Paul Poulton considers the poetry of Genesis

Paul Poulton

The first few chapters of Genesis have caused quite a stir over the years and it's remarkable that a book written so long ago is still making waves. Some people dispute when it was actually written because writing wasn't a common practice in the ancient world like it is today. It was mostly government officials, administrators and traders who found writing useful. Moses is generally credited with having written the first five books of the Old Testament although not all of it is his work: The bit about Moses dying on the mountain for instance. But it seems that quite a chunk of it is his work. Some of his writings have made their way into the rest of the Bible too, Psalm 90 for instance; it turns out that Moses was quite a poet.

When God told Moses that he was being sent to Pharaoh to get the Israelites out of Egypt, Moses didn't seem enthralled by the idea and came up with five excuses why God shouldn't send him. The final excuse being a last ditch cry of, "Oh Lord, please send someone else to do it." The Lord was patient with Moses' pleas for exemption but firm: He wanted Moses to do this. So Moses ended up doing it, despite his age and despite his reticence, and with some difficulty and help from above he got the Israelites out of Egypt.

The Israelites had only been out of Egypt a matter of months when God told Moses to write things down. This may have been one of the reasons why God was so insistent that Moses did the job; Moses was the one Israelite who had been taught to read and write by the Egyptians. The ancient Egyptians had a high respect for education and had several schools, the most prestigious of which was The Princes School which undertook the education of Pharaoh's household which, you may remember, Moses was a member of.

Egyptian hieroglyphics are well known but the international language back then seems to have been Akkadian, and there are many examples in museums around the world of leaders writing to each other in Akkadian. Hebrew is also part of the Semitic branch of languages from which Akkadian comes. God himself wrote some text on two tablets, so Moses must have been able to read it and then teach the other Israelite leaders to read it also, if they didn't already have the ability. Recently some written Hebrew was found dated at 10th century BC, it doesn't look like modern Hebrew, but language changes over the years, and so too does its written form. The University of Haifa said, "The discovery makes it the earliest known Hebrew writing." Moses lived a few hundred years earlier than the 10th Century but it shows that writing caught on in the fledgling nation of Israel. We know that Moses had some kind of speech impediment and some fine writers are not always articulate when it comes to the spoken word. Moses rose to the task of writing and wrote well - The 'Song of Moses' found in Deuteronomy is said to, "exhibit striking originality of form".

Moses spent time talking with God face to face up on Mount Sinai and in the Tent of Meeting so he was not short of insight. It was probably from those meetings that Moses was inspired to write the opening verses of Genesis. They can be read in a number of ways, not dissimilar to the way CS Lewis wrote the Narnia stories with levels of meaning - there's the story itself, then people began to realise there was a secondary meaning to the stories and recently it was discovered that there was actually a third level. People can view the creation story in Genesis in a similar way. Some people like to talk about the story itself, others about the way the story reveals what science has taught us, but maybe there is another level that we can look at it from. Let's remember that Moses was a poet and a good one, his writings contained not only an aesthetic quality but also a prophetic vein running through them. One of the ways we can look at the opening chapters of Genesis is to look for the poetic and prophetic aspects of the creation narrative. Such as when the serpent deceives Eve and God says, "I will put enmity between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." We understand this means something prophetically, but at the time it was written people may have struggled to understand what exactly it referred to. The devil did strike Christ's heel, because Jesus had a nail go through it, but at the same time Satan's plan was crushed by Jesus when he rose from death.

So let's take a brief poetic view of the opening of Genesis. On the first day God said, "Let there be light," he then separated the light from the darkness calling it day and night. This opening picture sets the scene for a parallel used throughout the rest of the Bible. The darkness came first but God has called us out of darkness into his marvellous light. We are children of the day and children of the light. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness, said the apostles Peter and Paul.

On day two, there was a dividing of the waters. God made an expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse. God called the expanse heaven. This is important for us to know; some things are above and some things are below. It's good for us to keep this in mind as we live our lives and as we read the scriptures. Daniel saw four beasts coming up from below out of the sea. John was told to come up higher and he saw a rainbow around the throne in heaven. Jesus ascended into the clouds, it doesn't mean that if we look hard enough into space we'll see him, but it does teach us that there is somewhere higher than this earthly plane we live on.

On day three, dry land appeared with trees bearing fruit with seed in them. One of those trees was called the tree of life; it stood in a garden that God had planted. God told the man he was free to eat from any tree in the garden including the tree of life (only one other tree was prohibited for eating). But no one got to eat from the tree of life or did they? Jesus proclaimed himself to be "the life" and said, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you cannot have eternal life within you." So maybe we can still eat from the tree of life, it's not without reason that we are encouraged to "taste and see that the Lord is good".

Day four and God made a great light and a lesser light to shine on the earth. Strangely or poetically the word sun is not used here neither is the word moon. But Jesus did say "I am the light of the world." Jesus had a relative called John about whom Jesus said, John was a shining light. Two lights - one greater, one lesser. There were also stars and Jesus told each one of us not to hide our own lights. Paul reminded the Philippians to shine like stars in the universe.

On days five and six God creates fish, fowl, livestock and creatures that creep along the ground. Then he made man and breathed into his nostrils and told him to rule over the beasts and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. But there was one creeping thing that turns up in the story quite soon after this. The man and woman were suppose to rule over it, but the opposite happened, the creeping serpent ruled over the woman and man, and since that point we have needed saving from our own condition. We needed someone who was strong enough to rule over the serpent.