Month: May 2019

The general instruction to till and watch Eden is a place to pause and consider what that might mean in today’s experience of plenty. There is still enough food for all. Even as we over-till and close a blind eye to environmental degradation, might there be something more that needs saying in a hope of it being understood?

At this early stage of primal infancy or innocence or ignorance, what might strengthen what was meant by “till” and “watch”?

It is at this point (who knows how many Days down the pike) we hear of a tree unknown to the human who is not privy to some “center” of Eden. This one only knows that trees are good for food. There is no location given, simply a doctrine of “No!” to eat from one particular tree without a fence around it. Remember, every tree is “lovely to look at and good for food.”

A reader might understand how this tree is central to this story, but within the story, there is nothing to set this centrally located tree of good and not-good apart, until it is too late. A very lovely and sustaining tree becomes a threat to tilling-as-we-will and watching for our pleasure.

Translators tell us that the Hebrew here has an infinitive absolute—an infinitive followed by a conjugated form of the same verb. Its effect is to double down on the verb “to die” and sends us toward being “doomed to die.”

This is quite the setup that might have led Robert Frost to quip: “Lord, forgive all the little tricks I play on you, and I’ll forgive the great big one you played on me.”

There is opportunity here to reflect on the danger and limits of commands. At the very least we might recognize there are consequences for assuming what might be intended as fair-warning and ends up not being understood as significant. What would “die” mean to someone who has no experience of anything other than a new Eden.

Our erstwhile human has been breathed into action, surrounded by plenty, and given a limited purpose. Nowhere is there an awareness of no longer having breath, a notion of death.

The first creation story spent much energy working on water. It’s slipperiness scootches here and there. Like a flash flood, it is dangerous and chaotic. Taming is in order. The waters are separated above and below and then pushed aside or gathered together.

Here the waters have been tamed. Though their geographic location cannot be calculated back to the source of a mysterious Eden-to-the-East, a cacophonous big-bang, they give us pictures of resource-rich regions.

Confusion continues with one river that splits into four rivers, unlike a watershed where many rivers join into one. This four-fold river flows out from Eden to water the garden (writ large as Earth), which garden is located in Eden. Such circularity reminds us not to get tied to any rational or linear understanding. A tree of knowledge, of any kind, might be envisioned on an island surrounded by Rivers (one and four) rather than Seas. Living between rivers is a much more human-sized space than between waters above and waters below.

The River Pishon leads to Havilah where there is gold (precious metals), bdellium (aromatic resin, like myrrh), and lapis lazuli (precious stones). A question arises about the value of these materials if a “living creature” is in an Edenic setting (a utopia?). Each of these materials, later symbols of wealth and power, seem out of place for a singular one designed to till and watch (over?) Eden. To flaunt such before there is someone to impress speaks to an inherent sense of vanity within androgenous ’adam. It is as though humans are pre-loaded with a yearning for and distractability by such shiny objects.

The Pishon and Gihon rivers are unknown to us. Suggestions have ranged from the Blue Nile to the Ganges. Since I live on the Mississippi, I’ll claim that is is the correct spelling of an Edenic river. You may have another to suggest and to work at keeping clean.

After Six Days, g()d ceased work. As evening and morning of Day Seven comes and goes, it becomes obvious that an eternal listening to harps and receiving praise for those previous Six Days are not the end of the story. There is another project—Eden, a parallel universe just to the East. This is directionally similar to Peter Pan’s description of the location of Neverland: “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.”

A decision to refocus on Eden is very much like a call for “Light.” The intent is directly linked to its implementation. After this enlightened decision, we find the first work has to do with plants—this time brought in to be planted rather than being latent. Gardening, though, can be understood as working with or ordering what is already present. As the first creation was not from nothing, there is the sense here of a starter home that will be flipped from earthly garden to Home in the Heavens. At question will be how dilapidated the original is.

A garden is planted. Among the plantings is this left-over human, male and female, from Day Six. Our sequel continues by beginning again—Day Eight.

The specific plants focused on are trees. There is a forest of food trees, fruit trees, fruitful and multiplying. There are trees of physical life and knowledge of good and not good. These are presented as unique, singular—trees among trees. These utopian trees are also like a fixer-upper—they appear grander than they turn out to be and it is found out that this Day Eight is going to take longer to wrangle than the previous Seven combined.

There will need to be several refinancings, new architects brought on board, and restarts. We’ll have to wait to see how our investment pans out—worth it or bankruptcy?

Alter describes the first creation story as a “harmonious cosmic overview” and the second as a “plunge into the technological nitty-gritty and moral ambiguities of human origins.”

Right off the bat, the Six Days are condensed to One. Instead of deep, dark, wild water as the background, we first have deserted earth, literally a desert. We hear a call for water to sprout seeds latent within Earth and the fashioning of a human to till the earth (already a farmer in anticipation of later being set to plow until their brow sweats). This envelope of Water and Human points to the entirety of the first creation story and focuses on the human component rather than the context for human life.

Instead of separating from water, we seek its presence. In the first tale, G*D hovers, breath-like, to call distinctions into being. In this second look, the call to be imaged becomes tangible with a “making,” a fashioning of humus into a human being—how humorous. James Weldon Johnson’s picture of a mammy bending over her baby is quite apt. This will become a story of a baby maturing and separating instead of the distinguishing between elements coming first.

The resultant ’adam was not latent, needing only water to revive a package of Sea Monkeys. There is a deliberate construction project implying blueprints and penalties for a time or cost overrun. Unrecorded in this shaping is the number of tries it took to get a stable unit capable of holding an animating puff of air. Who knows how many stones had to be sifted from the humus lest they lodge in the heart or head. Who knows how many leaks had to be patched. Who knows how long it took for the learning of language—at what point baby-talk ceased and conversation could be engaged in an attempt to be on the same page.

First water to sprout seeds to become food, then water to make the soil malleable to shape an ’adam, and only then fashioning and inspiring.

The tale is over; another story rises. The space between verses 4 and 5 is both too small to take into account, justifying conflation, and too large to hold within a vaulted space marginally freed from chaos.

How we deal with this space between stories will come to be seen as a Babel moment separating hearer from hearer, reader from reader.

Honoring a host of resources can help as we select Note A from one commentator and Note B from another midrasher. Here I jump to Karen Armstrong and her book, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis to reiterate a creator’s cessation and to pick up a next creation story as if it began the in the midst of the one just put down.

In the next story we will also come to the point of cessation at a critical moment for going ahead, anyway—without the benefit of an on-going conversation in the evening that grants a courage to sleep through a dark reminiscent of a great, never remote, dark always awaiting after a day and parted before any next day.

= = = = = = =

… We always enter the action in medias res and seldom see the whole shape and pattern of events: impressions and experiences jostle for our attention, and we rarely see incidents and their consequences in clear focus. Since religion is also concerned with the quest for meaning amid the chaos of mundane existence, fiction can be more useful to the spiritual life than a purely historical narrative.

By giving us two contradictory accounts of the creation, the bible editors were indicating that both J and P were writing fiction. They offered timeless truths that could not be rendered obsolete by new cosmological discoveries. If P wanted to show us how to regard the universe in relation to the divine, J was more interested in humanity. He turned the spotlight from God in his heaven to adam in the garden. Above all he was concerned with the distance that seemed to separate God from humanity. How could human beings, who were sustained by the divine breath, feel that God was so remote?

Karen Armstrong
In the Beginning, pp. 19–20

This summary verse introduces us to a marker that will raise a remembrance of creation in each subsequent portion of a larger story. This verse begins, literally, these are the “begettings” of the heavens and earth. In like manner, a named series of people and events are held in later recordings—the begettings of generations. This means the begats to come are not present as details such as years lived and so cannot be plugged into any arithmetic process and toted up to figure out the year, day, and hour of any of the Six Days in any calendaring system.

This verse is a marker completing a unit of story. A helpful response to a mention of begats is a pause to imagine all we don’t know from what we are told. Even though our imagination is too small to scratch the surface of what we don’t know, that which is given is fertile ground to hold seeds of connection between then and now as well as give anchoring points for lines of intersection between various aspects of now.

The story told is of a piece. Many have written of how this telling is drawn over against other recordings of a beginning space and time. There is uniqueness here, but not an inherent superiority over other accounts. As a part of a living tradition within this storyline, we are able to find an abundance of responses to this telling. We are missing this lived function in other traditions gone by and even those of other current traditions we are not a part of.

As our “once upon a time …” we are able to bring it to a joyous, “… and they all lived happily ever after.”

A special case has been protected from most of the onslaught of roiling waters darkening our apprehension of position and pattern. We are no longer completely adrift even though the story has come to an abrupt end—a cessation of Days. We are always in danger, now, of trying to go back to a great day again and failing to take our place in moving the story on.

While we have a tale of abundance and connectedness, we also have a story broken off, ceased. Now to see where what has been begotten will next fruit.

To be completed is far from being finished. This completion, in particular, is only a rounding off in anticipation of being rolled ahead. Initially, we read, “It was evening and it was morning, Day Six,” as though Day Six, with its two-fold story of beasts and a grammatically patriarchial masculine image both female and male, has ended a cycle.

However, we are now met with a “Then” and an “and” that is both future (next in a sequence) and present (still connected). The noting of this Day moves from a stamp of approval (evening and morning as a way for good to be fruitful and multiply) to a Day Seven raising expectation of what could surpass the “very good” us of Day Six?

We lose the refrains—”saw that it was good” and “evening and morning.” We are, instead, introduced to “blessed” and “hallowed.” An active calling forth becomes an active cessation. The blessing is that we have what we have to live with (six Days of context setting). This is hallowed by partnering with it—engaging it and one another as our “image.” The creative G*D has become a ceased g()d—ceased from “all His task that He had created to do” (Genesis 2:3b, Alter)

This ceasing may be the most difficult of the Days. Before Day One and after Day Six is a great blessing not contingent upon being recognizably present. It is a blessing of all the chaos that has gone before and the potential or indeterminacy of a chaos of futures to come. In both instances, it takes an active choice to call forth and subsequently let loose to be as fruitful and multiplicative as a context with its choices will affirm. The abundance of creation occurs within an abundance of desert before and wilderness after. In a moment of “Light,” we sing our Dayenu that it is enough to have come this far.

This “creator” has a sense of distinction, almost a necessitating desire for distinction by drawing specifics from the wasteland, the wilderness, over which she hovers—noting kinds (fish and fowl, cattle, crawler, and wild thing). And distinct from these, as they are from one another, comes “’adam”, a generic human being in all their femaleness and maleness.

A hierarchical distinction comes forth as G*D is separated from g()d and, especially, from gods. Likewise comes a distinguishing of ’adam from plants and animals over which ’adam is instructed to hold sway.

Even here all is not perfected. Sea monsters and wild beasts are to be plant-eaters, and no notice is given of the nutritional needs of plants. We are not simply who or what we eat.

This is a day of more than calling out elements already virtually present, but a setting loose of connected creations. Animals, after their own kind, are called “good” or “blessed.” Then, at midday we move toward “very good” with an ordering of orders of creation—’adam is to hold sway, to oversee the differences.

In this not-yet full week of Days, there is a premonition or foreshadowing of slipping back into welter and waste, desert and dark. To hold sway, to carry dominion, presumes an equality, at the least a partnership, with that which can call forth in the first place — a state of being not limited by a care-taker, servant, role. A balancing of relationships will be difficult to sustain.

Being granted a specific authority is never as limited as it may have been intended. Centers of authority carry their own seed of destruction as they attempt to bring adjacent and further authority under their own umbrella.

The very act of creation carries the risk of deconstruction within it. The specter of seeing all in its own image is inescapable. Our knowledge-seeking is not just for its own sake, but for its own advantage. Enjoy, for a moment, a good and even very good Day. Prophets will come to remind us of Day Six.

We have dealt with water, light, firmament (vault), earth, and sky. Now water, again, to round out a parallelized envelope. The water above the vault of heaven is welter and waste, deep and dark, with everything teeming at once—and so bringing forth nothing.

Though everything is the heritage of water, this day brings forth two subsets of life—that which can live and multiply within water and that able to fly above water. Note the absence of amphibians that don’t honor the earth/water boundary. Such boundary-breaking will eventually come to be known as “unclean.” There is also no notice of mammals of the sea. The wideness of creation is more dynamic than such details.

This flowering of living elements follows the flowering of the sky after sun and moon—the unnumberable starts.

Such flowering does not happen while water is wild. As water is domesticated, put in its place, the latency of life bursts forth in earth and sky and sea—flowers and fowl and fish.

Though the focus here relates to water, the space between waters below and above is filled with fowl and that between continents of earth abounds with fish.

The emphasis on fecundity moves from passive seed dependent upon a distributing force beyond itself to active, mobile, reproduction. Two by two, the shifts of mutation and evolutionary advantage are set in motion.

A structuring of fluidity brings a blessing that could not be predicted and still cannot be seen—what and who shall yet become. Guard the gathered waters well for their health is less certain than realized grace and expanding galaxies.