How should we read the early chapters of Genesis? [Moberly]

Moberly, RWL, How should one read the Early Chapters of Genesis?, from Reading Genesis After Darwin, OUP 2009, ed. Barton and Wilkinson

Two sentence summary. Darwin would only make a difference to how we read Genesis if we read the text at face-value, like creationists do; but tensions in the story suggest that it was artificially constructed from originally disparate narratives. A face-value reading is therefore wrong-headed, and Darwin should not make a difference to how we read the early chapters of Genesis.

1. The difficulties of reading Genesis at face-value.

1.1 Introduction. Certain kinds of face-value readings of Genesis 1-11 meet with difficulties. These difficulties were recognised a long time before Darwin by exegetes like Origen, whose work reminds us that Genesis was not always read creationistically. In a similar manner to Origen, Moberly undermines face-value readings by pointing out elements of the text that stand in tension with their context. (While Moberly focuses on Gen 4-9, the same sorts of arguments could be made for Gen 1-3.) It is possible to resolve all of the issues below; but it is much harder to resolve them and also do justice to concerns and form of the narrative.

1.2 Cain and Abel. The context is the outset of human life on earth, but the story presupposes the earth is populated.

• There are advanced divisions of labour (tiller of the ground/keeper of sheep).
• Cain deliberately kills Abel in the open countryside, i.e. away from settlements where no one can see.
• Cain complains about becoming a restless wanderer who will be killed if found, which is only an issue in a widely populated world.
• At the end of the story there is a reference to the building of a city (‘ir).
• Whence Cain’s wife?

1.3 Noah and the Flood.

• The story seems to have priorities other than historical realism.
• We hear divine soliloquies, and we hear them on the same level with everything else in the story. We hear nothing from Noah.
• The narrator has no interest in practical feasibility: what animals were on the ark, how they got there etc. (Though the narrator is very interested in the entry and exit from the ark, and the increase and decrease of flood waters, matters that don’t interest most readers.)
• The ark is impractical. Those inside appear to be in total darkness, since it has but a door (which God closes from the outside) and a hatch (not a window, otherwise Noah could have just looked out of it, instead of releasing the dove through it).
• After a year under the sea the trees would be indistinguishable from seaweed. They would not show fresh life (the freshly-plucked olive leaf) or be in a state to house a dove.
• The wider narrative context is written as if the flood never happened.
• The Nephilim are said to be ‘on the earth in those days and also afterwards’ (Gen 6.4; they appear again in Num 13.33).
• Cain’s pre-flood descendants are the ancestors of those engaged in certain pursuits, e.g. Jabal, ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock; Jubal, ancestor of those who play the pipe and lyre. The narrator is presumably referring to people known in his own time.

1.4 Language and drama. The perspective and convention embodied in the use of Hebrew language is characteristic of dramatic narrative portrayals, rather than of strict history.

• All characters in the story speak Hebrew, God and humans alike. For instance, the first human speech involves a Hebrew pun on ish and ishshah, man and woman (Gen 2.23).
• It is common among dramatic narrative portrayals (e.g. Shakespeare’s plays) for foreigners (e.g. Julius Caesar or Othello) to speak the language of the reader (e.g. English). The point of the story isn’t that God speaks Hebrew.

2. Moberly’s alternative to face-value readings.

• The story is composed of originally disparate narratives which were once located in the context of ancient Israel. But they’ve now been brought together and placed in a new context, the beginning of human history. The whole narrative sequence has been artificially constructed. This is why they stand in tension with each other, and with this setting. This is a common phenomenon in literature, and we need to take seriously the Bible’s literary character.
• The writers are juxtaposing certain archetypal portrayals of life under God to provide an interpretative lens for reading God’s call of Abraham and his descendents.

3. Consequences.

• The role of normal human processes in Genesis’ composition—literary conventions and the historical process of its composition—does not mean it cannot simultaneously be divine self-communication.
• If we understand the text as a narrative construction, Darwin makes no real difference to how we read the text.
• Darwinian biology does raise important questions though: what does it mean for an evolved creature to be ‘created in God’s image’?
• Belief in creation needs to be divorced from the modern idea of ‘design’, and the narrative’s own concerns with creation brought to the fore: creaturely contingency, responsibility, the difficult that humans have in genuinely trusting God as a wise Creator and living accordingly etc.