creation

3 Comments January 4, 2010 Steve A. Wiggins

Over the holiday weekend I listened to an amusing recording my wife gave me as a holiday gift. A comedy troupe known as the Reduced Shakespeare Company produced a recording of their sketches entitled The Bible: The Complete Word of God, abridged. As might be expected from a comedic treatment of sacred writ, there were a few moments that were calculated to make those who take their religion very seriously tremble a bit, but overall the recording was quite funny. While listening to it, however, I became aware of just how much time the Company was spending on Genesis.

Not a sophisticated, exegetical approach to the Bible, a comedy album is not the place to assess the status of serious biblical study. Nevertheless, a deep truth emerges from this lighthearted treatment of the Bible — people today tend to focus too much on the beginning. Every semester I ask my students, “What is Genesis about?” and inevitably the answers begin with, “the creation of the world.” Genesis is not about the creation of the world, despite its unfortunate title. Genesis provides two of the many biblical creation accounts, but its primary purpose is to introduce the Israelites and the special relationship Yahweh has with them. Nearly four-fifths of Genesis deals with Abraham and the next two generations of proto-Israelites. Once Exodus is reached, we are fully within the realm of Israel’s story.

This misunderstanding of how to read the Bible has led to countless uninformed attempts to make the Bible into a narrative of the science of cosmology. Nobody was present for the creation of the cosmos, and the point of Genesis is not to state what actually happened. In borrowing mythic themes from Mesopotamia and Egypt, at the very least, the biblical writers start their account of Israel’s origins with a “a long ago in a land far away”-style introduction. Modern-day readers are trained to latch onto first sentences for vital clues as to what happens further along in the story. The Bible was never intended to be read this way. When we mix ancient ideas of setting the scene with modern attempts to understand our world, it might be better to listen to the Reduced Shakespeare Company than to pundits who claim that earth’s light was created before the sun.

In the beginning was a laugh

3 Comments October 13, 2009 Steve A. Wiggins

In my Ancient Near Eastern Religions class we have been discussing Egypt. Students have been giving their deity reports and have been shuffling their feet in an embarrassed way when they have to discuss some of the gods’ various sexual activities. I have to assure them that this is not “dirty talk” or pornography — it is simply a pre-Victorian way of looking at the world. Understanding of the mechanics of conception and fertilization, involving, as they do, microscopic gametes, has only fairly recently emerged. Ancient people knew that sex led to kids, but they didn’t know how. When you can’t explain it, pass it along to the gods and forget about it!

Ancient Egypt is often where this disjunction appears most clearly. Various gods in a constellation of creation myths (Atum, Ptah, with others probably standing in line) onanistically generated the matter that makes up either other gods who reproduce sexually or the very stuff of the universe itself. This explanation of the world was not profane or vulgar; indeed, it was the very sacred act that brought all of this into existence.

When we look judgmentally on earlier religions we are condemning our own ancestors. It has become abundantly clear in recent years that ancient religions freely borrowed from each other and developed their own distinctive traditions without wholesale rejection of the earlier cultures they knew. It has even been suggested the Psalm 8 might reflect this very form of creation as an echo in the Hebrew Bible! So instead of looking nervously at our feet, or trying to find a big stone to throw at the heathen while our eyes are down there, it is best to recall that religions grow out of unions and parturitions of other religions. Unless they are created single-handedly — and this is what originates the concern in the first place.