by Sheldon Greaves

Thanks to some positive comments about my previous backgrounder post to the encyclical Laudato Si, I thought it would be worth while to add a few insights into the role of the Genesis cosmogonies in the structure of ancient Israelite ethics–ethics that inform Judeo-Christian thinking to this day, and manifest quite clearly in Pope Francis’ encyclical.

First, some outside observations. I was pleased to see that the Dali Lama has endorsed the encyclical and its message, which pulls close to 380 million Buddhists into the conversation. Likewise, Patriarch Bartholomew, 270th Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch spoke approvingly of the encyclical, although he apparently couldn’t help noting that Orthodox Christianity has been saying similar things for quite some time. A little ecclesiastical one-upmanship there, although to be fair, this is hardly the first time Roman Catholicism has spoken out on the subject. In any case, this brings in another 300 million. In other words, between these three religious leaders you have close to 2 billion people who take them seriously, and revere them as having solid moral authority.

But let’s return to Genesis, because there are a lot of misconceptions about that document. Much of this problem goes back to a seminal paper by Lynn White called The Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, published in 1967.  To be brief (and blunt) the paper lays much of the blame for the ravages visited upon the environment on Christianity and in particular cites the Genesis creation as the keystone of his critique:

By gradual stages a loving and all-powerful God’ had created light and darkness, the heavenly boodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes.

Unfortunately, this thesis became popular. It continues to inform the understanding of Genesis among many in the scientific and scholarly community. However, a thorough survey of Judeo-Christian interpretive literature on Genesis spanning literally thousands of years offers no support at all for this view. White’s paper was a travesty of shoddy polemic masquerading as scholarly critique. In what follows, I hope to clarify why, on the contrary, the Genesis cosmogony is one of the “greener” documents in world religious literature.

Understanding Genesis is impossible unless we study it in context, and that context was where it received its final editorial shape, during the Jewish Exile in Babylon. During that time, Jewish religion struggled for survival against the prevailing Babylonian worldview. Most readers of Genesis do not realize that the text is responding quite pointedly to that particular worldview.

Mesopotamian religion was a tool of the state. Each year, the Akitu festival would welcome the new year. Rituals included the recitation of the Enuma Elish, the epic of creation. As I have mentioned elsewhere, creation stories were used as a framework to articulate core values, and for the Babylonians, they were kingship, political power, and military dominance. In the epic, the god Marduk perceives a threat to him and his fellow gods from Tiamat, a sort of monster representing the forces of Chaos. Both sides assemble their allies for the big fight. When the fight comes, Marduk personally dispatches Tiamat, and creates the world out of her carcass. He punishes her allies, and rewards his own. But what happens next is particularly interesting. After the world is created, most cosmogonies from the ancient Near East depict the creator god creating an edifice that embodies the central organizing institutions that define their reign. Marduk builds a costly palace and temple. We read the descriptions of the rare stone and rich cedar used to build it, while the other gods look on in awe. Marduk is king. The cosmos is safe because he is in charge, and he will beat the crap out of anyone who threatens that political order.

Now, consider Genesis. Judaism is a monotheistic religion, so there are no rivals. God is simply there, and he creates the world by fiat. At each stage, God looks at the emerging cosmos and sees that “it is good.” He eventually creates the plants and animals (I’m pretty sure the Enuma Elish says nothing about creating animals), and finally humans.  Creation is (mostly) finished. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

But where Marduk creates a political power center in the form of a temple/palace, God plants a garden. This by itself is a potent statement of the difference btween the two worldviews. Marduk’s focus is on political and military power, but Elohim’s realm is life; and he is every bit as jealous of his dominion as Marduk is of his. A closer reading of the Old Testament shows that God is in complete control of life, fertility, and death. He dispenses all at his pleasure. Just as humans are forbidden from killing, they do not even reproduce unless God allows it. The phrase “be fruitful and multiply,” often mis-read as a commandment, is always couched in the form of a blessing. When God tells Abraham of his vast future progeny, he always states, “I will multiply you.” We should also note, that this same blessing to “be fruitful and multiply” is given to the animals world as well.

Chaos and Cosmos

Throughout the ancient Near East, the aim of creation was to subordinate chaos to a created order. Chaos is everything that is inimical to that created order. A state of chaos is when things are undifferentiated, mixed together, homogeneous and, above all, dead. In the ancient world, chaos is a state utterly hostile to life. Nothing lives, nothing grows. “Cosmos” is the opposite. Even in Babylonia, where cosmos was viewed more in terms of political order, vestiges of this idea remain. The Old Testament describes the created world as full of life and living things. Moreover, as I described last time, humans are explicitly co-creators with God when Adam gives names to the animals. In Genesis, life is the defining feature of creation. This is a crucial point.

Economy in Eden

When all is finished, God gives instructions to Adam and Eve:

God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so.

Genesis 1:29-30

Two things stand out: first, humans are allowed to use plants for food–and nothing else. Animals are off the menu. While God explicitly gives humans “dominion” over the animal world (verse 26), animal life may not be taken for any reason; we see this later on when, after discovering their nakedness, God makes clothing of animal skins for Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:20). Humans did not have access to animal products at this time. Second, the animal world also has the same god-given right to plant resources as humans. In a very real sense, humans and animals are on an equal footing when it comes to food resources.

So what is “dominion”? The Hebrew word used here, radu, is not the one normally used to denote kingship. While it does include the sense of “subdue” or “subjugate,” it also has the force of “to tend” as one would tend a flock. Its use may be due to a cognate word in Akkadian cuneiform, which would have been more familiar to Babylonian readers. But another factor to consider is how the ancient world defined good rulership. Read nearly any royal inscription from anywhere in the region and, besides military conquests, kings boast of making the land rich and fertile beyond what has ever been. This is clearly a significant indication of wise dominion.

Even after that unfortunate episode with the talking snake, God insists that humans must make the land fertile as part of their original mandate of “dominion.” The earth does not produce fruits the way it used to, but humanity still has responsibility to maintain its fertility.

Unfortunately, humans turned out to be both carnivorous and homicidal. After the Flood, God makes a compromise (“compromise” is not something normally associated with the God of the Old Testament, but it is much more common than reducing miscreants to a smoking hole in the ground). God tries again with slightly amended rules. Humans may eat animals, but their lifeblood must be returned to God, since he insists in retaining his power over life. The penalty for consuming the “life” of an animal (i.e., eating the blood with the meat) is severe; it is considered the same as committing murder. This is why we have the otherwise inscrutable prohibitions against eating blood in Leviticus 17. This also explains the roots of Jewish food laws; they were an arbitrary set of rules designed to reduce the taking of animal life to an acceptable minimum.

Finally, we should note that when the Bible imagines its future perfect world, it is a world in which there is both fertility and concord. Humans and animals do not exploit each other, as in Isaiah’s beatific vision (Isaiah 65:25):

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

My thanks to Dave Bella for a  stimulating discussion that informed and precipitated this post.