Understanding the Evidence: Interpreting Genesis in Ancient Near Eastern Context

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Understanding the Evidence: Interpreting Genesis
in Ancient Near Eastern Context

© 2016Richard E. Averbeck

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

I sincerely believe in the truth, authority, and reliability (inerrancy) of the Bible, including the early chapters of Genesis. But how does God himself intend that we read these first chapters of His Word? Some would argue, for example,that Genesis 1 clearly teaches that God created the whole universe in six literal days, one right after the other,followed by a seventh day of rest. After all, there is the evening and morning formula throughout the chapter, day by day, and the fourth commandment reinforces this when it bases the seventh day Sabbathon the creation week (Exod 20:11).

Others say this is an overly “literalistic” way for us to read the text – that is, it is a misreading that does not properly allow for the genre and intent of the text,the figurative use of language, or the ancient Near Eastern context of its writing. For example, the six/seven pattern is common literary pattern in biblical and ancient Near Eastern (ANE) literature. Could it be that God intended from the beginning that the ancient Israelites read the 6/7 pattern in Genesis 1 as a literary motif well known to them, and that we need to take that into consideration when we read it today? This and many other features of the chapter may suggest that perhaps the account has been schematized. The story has been given this literary shape for the effective telling of it in ancient Israel. I will return this particular point later in this paper.

The goal of this essay is to clearly set forth the ANE literary and iconographic evidence that may inform our reading of these early chapters of the Bible.[1]My own primary text expertise is in the cuneiform world, not Egyptian, but I will do what I can to take the latter into serious consideration as well. As will be noted below, methodological issues abound in the “reading” of these source materials themselves, and in theirapplication to the Bible. But they have self-evident importance for helping us read the biblical text in its ancient real world context, and from the point of view of their concerns, rather from our own modern point of view. The ancient Israelites were ancient Near Eastern people, and it was to them that God addressed the Book of Genesis in its original setting. Yes, it was written for us today too – this current generation of believers – but in our reading of the Bible today we must not ignore the fact that God initially revealed himself to them in the first instance, not us. No one among us questions this. The real question is how much and in what ways should our current knowledge of the ancient context influence how we read the text today?

My colleague and friend, Lawson Younger, has written well on this methodological question. In the present essay the plan is to walk through specifically how all this might come into play in reading the early chapters of Genesis. The intention here is to be relatively thorough, as well as judicious and fair, in the treatment of both the Bible and the ANE material and the various scholarly views regarding the relationship between them. Of course, from time to time my own opinions will become self-evident on certain points, but the goal here is not to set forth a particular position, other than the fact of the importance of the data and its inclusion in the interpretation of the Genesis creation narratives. We will walk through Genesis 1 and 2 step by step, and from there into some important connections to Genesis 3-4. The structure of the text tells us that Genesis 2 is the beginning of the unit that runs from Gen 2:4 through chapter 4. The purpose here, however, is to focus our attention on the interpretive issues that arise from consideration of ANE comparative materials, not deal every issue that one could raise in the interpretation of these chapters. I will leave that in the capable hands of Jack Collins. 

Genesis 1:1-3

1In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (NIV)

There is much discussion over the first three verses of the Bible these days. Traditionally, v. 1 is taken to be an independent temporal sentence stating the original creation of the “formless and empty” universe of v. 2 at the beginning out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. Many have moved away from this interpretation, suggesting that v. 1 is indeed an independent temporal sentence, but it serves as a summary title announcing what is to follow in the chapter. The latter interpretation is accepted in the notes of first edition of the NIV Study Bible. Both are given as legitimate options in the second edition, where the note includes this remark: “Although creation out of nothing is implicit in Gen 1, for more complete statements see Isa 45:7-18; Rom 11:36; Col 1:16-17.” One might add Heb 11:3. The translation itself remains the same in either case, but if v. 1 is treated as a title of the chapter it stands parallel to the other unit titles in Genesis – the “generations” formulas throughout the book (Gen 2:4; 5:1; 6:9; 10:1; 11:10, 27; etc.). Such a formula could not work in Gen 1:1 because these generations formulas always link what is before to what follows, and there is nothing written before Gen 1:1.

Some other English versions read v. 1 as a temporal clause introducing a sentence that runs through v. 2. There are various forms of this but, for example, the NRSV reads, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” This rendering makes it clear that Gen 1:1 does not refer to creation ex nihilo. All of vv. 1-2 provides temporal and circumstantial background for the creative words of God that begin in v. 3, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ so there was light.” There are a total of nine of these throughout the chapter. Issues of Hebrew grammar could also be raised here, but this is not the place to enter into that discussion.[2]

The ANE context enters the discussion at this point. One of the well-known features of creation stories in the ANE world is the fact that many of them begin with a deep, dark, watery abyss, much like what is described in v. 2. Perhaps the most well-known of these creation accounts is the Babylonian creation mythEnuma Elish, the oldest extant tablets of which date to the Middle Assyrian period (1300-1100 BC). It begins this way:

(1)When the heavens above did not exist,

And earth beneath had not come into being –

There was Apsû, the first in order, their begetter,

And demiurge Tiāmat, who gave birth to them all;

(5) They had mingled their waters together

Before meadow-land had coalesced and reed-bed was to be found –

When not one of the gods had been formed

Or had come into being, when no destinies had been decreed,

The gods were created within them: . . .[3]

Tiāmat is the goddess of the depths of the sea (cf. tĕhôm in Gen 1:2b, “and darkness was over the face of the deep”). She had serpentine while Apsû is the god of the underground waters. The name Enuma Elish comes from the first words of the composition, “When (the heavens) above.” The similarity to the beginning of Genesis 1 bĕrēšît “In the beginning” is obvious. Both compositions begin with a temporal clause, and at the beginning there was water – only water. The deep dark watery abyss is also one of the standard starting points for creation in the Egyptian world. For example, in one Coffin Text we read: “. . . on the day that Atum evolved – out of the Flood, out of the Waters, out of darkness, out of lostness.”[4]

Of course, in Enuma Elish there follows a theogony (i.e., creation of the various other gods). In this way Genesis 1 is completely distinct. There are no other gods at all. In fact, there appears to be certain amount of polemic against the common belief in multiple deities. Moreover, in Genesis 1 the creation of the cosmos follows immediately after the introduction of the deep dark watery abyss at the beginning of the account. The material creation of the cosmos in Enuma Elish comes much later in the composition, starting at the end of Tablet IV and ending with the creation of humanity in Tablet VI, each tablet consisting of about 150 lines of text. This is after a long account of disputes among the gods and the consummate and victorious battle of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, against Tiamat, the serpentine mother of the gods. We shall return to this battle later in this essay.[5]

After defeating her, Marduk split her body in two and set up one half as the cover, heaven, and the other as earth below which, in turn, is over the Apsû, the underground source of waters. Heaven became the realm of Anu, the god of heaven, Ea was already the god of the Apsû, and Enlil became the chief deity over the world of air and land that stands between them. After the whole cosmos was properly created, arranged, and assigned to the appropriate deities, Marduk also determined to make humanity to relieve the work of the gods by feeding and otherwise caring for them. He employed Ea, the god of wisdom and crafts, to kill Qingu, Tiamat’s previous partner in crime, and used his blood and bones to create humanity.[6]The point is that this composition gives a great deal of attention to the material creation and functions of the cosmos as we know it even today.

So, we have evidence from Mesopotamia to Egypt that a deep dark watery abyss was a most natural and understandable starting point for a creation story in the ancient Israelite world. Thus, in Genesis 1 we watch God paint his literary picture of creation and the cosmos step by step, and he paints it against the same standard backdrop as would be normal in the ANE. The actual picture itself is really quite different in many important respects. Nevertheless, one of the ways in which it is similar is that God speaks his first creative word in v. 3 into the deep dark watery abyss of v. 2. As we follow this through the chapter, God progressively eliminates the conditions of v. 2. On day one he eliminates the total darkness. Each following day progressively eliminates some element(s) of the conditions in v. 2. If we take Gen 1:1 to be a title verse and initial temporal clause leading into v. 2 rather than original creation of matter ex nihilo, this should not surprise us for a creation story written in the ANE. It certainly would not have surprised the ancient Israelites, since they were ANE people. They would not necessarily have expected a statement of creation ex nihilo. Perhaps that is why God did not bother including it in the account of creation as it is given in Genesis 1.

Genesis 1:6-8

6And God said, “Let there be a vault (Hb. rāqîa῾) between the waters to separate water from water.” 7So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so.

8God called the vault “sky.”(Hb. šāmayim ‘heavens’) And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day. (NIV)

On day two God separated between the waters above and below so that there was not just one big watery abyss as in v. 2. The whole question of what the rāqîa῾ is has been a subject of scholarly debate and variation in the translations. NASB, ESV, NET, and Tanakh render it “expanse” (= “space” in the NLT); the NIV has recently changed its translation from “expanse” to “vault” (= “dome” in the NRSV and “firmament” in the KJV, NKJV, RSV, ASV). We shall enter into all the details of this debate here.[7]

Another well-known ANE creation tradition comes into play here wherein creation does not begin with a deep dark watery abyss, but with the separation of heaven from earth to create a three level universe: heaven above, earth below, and the region in between where man does the work and the gods have their temples. Actually, this has some basis in the texts cited above when you consider that, for example, the Akkadian tradition in Enuma Elish where the watery beginning leads immediately to a theogony, not a cosmogony, but the battle against the evil serpentine sea monster, Tiamat, comes later in the composition. Her defeat leads to splitting her body in two so that one half was raised up to create the heavens above the earth, with the world of humanity and the temples of the gods in between. Sumerian texts, however, tend to begin immediately with the separation of heaven from earthand do not include the battle with the sea monster. Before dealing with this tradition in more detail, however, it is important to set aside what I and some other scholars believe is a common misunderstanding of how the Israelites and other ANE peoples saw their world.

A Common Misunderstanding

For a long time now it has been common for scholars to represent the ANE and Israelite view of the cosmos in terms of a picture in which there was a body of water above the stars held up by a dome (see NIV “vault”; Heb. rāqîa῾ mentioned above), the dome had sluices for the rain water to flow through, the sun, moon, and stars wereeither imbedded in that dome or suspended below it, and so on. Many artistic representations of this supposed ancient world view have been produced and affirmed by scholars.[8]Consider, for instance, the picture of the cosmos as it is presented by T. H. Gaster in his article on cosmogony in the first volume of the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible:

From Egypt we have their native ancient representation of something similar. There the goddess Nut is stretched like a dome over the earth, the stars are embedded in her body, the earth god Geb lies on the ground, exhausted from union with Nut, and the air god Shu holds up the sun and sky, among other things:[9]

Wayne Horowitz, for example,questions whether the ancient Mesopotamianswould have really believed that such pictures represented physical reality. Perhaps they thought of them “in metaphysical or mystical terms.”[10]The doyen of ANE iconography as it relates to the Bible, Othmar Keel (along with his co-author Silvia Schroer), writes as follows:

The thought, pictorial representations, and language of people of that time were generally symbolic – that is, neither entirely concrete nor purely abstract. . . . People in the ancient Near East did not conceive of the earth as a disk floating on water with the firmament inverted over it like a bell jar, with the stars hanging from it. . . . The textbook images that keep being reprinted of the “ancient Near Eastern world picture” are based on typical modern misunderstandings that fail to take into account the religious components of ancient Near Eastern conceptions and representations. All ancient Near Eastern world images imply the involvement of divine powers that, especially at the beginning, make possible the cohesion and functioning of the parts of the cosmos . . . Ancient Near Eastern Images are conceptual, not photographic. They combine aspects of (empirical) experience of the world and worldly outlook, . . .[11]

Increasingly, therefore, scholars are beginning to doubt that the ANE peoples believed in such pictures. These representations do not take into account the fact that, for example, the ancients knew that it did not rain unless there were clouds in the sky. And they knew what clouds were because they knew what fog was. Moreover, the clouds sometimes obscured the sun, moon, and stars, so the water that fell from the sky were not above these heavenly lights. Much more could and should be said about the problems with this longstanding scholarly reconstruction.

The point here is that this picture has been built from misunderstandings ofthe analogical expressions that are found in the texts, and a lack of recognition that the ANE peoples from Egypt to Mesopotamia, by and large, considered the cosmos to be populated by gods who managed the various elements of nature and culture. They knew they were doing analogies when, for example, they made the waters of the deep into two deities who cohabited in order to birth the other gods (see the citation from Enuma Elish above). It is based on the human experience of marriage, family, house, and household – an analogy that everyone could identify with from their own experience and could extend to the gods and the cosmos in the form of familial relationships on the divine level as it relates to the temple household and estate in their community.[12]Egypt is somewhat different but likewise analogical, with the union of Nut and Geb, heaven and earth, in the Egyptian depiction of the cosmos. Their religious cult gave them a means of engaging with it; again in analogical ways such as the feeding of the gods and festival rituals enacting their human concerns on the divine level. In general, mythology is analogical thinking and ritual is analogical action. Sometimes they are directly related; sometimes not.