So I wrapped up a six-ish month tour in the book of Genesis last week. The theme that struck me most this time through was how many starts and re-starts occur in the first several chapters. All of the re-starts come after things bottom-out pretty bad.
Bottom out #1: Genesis 3, Adam and Eve sin and are kicked out of the Garden. Of course, things only get worse as Cain kills Abel and Lamech gets his revenge "seventy-seven fold."
Restart #1: Genesis 5, a recap of the fact that God created male and female in his image (in case you've forgotten it) and a description of the birth of Seth, who somehow makes up for the Cain and Abel debacle.
Bottom out #2: Genesis 6, people are wicked and God's going to wipe them off the face of the earth. Only Noah will be saved.
Restart #2: Genesis 9, and the covenant with Noah--with the familiar command to "be fruitful and multiply."
Bottom out #3: Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel--God gets ticked off at the arrogance of the people, confuses their language and scatters them everywhere.
Restart #3: Genesis 12, the call of Abram and the covenant with him. This is really where the narrative settles down and focuses on this one man, his interactions with God, and the roots of the Israelite nation...as well as the Messiah who is to come, the one who will bless all the nations.
Of course, there's more Genesis/re-start language at the beginning of the New Testament. John's gospel starts with "In the beginning" as a deliberate echo of Genesis 1:1. And there's the beauty and power of the church being launched in Acts 2 as a deliberate un-doing of the Tower of Bable incident. There everyone is re-gathered in the name of Jesus, and the beginnings of all the nations being blessed is seen and experienced at the I.P.O. (that's "initial public offering" for those of you who don't buy and sell on Wall Street all the time like I do) of the Christian church.
Bottom line: I think that our love of new beginnings and our occasional longing for fresh starts is a fractured and murky reflection of God's love of His fresh starts. He loves to do new things. He especially loves to do new things that are in line with His old things.
3 comments:
Those are good points, but you can also thank those people to whom theological scholars refer as the J,E,D, and P sources. The 4 different writers of the first 5 books of the Bible's Old Testament. They had a really bad hang up with adding stuff to other's works.. thus the two Genesis creation stories. I love this stuff though, it's so interesting. But you're point is right about the bottoming out and restarting, but lately I think that's how most people get through life.
Great insights, Alex. Genesis is such an amazing book - both on its own and as a summary of where the Bible as a whole is going. I particularly love the connection between Babel and Pentecost.
I also love the theme of estrangement and reconciliation between brothers. For me, the pivotal passage on this subject is Jacob wrestling with God. Here is the big turning point, where God himself enters the fray, and is conquered by Jacob in order that he may do well, where Cain did not.
Lparsons: Perhaps I'm being a bit of a sophomoric snob here, but I don't tend to give much credence to source criticism. There's the old saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - and it is especially true in this case. It seems ridiculous to me that every work of genius - Shakespeare, Genesis, Homer - was actually produced by a committee compiling different sources. Not to mention the coincidence that we just happened to find all this out now. Anyway, I doubt most of these scholars are artists.
Genesis is an amazing work, and I have no doubt that the author built on his own traditions. There is such unity and artistry in the storytelling. What would it be without the opening creation story? Of course it absolutely belongs! It opens with a shout, and then jumps into the more personal story in the second. This is not a "tampering" with someone else's work - it is the masterstroke of a composer or an artist. You might as well say (2000 years from now) that all the great movies of the 20th century had all their prologues filmed 5 years after the original showing.
On source criticism, check out this link. It is an attempt at deriving the different sources that went into making The Lord of the Rings. It's marvelous satire, but the notion raises a great point: given only Peter Jackson's movie, could you discern what parts are PJ's, which parts are Tolkien's, and which parts Tolkien derived from various mythologies?
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