The Lost World of Genesis One: Day Seven

I am posting on The Lost World of Genesis One, by John H. Walton. The previous post is here.

In the previous posts, I have indicated that Walton claims, and presents evidence for the claim, that the description of what happened, in Genesis One, is all about God establishing functions, not about God creating matter. (Walton believes that God created matter, but not that Genesis One describes this.) In other words, rather than describing God creating from nothing, the text is describing how God caused the earth to become organized. He says that we put our own cultural bias into the reading of Genesis One.

Walton's chapters are not listed as chapters, but as propositions -- statements to be supported. The seventh of these propositions was difficult for me to understand. I shall quote Walton:
. . . a reader from the ancient world would know immediately what was going on and recognize the role of day seven. Without hesitation the ancient reader would conclude that this is a temple text and that day seven is the most important of the seven days. In a material account day seven would have little role, but in a functional account . . . it is the true climax without which nothing else would make any sense or have any meaning. (p. 72) Walton, evidently an expert on Middle Eastern culture of the time -- which I certainly am not! -- discusses some of the non-Hebrew literature from ancient times to support this assertion.

It is true that the seventh day seems to be of  little importance, as most of us 21st century readers understand it. Is it true that the seventh day was one in which God acts as if He has settled into a temple? That is a little harder for me to grasp. Walton says, and uses other Old Testament verses to support this, that rest, to the culture of the ancient Hebrews, didn't necessarily mean "doing nothing." It meant, he says, that everything was in place, and functioning as it was supposed to.

An interesting claim. Thanks for reading.

The Lost World of Genesis One: God establishes functions in Genesis one

I have previously posted on John H. Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, indicating that Walton believes that the creation story of Genesis One is not the story of how God made things, but of how God organized things already present. Walton says that we impose our own cultural bias (create = make something) on the Scripture. I summarize some of Walton's evidence for that in the previous posts.

Walton claims that the so-called creation of light, on the first day of Genesis One, was actually an act by God to create time -- to make periods of light and dark exist on a regular basis. That is, to organize time into day and night. One the second day, says Walton, God organized the material of the earth so that there was a place for humans (and other organisms) to live on dry land, and also made weather possible. The act of the second day was not, he says, to create some kind of dome over the earth. He writes "That we do not retain the cosmic geography of the ancient world that featured a solid barrier holding back waters does not change the fact that our understanding of the Creator includes his role in setting up and maintaining a weather system. The material terms used in day two reflect accommodation to the way the ancient audience thought about the world." (pp.57-58)

Thanks for reading!

The Lost World of Genesis One: Making things or ordering things?

I recently posted on John H. Walton's book, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. I wrote "He claims that the creation account in Genesis 1 was not understood, by contemporary listeners or readers, as being about making things, but that it was about arranging things so that various entities had a function within a created world." Let's  consider some of Walton's evidence for that claim.

Walton appears to be an expert in documents from the ancient Middle East, based not on this book, but on his other scholarly publication. I have seen him referred to in that way, even in the writing of an organization that does not accept most of the claims in this book. He uses that expertise to analyze a number of creation myths, more or less contemporary with Genesis, and from the same general area. He does not accept these as divinely inspired, nor does he claim that the early part of Genesis is similarly in accuracy to these accounts. Walton simply wants to show the way that the people of this part of the ancient world, including the Hebrews, thought about things. He presents his analysis, bolstered by quotations from several ancient texts, and, as he says, ". . . analysts of the ancient Near Eastern creation literature often observe that nothing material is actually made in these accounts." (35) and "They thought of existence as defined by having a function in an ordered system." (p. 36) The activity of the supernatural beings, in these accounts, is to take unorganized material, already present, and to organize it. As I indicated in the previous post, Walton is not saying that God didn't make things, nor that the Hebrews didn't believe that He did, just that Genesis 1 is not about that. We, he says, read Genesis 1 through our own cultural biases. It was written from the viewpoint, and to be understood, by the people of the time when it was written.

He goes on to say that bārā, the Hebrew word translated as "create," in Genesis 1, is used in a number of places in the Old Testament. Walton presents a table of these uses, on page 42, giving the object of the verb  bārā in each case, and, he claims, ". . . no clear example occurs that demands a material perspective for the verb, although many are ambiguous." (43) I am not competent to evaluate that claim, but, based on the rest of the book, it makes sense. Creation, in Genesis 1, is about organizing things, giving them a function.

I hope to post more on this book later. Thanks for reading.

The Lost World of Genesis One by John H. Walton: introduction

I have recently read The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, by John H. Walton. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009. I hope to post on the book several times over the next few weeks. (Walton has a Wikipedia page, but the information on it is minimal. It does say that Walton is a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College.

So what does the book have to say? In summary, Walton makes a bold claim. He claims that the creation account in Genesis 1 was not understood, by contemporary listeners or readers, as being about making things, but that it was about arranging things so that various entities had a function within a created world. How is that possible? After all, the words used speak of creation, and doesn't creation mean making things? Walton says that that's what it means to us, in the 21st century, but it's not what it meant to the ancient world. (He says clearly that God can, and did, make things, in the way that we mean it.)

How is this possible? See here for a Biblical example of how our understanding is not the same as that of people in Biblical times.

Walton is an expert in creation myths from Near East cultures. That doesn't mean that he believes Genesis 1 is a myth. But he uses his knowledge to shed light on the way people thought at about the time Genesis was written. I hope to set forth what Walton thinks they thought -- what he thinks Genesis 1 and 2 meant to the people who first heard and read them.

Thanks for reading.