Category: Genesis

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.

Grass begins before there is a great light to sustain it. This reminds us that we are not dealing with a science of evolution, but a cosmology arising from a selection of elements within a context of too much floating where it will. To have grass precede sun is no problem. Dry ground, on top of water and surrounded by water, is already latent with life. An extension of latency of life will come in a later story—that which tells of ’adam from ’adamah.

These large and small lights are after-thoughts to care for the consequence of dividing waters to reveal Earth. This creation based on chaos reveals the nearness of the structures waste waiting to have these moments fall back or be enfolded again in darkness.

In the meantime, a metronome assists this growing music of the spheres in all its counterpoint and syncopation, harmony and various tonal scales.

Oh yes, these small measures of times and seasons play out their solar and lunar schedules against another progression of stars and regressions of planets. Depending on which measuring tool is used, we see creation in differing stages. For some, it is done and set; for others, it is still beginning or yet evolving. A complicating factor enters as the sun is demoted from a source of energy (a “god”) to a mere marker of time or season. Grass does need sunlight, but our story shifts from Earth to Firmament, from a source of food to a setting of a cosmic context.

A line is drawn in the middle of everything, dividing it into Heavens and not Heavens. There is no other distinction made between the two. The Heavens continue to have all the welter and waste of the starting point roiling throughout. Any further organization here is unknown. Potential abounds.

On the not-Heavens side, the preternatural “water” is gathered and inherently present Earth stands revealed. As long as it is not flooded over, the possibility of additional specifics take their turn upon its stage. This is its opportunity to reveal the limit of glory and nearness of disaster in both the deep un-yet and a hovering present.

The gathering of waters that reveal Earth, allow it to be seen, is named Sea. It is good to always have one eye on Earth and one on Sea as we travel paths through the seeds of life—grass, plants, trees.

An appreciation of Earth and Sea looks upon all the specifics and echoes—these are “good.” Here we catch a glimpse of the value of space where a line can be developed sufficiently to have form and identity. This is no promise of perpetuity. So much water must be removed to allow Earth and its companion Air (implicit in Breath) to interact that everything remains fragile.

From wet to dry, from potential to active, we find ourselves located. Gratitude also begins to grow as wonder gives ground.

From evening to morning we find expectation growing that there will be a next morning, a next evening. Already readers are moving from it is enough to have Earth, Air, and Grass. Our grasp for more is awakened. If this is “good” might there be a better?

With “light” comes its foil—”not light.” Together they set up shop in medias res—in the middle of the story of “water.” Here is raised another division of above and below, of before and after. Such a boundary engages each subsequent telling-forward and flashing-back that sets us above to judge and submerges us into unknowing action caught in the tides and eddies of context and instinct.

Evening by morning and morning by evening, sun and moon and ambiguous dawn and dusk, roll through this vaulted lacuna where, in the midst of nihilo, a space non-resistant to order might reach beyond a divisive boundary for inspired material to shape into a beginning of a branching and fruiting story continually at risk of being lost to a weakened resolve to encapsulate a sense of suspended disbelief so a meaning within one set of choices is the meaning for all such attempts to set limits on a many-fingered movement writing and erasing outside the limit of coherence.

The plurality of heavenly vaults suggests the expansion of space in all directions—with an “edge” beyond our apprehension. This restricts our appreciation of indeterminacy and encourages an over-valuing of constructs that set belief and intention over and above the waters of nature, politics, and religion where we swim during our day and night and in between.

Signifying the temporary nature of this division is the lack of the now traditional blessing of “it is good” upon this heroic work of separating heavens from earth. We are left with an ambiguity devolving into a morality of right and wrong, clean and unclean, now and never.

A blessed division or distinguishability sets a stage for any play to come that goes beyond sitting in dark silence. Such a space of deep waste may have its moment of instruction but such will be in a context of what has gone before. It can be in medias res but not before.

Against a backdrop of “light” come its twin rhythms of Day and Night. Each encloses the other in a way known as yin-yang.

The boundaries are set within which direction can be discerned.

With a duality of Day and Night we begin to enumerate an unordered set—Day One—not 1^st day among others. Cardinal numbered days play back and forth as unique experiences. In this way we continually engage the fundamental of “light” within every subsequent day.

It is the intersection of day (and) night that is a marker of Day One having come to identifiability. The writer moves us from dark to light with an ordering of an on-going sequence—from evening to morning. When joined we turn this fact to poetry— “…it was evening and it was morning, Day One….”

The goodness of light becomes formalized, ritualized into a good process of evening and morning. Evening has broken like a new day to dream all that is needed for awakening into morning. The desert of night is found to be an oasis of day and prepared to welcome day back for deconstruction in anticipation of going further in a next day.