Understanding the creation days...

• The record of the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 poses many challenges to the reader and interpreter of Scripture.

• We must first ask: what is the genre of this material and what is its primary intent? Since God revealed his Word through specific human authors to people in real historical and cultural settings using human words and literary conventions, the type of literature and what it was designed to communicate to the original audience matters.

1. Are these words straightforward reporting, written as though a journalist were watching and recording God's acts over seven 24-hour days?
2. Does Genesis 1 teach creation in a way that correlates with modern science, with the "days" representing long ages of time that allow for evolutionary development?
3. Is this narrative a strictly chronological account of things that took place (whatever the time factors involved), or are these historical events presented within a literary framework that is intended to portray God and his work in a certain light?
   
4. Is Genesis 1 myth, an a-historical artistic representation of cosmology, like the mythological accounts of the Ancient Near Eastern nations around them?
5. Is this text poetry, designed originally for use in worship liturgies?
   
6. Is the Genesis account primarily a polemic narrative, designed to present theological truths—setting forth a picture of God the Creator using the language and perspectives of the Ancient Near Eastern world in order to counter the myths of Israel's polytheistic neighbors?

• To start with, it is clear that Genesis 1 is not poetry. Nor does it contain the fantastic elements that characterize Ancient Near Eastern myths such as tales of the gods and warfare with great creatures representing the forces of chaos. It is prose, a simple and elegant narrative description of things that actually took place. However, it is also apparent that Genesis 1 is a highly structured narrative. The story of the days of creation has been written with great literary skill.

1. There is a clear parallelism between the first three days and days four through six. On Days 1-3, God separates light from darkness, waters above from waters below, and land where edible plants begin grow to from the waters of the seas, forming the environment where his creatures will live. On Days 4-6, God fills this environment by setting lights in the sky, forming air and sea creatures, and then creating land animals and human beings. (1/4) Light/lights, (2/5) Sky and sea/birds and fish, (3/6) Land and plants/animals and humans. Perfect parallelism, even down to the fact that day three and day six contain multiple acts of creation while the other days have only one. On the first three days God forms, the latter three he fills his creation. Only Day 7 stands apart from this parallel scheme.
   
2. Each creation day follows a specific, highly ordered pattern. (1) Each begins with the divine word, "And God said..." (2) Each day contains a statement affirming God's work, "And it was so..." (3) Each day (except day 2) portrays God evaluating his work: "And God saw that it was good..." (4) Each day ends with a summation: "And there was evening and morning, a ___ day."
3. The narrative is also structured using the number seven in various ways. The following are pointed out by Cassuto in his commentary:
   
1. Genesis 1.1 has seven words.
2. Genesis 1.2 has fourteen words (7x2).
   
3. The seven-day week is described in seven highly patterned paragraphs.
4. Each of the three main nouns in verse 1 are repeated a number of times that is a multiple of seven—God (35), heavens (21), land (21).
5. Seven times God utters the creative word, "Let there be..." or a similar command.
6. "Light" and "day" are found seven times in the first paragraph.
7. There are seven references to "light" in the fourth paragraph.
8. "Water" is mentioned seven times in paragraphs two and three.
9. The "living creatures" are mentioned seven times in paragraphs five and six.
10. The seventh paragraph about the Sabbath (the seventh day) has 35 words, and also contains three sentences of seven words each. In the very middle of the verse is the phrase, "the seventh day."

• It is obvious, is it not, that we are dealing with a text that has been carefully written and arranged. Such structuring must be taken into account when interpreting Genesis 1. This is no journalistic prose!

• So what kind of literature is Genesis 1, and how should we approach it in order to grasp its teachings? For my own conclusion I will quote C. John Collins here from his book, Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary:

All of this leads us to conclude that the genre of this pericope is what we might call exalted prose narrative. This name for the genre will serve us in several ways. First, it acknowledges that we are dealing with prose narrative, and thus its purposes will be related to other uses of prose narrative—which will include the making of truth claims about the world in which we live. Second, by calling it exalted, we are recognizing that when we come to examine the author's truth claims, we must not impose a 'literalistic' hermeneutic on the text. Further, to call it exalted points us away from ordinary narration and leads us to suppose that its proper function extends well beyond its information to the attitudes that it fosters....

...We may conclude from this high level of patterning that the order of events and even lengths of time are not part of the author's focus; this is at the basis of what is often called the literary framework scheme of interpretation. In this understanding, the six workdays are a literary device to display the creation week as a careful and artful effort.

• In addition to this general statement about literary type, the reader will also note that the author describes God's creative acts in ways that would have stood contrary to the mythological assertions of their polytheistic neighbors. Though it is subtle, there is a great deal of polemic against false gods and other worldviews here.

• Also, though the text is not poetry, its symmetry makes it poetic and therefore useful in instructional and liturgical settings. As Bruggemann says in his Genesis commentary, Genesis 1 is not an abstract musing on origins, but rather a theological and pastoral document addressed to real people in actual historical settings with genuine faith questions and concerns. This text was designed to form the faith of God's people and equip them to worship the true and living God.

THE Most Basic Truth: Genesis 1.1

"In the beginning, God created the skies and the land."

Contrary to translations like the NRSV and JPS, I believe this important text is best understood as an independent sentence. These versions see it as a dependent clause introducing a longer sentence with a different main clause. For example: "In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth..." (NRSV)

In his fine book on Genesis 1-4, John Collins points out that the grammar of this verse does not support such a translation. The verb "created" is in the perfect tense, and the normal use of an opening sentence like this in Hebrew is to make a statement about events that took place before the narrative storyline that follows.

Also, verse 2 begins with the disjunctive phrase, "Now the land was...," which is a common way for the author of Genesis to begin a new subject. (See Cassuto's commentary for this argument.) Genesis 1.1 is about God creating the universe. Genesis 1.2-2.3 is about God's subsequent work of preparing the land for life.

What did God create in the beginning? A translation like "the skies and the land" accurately represents what the author would have been saying as a pre-scientific observer of the world around him. Don't picture a globe in outer space amidst all the other heavenly spheres. That is not the perspective of the observer. Rather, our author is standing with the reader and looking out on a landscape, motioning with his hands across the whole sweep of the view and saying, "God created all of this."

The phrase is a merism, a figure of speech that uses two contrasting concepts to present a single idea. For example, in Psalm 139, David says, "You know when I sit down and when I rise up." In other words, God knows every movement of his day. "The skies and the land" is likewise a way of saying, "Everything that is." Genesis 1.1 thus affirms that there is one true and living God who created the universe, all that exists.

When did God do this? "In the beginning." Beyond these words, the author does not specify when this occurred. He simply thinks back as far as possibly can be imagined, to a time when there was no sky, no land, no world as we know it. At that time God created the world and the heavens that surround it.

Please note that Genesis 1.1 stands outside the seven days described in 1.3-2.3. That leaves us with two basic options with regard to its meaning.

First, many see Genesis 1.1 as a "title" for the chapter, and then say that the rest of the verses describe how God created the universe in seven days.

If this is true, one must recognize that the seven days that follow start with the earth already in existence (1.2). That would mean that Genesis 1 nowhere gives information about the creation of the universe. Bruce Waltke takes this position in his commentary, saying that the seven days of "creation" describe a relative creation, not the absolute origins of the cosmos. Likewise John Walton, who sees Genesis 1 not in terms of God bringing matter into existence, but of God organizing and assigning function to elements already in existence.

Second, we can take Genesis 1.1 as the initial creative act of God.

By this interpretation, Gen 1.1 says that out of nothing, God brought the universe into existence. It presents God as the Creator of everything. And the entire cosmos was in place before the seven days described in the rest of the chapter. That means that 1.2 describes the condition of the land, already created in 1.1, before God made it ready for his creatures, and 1.3-2.3 describe his subsequent acts of preparation within a six-day framework.

I believe the second option should be preferred. Genesis 1.1 tells how this earth, surrounded by the skies, came to be. With the universe thus in place, the rest of Genesis 1 describes God's subsequent preparation of the land for life, climaxing with the creation of human beings on day six and God's Sabbath rest on day seven.

So then, Genesis 1.1 looks back to the absolute beginning and asserts that the Source of the entire material universe is the one true and living God, who existed before all things and made all things.

This would have served several purposes as an introduction to Israel's Torah:

1. It would have affirmed to them that God and God alone is the true and living Creator, in contrast with the lifeless and impotent idols of the nations.
2. It would have reminded them that God is Lord of all the earth and nations. Though Israel was chosen as God's unique people, the whole world belongs to him. This is therefore the foundation of their calling to be the priestly nation through whom God's blessing would be restored to all the peoples of the earth.
3. 3. The phrase "in the beginning" would have affirmed to them that God is the Author of history. These words reflect a teleological understanding of history—that which has a beginning is moving toward an ending, and the events that make up the course of history have purpose and meaning. God initiated a plan for his creation to be consummated in the end of days.

Following this fundamental declaration, the rest of the chapter describes God preparing a place within his creation where humankind might live, blessed by his good favor. The God of the universe (Gen 1.1) becomes the God of covenant and blessing (Gen 1.2-2.3).