We note also that man is male and female. Man is a generic term that encompasses both sexes. There is nothing of superiority here, male over female; rather there is equality of personhood and differences only in function. Man and woman together are to populate the earth and through concerted effort bring order out of chaos. Creation is not complete and finished with God’s final word on day six. Rather creation is in a primitive and unfinished state, so that man’s task is to develop, to cultivate, and to renew all that has been placed in his charge. This task male and female are to do together in partnership under the dominion of the God who had created them.
The Setting for “in the Beginning”
The setting for the author is “in the beginning,” yet the beginning had no observers. The confession is marvelously descriptive of a sequence of events that are shrouded in the distant past, how distant the author could not know. If he composed in the sixth century before our era as we have surmised, he has reached back into a past that is lost to us and given an account that is true in essence but not in detail. Did he borrow from antiquity? Perhaps, since there are points of kinship between his description of cosmology, that is, his understanding of the universe, to that which is common in the Mesopotamian world from a much earlier time.
The universe is a three-tiered structure with the heavens above, the earth beneath, and the water under the earth. But evidently his basic motifs and content were more consonant with those concepts and practices that had developed in the worshipping community of Israel over many centuries of worship in the temple at Jerusalem. How much of the organization and arrangement of the material into the pattern in which it now appears in this confession of faith, or how much of the content has been provided by the author we cannot know, but it is not improbable that some of the arrangement and some of the content are his own contributions. The composer is never limited to the language or to the concepts of the past, but is always creative in the arrangement, the word choice, and especially in the meaning he indelibly imprints upon his composition. The references to the days of creation are vague and indistinct. It would be fortuitous if we could equate them with geological periods of time designed by specialists of this discipline in our twenty-first century, but such is not the case. This would be a kind of eisegesis, reading into the text our own presuppositions and subjective assumptions. This is the real problem of hermeneutics, or interpretation, that too often we have done just that. We have approached our biblical subject or our biblical study with our own agenda, looking for support and verification for a theology that has little rapport with scripture and more kinship with philosophy or sociology. Our text is suggestive and we are to be imaginative, but the rules of interpretation demand that our solutions be grounded in a knowledge of the language, the history, the sociology, the literature, and the religion of our source and in the times of which it speaks and the time in which it was composed. There is nothing basically contradictory in this confession of faith to a modern scientific view of “the beginning,” but at the same time we cannot promulgate this text as a true and definitive account of “the beginning” superseding any of the findings or conclusions reached through a modern scientific approach. It is more proper in the opinion of this writer to view the two approaches, the religious or biblical and the scientific, as complementary and not mutually exclusive.
The Sabbath as the Setting for the Confession of Faith
The primary intention of the confession of faith is to provide the ground and the basis for the observance of a Sabbath day, a day of rest, by the worshipping community. On the seventh day, Elohim rested from all the creative work that he had done. In a similar way, man is to rest periodically and regularly from his normal activities as steward of the earth in order to set aside a time for response to and communion with his Creator God. Total attention to his own concerns can only result in a self-centered and self-indulgent creature. The center of the universe is not man but God. God the Creator is not a part of creation, but is totally independent and apart from it. He is above and beyond all that he has made; yet he is intimately involved in all that occurs within it. The universe, that is, earth and man, is his concern and his continuing activity is to guide and direct the course of history to the conclusion that he has appointed for it.
The origins of the Sabbath, the concept of a regular day of rest for worship and for a time of special attention to the concerns of the Creator God, are lost in antiquity. The writer’s purpose here is to anticipate the establishment of such a day for the observance of the things of God in the Mosaic period, for there it is specifically stated in one of the primary commandments of the Mosaic code that man is to “remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.” Its observance became fixed very early in the life of the community of God’s people and therefore was of prime importance to distinguish the believing Israelite from the people of the land of Babylon. In summary, the keeping of the Sabbath was an important witness to the commitment of the Israelite to the God of Israel and a confession of his faith to the unbelieving Babylonians among whom he lived. Thus the Sabbath is to be seen as the culmination of the writer’s account of the creation of the universe by Elohim in six days and his declaration that God rested on the seventh day from all his work. The normative activities of God are set aside regularly and periodically for the renewal of his being. How necessary then for man created in the image of God to set aside a day from his normal activities in order that he might be renewed and re-created by his Creator for the vocation that has been entrusted to him.
The Second Account of Creation
When we turn to chapter two of Genesis, we enter a new and strange world. This account of creation is earlier in time by several centuries and is much more ancient and primitive in some of its detail. The earth and the heavens are made by God without reference to time, not even to “in the beginning.” There is no vegetation, no rainfall, only a mist watering the face of the ground. In this barren setting God acts to create man. The setting for this act of God has no reference to probability, or even to possibility. Nevertheless the description of the creation of man is striking in its theological insight and perception. The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. It is Yahweh Elohim who acts in this account of the creation of man. The divine name revealed first to Moses and then through Moses to the people of God is used in this account of creation, the name Yahweh, meaning “he who causes to be.” It is used in tandem with the older name for God already encountered in the later account of creation, Elohim, as discussed above. It is Yahweh Elohim who acts decisively to create. The life work of Moses is usually placed by critics in the thirteenth century before our era. This would translate into a date approximately B.C.E. 1250 according to our calendar. Therefore the use of the divine name Yahweh in the account of creation calls for an explanation.
The author of this second and earlier account of creation is usually identified by critics as the Yahwist, since he prefers to use the divine name Yahweh in his account of events even from the very beginning. Why does he do this, since obviously this is historically inaccurate? The earlier name, Elohim, by which God was addressed, and even the singular form El, is well documented in the traditions reaching back to early times. The author is not so concerned with historical accuracy as with another and more compelling concern. There is only one true God. Whatever he may have been called, he was and is Yahweh forever. Therefore it is theologically correct to address him by the unique and singular name Yahweh. The earlier divine name, Elohim, was probably not in his account, but was added by editors who joined the various strands of tradition together into a consecutive and orderly account sometime during the Babylonian exile, perhaps in the fifth century before our era.
The Yahwist wrote at a time when the Kingdom