so far been a list of events in order. Perhaps we must simply conclude that Moses is talking about some aspect of cosmology, but that we cannot decipher his meaning because our own knowledge is inadequate at this point. After all, the best scientists of the nineteenth century could not even begin to see what the first chapter of Genesis was all about, because they had never heard of the Big Bang, and lacked the knowledge necessary to understand him. Science has sufficiently caught up with Moses now so that we can understand his account of the first three days, but we need not be ashamed to admit that it still has some catching up to do.
(FIFTH DAY)
Day five brings us the water animals and the flying animals, and day six the land animals, including man. An obvious difficulty is that, on the standard theories of evolution, it is difficult to see how you can have birds in the sky before you have reptiles on the ground. A few years ago I would have found this an insurmountable difficulty. However, Hoyle and Crick, among others, have given respectability to the idea that the first insects on this planet were of extra-terrestial origin. If so, then (maybe) you have flyers before you have creepers. I am not about to try to evaluate the bug-from-outer-space theory. However, I note that it is not at all in the same category with supposing (for example) that, while all other species of felines have evolved on this planet, the tiger has evolved on another planet and come here in its present form. Tigers are too much like other felines to make this plausible. (Also, barring the hypothesis of a space ship, you have the question of how the tiger got here, whereas insect egg cases can take a lot of cold and other abuse. An insect egg traveling in or on a meteorite is a possibility. A tiger cub traveling in or on a meteorite is not.) Also, theories about the terrestial evolution of insects are lacking. We assume that they evolved from some kind of worm, because we assume that they had to evolve from something, and worms seem as likely a candidate as any, but that is all the theory there is, and that is all the defense of it there is. No one claims to have any fossil evidence of this, or to have any guess about what the worm ancestor was like, or what the lines of development were, or the environmental conditions that pushed the worm in the direction of insecthood. So when Hoyle says that the first proto-insects on this planet came from another planet, it's not as if we already had a perfectly coherent explanation of where they did come from. At this point, something suddenly occurs to me. Flying fish! It is understood, I trust (perhaps I should have made this explicit a few paragraphs back), that in order to reconcile Moses with science it is suffient to show that the FIRST flying animals preceded the FIRST creeping ones. The statement that water and air animals were created on Day Five and land animals on Day Six does not mean that ALL birds, for example, evolved before ALL reptiles. Presumably new species of all classes are steadily evolving all the time. What a historian of biological evolution would give us would be a recognition of the first birds, the first reptiles, etc. Or, with a summary of cosmology on the scale found in Genesis, the first sea animals, the first air animals, and the first land animals. Now no air animal, whether flying mammal (bat), flying reptile (meaning bird), flying insect, or flying fish, spends ALL its time in the air, or could. If nothing else, they lay their eggs, or bear their young, on land or in the water. So flying fish are not to be ruled out because they also spend time in the water. Do they spend enough time in the air to be classified as air animals? Perhaps not. But they at least show that the transition from sea animal to air animal without an intermediate creeping stage is not unthinkable. How did birds evolve? We suppose that they ran from their predators, and that nature favored those that flapped their arms in a way that helped them run faster and jump higher, etc. Is this sort of scenario possible for a reptile being chased on land, but not for a fish being chased in the sea? Is there any reason why some species of fish could not have evolved, along lines suggested by the flying fish, into a bona fide flying animal? I do not point to any extant species as a likely example, but then the evolutionary experts assure me that there are many more exinct species than extant ones. (I add that a species of flying fish able to spend a significant amount of time in the air, say ten or twenty minutes at a time, but not to land safely anywhere but in the water is not a particularly good candidate for fossilization.) Again, if we consider insects, we note that the mosquito, for example, lays its eggs in water and its larvae live for about a week a wrigglers in the water and then emerge as winged adults without going through a crawling stage. Many evolutionists would take this as suggestive, at least, of an evolution from an aquatic ancestor with no land ancestor intervening. So! No need to bring extra-terrestial insects into the picture at all.
(SIXTH DAY)
This brings us then, to the sixth day, and the creation of the land animals, including man. About this, nothing special need be said that has not been said already. However, it should be noted that we have not settled the question of where Moses makes the Great Transition and begins to talk specifically about the earth. The preceding paragraphs about Days Five and Six are written on the assumption that Day Four gives us the creation of the solar system, including the earth, and that the remainder of the narrative is concerned with strictly terrestial events. If this is not the case, then all bets are off, and I have nothing to say about these days except that we may understand Moses' narrative better when we know more science. Well, almost nothing. I will add that on this hypothesis, the reference on day six to the creation of man may be a reference to rational life in general, not to our species in particular. This does not mean that Moses has nothing to say about the creation of man, but that he says it, and indeed all that he has to say about the creation of this planet and its biota, in Chapter Two.
And that concludes my remarks on the third interpretation of the Creation Hymn.
A BUCKET OF COLD WATER POURED ON WAY 3
Upon reading my third suggestion for interpreting the Creation Hymn, a certain critic replied as follows:
This account seems better suited to entertain the reader than to impress him with the scientific reliability of the Creation Hymn. The moral I draw from it is that, given any scientific theory whatever, one can interpret the Bible as confirming it. When men thought that the earth was flat, they quoted the Bible to prove their point. Now that the earth is known to be round, people have no difficulty finding Bible verses to prove that the prophets knew it all along. Let me demonstrate my point by applying to the second chapter of Genesis the techniques that you have applied to the first chapter.
We are told that God (or "Elohim," which can without absurdity be translated as "those in charge") made man and placed him in a garden. Now the word here translated "garden" means an enclosure, a sanctuary for living things, fenced in, hedged-in, walled-about, all fertility within and barren-ness without. It is exactly the word one would use to describe a space-ship, a capsule. Clearly, what Moses is trying to tell us is that Adam and Eve were the first astronauts. Now the designer of a space-ship intended to spread intelligent life to a new planet would install in it an automatic navigational system, a computer. (I am assuming that the designer of the system is far more intelligent than the astronauts who are aboard the ship, and that it makes sense for him to make the navigational system automatic rather than trust them to do the navigating.) How would one describe such a system in ancient Hebrew? Well, a computer exhibits a lot of interconnectedness, a lot of branching, with information flowing in from numerous devices and out to numerous devices. In fact, it resembles a tree. A computer, or a computer program, that instructs the ship what to do, and what not to do, is fittingly called a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Hence the basic instruction to the astronauts: "Don't fiddle with the astro-navigational guidance system if you want to survive!" (Hebrew translation: "Of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, thou shalt not eat. If thou dost eat of it, thou shalt surely die.") Besides an automatic navigation system, one would want to equip the space capsule with an automatic life support system, one designed to recycle wastes and provide the passengers (humans, beasts, and plants) with food, water, oxygen and other necessities. Predictably, the writer of Genesis refers to this as the Tree of Life. So far, so good. But as the capsule proceeded through inter-stellar space, there appeared what the ancient Hebrews would call a serpent in the Tree of Knowledge, or what we would call a bug in the navigation program. This convinced the astronauts that they had to take matters into their own hands and reprogram the navigational system. They failed, of course, and the ship finally landed on earth, unable to continue. In the process, the life maintainance system broke down (or perhaps it was never intended to be able to function indefinitely), and the passengers were forced to abandon the capsule and to make their living as best they could on the surface of the new planet.
Now I submit (the critic continues) that this account is in no way more far-fetched than yours. The only objection to it is that science does not currently support the hypothesis that men (and other species) came to this planet by space-capsule, whereas it does support the view that the universe originated in a Big Bang, together with the other view which you have discovered in Genesis now that science has discovered them in the real world. In short, your Third Way amounts to no more than (1) asking what the latest scientific theory is, (2) announcing that the Bible says exactly the same thing, and (3) rummaging through the Bible in search of a passage that can be "interpreted" to give the desired results. Bah, humbug!
I reply that my interpretation of Genesis 1 differs conspicuously from his interpretation of Genesis 2, in that I have tried to account for every word of my text, whereas he has blithely picked out a scant handful of verses and thrown away the rest. Besides, it is not quite true that no one began to interpret Genesis 1 along the lines of my Way 3 until the Big Bang theory had become established science. It was a French priest, the Abbe Lemaitre, who is commonly accounted the author of the Big Bang theory of modern astronomy. And, during the first half of the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, teaching at the newly founded University of Oxford, taught that light was the raw material of the universe, because of the way it behaved, expanding instantly from an immeasurably small point into a perfect sphere. (see James Burke, THE DAY THE UNIVERSE CHANGED) I am hard put to see what a mediaeval European scholar could say that would come closer to a statement of the Big Bang theory, and his starting point is Genesis 1:1.
So much for Way 3. Now for Way 4.
[To be continued.]