Genesis — themes & analysis

Genesis opens with not one creation story but two, side by side, in different voices. The first runs from 1:1 to 2:3. It is stately, liturgical, repetitive in the way of a hymn — and God said, and it was so, and God saw that it was good, and there was evening and there was morning, the second day. The God of this account is called Elohim, the generic Hebrew word for divinity in the plural form with singular verbs. He stands above the waters and speaks the world into existence in seven days, with the Sabbath as the crown. Human beings are made on day six, male and female together, in the image of God.

Then at 2:4 the camera changes. The divine name is now the unpronounceable Tetragrammaton, usually rendered LORD in English translations. The earth is not water but dry dust. God forms a single man from the dust, breathes into his nostrils, plants a garden eastward in Eden, watches the man name the animals and find none of them adequate. He puts the man to sleep and forms the woman from his rib. The God of this account walks in the garden in the cool of the day. He is closer, more anthropomorphic, more conversational than the God of chapter 1.

For most of the last three centuries the standard explanation has been that these are two different sources — the Priestly account of chapter 1 and the older Yahwist account of chapter 2 — joined by an editor who chose to keep both. The editor's choice is what matters most for a reader. He could have harmonized them. He did not. He let two visions of the relation between God and world stand next to each other on the page and trusted the reader to hold both. The Bible begins with that double witness.

What the two accounts share is the proposition that the world is good — created, declared good, made for the creatures who live in it. What they disagree about is the angle. From above, in chapter 1, the world is structure, dominion, the orderly alternation of light and dark. From below, in chapter 2, the world is a garden, intimate, made for a man who is lonely and for the woman who answers his loneliness. The Bible begins by refusing to choose.

Where to follow it: Genesis 1 (the cosmic creation), Genesis 2 (the garden).

Genesis 3 is the chapter on which more theology has been built than perhaps any other in the Hebrew Bible. The man and the woman are in the garden. They have been told they may eat from any tree but one. The serpent — the most subtle of the animals, the text says, with no further explanation — asks the woman if God has really forbidden the tree. She answers. The serpent says: you will not die; you will become like God, knowing good and evil. The woman looks at the tree, sees that it is good for food and a delight to the eyes, takes, eats, gives to her husband, who eats. Their eyes are opened. They see they are naked. They sew fig leaves together. They hide.

The scene is told in roughly two hundred Hebrew words. Almost everything in the Western tradition's account of human fallenness is built on those two hundred words and what comes after — the curses, the expulsion, the cherubim with the flaming sword. Augustine's doctrine of original sin, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Catholic and Reformed accounts of grace and nature, the modern secular intuition that something is wrong with the human condition that does not seem to be wrong with the rest of nature — all of them go back here.

What the chapter actually says is harder to pin down. The Hebrew Bible itself rarely refers back to Genesis 3. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian development, particularly Augustinian, that reads Paul reading Genesis. Jewish readings have generally been more various and more tentative. What is undeniable on the page is that something is broken between chapter 1 and chapter 4. In chapter 1 the world is good. In chapter 4 Cain murders his brother in a field and lies to God about it. The chapters between are the account of how that became possible.

The long consequence runs through the rest of Genesis. Cain's line ends in violence. The flood comes because the earth is filled with violence. The covenant with Noah after the flood acknowledges that the inclination of the human heart is evil from its youth, and God commits to working with that. The patriarchs are not pure men. Abraham passes Sarah off as his sister twice. Jacob deceives his blind father. Joseph's brothers throw him in a pit. The book does not pretend that the human beings whose story it is telling are unfallen. The fall, on the page, is the fact pattern the rest of the book has to work with.

Where to follow it: Genesis 3 (the garden, the serpent, the expulsion), Genesis 4 (Cain and Abel).

Genesis 6-9 is the part of the Bible that an average person on the street can probably summarize without ever having opened it. The world becomes wicked. God resolves to destroy it. He chooses one righteous man, Noah, and instructs him to build an enormous wooden box and fill it with animals, two by two. The rains come for forty days. The fountains of the deep are broken open and the windows of the heavens are opened, and the waters rise above the highest mountains, and every living thing on the dry land dies except those in the ark.

The story is older than Genesis. The flood narrative on Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, recovered from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh in 1872, tells essentially the same story — a single survivor, an ark, a mountain, birds sent to test the waters, animals saved two by two — and is at least a thousand years older than the Hebrew version. There is also a Sumerian flood story, a Babylonian Atrahasis epic, and flood traditions across the ancient Near East. Genesis takes a story its first audience already knew and tells it differently.

What is different is the covenant at the end. In the Mesopotamian flood stories, the gods regret the flood because they have lost their human food supply, and they more or less accidentally swear off doing it again. In Genesis 9, God makes a formal covenant with Noah, with Noah's descendants, and with every living creature — never again will I curse the ground because of human beings, even though the inclination of the human heart is evil from its youth, and never again will I destroy every living thing as I have done. The rainbow is the sign. It is the first covenant in the Bible, and it is universal — not with one people but with all humanity, and indeed with all flesh.

The theological move is precise. The flood does not solve the problem of human evil. The post-flood world is not better than the pre-flood world. Noah, the righteous man, gets drunk almost as soon as he is off the ark and curses one of his sons. The flood demonstrates that purification by destruction is not the answer, and the covenant commits God to working with humanity from the inside out instead. Everything that follows in Genesis — the call of Abraham, the patriarchal promises, the long descent into Egypt — is the development of that alternative strategy. The flood is the option that gets ruled out.

Where to follow it: Genesis 6 (the decision), Genesis 7 (the flood), Genesis 9 (the covenant and the rainbow).

Genesis 12:1-3 is one of the four or five most consequential paragraphs in the history of religious writing. The Lord said to Abram, Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Abram is seventy-five. He is married to Sarai, who is barren and decades past childbearing. He has no son. He goes.

The scale of the call is what makes it strange. God does not promise Abram an experience. He does not promise enlightenment, or salvation, or even an afterlife — Genesis is famously sparing on the question of what happens after death. He promises land, descendants, and blessing for the families of the earth. The promise is for a future Abram will not live to see. He will die owning only a single field — the cave of Machpelah at Hebron, which he buys in chapter 23 to bury Sarah. The descendants will be slaves in Egypt for four hundred years before they ever return to the promised land. The blessing for the families of the earth is still being argued about three thousand years later.

What Abram does is believe the promise anyway. The famous line in Genesis 15:6, after God has shown him the stars and told him his descendants will be that many — he believed the Lord, and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness — is the verse on which Paul will later build his entire theology of justification by faith, and on which the whole Reformation will turn. But in its original setting the verse is doing something more concrete. It is saying that the relationship between Abram and his God is going to be a long argument in which Abram's part is to keep walking even when nothing he was promised has yet happened.

The pattern repeats. Sarai gives Abram her servant Hagar, and Ishmael is born, and God says the promise is through Sarah. Sarah is ninety. Sarah laughs. The boy is born and they name him laughter — Isaac. The promise is partial; the promise is delayed; the promise is fulfilled in tiny, almost grudging instalments that are nothing like what Abram had every reason to expect. And then in chapter 22 God asks for the boy back. The whole patriarchal cycle is the working out of that strange promise across three generations and into the fourth, and Genesis ends not in the promised land but in Egypt, with Joseph's coffin waiting to be carried home.

Where to follow it: Genesis 12 (the call), Genesis 15 (the covenant confirmed), Genesis 17 (circumcision as sign), Genesis 22 (the binding of Isaac).

Genesis 22 is nineteen verses long. It is the most famous chapter in Genesis and one of the most argued-over passages in world literature. After these things, God tested Abraham. Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you. Abraham gets up early in the morning, saddles his donkey, takes two young men and the wood and the boy, and goes. They walk for three days. On the third day Abraham sees the place from a distance. He tells the young men to wait — we will worship and come back to you, he says — and he and the boy go up alone.

The walk up the mountain is one of the most quoted exchanges in the Hebrew Bible because of how little is said. Isaac speaks. My father, he says. Yes, my son, says Abraham. Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb? My son, God will provide for himself the lamb. They walk on together — the text says it twice, as if the act of walking together past that question is what costs. At the place Abraham builds the altar, binds his son, takes the knife. The angel of the Lord calls from heaven. Do not lay your hand on the boy. Abraham looks up and sees a ram in a thicket. He sacrifices the ram. He names the place the Lord will provide. They go down the mountain.

Erich Auerbach, in the opening chapter of Mimesis, used Genesis 22 to argue that biblical narrative invented a kind of representation Homer never attempted. The Odyssey, Auerbach said, lays everything in the foreground — every feeling, every detail, every motivation. Genesis 22 leaves almost everything in shadow. We are not told what Abraham feels on the three-day walk. We are not told what Sarah is doing back at the camp. We are not told what passes between father and son after the angel speaks. The text refuses to tell us, and the refusal is the point. The chapter requires the reader to do the work the narrator will not do, and in requiring it produces a kind of narrative depth that has shaped Western literature ever since.

Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about this chapter — Fear and Trembling, 1843 — in which he could not decide what to make of Abraham, and the inability to decide is the book. Jewish tradition has read the Aqedah every Rosh Hashanah for two thousand years, and the rabbis have been arguing about it the whole time. The chapter ends with no resolution — only a son who was not killed, a father who passed a test he never asked to take, and a name for the mountain. The Bible refuses to explain.

Where to follow it: Genesis 22 (the binding), Genesis 21 (Isaac is born), Genesis 18 (Sarah laughs at the promise).