The Cerebral Faith Blog-Cast

Genesis 1: Functional Creation, Temple Inauguration, and Anti-Pagan Polemics

Blog Post: https://cerebralfaith.net/genesis-1-functional-creation-temple-inauguration-and-anti-pagan-polemics/ This is the beginning of a series of papers that I have written exegeting and commentating on Genesis 1-11, known by scholars as The Bible’s “primeval history”. In this paper, I will argue that Genesis 1, when interpreted in its Ancient Near Eastern context, is not about God materially creating the universe over 6 calendar days or even 6 long ages. Rather, the text is a theologically rich statement affirming three major things (1) That God assigned functions to everything that exists, and that his is what it means when it says “God created”, (2) that the 7 day structure of the account depicts the inauguration of the universe as God’s Cosmic Temple. (3) The author, while asserting that God declared how everything will function within his temple (i.e the universe), He also made it a point to make jabs at the pagan religions of his day, their gods, and what their gods were said to do when they (supposedly) created the world. He did this to telegraph to the reader that Yahweh is the supreme God we should worship instead of lesser gods. Consequently, Genesis is not about material origins, but about functional origins. At the end, God “rests” in the universe as His temple, ceasing the work of assigning functions and beginning the work of running the cosmos. Therefore, Genesis 1 is compatible with any scientific model of origins scientists may want to posit.