Mountain Minyan המנין בהרים

Over at the Jewish Journal, Rabbi Shafner argues that the Jewish tradition leaves the creation story in B’reshit/Genesis somewhat reconciled to science.

I will confess that there is a certain crossword-puzzle-like attraction to reconciling the text with science of all kinds: Genesis with cosmology, Exodus, Joshua, and Samuel with archaeology and other written sources, trying to explain parts of Exodus through vulcanism and other geological events, etc.

And while I’m not specifically accusing Rabbi Shafner of engaging in those attempts, I think that these attempts in general are both belittling to science and to the Tradition.

If you read B’reshit/Genesis as a “literal” account of the origins of the universe, i.e. as a Cosmological treatise, it is simply not correct according to science. If you, on the other hand, read it for what it is: a theological, ethical, etiological, and anthropological document, woven together with the traditions of the Ancient Near East from which the fundamentals of the beliefs of half the world’s peoples spring, then not only is there no need to call it false, but there is reason to wonder at it.

In other words, I don’t think the Torah is trying to tell us something like E=MC^2. I think the Torah is trying to tell us that there is one God: that the primordial water is not a god, in contrast to Mesopotamian belief; that chaos was not a god, in contrast to Mesopotamian belief; and that the sun and the firmament are not gods. Most importantly, it tells us that humans are dignified because they are made in God’s image.

This latter bit can be read also as a biological document. Boom! There’s a man. Or it can be read as an ethical document. Humans are part of “creation”—part of the world—and are thus deserving of human dignity, as they are—at least so far—the highest expression of nature on earth. You can agree or disagree with that last claim, but I think that’s the one being made. I do not think this is a biology text. And in fact, if you reject that claim, you are more or less rejecting monotheism, which, at the bare minimum holds that there is a primum mobile is what began, and it is singular. If you can’t even entertain (even if you can’t believe it) that notion, you probably don’t belong in a temple or a church in the first place, and shouldn’t bother reading the Torah anyway.

[Edit: God making man in his image could also be seen as a sort of in-your-face reversal of men making gods in their image: the idols prevalent all over the Ancient Near East.]

Textualists tell us that this part of the Bible is part of the P source. That author was very concerned with orthodoxy. I think that in the context of the first millennium BC, the P author expresses the orthodoxy of monotheism and ethics very well in the open part of B’reshit/Genesis and there is no need to come up with explanatory hacks like “before the sun the days could have been millions of years long!”

In sum, this is the fallacy of taking the Bible “literally”: you’re taking it literally on your own 21st century terms, probably in translation to another language, but at least into an entirely different gestalt. Just by doing that, you’re setting it up to fail.

Try reading it on its own terms from its own time. It’s a brilliant text when you don’t expect it to explain Gauss’s formulas or DNA replication.