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LEAVING EDEN Lenn E. Goodman What Does Genesis Actually

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LEAVING EDEN Lenn E. Goodman What Does Genesis Actually LEAVING EDEN Lenn E. Goodman What does Genesis actually say about creation? Can we learn from a mes- sage sprung from so deep in antiquity? In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. The earth was formless and void, darkness on the face of the deep, God’s spirit brooding over the face of the water. God said: “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw the light, that it was good. God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night. Evening, and morning. One day. Painted in somber grays, the scene is suddenly lit up, then wanes into evening. The procession of days and nights begins. God remains unseen, beyond the light and dark, the earth and watery abyss. He is called Elohim here. The noun is in plural form but takes verbs in the singular. This open- ing gives a freshness to the God idea: The Creator is no familiar deity but unknown, unique.1 The plural form, says Abraham Ibn Ezra, is honorific. It sounds generic, abstract, setting a courtly distance, sidestepping deep per- sonification. God here is not the hero of some saga; creation is not a literary fiction. The word for heaven too (ha-shamayim) is not singular in form, but dual, perhaps reflecting some long dead cosmic architecture, yet already no more portentous than our speaking of the sunrise. The definite article (ha- sha-mayim), Ibn Ezra explains, shows that the familiar sky is meant. The plain intent: to account for the world we live in. Heaven and earth means everything natural: God made the world—earth, sky, and all they contain.2 The article was first published as Lenn E. Goodman, “Leaving Eden,” in Creation and Evolu- tion (London and New York: Rutledge, 2010), 42–75. Used with permission. 1 Targum Onkelos, the ancient Aramaic translation, renders Elohim here by the tetra- grammaton, meaning God Himself, lest one imagine some other deity is meant. 2 As the exegete Rashbam, Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir explains (at Genesis 1:1), the Hebrew Bible often uses summary statements that anticipate the subsequent narrative. Sasson notes summary sentences here and in 2:3: All was God’s work. If there were prior exis- tents, that “in no way deters God from creating many things out of nothing. For example, light . is created ex nihilo, and then simply contrasted with darkness. In fact, no item which God orders into being by using the jussive y’hi (let there be) within a va-yo’mer (He said) statement can be said to emerge from preexisting materials,” “Time . to Begin,” 187–90. 72 LEAVING EDEN The vision of a unified cosmos shines through in a homely ancient gloss: God made heaven and earth together, “pot and lid.” Ultimate Causality The Torah assigns God neither lineaments nor lineage. There is no back- story. Other creation accounts, some familiar to ancient Hebrews, tell of battles subduing the Sea or River. But here the writhing coils of Levia- than or Tanin, the turbulence of Rahab are stilled.3 The Mosaic Law, Philo writes, is no mere fiat. It has a cosmological preface. The legislator is the Creator. But the Law is not tricked out with mythologies, as if to bare God’s motives. This is no aftermath but the beginning. That speaks pow- erfully, if obliquely, of God’s goodness. The only face here is the surface of the deep. Brooding over it, with a rustling hinted in the sound of the word (meraḥefet), is a wind or spirit said to be of God. In the bold whimsy of one ancient reader, that rustling presence is the human soul.4 The rare word for brooding, a participle, feminine, to match the gender of ruʾaḥ, wind or spirit, recurs when the song of Moses recalls God’s finding Israel in a howling waste, brooding over them as an eagle stirs his young (Deu- teronomy 32:11), no alien god beside him (32:12). The fierce, protective pres- ence that brooded over the waters still sustains God’s beloved. In the Talmud (B. Hagiga 15a) Ben Zoma will say that this spirit was hov- ering like a dove over its young. An eagle, Rashi explains (at Deuteronomy 32:11), does not just burst into its nest but flutters overhead, not settling its weight on the fledglings but hovering, “touching but not touching.” 3 Bible critics know Rahab as a turbulent goddess. In the Psalms (89:10) and Isaiah (51:9) she is cut to pieces—a deity no more. Here she is simply absent. “It is now practically impossible to locate a biblical commentary which does not devote many pages to Enuma Elish. I doubt, however, that Israel was much interested in the theologies of other nations, if only because its own theologians did not have ready access to Pritchard’s hefty Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament from which to mount their polemics. Lin- guistically tehom [the deep] could be related to Tiamat [the pagan goddess] only indirectly, through a link which is missing from the evidence at hand. Tehom as an adversary for God makes fullest sense only in creations where the combat metaphor is dominant. While this particular metaphor appears frequently in Scripture, it is not featured in Genesis where there are metaphors of rearrangement and of craftsmanship. Therefore we should recog- nize that here, as elsewhere, tehom is a poetic term for bodies of water . theogony or the birth and emergence of God from preexisting matter is a theme which the Hebrew writer could not profitably discuss. It is this reluctance which makes the Hebrews so dif- ferent from their more mythopoeic neighbors who repeatedly retold how deities emerge either from unformed matter or from each other.” Sasson, “Time . to Begin,” 188–91. 4 Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 57, following Ezekiel 37:14..
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