The Book of Genesis is an extraordinary book

by Sarah Golsby-Smith

The book of Genesis is an extraordinary book, as complex as any text I have ever laid my hands to. Its structure, syntax, rhetorical complexity and its beauty are unplumbable, to some degree, and I want to start by saying that my experience of Genesis is just that: it somehow always escapes and envelopes its readers. And yet, we come to it again and again, changed by it and entranced by it, which I think is the point of a literary reading. One of my favourite literary critics, Wayne Booth, suggests that the point of reading a literary text is that it generates a conversation between the text and the reader. I ask questions of the text, its answers change the way I see the world and the text itself, and so the next time I come to it, I ask a different set of questions, and so on. And I see that occurring here … the text continually challenges and changes, so that the next time I come to the text, I am a little different than I was the day before. I have been absolutely unable to come up with a summative view of Genesis, because my view of what it is doing is enlarged with each reading. So, whatever I say today I must preface by saying that any reading I give I am happy to call provisional. Provisional on subsequent readings, provisional on what you will say here, provisional on the circumstances in which the book is written and so on. I believe that texts respond uniquely to each unique context, each unique set of questions that we bring to the text. Do I see that as a measure of the text’s relativity? Am I therefore degrading its status as infallible word of God? Sort of, yes, to the first, and no, to the second.

If you were here last time I was speaking, I spoke carefully about a precedent that I have for the biblical text: Christ himself. I spoke about how Flannery O’Connor asks us to remember that Christ did not save us by direct intellectual act, but by inhabiting a body. In the same way, literary texts — and biblical texts — come to us clothed in story, metaphor, structure, musical devices and so on. No text can come to us without human convention. So, yes, the text is relative to the culture in which it is written and to the culture of the person who asks questions of it. Does this limit its power to speak? I would argue that no, it does not, that in fact it increases the text’s power to speak to us. And to my other question: does the text’s relativity degrade its status as the Word of God? Well, I hope this question is answered now. I firmly believe that to ask this question is the same as asking this question: does Jesus’ incarnation in a human body degrade his membership in the Trinity? The answer, as any Christian will tell you, is that not only does it not degrade his membership of the Trinity and in the Godhead, but that his salvific power DEPENDS upon his incarnation, on his inhabiting a body. So, if this is true, surely I can say that the biblical text’s ability to speak into my life is not marred by human and literary convention, but that it DEPENDS upon those necessary forms to communicate.

All of this begs an important question. What about metaphor and allegory? Whenever anyone suggests a reading of Genesis, there is that question that has run amok, got away from us, found its way into even the ABC’s Q & A, into the secular sphere. Is the 7 day creation narrative literal or is it an allegory for the process of creation? I want to talk very briefly about this, but to use it as an excuse to talk about what I believe I am qualified to talk about: that is, the power of literary communication. Firstly, the kerfuffle about whether Genesis is literal or not misses the point, and I feel that Christian and atheist alike have fallen into this essentially boring question. The question that somebody trained in literary readings will tell you is this: what is the purpose of the text? I am fairly confident in saying that, whatever the purpose of the text, Genesis is not in the business of providing scientific clues to a modern scientific community. As Iain Provan reminds us, it is in no way interested in HOW creation came into being. It is profoundly interested in WHY we came into being, and BY WHOM we came into being, but utterly uninterested in the nuts and bolts of it all. Interestingly, just as a side note, in my preparation for this evening, I read the Genesis account of the conflict between Jacob and Laban; if you remember, Jacob must barter first for his wives, and then for his livestock. He says to Laban that he will only take the spotted livestock, and then goes about ensuring that only the strong stock will develop streaks or spots. If that is not evidence of the fact that farmers knew about natural selection well before Charles Darwin, I’m a monkey’s uncle. In Genesis itself, no less.

The other thing I want to briefly canvas, before we tuck into the text itself, is the sense that the minute we admit the residence of metaphor or allegory in a text, that somehow we move further away from the truth itself. Because metaphor is representative, goes the thinking (rather than the thing that it represents) it is less powerful. I believe this could not be further from the truth. Again, I turn to the incarnation for my defence. God saw fit to clothe himself in human flesh. There are a few examples of God’s revelation of himself to humankind without any kind of fleshing, and those examples did not go so well. Remember Moses? The turned back? The veil? Metaphor is simply incarnated truth, just as Christ is incarnated in human flesh. I have absolutely no problem with Genesis using metaphor or allegory, primarily because I think God has no problem with our fleshedness. We can choose to see our anchoring in flesh as somehow a degrading of the truth, but more and more I see that this kind of oblique revelation of the fullness of God is actually where the game is at. We can’t look at the sun, we can only look at what the sun illuminates. And sometimes, we can’t see the truth directly, we must see what the metaphor or allegory illuminates. And just in case you missed it, the fact that I had to use a metaphor — the sun — to talk about metaphor, is a right and proper example of the fact that all language — even divine scriptures — are wedded to metaphor. Let’s enjoy it rather than apologise for it.

OK. Now that we’ve got some of those skeletons out of the closet — yes, another metaphor, another idiom — let’s do what we spoke about last time and let’s look broadly at Genesis. If we’re going to drill into some detail, we must get a sense of the broad picture first. The way a literary reading is conducted — in that conversational way that Wayne Booth canvassed for us — we get a provisional big picture, drill down into the text with that picture, and then what we come up with may in fact change our big picture, then we go again. It’s a dialectic model of reading, suggesting a kind of never-ending expansion, which I’m hoping we’ll begin today.

Okay. If we look at Genesis as a whole, we can see a narrowing of focus. If you flick through your bible now, we can see this stories in this sequence: The making of the created order, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Babel, Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, Isaac and Rebekah, (I will refer to the patriarchal stories by their matriarchal lines also, just for argument’s sake), Jacob and Esau and then Jacob and Leah/Rachel, Joseph and his brothers from then into exile into Egypt as we await the story of the Exodus. If we look carefully at this sequence of stories, it tells us a few things. Firstly, we can see the narrowing of focus I was talking about. We have big, architectonic stories that speak to the foundations of the earth (the creation narrative), then the creation of humankind (Adam and Eve), human aberration and sin (casting out of the garden), the shape of life post casting out (Cain and Abel), the proliferation of humankind and its attendant sinfulness (Noah), building of cities (Babel), and then we move from there into the first patriarch and matriarch, down through to the intricacies of family rivalries and petty hatreds, to Joseph’s story. It’s a lovely movement through a set of concentric circles — an idea I borrow from Robert Alter — where the focus of the book becomes narrower and narrower. Looking backwards, each circle depends upon the previous one for its frame. Joseph’s petty hatreds are set within the frames of cities, hatred for a preferred brother, difficulty tilling soil, God’s promises and punishments, and then back to creation itself.

With that shape in mind, it’s useful to think of Genesis as roughly split into two types of “history”, if you like. By history, please understand that we are not talking about a modern history, in the sense of gathering facts, dates, photographs and interviews. The modern foreign correspondent did not exist in the Ancient Middle East. Are we talking about the genuine history of a particular people? Yes, absolutely, but we must not force the text to conform to a sense of what history is guided by our scientific, rationalist presuppositions.

So, two parts. The first is what has been terms the “Primeval History” — which is chapters 1 through 11, and the patriarchal/matriarchal narratives, which run from chapters 12 through 50. If you flick through the text quickly, you can detect the difference straight away. As a rule, in the first part: very little dialogue, fable-like in its scope, human characters are rendered at a distance — they seem more generalised. The text is backward looking at this point — it refers to what has already happened in the deep past. In the Patriarchal narratives, we see a different style altogether. Dialogue plays a central and powerful role, bringing tension and climax to the stories, just as dialogue works in the modern text to focus our attention on a particular problem, resolution, moral quandary, what have you. The human characters are different in personality from one another, rendered differently, and the plot is fleshed out in comparatively realist detail in comparison with its primeval antecedent. And yet, while different, it is important that we try to get a sense of what Genesis as a whole is doing. To do that, what we need to do is to have a look at what unites these two histories, to see if there are any aesthetic patterns that bind it together, and give us a “total act of discourse”. Walter Brueggemann neatly explains that if God called the universe into being at the beginning of the primeval history, he calls a special people into being at the beginning of Genesis 12. Even just in this neat observation, we can see that we need to see things that trace patterns across the divide of the broad primeval history to the close-up of the patriarchal/matriarchal stories. If we can see some pattern, then perhaps we can provisionally say what Genesis is getting at.

So what I propose we do tonight is to drill down into two stories, one from the Primeval history and one from the Patriarchal/Matriarchal narratives. We’ll have a look first at Noah’s story, and then I would like to look at the Abraham/Sarah cycle. The questions I wants to ask is this: if the book is split into two, WHAT UNITES THEM? If we can answer this question, then we have a provisional sense of what drives Genesis as a central proposition. Given that the two parts are so markedly different if we can find similarities, then we might go a good way to developing a thesis as to what the book is saying to us.

Let’s start with Noah. Let’s read the 3 chapters associated with the story … Now last time we gathered, we spoke about chiasm, and its uses. Noah is a tightly constructed story, as you can hear, so let’s go looking for the chiasm.

So, you can see the way the text draws us to two things as it uses its chiasmus. The text is bracketed by the population of the earth via Noah’s line, but its central focus is the mercy of God. God remembers Noah, and that remembrance is flanked by the covenant given to Noah, becoming more specific in the second repetition of the covenant. So, immediately, I think to myself that what this chiasmus does is to suggest something about the character of God. It is not Noah who is the centre of this chiasmus, or his decision to judge the earth, or even the flood itself, so much as God’s turn of mind toward this man afloat a raging sea in a wooden boat. Provisionally, then, let us say that if the Noah story is somehow a microcosmos of the Genesis story as a whole, then it is the story of God and his mercy.

Now that we have a broad picture of the text, seeing the way the chiasmus operates, let’s have a look at what goes on in the syntax of the text and the images it uses. I will start with Genesis 6:5: “And the Lord saw that the evil of the human creature was great on the earth, and that every scheme of his heart’s devising was only perpetually evil. And the Lord regretted having made the human on earth and was grieved to the heart. And the Lord said, “I will wipe out the human race I created from the face of the earth.” So, great judgement. In my preparation for tonight, I did a bit of digging around, and it appears that there are many other Ancient Near Eastern texts that cite a great deluge at the hands of the gods. It seems that this Hebrew story draws from the Mesopotamian story Epic of Gilgamesh … the similarities are apparently striking. What’s interesting, though, are not the similarities so much as the differences. The Mesopotamian story has the gods sending a deluge either for a bit of a laugh or as a measure to hem in a spot of overpopulation; their gods (plural) are either capricious and cruel, or utilitarian. This God sends the deluge in response to great human evil. The text is really specific that the Hebrew God — Yahweh — is “greatly grieved”. It’s a really emotional response. Robert Alter tells me that the Hebrew word for “grieved” — “-ts-b” — is the same word that is used to describe Eve’s pangs, Adam’s pain, and the ‘pain of our hand’s work’. It’s a deeply human groaning that this God feels here. Utterly different to the texts that sit alongside this flood narrative. So God’s judgement comes out of anguish, but judgment does come.

But before it does, something very interesting takes place: “And God said to Noah, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh, for the earth is filled with violence because of them; now I am going to destroy them along with the earth. Make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch.” Firstly, because I love patterns, there is this: the word for “ark” in Hebrew is also the word for “basket”. Anyone’s mind firing yet? Can you see the text foregrounding what comes in Exodus? God gathers his righteous remnant into the ark to protect them from his own judgement, just as he shielded Adam and Eve from the full extent of his wrath and as he will protect a righteous portion in the stories to come. But the pun on “ark”, to bring to mind “basket” sews together Genesis and Exodus, inviting us to connect Noah’s remnant with Moses inside his basket. What lives in side the “ark” and the “basket” is God’s instrument to bring renewal, mercy, grace. And skip your mind even further forward to another infant in another basket, and you have a foretelling of favour to come: the righteous remnant protected by the flimsiest of wood.

Fast forward several verses to Chapter 7 verse 11. After Noah has made his headcount and ushered in “every crawling thing, “every beast of the earth, the water comes. “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heaven were opened.” Now, a part of what it means to read literarily is to trace patterns, to read closely with an eye on what has happened before and after, so that we can place the text in an aesthetic context. Well, before this, in Genesis chapter 1 and 2, there is this account of the making of the heavens and the earth: “And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome.” Can you see the similarities between the two verses? The bible’s preoccupation with water is here instructive: in Genesis 1 it represents the primordial waters of chaos, swirling with nothingness. At God’s word, the water below separates from the waters above, and the earth is protected by God’s good will. The earth is a marker of order, of goodness. Life flourishes because primordial water is held at bay. And then the second verse from the Noah narrative makes much more sense when you read it closely: the water does not only come from above — “the windows of the heavens were opened” — it also comes from below: “on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth” — something I missed as a youngster reading the Noah narrative. Once you make the connection between the Genesis story and the Noah narrative, we must import the symbol of water in with it also. What occurs in the Noah narrative is a withdrawal of God’s order, and primordial water comes in to destroy creation. Order is lost. And so, life is lost. Just as your mind should have been firing when we spoke of “baskets”, so now it should be firing. Can anyone think of anywhere else where walls of water were held back to preserve life? And then released to destroy it? With the firepower of the way the biblical text conceives of water — as primordial chaos — all of a sudden the Exodus story starts to look a bit more interesting. So does the story of Jesus walking on water, calming the storm, making wine out of water. As the incarnation of life eternal, how fitting that Jesus have control over water in its many forms. How fitting that He should be baptised in it, only to rise up through it: God’s land that will never be destroyed. To trace these symbols all of the way through gives us a richer understanding of what is going on here, I think.

The last thing I want to pay attention to in this rich text — there is too much to talk about tonight — is the relationship between the righteous man and a merciful God. What does the Noah story tell us about this relationship, and what does this have to do with the rest of Genesis? Let’s put some of these details together. We have a created order that is both good in its gloriously alive state and marred by evil, capitulating in murder. Then we have God’s judgement on that evil, reversing the created order in the pangs of grief. Then we have God’s command to preserve a tiny part of the populace — a remnant — and to that remnant God not only delivers salvation but reiterates and deepens the covenant that stood before the whole story began. You will notice that the covenant to Noah is given twice; once before the flood and once after. After the flood, the covenant is more detailed, more specific, more focussed, and this is made clear by the inverse parallelism that is the backbone the chiastic structure. The first covenant: “I am going to bring a flood of waters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you; and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.” And then after the flood, on the other side of God’s remembering, comes the second covenant, this time more focussed, more specific, and utterly reconciliatory: “Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth wit you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations; I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” I used to love this image as a little girl, since it seemed so pretty. But the image is actually far from pretty. I thought the word “bow” was taken from the word “Rainbow”, without stopping to think that the word “rainbow” is actually taken from the military, hunting “bow”. God literally says, “I will hang up my bow”, a sign of retirement from battle. In this image, the writer of Genesis is communicating a God who is actively and emotionally involved in the Creation he singlehandedly wrought, and covenant after covenant refocuses that love. As the great hymn “Here is Love” tells us, what we see in Noah is the movement of two things: “Grace and love like mighty rivers, poured incessant from above, heaven’s peace and perfect justice, kissed a guilty world in love”. As the middle of the chiasm — the crux of the cross — tells us, “But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark.” Indeed.

OK, let’s move onto Abraham. Shall we go chiasm hunting again? The centre of the chiasm in the Abraham cycle is really surprising, totally left field. But I think it is very telling, actually. I take this chiasm from Joel W. Rosenberg.

What I think is fascinating about this chiasm is that for a story that centres on Abraham and his wife Sarah, it’s remarkable that the centre of the chiasmus is Hagar, the slave-girl from Egypt. She has been cast out of the family circle, into the desert, with only a skin of water and some bread, because Sarah’s view is that the promise given to Abraham — that Isaac would be the rightful heir of the covenant, the father of many nations, and the inheritor of land — would be diverted because of Ishmael’s existence. As she says to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Vicious rivalry, bitter resentment, and ultimately, were it not for the grace of God, manslaughter. Sarah is desperate to protect her line, which has been under threat a couple of times already: when Abraham passed her off as his sister and her barrenness being two cases where God’s covenant with Abraham came under threat (or so it seemed). And so, from a little family with a whiff of a covenant, who are in exile themselves (let us remember), it is a pitiful, terrible picture. A lonely woman who is doubly exiled — she is in exile from exile — and Abraham’s firstborn son lies dying under a tree. Now, we know the unlikely story that is the birth of Isaac. Against all odds, God shows the way that his eye roves around the margins, his heart is with the exiles, the barren, the women. Like Noah, God remembers.

And I think the point here is that God remembers. His kindness and mercy expands even beyond the original covenant he gave Abraham, as the father of many nations. God makes it clear that his promise will come through Sarah, but his mercy expands when Sarah, in desperation and doubt, messes with it all by giving Hagar to Abraham in view of her own barrenness. Ishmael is born entirely of Sarah’s own faithlessness, and in a harbinger of Jacob and Esau, Jacob and his brothers, and in an echo of Cain and Abel, Lot and Abraham, we have two warring brothers. But rather than consign this boy and his slave mother to the dustbin, God actually extends the covenant to him also; when Abraham fears for Ishmael as they go into the desert, God says this: “Do not be distressed because of the boy and because of your slave woman; whatever Sarah says to you, do as she tells you, for it is through Isaac that offspring shall be named for you. As the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring.” Breathtaking mercy.

And then the narrative moves even closer to the intimate details of just how close Ishmael’s death comes. “When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come lift up the boy, and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink. God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow.” My mother’s heart breaks when I read this story. So utterly at the mercy of cruelty.

And yet my heart is lifted with this insight, and perhaps gives me a reason for its centrality as the crux of the Abraham chiasmus. Like Noah — stranded in the middle of a flood — God hears, stranded in the middle of a desert. The name “Ishmael” means “God hears”. And immediately after God hears Hagar crying in the desert, hears the last wispy breaths of Ishmael under the tree, she “sees” the well of water, in an almost inverse parallel to Noah, who sees land in the midst of the sea. And all of this, of course, prefigures the next test that Abraham must face as a father: first he consigns his first son to the desert and to death, and next he must sacrifice the heir to the covenant. I hope your imagination is now running with the prefiguration: Abraham also miraculously sees the ram, under direction of an angel from heaven, who saves his son Isaac from death: “But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham! Abraham!” and he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God; since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns.”

If I can point out one more fascinating thing about the Hagar story. There are two Hagar stories, two attempts on Hagar’s life at the hands of Sarah. The first was when Hagar ran away from Sarah, and the second is the one we have spent some time discussing tonight, where Sarah actively casts out the slave-girl Hagar. Both of them follow the same shape, which is echoed by the story of Isaac’s sacrifice. A journey into the wilderness, encounter with an angel, divine consolation, miracle at the site, and naming of the site. In the first casting out into the desert, Hagar responds to God, as the angel appears to her, “You are El-roi” (which means God of seeing or God who sees) for she said, “have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him.” Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi;” (which means The well of the Living one who sees me”). Can we go back the chiasmus for a minute? In some ways, then, Hagar’s story is a microcosm of the entire Abrahamic story. The exile, the wandering in the desert, life on the margins. Then an angel appears, and confirms God’s favour and delivers God’s promise. God hears. Then the protagonist opens their eyes and they see. And in response, they build an altar to God in worship. So, at the centre of the Abrahamic story is a mini version of the wider story itself, confirming God’s interest in the margins, in restoring and rescuing those who are very nearly almost snuffed out, either by the vicissitudes of life or by infighting and cruelty. God is beyond none of it. At the centre of this story — as with Noah — God listens to a desperate and frightened human voice.

And Hagar’s story also microcosmically prefigures what is to occur in Exodus: a people in exile, hungry, wandering, alone in the desert, and God hears. And it microcosmically prefigures what is to occur hundreds of years later, in the figure of Jesus, also cast out into the desert.

Now, to come back to our purposes tonight, we can see a pattern emerging because of our attention to the structure and form of Genesis. A pattern of exile, rescue, worship and expanding covenant. If we look at the two stories side by side, we can see echoes backwards and forwards, drawing our attention to the attributes of a listening God, and a wandering people. Any aberration that human beings seem to throw at the covenant — like Sarah does with Hagar — only expands the covenant, only makes the means of mercy greater and more creative. God’s eye is ever on the sparrow, and his hand it comforts me.

To quickly come back to the patterns of rings throughout Genesis. In each story, be it primeval or patriarchal history, we see this same pattern. Exile, covenant, human folly, God hears, God preserves the remnant and confirms the covenant. Trace it through, I dare you! And so, what we have in Genesis — provisionally — is an aesthetic pattern that gives us a theological shape. Be those stories allegorical or realist, the pattern is the same, and I think it behoves us to take note. God’s eye is on the remnant, and his promises hold fast. It is his power that saves — like Psalm 149 which we spent some time on last time — not our might. The smaller and more desperate the remnant, the greater his salvation.