A little Scripture first. Levenson concentrates on the first account of creation given in Genesis Chapter 1. Most people educated in the Scripture are aware that Genesis gives two accounts of the beginning of the world, one following the other. The documentary theory, widely accepted beginning in the 20th century, holds that four traditions are combined into the books we know as the Pentateuch. Genesis 1 belongs to the Priestly Tradition. This is a little more than you really wanted to know about the Priestly Tradition but bear with a minute of history. Before the exile to Babylon (586 BCE,) the Zadokites were the high priests of Temple Worship in Jerusalem. They owed their name to an ancestor (Zadok) whom, tradition held, began the priestly line. They are the forebears of the Sadducees who figure prominently in the Jesus story. There were other priests, such as the Levites, but these were of a lower order and forbidden to make sacrifice.
The Zadokites were highly educated and perceived as a threat (and possibly an asset) by the Babylonians. As a result, they were captured and taken into exile. The Levites, who posed little danger to the conquerors, were left behind. The Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed and the focus of sacrifice moved to Bethel and the sons of Aaron (Levite) priests.
When the captivity ended, the Zadokites returned and waged a battle for control of religious life against the Levites, including an interesting flanking maneuver of adopting the name "Aaronite" to cement a Mosaic claim to the priesthood--and to confuse students forever. Their struggle proved to be successful and they not only defeated the Levites but also ensured absolute control of access to and regulation of priestly prerogative.
It was during this period (after 538 BCE) that the priests formulated their traditions which taught that even all seemed lost (the Temple after all was destroyed) God was still present to Israel, if the community observed the code of the cult and was obedient to the demands of liturgy. The code and ritual were, or course, controlled by the priests.
It is worth noting that the Priestly Tradition is a relative latecomer to the construction of the Torah. The Yahwist Tradition, which contributes the second version of creation, was formed about four hundred years earlier. The redactor of the Torah nevertheless gave the Priestly version the privileged position of opening the book of Genesis. All of this is important both in what the first chapter tells us about justice and society and in understanding the need to go to earlier sources (especially the Psalms) for an idea of what the tradition was before the demythologizing of the priests.
With all that background, let's turn to the first verse of the creation story. This is how NIV translates the opening:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The question here is whether anything existed before God did this creation. The Christian tradition has supported the notion of creatio ex nihilo, that is creation out of nothing. This suggests that nothing can or did precede God and the act of bringing the world into existence. This has been theologically important for Christians who, in the mode of Greek philosophy, have contended that God is static, all-powerful, and unchanging. While the pre-existence of God is not indicated in the synoptics, it does seem clear in the logos opening of the gospel of John. Levenson questions whether the Hebrew Bible (leave Christian revision aside) supports ex nihilo. He points out that the action of creation begins in verse 3 and takes place against the backdrop of the void and the waters. The Revised Standard Version notices this difference and makes the creation of the heavens and the earth a temporal dependent clause which describes the state of things at the time of creation, "formless and empty."
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
It is clear in RSV, that "when God created" the earth existed as wabohu (without form--only used in the Scripture to describe the earth before creation) and tohu (can be "void" but more often "chaos" or "confusion" as in a city that is under siege.) This is an interesting suggestion and one that will impact our idea of evil, Levenson contends. If chaos existed before creation, than the action of God is different than the Greek and Christian traditions have claimed. Creation is now seen as transformation. Order comes out of chaos. We might think of things in terms of Aquinas here: jus is created--the well-ordered and just condition of society. So the creation is an act of creating justice in which God moves his spirit (ruah, breath, wind) over the chaos and transforms it.
The next verses suggests what that act of transformation might be.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
God is separating the forces of the world, light and day. The light is brought into existence sui generis. The sources of light are not created until the fourth day. The first light is presumably the person of God with a light that is essential to "Godness." Having demonstrated her own light, God does not eliminate the darkness, which is associated with chaos. He separates it. If chaos is the opposite of justice, then darkness is the visual manifestation of disorder. Those who would optimistically suggest that everything God has created is good (probably with the exception of humans) need to encounter the continued existence of the darkness of the formless void, which is separated, named, and kept within a boundary, but not eliminated.
If we can conclude that evil the lack of justice and therefore chaos, we can learn two things from this account. First, that chaos an evil preceded creation. The Spirit of God has brought justice out of confusion but it has not eliminated the formless void. The darkness still exists which leads to the second conclusion that the work of God has been to separate evil from good, to name it, and to create a boundary it must live within.
We will see though that this boundary is not fixed and that the action of separating evil from good is not completed in creation. Rather, chaos continues to exist and to ebb and flow into the pleasant and habitable world that was the intention of the creator. I will describe how that happens and what the implications are for theodicy (including whether we need to accept a limited God to explain suffering) in the next installment.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
God is separating the forces of the world, light and day. The light is brought into existence sui generis. The sources of light are not created until the fourth day. The first light is presumably the person of God with a light that is essential to "Godness." Having demonstrated her own light, God does not eliminate the darkness, which is associated with chaos. He separates it. If chaos is the opposite of justice, then darkness is the visual manifestation of disorder. Those who would optimistically suggest that everything God has created is good (probably with the exception of humans) need to encounter the continued existence of the darkness of the formless void, which is separated, named, and kept within a boundary, but not eliminated.
If we can conclude that evil the lack of justice and therefore chaos, we can learn two things from this account. First, that chaos an evil preceded creation. The Spirit of God has brought justice out of confusion but it has not eliminated the formless void. The darkness still exists which leads to the second conclusion that the work of God has been to separate evil from good, to name it, and to create a boundary it must live within.
We will see though that this boundary is not fixed and that the action of separating evil from good is not completed in creation. Rather, chaos continues to exist and to ebb and flow into the pleasant and habitable world that was the intention of the creator. I will describe how that happens and what the implications are for theodicy (including whether we need to accept a limited God to explain suffering) in the next installment.
Rabbi Shlomo ben Itzhak translates it as: "In the beginning OF God's creating the skies and heavens, when the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and God's spirit was hovering on the face of the water, God said, "Let there be light." Every creation after that was a separation of some kind, beginning with light and darkness, of what in God's eye was good and useful for mankind and what was not, NOT what was evil, but what was not useful, so, already at the beginning of the story we encounter judgement, discernment. The second telling of a story in the bible, which is common is usually thought to be a further, more detailed accounting, though the competition of priesthoods was certainly an issue, both stories are included which implies that neither Zadokite nor Levite was supreme, but that one story fills out the picture of the first. Interesting stuff, John, not what the typical Catholic ever thinks about in any detail...
ReplyDeleteOf course nowhere in Genesis is 'evil' mentioned, there is a big assumption to say that what came before creation was 'evil'. Light was good for many things, it differed from darkness, which on can assume is good for other things, God separates them, assigns them their own spheres of existence, each complementing the other. Why say darkness is 'evil'? Why say the void, nothingness, even chaos, which is another assumption to my mind, borrowed from Greek philosophy, not really in Genesis, but even chaos is not of itself 'evil', it is just the complement to order. God is the namer, the demarcator, the differentiator, the judge. When he sees evil he calls it so, but it is not a given at the beginning, nor is it a creation of God. It, to me, is a creation of mankind, and in Genesis it makes its first appearance as the 'Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil'. Prior to eating the fruit of that tree we can presume there was no evil. It cannot exist without our human knowledge of it, so it is a creation of our mind. The ignorant and the innocent, being 'not knowing' and being 'not harmed' by that knowing, cannot do evil, only those who 'know' what is evil and choose to do it. I would say it exists no where in all of creation, just in the minds of men. The sense organs of human beings are as that of a blind man, we see a tiny bit of light in the spectrum of light, our brains create maybe 90% of what we 'see', we hear and smell even less, we feel a small range of temperature variation, we experience next to nothing of the universe through our feeble and limited senses, we can't really say what that 'light' is that was created first, the big bang?
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