Genesis 1-3—

Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

The Fall

Over the centuries, Genesis has endured countless, seemingly—irreconcilable interpretations. The approach currently most venerable in academia, the Documentary Hypothesis, speculates that the work arose from almost a millennium of editing. This theory derives from what is known about ancient redaction. One documented example is the best—preserved version of Gilgamesh, edited by the exorcist priest Sîn—leqi—unnin—i . He devotes eleven tablets to a story in which Enkidu dies. Then, without explanation, the twelfth tablet has Enkidu talking to Gilgamesh, an alternative version literally translated from a Sumerian work (Sîn—leqi—unnin—i253-71). With what fragmentary evidence is available, careful detection has shown that even the body of the text is not an entirely unified narrative but shows traces of many earlier versions (Tigay 1982: 76-81).

The Documentary Hypothesis assumes that Genesis evolved through similar editorial confusion and conflation. The strength of the Hypothesis is that it helps ease modern readers’ shock at noticing seeming discrepancies. Genesis 1, for example, first describes the creation of the animals then humanity, while Genesis 2 first describes the creation of humanity then the animals. There are also subtler differences in these two creation accounts such as between calling God “Elohim” or “Yahweh Elohim.” An awkwardness of the Hypothesis is that it has grown ever—more hair—splitting with the ancient redactors allegedly shifting back and forth between versions, sometimes within a single verse. The number of mindless splices alleged increases with each new refinement of the Hypothesis.

While advocates of the Hypothesis slice Genesis into smaller and smaller pericopes, some of their opponents, armed with electronic concordances, have begun looking for words and phrases in common between the supposedly separate versions. This opposition includes both some fundamentalists as well as people who accept the idea of redaction, but have become aware of large patterns and interconnections within the text.
… especially among biblical scholars no longer persuaded of the absolute authority of the “Documentary fiction, or Source Myth,” as one of the disaffected critics in this tradition has termed it, there has been a growing interest in the logic of the canonical or received text of the Bible, as distinct from the chronology of its compositional elements or stages (Reed 39).

Among the disaffected, David Noel Freedman, Editor of the Anchor Bible Series and Editor in Chief of the Anchor Bible Dictionary, believes that the organization of the Hebrew scriptures comes from creative editing in the fifth century B.C.E. Among other signs of unity, he contends that each of the first nine books focuses on a sin in the same order as the Decalogue, thus showing the decline of Judaism toward exile in Babylon. Robert Alter’s classic work The Art of Biblical Narrative emphasizes the importance of “the final redactor” in shaping the “montage” of sources (Alter 1981, 20). Particularly valuable because of its comparative approach, M. Kikawada’s and Arthur Quinn’s Before Abraham Was: The Unity of Genesis 1-11 substantiates the patterns it discovers in the Bible by finding them also in other ancient literature:
Take, for instance, the double—creation of man. We find man created in Genesis 1, and then formed again in Genesis 2; we naturally assume that two creation stories have been combined. And yet when we look at ancient Near Eastern stories of human creation, such a double creation is not unusual. We find it in the Sumerian primeval history of Enki and Ninmah…. In the story of Enki and Ninmah, the creation of mankind to do the work of the gods is first described in general terms, and then recounted more specifically with an emphasis on the human capacity for reproduction (40).

Kikawada and Quinn’s treatment of this parallel is interesting but not totally convincing. The Sumerian and Biblical narratives really do involve double accounts of creation. The problem is that, in trying to disprove the Documentary Hypothesis, Kikawada and Quinn tend to minimize or ignore discrepancies between variants–precisely what the Hypothesis tries to explain. Thus, for them, in the Bible and the Sumerian epic, the first creation is more general, the second describes the same event “more specifically with an emphasis.” Actually, in both the Bible and Sumerian work, the two creations are significantly different variants.

In a review of Before Abraham Was, P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., objects that the Sumerian creations are not even descriptions of the same event but happen one after another (McCarter 34-39). However, Genesis 2-3 has also been seen as a chronologically second creation, e.g., by the seventeenth—century scholar Isaac La Peyrére, who “argued that the first Creation had been the work of the non—Jewish peoples, and the second of Adam’s particular race, the Jews” (Fox 20). His interpretation was much discussed, disappeared, then (minus its anti-Semitism) independently rediscovered two centuries later by Thomas A. Davies. Alternatively, Kikawada and Quinn present some evidence that the two Sumerian creation accounts do describe the same event. Actually, then the parallel between Genesis 1-3 and the Sumerian epic is that both give double versions of creation that may almost be read as single. Whether from typical ancient composition, or from typical ancient editing, or even from chance, one should expect the text to be much as it is–an amalgam of iterated themes but with contradictory details. Before literacy gradually taught anti—chaotic logic, writing was like John Holland’s self—contradictory program, which he designed to mimic the natural state of the human mind.

Genesis’ creation from chaos is itself a dynamic system. Thus, it has self-similarity on different levels. Within sentences are the paired phrases connoting order/disorder. Thus, in the first verses (1.1—6), the three words “heavens,” “light” “day,” “morning” balance “earth,” “darkness,” “night … evening” as the lower waters do the upper ones. On a larger scale, the two creations present the ideal order in the first account and the Fall in the second. Before literacy became highly developed, elegant variations (particularly where most needed as in Hebrew) were the only enduring style. Consequently, they were not only an ornamentation but a habit of thought, a major manner reality could be conceived. Whether a redactor were aware of them or not, they were linguistic self—organization emerging from a particular stage in communication.

Rather than analytic (the logic later writing developed), this mannerism of speech and thought uses comparison in ways no longer common–except to chaologists intent on discovering the approximate analogies that arise spontaneously in nature. Genesis 1, the more ideal or orderly version, shows humanity made in the “image” of God on the final day of creation as a culmination of that work. Genesis 2, the complementary, less exalted version, starts with a humbling modeling of man from earth and moves toward the catastrophe of the Fall. For Ovid, humanity is first said to be of the heavenly seed of a mysterious Creator; second, a named, anthropomorphic figure (Prometheus) is described as molding the species from mud. In both Ovid and Genesis, the first version makes humanity’s origin (i.e., its nature) somewhat more lofty than the second. Similarly, in the narrative of Enki and Ninmah, its second account depicts the created as sickly beings, each emblematic of some human weakness, such as that of a baby at birth (Kikawada and Quinn 165).

The pairing of creations alternates order and disorder. Discrepancy is not an accident but a necessary part of the paradoxical structure, which survived in oral rhetoric. Thus, Rabbi Shimon ben Laqish preached to the good that God planned mankind before the creation of the angels and to the evil that even the gnat and worm were created first (Visotzky 186). One may also be reminded of the old story of the rabbi who, when depressed would console himself that the universe was created for humanity and when proud would counter that sin by recalling that mankind came from earth and returned to earth. Like John Holland’s finding contradictory algorithms useful in the same program, so here also opposite ideas work together.

Such a structure is relatively easy to see in later Biblical allusions to creation, for instance, in Isaiah 45. There an image of God as potter is juxtaposed to one of His creation as begetting. Obviously, one should not say that the beautiful contrast in Isaiah means sources have been carelessly conflated. Ancient readers would confront ideas for which they were familiar: humanity modeled of mud; humanity begotten in the divine image. In Isaiah 45, the pot is so different from the potter that it can never speak. In contrast, although the fetus being begotten is not yet in a position to question the father, inquiry eventually becomes the child’s duty (as with the question incorporated ritually in the Passover). In the image of a divine city (45:13b)–people and buildings–the Isaian poet brings together these images of humanity as inanimate and animate. This juxtaposition, however, is not homogenization. However much mud entered architecture, the heavenly city is not literally a pot nor are its inhabitants said to be sired literally by the Divine.

Rather, the connection between verses 9-12 and 13b is 13a: God’s raising humanity in righteousness (perpendicularly straight) and His making straight human paths (horizontally). The metaphor transforms moral education into the gridwork of the city. The connection is not logical or illogical but what Briggs calls a “reflectaphor,” one part of a work reflecting another, like the repeating patterns of any dynamic system. After the creation in the divine image, Genesis 2 humiliates not only in man’s being formed from earth but in God’s then making animals, offered to man as a mate, as if that were on the human level. When Adam refuses the proffered beasts, the mate he desires becomes his undoing. The second creation account is not a close up of the first but its complement. Logically, the two are no more reconcilable than the Isaian pot and Isaian divine child, yet the stories’ emotional implications balance one another. Attempts to homogenize Biblical contrasting imagery (e.g. by Kikawada and Quinn and such of their predecessors as William Henry Green, Umberto Cassuto, Gleason Archer, Jr., C. R. North, and K. A. Kitchen) censor away much of the literary interest of the original text. Their attempts, nonetheless, are understandable, since chaology is the first hermeneutics that shows how contradictions work together in systems less concerned about consistency than was the classic science that grew from centuries of literate education.

As Marshall McLuhan proclaimed (perhaps too loudly and prematurely), we are no longer in an age when information transfer is dominated by writing. Even where writing seems most resurgent, the publication victory of Harry Potter, with children turning off their DVDs and video games to read thousands of pages, they are encountering no consistent reality but an interweaving of the quotidian and the magical in English interspersed with Latin charms. In other words, the attacks on Harry Potter by a number of L4 ministers come from the series’ having more in common with miracle-filled Genesis than with the L4 sensibility. Since (as I argue above in The Big Picture) Rowling is writing from a higher level than L4, Harry Potter (along with systems dynamics, McLuhan’s predictions etc.) perhaps betokens a swing of the pendulum away from L4 consistency and toward a more paradoxical understanding of reality.


In a Beginning

If Genesis consciously presents two creation stories, why does it commence “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” as if there were only one beginning? Actually, despite the KJV, that is not the canonical opening of Genesis. “In the beginning” would be bareshit. Instead, the Masoretic text reads bereshit. It either means “In a beginning” or “In the beginning of,” the latter posing grammatical problems. Andrew Martin summarizes:
And in either case [“In a beginning” or “In the beginning of”], the singularity of reshit is in doubt: God is an originator, a beginner, but not the only one; the divine origin is thus neither original nor unique (Martin 4).
Rabbi Hoshaya (third century C.E.) invented an ingenious, but unfortunately, unconvincing alternative:

Thus [like the architect looking at his plans] did the Holy, praised be He, look into the Torah and create the universe. So the Torah states: “Be—resheet, By means of (be) Beginning (resheet) God created …” (Genesis 1.1), and the word “Beginning” here refers to the Torah, of which it is written, “God created me the Beginning of his ways” (Proverbs 8.2) (Genesis Rabbah, translated in Visotzky, 222).
Hoshaya’s interpretation comes from a scholarly period that wanted there to be one creation, that of the text itself.

With some possible exceptions such as perhaps the Marcionites, a second—century Roman readership would probably have believed Genesis itself had a double origin, God and Moses. Faith may permit one to remain within that chaotic cusp, without trying to decide what was of Moses and what of God. Preserving old tradition, the Church generally tended to speak of the Pentateuch in such joint terms. Exceptions, however, already occur within the Christian canon. For instance, with a literate assumption that words must have only one true author, Matthew’s and Mark’s Jesus refer to the scriptural support of divorce as the work of Moses not God (Matt. 19.8; Mark 10.4).

Taking their cue from Jesus’s remark, the highly literate Valentinian Ptolomæus sought to find which verses were by God and which were by Moses. He is even complex enough to seek a third source, a Demiurge (to which he assigned divine utterances deemed inconsistent with the New Testament) (Ptolomæus, Epistula ad Floram, ap. Epiphanius, Panarion, Hær. XXXIII, 3. Ed. Oehler, 1859. (MSG, 41: 557).. Ironically, among such Gnostics as Valentinus, the literate insistence on coherence fostered a belief that the truth (as opposed to the contradictory text) had been transmitted orally–the assumption also among the mysteries. In other words, literary education had two results.

On the one hand, those thus trained anatomized texts, trying for great precision and consistency. On the other hand, consciously or unconsciously aware of the strains of this eisegesis, they could best find faith in what was too flexible to be disproved–oral tradition and mystical writing obscure enough to resist anatomizing. Irenaeus records: “For they [the Valentinians] allege that truth was not transmitted by means of written documents, but in living speech… . (Irenaeus, Adverses Haereses, 1.8.2-3.” According to Valentinians, the old covenant is a “handwritten bond” (cheirographon)–presumably the Mosaic laws, which the literate may study until they discover some flaw therein. Valentinus contended that Jesus replaced those laws with an edict (diatagma) of the Father. Apparently, the latter is also writing, albeit of some mysterious kind. According to one Valentinian, it is fastened to the cross, yet according to another it is proclaimed, perhaps read aloud (Pagels 1975, 139). Presumably, Gnostic gospels, particularly in their obscurity, are meant to be like that edict. As to the Gnostics’ attitude toward those gospels, the fourth—century scribe Eugnostos described them as “God—written” (Robinson 18).

Valentinus taught in Rome from about 140 to 160 C.E. As to Marcion, he proselytized there from approximately 137 until 144 when ecclesiastical elders expelled him and he left to found churches elsewhere. Like the Valentinians, carrying the new literate demand for consistency to a radical extreme, Marcion insisted that since the deity of the “Old Testament” is described differently from the Christian One of the New, the former must have been a different being, a mere demiurge. Comparably, because of contradictions between the gospels, he accepted only one: his own edited version of Luke (the gospel closest to Classical Greek).

In contrast, less literary Christians probably believed that “Old” and “New” said much the same, the latter fulfilling the former. Between radical consistency and conservative indefiniteness arose allegorization, reconciling every detail of the variants, by largely ignoring the literal sense. Obscurantism was popular as a way to pretend consistency. Demetrius’s guide to style (ca. second—century B.C.E., to the first century C.E.) contends “What is surmised (but not overtly expressed) is more frightening…. Therefore the mysteries too are expressed in the form of allegory, in order to arouse consternation and dread, just as they are performed in darkness at night” (Demetrius Eloc. 101, as translated in Burkert 79).

Like those mysteries (or any ancient text), Genesis depended for its effect on being performed publicly. Thus, in trying to move from literate, linear interpretation of the text to an appreciation of its dynamic pre- (or post-)literate dimensions, one should try to imagine such a performance. The word for reading aloud, qara, occurs frequently in the text, though in its related sense of naming. By taking the important prerogative of naming/reading aloud, the lector takes the part of YHWH. In Genesis 2, Adam names the animals (2.19), then Eve, the latter twice (2.23 and 3.20).

Theology, the product of a later age, consists of a literate distancing the author from the dogmas propounded, which are delivered in a logically consistent (linear) manner. In contrast, the performance of a manuscript is a participational ritual during which the divine act of naming/reading is being transferred to humanity. In Genesis 1, lectors echo the divine entitling by enacting the role of God. In Genesis 2, they speak the part of Adam, whose activity is also described by the word qara. Adam and Eve aspire to the part of God, which the lectors themselves play while simultaneously condemning playing God as the essence of the Fall.

Reading Genesis is not (as in a print culture) a consumption of goods to be inspected and judged as from a distance; it is an intimate participation, all—the—more dynamic because an analog of literacy itself lies imbedded at the heart of what otherwise seems a pre—literate world. The Knowledge of Good and Evil is not like knowledge in an oral culture, an invisible possession of the tribe. Rather, it has taken on tangible form like a book, something an individual may possess and use for personal prestige and power. Unlike the scripture that Ezekiel eats at God’s command (Eze. 3.1-3), this forbidden devouring of knowledge brings divine disapproval for seeking to be “like God.” Yet in Genesis 1, humanity was created in the likeness of God. The variant creations eloquently express the paradox that man is to be like God, but not. The relationship is central to sacred writing itself, deemed by the faithful both human and an imago dei.

The Shiite sect of Islam, for instance, expects that, on the day of Judgment, the Koran will acquire a body and “contend before God with the people, interceding for some and condemning others” (Ayoub 181). To the famous Kabbalist Joseph Karo (1488—1575), “the maggid, or revelatory voice [that he mystically heard, was not God but] …the Mishnah (the first collection of Jewish law…)” (Biale 114—115). Perhaps out of jealousy, this voice of the Mishnah (which he sometimes heard in the middle of the night) warned him to avoid any sexual pleasure from his third wife, revealed by the voice to be the reincarnation of a male scholar. “This kind of erotic relationship with a text can be found as early as the fourteenth century in Israel Ibn al—Nakawa’s Menorat ha—Maor, ed. H. G. Enlow (New York, 1931), 3:275—76, in which a mystic who studied only the talmudic tractate Hagigah dies and a figure “like a woman mourning her husband” comes to weep over his grave. The woman is the tractate Hagigah.” Biale 269, n.76). Less interesting but more significant because it is so widespread, the phrase “the Bible says” is a token anthropomorphism. More interesting is the Christian use of the title “Word of God” both for scripture and Jesus.

As the link between God, the Font of names, and humanity becomes attenuated, so perhaps language itself shifts. At least, Eve must be retitled (Gen. 3.20), making her the first of a long line of figures or places in Genesis with two names. According to the old paradigm, this variation (whatever its actual source) is but one more instance of the doubleness of humanity. Sometimes it explicitly renders their earthly and heavenly aspects as with Abram/Abraham and Jacob/Israel (who alternate between the two names through much of the text as if oscillating between those two poles). To Canetti, however, semantic variety is ominous, implying the Fall of scriptural language. Instead, Jewish belief in the literal perfection of the Bible went to the other extreme:

Just as the letter beth [b] is closed on all sides and open only in front, similarly [because Genesis begins with beth] you are not permitted to inquire what is before or what is behind, but only from the actual time of creation.” (Chagigah 2:1, quoted in Josipovici 67).

Consequently, even the shape of the letter came to have meaning and that meaning was that there was one creation, before which nothing could be known. This seems fanciful, yet from its opening, the Bible does emphasize qara (naming/reading, i.e., authored language) as the means of moving from disorder to order. The way is set for this means to become evermore self—reflexive and sensitive.

In the Rome of the second century, neither Jews nor Christians were likely to have been that devoted to the very alphabet of scripture. Accustomed to access the holy words sometimes via the Septuagint, sometimes through early Latin renderings, Christians in particular should have been aware of the approximateness of what they were seeing or hearing. As to the indefiniteness of the first words in Genesis, the Septuagint opens En arche, without a definite article. Latin itself lacks definite articles. So no common text insisted on one creation occurring “In the beginning.” From approximately that period, “Origen is forced to answer that God made other worlds before this and will make others after it ([De principiis] III, 5, 3)” (Robbins 1912, 40). Like Philo before him, he sees Genesis 1 and 2 as separate creations, the first of the soul, the second of corporeal humanity. The creation accounts were therefore still read as a paradoxical pairing of immortal and earthy.

Towards Babel

Next come the paired births of Cain and Abel. The brothers bring God offerings: one acceptable, the other not. Wishing to justify Him, pious readers tend to emphasize that Abel provided “fat” from the “firstborn” (4.4), by which they presume that Cain’s offering was sinfully inexpensive in comparison. Genesis does not say so. Furthermore, a fat covered offering might be a deliberately stingy one as in that given by Prometheus to Zeus. “Higher criticism” usually contrasts the pastoral and agricultural origins of the sacrifice, but, if the “higher critics” are correct about the date of redaction, the people of Israel were mostly farmers by then, whose profession would make them identify with Cain, not Abel. Other explanations are possible (e.g., that the cursing of the land in 3.17 made harvesting less holy than butchering), but Genesis furnishes no such explanation.

Ovid is more definite; he writes for the literate, who expect definiteness. Consequently, he generally makes explicit why the gods are displeased, e.g.: “When she had been filled with her father’s seed, Myrrha left his room, bearing in her disgusting womb a sinful burden, the child she had criminally conceived.” (10.469, italics mine) Despite this preachiness, Ovid sounds as if he were recounting the incident for amusement. From the visual perspective that literacy gradually encouraged (as the number of the literate increased) the story is seen mentally. It should be clear so they can remain detached, watching, sexual incidents becoming voyeuristic, violent ones a frisson. From an age of a few lectors with large audiences, Genesis 4, despite a violent murder, permits no such detachment. The audience is drawn in, wondering why one sacrifice is accepted, the other not.. From the Marcionite perspective, YHWH acts capriciously because he is not the True God.

The allegorists would sidestep the problem in some such manner as Philo’s Alexandrian approach. For him, Cain represents verbal ambiguity like his descendent Jubal whose name “means ‘inclining now this way now that,’ and … is a figure for the uttered word” (100.2—10, quoted in Bruns 94). Philo’s allegory makes the orthodox assumption that Cain is the villain, but, since allegorizing can work in any direction, the second—century Valentinian gnostics used it to make Cain the hero, personifying spirituality (Irenaeus, Adv. Hær., I, 7, 5). Philo compares Cain as orality to the vacillations of the foolish but also to the skillful adaptations to an audience made by an orator (Philo, “The Posterity and Exile of Cain,” 100.2—10, 108.4-110.11; Bruns 94.). So Philo is himself vacillating, longing for the definiteness of what is carved in stone, but also appreciating the need to adapt meaning to context. If Cain is the oral, Philo implies that Abel is the written since Philo mentions that, like writing, Abel’s voice continues after the death of its author (4:10). Consequently, Abel’s sacrifice should be preferred as literacy to orality. The primary interest of this allegory is that it is among a number of ancient text that demonstrate McLuhan was not the first to consider the implications of the gradual shift from orality to literacy; some involved in the transition were already trying to theorize it.

Continue to Gen 4-11

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