Week Two

Moses, The Book of Genesis

Does life have a divine plan?

What is human liberty?

The Book of Genesis (Hebrew Bereshit, “In the beginning”) opens the Bible sacred to both Jews and Christians. The first five books of the Bible (the Torah for Jews, the Pentateuch for Christians) were traditionally ascribed to the Lawgiver Moses, who belongs perhaps to the 1200s B.C., around the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Genesis itself begins with two creation stories (the first cosmocentric, the second anthropocentric). These accounts form the basis of the primeval history unfolded in Genesis 1-11, which presents the origins of the world, civilization, and humanity’s existential predicament, whereas the rest of the book recounts the patriarchal history, the origins of the people of Israel in particular.

These narratives emerge as dramatic variations on the mythologies and stories of the ancient Near East. [This background is brought forward in the text itself: Abraham (perhaps in the 1400s B.C.) is called out of Mesopotamia, the origin of civilization, into Canaan, a land of hardscrabble independent city-states between the great river-valley civilizations—the other being Egypt, which Abraham visits.] For example, Genesis shares with Mesopotamian accounts a recognition that there is a primeval chaos (the metaphysics of creation ex nihilo, “out of nothing,” is not as such to be found). However, the Mesopotamian myth of creation out of violence and out of divine need is radically critiqued. The Babylonian creation narrative En¯uma eliˇs presents a political mythology legitimizing the storm-god Marduk’s accession to supremacy in the pantheon, which coincided with the achievement of Babylonian hegemony in the time of Hammurabi (eighteenth century B.C.) There we find that the formation of the heavens and the earth involves the dissection of Tiamat, the goddess of the sea (symbolizing the primordial chaos), who has taken the form of a giant dragon. Humans are then created for the care and feeding of the gods.

If Genesis 1-11 indeed consists of mythical, legendary, and archetypal material, nonetheless a different spirit blows. The Israelite insistence on the worship of one God (monolatry) would not become straightforward monotheism until the Babylonian Exile (586-538 B.C.), but it already changes everything. There is no sexual melodrama in the divine; there is a profound intimacy between God and humanity, exemplified in various covenants; God is only good, and seeks to establish the sovereignty of good in history with the collaboration of humans, male and female.

- David Franks