Genesis and Genre

While at the Tomlinsons’ recently, Emma Bush asked how I read Genesis 1. This is an extremely good question, and engages many of the interpretative conundrums that scholars produce learned work on. Without wanting to appear like an oracle with all the answers, or even all the answers from four years of theological study, I hope to offer a few brief comments on the nature of Scripture, and how best to read it.

By far the most important thing when reading a biblical passage is not the context in which it was written. Though this is an important insight, and can lead to suggestive readings of biblical material, its place is secondary to my suggested focus of analysis, which stresses the centrality of genre.*

Genre is the type of writing that the writer of a piece of work is engaged in, and can take many forms – songs, poems, historical accounts, myths (by which I mean meaningful stories, rather than untruths) etc. So, Proverbs (sayings and philosophical proverbs) is a very different genre to Psalms (songs, laments); and both are very different to the gospels, say. To read a Psalm like a Proverb is to miss the point, and as the answers that one receives from a text depend on the questions that one asks of it, and the questions that one asks depend on the genre that it is seen to reflect, the classification of a work into a genre is essential for the formulation of searching readings of scriptural passages. So far, so good.

But what about the genre of ‘history’, which is seen to take up large amounts of the OT and the gospels? By history, most people mean the record of events that happened in the real world, usually recorded by eyewitnesses in an unbiased and objective manner. This is certainly how modern history is done – but is alien to the ancient world. Only in the 18th century onwards did truth become equivalent to historicity (ie, whether something happened or not) – such that apparently historical material like the gospels, if seen to be imperfect records of history because of theological bias, inaccurate sources, textual tampering etc, is rendered untrue as a result of these difficulties.

If, then, the modern concept of history is alien to the biblical writers, who see truth as a deeply more searching question than whether something happened or not, how to approach the biblical texts which appear to be historical accounts?

I offer two models, with an example of each.

1. Fictionalised history. The components of the story, broadly speaking, happened – the people in it existed, and the bare bones of the story are historically accurate. The detail, however, is filled out and explained through the insertion of ‘fictional’ elements, which give broader significance to the narrative as a whole and play out some of its themes. As an example, Matthew 27:52-53, in which at the point of Christ’s death the tombs of the dead are opened and their bodies raised, such that they walk around Jerusalem and are seen by lots of people. Had this happened historically, records would surely abound; and might the resurrection of a single man be rather overshadowed? To read this element of the Matthew as history misses the point, and to defend its historicity misses the nature of Matthew’s writing here – rather than making a point about an actual event that happened, he is drawing out the significance of Jesus’ death with reference to concepts of eternal life. // Jesus certainly existed and was crucified (history); here Matthew uses fiction to play out the significance of these historical events.

2. Historicized fiction. The locations, names, context and modes of relationship found in the story are from the real world – but the narrative is entirely fictional. As an example, Genesis 4, in which Cain kills Abel. These are the third and fourth people on earth, hence several questions for a historical reading: where does Cain’s wife come from? Who would have killed him, hence the need for a protective mark? Why does he build a city and who would live there; did he do it on his own? // The story is not concerned with these questions, and addressing these issues misses reading the story on unfamiliar terms to its authors’ – it uses the historical context of Israel’s life and experience (of murder, wives, cities and the need for protection) as the setting for a fictional story that plays out the significance of relationship to God and fellow humans. This doesn’t make it untrue, it simply takes the story on its own terms as unconcerned with historicity.

So, Genesis 1 is a myth – it is unconcerned with historical events (whether a literal 6 days or geological ages, which relies on bad science and tenuous links, in my view), and deeply concerned with the nature of human relationship to the cosmic order of things, and the classification of reality into three spheres – air, land and sea – which is central to the Priestly order of things, especially in Leviticus, but that’s another post…

I don’t think anything I have said here is too controversial, but some may disagree. It would get rather more controversial if I said I thought Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Samuel and Kings are not historical accounts but interpretations of history that play out the significance of present life; and that some components of the gospels are fulfilling a similar purpose.

In summary, the accusation that I am adopting a ‘liberal’ model of Scripture is more of a libellous rhetorical insult than an accurate description – unless, of course, ‘liberal’ means taking biblical writers on their own terms and seeking to hear the work that they produced within the correct frames of reference, in order that theological truth be sought in it through the asking of good questions…

* It might be noted that my emphasis on the importance of genre is itself part of the ancient world’s context – ie, modern concerns about the nature of history as objective, factual records of actual events are alien to the context of the biblical – and, indeed, any – ancient writers.