now we talked a little bit about different sources and the priestly source being one of these and we have a classic example of the priestly source here already in the first chapter of Genesis as most people know there's two there are two stories of creation and this one being more properly creation might say the story of anybody Eve will be creation phase two but we start here with the reading from the NRSV in the beginning when God created the heavens and the in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth now actually a
lot of translations would have said in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth yeah this this is it's a wonderful teaching moment right to think about yet the impact of translation right which is of course how almost everybody encounters the Bible is is through translation the Hebrew here were a sheet bara Elohim at Jemima Tara's right it's not quite clear exactly how it should be translated and these debates about what it means have gone back go back thousands of years the traditional view that is expressed in the King James is the in the
beginning God created which implies this creation ex nihilo right creation out of nothing yeah which becomes an important doctrinal points or was before then at the very least whereas the traditional Jewish translation advocated by Rashi most famously is in the beginning when God created or when God began to create and that led in the history of interpretation to notions of their having been multiple attempts before this one or multiple worlds there are lots of creative ways to go with that but what I always appreciate about about this opening verses but there's a doctrinal issue that
is based on create on translation right from word one which I always tell my students is a good reason that you should study a little bit of Hebrew indeed but now there are other creation stories from the ancient world which we barely touch on in these this discussion one of the famous ones the Babylonian a new may a leash and that also starts out when in the beginning because it's very difficult to actually imagine nothing right and I think this is what you don't get stories about creation out of nothing you always started in this
case it's Tohu Ivo who waste and voice yeah something watery chaos some some kind of chaotic situation yet is this the only model of creation we guess in the Bible well certainly not I mean there's another one we're going to encounter in the next chapter which is decide not a watery chaos but a dry dusty emptiness which is very different and then there are the far more mytha sized versions that we find for example in Joe where creation much like it is in some of the Mesopotamia myths is the result of you know cosmological battles
between yes Yahweh and Leviathan actually these are much more fun of creation but we get to maybe a dry one here that's how you could also say it's an exalted one it's a dignified one but it's actually quite exceptional it is a range of the way people thought about creation in the ancient world it is though it is also very it's very priestly right it is a very priestly notion of creation that everything is very ordered and everything is is put in its proper place in its proper time and when you're a priestess that's that's
what you're that's what you have to make sure is the case right everything has to be ordered and correct so that everything will work properly now an awful lot of people have spent an awful lot of energy trying to reconcile this chapter with modern science and I don't just mean fundamentalist and thinking of a book by a well-respected Old Testament scholar who may won't name it the cadres but who wrote and think it's seven pillars of wisdom something to that effect arguing that this really is you know an expression of a view of creation that's
quite the chord and with modern science so the breath of God becomes the big bang or something like that and there is I would say a cottage industry among scientists who happen to be religiously conservative trying to salvage science out of this what do you think of that about what it seems that you think of that you know I have always had a problem with people trying to reconcile science with the theological miraculous but the story here of creation is telling us something about what God did about God creating through you know verbal expression purely
through word the message of the origins of all life here is not it was evolutionary it may take a week and even if you say it was with the Lord the thousand days it says being about a thousand years since as a day even so right this ain't evolution not even not even close not even it's a different way of going asses like all stories of creation you know what you do is you start with world as you observe it and you extrapolate from that and so I think there's been an awful lot of wasted
energy I should probably mention here by the way that while it's unusual to have stories where God creates just by the word it's not unknown there are there is at least one Egyptian myths also Bertha God just gives the command and it happens now the model for that is that a king can order something maybe not a president but it came good or there's something in it would just happen and so well again well it's unusual it's not quite unique right one of the things that strikes one reading through Genesis one is in chapter 1
verse 27 God created humankind in His image in the image of God he created them male and female he created them and that she probably should be in the image of God he created him in the first case what he's the image of God you know this is again this is one of these words and phrases that I think has undergone so much scrutiny previously because our views over millennia of what God is have have changed so nowadays the idea of God having a physical representation at all is essentially unheard of in the ancient world
it's really really unimaginable that he wouldn't that he wouldn't tell you know the word that's used here for an image Selim is the word that's used often for idols for physics for statues for physical images and I think that we might not like the fact that the Bible suggests that by virtue of us being created in God's image it's necessarily the case that God sort of looks like us as well yeah but it's hard it's hard to get around it's hard to ground it especially when we read on when you get to the beginning of
chapter 5 in Genesis it says that Adam has a son Seth in this case who is in His image yeah right so the relationship the physical resemblance of son to father this exact same wording is used for the resemblance of mankind to know the inspiration for this idea I would think was that any Babylonian God would be a cult statue in the temple you have a way of representing the presence of God so I suppose you could say that besides the the physical resemblance there is also the idea that humanity is what represents God there
is and I think that there is some of that in in this creation story also the notion of mankind being godlike in a certain way certainly in this story in Genesis 1 where humans are created after the animals right there's something more to them right there there's animal life and then there's humanity which uniquely is in the image of God come back to that in a minute because it raises the question of how humanity is supposed to relate to the rest of creation before we get to that male and female yep he created him now
so does this mean the females also in the image of God I'm fairly certain that it does actually I think that I'm fairly certain that they're in order to read that verse any other way you have to do some very fancy footwork does it imply gender equality as some scholars have argued relative equality some other some other creation stories that we might come to you in a moment but you know gender equality at least in that fundamental relationship of humanity to God social equality in the way that modern scholars might think of it is sort
of out of the question though it is for the ancient world though it is interesting that this priestly source is the one that when it gives its ritual cultic laws later on in Leviticus it's perfectly clear that I think perfectly clear that both men and women are equally allowed access to the sanctuary equally allowed to sacrifice and bring sacrifices so there is a concept within the priestly source of some some reasonable equality but not not in the modern sort of no of course one of the things one has to bear in mind is that all
of Genesis 1 is laconic you know it's very terse and schematic and so it's making one point in a verse it isn't necessarily addressing every other question that you might bring to it and one of the issues that comes up nowadays in modern discussions of gender is then did God make everybody unambiguously male or female and I think you know we're not looking at that you would have to say God created night and day does that mean he didn't create dawn and dusk or there no AIDS in between but of course the story isn't meant
to address questions like that at all really it's also there you know what you raises reminds me of this relatively well-known rabbinic interpretation trying that tries to reconcile the male and female being created simultaneously here with the Adam and Eve story to come and there's their solution is that what God did here was created one being essentially with two faces facing right out male and female simultaneously and that they were then the androgyne right does the story we get in Plato and the symposium which I which I think is a fairly clear indication that it
is possible to read this story without without thinking that there is a clear gender divide in fact you know there's these famous readings that do quite the opposite but now it does then give us some indication of why he created male and female because in the very next verse we get be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it which we'll get to in a minute but be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth this has sometimes been taken as a commandment right right though but the problem is its grammatically a command right
it's an iterative do this but it's explicitly said right god bless them bless them with these words so you know what I would say is there's clearly a blessing element here right there's an element of right bestowing upon them and hoping for fruitfulness from them there is also a necessity there is a necessity for multiplication here right these are the only two people on earth they need to multiply if there is going to be a population Oh perhaps you know it says and fill the earth one might make the case we can stop now that's
exactly what I was going to say does that stop completely but not that do it it's about to play it great to say the question is great from them all right are the male and female in this story supposed to represent every human that comes thereafter such that we have all been commanded to be fruitful and multiply or was it actually given to these people in a historical setting be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and as you say once that is accomplished to a certain degree it's it's now sort of more a blessing
than it is an imperative command now there's another statement here that not only are you to fill the earth you're to subdue it and some people have looked at this first and said that this is the source of all our environmental problems in the modern world that humanity felt it could trample the earth any way it wanted to that a fair reading of this I think you could start by pointing out that most of the major corporations that are probably responsible for the environmental destruction are not reading Genesis every morning 2 SEC at they're doing
their job correctly I would also say the surprise I would be the price I would also say that we have to remember that in the ancient world that this came out of the capacity for humans to actually subdue the earth would be relatively limited if in fact there at all if you read the Bible you see how at the mercy they were of climate they had they were incapable of really subduing the earth that we can today more to the point I think the translation of this word has often been understood not so much as
subdue but maybe more in the sense of have dominion as humans have power over and a responsibility for the earth in the same way that a beneficent King has has responsibility for the well-being of his subjects and I think that that is at least a reasonable way to render the same the same kind of mission and I think again we have to remember how schematic and how laconic this whole chapter is so it's saying something about the relationship this you could say this is the flip side of being in the image of God that humans
are in charge here is essentially what it's saying but this chapter is never meant to enter into all the details of issues that would become controversial several thousand years later so that's one account of Genesis and in a couple of minutes we'll turn to a quite different account that we get in Genesis chapters 2 & 3 [Music]
