It’s a Myth!
May 15, 2020
Genesis 1:1-2:3
God created everything
that is in six days. Well, seven if you count the sabbath, but that’s for the
Jews not for us Christians. It says so right there at the beginning of God’s
word in the Holy Bible. A bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals try to tell is
it ain’t so, that’s not how creation happened. But God knows how He did it, and
He told us how He did it. It’s right there in black and white. So don’t tell me
that some smart guy with some sort of fancy education knows better then God. It
just ain’t so. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.
Sound familiar? Despite
all the discoveries of modern science there still are Christians who think and
talk like that.[1]
And I suppose I’m one of those pointy-headed intellectuals with some sort of
fancy education; but no, God did not create all that is in six days. Chapter 1
of Genesis[2]
sure makes it sound like that’s what God did, but actually the unknown author
of that text never intended his beautiful words to be a factual account of
creation. We children of the Enlightenment are all hung up on facts as the only
kind of truth. That’s why so many of us think that Chapter 1 of Genesis must be
factually correct or it isn’t true at all.
The thing is, people in
ancient Israel where this text was written didn’t think that way. Surely the
author of this beautiful piece of writing knew that he had no factual information
about how everything came to be. He did know that God somehow created
everything that is, that God’s creation is good, that God created men and women
in God’s image and likeness, that God put humans in charge of the earth, and
that the sabbath day was a sacred day of rest. So he did what people in the
ancient world did when they spoke of profound truths about God. He wrote a story.
He didn’t write a theological essay. He sure didn’t write a scientific research
paper for a peer reviewed journal the way scientists do today. He told a story
that presents what he believed to be true to people who were used to truth
being conveyed in stories. Not factual truth so much, but much more profound
truth than mere facts. Genesis 1 isn’t factual, but it is profoundly true
nonetheless.
There’s a word for what
Genesis 1 is, but it’s a word that
causes all sorts of problems because in this context it doesn’t mean
what people mostly think it means. That word is myth. Yes. I know. I’ve heard
it a hundred times. A myth is something people think is true that isn’t true,
but please bear with me. I’m going use the word myth and give it a different,
theologically correct meaning. In theology-speak a myth is a story about God or
God and humans that points beyond itself to a truth too deep for words. A truth
science cannot give us because it is a truth beneath or behind the physical
world of scientific research. A myth doesn’t convey facts, or at least that’s
not its primary function. Rather it points us toward the spiritual dimension of
reality. It points us toward a reality human words can never fully encompass.
It points us toward the spiritual dimension of reality, toward the depth
dimension in all that is, to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich. To take a myth
literally is to misunderstand completely what it is and what it is not. In our
world today people do that with Genesis 1 all the time. They do it with the
second creation myth in Genesis, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden, as well. When they do they completely misunderstand what those stories actually
are. Taking a myth literally is to reduce it to mere fact when it truly is so
much more than mere fact.
You may well ask how we
know that the author of Genesis 1 didn’t intend for us to take his words as
mere statements of fact. We know that in a general way because we know that the
ancient world conveyed truth in a different way than we do. We know it more
specifically about Genesis 1 because we know that it was written specifically
as a refutation of the creation myth of another ancient culture with which
ancient Israel in the late sixth and early fifth centuries when Genesis 1 was
written was painfully familiar, namely, the creation story called Enuma
Elish, the creation myth of the Babylonians.
In that myth creation is
a product of matricide. The son of a sea monster goddess kills her and makes
creation out of her body. In this story creation is a consequence of a horrible
evil act and is therefore evil itself. Moreover, in that myth the gods create
humans not as lords of the earth as in Genesis 1 but as slaves of the gods.
Israel learned that myth up close and personal during the decades of their Babylonian
exile in the sixth century BCE. It didn’t express their understanding of their
God, who they had come to believe by the time someone wrote Genesis 1 was the
only true God of all creation.[3]
For all its troubles and harshness they experienced God’s creation as good. They
knew that God loved them, had liberated them from slavery in Egypt centuries
earlier, more recently had brought them out of Babylon home to Israel, and
could never want them to be slaves again, not to any humans, not even to God.
So someone, almost
certainly a priest, crafted a magnificent story of God creating everything not
through an act of violent murder but through the peaceful act of speaking
everything into being. That story says that God found all creation to be good.
It says that so far from creating humans as God’s slaves God created human
beings, both male and female, in God’s own image and likeness. So far from
being God’s slaves in this creation myth God makes those humans dominion over
God’s good earth. The Hebrew people of the time when Genesis 1 was written knew
what their Babylonian captors thought about gods, creation, and humans; and to
that Babylonian understanding Genesis 1 shouts a profound and powerful No! No,
Babylon God’s creation is not evil, it is good. No Babylon, God didn’t make us
slaves, God made us in God’s own image and likeness. No Babylon, we’re not God’s
slaves, for God has given us dominion over the whole earth. No Babylon, you
conquered and captured us, but we know God’s truth far better than you do—or
than you did, because by the time Genesis 1 was written Babylon had fallen to
the Persians and no longer existed as an imperial power. With this myth we
proclaim our God and God’s creation as good not evil. We proclaim our status as
free stewards of God’s good earth.
Let’s imagine for a
moment that instead of writing a magnificent creation myth the priestly author
of Genesis 1 had written a theological essay in refutation of the Babylonian
creation myth. Do you see how weak a refutation of that myth that essay would
be? It might has stated divine truth, but theological essays are head work.
Powerful myths like Genesis 1 are soul work. They come from and operate on a
plane far deeper than head work. They convey and proclaim God’s truth far more
powerfully than any scientific research paper or theological essay ever could. So
let’s get over understanding Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 as a statement of mere facts.
It isn’t that at all. It is a myth. A powerful and profoundly true myth. For
that let all of God’s people say “Thanks be to God!” Amen.
[1]
For a meditation on the Bible as coming from God, or not, see Sorenson, Thomas
Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians,
Revised Edition, Volume One, Approaching the Bible, Coffee Press, Briarwood,
New York, 2019, pp. 193-211.
[2]
The story we’re discussing here is actually Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, but I will
often refer to it as Genesis Chapter 1 or just Genesis 1 for convenience.
[3]
For a discussion of how the Hebrews developed true monotheism when they were in
exile in Babylon see Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, op. cit., Volume
Two, The Old Testament, pp. 281-290.
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