biblical canon. “Genesis” is a book of “beginnings,” a book of firsts for humanity shaped by the tools of an ancient Israelite worldview. “Revelation” is a book that “discloses” or “unveils,” a book of endings for humanity viewed through the lens of an early Christian perspective. Together these biblical writings sketch out a story of God, humanity, and all creation, a narrative that moves from the beginning to the end with ourselves in the middle, a narrative that calls us to live in a certain way, shaping our identity and our values in light of our origins and our destiny.
In the Beginning . . .
No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.
– native american proverb
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.
– george bernard shaw (1856–1950)
The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.
– anais nin (1903–1977)
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
– charles dickens (1812–1870)
If you want to know the end, look at the beginning.
– african proverb
Reading Ancient Origins Stories
Once upon a time . . .
Only four words. Yet these four words, placed at the beginning of a story, are evocative. They set the stage for a story of a princess and a prince, a story of mysterious magic and true love, a story ending with equally evocative words: and they all lived happily ever after.
If you are a native English speaker raised in a Western society, chances are you will immediately know the genre: it is a particular kind of folk tale commonly called a fairy tale, made popular by a wave of animated Disney films over the past century. Not only that, but you will know exactly what to do with this story, how to interpret it. You would not take the opening “once upon a time” literally, as if the narrated events really did happen at a particular time and place in human history. Nor would you put much stock in the final “and they all lived happily ever after”; if you thought about the words at all, you might smile ruefully to yourself, since “happily ever after” is so rare in real life. Rather, you would read the story as a fictional tale intended to entertain or, at most, to reinforce certain social values—the importance of making good moral choices, maybe, or perhaps a societal ideal of romantic love.
But we can look a little deeper. How does truth work in such a story? The fairy tale is not “true” in the sense that it accurately relates events that happened in human history. But the fairy tale does have its own kind of truth: like all texts, its truth is related to its purpose. As we have just noted, a fairy tale is supposed to entertain, or perhaps to support certain social ideals. If the fairy tale does indeed provide the promised entertainment, then in a very pragmatic sense it can be said to be “true.” More significantly, if the values it reinforces are in fact good and useful within the particular society in which the tale is told, then in a more profound sense it can also be said to be “true.”
We can push these reflections even further. How do you know these things? How do you know that this story is a fairy tale—that it did not actually happen, that it should not be taken literally, that it is intended for entertainment or social reinforcement? Again, if you are a native English speaker raised in a Western society chances are you know all this intuitively. Sure, you may have formally studied fairy tales at some point, but quite likely you picked up on most of this already as a child, even if you could not have expressed these ideas at that time in quite this way. If, however, you are not a native English speaker raised in a Western society, you would have to learn about fairy tales in order to make good sense of them.
All this is related to what is perhaps the most crucial key for interpreting any text, whether ancient or modern, secular or sacred. That interpretive key is understanding the text’s genre, or the kind of literature it is.
A genre is like an implied contract, an unwritten agreement, between the author and the reader of a text. The genre establishes a framework, certain conventional guidelines or constraints, for creating and understanding the text. The author of a text works within the conventions of that particular genre, perhaps stretching those guidelines in some new directions, but still in a way that is recognizably that genre. She will indicate the genre through a variety of means—none explicit (the author will not start off announcing, “This is a fairy tale”), but rather implicit: through characteristic words or phrases or topics or themes, or through such features as the piece’s style or length or structure. Once you recognize the genre—whether intuitively or through careful determination—you are better equipped to interpret the text, to discern whatever truth (or even goodness or beauty) it may convey.
So you will interpret a history textbook differently than a historical novel, even if they speak of the same historical setting. You will read a newspaper editorial differently than a front-page report, even if they are on the same topic. A Shakespearean sonnet will make a very different impression on you than a vehicle’s mechanical manual, even if you really love that car. And you will understand and experience the truth of a cookbook in a very different way than you would the truth of a chemistry textbook, even if they describe the same chemical processes.
But if you miss the text’s genre, you will miss the text’s purpose, and that can get you into all sorts of trouble. Woe to those who mistake historical fiction for a history textbook! (Remember The DaVinci Code?)
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Genesis is certainly not a modern folk tale or fairy tale, but what is the genre of Genesis? If you were a librarian 2,200 years ago in the ancient library of Alexandria in Egypt, where would you put your newly acquired scrolls of Genesis? Should it be placed alongside the Greek histories of Thucydides, or with the fables of Aesop, or perhaps beside the narrative geographical sketches of Patrocles?
If you were that ancient librarian, more than likely you would place Genesis alongside writings known today as Enuma Elish and Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh, primeval stories from ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, essentially where modern-day Iraq is, and extending up into Syria. Babylonia was the most prominent of the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms at least as it relates to ancient Israel. Ancient Egypt itself had similar primeval stories inscribed on stone walls and coffins (making it a little hard to fit them into Alexandria’s library!), but these stories were later copied and collected together with other religious writings in what is known as the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts. All these primeval stories could be called “etiological narratives”; that is, they depict in story form “why things are the way they are,” describing the nature and function and purpose of common realities in the storyteller’s lived experience (realities such as deities, religious worship, human beings, ethnic groups, languages, and so on) by telling a story of the origins of those realities. A more specific type of these etiologies is a “cosmogony,” an account of the origins of the earth and life on earth from the perspective of the storyteller or her community.
Ancient etiologies and cosmogonies such as Enuma Elish and the stories in the Pyramid Texts were not so much concerned with the precise when and how of these origins, or whether the stories happened in history exactly as described—though undoubtedly many ancient Babylonians and Egyptians believed the world had been made just as their stories said. Rather, these stories functioned at a deeper level to shape the worldview of these peoples by answering the who and the what and the why of human existence in the world: Who are the gods? What is the world? Who are human beings? Why do human beings exist? What is our purpose related to the gods and the world and one another? What (if anything) is wrong with the world? How (if at all) can things be made right? This is in fact the way truth works in such ancient etiologies.