The book of Genesis refutes lots of bad ideas that were current in the day, because it told a very different story of how we got here. A non-Israelite living in 1,000 B.C. would certainly have heard the Bible’s account of creation and been very confused. But was it written to rebut the wrong thinking of the cultures around Israel only? Is it true to claim that this text is making theological claims and not scientific ones?

If you’ve done much reading recently on the origins debate, you may have noticed that those who want to make room for evolution in Genesis 1-2 have moved past theories like day-age and gap. The new rationale is that Genesis is a creation myth, an origin story written by an ancient people. Other cultures and civilizations had their stories about where we came from, and such stories normally focused more on making sense of the world than they did on the material origin of the universe, or so the logic goes. In such a cultural arena, the story in Genesis is designed to push back against those false claims, not to give us a literal material origin of the universe. Genesis is making theological claims, we are told, not scientific ones. 

How does this play out? Maybe it’s better to show you than tell you. As we have discovered more and more of the creation myths of Israel’s neighbors, several things have stood out, commonalities or contradictions that we see in the Genesis account. For example, many of Israel’s neighbors believed that creation began with a dark, tumultuous water from which everything came. That does, in fact, sound a lot like Genesis 1:2, where immediately after we read that God created the heavens and the earth, there is a watery depth the Spirit is hovering over. Ancient stories had a greater focus on organization of the cosmos, and similarly Genesis 1 seems to provide a nice orderly account of how God worked to bring beauty and order to the earth. 

But perhaps more interesting than the overlap is the differences. For example, many of the ancient stories began with gods giving birth, and then fighting, and killing one another. In contrast, the story of the Bible tells of no other gods except the God who single-handedly created everything. Ancient stories describe great battles that led to the creation of the world. In the Bible God merely speaks. In ancient cultures, the sun was highly revered and the stars were thought of as divine. In the Bible the word “sun” isn’t even used (it’s called the greater light) and the stars are an afterthought. Ancient Mesopotamian sources also believed that mankind was created by the gods for slave labor. The Bible, on the other hand, teaches that man was made to rule over the earth on God’s behalf. Ancient cultures thought their rulers were the very image of God, but in Scripture every person is made in the image of God by merely existing.

All of this adds up to a very different story, at times using similar language but turning it completely on its head. That different story will lead to a very different outlook on God, the world, and humanity’s role. It is a counter-narrative, a story told for apologetic purposes to help people reorient their way of thinking. Living in the shadow of great empires like Egypt and Babylon, and walking into the land of Canaan, God gave a story to His people to help them reshape their thinking.

Read More