Summary article: Genesis One – Summary
Genre of Genesis 1. If the subject of ‘Genre’ is touchy in pop-Christian circles, then this is multiplied when talking about the first chapter of the first book of the first part of the Bible. But what is genre?
Genre
Genre is simply a category we use to loosely define what sorts of style a particular piece of (in this case) literature employs. They are not pre-existing categories that a writing must mindlessly conform to, but are descriptions of patters that a certain piece of writing more or less follows. It is, in other words, a way of trying to relate one piece of writing to the cognitive place of others. We call both Shakespeare and the Iliad poetry, even though they are at most loosely related insofar as Shakespeare may draw on the western tradition inspired by Homer, but that doesn’t mean that Shakespeare was copying Homer, only that he is trying to communicate to people in a somewhat similar way.
Talking about ancient days
But in what way does one communicate about things unreachable in the far past? That no human eye has seen, nor ear heard? The obvious answer to this from many in our day has been: You don’t. You either make it up, or (if you believe in the inspiration of Scripture): you believe God whispered it in Moses’ ear. The former is what most Christians, I suppose, think about all other myths from the ancient world; they are made up. The latter must therefore be the case with our own texts. Problems aside with the view of inspiration that is only a step short of the extremely problematic dictation theory of inspiration, as if the Bible was the Christian Quran so that, as the Rabbis claim, Moses wrote down the account of his death with tears in his eyes while God whispered the words to him, not to mention the questions raised by a supposed pure Mosaic authorship; this is a view about ancient people that droops with a triumphalist western mindset. The person or persons who wrote the Enuma Elish, and the Gilgamesh Epic, not to mention the Homeric literature or the Anaeid, weren’t ignorant brutes whose brains were as full of lead as ours are of microplastics. Perhaps we can ascribe to the authors of these poems, whether a single person or a folk tradition, deception, malice, demons, or just naivety. But suppose the other thing is true: suppose these people weren’t idiots who made stories up to get attention, that we can now readily dismiss as fiction, suppose the stories were meant to do something other than historiography, what could this be?
Writing (and interpreting) Genesis 1
If I don’t know exactly how the cosmos came into existence (which, believe it or not, I don’t), this might not be a problem. After all, does anyone really care exactly how everything happened? We have to remember when discussing the ancient world, that this is a mostly pre-literary, pre-scientific, pre-most-things-modern culture. I, as the hypothetical author, might instead set out to do something different: I will tell them what lies behind whatever the events that brought the cosmos into existence were. After all, who cares if the Euphrates is the result of rainfall in Asia minor (not that I have any way of knowing this)? Instead I will tell them something else about this great life-giving river: I will write a myth about times past where the god Enki brings the Euphrates into existence by an act of self-pleasuring lust.1 Not to signal that the river is made of god-semen, everyone would know that the Euphrates is made of the same water that is in the Tigris, and every other stream, and every rainstorm, and so on. No, this is my way of saying that the Euphrates was given to us by Enki, and that he endowed it with his life and fertility. In other words: because of both my lack of knowledge of, and lack of interest in, the physical and empirical, I have decided to write about the metaphysical.
Distinction between the empirical and metaphysical
Of course, as any good aristotelian will know, the physical and metaphysical are distinct but not separable. I cannot write metaphysics that are unconnected to actual events (so that Genesis 1 didn’t “actually happen”), likewise I cannot write empirical history about what happened without there being a reason for the things happening (“this is just how God did it”), but the two are different. One can write about the empirical; “rainflow creates the euphrates”, without writing about the metaphysical; “Enki blessed the euphrates valley with his life and fertility”.
What ancient writings, and I would argue even the Bible, shows is that unlike in our own cultural river, where empiricism has completely destroyed metaphysics, the ancients were much more interested in what was behind events than the events in themselves. So when whoever wrote Genesis 1 did so he is not retrieving some empirical past, or having it dictated to him by the Holy Spirit in his ear. He is doing something else, he is telling us the why behind creation, and the what creation really is: God wants to dwell with his creation, and therefore he built it to be his temple.
- ‘Enki and the World Order’, lines 250-266, https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr113.htm, accessed 2025-05-13 ↩︎
