Theological Exegesis of Scripture, Volume I: The Pentateuch

Preface

The present book is the first in a projected six-volume Theological Exegesis of Scripture, covering both testaments of the Christian Bible. By theological exegesis I mean the interpretation of Scripture according to its theological shape as a witness to the living will and work of God in church and world. The book is based on careful study of the Hebrew text, in close consultation with commentaries ancient and modern, Jewish and Christian.

A few very brief comments are in order that will help to describe and delimit the scope of this volume, and the projected set as a whole. First, I have, out of necessity, chosen the method of lectio selecta (commentary on select passages) rather than lectio continua (commentary on whole books) in order to keep the project within manageable limits of both space and time. At times, my selections accord with those common to traditional lectionary readings (which lean toward Genesis and Exodus, within the Pentateuch); at others, I have worked with passages often neglected, but in my judgment worth closer inspection at the present time. At all times, I have endeavored to make selections useful to teachers, pastors, and students, for whom the book (and set) is primarily designed.

Second, I have decided against adding a scholarly apparatus. Doing so would likely double the size of the volume, without adding to its inherent value. And that is simply because so much of the information such an apparatus would include is readily available in the myriad biblical encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, introductions, and so forth—both in print and online—that are now readily available. I thought it best to keep the present work laser-focused on the contribution it is intended to make, and resist the temptation to crowd the text with extraneous material.

Finally, this is a work of theological exegesis, not a work about theological exegesis. I do not for a moment deny the importance of careful reflection on the question of how to do theological interpretation of Scripture, and there are of course several fine books on the subject. This however is not one of them. At some point, it comes time simply to get on with the task, and that is the aim of the present volume, and the overall project of which it is a part.

This book was written during a time of national and indeed international crisis. A raging pandemic has, at the time of writing, already caused several million deaths worldwide. The rise of ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism has, both in the United States and globally, scarred the peaceful unity of peoples and nations, often with tacit or even explicit support from elements within the Christian church. Climate change is not only continuing, but accelerating, because of the unleashing of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, and humanity seems paralyzed to the threat it is both causing and facing as a result. Immigration is growing, yet the humane treatment of immigrants is diminishing. In short, the church of our time faces these and other challenges the church of the past has not faced, at least in the present form.

Yet we live now, by the same promise to the church of all ages, that the risen Christ guides us still through the witness of Holy Scripture. Theological exegesis of Scripture is based upon that promise alone, and upon no other foundation. Indeed, we first encounter that divine gift of promise in the book of Genesis. And so, we begin, at the beginning . . .

I. Genesis

1. The Morning Stars

Genesis 1:1–5

The opening verses of the Bible resound with a confident affirmation of faith. Not a word is missing; not a spare word is added. The declaration of God’s sovereign act of creation is filled with a precise wonder. Indeed, the entire first chapter of Genesis reads like a long-circulated confession of faith, symmetrical in form, theocentric in vision. God is the grammatical subject of the first sentence of Holy Scripture; God is the one theological Subject of creation, who alone calls the world into being according to his own mysterious purpose.

The opening sentence contains a syntactical ambiguity, often referenced in modern translations. The traditional rendering is In the beginning, God created . . . Hebrew syntax would also allow the translation: When God began to create . . . While the syntax is indeed ambiguous, the theological content leaves the translation far from uncertain. The traditional rendering in fact captures the genuine sense of the text and should best be followed. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Such is the opening profession of faith with which the Bible begins. We can only understand it by recognizing that the word God in the text is in fact God of heaven and earth; and that the God of heaven and earth is even now our Creator who comes to find us in the word of Scripture.

In the beginning. There is no reference here to an abstract chronology by which time can be measured. The point is not to suggest: go back, year by year, and you will at such and such a date reach the beginning. Various short and long chronologies have been introduced to date the creation. All must be cast aside as contrary to the biblical word. For the entire point of the opening passage of the Bible is that time itself came to be with creation. Time is a creature of God. He is not timeless; he has his own time, the eternity of his life in glory, which gathers all time, past, present, and future, into a single moment. But his time is not our time, his ways not our ways. Creation came into being with time; time came into being with creation. It cannot be dated, for there is no reference point outside of the existence of God’s own act, which can be measured only in reference to itself. The creation is new absolutely.

God, and God alone, created the world from nothing. As has often been remarked, the Old Testament uses a special Hebrew word to describe the divine act of creation, in order to make very clear the absolute difference between divine and human acts. God alone creates by using no preexisting materials, no preexisting pattern or design. Human beings can certainly be creative according to the Bible, but they use tools to hand, often in unique and extraordinary ways. By sharp contrast, God alone, without any analogy whatsoever, creates from nothing. Before the universe came to be, there was God alone, in the majesty of his eternal reality. Not a monad, according to the fuller witness of Scripture, but a living relationship of love, the triune God. For his own mysterious purpose, according to his own sovereign good pleasure, God in his own merciful love created a world independent of himself.

And what did he create? The heavens and the earth. Hebrew often uses the rhetorical figure of merism, in which two contrasting words are used to refer to the whole. In this case the whole is . . . everything that is, the cosmos. The scope of God’s creative power and will reaches forth over all reality. The remaining verses of the first chapter will unfold the beauty of God’s creation of the cosmos in two contrasting rows. On the one hand, God will create a series of domains; today we would call them ecosystems: the light, the sky (separating the waters above and below), the dry land and plants. Then he will populate those domains with creatures: the sun, moon, and stars; fish and birds; and finally land animals and humans. God creates human beings in his own image; he creates them male and female. God gives humankind the Sabbath as a gift. Notice, God does not invite humanity to join his work of creation; he invites them to join his rest. From beginning to end, there is an inviolable focus on the sovereign and creative majesty of God alone, different in kind, not just degree, from all human effort. The Sabbath is described in the Bible as a perpetual covenant (Exod 31: 16). Creation is both the basis for the gracious covenant that provides its true inner purpose; and it points forward from the very beginning. God’s creation of the universe is an eschatological act. The God of creation is found always in the future, never in the past.

God and the cosmos, the cosmos and God. We are well on our way, it would seem, along the unfolding story of creation. Until suddenly everything comes to a full stop as a new threat suddenly enters the picture: the earth was a formless void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Now, we must unfortunately quickly depart from the traditional reading of this verse. Theological exegesis is not the same thing as retrieval of tradition, however much it is rooted in it. Traditional exegesis understood the formless void to be a reference to the incomplete nature of creation at the beginning. Usually on the analogy of Greek metaphysics, it was seen as the underlying matter of the universe, to which God in the subsequent days of creation would then give form. It is a logical, even compelling reading; but it is not true to the text of Scripture. We must dig deeper to find a fresh understanding of these remarkably fulsome theological texts in the opening verses of the Bible.

The creation is complete; God has created the cosmos. He will in the coming days of creation with the hand of a divine artist draw in the details of his beautiful world. But the formless void does not refer to the incomplete; it refers rather to a profound threat to creation, and that is the threat of chaos. No sooner does God make his cosmos than chaos threatens to undo it. We have two questions. What is the nature of this chaos, and where does it come from? We will get the answer to one, but be left to ponder in mystery the other.

The nature of chaos, here and elsewhere in the Bible, is the threat of total destruction, total annihilation, utter and complete assault on all blessed order in the universe. Since the time of Descartes, our own modern culture has been held captive to the question of existence: the opposite of being is simply not-being. The metaphysical question is thus: why is there anything at all, and how can I prove it? Not so the Bible. For biblical faith the opposite of existence is chaos. To live under the goodness of God the Creator is to enjoy blessings of life in his ordered universe. To lose our way, as individuals or societies, is to face the threat of chaos, which tears apart the fabric of creation, leaving us defenseless and hopeless against the powers of destruction. Chaos comes when a pandemic brings massive global disease and death, forcing to a full stop the entire world of modern social existence; when an authoritarian political movement defaces the architecture of civil society as a whole; when the climate itself turns against the world it otherwise nourishes. Chaos is not just an event, however unfortunate; it enfolds every other human occurrence within its grasp, calling humanity itself into question. So, the why question is different, and leads to our second question: why is there chaos?

And here we are left to ponder in mystery. As is often the case in the Bible, we are not left without guidance. Indeed, two points are very carefully made. First, chaos is not eternal. Before the world began, there was only one reality: God. Not God and chaos. There is no primordial dualism in the Bible. But if chaos is not primordial, where did it come from? The other point is also clearly made: God did not create chaos. He created the cosmos; chaos threatens the world he made. So how are we to account for the presence of chaos so soon—indeed immediately—after the creation of the world?

We struggle to say the unsayable, but the struggle is worth it. There are not words for chaos, for chaos is the destruction of language, the destruction of order, the destruction of logic, the destruction of meaning. And so, we can only point with broken language. In creating order, God did not create chaos. It therefore lives as that which God did not intend, as that which God did not create; it is possible only as that which is impossible. In creating the cosmos God rejected chaos, and it lives as that which God rejected, always threatening to undo that which God chose to create. It exists as the power of bringing existence to an end, the power of sheer destruction. It has no life apart from God; yet it draws no life from God, but lives only as that which God grants no being at all. It is formless and void.

That it does not undo God’s creation from the beginning is simply because of the action of God’s Spirit. The verb is a participle, and should be kept a participle in translation, to catch the immediate and active force: "the Spirit sweeping [not swept] over the face of the waters." Only the moving of God’s Spirit keeps chaos at bay. And indeed, as the remaining portions of Scripture confirm, God’s Spirit can withdraw in judgment, and chaos again invades creation, wrecking and destroying lives, societies, epochs. Chaos here is held in check; but the threat remains. We pray to God’s Creator Spirit even today to sweep away the chaos of our time.

We come to the first day. God brings the reality of his world into being by speaking. There is no gap in God between intention and speech; between speech and action. The text is precise: God speaks, and it is. God said, Let there be light; and there was light. Once again, we must depart from much traditional exegesis, again in large measure based on Greek metaphysics. It was argued that God in speaking caused" the world to exist. Indeed, because causality could be ascribed to God, a rational proof for God emerged. The chain of causality must have a First Cause; God is the First Cause of the universe. Now, the Bible will come to show a fine understanding of causes; why some things happen, why others do not. But the point to be stressed here is that the idea of causality is not only absent from the witness to creation, but inimical to it. The reason is not far to seek. Like time, causality is a creature of God. In creating the world, God created causality; but God is not subject to the laws of time and causation. The Bible does not say God’s Word caused the world; it says, in the miracle of joyous affirmation, God spoke, and the world was. There is only God’s word, and the cosmos he creates; there is no intermediary. We assign names to objects that already exist; God gives existence to objects simply by declaring their name. Creation is a miracle without any analogy whatsoever; it cannot be proved; it cannot only be believed.

God creates light. He not only creates it, he sees his creation, and calls it good. God in these opening verses of the Bible is creating a universe, filled eventually with earth and sky, plants and animals, and at long last humankind. But he not only creates; he sees what he creates, and affirms and embraces its existence. It is not just there; it is good. Creation itself is not a neutral fact, still less a harsh wilderness to be tamed, or from which we must ultimately escape in order to find our true being. Creation is a divine gift of grace and blessing. Creation is not the promise of salvation; but it is the necessary basis upon which the divine promise of redemptive love will be freely given. God sees all his works and calls them good, and we marvel at his handiwork.

He divides the light from the darkness, and calls the light day and the darkness night. Morning is broken on the first day. Notice that there is a rhythmic pattern built into creation. It is not all light; there is darkness and light, light and darkness. Of course, in the literal sense that is true of the beauty of sunlight and the sacred dark of night. Both fill heart and mind with wonder, with readiness for the day, giving way to the coming ease of the quiet night. But there is clearly a figurative sense. Life itself is light and darkness, darkness and light. We are not now referring to chaos and cosmos; rather, within the cosmos itself there is a dialectical pattern in human existence. There are times when life is light, and we step lightly. Yet there are times when shadows intrude, and we struggle forward with difficulty, looking—even blindly—for a way. Both make us more human, both make us more nearly the wondrous creature of God we are.

We consider now three points more carefully. First, as we have seen, God not only creates, he rejoices in what he creates. He makes; and he sees what he makes. There is an element of sheer divine pleasure in the glory of light and dark, sun and moon, field and ocean, plant and animal. The psalmist brings this divine joy in creation out most explicitly: The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your faithful shall bless you (Ps 145:9–10). We are not allowed to be against creation, nor even indifferent in the face of the natural world. We are called by the glory of God to live with joy in the world he has made and called good. We do not wait for the joyous mysteries of creation to come to us; we seek them out, often finding them in the most unlikely places. The truth is they are everywhere; it is our calling to seek and find the joys of life that God himself freely gives to those who look where they may be found. The most astounding truth of all is that God, our Creator, takes delight in our joy in his blessed creation. We give God joy by our joy in his marvelous world; such is the miracle of his love.

A second point arises not so much from the text itself as from the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. The Bible predates the modern industrialization that produces the crisis that now quite clearly threatens the health of our planet, the very planet described with such care and evident admiration in the first chapter of the Bible. While the Bible does not speak to a crisis, does it speak to a perspective from which the crisis can best be addressed? Indeed, the opening verses of the Bible offer the church and the world a quite distinctive alternative. We have heard far too much from those who feel that human beings have the right to exploit the world for human need and consumption. Clearly, exploitation is not a biblical option, nor is it a remotely attractive solution to the problem; indeed it is the problem. But nor does the common alternative of taking responsibility for creation, however well intended, reflect the awful majesty of the biblical word. Who are we—human beings—to take responsibility for God’s universe, God’s cosmos, God’s earth? We made nothing; how can we be truly responsible for it? Rather, the Bible sounds a third option which needs to be heard. This is not our world; this is God’s world: The heavens are yours; the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in it—you have founded them (Ps 89:11). Even the ground beneath our feet is not ours, but his: The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants (Lev 25:23). The entire earth belongs to God alone, and we are all—all—immigrants, passing guests here but for a while. If that is the clear biblical witness, I question whether rushing to a notion of human responsibility for creation is quite the answer. Do we not need, on the basis of the Scriptural mandate, a new sense of frank humility in the face of the natural world? It is not ours; let us start with that as our first premise in every public and private decision made.

Thirdly, we reflect briefly on life under the dialectic of shadow and light. We love, and that love fills us with the light of life. But in daring to love we also risk, and suffer, loss. The loves are profound; the losses leave our emotions numbed and our sense of purpose exhausted. We strive for achievement, and using every ounce of imagination and creativity we arrive at our goal. But along the way there are mistakes, there are failures. We cherish our achievements; yet we can come close to breaking under the burden of our failure, and struggle to shake off the abiding effect of regret. Could we not just have light without shadow? God himself answers the question from the very beginning. He names the light and the dark. Both belong to him: Yours is the day, yours also the night (Ps 74:16). It is not a biblical faith which says: God is with us only in prosperity . . . so pray for the light! God’s truest saints have long known that he draws nearest in the shadows of life: in loss, disappointment, grief, suffering, oppression. Only when we recognize his loving face in the shadow of night do we truly praise in the glorious light of day. Shadow and light converge on Easter morning, God’s new Day.

2. Houses of Clay

Genesis 2:15–25

While we will focus upon the final section of the chapter, it is helpful to begin with a few comments about the second chapter of Genesis as a whole. It is now quite common to see in modern Bibles a title or reference to this chapter something to the effect of a second story of creation. And it is true that the second chapter of Genesis almost certainly derives from a quite different literary source than the first, though the history of how and when those sources were linked, and by whom, is much disputed. But we do not have two accounts of creation in the written word, whatever the origin of the traditions that make it up. The key to understanding the theological shape of these two chapters is 2:4: These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. How does this help us understand the theological setting of chapter 2, in its relation to chapter 1?

This is the first of the ten generations formulas that provide one of the prominent elements of the theological structure of the book. These formulae not only tie the various stories of Genesis into one coherent whole; they structure that one theological framework around the concept of the divine promise. But we meet with the first such formula only to find an inviting anomaly. Throughout the remainder of the book of Genesis, the formula always stands at the head of a group of stories, which then tell the family history of the person referred to. The formula is always at the head of the stories to follow; and always points forward to progeny, never backward to ancestors. So, what does that tell us about the relation between Genesis 1, which focuses on the creation of the cosmos by God, and Genesis 2, which focuses on the creation of humankind? Why is the first generations formula put between the two so prominently and so counterintuitively, as no human person is involved?

First, the two passages are not two accounts of creation, but rather the one story of creation in chapter 1, followed by its continuation in chapter 2. There is only one account of creation in the Bible, despite the insistence of modern editors. Second, the shift in focus is obvious to the alert reader or listener: chapter 1 portrays the grandeur of God in bringing the universe into beginning by his Word, while chapter 2 focuses on the special role of humanity within the patterned beauty of the earth. Indeed, verse 4 inverts the common merism: heavens and earth becomes earth and heavens. We will now see the divine creation, no longer from the perspective of the cosmos, but from the special vantage point of earth, where humankind dwells. But third, and most remarkably, the account in chapter 2 is in some sense on the analogy of a child to a parent to chapter 1. That is to say, humankind is the child of creation. That is not to deny the spectacular assertion in chapter 1 that humanity is made in the image of God; nevertheless, the generations formula sets the human story going forward as, in some sense, a product of the universe. Darwin could not have said it any better.

Two more comments derive from the extraordinary declaration in 2:7: then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. Humankind is made from dust, from clay, from a clod of dirt. The word for dust and the word for humanity sound very similar in Hebrew; a play on words in Hebrew is reminding us that from the beginning, dust is destiny. We are dust, and depend solely upon the breath of God for life itself. He breathes, and we live; he returns his breath, and we die. The resonance of this statement goes far in the Bible. Human beings are created mortal. They die as a result of the catastrophic sin in chapter 3; but clearly that death is not the introduction of mortality. We are dust, mortal from the very beginning. We are born into families; we live in communities, which shape our very identity. Our lives begin, then flourish, then sadly and inevitably decline. In death, we return to the dust from which we came. Along the way we are fragile creatures, profoundly susceptible to the threats of disease, attack, loss, unnamable fears, exile, verbal assault. We may indeed be created in the image of God, but that most certainly does not mean that we are accorded semidivine status. There is a sense of realism about humanity that is built into the biblical picture of creation, and is never abandoned. Humankind is never seen in the Bible as the great achiever of glorious goals, the great generator of life-changing worldviews. Dust is not an –ism; dust is dust. We are houses of clay.

Yet God makes us into living beings. The word used here in Hebrew was once commonly translated as soul, as if the outer body was dust while the inner person, breathed by God, was an invisible and immortal substance. That is the Greek view; it is certainly not the biblical view. There are not substantial parts to the person in the Bible. The Bible sees human beings as whole creatures, right from the beginning. That we are dust is true of the whole person, not just the external body. We are dust, from the inside out, and from the outside in. We are also living beings, as whole persons. So, what does that mean, in distinction from the dust from which we come? As whole persons we have desires, longings, even cravings. Some of these may be to our own benefit; some, alas, may do us harm, such as the unchecked desire for vengeance. We feel alive, happy, hopeful, loving; but again, we just as easily turn to hate and despair. As living creatures in society we make laws; we also break those laws. In short, to speak of life (or the older formulation of soul) is to see the whole person as one who desires, longs for, and decides. This is what God makes when he breathes into humanity his own breath. Keep in mind that all living creatures have the divine breath of life (1:30), as anyone who has ever loved a pet animal knows well. The church assault on Darwin was a mistake, unless we are ready to make the same assault upon the word of God, which is ultimate folly.

The first human being—we will not learn his name, Adam, until verse 20—is placed by God in a garden park in the paradise of Eden. The first home of humankind is a bountiful and beautiful garden. The garden is filled with luxurious trees, and fruit is abundant and available to the man. He must do minimal work to keep and cultivate the garden, but clearly it is God who provides the abundance. Two trees however stand out. The first is the tree of life, about which we will hear later. The second is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which now provides the setting for the drama to follow. God gives the first man freedom to eat of all the trees of the garden, with one exception: he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Death—not mortality, but death—will follow if he does. Our first question concerns the nature of this tree: what is its significance? The issue is not rightly captured by the simplistic idea of moral choice, as if eating the fruit from this tree will confer such moral knowledge. Indeed, as we will see, the scene immediately determines the true nature of moral choice, the ability to decide between right and wrong (liberum arbitrium). Rather, eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil aggrandizes to humanity the supposed right to establish abstract moral norms—including religious norms—independent of the living will of God. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil would give humanity the correct human view of God and the world; what God offers, even demands, is the right divine view of humanity.

Why is this not then a tree of moral choice? Here we must observe a distinction. God makes it clear for the first time in this passage that true freedom comes only through service to his living command. An abstract system of moral and religious values—today we call it a religious worldview—not only fails to capture the biblical vision of truth, but in fact profoundly perverts and distorts it. Freedom is obedience to the divine will. It is