Historical Genesis: How to Read Primeval History (S07, E08)

Greetings, and welcome to the Faith Chapel podcast. My name is Jason,

and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast, we are going through an eight-episode series looking at whether

Genesis should be taken as history or mainly as fiction.

In this seventh season of the podcast, we will look at different aspects of

what is known as primeval history, the first 11 chapters of Genesis,

and discover if the Bible was account of the origins of the world can be trusted.

Today, we finish our series by looking at how Christians should view the first

11 chapters of the Bible.

Thanks for joining us as we dive into this discussion.

Okay, so the first 11 chapters of Genesis are known as primeval history.

And that term primeval means of or relating to the earliest ages.

It comes from two different Latin

words, one meaning first and the other meaning age, as in like an era.

And the concept here is that this is the first things that happened in the human era.

It is primarily the story of what caused the beginning,

what caused our existence, and about giving us a proper worldview of how to look at this world.

Genesis isn't the only account of the first age or of primeval history.

There are other stories that are also telling of these first happenings.

And to really help us to understand the purpose of this story,

I found this text from the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible very helpful.

It says, The mythology of the ancient world encapsulated contemporary thinking

about how the world worked and how it came to work that way.

It features the gods prominently because the ancients found the answers to their

questions about the world and the divine realm.

If we describe mythology functionally in this way, we can conclude that our

modern mythology is what we call science.

That is our culture's way of encapsulating how the world works and how it came to work that way.

Contrary to the divine orientation of the ancients, our scientific worldview

is naturalistic and empiricist.

Genesis functions in Israelite society the same way that science functions in

our culture and the same way that mythology functioned in the rest of the ancient world.

Genesis offers an alternative encapsulation of how the world worked and how it came to work that way.

Like the rest of the ancient world, it has a divine orientation rather than

a naturalistic empiricist one, as is common today, but its view of the situation

in the divine realm also makes it distinct from the mythology of the ancient world.

Starting here at the end, while Genesis is joining in the ranks of its predecessors,

of the ones that came before it.

The idea here is that it has very significant differences to these other ancient

texts about primeval history.

This helps me to understand what Genesis was trying to do was to get the Israelites

to understand how the world came to be.

And why we're here. What is our purpose? What is our intent?

And in the same way, science is doing that by helping us to comprehend like

what gravity is, how we go around the sun.

Science has helped us learn that there was a beginning to the universe.

And all of these different things, it helps us know how this came to be as best

as we can and what our purpose is.

And for me, I think this is a very helpful definition of what Genesis does.

It gives us our worldview. It helps us to understand the world around us and

to give us our way of thinking about everything that we process through.

The ESV study Bible would put it this way.

Through these stories, the people of the ancient world learned their traditions

about the gods they worshiped and the way of life that people should follow.

So these stories about primeval history are helping people understand the way

of life that people should follow.

This is a worldview. They are trying to get people to understand how to perceive the world.

And it depended on which culture you were in in the ancient world as to what

you would believe and how you would live your life.

And I think there are a few fascinating overlaps in these stories.

As we take a look at the Babylonian creation narrative, the Sumerian texts,

there are some very interesting overlaps in these stories.

So this comes from the Old Testament survey, and it says the ideas that are

similar include a picture of the primeval state as watery chaos.

This is why in Genesis, the ground comes up out of the water.

There's just chaos all around them, and then God brings up the land,

and there is order. There is function there, and in the same way, other states.

Primeval history accounts state that it was started as watery chaos.

The basic order of creation is similar in these different stories.

And so it's God or in other stories, the deities, the gods that they worshipped,

they brought the world into order.

Light, and then land, and then vegetation, and then the sun,

the moon, and the stars, and then the aquatic animals and birds and then the land animals.

And it's a similar pattern that you can find in the other creation accounts as well.

There is divine rest at the end of creation. In the Bible, this is on the seventh day, God rusted.

And there are similar accounts in other versions as well.

The word that I'll just say is ed, I don't know how else to pronounce that,

but in Genesis 2.6, that is usually translated as mist,

can also be understood as an Akkadian loan word, meaning flow of water from underground.

And so there are similar words that are used in these different primeval accounts.

Another example of that is in Genesis.

The Genesis account, we have the word Eden, which is similar to the word Edenu, which means plain.

This is another term that is used that seems to be in multiple accounts of the primeval history.

And then there are multiple in the flood story alone. So for instance,

the hero is instructed by a divine agency to build an unusual boat and caulk it with pitch.

He is to take animals along to preserve them from a universal catastrophe.

The entire population is destroyed. After the flood, waters abate,

the hero releases birds to determine if there is any dry land.

Eventually, the ship comes to rest on a mountain.

On leaving the ark, the hero sacrifices and God or the gods,

depending on which story, happily smell the sweet odor.

And so those are all similarities from all of the primeval accounts of the beginnings of the human age.

And some people can look at these and say, all right, well, they must have been

borrowed. So whichever one was first was more than likely the correct story,

and then everyone else borrowed some from them.

But I think of it in a different way. I think of it that if we have multiple

different witnesses, multiple different stories and different texts and languages,

then more than likely they come from one story.

And we just have to decide which one's the best story to look at.

And so this is a book called the Old Testament Survey. It says this,

These resemblances prove nothing beyond a genetic relationship between the biblical

and Mesopotamian accounts.

The Genesis stories in their present form do not go back to the Babylonian traditions.

The evidence, even that of the close ties between flood stories,

merely suggests a diffuse influence of a common cultural heritage.

The inspired authors of the primeval account drew on the manner of speaking

about origins that was a part of a common literary tradition.

So the concept of the Bible being inspired by God is faceted in two ways.

The first one is that the words come from God. It is God breathed.

It is from the mouth of God.

But God used different human authors who have different perspectives,

who have different personalities, and they were able to infuse their personalities

into these stories as well.

It is not just solely a tablet that fell from heaven. It's.

Is divine authorship and human authorship, and this is what we would see.

If they knew of a different account and they used the word Eden when someone

else used Edenu, it's okay if they did that.

It was just describing a plane, an area of beauty where God first put these people.

It doesn't matter if Adam and Eve called it Eden or if God even called it Eden.

That was just a description of the place.

And so this is what it's trying to get through here, the idea that the similarities

between these different accounts don't negate the divine authorship of God.

While there are multiple similarities, like we went over, there are a few differences

between these primeval accounts that I think are important to note.

And these will come from the ESV study Bible.

So it says, In other ancient literary traditions, creation is a great struggle

often involving conflict between the gods.

The flood was sent because the gods could not stand the noise made by human

beings, yet they could not control it.

Babylonian versions of creation and flood stories were designed to show that

Babylon was the center of the religious universe and that its civilization was

the highest achieved by mankind.

And so in these other.

Primeval history accounts, the concept is polytheistic.

It is about multiple deities coming together to create what we see and hear.

But in the Bible, it is monotheistic. It is one God who creates it all.

And so when you get multiple deities, you get often very strange stories.

And the concept here is that the flood was sent because they couldn't stand

the noise made by human beings, and they could not control it.

They weren't sovereign over it.

And in Babylon, the whole reason for writing their primeval history seemed to

be about showing how Babylon was great and how people should

acquiesce to the presence and the power of Babylon that they were trying to

show and cultivate in their area.

There are reasons that we can infer that people writing these had specific reasons

to write these in that way.

There is a very big difference that we'll get to from the.

Perspective of the Israelites and Genesis in particular, but one more idea about

the dissimilarities between Genesis and the other primeval accounts,

again from the ESV Study Bible.

In contrast to the patriarchal stories, however, other ancient non-biblical

stories do exist recounting stories about both creation and the flood.

The existence of such stories, however, does not in any way challenge the authority

or the inspiration of Genesis.

In fact, the non-biblical stories stand in sharp contrast to the biblical account

and thus help readers appreciate the unique nature and character of the biblical

accounts of creation and the flood.

Reading Genesis, readers can see that it is designed to refute these delusions.

And so the ESV adds the contrast of

Genesis could easily be read as a polemic against the other ancient accounts

that testify about the polytheistic world that they were living in and their worldview.

But Genesis is written to give

us a strong understanding of who God is and why he created this world.

It is designed to refute the delusions of these other primeval accounts.

With that being said, I think it's important to look at how we should take Genesis and.

First and foremost, we need to take Genesis as theology.

It is something that we can study God through.

We can look at Genesis 1 and 2 and see that God is supreme, the being that can

speak things into existence.

He is stronger than anything else, and he is not tethered to any part of creation.

He is outside of creation.

The other deities in one of the accounts when the flood came,

the deities forgot that the humans were the ones that had provided them with

the sacrifices and the offerings.

And so they got really hungry because there was no one providing them with these sacrifices.

But God is outside of that. He doesn't need food. He doesn't need drink.

He has perfect relationship with the Spirit and the Son, all as one.

He does not need these things. God is unique. God is different. God is holy in this way.

And so it literally needs to be taken as a theological text,

something where we can learn and study about God.

The ESV Study Bible puts it this way.

There is only one God whose word is almighty.

He has only to speak and the world comes into being.

The sun and moon are not gods in their own right, but are created by the one God.

This God does not need feeding by man, as the Babylonians believed they did

by offering sacrifices, but he supplies man with food.

It is human sin, not divine annoyance, that prompts the flood.

Far from Babylon's tower, the Tower of Babel, reaching heaven,

it became a reminder that human pride could neither reach nor manipulate God.

It continues by saying, the primeval prologue prepares the way for the history of redemption.

The relationship is that of problem and solution.

Its chapters carry utmost importance for understanding all of Scripture.

The desperate problem of human sin so poignantly portrayed in Genesis 1 through

11 is solved by God's gracious initiative, already intimated

in the prologue, but sounded strongly in the promise of land and posterity to Abraham.

And so the idea here is simply saying that.

The Bible helps us to understand ourselves better as well as God.

It helps us to understand why this world is broken.

It helps us to understand what our response should be, which is obedience.

And when we don't obey God, our understanding from this primeval history is

that there will be consequences.

If you don't obey God, there will be consequences.

And then it goes on here to say that it also prepares us for redemption.

The story of Adam and Eve receiving Seth as a son in replacement of Abel who

had died, that is a story of redemption.

The story of Noah being selected to enter the ark is a story of redemption.

The stories of how God promised Noah at the end of the flood,

that there would be never this cataclysmic event to happen ever again is a story of redemption.

The whole concept here is that of theology. We need to understand the theology

of Genesis 1 through 11 to understand the main points of this.

It is clearly about theology.

The ESV Study Bible goes on to say, These principles, which emerge so clearly

in Genesis 1-11, are truths that run through the rest of Scripture.

The unity of God is fundamental to biblical theology, as is His almighty power,

His care for mankind, and His judgment on sin.

It may not always be obvious how these chapters relate to geology and archaeology,

but their theological message is very clear.

Read in their intended sense, they provide the fundamental presuppositions of the rest of Scripture.

These chapters should act as eyeglasses so that readers focus on the points

their author is making and go on to read the rest of the Bible in light of them.

The first 11 chapters are like a stair step, the bottom step of a huge staircase

that is going to help us to understand God better.

And if we don't understand these 11 chapters theologically, we are going to

be lost throughout the rest of the Bible.

There is so much theological work done in these 11 chapters that we need to

understand it that way to grasp what it is truly saying to us.

Then the NIV Zondervan Study Bible says, the Bible begins by telling the story

of how the world began, how humanity fell into sin and how God began to address that sin.

This story describes God's creation of the world and all of life,

the harmony that was in the world, the sin that destroyed that perfect harmony

between God and his creation,

the spiral of sin and violence, the judgment and salvation in the flood,

the covenant that resulted, the common heritage of all people,

the Tower of Babel and the family line to Abram.

The cycle begins. God creates and humanity sins.

As the violence of humanity increases, God punishes people with a flood and

delivers Noah and his family.

Humans continue to sin, yet God does not give up, but brings hope in the family

line that leads to Abram.

Again, that's just a synopsis of what happens in these first 11 chapters.

But the idea here is simply putting that God is in charge.

He is in control. And although he did give us free will and we did mess up his

good creation, he has plans for us.

He is going to bring redemption to us.

Then we have the Old Testament survey, which says, how then is the unique literary

genre of Genesis 1 through 11 to be understood?

One may suppose that the author, inspired by God's revelation,

employed current literary traditions to teach the true theological import of

humanity's primeval history.

The book's purpose was not to provide a biological and geological description of origins.

Rather, it was intended to explain the unique nature and dignity of human beings

by virtue of their divine origin.

They have been made by the Creator in the divine image, yet marred materially

by the sin that so soon disfigured God's good work.

Again, the idea is we may not understand all aspects of what Genesis is saying

genetically. We may not understand all of it geologically or biologically.

There are some ambiguous things in there, and we've talked about those,

like what are the Nephilim, or did dinosaurs live with human beings?

There are some things we are not fully going to know on this planet.

But what we do have in Genesis 1 through 11 is,

such beautiful understanding of our relationship with God, how strong and how

powerful God is, and how important we are to him.

This is what's important.

Historical theology again reiterates this by saying Genesis 1.1 affirms divine

creation, and the remainder of the chapter sets forth how that creation came about.

The first Christians preached this traditional belief, and it cites Acts 14.15

and Acts 17.24 as examples of that.

According to the Apostle John, one of the songs of praise sung in heaven acknowledges

God as the creator while affirming the marvelous work of God in creation.

The apostles also underscored the prominent role of the Son of God in the creative

process, and it cites John 1.3 and Colossians 1.15-17 as examples.

Both the Father and the Son were involved in the creation of the universe,

which was brought into existence out of nothing.

And that's one of the things that I would think would be a primary thing to

believe in, that Genesis 1 is really getting across theologically that this

world had a beginning and that God was the architect of it.

We're not told how he did it other than just speaking it into existence.

We don't know how long it took him to create all of it, but what it does tell

us and what I think is one of the firm foundational beliefs of the Christian

faith is that God is the creator.

There is no other thing that can explain it.

It is firm on that.

And so Genesis should be taken as a theological work, but this doesn't mean

that Genesis should not also be taken as a historical piece of literature.

That's what we're going to end with, how I see Genesis as being a historical perspective.

And again, you can have different views on some of these topics,

and that is perfectly fine.

But this is how I see us looking at Genesis as history.

So we're going to start with the New Interpreter's Study Bible,

and it talks about chronologies and the genealogies that are in the first 11 chapters.

And I think this provides good evidence for us to understand Genesis as history.

So the New Interpreter's Study Bible says, the concern for chronology is evident

in the various genealogies, which allow us to track the years from Adam through

every generation to Israel.

We can discern the same motif in the flood story.

The presence of such chronology in chapters 1 through 11 and chapters 12 through 50

means that these two sections of Genesis share a fundamental understanding regarding

typicality and atypicality.

What it's trying to get across there, what I glean from that is that the genealogies

in the book of Genesis do point to a historical narrative.

It is something that they were trying to pass on from one generation

to another to help us to understand where humanity came from,

how it ebbed and flowed, and ultimately how we are in the image and likeness

of God, tracing our roots all the way back to the first man and first woman.

I think this provides good evidence for us to be able to say, all right, it's.

Teaching us historical things. And then some of the evidences that we went over

at the very beginning, as I reiterate them, are something that's important for

us to keep in mind that, yes, they are transmitting true things.

When we first went over these, we were talking about how some people believe

Genesis was a compilation of four different authors, J-E-D and P,

if I'm remembering how they identify those correctly.

Four different letters there, and the concept here is that they thought these

were written much later than when these events are supposed to have happened.

But when we went through the evidences for believing in the historicity of Genesis,

there are some things that don't make sense to us as far as,

how could they have known that 500, 600, even a thousand years after it happened.

Today, we have the internet and we can search things like what were common names in the 1200s.

And we can probably write a pretty accurate, based upon other people's research,

pretty accurate description of what their lives were like back in the 1200s,

even though we're so far removed from that.

Thinking about this in terms of 600 years before Jesus or so,

how would they research what happened 1400 years ago and have the right names and the right places?

It just doesn't make sense.

Part of this evidence is from the NIV Study Bible, and it says in chapters 1

through 38 of Genesis, they reflect a great deal of what we know from other

sources about ancient Mesopotamian life and culture.

Creation, genealogies, destructive floods, geography, and mapmaking,

construction techniques, migrations of people,

sale and purchase of land, legal customs and procedures, shepherding and cattle

raising, all these subjects and many others

were matters of vital concern to the peoples of Mesopotamia

during this time.

And the fact that Genesis gets it right means that either A,

it is divinely inspired and God gave them that information, or it happened at

a time where they could record these things down.

I think that's a very positive affirmation of the historicity of these stories,

that the customs and all of these things add up to the time frame that they

are stated to have happened.

And then it goes on to give us more information.

As Genesis 1-38 is Mesopotamian in character and background,

so chapters 39-50 reflect Egyptian influence, though in not quite so direct a way.

Examples of such influence are Egyptian grape cultivations from Genesis 49-11, the riverside scene in,

Genesis 41, Egypt as Canaan's breadbasket in Genesis 42, Canaan as the source

of numerous products for Egyptian consumption, chapter 43, and.

Egyptian religious and social customs in chapters 43 and 46,

Egyptian administrative procedures in chapter 47,

Egyptian funerary practices in chapter 50, and several Egyptian words and names

used throughout these chapters.

And again, the concept here is, all right, these are all the things that chapters

39 through 50 gets correct about Egyptian culture and what we know of Egyptian culture.

And if this was written a thousand years later, as time changes,

as scenes shift, we would not expect them to get all of these things correct.

And so again, this is leading us to believe more and more of the accounts of

Genesis 1 through 11 are accurate.

They are true to the history that they are revealing to us, and therefore,

we should put more trust in these stories as history.

I believe that Genesis is history.

And I believe that there was, that God created human beings very uniquely,

that he created Adam and Eve.

And the first human beings that we,

can encounter in the record of the skeletons that we have dug up,

like those are reflecting more and more of who Adam and Eve are.

I don't necessarily trust what they say these early people can do.

I would trust the Bible more about that if people say that communication didn't

happen until really late in the fossil records of these human beings.

I believe it happened at the very beginning. This is what I believe.

I believe that God created the world and I don't know, I don't have a firm belief

on if it was exactly six 24-hour days or if they were longer periods of time.

That's not something that is important to me.

You might even say I would ignore that aspect of it, but the concept here is

that God did create it. He spoke it out of nothing.

There was a beginning and God was the cause of that.

I believe that sin entered the world. I don't necessarily need to believe that

Satan really took the form of a serpent to believe that Satan influenced Adam

and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

I don't need that for myself. I don't need to understand it as a literal snake that spoke.

But what I do understand it as, the physical representation of evil was clearly there.

Kicked out of heaven because of his rebellion against God.

And for whatever reason, God

allowed him to influence human beings to the point that they had sinned.

I believe that the flood of Noah was a worldwide catastrophic flood.

It covered the entirety of this earth.

But I don't have an opinion on whether baby dinosaurs were on that ark.

That's not something that is important to me. I don't have a care about that

in my own heart. And again, it's just something that I don't need to know the

answer to at this point in my journey with God.

I believe that all of humanity has now descended from Noah and his wife, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

I believe that's where our common ancestry leads to. All human beings came from

those three sons and their wives of Noah and his wife.

I do believe in that historicity.

And then I believe in the stories of the Tower of Babel, the scrambling of language

that I believe that was an actual event that happened in human history.

And so for me, I do believe the historicity of a lot.

I don't need every detail to be 100% accurate.

There can be some things, like I said, about Eden.

Was that what Adam and Eve really called it? That doesn't matter to me.

I don't need it to be right for the whole Bible to be true. It doesn't break it down.

But there are people on opposite sides of the spectrum, in particular of young

earth versus old earth, that are very dogmatic about it.

People who say, if you don't believe in a literal six-day, six-24-hour-day creation,

then you're not a Bible-believing Christian.

And there are people who are on the opposite side, who I have heard them say

that we need to get rid of that young earth. It's an embarrassment to the Christian thinking.

And so I have seen that divisive nature, but I'm not a part of that.

I don't need to believe it was literal six 24-hour periods, but I do believe that God created it.

He individually made human beings, and we have a special worth and value from him.

And so as I state that, this is what I believe about the first 11 chapters of Genesis.

And I want to conclude with this definition of what history is.

The ESV study Bible puts it this way. It is crucial to have a good,

clear, and precise definition of history.

In ordinary language, the word simply refers to an account of events that the

author believes to have happened.

In and of itself, the label history makes no comment about whether the account

is complete, unbiased, free from divine activity and strict chronological sequence,

or with or without figurative

and imaginative, sometimes called mythological elements.

And that's where I stand. I don't need to believe every literal thing that happened.

I don't need to believe about the serpent being in the garden.

Is that what they perceived? Possibly. But it could have just been Satan in

angelic form, and they didn't know how to describe it.

And so, like I said, not everything has to be taken, in my opinion, as 100% accurate.

But I do believe that Genesis is history.

I do believe that we have common ancestry. I do believe that God created this

world and he made it perfect and sin entered and corrupted it.

It's very important to me to understand Genesis theologically and then historically.

And that's why I presented them in that way.

I think theology is first and foremost, how we need to understand these stories.

But then with all of science, the debate that goes on with old earth versus

young earth, how do we put dinosaurs in there?

Is a flood really viable on this planet? All of those things, they can break us down.

They can be a stumbling block to people.

But for me, I do understand them as historical events, but not every detail

in those, in my opinion, has to be 100% correct for Genesis to be taken as history.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of how to read the primeval

account of Genesis in the Bible.

I do believe Genesis is a theological text that teaches us true things about history.

This was an important time of research for me that has blessed me in my relationship

with God, and I hope you have been blessed by this series as well.

If you would like more information about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week, the podcast will be an interview with missionary Jacob Osborne. Have a great week.