Day 1 and 2 (Genesis 1-3, 4-7)

So as you've no doubt noticed, I'm doubling up today, since I started reading yesterday and only started writing today. I'll mash my thoughts together for this one, but they'll roughly occur in chronological order. This'll also hopefully be the last time I include an editorial-ish opening to the post itself. Most of the time I hope to just leap right in.


Like now...

Genesis 1-3, 4-7

It's funny how hard it actually is to really read something that you're so familiar with as the opening chapters of Genesis. It's almost like you just automatically shift into 'skim' mode because your brain just assumes that you can fill in the blanks on your own, which you can - in a way.

In another more accurate way, this is a great method of getting nothing out of the experience other than what your brain provides by dipping into the murky waters of prevailing cultural interpretation of what's said, rather than what's actually there.


To be honest, these opening chapters are among my favourites in the entire Bible, although it hasn't always been that way.

What hits me now, and I owe a great deal of my feelings here to my Old Testament professor (Dr. Marion Taylor) at Wycliffe College in Toronto, is how distinctly beautiful the language and descriptions are. I'm a lit. nerd, and have been for a long, long time now, and I just can't help but read this as poetry of the highest order.

It's simply a stunning depiction of what, ultimately, is a complete mystery.

This chunk of the Bible is also what leads to an incredible amount of frustration for me. It's just so clear (to me) that it is poetry, grounded in the ancient near-east traditions in which is was penned (scratched? engraved? marked? Did they have pens then?) and issued as a direct rebuttal of the much more prevalent creation myths that have the earth and universe born of a violent, tumultuous, chaotic struggle, that I cannot fathom how A) people who claim to read/know/cherish scripture and B) people who claim to be familiar with science/scientific theory/scientific method can possibly use it as a point of contention. It simply doesn't allow for a scientific interpretation.

Setting aside for the moment the question of how you have a literal evening and morning before you have a sun for the earth to expose itself to whilst rotating, how do you transmute the achingly gorgeous image of the spirit of God hovering over the primeval waters just waiting to conjure life in incredible abundance for the sheer joy of sharing existence into a subjective, categorical documentation of the exact scientific process of creation? I can't see how it can be done.

However, I also can't help but hear echoes of now-established truths coming through in the poetic and metaphoric language of the text.

From the geological prehistory of Pangaea (1:9 - gathering the waters into one place, not many, which only leaves one place for land) to the basic progression described by evolutionary theory (everything starts in the water and only then moves to land and only then do people show up...) there's something complimentary about the Genesis creation account and the various things we've discovered/postulated in centuries of inquiry and study.

I'm loathe to have to make this disclaimer, but I will... I'm not saying that Genesis directly describes evolution either, so don't bother pointing out minutiae that I've missed/messed up. The poetry, analogy and metaphor are the point. The author clearly didn't have evolutionary theory or proto-geology in mind when writing this, but I think it's a good point to make, since it's a decent example of the way I tend to view scripture.

Is it "southern baptist, American stereotypical evangelical nutbar fundamentalist" literally accurate and infallible? No.

Is it "New York/Boston/urban American/European scientific-enlightenment snobbish holier-than-thou smug Atheist" false? No.

Does it, in general, allow for any black-and-white simply dichotomy in thought, moral, ethic or any other field of view? No.

A journey through the Bible is a journey through relationship, much as the Christian faith is. Relationships are not black-and-white things, so why should documents of them be?

----

Although, coming to the latter part of these two days' readings, there are some fun things to do with math and numbers that often (always?) get overlooked in Sunday School-ish readings of the classic Bible stories.

Take Noah, for instance.

The genealogical rundown in Genesis 5 contains some fantastic numbers (including the trivia-laden Methuselah, oldest man in history at 969 years young), but there's something interesting when you actually look at the numbers.

Here they are:


Year 1: Adam - 130 years old at the birth of Seth, lived 800 years afterwards - died at 930
Year 130: Seth - 105  years old at the birth of Enosh, lived 807 years afterwards - died at 912
Year 235: Enosh -90 years old at the birth of Kenan, lived 815 years afterwards - died at 905
Year 325: Kenan - 70 years old at the birth of Mahalalel, lived 840 years afterwards - died at  910
Year 395: Mahalalel - 65 years old at the birth of Jared, lived 830 years afterwards - died at 890
Year 460: Jared - 162 years old at the birth of Enoch, lived 800 years afterwards - died at 962
Year 622: Enoch - 65 years old at the birth of Methuselah, lived 300 years afterwards - died at 365
Year 687: Methuselah - 187 years old at the birth of Lamech, lived 782 years afterwards - died at 969
Year 874: Lamech - 182 years old at the birth of Noah, lived 595 years afterwards - died at 777

Year 1056: Noah born
Year 1656: rain in the forecast

If you look at the ages of the dads in the line when their sons of note were born (they all had more of them, they just don't warrant the line in the text, apparently), you find out that since the pre-kids numbers were so comparatively small, Adam was still pretty freshly dead by the time Noah was born. He actually lived to see Noah's dad turn 56, and if Methuselah and Lamech hadn't been so lazy about getting down to fruitful and multiplying, he would've met Noah himself.

In fact, all 8 preceding generations of dudes were around to welcome Lamech into the world, and only Adam and Seth had croaked before Noah arrived, Seth only having been dead 14 years at that point.

However, you'd think that that'd mean that Noah's boys would have been hanging with most of their ancestors (not to mention the whole of the human race, if you're keeping that kind of track on that kind of Genesis reading), but Noah took 500 years to get to the baby-making, so they only could really have known their grampa and great-grampa.

But wait... doesn't that mean that they should have been in the ark too? Nope, the math works out pretty perfectly, actually. According to Gen. 5, not only did Methuselah manage to outlive his kid by five years - not bad when junior doesn't kick off until age 777, but he died, apparently, in the same year that the flood started. All these guys, who stuck around for centuries after their kids were born and lived damn near a thousand years each, had finally shuffled off by the time the rain started.

Whether you think these are actual, scientific ages being recorded by registrars with birth records, etc (see above if you're still curious what I think) or not, that right there is authorial attention to detail. Well done, person who wrote Genesis. Well done.