The Creation Narratives
(First published January 13, 2006)
The God Who appears in the creation narrative of Genesis 1 is a good, benevolent being. He fashions humanity in His image, placing people in a good world made for their use. He pronounces His blessing upon humans, then initiates a rest that implies delight in Him and His works.
The goodness of this God is further highlighted in the second creation narrative, which occupies Genesis 2:5‐24. In this narrative, Moses recapitulates the story of creation with a significant shift in perspective. This retelling of the story allows him to focus the reader’s attention more specifically upon God’s purpose for humanity.
God’s goodness is emphasized from the beginning of the account. The original creation had no weeds, no harsh weather, and no hard labor. Rather, God provided everything for the man whom He created, placing him in a garden or sheltered park. Moses specifies the location of this garden by naming four rivers that would have been familiar to the people of his day. The Tigris (Hiddekel) and Euphrates are known to moderns. The Pison is unknown. The Gihon, while not known, is said to flow through the land of Cush, which places it somewhere in the western Arabian peninsula or east Africa. The Gihon may be another name for the Nile (though this is doubtful). It could be another reference to the “River of Egypt” that evidently marked the border of that country.
In any case, Moses depicts Eden as a place that was larger than a farm or even a city. It stretched from modern‐day Iraq all the way (approximately) to modern‐day Egypt. The garden was larger than many entire nations. Incidentally, it also appears to correspond to the boundaries of the land that was later promised to Abraham (Gen. 15:18), as well as the territory that was tributary to Solomon (2 Chr. 9:26).
Eden was a beautiful park that God prepared for humanity. God “rested” the man in the garden (Gen. 2:15), which carries implications of shelter and safety. God caused trees to grow there for the man’s nourishment. He also caused other trees to grow: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad.
The name of the second tree is what ties this narrative to the first creation account in Genesis 1. The emphasis of the first account was on the goodness of the Creator. The second account reemphasizes the Creator’s benevolence in many ways. The expansive dimensions of the garden, its nature as a sheltered park, the provision of food, and above all, God’s provision of safety reflect the kind nature of the good God who blesses.
The tree also draws attention to God’s purpose for humanity. This has already been intimated in Genesis 2:14, which should probably be translated that God “rested” the man in the garden “for worship and obedience” (see Cassuto or Sailhamer for the reasons). If this translation is correct, then the man was made to be a priest, not a farmer. He was made to walk with His Maker, to adore Him, and to obey Him.
Obedience should be easy when every command comes from a completely benevolent deity. Both creation narratives emphasize God’s goodness repeatedly. This alerts readers that God is worth obeying, that His commands stem only from His interest in blessing humans.
That is why God confronts the man with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad. Throughout this context, good means useful or beneficial. This hints at the purpose of the tree. Surely it was a real tree with real fruit, but it was also a symbolic tree that represented the knowledge good and bad. To this point, God has always been the one to say what is good. Human responsibility has consisted entirely in the willingness to receive whatever good the Creator has provided. Human knowledge of the bad is non‐existent, and human knowledge of the good is a derived knowledge that comes strictly from trusting the Creator. Therefore, the tree must represent the intention for the man to determine good and bad for himself. If the man will not trust the Creator to determine what is good, then he will have to decide for himself. He will gain his own knowledge of good and bad.
In other words, what was being tested was Adam’s willingness to trust God. By not eating of the tree, the man would be submitting himself to God’s decisions about what was good and what was bad. If he ate of the tree, however, that would signify his declaration of independence from God and his choice to determine good and bad for himself. This would be the worst sort of treason, for it would imply that the man now considered the Creator to be untrustworthy. In this test, obedience and trust are inextricably linked.
If the man rejected the Creator, pronounced Him untrustworthy, and declared independence, he would come under sentence of death. How could it be otherwise? The Creator is the origin of life. To separate one’s self from Him is to choose death. God warned that if the man ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Bad, then sentence of death would be passed on the same day.
At this point, all of the pieces are in place for the great drama of temptation that will follow in Genesis 3. Before the man is allowed to face temptation, however, one further episode intervenes. This episode begins when God declares that something is not good. He says that it is not good for the man to be alone, and He purposes to make for the man a helper “like himself.” This comes as a surprise, because up until this point everything has been very good. Why choose this stage of the narrative at which to announce what is not good?
The crucial question is whether the Creator really deserves the trust that He requires from the man. Can humans truly rely upon the Creator to supply everything that is good for them? Will the Creator notice any deficiencies, and can He be trusted to supply them?
God was aware of Adam’s need even before Adam had noticed it. In fact, God had to show Adam the need by putting him through an exercise in taxonomy. By comparing and classifying (naming) animals, the man discovered that he was alone in the world. No one else like him existed.
God was now in the position to meet the need. He caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, took one of his ribs, and fashioned a woman. He then brought her to the man and presented her to him. Adam’s response takes the form of the first poem to be composed by any human being.
She is bone of my bones,
Flesh of my flesh,
She shall be called Ishah,
Because she was taken out of Ish.
Adam’s poem draws attention to the likeness between the man and the woman, which in turn provides the basis for the intimacy that God intended them to enjoy. This is an expression of ecstatic joy. Not only did the Creator notice the need before Adam was aware of it, but He also met the need in a way that was beyond anything Adam could imagine.
The Creator God—our God—is absolutely worthy of our trust. He is good and benevolent by His very nature. He desires our trust and obedience, but He does not compel it. To worship God by our trust and obedience is that for which we were made. It is our highest good, and no lesser good can satisfy us.
By Night When Others Soundly Slept
Anne Bradstreet (c.1612‐1672)
BY night when others soundly slept
And hath at once both ease and Rest,
My waking eyes were open kept
And so to lie I found it best.
I sought him whom my Soul did Love,
With tears I sought him earnestly.
He bowʹd his ear down from Above.
In vain I did not seek or cry.
My hungry Soul he fillʹd with Good;
He in his Bottle put my tears,
My smarting wounds washt in his blood,
And banisht thence my Doubts and fears.
What to my Saviour shall I give
Who freely hath done this for me?
Iʹll serve him here whilst I shall live
And Loue him to Eternity.
Kevin T. Bauder Bio
This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, who serves as Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.
- 23 views
[Kevin T. Bauder]James,
I’ve already stipulated that Alex was careless (at best) in how he framed his position. I’m not particularly interested in defending his locutions.
Nevertheless, it seems evident that you and Alex (at least as he phrased himself) are committed to the same basic assumption, i.e., that there is a strong disjunction between “author” on the one hand and “editor/compiler” on the other. This assumption is what I wish to challenge, for a whole range of reasons. For the moment, however, I’ll simply adopt your own method of procedure. Can you produce a verse from the Bible that gives clear and compelling evidence for supposing that authors are never editors and editors are never authors?
In fact, in the ancient world it was common for authors to pursue their task by means of what we would now call editing or compiling. To be sure, that is not the only thing that they did, but it is one of the things. A man could legitimately claim to be the author of a work that incorporated a good bit of preexisting material. Typically, he shaped this material according to his own interests and incorporated it in such as way as to support his own arguments. For that reason, even preexisting materials became contributing parts of his own work.
This is almost certainly what the authors of the Synoptics did, and there is no reason to suppose that Moses did not or could not. It is, of course, possible that God simply revealed to Moses directly all of the information that is incorporated into the book of Genesis, just as He might have revealed directly how Moses would die and that there would not be another prophet like him unto “this day”—though that theory seems to be freighted with more assumptions and contortions than almost any other that we could devise. The point is, we do not have biblical statements that tell us whether or not Moses was relying on sources and to what extent he stitched them into his text verbatim. Any position—including yours—is, to some degree speculative.
Whatever sources Moses may have used, and however he may have incorporated them into his text, he is the author of the Pentateuch. Earlier sources (if they existed and were employed) were simply uninspired documents or traditions. The biblical text is what is God-breathed, and its inspiration would have prevented Moses from incorporating any errors that existed in older sources.
You and Alex both seem to assume that if Moses were the author, he could not have been an editor/compiler, and if Moses were an editor/compiler, he could not have been the author. Alex chose one side of the disjunction (at least as he worded his position), and you have chosen the other. What I am asking you to do is to defend this disjunction biblically. Give me the verse that precludes authors from being editors and vice versa.
Now, one other thing. I am a pretty strong traditional dispensationalist, a premillennialist, and a pretribulationist. I think that covenant theology and amillennialism are significant theological errors. If, however, I were to accuse those men of mere conjecture and speculative theology, I should become guilty of bearing false witness. I don’t see how anyone who has read their writings with any degree of care could repeat this kind of insult. And I don’t see why anyone who has not read their writings with that kind of care would have the right to comment on their position.
Blessed Epiphany,
Kevin
“Careless at best” in framing my position? It was a comment in passing, not a position statement in a formal debate. If I would have been cognizant of the back and forth, I would have more clearly indicated what I meant. Last time I checked this was still a message board of sorts. Overly pedantic, I presume?
"Our faith itself... is not our saviour. We have but one Saviour; and that one Saviour is Jesus Christ our Lord. B.B. Warfield
Without the fall Huw salvation would not be needed, there would be nothing to be saved from. There would be nothing that needed to be forgiven and Adam and Eve walked with God and, this is my assumption, walking and talking with God is knowing His love.
If you think the fall was beneficial it seems to be that you would condone Adam’s disobedience because without it , according to you, Adam, and we, would not have known forgiveness or the love of God.
If oral tradition was all there was before Moses started to write are you saying that Moses was taught to write when he went up the mountain? Are you saying that writing was unknown until Moses wrote? If it wasn’t then how can you say that Moses had no recourse to written sources when he wrote? On what evidence do you base your assertion that there was only oral tradition and no written accounts?
I am not seeking a quarrel, I simply would like to know how you get to your conclusions.
Richard Pajak
[Huw]
Adam willingly became a sinner for his woman/bride so that the Last Adam would become sin for His bride.
Are you saying that the unfallen man was essentially superior to his unfallen wife?
How was Adam later ashamed and buck-passing, if he was willingly self-sacrificial in eating the fruit?
The fact that there is a pattern-match between Christ and Adam does not necessarily imply that that match was one of spiritual identical-ness.
It may seem divinely romantic to imagine that Adam ate the fruit self-sacrificially. But, with all the details of my view on the matter, I think that to insist that this was Adam’s motive is to have borrowed from a male-centric arrogance like that of extremist Muslims (who hold that the female is the senseless dunce who is essentially more given to sinning than is the male).
Here is a little of my thinking:
According to those males whose basic conscious intellectual content is informed by an antagonism to women, the Genesis account of the pre-fallen Eve is ‘clearly’ adverse to the female. This female-adverse interpretation includes the fact both that Eve spoke something about the forbidden fruit not recorded to have been spoken by God or Adam, and that Eve was made from Adam’s rib rather than ‘equally’ from the dust.
But, as most preachers teach, Eve’s having been made from Adam’s rib means something incomparably profound for the Feminine in relation to the Masculine: A human rib not only is analogue to that which is at once most deep, solid, equal, independent, and enduring about us all—unlike, say, a toe, a hair, or a neuron—, but, precisely because it is a human rib, it already is more human than dust.
So, there is more that one kind of ‘special’ humanness. Adam was made as one kind of ‘special’, and Eve as another. Eve’s kind of ‘special’ was an emphasis of Adam’s own humanness, not a sub-human or sub-male kind of ‘special’.
That ‘Eve was tempted and not Adam’ does not necessarily mean that ‘Eve was created morally weak and Adam morally strong.’ It can mean, rather, that Eve was made so as to be the more prime target for the serpent. Had Adam been presented as the only target, then all sorts of sufficiencies would have fallen away had it been the man, instead of the woman, who first ate the fruit.
In a most wise effort to pin a con artist as such in all jurisdictions, you ensure the least possible damage done by him in the meantime by ensuring he takes the exact bait to those ends.
The next word you read is true (and now it's the seventh-to-last word).
Discussion