This morning I read the first 25 verses of Genesis, the account of the creation up until the creation of the “man” (ADAM) from the “ground” (ADAMAH; btw, I’m going to be really lazy with my Hebrew transliteration). Like the Matthew genealogy, this is a pretty routine passage that I’d normally skip over rather quickly. Also like the Matthew passage, it has some oddities that make me sort of chuckle. After all, how can you have day/night (v. 5) when you haven’t even had the creation of the sun and moon (v. 16). Silly Bible! But what struck me on this reading was that that silly aspects of it come from the imposition of our order on the creation narrative. That is, the narrative is told in such a way that it makes sense to a human reader who is using to the work of creation. Even the verbs used, like “Make” and “See” and “Declaring Good” are the types of verbs we’d use to describe a bench we’re making or a field we’re plowing. With this language, the narrative of creation seems rather mundane. I liken it to other “creation” narratives in the Bible, like the creation of the tabernacle or the re-building of the walls of Jerusalem. There is a particular order of steps that are followed, and each builds on the last. So, you have light/darkness created so that you can have day/night. You have the firmament put in place to separate the waters so that you can have dry land and gatherings of water, so that you can create beasts to fill the waters and beasts to fill the earth.

But back to those oddities that make me laugh in the narrative. These break up this ordering. They make me pause in the narrative and realize that my normal structure to this creation doesn’t make sense. They’re like those little tears in the Matrix that give you some sense that what you’re seeing is not really the reality. Like Origen’s “stumbling blocks” in the gospels, the oddness of the creation account gives me some sense that I’m not getting the full picture, just one take on what may have happened. People tend to get squeamish in seminary world when we talk about the creation narrative, science, etc. But the reality is, why would we want a creation narrative that literally recounts how everything got made, in 6 days no less. Surely the process was a bit more complicated than 25 verses can capture. So I tend to appreciate this narrative for what it is: a human’s imagination of a divine act. This is why we put it in stages. This is why we personify the divine as satisfied with a good day’s work. But this is also why we have a “dome” that separates heaven from earth. This is also why we have irregularities that don’t add up. Of course they don’t add up, because what we’re doing is translating a divine act into human language. That’s going to “fail” in some sense every time. And thank goodness that is does. A divine act that can be sufficiently captured by human language is not all that divine, methinks.

So I’m going to enjoy continuing to read this human narrative of creation, told with language that is so human and workmanlike. I am going to enjoy it not because it completely captures what happened in those 6 “days,” but rather because it attempts to give me some sense, in language I can understand, and imperfectly at best, the majesty of what has been created. God made it all. That, to me, seems to be what the author’s getting at. It’s up to me to realize that recognizing that everything was made by that same divine figure, in whatever manner it was made, has some serious implications for how I treat other things and beings.