Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and I'm glad you've joined me for this episode where I am going to get into some nitty gritty ideas of higher criticism. This is, to me an intriguing topic, though I'm aware that many Christians do not like it.
Higher criticism is where we look at the origins of the text, and that makes some people uncomfortable because it's much, much easier to look at the Bible and say, well, God is the author of that, so we won't look at how we got this amazing text. But that doesn't leave any room for intellectual curiosity or honestly looking at the text because let's face.
The Bible was edited and compiled. This fact does not speak against the sovereignty of God in any way. So we [00:01:00] need and feel threatened by studying higher criticism. Of course, it is true that many higher critics have had motives that we do not agree with, and it is fair to look at these motivations when we are studying higher criticism, but there's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And looking into the sources of the text is one thing that can help us get into the heads of the original authors because we can understand their motivations and we can understand the purpose of the text anyway. It's bizarre to me that people don't want to know these kinds of things, and I get that people don't like the discomfort of speculation and the fact that there's really no way to know a lot of this for certain.
We like our buttoned down answers and descriptions, and I get that. I, I really do. But we're here to explore. So higher criticism being a really broad umbrella. Let's narrow down what we're gonna talk about today. I've mentioned before the idea in the [00:02:00] scholarly world of the documentary hypothesis. You might also have heard of the four letters, J E D P, to describe this.
So here's a brief rundown of this. The documentary hypothesis is the suggestion that the first five books of the Bible came from four distinct sources that were later combined into one. The first five books of the Bible are also known as the Pentateuch, which means five books. And they are also called the Torah.
In episode 15, I talked a bit about how many, many people believe that these books were written by Moses, that Moses wrote. Um, somewhere like 97% of these books, we have to leave a little room for some editing of at minimum place names. And also he didn't record his own death and that kind of thing. So we know for a fact that there was some redaction going on.
Redaction just means editing was done. A redactor would be an editor [00:03:00] you've maybe seen in some TV show, some kind of legal document where some of it was blacked out so you couldn't read it. Some of the material was redacted. So we might have an idea that redaction has a sense of removal of information, but it could just be that a redactor is preparing a manuscript for publication.
So the redactor of the Pentateuch would be the person or group of people who put the text into the state that we see it today. It doesn't have to be a nefarious or suspicious type of activity. Okay? So if you hear the word redactor, that doesn't have to mean any funny business. It can just mean editor or compiler, that kind of thing.
All right? Because of some of the information in these first five books, we know at minimum that there was redaction going on, that there was editing. That's obvious to anyone who looks very closely at the text and the geography and all of that. It's simply incontrovertible. But we have the most common idea coming from tradition that [00:04:00] Moses wrote these books, and these are known in the New Testament by Jesus himself.
Even that these are the, the books or Law of Moses. So if he's labeling these books like that, then case closed, right? Except it doesn't have to be identifying them with Moses may be just as simple as the fact that he's the central figure of the action for the story. And the books themselves do claim that Moses wrote some of the things down, and we have speeches from God that Moses would've had to record.
So yeah, Moses wrote at least part of these books for sure. There is simply no reason to see it as being a negative idea that an editor or compiler could have come along later to put all of this various material together cohesively. This doesn't speak against the idea of revelation. The Bible is a compilation of many books.
That fact alone speaks to the nature of the Bible that we don't need to be threatened by it. Having various human authors who had different reasons for writing [00:05:00] nothing in the general idea is the least bit threatening to God, his sovereignty, or the idea of the Bible as revelation. We have to trust that the Bible has been preserved by many hands.
Absolutely hundreds. Really thousands of people have helped pass this text along throughout history. Okay, so, but the documentary hypothesis is a particular proposal that the Pentateuch came from four distinct sources, that there were originally four authors who wrote four documents, and these documents were later compiled into one, and this would be the Torah that we have today.
Now, you can kind of see why this theory in particular might seem a bit threatening to the concept of Revelation once you start seeing these bits and pieces that were supposedly from each of these four authors. Because some suggestions make it look like the Torah is a patchwork quilt. And if it's edited by that much, well, how does it make sense that we [00:06:00] could have revealed material if this was necessary?
We start wondering, well, where is the real history? Were these people actually real? Or were these stories just made up and later put together to just look like a historical narrative? And those are fair things to wonder. Now, in case you're curious, I don't land on the side of affirming this hypothesis in the way it was originally presented, and most scholars now think it has effectively imploded upon further research, or at least that this idea needs some severe modifications.
This theory was the scholarly consensus for, well, maybe a hundred years or so. There was another idea proposed more recently called the supplementary hypothesis, and this is the suggestion that there was a core of material to the Pentateuch that got additions later. So we have competing theories today.
There is also the so-called fragmentary hypothesis where there were many texts which came together to form what we have [00:07:00] today. To be honest, I'll admit that these theories start feeling a bit pedantic upon close examination because we're just trying to reverse engineer the text in a sense. And there's just going to be a lot of speculation involved in that.
So now we have a lot of competing ideas with no clear winner in the consensus. However, I remain confident that we can still look at clues and gain some real insight that is helpful to us. And looking at the documentary hypothesis can kind of help us get started in that. So back to the documentary hypothesis.
How was it developed and when It's not a terribly old theory, depending on your definitions of old, uh, Julius Welhausen and is credited for the basic idea of the documentary hypothesis. He was a German scholar who worked in the later part of the 18 hundreds to the early parts of the 19 hundreds. The mid 18 hundreds on was a very interesting time of biblical scholarship in a lot of ways.
Uh, [00:08:00] so there are elements of the text that really stood out to these scholars of the time that made them start thinking about potential sources rather than thinking that these books were the product of a single author. These elements were things like tracing the different names used for God through the text.
Uh, that's a big one. Also, things like changes of style in the writing and potential duplicate events and supposed inconsistencies. Now, my opinion is that the duplicate events and supposed inconsistencies can usually be explained. Literally. I mean, the redact, whoever they were and however many texts they were putting together were certainly smart enough to remove things like duplicates.
So those things are there for real purposes in the text. In any case. Um, moving on. So I mentioned the letters, J E D P. These are shorthand for each of the sources. The J stands for the Jehovahs Source, also known as the [00:09:00] Yahweh Source. One evidence that the text came from here is the use of the name Yahweh.
The E stands for Ello Hist Source. This source references God by the use of the word Elohim, so that's the J and the E of J E D P. The suggestion that the text could be broken into sources via the use of the divine names was actually older than Welhausen, and got this whole thing on the track it was on, and it's probably actually more accurate to say that the fragmentary and supplementary hypothesis didn't didn't come last.
It's just that the documentary hypothesis came out strongest for some ideas of the time. In any case, the D in the acronym is Deuteronomist. That's always a fun word to say. This source is well found only in the book of Deuteronomy. So j e d p, the P stands for priestly. This is the source that is most concerned with the [00:10:00] priestly matters.
And again, the reason or the way that scholars divvied up the text in the four sources was for, or in regard to the themes that are noticed and the vocabulary used and the writing styles. And I agree that all of these things can and ought to be looked at when studying the sources of the text. Uh, we'll get to a further response about that in light of this particular theory in a minute though.
But this four source hypothesis has suggested potential dating for the various, uh, the various source texts, and those who, like this theory will quibble about this. But a general understanding is that the J document, the Jehovahs or Yahweh text, was the earliest, uh, dating around a thousand bc give or take from the time of Solomon.
The E document, the Eist was from the Northern Kingdom of Israel about a hundred years after that or so. So Jay and [00:11:00] E were the earliest and got combined first. Then came the de document, the Deuteronomist. This was said to be from the time of King Josiah. And finally came the P document, the priestly account, which was around the time of the ex.
So if you combine these dates with the theory, you can see how people will get up in arms about the revelation question. And I get that. It's like they're putting the cart before the horse in a lot of ways because you need to assume certain things in history to come up with this idea to begin with.
They're studying what they think history can say, and then they're trying to insert the text into the slots. That make sense? But we know how messed up our understanding of ancient history is, don't we? I mean, there are things we know, but we're always revising this in specific ways. As Dr. Heiser said, chronology is a quagmire and it's not nearly as cut and dry as we want it to be.
What sources do you trust [00:12:00] is one question that we need to wrestle with. And if you're taking the Bible as an ancient text to not be reliable in its historicity, then we're removing a lot of the evidence we have. But it's a chicken and the egg problem. Which one are we going to trust more and which one is going to have its authority over us?
In a sense, archeology is helpful, but it's hardly a clear science, and anything we get from that study needs to be held with an open hand ready for reinterpretation. So the entire dating scheme, well dating is always a risky venture, isn't it? The whole dating thing is hard, even when just looking at relative chronology, when you're not concerned with exact dates.
Of course, we have no texts of the Hebrew Bible that date to these times either. This isn't like QE form tablets where we have piles of them from various points in history. Uh, let's take the example of the stories of Gilgamesh. We have quite a few qna form [00:13:00] tablets from various points in time, which show that this story is definitely extremely old and it got changed through time to suit new purposes.
That's just what they did with texts and that tendency is one reason why some scholars assume that the Bible would not have been any different. But in any case, we can see some of the transmission history of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is interesting to me that in as much as the things change, a lot of it also stayed the same.
It's a very recognizable to the point that often it seems the older words, which were not common, were still used in the text, or that perhaps we have loan words that are used in the text. That kind of thing is extremely useful in dating the origins of a. You can see just in the last few decades here in English, how language use changes and dates people.
So we can see these things in QE form because QE form was written in clay, and clay doesn't decompose [00:14:00] like other types of manuscripts. So is the Bible just like these, that we have older texts, which were repurposed and reused and put together to look like a cohesive story? How do we think of that from the perspective of Christianity?
Well, I have a few questions that aren't adequately addressed in all of this to my way of thinking. Now, in principle, I have no problem against multiple sources and potentially the documentary hypothesis can help direct a few thoughts. I don't have a problem with the general idea that many things could have been written in history, that someone then later combined under direction of inspiration.
I think looking at inspiration as a process rather than a single event makes much more sense. In any case, God can certainly direct people through time just as well as he might direct any single person or orchestrate things in certain ways. But why, [00:15:00] for sources, if you're trying to keep things as simple as possible, I can appreciate that.
Part of the procedure of science, after all, is that it tries to find the simplest explanation that fits all the available data, and I think that's why they tried to land on four, so that's fair, but it's still arbitrary to some extent. There's frankly no way we could actively limit it like that to know it was only four sources, and then trying to fit those into a space of about five or 600 years.
Again, it seems that the epic of Gilgamesh spanned far longer of a time than that, so why limit these source texts to beginning in the reign of Solomon? Probably the reason for that is that it was assumed Israel as a nation didn't really exist prior to that as there is too much data in the text to suggest a connection to Egypt, and thus the Exodus that doesn't wash with me.
As I said [00:16:00] in episode, uh, episode 15, the fact that the Tabernacle description and some other things so closely resembles things we see in Egypt, I think that in itself is proof enough of the Exodus, but we're not going to discuss the Egyptian side of things just yet. Since the documentary hypothesis doesn't really accept much direct connections with Egypt as anything more than being an influence by a trade and international politics and the like.
We'll leave that discussion for another day. So, so far my issues with this hypothesis is, is that I don't think we can assume only four sources, and it isn't satisfactory for the connection with Egypt. The next big issue is that it assumes an evolutionary development of the Israelite religion. This is probably a big reason why the documentary hypothesis won out at the time over other theories because evolution was the big idea on the scene and everyone thought, Hey, if creatures evolve, then so do [00:17:00] ideas, and here's how we fit all of that into a neat little system.
I'm not particularly for or against biological evolution, but even there, we have to admit it's not really a smooth of an idea as was supposed originally. Things just get messy when we really look at them. Funnily enough, they don't fit into our pre-ordered and nicely packaged systems. That's not a reason not to pursue systematic thinking, but it's a reason to pursue rethinking all of those systems.
Another point, a style of writing is, well, it's not useless in determining source material, but when you have editing going on, how do you determine what the style of it was to begin with? And we most definitely do have editing, like throughout the whole text. So this idea that someone just copied and pasted text together, that's just silly.
Oh, look at that. We have two stories in the Pentateuch that look like they are just different versions of the same thing. That must [00:18:00] mean that they just copied those stories and didn't realize that they were the same story differently written. I mean, really the editors weren't smart enough to just take one of those out.
This is the point that the theory makes that I just really cannot take seriously. We could say the same about the use of the divine names. They weren't smart enough editors to fix all of that in some way. If you look at the text carefully, it's undeniable that there are layers upon layers of design. You don't get that by taping pages together randomly and looking at motivations of authors.
Yes, there are multiple reasons for the writings, but again, you can't split them into simple divisions, and I'll lay out some evidence for this. If you separate the text into having different sources, you're going to come across some problems when it looks like a particular section comes from multiple sources.
Actually, let's go ahead and get into an example [00:19:00] there. The theory came about first because of the different ways God is addressed. In some texts, he is known as Yahweh, and in some texts he is Elohim. The suggestion is that the name Yahweh was not known until later. So of course it couldn't have been used in a source that was written earlier.
Right? So that's why we have places where God isn't called Yahweh, except this isn't consistent. Genesis 2211 is supposed to have come from the E-source document, yet it uses Yahweh, the angel of the Lord. Lord, there is Yahweh. The fact is the different uses of the addresses for God can be explained quite simply by an appeal to different aspects of God and his relationship to humanity.
God is both the universal creator of all humankind, and he also took Israel as his own special people with whom he will bless all of humanity. That's a covenantal relationship. [00:20:00] So the different uses of terms could reflect these different realities. Which are actually the same reality, differently expressed now, it's commonly understood that passages in Exodus, like Exodus, uh, six, two through three, suggest that no one knew the name Yahweh before Moses.
But there are grammatical reasons to suggest that this is not a necessary interpretive option for that. It's too complex a matter to get into here, but in short, there are perfectly good options of translation, which don't suggest that the name is a new revelation to Moses. And if it's not a new revelation later, or even if it didn't come to be used later, but rather can be seen to have been used earlier, then the basis for separating the text by the use of names falls apart.
And if we can't separate the text that way, this theory effectively fails. Now that does not mean that we cannot speak in terms of different expressions of the [00:21:00] text. That's an entirely different thing. Can different parts of the Bible be used to communicate different things? Absolutely. I find that and in fact, quite essential, and that's the power of looking at things like vocabulary use.
It can hint at different intentions by the authors. However, it doesn't require different original sources and certainly not different times of writing. I mean, I just mentioned how different names for God can show different ways he interacts with humanity. Genesis one and two are fantastic places to look at this because Genesis one uses Elohim to refer to God, and Genesis two uses Yahweh.
Elohim translated as Lord God. So in J E D P theory, we might see Genesis one as an example of a text that came from E and Genesis two came from J because of its use of the names. However, this gets really [00:22:00] complex because most scholars categorize Genesis one into the priestly account because of the things like the introduction of sacred time on the seventh day.
Any mention of a holiness belongs supposedly to the priestly document. But anyway, my point is that we could just as easily see Genesis one as using Elohim because it's talking about God's relationship to the entire world. Genesis two uses Yahweh, Elohim because it is now describing the creation of man in detail and God's relationship, specifically with man is in Covenant.
Genesis two isn't concerned with creation at large, but rather how God and humanity intersect. I mean, in Genesis two, it's not about God creating the plants and animals, but about how plants and animals are subordinate to man's needs. So there's a hierarchy with God and man and everything else below that, whereas in Genesis one, it is God and all of [00:23:00] creation.
All right, well, at the end of the day, what we need to look at in regards to the documentary hypothesis is does it actually have strong explanatory power? Is it the best explanation of what we see in the text? Does it explain what we see better than the other ideas? Through the examination of the last few decades, it seems pretty clear that it just isn't the best explanation for pretty much any data point.
But I will say that it has brought us the boon of seeing the character of God in different aspects. Now, the lone exception to this might possibly be centered on the depictions of the priesthood, because in some places, like in Deuteronomy, all Levites are called priests. In other places such as parts of Exodus and Leviticus, it is the family of Aaron who are called priests and the rest of the Levitical tribe are more like the supporters [00:24:00] of the priests.
Just right off the bat though, I could think of a reason why there would be a distinction, just like Sacred Space gets more distinct and more holy as one interested. So might the family of priests Levites are the broadest category followed by the priests who enter into this space for specific work and then leading up to the high priest who is the only one allowed into the hol of Holies Plus, this only points out a potential unique perspective regarding the priests and documents related to the priests, which I do think there are reasons we can look at the text from a priestly perspective, but that's not the same as saying that unique documents were written later and collated together.
Just like we can see creation from different angles in Genesis one and two, we can use other texts to shine light on things in different ways, if that makes sense. In my current view, I think the documentary hypothesis has been useful in pointing [00:25:00] out some ideas regarding different perspectives and motivations and views in the text.
I think some level of this is fair and I'm going to try to show that, but this isn't threatening, and for the record, I don't see how we can possibly connect this to different places in history. I mean, we know there are different facets of how to view God's work. We have the perspective of the king, for instance, and the royal Court.
God is like a king and he grants his human family places in the court, but we also see God as a military conqueror. This is related to being a king, but instead of being focused inward on the people he rules, it is focused outward on the people who are not submitting to his rule. We see God as a loving father, as well as a communicator through the prophets, and we see God through the lens of the priest.
The priest is concerned with similar things that a king or even a father would be concerned with, but the priest is uniquely [00:26:00] centered on the theme of sacred space, and that's how I want to take all of this information. When someone talks about the documentary hypothesis and these various sources, I don't need to roll my eyes and say, boy, are you outdated with silly ideas?
To me, looking at the framework of J E D P is less about knowing source documents as it is about looking at the purposes behind the text. What is its focus? Now a bit of a spoiler alert, I do think there are ways we can see how the Bible comes from both the time of the exodus as well as the time of the exile.
In short, the themes that relate to Egypt are best explained by the people having actually been in Egypt. I know that's crazy, but there are too many Mesopotamian related themes as well, and this suggests that the people were also steeped in the Mesopotamian climate, which would be [00:27:00] explained by the time of the exile.
And the overabundance of the Mesopotamian themes to me suggests that the text did reach its final form during that time. Then lastly, of course, we also have all the Canaanite influences seen throughout the Hebrew Bible, including the massive amount of pagan worship that the people of Israel were mixed up with.
All of these influences look to me like a whole lot of historical evidence for what we see in the Bible where we have the people of God formed, put into slavery in Egypt, brought out of that, then put into the exile because they followed all the strange gods instead of sticking to the one that they really ought to have known was true.
Does that mean that everything happened just as it was recorded? Like an angel followed everyone around with a camcorder and then that footage was downloaded into the writer's brains when they were in a trance? No, but we have enough to form a basis for [00:28:00] historical reliability overall. Okay. I want to move into looking at the Bible, well, at Genesis in particular, or the creation accountants from the perspective of a supposed priestly writer, or perhaps I would rather say from the priestly perspective.
I realized that for some of you who aren't familiar with this stuff to begin with, all of this might be kind of reeling in your heads. So I wanted to back up and take a moment and sum things up and maybe restate things cohesively. The documentary hypothesis has suggested four sources for the first five books of the Bible and that these books were written from the time of Solomon to the time of the exile.
These four sources known by the acronym J E D P, are the Jehovahs or Yahweh document, the elo, his document, and the Deuteronomist document and the priestly document. After examination of the evidence, it doesn't seem like we could cut the [00:29:00] text up nice and neat like that. There is too much crossover between these supposed texts and there are too many other better explanations for what we see.
However, my opinion is that we can still look at the Bible from some of these different perspectives and say that different parts of the Bible are written for different purposes from different perspectives with different motivations. And what are those motivations? Those motivations would be things like explaining Israel's history through the construct of kingship, explaining the nation's foundation in covenant relationship with God.
Also, we need to see how sacred space and holiness are part of how God interacts with us. And also we need to know how does God relate to the rest of humanity outside his chosen people? Because you see, each of these questions or topics are really important and foundational, and so the Bible is going to explain everything.[00:30:00]
Everything with the lens of each of these things. And this. Fundamentally, this is the reason that fundamentalist or literal readings of the Bible don't make a whole lot of sense. When we read the Bible in the context of the concerns of the biblical authors, the writers of the Bible were not engaging with people who were asking questions like, how did the universe come to be?
Did the universe format of nothing? How long ago was the universe created? These are simply not the questions of the ancient writer. They're just not. Their questions were, how does the king relate to God? Where did our nation come from? What's up with the system of the priesthood? How do we interact with God?
Which is a question about sacred space. How does God relate to our nation and how does he relate to other nations? And also they are asking, why is our nation in the pickle it is in? If God is for us, [00:31:00] then why do we have all these problems? And why are the people of this nation not following God? How do we explain all of these things?
When we realize what questions they are asking, then we can know what questions they are trying to address and we can start seeing how these questions and answers are in fact embedded in the text. So ultimately it, it amuses me that we can use the discipline of higher criticism to help us not tear the Bible apart, but rather get deeper into the pages of the Bible and the heads of the ancient person.
It is in actuality the discipline of higher criticism, which caused backlash in confessional, in the confessional scholarly community to double down into the ideas of literal fundamentalism. Because confessional scholars were allowing the more liberal scholar to define everything. We don't need to let liberal scholars define the boundary lines, but we also don't need to discount everything they say because, well, [00:32:00] humility is a virtue, isn't it?
I think that includes intellectual humility. And curiosity. That's a good thing too. All right, so we're going to step away from the exact formulation of J E D P and broaden things up a slight bit. I want to show you how these different ideas, which stem from this can be seen in the creation accounts in particular.
And yes, this is about Genesis one and two in particular, but remember those just happened to be at the start of our books when we opened the Bible. Back in the day, these would've been scrolls and probably not everyone had the same scrolls. The first chapters of Genesis are not the only creation accounts in the Bible.
They just happened to be the ones that we read first. And you know, it helps that they are narrative accounts, so it makes them sound like these are the historical descriptions of creation. When we find creation accounts in, in the Psalms especially, it's much easier for us [00:33:00] to say, oh, that's poetry. It's not history.
It's all right. For poetry to describe things in metaphorical terms, and well, kind of, sort of fair enough, but do you realize how much history was written in poetical form? Right. We, we make these into separate categories, but the ancient world used rhyming and parallelism in all sorts of poetic structure to describe history.
It was the very form of an epic. So I think it's right of us to not take our modern categories of genre and place them back in the text. I see all kinds of claims that Genesis has every aspect of a continuous historical narrative, and yet, and yet everyone will also realize that the first 11 chapters are radically, radically different than the chapters that come after.
Anyway. Let's dig into the Bible. We're going to look at Genesis one, [00:34:00] Genesis two, and Psalms eight, A 74 and 1 0 4. There are passages in the prophets and so-called historical writings that we could also look at if we have time, but we gotta start an end somewhere. I also wanna bring to mind other creation accounts outside of the Bible.
In episodes seven and eight of the podcast, I talked about ancient near Eastern mythology and the Babylonian creation account. Auma. We've discussed in the work of John Walton, especially the idea that the ancient person did not think of creation out of nothing, but rather, they were thinking of organization of matter for some purpose.
The question is now how was it organized? What kinds of actions did God do to organize creation? Reading Genesis one, we see that God spoke creation into existence. He used the word, and we tend to leave it at that, but there are other, [00:35:00] uh, methods that God is seen to use. We haven't talked too much about the broad theme of the conquering of creation.
That's much more of a kingly military theme rather than a priestly one. The king's power stemmed from the gods and the gods were violent and blood thirsty. Conquerors. We have a lot of military image in the Bible, even of Yahweh. God being a conqueror, the theme of his strong right arm. This relates a great deal to the theme of creation in the Bible in ways we don't always see.
When we have Pharaoh chasing after the Israelites, as they cross the sea, what happens? We see the theme of creation here in the chaos waters and the rebirth of the people as a nation, as they cross those waters and the enemy is swallowed up by them in depth in death. Uh, we see Leviathan, the archetypical, chaos, sea dragon in relationship with God as well.[00:36:00]
Let's read a bit of Psalm 74 here, uh, in verses 12 through 17. Yet God, my king is from of old working salvation. In the midst of the earth, you divided the sea by your might. You broke the heads of the sea, monsters on the waters. You crushed the heads of leviathan. You gave him his food for the creatures of the wilderness.
You split open springs and brooks you dried up ever flowing streams. Yours is the day yours also, the night you have established the heavenly lights and the sun. You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth. You have made summer and winter end quote. Clearly there is the theme of conquering here, and some people want to harmonize this text with Genesis one, and some people are uncomfortable when they can't really do that directly because while we see God separating waters in Genesis one, like here we have the description of how God [00:37:00] divided the sea by his mite.
Well, we don't see God breaking the heads of the sea monsters in Genesis one. So what do we do with that? Just ignore it. Just call it metaphorical. Or can we recognize that maybe this text is just as much a creation text as is Genesis one, but it sounds so different. Well, of course it does because it has a different purpose.
This text in Psalm 74 is describing creation through the theme of the king and his military might, through the idea of power and conquering, which was simply how the ancient person liked to think about deities. Here's a question. It looks like there are, well different types of creation accounts, creation accounts that relate to the military king with the conquering or the sage, with the wisdom and the words, or the priest with the ordering of the cosmos.
Do different [00:38:00] types of creation accounts like this, do they indicate that the Israelites actually had different ideas of how creation was done? It's possible because they had different views of reality and priority, depending on if you were the king or the priest or the wise man. Each of these authorities related to humanity in different but all important ways.
What's interesting is that we could actually see Psalm 74 and Genesis one lined up in some suspiciously common ways, which Mark Smith suggests in his book the Priestly Vision of Genesis One. He, he suggested it's an indication that there was a common structure to the process of creation, but it was described differently depending on your perspective.
If this is the case, then we don't need to see these texts at odds with one another. Fundamentally, they just took the process of creation and wrote about it differently. [00:39:00] Verse 12, in Psalm 74 talks about God as a king from of old, that suspiciously echoes in the beginning. We have the Division of the Sea in Psalm 74, and the separation of the waters in Genesis one, as well as the land and the sea, which are fixing boundaries.
Both accounts echo the division of the day and night and the lights in the sky and seasons. We have a focus on food. Uh, there's probably more connections than that even, but what we can see is that though there are different purposes and perspectives in creation here, there're not necessarily different accounts in the sense that they have had to have come from vastly different times.
Okay, so Psalm 74 is a conflict creation account. There are others in the Bible and for sure, a lot of material outside of the Bible also saw creation [00:40:00] in these terms. No surprise there. As I've described in the views of Creation series, though Genesis one is somewhat unique. The only thing in the ancient world that really compares to it is the MPH Fight Theology of Egypt, which probably did originate in the couple of centuries before the exile.
So it's possible that Genesis one was in response to that rather than being 100% unique. And again, I will state that does not have to be a threat to us. The Bible doesn't have to be unique. It just has to be true, so we don't need to worry overly much about these types of similarities. The Meph fight theology didn't even last very long in Egypt, and it didn't get widespread attention.
This is certainly not the case for the Bible. Genesis one doesn't have overt conquering themes going on. But its theme of separation can be [00:41:00] seen as a parallel or a head nod to these other ideas. What Genesis one does is talk about creation via word and word is a concept that is related to the sages of wisdom.
Let's turn now to Psalm eight. It's short, so I'll read it in full. And as I read, I want you to think of Genesis one, parallels, um, and also the fact that this is often seen as a wisdom text, which relates to the word, and I want you to notice any conquering themes as well. Okay, ready? Think of Genesis one, wisdom and conquering.
Okay, here we go. Quote to the choir master, according to the gif, a Psalm of David, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all of the earth? You have set your glory above the heavens, out of the mouth of babies and infants. You have established strength because of your foes to steal the enemy and the avenger.[00:42:00]
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have said in place, what is man, that you are mindful of him and the son of man, that you care for him, yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands.
You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also all the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea. Whatever passes along the paths of the seas, oh Lord, our God. How majestic is your name in all the earth? End quote. That was at the E s v. Okay. Did you notice the mentions of the name, the mouth, and the glory?
Those are words connected to wisdom and glory in particular is a word that should bring imagery of the temple To your mind, did you also notice the heavens, the moon and stars, the man, the dominion, the [00:43:00] animals. Those are all in Genesis one. And the lastly, did you notice the established strength, the foes, the enemy, and the avenger, all conquering language?
So here in Psalm eight, which is generally understood to be a wisdom creation text, we have the themes of Genesis one. We have the idea of sacred space being called to mind, and we have the idea of conquering. Okay, so if we wanted to look for the elements that would describe which text this supposedly comes from in the documentary hypothesis, what would stand out here we have Yahweh, so this could be from the J document.
Or it could be from the priestly source because of the term glory. Genesis one is supposed to be written by the priests, so Psalm eight seems to line up in that in a number of things. But then why does Genesis one use Elohim for God? And this text uses Yahweh? [00:44:00] Basically what I'm saying is we could pick and choose which source this comes from, depending on which element we are looking at.
It's just it. It's not all, not all that helpful. In particular, it's not helpful to suppose that the priests had their own writers, and so they just wrote some of the documents that eventually got codified into the Bible. Because look at this, this is priestly, but it's also very militant as well, very focused on the king.
If the priests were their own writers of their own texts, this wouldn't make much sense. Alright, so I'm officially abandoning the Forest Source hypothesis. It seems to me like the Bible is simply too cohesive to go down that path, and maybe that just means it had good editors at the end, so what the editors needed to be just as inspired as any writer would need to be.
But I think it's definitely fair and helpful to look at the motivations behind the meaning of the text. And this [00:45:00] includes looking at the elements that J E D P looks at, the names of God, the inclusion of priests, the elements, the style of writing. So in Psalm eight, there are a lot of similarities with Genesis one, dominion for a major one, but Genesis one uses the term Elohim for God, and Psalm eight uses the term Yahweh.
I think it might be interesting to consider why that might be, if you don't have Psalm eight open, I suggest taking a look at it sometime and noticing how it is split into two parts with the middle section. This is a chiasm. A chiasm is like a mountain. You climb up the mountain, you get to the top, then you climb back down the other side of the mountain, the peak of the mountain.
The middle part of the text is something that is being emphasized. The first part of Psalm eight is about God and the heavens. God has established his strength. God is the creator and king. God has glory in the [00:46:00] he in the heavens. Then we get to the middle of the Psalm and it's all about humanity and how humanity has been given dominion.
The last part of the psalm is about our place in creation, culminating at the end with still it being God's name, not ours that is proclaimed with glory. So there's this mirroring going on with God and humanity. If you've been listening to the imaging episodes I've been doing, especially with Joshua Sherman, you might have noticed that, and that's what a chiasm does too, is mirror the text on either side of the high point.
It starts and ends with God here, and humanity is the pinnacle of creation, whose purpose is to rule in light of God's heavenly rule and to bring God's name and God's glory to the earth. Genesis one has a similar message, but it's constructed differently. All of creation leads up to humanity in Genesis one, and it doesn't talk specifically of the purposes of Man's dominion mandate.
I [00:47:00] think this is why the broader term of Elohim might be used in Genesis one, the title of Yahweh is used in Psalm eight because of this mirroring going on that relates to our covenantal relationship. Yahweh is a title for God in how he shows his power to creation, innocence, and we, humanity are, are part of that.
When we hold earthly dominion as a mirror to God's heavenly dominion, we are displaying God's power to creation. We are literally reflecting the heavens to the earth. Our actions form part of God's coming down to creation in a real sense. And yeah, I just get super excited about all of that. It's all over the Bible.
Okay, so my suggestion is that rather than look at the Bible, like it's some product of evolutionary belief, we ought to be looking at it as far as what the purposes of the text were. So back to Psalm 74, what was that addressing? [00:48:00] Well, we didn't read very much of that, so let's go to the beginning of that Psalm quote.
Oh God, why do you cast a soft forever? Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture? Remember your congregation, which you have purchased of old, which you have redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage. Remember Mount Zion where you have dwelt direct your steps to the perpetual ruins? The enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary.
Your foes have roared. In the midst of your meeting place, they set up their own signs for signs. They were like those who swing axes in a forest of trees and all it's carved wood. They broke down with hatchets and hammers. They set your sanctuary on fire. They profane to the dwelling place of your name, bringing it down to the ground.
They said to themselves, we will utterly subdue them. They burned all the meaning places of God in the land end quote. Hey, look at that. Here we have God as [00:49:00] conqueror. And in the psalm, the psalmist is wondering how and why they have been beset by enemies who have conquered them. So the psalmist is calling on the creator in the theme of conquering creation.
The psalm is asking God to remember his covenants in relation to his people, asking God to be the great conqueror on behalf of them once more. So it's easy to say that this is just metaphorical language when we have it embedded in this kind of a situation. The thing is, we don't have that kind of setup for Genesis one.
It's harder to tell what the purpose of that is in light of anything else. So we default to, in the beginning and looking at it in kind of a more static and, uh, sterile sense in a way. I mean, we treat Genesis one, like it was the first thing humanity ever wrote, as if it came out of no context whatsoever.
But I don't think that's fair to it [00:50:00] because that seems to treat it like it's disconnected when really the themes of Genesis one do stretch through the entire narrative of the Bible. But how do we get the context We should read this in then when it's the first thing that we read. This is where we're going to turn to Genesis two.
How can that shed light on Genesis one? Well, we've previously talked about some of the distinctive differences of Genesis one and Genesis two. In light of the documentary hypothesis, it's a common suggestion to say that these are two creation accounts that someone somewhere decided to paste together because, hey, why not?
I've seen others say, oh, they're different accounts, but they're still kind of randomly put together. They just have different purposes. That's slightly closer to the truth in my estimation. Still missing some things that are important, I think, because I don't think they're really all that randomly connected after all.
Still, others will say Genesis two is a zooming in of Genesis [00:51:00] one, and that might be right, but then they try to harmonize them in some way. Which again, I'm not saying is wrong. This is probably the closest thing we could say. But Mark Smith suggests that Genesis two forms a kind of commentary on Genesis one, not in the sense that Genesis one can't just be read on its own, but that Genesis two gives us context that we need in order to understand.
Genesis one Smith says it's odd that Genesis one is the text that is considered to be from the priestly account because Genesis two has so much to say in regards to Adam acting and being a priest. So is Genesis one not a priestly account then? Well, I think just the opposite. We read Genesis one, which is a temple building text, but it doesn't give us a whole lot of information as to what it means to be the image of God.
And then we read the atom was created from the ground in the form of an idol. This is something that we're going to get into as our [00:52:00] imaging series progresses, but it's much harder to see what Genesis one is doing without the following chapters, which includes Genesis three, Genesis one, and then Genesis two, shine light on what exactly Eve should have been able to do in regard to that pesky snake.
Also, what these chapters do when read as a whole is to combine the idea of the priest and the king. If you come at these chapters with the assumption preloaded that the king and priest are going to be separate people with separate duties, and that's that, then the priestly imagery becomes difficult to sort out as to why it's there in these chapters.
The separation of these offices was, we might say, a part of the decline of humanity that matters to how we read everything else in the Bible. Oh, how strange and surprising that Christ should be both our king and our high priest. No, no. It's not strange at all. This was the original design, the original setup of creation and the [00:53:00] original intent of humanity.
And if the king and priest could be combined, if the cosmos is a holy temple, then we could also combine the idea of the priest in sacred space. With the image of military conquering in the sense of taking back the world from the enemy, it becomes difficult to separate the two infect. This is really the purpose of the church, or at least one of the purposes.
So here we are, back to the image of God and the idea of sacred space. Funny how often we get to this point. Okay, so we've been through several texts now and we've seen how they are super, super interconnected to the point that I just think you really have to want to see something like the documentary hypothesis.
One last text that we're going to look at, Psalm 1 0 4. What if we didn't have Genesis one, but we did still have Psalm 1 0 4? Would that change the way we view creation? Let's have a look. [00:54:00] I'll read it in parts. I don't know if I'll read the whole thing, but here starting in verse one, bless the Lord. Oh my soul.
Oh Lord, my God. You are very great. You are clothed with slender and majesty covering yourself with light. As with the garment stretching out the heavens like a tent, he lays the beams of his chambers on the waters. He makes the clouds his chariot. He rides on the wings of the wind. He makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire End quote.
We start out in this Psalm with God, with light covering God and with the heavens being stretched out like a tent. This isn't really all that different to Genesis one, with the exception of light not being created, but it's clearly a separate thing from God. And we might be tempted to say, Hey, look, God is creating the heavens, but it only says he stretches them out like a tent.
Then it says that the beams of his chambers are on the waters. That the clouds are his chariot, the wind, his wings. [00:55:00] Look, I'm not trying to harmonize here, really, I'm just pointing out that as different as this imagery is from what we see directly expressed in Genesis one, it's really not that different until we get to his messengers as a fire.
Interesting that remember, job 38, the Sons of God shouting and joy at creation. It's almost like there's all these common ideas that are being expressed in these creation texts, isn't it? Let's keep reading and watch for similarities in images with Genesis one, he set the earth on its foundations so that it should never be moved.
You covered it with the deep As with the garment, the waters stood above the mountains at e rebuke, they fled at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. The mountains rose. The valleys sink down to the place that you appointed for them. You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they may not get again.
Cover the earth. You make springs gush forth in the valleys. They flow between the hills. They [00:56:00] give drink to every beast of the field. The wild donkeys quench their thirst beside them. The birds of the heavens dwell. They sing among the branches from your lofty abode. You water the mountains. The earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
You cause the grass to grow for the livestock and plants. For man to cultivate that he may bring forth food from the earth and wine to gland in the heart of man oil to make his face shine in bread to strengthen man's heart. The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly. The cedars of Lebanon that he planted in them, the birds build their nests.
The store has her home in the fur trees. The high mountains are for the wild goats. The rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers. End quote. Okay. Tons of imagery from Genesis one here. Also some definite illusions to the flood. And you know what the flood was, right? A de creation and a recreation. So I guess it's fair to say that creation is a big theme in the Bible, huh?[00:57:00]
So what about my question? What if we didn't have Genesis one? What if we used a Psalm 1 0 4 as the start of our Bible, that this was the, the creation text we all look at? I think it's fair to say that we'd come up with basically the same kind of ideas we tend to have when we read Genesis one, at least as far as the sovereignty of God, his status as a creator.
However, if we're concordians who want to line up the days of creation with epics of history on Earth, that might be harder to do if we just had Psalm one oh. If we keep reading in the Psalm, we get suggestions of the other themes of Genesis one. And I know I've read the psalm in its entirety before on the podcast, but I might as well finish it up here.
Quote, he made the moon to mark the seasons. The sun knows it's time for setting. You make darkness and it is night when all the beasts of the forest creep about the young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they [00:58:00] steal away and lie down in their dentons. Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening.
Oh Lord, how manifold are your works and wisdom? Have you made them all? The earth is full of your creatures. Here is the sea. Great and wide, which teams with creatures innumerable living things both small and great there go the ships and leviathan, which you formed to play in it. These all look to you to give them their food in due season.
When you give it to them, they gather it up. When you open your hand, they are filled with good things. When you hide your face, they are dismayed. When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground. May the glory of the Lord endure forever.
May the Lord rejoice in his works who looks on the earth and it trembles who touches the mountains and they smoke. I will sing to the Lord. As long as I live, I will sing. Praise to my God. While I have being, may my meditation be pleasing to him. For [00:59:00] I rejoice in the Lord, let sinners be consumed from the earth and let the wicked be no more.
Bless the Lord, owe my soul. Praise the Lord. End quote. All right, I'm going to wrap up with a few more words in regards to what we see here in relation to Genesis One. Again, we have the moon, the seasons, the sun, darkness, and beasts. We have the suggestion here of predator and prey, so there goes the idea of an idyllic creation without death.
Of course, you might say, Hey, that's not fair, since we do have Genesis one and two, but I'd say that neither of those suggest we can't have death either. You've got to go to the book of Romans for that in chapter five, which if you didn't notice, that speaks only of human death, not animal. Oh, and Psalm 1 0 4, the line about man going to his work until the evening.
That lines up with much of what we were saying about theological days of creation. Leviathan here is formed to [01:00:00] play in the sea with his rubber duckies rather than to be conquered. The theme of creation is wrapped up in the sending out of God's spirit. Psalm 1 0 4, as you might guess, is also in the category of creation by wisdom.
Just as Genesis one shows and like Genesis one, it has its nods to other types of creation, but the point is God's fullness and wisdom that everything has order. What the Psalm is missing is the direct temple imagery that we have in Genesis. For that reason, it would feel odd, wouldn't it, to switch out Genesis one with Psalm 1 0 4, and then continue with Genesis two.
Anyway. I hope you've enjoyed exploring these creation texts with me a little more deeply than you have before. Perhaps. I actually had been meaning to get into this study for some time, and I found it to be very enlightening. It's easy to say there's all this interconnectedness, but once you get into it, it's, it's just crazy how much there is.
I love it. So I'll just wrap up by saying thanks [01:01:00] for listening, and if you've got any questions about what we're talking about here, please feel free to share them with me on Facebook or by emailing me at
[email protected]. Big shout out to those of you who share my episodes with others.
It makes me happy to know that you enjoy what I do here. Thank you also to those who have rated my show on podcast apps or who have commented on my YouTube videos. All those things help others come across this who might also enjoy it. Thanks to Wintergatan for the music, and I hope you all have a blessed week. We'll see you later.
