[First posted November 26, 2013. This is from Pentateuch and Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H.Hertz. We are greatly indebted to the best of Jewish and non-Jewish commentators who have contributed their lifelong work, all compiled in this resource book which we have included in our MUST READ/MUST OWN list.—Admin1.]
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THE BOOK OF GENESIS
- The Hebrew name for the First Book of Moses was originally Sefer Maaseh Bereshith, ‘Book of Creation.’
- This was rendered into Greek by Genesis, ‘origin,’ because it gives an account of the creation of the world and the beginnings of life and society.
- Its current Jewish name is Bereshith (‘In the beginning’), which is the first Hebrew word on its opening sentence. Bereshith is also the name of Chap. I-VI,8, the first of the 54 weekly Torah Readings (Sedrahs) on Sabbath mornings.
If the Pentateuch (which is a Greek word meaning the five books of Moses) were merely a code of civil and religious laws, it would have opened with the 12th chapter of Exodus, which contains the earliest specific commandment given to Israel (Rashi). But it is far more than a code of law:
- it is the Torah,
- i.e. the Divine Teaching given to Israel,
- and the Message of Israel to mankind.
- Therefore,
- it describes the origins of the Jewish people;
- traces its kinship to the other portions of the human family—
- all being of one blood
- and offspring of one common stock;
- and goes back to the creation of the world,
- which it declares to be the work of One Almighty and Beneficent God.
All this is told in the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
The remaining 39 chapters give the story of the Fathers of the Jewish people—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his children.
Image from vipasstothespiritworld.blogspot.com
THE CREATION CHAPTER
Genesis I-II,3, is a worthy opening of Israel’s Sacred Scriptures, and ranks among the most important chapters of the Bible. Even in form it is pre-eminent in the literature of religion. No other ancient account of creation (cosmogony) will bear a second reading. Most of them not only describe the origin of the world, but begin by describing how the gods emerged out of pre-existent chaos (theogony). In contrast with the simplicity and sublimity of Genesis I, we find all ancient cosmogonies,whether it be Babylonian or the Phoenician, the Greek or the Roman, alike unbelievably wild, cruel, even foul.
The infinite importance, however, of the first page of the Bible consists in the fact that it enshrines some of the fundamental beliefs of Judaism.
Among these are:—
I. GOD IS THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE.
Each religion has certain specific teachings, convictions, dogmas. Such a dogma of Judaism is in its belief that the world was called into existence at the will of the One, Almighty and All-good God. And nowhere does this fundamental conviction of Israel’s Faith find clearer expression than in Genesis I.
When neighbouring peoples deified the sun, moon and stars, or worshipped stocks and stones and beasts, the sacred river Nile, the crocodile that swam in its waters, and the very beetles that crawled along its banks, the opening page of the Scripture proclaimed in language of majestic simplicity that the universe, and all that therein is, are the product of one supreme directing intelligence; of an eternal, spiritual Being, prior to them and independent of them.
Now, while the fact of creation has to this day remained the first of the articles of the Jewish Creed, there is no uniform and binding belief as to the manner of creation, i.e. as to the process whereby the universe came into existence. The manner of the Divine creative activity is presented in varying forms and under differing metaphors by—
- Prophet, Psalmist and Sage;
- by the Rabbis in Talmudic times,
- as well as by our medieval Jewish thinkers.
In the Bible itself we have at least three modes of representing the overwhelming fact of Divine Creation. Genesis I gives us the story of Creation in the form of a Divine drama set out in six acts of a day each, with a similar refrain (And there was evening and there was morning, etc.) closing the creative work of each day. The Psalmist, to whom Nature was a continual witness of its Divine Author (Ps. XIX) gives in Psalm CIV a pure poetic representation of the Creation story:
O LORD my God, Thou art very great; Thou art clothed with glory and majesty. Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment, Who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain . . . Who makest the clouds Thy chariot, Who walkest upon the wings of the wind; Who makest winds Thy messengers . . . ‘Again, Proverbs VIII,22-31, shows forth Divine Wisdom presiding at the birth of Nature.
The ode of creation continued to engage Jewish minds after the close of the Bible and throughout the Rabbinic period, even though the Mishah warns against all speculation concerning the beginning of things. To some, the relation of God to the universe was that of a mason to his work, and they accordingly spoke of God’s ‘architect’s plans’; others lost themselves in heretic fancies as to what constituted the raw material, so to speak, of Creation; while to Philo of Alexandria, Creation as altogether outside time.
Several of the ancient Rabbis, followed by the later Mystics, believed in successive creations. Prior to the existence of the present universe, they held, certain formless worlds from the Fountain of Existence and then vanished, like sparks which fly from a red-hot iron beaten by a hammer, that are extinguished as they separate themselves from the burning mass.
In contrast to these abortive creations, the medieval Jewish Mystics maintain, ours is the best of all possible worlds. It is the outcome of a series of emanations and eradiations from God, the Infinite, En Sof. Furthermore, Rashi, the greatest Jewish commentator of all times, taught that the purpose of Scripture was not to give a strict chronology of Creation; while no less an authority than Maimonides declared: ‘The account given in Scripture of the Creation is not, as is generally believed, intended to be in all its parts literal.’ Later Jewish philosophers (Levi ben Gerson, Crescas, Albalag) made dangerous concessions to the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of matter; which doctrine Yehudah Hallevi, among others, strongly opposed as both contrary to Reason and as limiting God’s Ominipotence.
JEWISH ATTITUDE TOWARDS EVOLUTION
In face of this great diversity of views as to the manner of creation, there is, therefore, nothing inherently un-Jewish in the evolutionary conception of the origin and growth of forms of existence from the simple to the complex, and from the lowest to the highest. The Biblical account itself gives expression to the same general truth of gradual ascent from amorphous chaos to order, from inorganic to organic, from lifeless matter to vegetable, animal and man: insisting, however, that each stage is no product of chance, but is an act of Divine will, realizing the Divine purpose, and receiving the seal of the Divine approval. Such, likewise, is in effect the evolutionary position.
Behind the orderly development of the universe there must be a Cause, at once controlling and permeating the process. Allowing for all the evidence in favour of interpreting existence in terms of the evolutionary doctrine, there still remain facts—tremendous facts—to be explained; viz. the origin of life, mind conscience, human personality. For each of these, we must look back to the Creative Omnipotence of the Eternal Spirit. Nor is that all.
Instead of evolution ousting design and purpose from nature, ‘almost every detail is now found to have a purpose and a use’ (A.R. Wallace). In brief, evolution is conceivable only as the activity of a creative Mind purposing, by means of physical and biological laws, that wonderful organic development which has reached its climax in a being endowed with rational and moral faculties and capable of high ethical and spiritual achievement; in other words, as the activity of a supreme, directing Intelligence that has planned out, far back in the recesses of time, the ultimate goal of creation—‘last in production, first in thought’. Thus evolution, far from destroying the religious teaching of Gen. I, is its profound confirmation.
As a noted scientist well remarks:—
‘Slowly and by degrees, Science is being brought to recognize in the universe the existence of One Power, which is of no beginning and no end; which existed before all things were formed, and will remain in its integrity when all is gone—the Source and Origin of all, in Itself beyond any conception or image that man can form and set up before his eye or mind. This sum total of the scientific discoveries of all lands and times is the approach of the world’s thought to our Adon Olam, the sublime chant by means of which the Jews has wrought and will further work the most momentous changes in the world’ (Haffkine).
II. The second teaching of this chapter is, MAN IS THE GOAL AND CROWN OF CREATION—-he is fundamentally distinguished from the lower creation, and is akin to the Divine.
Man, modern scientists declare, is cousin to the anthropoid ape. But it is not so much the descent, as the ascent of man, which is decisive. Furthermore, it is not the resemblance, but the differences between man and the ape, that are of infinite importance. It is the differences between them that constitutes the humanity of man, the God-likeness of man. The qualities that distinguish the lowest man from the highest brute that make the differences between them, differences in kind rather than in degree; so much so that, whatever man might have inherited from his animal ancestors, his advent can truly be spoken of as a specific Divine act, whereby a new being had arisen with God-like possibilities within him, and conscious of these God-like possibilities within him.
Man is of God, declared Rabbi Akiba; and what is far more, he knows he is of God.
Nor is the Biblical account of the creation of man irreconcilable with the view that certain forms of organized being have been endowed with the capacity of developing, in God’s good time and under the action of suitable environment, the attributes distinctive of man. ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground’ (Gen. II,7). Whence that dust was taken is not, and cannot be, of fundamental importance.
Science holds that man was formed from the lower animals; are they not too ‘dust of the ground’? And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature’—this command, says the Midrash, includes Adam as well. The thing that eternally matters is the breath of Divine and everlasting life that He breathed into the being coming from the dust. By virtue of that Divine impact, a new and distinctive creature made its appearance—-man, dowered with an immortal soul.
The sublime revelation of the unique worth and dignity of man, contained in Gen. I,27 (‘And God created man in His image, in the image of God created He him’), may well be called the Magna Charta of humanity. Its purpose is not to explain the biological origins of the human race, but its spiritual kinship with God.
There is much force in the view expressed by a modern thinker:
‘(The Bible) neither provides, nor, in the nature of things, could provide, faultless anticipations of sciences still unborn. If by a miracle it had provided them, without a miracle they could not have been understood’ (Balfour). And fully to grasp the eternal power and infinite beauty of these words—‘And God created man in His own image’ — we need but compare them with the genealogy of Man, condensed from the pages of one of the leading biologists of the age (Haeckel):–
‘Monera begat Amoeba, Amoeba begat Synamoebae, Synamoebae begat Ciliated Larva, Ciliated Larva begat Primeval Stomach Animals, Primeval Stomach Animals begat Gliding Worms, Gliding Worms begat Skull-less Animals, Skull-less Animals begat Single-nostrilled Animals, Single-nostrilled Animals begat Primeval Fish, Primeval Fish begat Mud-fish, Mud-fish begat Gilled Amphibians, Gilled Amphibians begat Tailed Amphibians, Tailed Amphibians begat Primary Mammals, Primary Mammals begat Pouched Animals, Pouched Animals begat Semi-Apes, Semi-Apes begat Tailed Apes, Tailed Apes begat Man-like Apes, Man-like Apes begat Ape-like Men, Ape-like Men begat Men.
Let anyone who is disturbed by the fact that Scripture does not include the latest scientific doctrine, try to imagine such information provided in a Biblical chapter.
III. JUDAISM IS OPTIMISM, is the third teaching of this chapter.
No less than five times is the refrain, ‘And God saw that it was good’ repeated in the Creation Chapter. The world is not something hostile to God or independent of Him. All comes from God and all is His handiwork; all is in its essence good, nor is there anything absolutely evil.
Israel acclaims God as the sole ‘Kind of the universe, who formest light and createst darkness, who makest peace and createst all things’ (Authorised Prayer Book, p. 37). Though Nature seems to be indifferent to man’s sense of compassion, the world is good, since goodness is its final aim; without struggle, there would be no natural selection or adaptation to changing surroundings, and therefore no progress from lower to higher. ‘And God saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good’––even suffering, evil, nay death itself, have a rightful and beneficent place in the Divine scheme, is the Rabbinic comment on this verse.
IV. THE SABBATH CONSECRATES WORK AND HALLOWS MAN’S LIFE, is the culminating teaching of the Chapter.
The institution of the Sabbath is part of the cosmic plan, and therefore intended for all humanity. The Sabbath is a specifically Jewish contribution to human civilization. ‘The actual Jewish Sabbath as we know it is without any point of contact in Babylonian institutions’ (Skinner).
The ancient Babylonians had ‘ a day of cessation’, which they called by a name somewhat similar to ‘Sabbath’, and it was observed on the 7th, 14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th days of the months Ellul and Marchesvan. These were considered unlucky days, and on them the king was not to offer sacrifice, nor consult an oracle, nor invoke curses on his enemies.
Quite other is the Jewish Sabbath. It is not merely a day of cessation from toil. On the one hand, it has its positive aspect as a day of spiritual recreation; and, on the other hand, it is a day of joy, and is greeted in the Synagogue in the words (‘Come, my Beloved, to meet the Bride, Queen Sabbath’). It banishes toil and sorrow—a symbol of immortality, of that Life which is wholly a Sabbath; see on Exod. XX,9-11.
God the Creator and Lord of the Universe, which is the work of His goodness and wisdom; and Man, made in His image, who is to hallow his week-day labours by the blessedness of Sabbath-rest—such are the teachings of the Creation chapter. Its purpose is to reveal these teachings to the children of men—and not to serve as a text book of astronomy, geology or anthropology. Its object is not to teach scientific facts; but to proclaim highest religious truths respecting God, Man, and the Universe. The ‘conflict’ between the fundamental realities of Religion and the established facts of Science is seen to be unreal as soon as Religion and Science each recognizes the true borders of its dominion.