Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of a biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and today we're finally going to get into J Harvey Walton's dissertation. J Harvey Walton is of course the son of John Walton, and he has co-written several books with his father.
[00:00:30] But today we're just gonna dig into what he's saying in his dissertation, which is focused on Genesis two through four. And his main point is that these chapters do not describe a pristine, perfect world that is corrupted by moral evil, but rather it's something a little bit different than that. Walton is suggesting that the common theological narrative of Eden, fall, and redemption actually stems from Hellenistic influence and thus it is anachronistic to the text's original, ancient Near Eastern context. He has a lot of interesting ideas here and he gets into a lot of comparative studies with both Egyptian as well as Mesopotamian texts.
[00:01:19] So I'll first give you a really brief idea of what he's talking about here. Rather than a dualistic idea of good and evil, Walton is suggesting a threefold value system. And this is of course, stemming from the ancient world's understanding of what's good and what's bad.
[00:01:39] Rather than just a strict binary or dualistic good versus evil worldview, Walton is suggesting that the ancient Near Eastern cosmology as well as Genesis itself is actually seeing a three-part system. We have order, we have chaos, and we have evil. and Genesis two through four reflects these three categories rather than a simple moral dichotomy.
[00:02:08] Walton further goes on to suggest that Genesis is critiquing and reorienting the ancient Near Eastern value system and things like agriculture, kingship, and civilization. He's saying that Genesis deconstructs all of these Babylonian, imperial cosmological ideas and elevates the covenant with Yahweh as the true source of order. Instead of depicting humans losing immortality through sin, Genesis may be critiquing the pursuit of divine wisdom and immortality, such as we see with Adapa, Endiku, and Gilgamesh as being misguided or incomplete.
[00:02:54] Now, this is gonna help us kind of understand what we see in Genesis one as well, even though Walton is not talking about Genesis one. We have a pre-created state, basically. This state is chaos. It is not perfection. It is incomplete, and it has some problems. Genesis two itself begins with a lack. We have solitude. We have a lack of agriculture, and we have nakedness. The phrase "naked and not ashamed" is a statement of negation and not moral innocence, is one point that Walton is suggesting.
[00:03:36] He goes on to say that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil refers to divine wisdom and discernment which is necessary to rule or order the world for human flourishing.
[00:03:50] Now, because he's trying to stick with the ancient Near Eastern context of Genesis, and he's not getting into anything with the early church fathers at all, I'm going to insert the idea here that his ideas are not really incompatible with what the early church was thinking. At least not entirely.
[00:04:10] A lot of what you'll read in the early church fathers is that Adam and Eve were in a state of immaturity and that they were meant to gain maturity, but they took from the tree preemptively before they were ready, before God had prepared them. Now, of course, that's not what Walton is saying here, but I just want to offer that out as kind of an overlap of what we can see with these ideas.
[00:04:39] Now because Walton is talking about more than just the garden narrative, and he goes into Genesis four, he's doing that for textual reasons. We've talked about the structure of Genesis before with the toledoths or "the generations of." You have the generations of the heavens and the earth. That's mentioned back in Genesis two verse four, and we don't get a new toledoth until Genesis five.
[00:05:07] So that's why Walton is looping in Genesis four into the story as well. And he is saying that this chapter doesn't primarily show the escalation of sin necessarily, but rather critiques civilization's inability to resolve the mortality problem. Lamech and his line represent cultural achievements that fail to offer true solutions to human limitations.
[00:05:35] But of course for many of us, we have interpreted Genesis two through three in particular as a story about the fall. When we're picturing that, we are imagining a pristine paradise that is shattered by human sin. But what if that reading doesn't actually match the worldview of the text's original authors and audience?
[00:06:00] Now personally, in my own studies, I already had reservations long ago about this fall narrative just based on my reading of the Old Testament and understanding of biblical theology in its ancient context, and looking at the text in a narrative fashion.
[00:06:19] The traditional reading of Genesis three as the fall being the explanation for everything bad, it just doesn't really sink with the Hebrew Bible because the Hebrew Bible does not reflect on the story of Eden as a lost paradise. It doesn't point back to Adam as being the source of universal sin, and I would even suggest that the New Testament doesn't really do that, although it does a little bit more than the Old Testament does.
[00:06:50] But at any rate, I think the Old Testament is dealing with human brokenness from the framework of covenant infidelity, systemic injustice, and repeated failure to live wisely and faithfully before God. This is more of a cyclical pattern of behavior, and that certainly doesn't do away with the idea of a sin or fall narrative in Genesis, but it invites us to see ourselves in the story because we fit the pattern. So rather than like this beginning of sin and a chronological structure after that, we really have a story that patterns itself on the same ideas.
[00:07:34] Now again, when we turn to the New Testament, especially in passages like Romans five, we have Adam who reemerges as a key figure. We have the idea of death associated with Adam, and then we have resurrection life associated with Christ.
[00:07:53] And so that seems to frame Genesis three as a pivotal moment in human history, so that's fair. But again, we need to take care not to insert any later theology into the stories if that later theology isn't actually arising out of the text itself. That doesn't make all of our theology wrong, but it might need a readjustment to see where and how it aligns or doesn't.
[00:08:22] The New Testament never offers a full systematic doctrine of the fall in the way that later theology often assumes. Within the New Testament itself, there's no neat little creed describing Eden, sin, death, the imputation of guilt, and all of these things in one neat little text.
[00:08:46] What we find are layered metaphors, pastoral arguments, theological analogies, and those are often shaped by the needs of the early church and not really a fixed reading of Genesis necessarily.
[00:09:01] The answer to that is not to create a systematic theology of doctrinal points that we then cannot question, but rather we need to look at the arc of Scripture in its fullness. What themes show up and how do they develop? In other words, the New Testament gives us interpretive trajectories, not a fully mapped out unchangeable fall doctrine that gets conflated with the gospel later on in history.
[00:09:32] So at the base of all of that should be a question. What did Genesis two through four actually mean in its original context? Only after we understand that, can we understand how it can shape, challenge or even reframe how we can read Paul and the rest of the New Testament. Then that is going to get us into the questions that J Harvey Walton is asking here.
[00:09:59] If the real concern isn't, in fact, how goodness was lost, but rather how order is made, and how order is threatened, and how order is also preserved in a world that was never fully ordered to begin with in the beginning. Then we come to the conclusion that knowing good and evil isn't necessarily about moral guilt, but it fits more with the idea of divine wisdom. Which tracks really well with how the phrase is used throughout the rest of Scripture.
[00:10:34] As I said, I'm just going to suggest to you that the Hebraic mindset has an emphasis on pattern over proposition. What we're gonna see is that there are patterns that are weaved through history and human experience.
[00:10:50] Walton says, quote, " This thesis argues that the theological interpretation of Genesis two through four which describes a pristine world corrupted by evil, derives from a cosmological model and accompanying ideas of what constitutes goodness and badness that is anachronistic to the original context of the Hebrew Bible, and instead arises from the reception of the material in the Hellenistic period." End quote.
[00:11:21] Basically, what he means there is that our idea of a dualistic good and bad comes from a Greek mindset rather than an ancient Hebraic mindset set. Now for us, we're gonna go, hang on a second. Of course, there's good and bad. Walton is not arguing against the idea of good and bad existing. He's just gonna nuance it for us.
[00:11:48] He goes on to say, quote, " By comparing ideas and images from ancient near Eastern literature that resemble those appearing in Genesis, we argue that Genesis presents a cosmology and system of values wherein an eternally preexisting, undesirable state of negation, chaos, is pushed to the periphery of a manufactured desirable condition of order and harmony, which in turn is threatened by an undesirable corruption from within and thereby under constant threat of collapsing back into nothingness unless perpetually sustained by the combined efforts of humans and gods." End quote.
[00:12:36] Okay, so this is kind of the core of his idea here. Rather than a good versus evil dichotomy, he is suggesting there are three parts to this. First of all, we have the state of chaos. This is just kind of what exists in whatever we have.
[00:12:55] This is before we have the idea of creation out of nothing. And if you read Genesis one, you see that state of chaos at the beginning. Things are not ordered in a sense where people can even live. So you have the state of chaos.
[00:13:12] The state of goodness comes when we have order and harmony that then organizes things. That order and harmony have to be intentionally sustained or else chaos will come collapsing back in.
[00:13:29] Okay, so then Walton goes on to say that evil is not just chaos, but it is a third state. Evil is what threatens goodness. When evil threatens the ordered state of creation, then it will cause the ordered state of creation to collapse back into chaos.
[00:13:52] So here in this framework, there's good, which is defined by order and structure and harmony, and then there's two negative states. The one is just natural and it's going to happen without the imposed order. The second state of badness is what we might call evil and it causes the order to collapse back into chaos.
[00:14:20] Alright, now continuing with his abstract, Walton says, quote, " Within this cosmology and axiology, which is shared with the literature of the ancient Near East, Genesis presents a subversive narrative that discusses where true order in the world might be found." End quote.
[00:14:42] Stopping here for a moment to define what axiology is. Axiology is the examination of the question of why are good things good. It is the study of value. So what Walton is doing is looking at the axiology of the ancient Near East. How did they determine what was good? And how did they describe that good as occurring? And what Walton is doing throughout this dissertation is he's looking at the common ideas of the ancient Near East and saying how Genesis participates in that, but turns it on its head.
[00:15:21] He continues to say, quote, " We argue that the primordial history provides a deconstruction of various institutions of order found throughout the rest of the ancient Near East, especially those favored by Israel's Babylonian conquerors, in order to promote the Israelite covenant with Yahweh as the desirable alternative. Each institution in turn is presented as valuable and useful, yet also insufficient to produce and sustain order." End quote.
[00:15:56] So he's saying that Babylon in particular had a certain way of determining what is good and how those things sustain order. Babylon says that it is agriculture, civilization, kingship, and human legacy that is what pushes back chaos and creates order and promotes good in the world. Walton is saying that Genesis is presenting a subversive narrative to that. And saying it's not actually agriculture or kingship or civilization that pushes back chaos to create order, but rather, the answer to all of that is covenant with Yahweh.
[00:16:42] Here's the last part of the abstract. He says, quote " The pericope of Genesis two through four, the account of the heavens and the earth deconstructs the institutions of agriculture and civilization specifically by demonstrating that in contrast to the presentation of comparative literature, their acquisition is insufficient to elevate humans out of a state of negation and further demonstrating the pursuit of cultural achievement is insufficient to produce the nearest possible human approximation of eternal life." End quote.
[00:17:23] Okay. So there's a lot more I could say about that. That's the end of the abstract. One thing that might be a little bit shocking to us is the idea that the ancient Near East really didn't have the idea of resurrected life as being the way that eternal life was lived out. That doesn't mean they didn't have an idea of eternal life, but it's just different.
[00:17:49] And I know we kind of wanna put some of our ideas of resurrection. By the end of the Old Testament, we start having those ideas of resurrection as having an embodied afterlife. But we just don't have that early on in the Bible, nor do we have that in the ancient Near East.
[00:18:09] And I think that we should not presume to just put these ideas back into those time periods if we don't see them thinking about them. Again that doesn't mean they weren't thinking in terms of eternal life, but it's a very different way of thinking about it.
[00:18:26] Let's look a little bit more closely at these three categories of value that Walton suggests. We have chaos, we have order, and we have evil.
[00:18:36] Walton says, quote, " Our argument will first demonstrate that the cosmological model where in a perfect world is corrupted by an artificially introduced badness is anachronistic to the implied audience for whom Genesis was composed. More importantly, however, we will argue that the binary opposition of goodness and badness is reductionistic and does not represent the worldview of the implied author of Genesis. We will argue instead that the implied author holds two distinct conceptions of badness. One is described in terms of deviation and corruption. The other is described in terms of alterity and absence." End quote.
[00:19:21] Evil would be the deviation and corruption that interferes with order. Chaos is the alterity and absence that he says here. It's a state of negation. Alterity is a state of being different or outside the group.
[00:19:39] Now, what Walton is not doing is he's not trying to take this narrative here and tell us this is what good and bad is. He's just trying to study it from within the context of the text and what the authors themselves were thinking.
[00:19:57] So then we enter into this realm of goodness as being that which is desirable. And so then we have the idea of order. Order should be what's desirable and what brings wholeness. What is life giving to us? We can think of it as everything working the way that it should be working. We have peace, we have justice, we have fruitfulness. Harmony between creation and creator.
[00:20:25] Order is not just a moral state. It's a cosmic condition, and it's not automatic. It has to be formed and protected and sustained. And if that's not happening, then order will slip away into chaos. Chaos isn't sin or moral guilt, it's the absence of order. It's the wilderness before the garden. It's barrenness, isolation, futility, and it isn't itself evil. It's just not ordered. It's just not going to protect and make life flourish. Chaos is what exists until God comes along and builds something better. And because we are his imagers, we are to do that with him.
[00:21:16] We have the third state, which is evil, and it's different from chaos. Evil is also not entirely moral. But it is what happens when we have order that is twisted or infringed upon. So it can be violence, oppression, corruption, anything that destroys what should be held together.
[00:21:41] If something is contingent, then it is dependent on something else. So the idea of order is not eternal or self-sustaining. It has to be created, it has to be maintained, and so that is a major shift from this common theological idea of a world that started perfect and was then fallen.
[00:22:06] In the ancient view order is always fragile. It's always under threat from two sides, from chaos as well as evil. Chaos is the thing that lives on the borderlands. Chaos is not contingent upon anything. It doesn't require anybody to do anything aside from let order collapse. And evil or badness is what makes order collapse, and then chaos flows in.
[00:22:39] And here's where I think it gets especially powerful for biblical theology because this model actually aligns really well with the idea of the cosmos as God's cosmic temple. In Genesis one, God is not just making stuff. He's bringing order out of chaos, building a sacred space where his presence can dwell like a temple.
[00:23:04] That's why themes like boundaries, rhythm, rest, and sacred time are so central to creation. Genesis is telling a temple story where order isn't just good, but it's also holy.
[00:23:21] Good is what we might think of for humans. Holy is what we would think of as encompassing what and who God is. So Genesis one is bringing together what's good for humans and the holiness of God and bringing them both together.
[00:23:40] So instead of reading Genesis as Paradise Lost, Walton helps us to see it as the beginning of a cosmic project. One that starts in the garden and points toward a holy place where God's presence and human flourishing can then dwell together. You might agree or disagree there, but that overarching idea seems very in line with how the text reads to me anyway.
[00:24:06] Now, back to the idea of contingency. The non-contingent thing or the necessary thing is the thing that doesn't require any sustaining. So chaos is something that is just going to encroach and nobody has to make it happen. It just comes in when order collapses. Now for Walton's framework we then have good and evil. But those two things are both contingent. Good is something that is imposed upon the chaos to create order. Evil is that which opposes the good. So evil can't exist until there is order.
[00:24:48] Chaos is the default. It's what exists before creation, because creation is about forming order. Chaos is formless, unordered, lacking boundaries. And order is introduced with structure, meaning, and purpose into that chaos. Order creates space for life, for relationship, for flourishing.
[00:25:16] So evil is not really the opposite of order. It's a distortion of it. So evil could happen when you are trying to order something, but it's actually causing the chaos to come back in. Evil isn't just an absence of good, it's what happens within that ordered system that makes it go wonky.
[00:25:41] So now how does that change our reading of Genesis two through four? The traditional reading is good then bad. What Adam did is the origin of evil. Now, that can still kind of fit in with what Walton is saying, even though he doesn't frame it that way. But again, this good then bad narrative has Eden as something that's perfect. But really in a close reading of the text, it's better to think of Eden as being unfinished.
[00:26:16] I think all of that helps us to look at what chaos is in Scripture. Because we tend to think of it as the dualistic idea, right? We have good and evil. And we think, well, evil and chaos are the same thing. If they're not the same thing, then that actually changes the idea of the chaoskampf or the struggle against chaos.
[00:26:41] Now in Walton's model, the idea of the chaoskampf, or the battle or war against chaos, is still kind of there, right? We have the idea of chaos that's being battled back by order, we might say.
[00:26:58] But if you actually distinguished chaos from evil, then it is not really that neat of a picture. Chaos is something that becomes non-functional. It is not necessarily something that is inherently wicked to fight against. It just needs to be structured.
[00:27:19] Chaos becomes the ever present background state of negation or otherness, which is not an enemy to defeat, but a condition to overcome by order. Chaos doesn't have to be inherently rebellious. It just needs to be shaped into the right thing.
[00:27:40] It doesn't have to be evil, it doesn't have to be hostile, but it is undesirable. And because it's undesirable, it's going to have a lot in common with things that are evil. So I hope I've kind of explained to that really well for you, and it's going to loop into a lot of ideas that I probably won't go too in depth because it's really kind of high level and hard to understand how death and divine space factor into all of that.
[00:28:11] But let's talk a little bit about that anyway, because one of the more striking ideas in Walton's thesis is the suggestion that divine space, which is what the Garden of Eden was, isn't automatically or actually good for humans, at least not in the way that we usually, presume, right?
[00:28:32] We picture Eden as a paradise that is perfectly suited for humanity. And the thing that we want to get back to. We want to get back to Eden because it was that perfect state of creation, right?
[00:28:46] But Walton is suggesting that Eden, as divine space, is actually ambiguous. It's unstable, and it's even uncomfortable for human beings.
[00:29:01] In many ancient Near Eastern stories like Adapa or Gilgamesh, we have humans who enter the realm of the gods and they die, or they fail, or they come away changed. And it's kind of just not seen as a good place for people. And so Walton is suggesting that the Garden of Eden is like this. It's actually not an idealized paradise for humanity, nor is it clearly a morally good space in the traditional theological sense.
[00:29:34] Because it is divine space, it's a sacred realm that places humans in proximity to things they're not necessarily equipped to handle. So the Garden, and especially the trees, represent not a moral test for Walton, but rather it's a choice about how humans will participate in ordering the world and where they will continue to live.
[00:30:00] Okay, so let's picture the Garden of Eden. It's not a hostile place. It's divine space, but it's not tailored for humanity because it's a divine space. So inside the Garden contains the two trees. We have the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
[00:30:23] Now most of us think of the second tree as being a classic test. If Adam breaks the rule that God gives him, then he's going to suffer the consequences of breaking that rule. This is why I've been talking lately about the difference between law collection and law code.
[00:30:44] Now, a law code would read this story as what I just explained, our usual view of what's going on in the Garden. Adam broke God's law, therefore he got the consequences of being kicked out of the perfect space.
[00:31:02] This aligns with the dualistic idea of good and bad. Adam had good and he lost it. Now he's in the state of bad.
[00:31:12] Now, if instead we look at this as being not a law code where the stipulation is necessarily broken, and then he's going to suffer those consequences, but instead, this is in the realm of law collection, which is wisdom literature. Then Adam did not get kicked out of the Garden of Eden simply because he broke a rule.
[00:31:39] Instead, with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil being the idea of divine wisdom, what Adam did, according to what Walton is trying to say here, is that Adam chose the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as being the divine wisdom given to humanity.
[00:32:01] Walton is arguing that the trees represent a choice. This is a moment of discernment for Adam. Will humans participate in ordering the world in divine terms, where they will participate in eternal life and keep taking from the Tree of Life, and as such, they will have to endure the situation of living in divine space, which may not be ordered for human mortal flourishing?
[00:32:31] Or will Adam choose human ordered existence?
[00:32:38] Now, both of those are connected to the divine, but the Tree of Life is a picture of staying in the divine realm. This is where we don't have death, but for the ancient mind, staying in the divine realm was not all that comfortable for humans. Walton is suggesting that Adam chose the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and this brought death, but not as a punishment, but rather a part of human ordered existence.
[00:33:11] So in this reading, the Tree of Knowledge isn't a trap. The two trees are portals into two different realms of wisdom that belong to the gods. The Tree of Knowledge is the ability to discern and establish order. But for humans, reaching for that kind of knowledge, especially outside of divine timing and will and provision, it's going to naturally bring destabilization.
[00:33:43] That means it's going to collapse order, not because it's inherently wicked, but because it's a mismatch and because it's going to bring things like death into the world.
[00:33:56] I know this is a lot to even wrap our minds around, but rather than Eden being a paradise lost, it's a space of tension. This is a place where human limitations and divine realities collide, and the exit from the Garden isn't just a punishment. It's a reorientation toward the kind of order that humans are actually called to build. We are supposed to go out into the world and create civilization, to do things like agriculture and even government.
[00:34:31] Now, even though Walton doesn't really go this direction, I still think we can take this idea and go with it in the way that the early church fathers did. The Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil being a way that Adam takes the wisdom of God for himself and then tries to go figure it out. And he's doing it in a way that is preemptive and he's not ready for it.
[00:34:56] He's immature when he's taking it. And this idea that God would've actually allowed him to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the right timing and with the right guidance, that fits in with the early church father's ideas, and it pretty much fits in with what Walton is saying here, even though Walton would probably disagree with the way I put that.
[00:35:21] In short, I think that his ideas help us to move beyond the idea that Adam and Eve broke a rule and got kicked out and toward the idea that Genesis is asking, what happens when humans try to take up a rule of ordering the cosmos on their own terms? And what happens is failure.
[00:35:44] We don't have things like agriculture or kingship or cities or human legacy, none of those things are actually the answer to proper ordering of the world, even though those are the answers that Babylon said, this is how goodness and order are created.
[00:36:04] So basically I think what Walton is doing here is some really good work in setting the stage for us. I think some of his conclusions are a little bit off. But overall, it seems like what he's doing is helping us see how order, chaos, and evil can interact all the same, and that not all deviation is evil, and human systems aren't evil in and of themselves, but their value is insufficient. Or our values can be misaligned.
[00:36:37] So as we go through the first chapters of Genesis, we have the three different falls of Genesis three, Genesis six, and Genesis 11, and we have all of the cohesive narratives in between those things. T really fit and parallel the ancient Near Eastern accounts very closely, but in a polemic and subversive way, that cities and kingship and legacy are all great ways of creating order. It's all pointing towards the idea of covenant with Yahweh. That's why the whole story, with Genesis one through 11 gets us into Genesis 12 with Abraham.
[00:37:20] Even the covenant with Noah, with the flood narrative is not enough to create order. So I think that is a lot of what this reading from Walton can help us to see.
[00:37:32] The true source of order isn't civilization but covenant with Yahweh.
[00:37:38] So what we have with the Genesis story here in the beginning is not just a story about humanity and its beginnings, but it's actively critiquing the dominant cultural narratives of the world.
[00:37:51] We move into the story in Genesis four with Cain and his descendants, and what we have here is a picture of human ordered existence. The civilization is building against the threat of chaos, but it's not doing it with covenantal alignment to God. So it looks like a kind of order, but it ends in corruption, and it in fact turns out to be a breeding ground for evil. And evil, as we know, is what defeats good and brings back chaos.
[00:38:25] So the failure isn't just one that's moral. It's axiological. The human systems can't produce the kind of order that God desires and that we desire because human systems don't emerge from relationship with him. They're not pushing back the chaos in a sustainable way. Without divine alignment, order always fractures. First into pride, then into violence, and then it fully collapses.
[00:38:59] So Cain as the first murderer, it's his line that describes the first building of cities. We also have music tools, technology. These are markers of cultural achievement. And while we don't really have kingship specifically mentioned, we definitely have that undertone, don't we?
[00:39:21] Then we get into the story with Abraham and he lives the life of the nomad. This seems to be a more fragile kind of order, doesn't it? Ordered existence for Abraham is not about conquest, but about faithfulness.
[00:39:37] Okay. Let's go back into the Garden story for a moment. The idea of naked and not ashamed. We've talked about that before and there's a picture here of innocence and immaturity, but Walton is suggesting this is showing us a lack of social structure. This makes a lot of sense because in the ancient Near East, there are stories of men who go back into being naked, and they are seen as uncivilized. Being naked is a statement of negation or chaos.
[00:40:11] So eating of the fruit doesn't necessarily corrupt, but it shows limitations and ambitions of humanity.
[00:40:20] Now we can still see it as an aspect of disobedience, even though that's not the direction that Walton goes. But in either case, we have human ordered existence where they are going to define what is good and evil for themselves.
[00:40:36] Now ideally they would do that with divine wisdom and covenant alignment, but we don't have that introduced yet. At least that's what Walton is suggesting.
[00:40:47] Remember that they eat from the fruit of the tree and they see that they're naked. They clothe themselves, but they still are afraid that they're naked. They become aware of their vulnerability.
[00:41:01] So the reach for the good is still not quite getting them exactly where they want to be. They are like the gods, but they are no longer like the gods because they've lost that immortality. Not that they lost an inherent part of themselves that was immortal, but they lost the Tree of Life.
[00:41:20] So once they do that, they're in a new mode of human existence. They have to navigate death, and there is no protective boundary of divine space around them.
[00:41:32] This is where we have a world of toil, pain and instability. Are toil, pain and instability aspects of chaos? Or are they aspects of evil? Well, the question is, are they contingent upon something else? Because remember, chaos is not contingent upon anything. Whereas evil is something that is active and that goes against actual goodness and order.
[00:42:03] So I think that there's elements of both things going on once we get out of the Garden. We are now facing both chaos and evil, and the only weapon we have against those things is some form of order. What we have in Genesis one through 11 are a whole bunch of people trying to do a whole bunch of things in order to create order.
[00:42:28] The best picture we have of that is Noah, who is declared righteous, and there is a covenant given after the flood, but that covenant doesn't fix everything and it doesn't actually create full working order.
[00:42:43] Now, here's an interesting thing that Walton talks about, the idea of legacy and immortality. Legacy is this idea of fame or name, which that's something that is really prominent in the stories of Genesis. Rather than having an embodied resurrected afterlife, they were thinking in terms of legacy. For Gilgamesh, immortality is basically unattainable, but they can have legacy as a kind of a consolation prize.
[00:43:19] And this is what we have mirrored in the story in Genesis four with procreation and cultural legacy. They're building civilization, but it doesn't undo mortality or chaos.
[00:43:32] By the time we reach Genesis four, the consequences of the Eden story begin to unfold, but perhaps not in the way that we expect. We actually don't see divine wrath instigated against Cain and his murder of Abel. We don't have plagues. We don't have cosmic collapse, but we do have exile.
[00:43:56] We continue to have birth. We have cities growing and developing. We have culture, but we also have the spread of death. But again, this isn't a picture of punishment, but a default aspect of chaos that comes into play because they don't have the proper idea of order.
[00:44:18] It doesn't seem to me that humans were ever immortal to begin with. They have a Tree of Life. That was the means by which they could obtain or sustain immortality. And it's not guaranteed. They're exiled. But it's not that immortality was an inherent part of who they were because it was never fully theirs to begin with.
[00:44:41] So what they chose in reaching for the Tree of Knowledge was not death per se, but a kind of life where death becomes part of the story. It's a mortal existence that is lived at a distance from divine space and divine, sustained order.
[00:45:00] The shift from immortality to mortality with the taking away of the tree is where Walton draws what I think is a pretty brilliant connection to the Epic of Gilgamesh. In that story, Gilgamesh is grieving the death of his friend. He embarks on the quest for eternal life.
[00:45:18] He fails several times. He is told by the gods that humans are meant to die, and that instead of immortality, then he should pursue legacy. So he could build a great city, he could etch his name into stone, and he can make something that lasts. And Genesis four seems to echo that exact theme.
[00:45:40] After Cain's exile, a city is built. It is named. We, have descendants who develop music metallurgy, animal husbandry. In short, we have civilization. And legacy begins there. Now, of course, none of it is reversing death, and importantly, none of it is keeping back chaos.
[00:46:02] The civilization building is not all of that redemptive. In fact, it's kind of a coping mechanism that introduces evil and brings in the chaos.
[00:46:15] Now, this is as opposed to what we have with a covenantal connection with the God who orders life.
[00:46:22] In both of these ideas with Israel and across the ancient Near East, they are very concerned with overcoming or defeating death. They weren't imagining it in terms of bodily resurrection or eternal life in an eschatological, New Testament sense, like what we see with Daniel 12 or Revelation or many other places in the New Testament. Instead in the ancient Near East, their way of defeating death was typically through some form of legacy: procreation, continuing your name and family line, cultural achievements like cities, music, craftsmanship, fame and memory, being remembered in story or song or inscription.
[00:47:12] The idea of personal immortality was pretty rare, vague, or possibly non-existent and eternal memory through descendants or social impact was the immediate concern and way that they defeated death.
[00:47:28] And even in Genesis, the idea is not that you're going to go on into embodied, resurrected life, but even so, mortality is going to be overcome through relationship with God in covenantal form. Now, just because they lacked the eschatological imagination that we later see in the later Old Testament or the New Testament and into the church, we should still understand their strategies in the same kind of way.
[00:48:00] Genesis is exposing the limitations of human systems to create order and defeat death. It seems like the real question we're asking in Genesis four is that in a world where death is inevitable, what kind of legacy actually matters? Are we building monuments to ourselves? Are we cultivating something that is aligned with the divine pattern of order, which is blessing and covenant?
[00:48:30] If we are in alignment with the divine pattern, then that means that our legacy will actually last and that whatever it means to defeat death, to create order and hold back chaos and prevent evil, all of that is answered within covenant with Yahweh.
[00:48:50] Now, in my opinion, Walton doesn't do this, but I think if you take these ideas and you track into the stories of Abraham, into the further stories of Genesis, and even into like the conquest narratives, I think you'll see the same kind of patterns.
[00:49:07] Because what we see is that order and covenants are intimately linked. When the people enter the land and they encounter the Canaanites, what is the problem? The problem is that the people who are now living in the land are a threat because they are a threat to order and covenant. They are violent and they're evil, and they are seen as deserving destruction because they are in that pattern of evil that will lead to the encroachment of chaos.
[00:49:42] Now what do we do with all of this? Well, this is going to be me kind of riffing off of it a little bit. I think that part of what this can do is help us distinguish between evil and chaos, or a negative state. This means that not all suffering is about moral failure.
[00:50:02] I would suggest that recognizing the absence or otherness, or the lack that can exist, can help us actually care for people who are residing in the state of chaos, not evil, without moralizing their pain or their situation.
[00:50:22] I mean, if you look at somebody else's theology or somebody else's politics or somebody else's ideas that we might not agree with, we kind of turn it into an us versus them. What if we saw it as a form of chaos?
[00:50:38] When life is not in alignment with God and order and structure into goodness, that doesn't necessarily mean evil. Now evil's probably going to have its play in that, but I really think there's a lot to think about here in this idea that it's not just good versus evil, but rather there's an element of chaos that the message isn't, we were perfect, we fell, but we just need to get back to perfection. But rather it's being placed into a world of incomplete order that is chaotic.
[00:51:14] We are charged with cultivating life in the shadow of this chaos, and with the threat of evil.
[00:51:22] It's like we're living in a sacred but unstable world. Order is emerging and it is accomplished in many places, but it requires God to sustain it, and we are part of that partnership.
[00:51:37] So let's take that into what the gospel is and what the gospel is about. it's about God entering the fragility of the world to bring new creation and new order through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Then were not being taken back to the Garden. We're moving forward from the state of disordered chaotic life to sacred covenantal life.
[00:52:04] Paul tells us that the first man became a living being, and the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. So this is a transformation of humanity, not a return back to Eden and some imagined perfection, but rather moving forward into helping God order creation.
[00:52:24] Sometimes what we're experiencing isn't evil. Sometimes it's chaos . And chaos comes from the absence of stability, structure and meaning. So a lot of the things that we experience that are bad don't have to be connected to moral failure, but they are outside of ordered life.
[00:52:46] Now, we have a lot of concerns that these kinds of ideas bring up. If there was no fall, then what is Jesus saving us from? But look, this reframing doesn't deny the reality of sin or death or a need for salvation.
[00:53:03] What it does is challenge the idea that the world was ever perfect to begin with. I think that Genesis shows us a world that was always in need of God's ordering presence forever. So Jesus is coming to complete the work of bringing that divine order to us. He's bringing covenant and life into a world that has always been fragile and contested and vulnerable to chaos.
[00:53:32] So the lack of a fall does not mean the lack of a problem.
[00:53:38] Now, what about Paul and sin bringing death into the world? Well, again, yes, Adam's actions do lead to death spreading through humanity. But that doesn't mean we were immortal before that. Because we had to partake of a Tree of Life in order to sustain that. Death was always a possibility. The result of being outside divine presence and provision and stepping into a way of being that couldn't sustain life. Well, now we have Christ who comes to offer a new way, a life that is aligned with divine order.
[00:54:16] So we still have Paul's theology here. This is just helping us see it through the ancient categories instead of our modern ones.
[00:54:25] Now what about the idea that the Garden wasn't really comfortable for people and wasn't good for human flourishing? Well, my suggestion there is that God's presence is good, but it's also and always everywhere seen as powerful and overwhelming and sacred. Just like Sinai or the Tabernacle or the Holy of Holies, divine space is not automatically compatible with unmediated human access.
[00:54:57] So I don't really think this really damages any ideas here at all. There's always the idea that being in the presence of the divine is dangerous and not really safe or suitable because a lot of human life is not sacred. A lot of it is profane. And profane doesn't mean immoral. It just means it's not holy.
[00:55:21] There is a difference between God, who is holy, and human life, which sometimes has to participate in the profane, and that's not a moral argument.
[00:55:33] Honestly, I don't really think that anything that Walton is doing is flattening or removing the gospel. Now, it doesn't mean he's right. I am gonna take issue with a lot of the things he said in particular, but I wanted to kind of bring you all of these ideas in a way that is hopefully a little more helpful rather than just being critical. But I do think a lot of his ideas are really interesting and helpful because what we call the traditional idea of the fall in the Garden. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense entirely with the narrative of Scripture.
[00:56:10] I really like Walton's idea of the tri-part structure of good, bad, and chaos, although I think there might be some ways to nuance it and change it a little bit.
[00:56:21] I do think that it brings about some ideas that are really helpful in understanding what chaos is, especially in the sense that God tends to use it as a form of judgment. Which means that it can't just be in the category of evil or against good. I think there's a lot of ambiguity there, and so Walton's idea is at least one idea to kind of remove some of that and understand it a little bit better.
[00:56:50] His model helps to explain why things like nakedness, city building, maybe even eating the fruit, are not necessarily straightforward evil acts, but they can and do bring disorder and dislocation.
[00:57:09] Chaos as being absence or a state of negativity rather than wrongdoing is really helpful as well. Something can be broken or unstable or unusable without being morally bad. It would be really interesting to take some of his ideas into the book of Leviticus, for instance.
[00:57:31] I think that this helps to give theological nuance where evil arises when order breaks down from inside rather than being external opposition or even necessarily a cosmic rebellion. Not that I don't think there is cosmic rebellion because I do. It's just not the full answer for everything, especially with how we see it described in the text.
[00:57:57] The idea that chaos precedes and threatens order really fits an ancient Near Eastern idea of the world and cosmology as well, which is what we have to fit Genesis into. This is why we have Genesis as not necessarily demonizing the chaos that exists. It's not a chaos of God battling chaos, but God does have to impose order upon it.
[00:58:26] Alright, well, I hope that this gave you some really interesting ideas and things to consider. I will be linking Walton's dissertation in the show notes. You can go read it yourself. What I especially like about it is that it helps us to rethink some of these ideas from the perspective of an ancient lens. It can explain why some things in the story feel like loss or danger without being framed as being sinful.
[00:58:56] But of course, it is also just a model or an interpretive structure. It's not a biblical formula, and so it can help us clarify, but it doesn't remove the complexities that we have to deal with here. It leaves a lot of questions and we can wonder when does absence become rebellion? Are the ideas of toil and pain and suffering, are those elements of evil or chaos? When does chaos become evil or vice versa?
[00:59:28] But again, I think those are kind of category distinctions that we wanna make. And what Walton is doing is not trying to create a new theology. In fact, he said that outright. He is only trying to read it from this ancient perspective. It is our job after that to then take that ancient perspective, bring it into our thinking and ask, what does this even mean for us? How is it helpful?
[00:59:55] I mean, it's not necessarily even a bad thing or a negative thing to say that we go from an ancient idea of what chaos and evil and good is to a more dualistic idea. There's nothing to say that the Hellenistic idea of good and bad is necessarily wrong.
[01:00:15] But if we're reading the Old Testament from that lens, things get pretty confusing. That's why we have so much written about and talked about with Genesis one itself. It's a strange story from the ideas that we tend to be thinking about it.
[01:00:31] I think that this structure can help us understand how punishment can happen as simply a removal of order. I think that's really key and important to notice. This fits really well with what I've been talking about, about the ideas of wrath and God just giving you over to your desire. If you are trying to order existence in a way that is counterproductive and that is not in alignment to God's will, then when God allows you to do that, you are then falling into that state of chaos. God doesn't actually have to do anything active himself to you in order for you to actually experience that consequence.
[01:01:16] I think it is helpful to notice here also that these elements of order that we try to impose upon the world, they aren't necessarily bad in and of themselves. That's why we can have the theme of city being one of chaos and evil and empire sometimes, but it's not always a bad thing. We have the idea of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is not a bad theme here and it's because Jerusalem is seen in alignment with God, right? When our structures of order are in alignment and in simpatico with the covenant with God, then they are not themselves bad things.
[01:01:59] I mean, we have the idea of agriculture as being a really big element in the ancient Near East of civilization and order. In the Old Testament, it's definitely also presented that way because we have the alignments of the festivals and the people's relationship with God are liturgically related to the agricultural cycle.
[01:02:22] So it is itself a bad thing, but again, those things are in alignment with relationship with God and the covenant they're in.
[01:02:32] The people who are out of relationship with God, they might be doing those things, but they're not doing them in a way that is going to promote their flourishing because they are in alignment with other deities.
[01:02:45] So this kind of helps to explain a lot of things about the Divine Council worldview as well. Why is being under the dominion of a lower Elohim something that is not going to promote the order that people are going to experience when they're in relationship with Yahweh directly?
[01:03:03] Like even if those other Elohim are ruling rightly, doing good things for their people, it's just not going to be the same as being in covenant with Yahweh. And I think there is a dramatic and a distinct connection there. So, I mean, I see a lot of times people ask the question of, What if some of the elohim didn't rebel? What if they're still in alignment with God?
[01:03:29] Well, I don't think we can answer that, first of all, if we're looking at it in a propositional way. What we see with the themes of the text is that that's just not gonna happen because the idea of flourishing and proper order is within the idea of relationship with Yahweh.
[01:03:46] Now, that's not to say anything about like the salvation status of somebody who is in another land and who may not have any idea of who Yahweh is. I don't think that's really the point here. We have to keep in mind that the Old Testament is compiled by a people who are in relationship with Yahweh and they messed up and they know that they messed up. They were sent into exile. And now they're trying to figure out what happened, who we and how do we now be in alignment with God to promote our flourishing and to provide the proper order and goodness in life?
[01:04:26] Those are the things that the Bible is answering. it's not necessarily answering the questions that we want to have it answer.
[01:04:33] If you're into the Divine Council worldview and those kinds of ideas, you'll find quite a few gems here in this dissertation. Walton mentions stories of the deaths of the gods. , If you put the idea of death with legacy, and that means being remembered. If you have an improper burial. If your family forgets you, then that is truly death. You are no longer alive. Death and remembrance are intimately connected. So the death of the gods happens when people forget to worship gods.
[01:05:10] Especially as I consider the Divine Council worldview and its impact on people today, a lot of people will go into it and think, oh, well, let's figure out who these gods are and let's align all of what's going on here and here and here. And when I read that in Walton's dissertation, I kind had one of those light bulb moments. Now of course, studying about them and learning about them is not the same as worshiping them, but it does make me wonder, are we keeping them alive by asking those questions? That was an uncomfortable thought, but well, an interesting one nonetheless.
[01:05:49] The idea of the connection with death and chaos is a really interesting one. Like I said, there's just so much in this dissertation I could have talked about, but one of the interesting ideas that death is part of order is quite fascinating to me.
[01:06:05] I mean, think about it really. If death was only about physical death and Jesus comes and he defeats death, but we still die, then what does that really mean? Is death itself the inherent problem or is there something a little bit deeper about it that is the problem?
[01:06:27] If the defeat of death is actually proper order, then what we have in the relationship with the new covenant in Christ is that actual defeat of death. It doesn't mean we no longer die.
[01:06:41] For me, that kind of helps to prevent a disconnect between what we see in the Old Testament and what we see in the New Testament. Not that Jesus didn't bring something new and greater because he did, but in both instances, what we have as the defeat of death is being in proper covenantal relationship with God.
[01:07:04] That's the answer. So when we make it about only our personal sin and salvation from that, and this idea of good and bad and fall. Well, I just think that Walton kind of brings to the table some ideas to help us rightly order those ideas.
[01:07:22] Not that his conclusion has to be right, but it's got some interesting things. Alright, I will wrap this up and stop rambling, but I hope you enjoyed thinking about some of these ideas with me. It is just not a simple story. There are layers and layers of things to study here. At any rate, I will invite you over to my new biblical theology community called On This Rock. You can find
[email protected]. But you gotta put hyphens between the words to get there.
[01:07:55] Come and join and come and ask me questions about Walton's thesis if you want. ' cause I do have a whole lot more I could say about it, especially in things that I think he's inconsistent in and other ideas. But that is it for this episode. Feel free to join me there. Feel free to go to my website at genesis marks the spot.com and sign up for my newsletter there.
[01:08:19] It gives you a little place to be put on the email list and I send out newsletters about once a week, trying to keep you all up to date with what's going on with the podcast and what's going on with my new community.
[01:08:32] But that is it for this week. Thank you guys for supporting me there or for being a Patreon supporter. You guys are helping me keep the lights on here and do more things as well. I just want you to know that I appreciate all of you and I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
