The Lost World of Genesis One-Introduction

John H. Walton

John H. Walton is a Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College and former professor of Old Testament at Moody Bible Institute for 20 years. He recieved a Masters in Old Testament Studies from Wheaton and a PhD in Hebrew and Cognitive Studies from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Old Testament Studies

Walton is an Old Testament Scholar. His major emphasis has been Israelite interactions with Ancient Near East Backgrounds and the Development of Hebrew Culture. He has also written books for children realting to Christian Doctrine and works with youth at his church.

From his faculty biography page @ Wheaton College he writes….

I am saddened by how little exposure to and understanding of the Old Testament many Christians have, but I am passionate in doing whatever I can do to remedy this spiritual and theological loss. As I have taught high school Bible studies, adult education classes, introduction to doctrine for sixth graders, or Bible stories to four-year olds, I have been driven by the desire to offer people a greater familiarity with God's Word and a greater confidence in understanding God's revelation of himself in its pages.

Prologue

One of the principal attributes of God affirmed by Christians is that he is Creator. That conviction is foundational as we integrate our theology into our worldview. What all is entailed in viewing God as Creator? What does that affirmation imply for how we view ourselves and the world around us? These significant questions explain why discussions of theology and science so often intersect. Given the ways that both have developed in Western culture, especially in America, these questions also explain why the two often collide.

The first chapter of Genesis lies at the heart of our understanding of what the Bible communicates about God as Creator. Though simple in the majesty of its expression and the power of its scope, the chapter is anything but transparent. It is regrettable that an account of such beauty has become such a bloodied battleground, but that is indeed the case.

In this book I have proposed a reading of Genesis that I believe to be faithful to the context of the original audience and author, and one that preserves and enhances the theological vitality of this text. Along the way is opportunity to discuss numerous areas of controversy for Christians, including relating Genesis to modern science, especially evolution. Intelligent Design and creationism will be considered in light of the proposal, and I make some comments about the debate concerning public education.

The case is laid out in eighteen propositions, each presented succinctly and plainly so that those not trained in the technical fields involved can understand and use the information presented here. Whether the reader is an educated layperson who wants to know more, a pastor or youth pastor in a church, or a science teacher in public schools, he or she should find some stimulating ideas for thinking about the Bible, theology, faith and science.

Introduction

We like to think of the Bible possessively—my Bible, a rare heritage, a holy treasure, a spiritual heirloom. And well we should. The Bible is fresh and speaks to each of us as God’s revelation of himself in a confusing world. It is ours and at times feels quite personal.

But we cannot afford to let this idea run away with us. The Old Testament does communicate to us and it was written for us, and for all humankind. But it was not written to us. It was written to Israel. It is God’s revelation of himself to Israel and secondarily through Israel to everyone else. As obvious as this is, we must be aware of the implications of that simple statement. Since it was written to Israel, it is in a language that most of us do not understand, and therefore it requires translation. But the language is not the only aspect that needs to be translated. Language assumes a culture, operates in a culture, serves a culture, and is designed to communicate into the framework of a culture. Consequently, when we read a text written in another language and addressed to another culture, we must translate the culture as well as the language if we hope to understand the text fully.

As complicated as translating a foreign language can be, translating a foreign culture is infinitely more difficult. The problem lies in the act of translating. Translation involves lifting the ideas from their native context and relocating them in our own context. In some ways this is an imperialistic act and bound to create some distortion as we seek to organize information in the categories that are familiar to us. It is far too easy to let our own ideas creep in and subtly (or at times not so subtly) bend or twist the material to fit our own context.

On the level of words, for example, there are Hebrew words that simply do not have matching words in English. The Hebrew word

ḥesed

is a good example. The translators of the New American Standard Bible decided to adopt the combination word “lovingkindness” to render it. Other translations use a wide variety of words: loyalty, love, kindness and so on. The meaning of the word cannot easily be expressed in English, so using any word unavoidably distorts the text. English readers unaware of this could easily begin working from the English word and derive an interpretation of the text based on what that English word means to them, and thus risk bringing something to the text that was not there. Nevertheless translators have little choice but to take the word out of its linguistic context and try to squeeze it into ours—to clothe its meaning in English words that are inadequate to express the full meaning of the text.

When we move to the level of culture, the same type of problem occurs. The very act of trying to translate the culture requires taking it out of its context and fitting it into ours. What does the text mean when it describes Sarah as “beautiful”? One not only has to know the meaning of the word, but also must have some idea of what defines beauty in the ancient world. When the Bible speaks of something as elemental as marriage, we are not wrong to think of it as the establishment of a socially and legally recognized relationship between a man and a woman. But marriage carries a lot more social nuance than that in our culture and not necessarily similar at all to the social nuances in the ancient culture. When marriages are arranged and represent alliances between families and exchange of wealth, the institution fills a far different place in the culture than what we know when feelings of love predominate. In that light the word marriage means something vastly different in ancient culture, even though the word is translated properly. We would seriously distort the text and interpret it incorrectly if we imposed all of the aspects of marriage in our culture into the text and culture of the Bible. The minute anyone (professional or amateur) attempts to translate the culture, we run the risk of making the text communicate something it never intended.

Rather than translating the culture, then, we need to try to enter the culture. When people want to study the Bible seriously, one of the steps they take is to learn the language. As I teach language students, I am still always faced with the challenge of persuading them that they will not succeed simply by learning enough of the language to engage in translation. Truly learning the language requires leaving English behind, entering the world of the text and understanding the language in its Hebrew context without creating English words in their minds. They must understand the Hebrew as Hebrew text. This is the same with culture. We must make every attempt to set our English categories aside, to leave our cultural ideas behind, and try our best (as limited as the attempt might be) to understand the material in its cultural context without translating it.

How do we do this? How can we recover the way that an ancient culture thought and what categories and ideas and concepts were important to them? We have already noted that language is keyed to culture, and we may then also recognize that literature is a window to the culture that produced it. We can begin to understand the culture by becoming familiar with its literature. Undoubtedly this sounds like a circular argument: We can’t interpret the literature without understanding the culture, and we can’t understand the culture without interpreting the literature. If we were dealing only with the Bible, it would indeed be circular, because we have already adjusted it to our own cultural ways of thinking in our long familiarity with it. The key then is to be found in the literature from the rest of the ancient world. Here we will discover many insights into ancient categories, concepts and perspectives. Not only do we expect to find linkages, we do in fact find many such linkages that enhance our understanding of the Bible.

To compare the Old Testament to the literature of the ancient world is not to assume that we expect or find similarity at every point; but neither should we assume or expect differences at every point. We believe the nature of the Bible to be very different from anything else that was available in the ancient world. The very fact that we accept the Old Testament as God’s revelation of himself distinguishes it from the literature of Mesopotamia or Egypt. For that matter, Egyptian literature was very different from Mesopotamian literature, and within Mesopotamia, Assyrian literature and Babylonian literature were far from homogeneous. To press the point further, Babylonian literature of the second millennium must be viewed as distinct from Babylonian literature of the first millennium. Finally we must recognize that in any given time period in any given culture in any given city, some people would have had different ideas than others. Having said all of this, we recognize at the same time that there is some common ground. Despite all the distinctions that existed across the ancient world, any given ancient culture was more similar to other ancient cultures than any of them are to Western American or European culture. Comparing the ancient cultures to one another will help us to see those common threads even as we become aware of the distinctions that separated them from one another. As we identify those common threads, we will begin to comprehend how the ancient world differed from our modern (or postmodern) world.

So to return to the illustration of marriage: we will understand the Israelite ideas of marriage much more accurately by becoming informed about marriage in Babylon or Egypt than we will by thinking of marriage in modern terms. Yet we will also find evidence to suggest that Babylonian customs and ideas were not always exactly like Israelite ones. The texts serve as sources of information for us to formulate the shape of each culture’s ways of thinking. In most areas there is more similarity between Israel and its neighbors than there is between Israel and our twenty-first-century Western world. As another example, even though today we believe in one God, the God of Israel, and therefore share with them this basic element of faith, the views of deity in the ancient world served as the context for Israel’s understanding of deity. It is true that the God of the Bible is far different from the gods of the ancient cultures. But Israel understood its God in reference to what others around them believed. As the Bible indicates, Israelites were continually drawn into the thinking of the cultures around them, whether they were adopting the gods and practices of those around them or whether they were struggling to see their God as distinct.

As a result, we are not looking at ancient literature to try to decide whether Israel borrowed from some of the literature that was known to them. It is to be expected that the Israelites held many concepts and perspectives in common with the rest of the ancient world. This is far different from suggesting literature was borrowed or copied. This is not even a case of Israel being influenced by the peoples around them. Rather we simply recognize the common conceptual worldview that existed in ancient times. We should therefore not speak of Israel being influenced by that world—they were part of that world.

To illustrate the idea, we must think of ways in which we are products of our own culture. For example, we do not borrow the idea of consumerism, nor are we influenced by it. We are consumers because we live in a capitalist society that is built on consumerism. We don’t have to think about it or read about it. Even if we wanted to reject its principles we would find it difficult to identify all its different aspects and devise different ways of thinking. One could make similar observations about Aristotelian, Cartesian or Baconian forms of thought. We could speak of capitalism and the value of liberty. We could consider self-determinism and individualism. We could analyze our sense of personal rights and the nature of democracy. These are ideas and ways of thinking that make us who we are in the United States. Where did we learn the principles of naturalism or the nature of the universe? They are simply absorbed through the culture in which we live. One can find all of this in our literature, but we didn’t learn it from our literature—it is simply part of our culture that we absorb, often with no alternatives even considered.

Mythology

By recognizing the importance of the literatures of the ancient world for informing us about its cultures, we need not be concerned that the Bible must consequently be understood as just another piece of ancient mythology. We may well consider some of the literatures of Babylonia and Egypt as mythological, but that very mythology helps us to see the world as they saw it. The Canaanites or the Assyrians did not consider their myths to be made up works of the imagination. Mythology by its nature seeks to explain how the world works and how it came to work that way, and therefore includes a culture’s “theory of origins.” We sometimes label certain literature as “myth” because we do not believe that the world works that way. The label is a way of holding it at arm’s length so as to clarify that we do not share that belief—particularly as it refers to involvement and activities of the gods. But for the people to whom that mythology belonged, it was a real description of deep beliefs. Their “mythology” expressed their beliefs concerning what made the world what it was; it expressed their theories of origins and of how their world worked.

By this definition, our modern mythology is represented by science—our own theories of origins and operations. Science provides what is generally viewed as the consensus concerning what the world is, how it works and how it came to be. Today, science makes no room for deity (though neither does it disprove deity), in contrast to the ancient explanations, which were filled with deity. For the Israelites, offered explanations of their view of origins and operations, in the same way that mythologies served in the rest of the ancient world and that science serves our Western culture. It represents what the Israelites truly believed about how the world got to be how it is and how it works, though it is not presented as their own ideas, but as revelation from God. The fact that many people today share that biblical belief makes the term mythology unpalatable, but it should nevertheless be recognized that serves the similar function of offering an explanation of origins and how the world operated, not only for Israel, but for people today who put their faith in the Bible.[1]

[1] Walton, J. H. (2009). The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (pp. 5–13). Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic.