What’s black and white and red all over?
A zebra with a sunburn.
If you’re familiar with this joke, then you know two things: (1) it works better audibly because of the homophone read/ red, and (2) the actual answer is “the newspaper.” But who reads those these days anyway?
Changing the punchline of a joke can have more impact than the original joke because it subverts expectations and takes the listener by surprise. They find themselves struggling with admitting that they’ve heard that one before or just letting you finish the joke they already know the punchline to, so when you hit them with a different punchline, they feel relieved and may genuinely laugh, or they might just roll their eyes, which is what people usually do in response to my jokes.
The Bible Changes the Punchline
This may not be news to you, but the Bible has a lot of similarities with other Ancient Near Eastern literature. Scholars of all different varieties have pointed out the similarities between the story of Noah and the character Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh. What makes the Bible stories different is that they tell the same stories but use different punch lines to make dramatic points about who God is.
In the stories of the conquest of Israel, there are leaders and kings who obliterate entire populations, but when David shows up and does the same thing, God cites that as the reason why he couldn’t construct the temple, and the prophets show up to envision a time of no more war, where weapons become useless and are turned into agricultural tools. Some poets even decry those who trust in chariots.
In the story of Abraham and Isaac, everything seems to match up with conventional wisdom: meat and vegetables make good sacrifices, but no sacrifice compares to giving up one’s own son. But then God stops Abraham in his tracks and provides him with a suitable sacrifice which tells all of Israel, “This is enough.” Of course, later prophets and poets doubted that God even needed sacrifice and instead suggested that it was a means to an end of creating a people who longed for a relationship with God and walked in mercy.
If you really want to go deep into a study on this, I suggest reading René Girard. Do some research on which book would be best for you to start with, but I began with The Scapegoat, but I’ll offer a lighter suggestion below.
How We Usually Read the Creation Stories
When we approach the creation stories, we have a tendency to put own our 7th grade science class goggles and lab coat. We expect the text to conform to our modern sensibilities and worldview. Armed with the tools of the enlightenment and the certainty of modernity, we lock the creation stories into a box of scientific foreknowledge and use the text to debate evolutionary biology, the Big Bang, and other scientific theories which were also produced using these same tools.
Cheryl Bridge Johns in Reenchanting the Text along with James Wm. McClendon Jr in Doctrine both talk about how modernity produced a disenchanted world or, as McClendon calls it, a “secularization of nature.”
For example, the Bible is both inspired by God and written by man. Holding both of these truths together, even when they seem to bump up against each other, is an important step in reading the Bible responsibly, in my opinion. But the enlightenment presented us with two opposites that we felt like we had to choose between. On the one hand, the fundamentalists took the humanity out of the Bible. On the other hand, skeptics took the Divine out of the Bible.
Instead of taking an incarnational approach to Scripture, as Pete Enns discusses in Inspiration and Incarnation, most of us were taught that if we didn't accept the “plain, literal meaning” of these passages, like the creation accounts, Jonah and the whale, or the infanticide passages, then we had to throw out the cross and the resurrection. So when a young Christian hears other ideas for the first time that seem to ring true, they are faced with a dilemma: do I accept these truths or keep my faith?
A Suggested Approach
So instead of reading the text with an “all or nothing” hermeneutic, and ignoring the cries of “compromiser” or “liberal” coming from some groups, how might we read the these ancient stories, specifically the creation stories?
One way might be to view these stories as critiques of the creation myths of other nations and people surrounding Israel or even enslaving Israel. James Wm. McClendon Jr provides some insight into this reading in the second volume of his systematic theology. He wrote,
…the creation accounts we find in Genesis 1-3 are written to repudiate the mythic account of the world, whether on Mesopotamian or Canaanite form. In Genesis there is no primal battle save God’s commanding repudiation of chaos. (p. 153)
Unlike the ancient creation story called the Enuma elish wherein the creation of the earth results from a battle between Marduk and Tiamat, the earth is made “not of pre-existent god-stuff, but simply by the command of God” (McClendon).
These ancient creation stories had theological meanings, but they also had political and technological purposes. Instead of establishing Babylon (or even Jerusalem or Washington) as the city of God and justifying the hierarchy of a world empire, God blesses all humans, counts them all as made in the Divine image, and pronounces a blessing upon all people through a man named Abraham who is told to separate himself from… you guessed it… Babylon.
McClendon writes,
The politics of creation in Genesis is universalistic, telling the story of all people everywhere and showing by its genealogies that all are at least distant cousins. The biblical creation story makes no chauvinistic claim for an empire centered in Jerusalem, but reaches its terminus in Genesis 12 in the call of a desert wanderer to be the father of a multitude so that in that faithful wanderer, Abraham, all people may receive a blessing. (p. 153)
Finally, McClendon says,
Biblical writers accepted some of the language, some of the plot, and some of the themes of their ancient context. But they rejected other language, other plot elements, other themes found in that same material. (p. 154)
Same joke setup, but different punchline.
Reading the Bible in this way makes a lot of sense to me. It lets the scripture be the subversive text it was intended to be, but it does require more work. Instead of carrying all of our modern presuppositions to the text, we have to return to their world and their time to better understand where they were coming from.
If you are interested in reading more on this approach, then I suggest reading Inspired by Rachel Held Evans.
(by the way, the violence in Revelation is a call back to these old creation myths, but who prevails? Those who are martyred because they refuse to take up the sword!)