The Infinitely Generative Power of Genesis

Next week’s Torah reading begins at the beginning of the beginning, with the first chapter of Genesis—469 words in the original Hebrew, 597 in the JPS translation—describing the creation of the world in a way that has fundamentally changed it.

Imagine trying to tell a story about the creation of not only the universe but this world and humanity in the language of a folk tale in under a thousand words. It must convey the origin of everything that is, including living beings, but identify its fundamental nature and its moral and spiritual value. In the course of the story, a supreme Intelligence will bring forth order and life through words. The words of the narrator of the story must somehow reflect in majesty, beauty, and structure a cosmos and world produced by the most sublime acts of oration imaginable. Unless the authors of Genesis had risen to this cosmic challenge, you would have thought it impossible.

Instead, they produced a literary work about the creation of our world that has influenced how we have perceived ourselves, governed ourselves, and spiritually inspired ourselves beyond any other single work in human history. The poet and classicist A.E. Housman once wrote that he valued poetry by its ability to bring a tingle to his spine. He admired verses from Blake where Housman himself—a master of conveying content with precision and clarity—could not understand what Blake was actually saying (Housman 1933). If you believe nothing about Genesis is true, just an ancient myth, you could still admire it, be enraptured by its artistry. But the impact of Genesis on humanity is not merely as a literary treasure. Far beyond thought, it conveys radically important concepts in a manner that is exceedingly compact and evocative.

God creates the world step by step from chaos (Genesis 1:1–2). We are taught that chaos is the default condition of the universe—structure, order, distinctions are essential to producing the material world as we know it, and ultimately life itself. At each stage, He surveys His work and sees that it is “good” (Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). After creating human beings, He concludes that the creation is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). We learn that it is good that we have an orderly universe, and that within it, there are living beings, and that ultimately among them there are human beings “made in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). Is there any more succinct and powerful way to reject nihilism, lifelessness, and death? To affirm that we should be grateful we have a universe, and within it, human life, and within that, our own?

All human beings have the same origin. All descended from Adam and Eve, all in the same family, all shaped and limited by being a part of the material world, but all endowed equally with the inherent dignity of containing a spark of the Ultimate (Genesis 1:27; 2:7). We are all capable of acts of creation. Reproductive creation is part of the plan, and it is an ongoing chain of creation, but within the course of a life, each and every human being created can think, discover, know, feel, plan, write, sing, make moral choices, educate, help to inspire the next generation.

The Enlightenment political project was largely based on the embrace of the vision of human equality and freedom in Genesis (Nelson 2010). The modern project of science is also largely owed to Genesis. The vision is of a world that is the product of a creative intelligence who made choices—and we learn later in Genesis, sometimes regretted them (Genesis 6:6–7). Science is not about discovering how the natural world must work according to an inevitable scheme. Science requires actual observation of the world we find ourselves in; it requires observation, experiment, reflection (Hannam 2011).

Science also requires an attempt to find underlying order in the real world to the extent that exists. The language of science is mathematics. Genesis deploys numbers in their most simple and stark form. Genesis does not merely set out a sequence of numbers from one to seven, first day of creation to the day of rest (Genesis 1:5–2:3). It starkly refers to “Day One,” “Day Two”; there is no subtlety like “First Day,” “Second Day,” or “the next day.” The number used, seven, is a number in Hebrew and other societies that conveyed the idea of order and completeness (Hannam 2011).

Many words have been spilled trying to explain—or reject—the idea that Genesis conveys a story of world generation that is consistent with, or even anticipated, theories like the Big Bang Theory or Darwinian evolution. There is a mysterious consistency, but it would be far-fetched to expect that an ancient story aimed to provide the kind of precision of modern science and be absolutely compatible with its best-tested theories. The aim of Genesis was to use the folk story format to convey fundamental ideas and feelings; it was not to be a physics or biology primer.

Genesis also provides a foundation for modern history writing. The Israelites have been called “the first historians,” seeing the course of human events not as the repetition of an initial mythical template, but as a story in which change is possible, including change for the better (Halpern 1988). The Israelite approach was to search for causes in the unfolding of the lives of its characters, its nations, and the world as a whole. The first chapter of Genesis is a story of progress: from a grungy cosmic mess to the step-by-step creation of space, time, and the living beings that inhabit them (Genesis 1:1–31). The progress is ascending: each day of Genesis there is more structure, more order, more creations, and eventually more life, and finally, human life.

But the Jewish sense of time includes not only repeating modes – like days, weeks, months, years – but also an ongoing progression of events starting with Genesis. The Creator rests on Day Seven and he will invite living things to rest on the Sabbath. But God does not end his watch over the world on Day Seven, he will intervene again, such as the rebirth of freedom during the Exodus. The human beings he has created will observe the cycles of the calendar, but they will move forward in history, learn from their achievements and mistakes, and at times achieve a new enlightenment – as at the acceptance of the spiritual and ethical revelations at Sinai. Thomas Cahill has written that among the gifts of the Jews has been an appreciation that human affairs need not, should not, move in a pre-patterned loop; we can progress in all dimensions. There can be setbacks, catastrophes, regressions, but human beings can pick up where God left off—with the occasional intervention by God—and continue cultivating the natural world and improving themselves as individuals and nations and a shared humanity. In the Jewish sense of time, there are regressions, lapses, descents into idolatry and chaos; but we look forward as well, to an ultimate earthly time of peace and serenity.

Moral equality; science based on combining observational curiosity with a search for a specific, often mathematical, order that underlies the details of creation (Hannam 2011); history that is open to understanding through the search for cause and effect and seeks to understand the past better so we can build a better future. The ideas formulated in Genesis have endured and helped to change the world for the better. But without the literary mastery with which those ideas were conveyed, the ideas might not have been preserved, might have been forgotten, might not be so alive today.

The first word of the first sentence: Bereshit. Scholars still debate whether the word refers to a discrete opening act or whether it refers to the beginning of a series of acts of creation. In the opening chapter of Genesis, there is a progression of creative acts. They culminate in Shabbat—but that is a pause, not a conclusion (Genesis 2:1–3). The Creator has spoken into being not only a dynamic system of physics, but plants and animals that reproduce—always producing new life that is of the same kind but individually variant. And on the sixth day, human beings are created, in the image of the Creator, with their own creative capacity, for good and bad (Genesis 1:27). History is just beginning.

Notice that “Bereshit” includes the root of “rosh”, a word that can mean “head,” “the top,” the “leader.” The Israelite sensibility, which became the Talmudic and Jewish sensibility, is about using concrete terms to evoke the biggest questions and concepts and dilemmas and imperatives. Much idiocy and cruelty would be spared in world history if “thinkers” had constantly anchored themselves in the real world and specific examples. One of the most brutally stupid things ever written is by the brilliant Hannah Arendt, who, on the eightieth birthday of the Nazi “thinker” Martin Heidegger—a peddler of gobbledygook too often mistaken as philosophy—excused his excursion into pure evil as an example of how a pure thinker could get lost in thought (Arendt 1969). “Thought”? Did he “think” about the colleagues expelled from the university, the innocents rounded up and penned in concentration camps, the murderous tactics and homicidal aims of the Nazis from the onset and throughout their rampage of torture and murder? In contrast, Adin Steinsaltz, the late genius of Judaic scholarship, spoke of the “sanity” of the Talmud, by which he meant its grounding of the most challenging discussions and speculations in specific, visible, audible, palpable examples from this earth (Steinsaltz 1976).

The first chapter must be read with the story that follows throughout the Bible; the later stories comment, fulfill, challenge the earlier stories, and in the Tradition, we try to read the whole as one coherent but endlessly generative account. The opening words of Genesis are echoed in Exodus, the Prophets, and the Psalms, each time as a reminder of God’s originating act of radical creativity, which included creating creatures who are duty-bound in gratitude to Him but possessed of their own powers of creativity—be it faithful, zealous, or ungrateful and perverse. The word “bara” that follows “Bereshit”—for “created”—is used only in connection with God (Genesis 1:1); the choice of the word and its absence in any other context is a sign of the unique, distinct, and supreme nature of the Eternal.

Listen to them together: “Bereshit bara”. Each begins with a muscular, expulsive sound, an echo of God’s speaking the world into being.

The next word is “Elohim”. It is a plural word for gods. But “bara”, “creates,” is a singular verb: “He created,” not “they created” (Genesis 1:1). The verbal and conceptual effect is profound. You expect a plural and hear instead a singular. Unlike the surrounding polytheisms, the Israelites believed in one God, imbued with all the powers and more of the bickering, limited, individualistic, all-too-human gods of the pantheons.

And the word “Elohim”—starts with a soft vowel, then the gentle “l,” another vowel—the sounds of spirit and air and freedom—air sounds that barely land or do not land at all—and ending in the “m” of Elohim, an “m” like murmur or mama, a soft closing. Genesis then speaks of the “wind,” meaning the “spirit,” of God hovering over the chaos (Genesis 1:2). The chaos is described as “tohu va-bohu”, which sounds like jingle-jangle or razzle-dazzle, evoking nonsense. The word “bohu” might not be a real word, just a nonce word, a made-up word to make the rhyming pair. And “bohu” is in contrast to “bara”, created.

The first few lines of Genesis, and we are just getting started…

In the Jewish tradition, the physical world we know is starting in Genesis, human history is beginning, and in our literature, we are at the beginning of a chain of stories and stories about stories and interpretation and rituals and prayers…

Hebrew is supremely suited to the literary challenge of Genesis. The style is radiant compactness—a word, a syllable, a letter within a word—can generate all kinds of thoughts, emotions, ideas. Hebrew permits extremely compact expression. Bereshit bara… in the beginning, God created… two words in Hebrew, five in the King James Bible, itself beautifully succinct in its attempt to echo the Hebrew style. The Hebrew root system means that a swirl of variations around a solid three-consonant root permits all kinds of variations—from standard grammatical variations such as conveying past and present, singular and plural—but also lighthearted punning and profound allusions and reinforcements.

Just the first few words of the first few lines of Genesis… The combination of conceptual and literary power makes it worthy of the beginning of the book that has been the most read of any book ever written, the most impactful… and to those for whom it resonates, the most meaningful, terrifying, reassuring, and endlessly echoing.

—

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1969. “Martin Heidegger at Eighty.” New York Review of Books, October 21, 1969.

Cahill, Thomas. 1998. The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

Halpern, Baruch. 1988. The First Historians: The Hebrew Bible and History. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Hannam, James. 2011. The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.

Housman, A.E. 1933. The Name and Nature of Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nelson, Eric. 2010. The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Steinsaltz, Adin. 1976. The Essential Talmud. New York: Basic Books.