LOOKING TWICE AT THE WORLD
Rabbi David L. Kline
(The reference numbers for endnotes do not link to the note. You must scroll back and forth to see the notes. Sorry.)
When
we reach back beyond the rabbinic stage of our development to our pre science
and pre philosophy ancestors who authored Tanach, we find fresh sources of
interest and pleasure. When we read Bible stories without the lens of
traditional interpretation, we find ourselves charmed by narratives,
discovering something of ourselves.
Our ancestors had diverse ways of looking at the world just as we do.
For
the first half of my pulpit career I taught and preached following the rabbinic
method, Midrash, “seeking meaning.” Then I turned to the critical
approach, the Documentary Hypothesis, with the conviction that we have been
missing out on our own early literature, its values and ideas. Midrash, in the
words of one of my teachers, is the purposeful misreading of text with
the goal of reworking the stories to teach current morality and piety. It began
in Roman times and continues to the present. My task now is to translate
ancient into modern, skipping two millennia of Midrash and commentary. I
attempt a direct reading with minimal comments needed for context and clarity,
and a few observations about the first two stories in Torah. In the present essay I go further than
usual because I am taken by the issues.
Story
text below appears in Calibri font in my translation. I have written
elsewhere about the idiosyncratic translating style. [1] To summarize: I see myself as a
storyteller standing in for my ancestral colleague. My job is to convey both
his poetry and his vision, and to keep up the entertainment value.
B’reshit opens with two cosmogonies, which I
call The First Week and The Garden, two stories from different sources, times, and worldviews.
Nowhere in Tanach is there a clearer side by side illustration of contrasting
views. Throughout biblical writings, the authors understood God as determiner
of all existence and events, but we find widely diverging theologies that must
have derived from changing times and circumstances or, perhaps personal and
professional tendencies in the authors. I argue that Genesis 1-3, presenting
such stories, is in essence pluralistic and comfortable with
contradiction.
We
begin with the earlier of the two compositions, The Garden. This being
the J version dating back to the 10th Century BCE,[2] Yahh[3] is the protagonist. The story opens on
a dry, desolate vista of adamah, “ground”…
Once upon a time, Yahh God made land and
sky. At the time, shrubbery did not exist, nor had grasses sprouted,
because Yahh had not made it rain over the land and there was no person to work
the ground.
Mist rises from the land and wets the whole face
of the ground. And Yahh scooped
up some dust from that adamah and formed
from it the adam. He breathed into its nose the breath of life, and the adam
came alive.
Yahh planted a garden of delight in the east.
There He would set the adam. From the adamah He caused to sprout
every beautiful and fruitful tree, pleasing to eye and appetite, and in the
very middle of the garden, a Tree of Life and one of Knowledge, good and bad.
(A
river flows from Eden to irrigate the garden, from there splitting into four
streams. The first, Pishon, borders Chavilah, land of gold – good quality
gold – and also fragrant bdellium resin and bright colored gemstones. The
second, Gichon, borders the land of Kush. The third, Chidekel, Tigris,
flows east of Assyria. The fourth, is Prat, Euphrates.)
So
Yahh took the person and set him in the Garden of Delight to work it and guard
it.
The
world now has two beings, Yahh and an unnamed person, the adam. The
garden–some imaginative geographer inserted parenthetic information–exists for
Yahh’s use and pleasure. The person he created will maintain it and may enjoy it
too, but part is off limits:
Yahh commanded the person: “Eat, eat, from any of the garden trees except for the
Tree of Knowledge, good and bad. The day you eat from that tree, you die,
dead.”
Then Yahh said: “It’s not a good thing for the adam to be alone. I’m
going to make a helpful juxtaposer.”
Here
the storyteller offers the first case of meddling, for the story never suggests
that Adam is unhappy. Was creation lacking? Was there some mistake? He who
formed ha’adam from earthy raw materials thought something was wrong. He
would correct the defect by supplying for the person a “helpful juxtaposer.”
(My best attempt to capture the irony and humor of the extraordinary Hebrew
idiom ֹ עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּו, ezer k’negdo.
“Helpful opponent” is too strong. “Help-meet,” offered by the King James, is a
good try but inadequate. “Fitting helper” in the JPS is possibly literal but
misses the piquancy.) Without a design in mind, He begins a series of
experiments, one by one, to find the perfect companion for a person.
So, with more clay from the ground, Yahh formed every possible
animal of the field and bird of the sky, bringing each to the person to check
his verbal response. Whatever he would call the creature would become its
name.
Nice
hint here towards pragmatism and taxonomy: a human response to variety in
nature, and an ingenious narrative device to define the relationship between
man and woman as distinct from that between man and any other creature.
The person gave every beast and bird a
name by which it could be identified, but the process yielded not one that
could stand up to the adam in a helpful way. So Yahh put the adam into a deep sleep and performed an operation, excising one of the ribs and closing and
healing the incision. From that rib, Yahh constructed a female and brought
her to the adam, who exclaimed:
“At last!
Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. This one will be called “ishah,”
(“woman”) because she is taken from “ish” (“man”).[4]
Success
at last! Man smiles with delight at what is in his eyes, a copy of himself,
derivative. Some say, parenthetically, that, in consequence of this initial,
short-sighted chauvinism,
(A man leaves his parents to cling to his
woman so that they become one flesh.)
And now the plot
thickens as human beings come to know and know one another:
They were, of course, both naked, the
person and his woman, and not a bit embarrassed.
The snake
was the nakedest/cleverest of the animals that Yahh had made. So this
snake, one day, said to the woman: “Hey, did God say you mustn’t eat from any
tree in the garden?”
Speaking of naked,
how about the snake, the nakedest of animals! As it happens, arom,
Hebrew for “naked,” has a homonym, “clever, shrewd, sly.” The storyteller, J,
seems to have delighted in word play and narrative intricacy: perhaps there is
something about a snake that, on seeing it, the first person named it nachash,
having in mind the meaning, homonymous, “puzzle out, guess, suppose?”
“Oh, we
can eat from the garden trees,” she replied, “except for the one in the middle.
For that one God said we mustn’t eat from it or touch it lest we die.”
“Nah, you wouldn’t die,” said the nachash. “Because God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened. You’ll become like God, knowers, of good and bad.”
“Nah, you wouldn’t die,” said the nachash. “Because God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened. You’ll become like God, knowers, of good and bad.”
She took
a good look at the tree of knowledge. She noted that the fruit looked
ripe for eating, a delight to the eyes. And eating from the tree could
make you wise? I want it! So she took some of the fruit and ate it
and gave some to her man, who ate it as well.
Sure enough, in both
of them, their eyes were opened. They recognized that they were naked.
What did the taste
show them that they hadn’t seen before?
Whatever, they must have become aware that body parts might have other
than innocent functions. The first
Ah Hah! morphed into the first Uh-oh! when the male body part stood out, so...
They sewed together fig leaves for
garments to go around their waists.
And then they heard the sound of Yahh God going for His stroll in the cool of the day. The adam and his woman hid from Yahh, among the trees.
And then they heard the sound of Yahh God going for His stroll in the cool of the day. The adam and his woman hid from Yahh, among the trees.
Yahh called out: “Adam, where are you?”
The adam
replied: “I heard You in the garden and I was afraid because I am naked, and I
hid.”
“Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten from that tree from which I forbade you to eat?”
“Who told you you were naked? Have you eaten from that tree from which I forbade you to eat?”
“The
woman You gave me served me from the tree and I ate.”
Yahh spoke
to the woman: “What have you done?”
And she
said: “The snake beguiled me and I ate.”
Now Yahh turned to the snake:
“For doing this, be cursed from the list
Of every beast, of every field animal:
On your underbelly shall you go, and eat dust all
your days.
Enmity, I set, between you and the woman,
Between your seed and hers.
He’ll crush you in the head and you’ll crush him in the heel.”
Enmity, I set, between you and the woman,
Between your seed and hers.
He’ll crush you in the head and you’ll crush him in the heel.”
To the
woman:
“I give you a lot of pain
and pregnancy;
In pain shall you bear child.
Yet your urge is for your man,
And he will dominate you.”
In pain shall you bear child.
Yet your urge is for your man,
And he will dominate you.”
To the adam:
“Because you listened to your woman and ate from that tree I specifically
forbade you to eat from:
Cursed be the adamah on your account;
By pain shall you eat of it all your days.
It’ll sprout you thorn and thistle though you eat of the grain grass.
By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,
Till you return to the adamah from which you were taken,
For, dust you are, and unto dust you return.”
By pain shall you eat of it all your days.
It’ll sprout you thorn and thistle though you eat of the grain grass.
By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,
Till you return to the adamah from which you were taken,
For, dust you are, and unto dust you return.”
(Then the
adam named his woman: Chavah for she was to be the mother of all that
live–chay.)
Yahh made
garments of leather and clothed the two of them. And then He spoke:
“Well, when it comes to knowing, good and bad, the person has become like one
of Us. Now, lest he reach out and take also from the Tree of Life, and,
eating, gain immortality…”
So Yahh God sent him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was
taken. He drove the adam out.
To the east of the Garden of Eden he stationed the k’ruvim monsters, and
the flaming, ever turning, sword, to guard the way to the Tree of Life.
Then the
man knew Chavah, his woman. She became pregnant and bore Kayin, as to
say: kaniti, “I have acquired” a man from Yahh. She then bore his
brother, Hevel (which
is to say, “for nothing.”) Hevel
grew to be a shepherd and Kayin a farmer, working the ground.
The
world of The Garden is chaotic but intriguing. Events proceed
unpredictably, because the divine artist works by trial and error to achieve
whatever notion may occur to him. Human missteps, in the world as we know
it, mirror divine missteps in creation. Yahh is well meaning but not
always successful, as witness the failed attempt, several chapters later, to
improve the world in a flood while hoping for a better result through selective
breeding, eugenics. An imperfect world reflects its Maker. Rather than
perfect, Yahh is immanent, sympathetic and approachable, hands on, intimately
involved in changes that can go in any direction. As for humanity, having eaten of the tree of
knowledge—judgemental, creative, and problematic—we now share one of the two
qualities that had been reserved for the deity. The other, immortality remains
exclusively Yahh’s but otherwise he is much like one of us. His power is but relatively greater
than ours.
The
First Week—the likely later, 6th
or 5th century BCE story by P the priestly writer—opens on a fluid
scene: a shapeless blob of liquid and solid matter. God—generic and unnamed in this
story—creates methodically and by speaking: “There shall be …” Not only are
there no missteps in this creation, but every orderly stage (but one) gets
evaluated and found to be good.
Overall grade: very good!
An elegant title opens the narrative and with it all of Torah.
IN THE BEGINNING
God created the sky and the land.
The
land was all formlessness and chaos: darkness over the face of the depths, with
God/wind, hovering over the face of the fluid.
And
God said: “There shall be light!” And light came to be. And God saw the light
as good. And God distinguished between the light and the darkness: God called
the light, “day,” the darkness, “night.” And evening came to be and morning
came to be, day one.
Neither of these
cosmogonies is creatio ex nihilo.
Both build upon preexisting matter, dry or wet potential.[5]
God, transcendent in this story, turns on light so as to see the blob
outside of which, as wind, God has been blowing. Good start, minimal staging, suggestive of a bright
future.
And
God said: “There shall be a spread in the middle of the fluid, that it be a
distinguisher between fluid and fluid.” And so it came to be, with God making
the spread that distinguished between the fluid that was under the spread and
the fluid that was above the spread. And God called the spread, “sky.” And
evening came to be and morning came to be, second day.
And
God said: “The water that is under the sky shall gather into one place and the
dry shall appear.” And so it came to be. And God called the dry, “land,” and
the gathering of water, “seas.” And God saw it as good. And God said: “The land
shall sprout shoots of grain bearing grass, fruit trees producing fruit by
species, each containing its seed for the land.” And so it came to be. The land
sprouted shoots of grain bearing grass, by species, and fruit bearing trees
each containing the seed of its species. And God saw it as good. And evening
came to be and morning came to be, third day.
As in the Garden, the
storyteller dwells on variety in nature and once again it is a literary
device. There the botanical
variety was for purposes of delight and the zoological variety resulted from
the search for suitability. Here
the emphasis is on procreation: preservation of every species.
And
God said: “There shall be lights in the spread of sky to distinguish the day
from the night. And they shall be indicators for sacred seasons, for days, and
for years. And they shall shine on
the land.” And so it came to be, with God making the two great lights: the
greater for governing the day, the lesser, and the stars, for governing the
night. And as God had spoken, they were set in the spread of the sky to shine
on the land, to govern by day and night and distinguish between the light and
the darkness. And God saw it as
good. And evening came to be and morning came to be, fourth day.
Not our modern way of
seeing the sun as source of energy—vegetation was created yesterday and light
on day one—but the author acknowledged the fourth day lights as purposeful and
functional. They serve as markers
of time, hours, days, months, and seasons. There is also the tantalizing hint
of astrology here, with no follow through in Tanach.
And
God said: “The waters shall swarm a living, breathing swarm; and fowl shall fly
over the land and up in the spread of the sky.” And God created the great sea
monsters and every living, breathing thing that swims. The water swarmed with
species, and every winged fowl by its species. And God saw it as good. And God
blessed them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and the
fowl multiply on the land. And evening came to be and morning came to be, fifth
day.
And
God said: “The land shall put forth living, breathing things by species, beast
and creeper, land living animals by species.” And so it came to be, with God
making land living animals by species, the beasts by species and all the ground
creepers by species. And God saw it as good.
At this point,
suddenly, God speaks in first person plural, unique in Tanach. Was God addressing a heavenly
council? Is this pluralis
majistates? The context
provides no clue. As a tactic in
storytelling it sounds like a narrative drum-roll setting off creation of human
beings from all that preceded.
And
God said: “We shall make humanity in Our image, as Our likeness. They shall
dominate the fish of the sea, the fowl of the sky, the beast and all the land
creepers, indeed all the land.”
And God created the human in the image –
In the image of God, created,
Created them male and female.
And
God blessed them:
“Be fruitful and multiply.
Fill the land and conquer it.
Dominate the fish of the sea, the fowl of the
sky,
And
all life that moves on the land.”
And
God said: “See, I have given you every grain bearing grass over the face of the
land and every fruit bearing tree. They shall be yours for food. And for all
land living animals and all fowl of the sky and all that creeps on the land,
for all that lives and breathes the green grass shall be for food.”
And
so it came to be. And God saw all that was done: Yes! It was very good! And
evening came to be and morning came to be, sixth day.
And
complete now were sky and land and all their hosts. God surveyed[6] on the seventh day the labor that was done and
desisted from all labor. And God blessed the seventh day and made it kodesh,
“special,” for on it ceased all the labor that God had done in creation.
This is the story of the sky and the land in
their creation.
Here
is the orderly, rational, well-conceived, purposeful universe. Natural law
prevails. Cause and effect work because they are fashioned in sublime style by
a deity with prescience and ability.
Two episodes leap to attention:
Shabbat. The narrative anticlimax follows creation
as if it were a natural development—God is justifiably tired after six workdays
of creativity. The storyteller, by this device, imaginatively introduces and
explains the week, with its seventh day, off. The Jews returning in the late 6th century BCE
from exile in Babylon may have picked up and brought with them the general
structure of seven days, along with the Babylonian names for months, but this,
at least in western culture, is the earliest literary presentation of a regular
seven-day cycle. And Shabbat is kodesh,
“special,” an entitlement for all humankind for all time, designed into the
cosmos.[7]
Shabbat is not part of the picture in The Garden.
Humanity.
Male and female created at the same moment, both in the divine image. Image? Likeness? In The
Garden a likable anthropomorphic and anthropopathic character–Yah–led. What
sort of divine image can we associate with God in The First Week?
Transcendent? Self conscious? Systematic? Rational? Creative? “Divine
qualities” all, and human aspirations, each available to us in some measure.
Perhaps we imitate God when we are creative? Rational? Note that the spiritual
figure of this story intends for us to be Godlike where in The Garden,
the good Fellow attempts to withhold divine prerogatives from His
creatures. And note further, that
the masculine pronoun is entirely fitting for Yah, but only an inclusive term
can properly refer to One who reflects both sexes.
And
speaking of sex, human beings are blessed in the same words as the birds and
the bees: P'ru ur'vu, "Be fruitful and multiply." There was no need for and no mention of
sex in the Garden prior to the forbidden fruit episode. Afterwards, sex is
forever linked to shame and guilt. But in the First Week procreation is a major
motif beginning from day three on. Sexual reproduction is natural and desirable
in human beings as in other creatures–even plants do seeds. No
complications, moral, psychological or otherwise. Go to it! The
more the better! Fill up the land!
The
First Week tells the teleology
of a world of sublime balance. God’s work leaves room for no mistakes, no
unintended consequences. Light and dark, hot and cold, life and death,
good and evil, all are cycles in a cause and effect string. The cosmos
works perfectly because it was made that way by a perfect God. Natural law
is God’s will. God is powerful, praiseworthy and remote.
The
redactor of these stories, likely a colleague of the priestly author, set The
First Week before The Garden, granting pride of position. Later readers, including many moderns
who take Tanach as divine revelation, read The Garden as a footnote to The
First Week. They attempt to
conflate the God concepts and harmonize the stories and the
worldviews. But neither author would have acceded to such violent misreading. Not only do the accounts differ in
form, order, vocabulary, and many details, but they reflect totally different
mindsets that are lost to such readers.
A
second outcome of what might be called a pious reading of the two stories is
that it encourages a widespread misimpression that chapter one describes God’s
intention of a perfect world while chapter two and following, are about human
sin that corrupts the would-be all-around goodness. The Garden became the place of “original sin” and
“the fall of man.” True, The First Week makes no explicit mention of
sin, pain, death, work, sorrow, greed or war. But it is a cosmogony not of some imaginary cosmos but of
the one we live in. The author may
have had in mind some initially simpler and more innocent world but his
explanation for death and all of the other obscenities would have been cause
and effect and the balance of natural law, that is, of God’s will. He is the rationalist father of all
those who say: “We may not always understand the way the world works–or, so to
speak, the way God operates–but we are certain that it makes sense on some
ultimate level.” The Garden
narrator is down to earth and can’t be certain of anything other than
feelings. He (some say she[8]) is the ancestor of existentialists.
We
can’t help but compare other cosmogonies that our authors might have
known. Two come immediately to
mind, Enuma Elish, (“When on High”) with roots in fourth millennium
Sumer but widely copied in first millennium Babylon; and Hesiod’s Theogony,
written in eighth century Greece but poeticizing earlier stories. The Genesis
word תְהוֹם, t’hom, “depths,” over which is
darkness, is cognate to Tiamat in Enuma Elish. Tiamat is the goddess
over whom Marduk hovers before killing her and building, from her parts, the
world. Interesting but not much
help in reading our story. Enuma Elish and Theogeny both feature
fighting between generations of gods, and world building that comes out of that
violence. Between these stories
and those of Genesis I see more difference than similarity. My guess is that
authors of cosmogonies do their best to make sense of the world as seen in
their culture. Origin stories–the ultimate foundation myths– are projections
backward of weltanshauung. J and P
would have argued over orderliness and comprehensibility in the universe. The author of Enuma Elish and Hesiod
both seem to have been intent on explaining a world of bloody conflict and war.[9]
What these cosmogonies share is that earth reflects heaven–or vice
versa.
Freud
and Jung spun fantastic readings of these myths finding in them the wisdom of
the subconscious. I am more
interested in the surface level of what my ancestors had to say about life, for
example, about sex and gender.
No
need for a psychologist to point out that The Garden is about growing
sexual awareness. The Tree of Knowledge supplies, first and foremost, that
which small children lack when their parents have somehow to convince them to
get dressed. The Garden
reminds us that adults are those who have learned about sex and mixed feelings.
Parents recognize Yahh’s wish to forbid sexual knowledge from little ones so as
to keep them little ones. And
adolescents are all aware that they have to break through these prohibitions so
as to self realize. And we can
understand why the first man and woman put the fig leaves where they did (and
we can wonder if it helped much). And we can empathize with them for passing
the buck, he to his subordinate, she to the snake. And we can feel for Yahh Who
has to throw them out of His Garden now that they are ready to reproduce. And
we all know we can’t go back again. And how about the nachash as the
first teacher who, naturally, subverts authority?[10] And how about woman as responsible for
Talmud Torah? What a story!
So
what was he thinking, he who wrote The First Week? Free love? Guilt-free sex?
I think he simply wasn’t writing about what might be called “relational
sex.” Nor is his story about
family life or morality. Rather he
had in mind rudimentary biology: the process of being fruitful. Men and women are created equal because
we share the responsibility.
Reproductivity is a value for all living things. To be sure, we dominate, but not
male>female. Rather, human beings are to the rest as God is to us. I think this author was interested in
systems and physics. He mixed in a dash of theology for the beauty of his
orderly world.
Millennia
of people reading these stories as revealed science or morality lessons have
obscured the quality of excellent fiction. The authors and their original
audiences may have thought of the narratives as plausible but this was long
before the time of scientific inquiry. Cosmogonists (including Big Bang
theorists) want to make sense of it all and those ancients did make sense of
it, literary sense. It’s nice to
know where to find a good story.
And I love getting in touch with my ancestors.
[2] The
“Documentary Hypothesis,” widely followed by Bible scholars since the late 19th
century, remains the most workable structure for critical understanding of
Tanach. It is a
literary/historical approach to an ancient text, as opposed to pietistic
reading of “the word of God.” In Midrash, what we call the פשט, the “simple, plain,” is, a priori, divine
revelation, a consideration with heavy implications that may be far from the
narrator’s intent. The critical approach makes no assumptions about revelation
or historicity. Rather than The Five Books of Moses, revealed to the
spokesperson for God, we hypothesize four distinct documents, J, E, D, and P
brought together by a 5th century BCE redactor. “J” stands for
“Jahwist,” a writer in the 10th century court of King Solomon, who
commonly refers to God as “Yah.” “E” stands for “Elohist,” later in the 10th
century in the northern kingdom of Israel. E in Genesis consistently refers to
God as “Elohim.” “D” stands for “Deuteronomist,” likely a school of writers
influenced by the values and judgements of the Book of Deuteronomy which
appeared in 7th century Jerusalem. “P” stands for “Priestly author,”
Beginning in the 6th century, perhaps in the Babylonian exile, a
series of writers presented their version of history and revelation, justifying
the complex sacrificial cult and the governing authority of the Kohen family.
[3] “Sh’ma
Echad,” first page and Appendix, CCAR Journal, Spring 2012, author. Yah, an apocopated form of our
ancestors’ four letter name for God, is well attested and pronounceable. Rather than breach the rule about
not pronouncing YHVH, we can grasp and convey the narrator’s intent with this
simple substitute rather than the common but questionable circumlocution:
“Lord.”
[4] An
alternative reading, suggested in the Kittel (BH, 1951)upper
paraphernalia, ‘me’ishah for ‘me’ish, would offer an
egregious pun in Hebrew: אשה/אישה , ishshah/iyshah
(“woman” has dagesh in the shin. “her man” has yud in the plene (full) spelling. Neither of these orthographic points
would be obvious in the ancient text.) “This
was too good a pun for the J author to miss!” observed my friend and study
partner Fr. Pat Madden, PhD, of Greco Institute in Shreveport.
Here is the textual evidence for “because she is taken from ishah
(“her man.)”:
Samaritan Pentateuch: לזאת
יקרא אשה כי מאישה לקחה זאת
Septuagint: ἐκ
τοῦ ἀνδρὸς αὐτῆς (but Vulgate: quoniam de viro sumpta
est)
Peshitta: נסיבא גברא דמן מטל אנתתא תתקרא הדא (with thanks to Fr. Pat’s deciphering)
Targum Onqelos: דא נסיבא מבעלא ארי אתתא יתקרי
לדא (but T Yonatan agrees with MT)
Note that Onqelos
introduces the word for “master, husband,” rather than “her man.”
[5] The rabbis
preferred to talk little about creation.
An interesting philosophical reference to creation from nothing occurs
in the second century BCE Apocryphal story of the mother (later Jewish
tradition names her Hannah) and her seven martyred sons. By way of encouraging her final,
youngest son to die like his brothers rather than yield to Antiochus, she
includes: I
beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that
is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that
existed. (2
Maccabees 7:28, RSV) The ex
nihilo argument here may be in response to Hellenistic ideas of
creation. Hesiod’s Theogony (8th century BCE) has Chaos
birthing Gaia, “earth” among the earliest of the gods.
In the
Midrash, Raban Gamliel, mid 1st century CE, responds to a
philosopher who suggests that God is a great creative artist but had good
materials with which to work, tohu and bohu (chaos), darkness,
wind, water, depths. Says Gamliel: “All of these are covered in the word
“creation.” (בריאה
בהן כתיב כולהון)
Taking the word from the title line in Genesis, he cites verses to show
that it applies to each of the elements that Gnostic philosophers held to have
been created by angels or others than the one God. (B’reshit Rabbah 1:9)
[6]
Most translations read וַיְכַל as a form of
√כלה, same as וַיְכֻלּוּ
in the preceding verse. This would
say that God “completed” the work on the seventh day, though the last of
creation took place on the sixth.
Could Shabbat be said to have been created on the seventh? Yes, but that seems to me a stretch.
Notes penciled into the margins of my Kittel Bible recall some long ago lecture
or reading where I learned that Tur Sinai suggested reading וַיְכַל
as a form of √כול , meaning “measure” as in Isaiah
40:12. The root also denotes
“contain,” suggesting that God “took it all in.” A rabbi might be forgiven for
understanding God’s Shabbat activity to be the archetype of the Jewish practice
of taking a walk and just looking, particularly when the reading has Tur Sinai
on its side.
[7]
Shabbat, along with New Moon, appears
in 2 Kings 4:23(9th century BCE) and elsewhere, passages that antedate The
First Week. The word means “stop, cease” and clearly refers to some
celebratory day, as in Hosea 2:13(8th century BCE). The earliest definitive
reference to Shabbat seems to be Exodus 34:21 which may be a P document or, I
should prefer to think, may have been moved there from the much earlier Book of
Deuteronomy(7th century BCE). The
Exodus 20 Ten Commandments seems clearly to belong to P. The Deuteronomy 5 Ten Commandments
strikes me as an earlier version of P’s.
Exodus 34, according to the context, contains the words written
originally on the tablets. Could
it be that Cecil B. DeMille
got it wrong?
[9]
Tanach contains scattered hints of
creative violence where God wins the fight against the sea and its monsters:
Isaiah 51:9; Psalms 74:13-15; 89:10-11; Job 40:24-25. Neither J nor P felt the need to cover these bases when they
wrote what they wrote.
[10] Teaching
as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman, 1971. I don’t remember reading through this book when it came out
but its title became my watchword as a teacher. That nachash knew. He taught the truth and was duly punished by the
Authority. But the punishment was
not all that bad, really, and teachers persist. They must.
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