A couple of weeks ago, the biblicablogging world went through a little flurry of attention to Genesis 1—more specifically, to John Walton’s understanding of Genesis 1. Walton, a professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, focuses his interpretation on the assignment of functions to various things rather than the creation of things. If you have not already done so, I encourage you to view the online presentation—essentially a slideshow with voiceover, in its current state—in which Walton explained his views at a March 2003 symposium (at Wheaton, I take it). At this late date, I can no longer reconstruct the exact path that led me to that particular presentation. Nor can I give a full accounting of the various bloggers who have discussed the matter in recent weeks—not without leaving people out who deserve to be included.

Of the various entries into this discussion, the one I found most engaging was John Hobbins’s. I always enjoy reading Hobbins’s posts, and I consider him a much better Hebraist than myself. I also happen to agree with much of what Hobbins has to say, in general and in that particular post. (For the curious: I do feel perfectly comfortable with John Hobbins and I addressing one another by first names. In this post, however, I’m talking about two Johns—a Hobbins and a Walton—and I want to be explicit about which is which.)

In particular, I agree with Hobbins that “both” supplies the correct answer to his titular question, “Does Genesis 1 describe the creation of things or the assignment of functions to things?” This, at least, seems “obvious” (Hobbins’s word) to me on a prima facie reading of the text. Consider, for example, Genesis 1:14:

ויאמר אלהים יהי מארת ברקיע השמים להבדיל בין היום ובין הלילה והיו לאתת ולמועדות ולימים ושנים

And God said, “Let there be lights in the sky-dome to divide between the day and the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.”

Obviously, here God assigns the celestial lights a timekeeping function. Nobody who can read would dispute that. But I also think that the wording implies that the celestial lights did not exist prior to God’s creative act on “day four.” This is not, pace Walton (in his 2003 presentation), merely a preoccupation of post-Enlightenment thinkers. The narrative really does seem to assert that God brought into being lights that did not previously exist. I base this claim on two chief points:

1. The initial verb is singular, suggesting an indefinite subject with the plural מארת as object.

2. The word מארת is indefinite, and in conjunction with item 1, this suggests to me that there are no lights around yet to fulfill the desired function. If the writer were referring to lights that already existed, I would expect המארת.

Obviously, I am dealing in speculation here, but if the narrator wished to say that God assigned functions to lights that already existed, the narrator could have done so by using the plural יהיו instead of the singular יהי, and by making הבדיל a participle rather than an infinitive. Imagine the following text:

ויאמר אלהים יהיו המארת ברקיע השמים למבדילים בין היום ובין הלילה

And God said, “Let the lights in the sky-dome be dividers between the day and the night.”

That would unambiguously focus solely on the assigning of roles and would not raise the question of “making” the celestial lights at this point. Even more simply, the author could have written:

ויאמר אלהים יבדילו המארת ברקיע השמים בין היום ובין הלילה

And God said, “Let the lights in the sky-dome divide between the day and the night.”

No need to mess around with היה. Yet the author does include the היה construction, which makes me think that the coming-into-being of the lights themselves—not just the assignment of their timekeeping function—is part of the narrator’s story.

I started with a fairly complex example, but I think that verse 3 strongly resists the reduction of Genesis 1 to assignment of functions, over against assignment of functions after bringing things into existence. Consider the verse:

ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהי אור

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

On the surface level of explicit narrative statements, God does not give light a function. God simply gives it existence, and a name. Perhaps the name, “day,” implies a function, but it’s the existence of light that resides that the surface level of explicit narrative statements. Moreover, this narrator appears perfectly capable of referring to entities without narrating their creation. I speak, of course, of the undifferentiated תהום and המים of verse 2. The narrator does not narrate the coming-into-being of either, but simply presupposes their presence—yet to my eyes this stands in contrast with what happens in vv. 3ff.

Please note that I am well aware of Walton’s “take” on light as presented in the 2003 symposium, but I do not entirely agree with it. Certainly, to whatever extent Walton’s argument relies on the idea that “physicist’s light cannot be separated from darkness,” Walton’s argument itself rests on “post-Enlightenment thinking.” Whatever they may have thought in their most reflective moments, biblical authors certainly wrote as if they considered light and darkness to be “things.” Moreover, the author of Genesis 1 seems to regard light as a “thing” that did not yet exist in the proto-cosmos envisioned in verse 2.

Now I do think that Walton has some very good points to make. In particular, I think makes a pretty strong case that function is primary in Genesis 1. But I do not think this means that the author of Genesis 1 was uninterested in material “structures” (to use Walton’s term), and I don’t think that, in the end, that matter can be completely sidestepped. To that extent, I cannot agree with Walton’s statement that “Genesis is not interested in the material structures that allow the functions to operate,” however much I may appreciate many of Walton’s other observations. The addition of an adverb between “not” and “interested”—an adverb like “primarily”—I could cheerfully accept, and that would eliminate my major area of disagreement with Walton’s approach.

I’ll be back another day with more to say on this topic, specifically on the verb ברא.