To most Americans, the Bible in general, and the book of Genesis in particular, is known, if it is known, as a document in the culture war, the chief adversary of On the Origin of Species. Since Genesis was composed between 2500 and 3000 years ago, I guess you could say it has enjoyed continued relevance, but not for the right reasons. There are different levels of absurdity in the view pressed upon us by the fundamentalists. It's pretty crazy that millions believe that Genesis relates a straightforward, literal account of how the world came into existence. But, even if we were to entertain that possibility, a cursory perusal of the text reveals big problems. For example, the opening chapters relate not one but two creation stories that are different in their particulars. There is the one commencing with the first verse of the Bible, wherein God creates by oral command, first light, then on successive "days" the seas and the sun and the moon and the flora and fauna and, finally, after all that, human beings. When this has been accomplished, the six days of creation are up, God rests on the seventh, indent, new paragraph, and:
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up--for the Lord God had not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground--then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
So which is it? Did things spring into being from the speech acts of God, or did God crouch over the dirt and form us with his own hands before breathing life into our nostrils? And were we human beings made before or after the plants and animals? The further we read into the text, the more questions like these arise. Were men and women made at the same time, or did God, seeing that man needed a helper, make woman afterwards? If Adam was the first man, then where did the women his sons married come from? Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?
These are questions for fundamentalists, and their answers involve them in deeper perplexities. At their best, the explanations possess a certain charm. I might as well not reserve my favorite. Against the Jewish tradition that the whole of the Pentateuch--the first five books of the Bible--was written by Moses, it has been pointed out that this cannot possibly be true, since the Pentateuch includes the story of Moses's death. The rabbis have two solutions. The first is that the whole Pentateuch was written by Moses, except for the part describing his death, which was written by someone else. The second is that the whole Pentateuch was written by Moses, including the part describing his death, and that when he wrote that part he wept.
It only seems, however, that the explication of biblical texts is mainly a matter of magical thinking. Regarding the Pentateuch, mainline scholarship holds, at a high level, that an ancient Semitic people had stories that were orally transmitted over centuries before being set down in writing by different authors whose work product was edited before being spliced together into a single narrative that was eventually canonized despite bearing everywhere the marks of what modern users of word processing software call "cutting and pasting." So there are in Genesis two different creation stories because--there were two stories, by two authors, both of which were incorporated into the text known as the book of Genesis. This "documentary hypothesis," though possibly lacking in veneration for the Word of God, has the merit of supplying a coherent explanation for what we in fact discover while reading Genesis. And perhaps we can be acquitted of irreverence if we admit straightaway that the contribution of one of these authors--the one called the Yahwist because of the word he uses to refer to God--is a good part of the reason why at least parts of the Bible qualify as masterpieces of the world's literature.
A quick word about the four documents of the documentary hypothesis before we examine more carefully the work of the Yahwist (or Jahwist), usually denoted J. There is also the Deuteronomist (D), whose work, as you might guess, is mostly confined to the book of Deuteronomy and is no part of Genesis. Then there is the Priestly writer (P). This material displays a strong interest in worship and other "priestly" matters, including genealogy. Generally speaking, we are pretty safe in concluding that, if our attention is waning, we have come to a block of P material. For example, the story of the Tower of Babel, in Genesis 11:1-9, comes to its conclusion and we then read, at verse 10:
These are the descendants of Shem. When Shem was a hundred years old, he became the father of Arpachshad two years after the flood. . . .
And there follows a long, boring section of the nature A was the father of B, who was the father of C, etc., etc. A freshman composition teacher might be tempted to write in the margin, "transition weak"--and indeed the explanation is that the Yahwist's account of the Tower of Babel is followed by a priestly block of material and that no editor was sufficiently offended by the abrupt shift to provide a few transitional lines. The fourth document, that of the Elohist (E), because it applies the word Elohim to God, is the most difficult to distinguish from the Yahwist. The serious student of the Pentateuch will pore over tables setting out which sections come from which documentary source, and some of these tables assign the designation JE to certain sections, to indicate either some merging of the sources or just uncertainty. The E document is more fragmentary than J and, geographically, exhibits more familiarity with the traditions of northern Israel.
The Yahwist's work was likely accomplished during the Davidic era, in the tenth century B.C., when Israel was enjoying a period of national unity and prestige unknown to that time. It's conceived on an epic scale and addresses the primal past forward to the conquest of the land of Canaan. The portion of the work contained in Genesis falls nicely into two sections: primal beginnings (ending with chapter 11) and the patriarchal period, concerning Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and their wives, "handmaidens," and children (chapters 12 to 50). Let us try to say something sensible about each section in turn, the relationship between the two, and the author's evident intent.
The Yahwist's creation story is the one found in Genesis 2. It's distinguished from the priestly account, in Genesis 1, by a certain earthiness--God getting his hands soiled and forming the dirt instead of creating by fiat from on high--that is representative of his work. There follow the stories that must sound familiar even to biblical illiterates, so dispersed are they in the air of our civilization: the fall of man, expulsion from Eden, Cain's murder of his brother Abel, the flood, the tower of Babel. These are not the creations of the Yahwist but his versions of circulating stories that have the pretty clear intent of supplying answers to such basic questions as: Why do we feel the need to wear clothes? Why must there be so much misery connected with birthing children and getting food? Why are men and women attracted to each other? Why do people speak different languages? The broad import is overwhelmingly pessimistic, a long catalog of humanity's disobedience and rebellion eliciting God's disgust. He made humanity but it looks like a mistake.
The stories concerning Abraham and his descendants, therefore, are set against a backdrop of brokenness. Instead of pronouncing "turn off the light," God makes a promise to the patriarch of a single family through whom he will continue his work with humankind:
Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves."
The interest of the succeeding stories derives largely from the possibility that this threefold promise--a land, a nation, a reciprocal blessing--will be added to the heap of broken things. You know the broad outline to a thousand Hollywood movies. The first movement establishes the worthiness of some person, group, or cause, which, in the second movement, is besieged by an escalating threat--and then, at the last moment, when all had just seemed lost, there is a dramatic and satisfying intervention that sends the audience home happy. I'm not saying that the Yahwist invented this plot but he was an early and skillful practitioner.
The first crisis concerns Abraham's difficulty in getting a legitimate heir. He cannot very well be the father of a great nation if his line dies with him. But time keeps passing and when his wife, Sarah, concludes she will never conceive, she suggests that Abraham get a child with Hagar, her Egyptian maid. To the embarrassment of our fundamentalist friends, this plan is acted on. Hagar bears a son, Ishmael, "a wild ass of a man" who, not being a fulfillment of God's promise, qualifies as a prototypical outcast (as Herman Melville well knew). In one of the Yahwist's many vivid, human details, Sarah nags Abraham after Ishmael is born--apparently forgetting that it was not his but her idea that he sleep with Hagar--and his short reply identifies one of literature's first put-upon husbands: "Behold, your maid is in your power; do to her as you please" (16:6). So Sarah "deals harshly" with Hagar, who flees.
This misadventure, a small jewel itself, heightens the tension created by the theme of the still unkept promise. The next development occurs when God pays Abraham another visit and repeats the promise regarding a son, this time with more detail: it will be next spring. In another memorable detail, Sarah is eavesdropping on this conversation between God and her husband:
The Lord said, "I will surely return to you in the spring, and Sarah your wife shall have a son." And Sarah was listening at the tent door behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?"
There's not a lot of laughter in the Bible and one therefore takes note of Sarah. The son she finally bears is named Isaac, yitzhaq in Hebrew, and, reading around in the Commentaries, one learns that titzhaq is Hebrew for "she laughs." So it seems that verbal playfulness was another tool in the Yahwist's kit. Though no one would call Sarah a "knight of faith"--as Kierkegaard did her husband--she is, especially considering how few words are spent on her, one of the most attractive and fully realized characters in the Bible. One of her rivals in this category is another creation of the Yahwist: Joseph, a grandson of Isaac, who figures in the later chapters of Genesis. I have a cunning plan to use his story as an introduction to the book of Exodus.