This is a Write 31 Days post.
Genesis is a book of stories.
Its focus is beginnings. Its events introduce and orient us to the other books of Moses and to the rest of the Bible. But if we miss, somehow, that Genesis is primarily a story book, we will misunderstand and misinterpret a lot of what’s going on in the book.
So, a quick literature lesson for you…
Stories are fundamentally important to the human race. Human beings are wired to tell stories. We think in stories. We understand our world through stories. Stories are the mechanism by which a culture records and rewards whatever characteristics it values.
In these stories, the “good guys” have certain traits and they win. Or they turn away from those good traits so they lose. And the “bad guys” have other characteristics that, according to that culture, we don’t want to be known for. And every single culture does this.
If you’ve seen the movie The Croods, you’ve seen this kind of story-telling. Grug, the father, tells his family stories to discourage them from curiosity, so they can be safe. He draws each story’s character on the wall, and he ends each story by slamming his hand onto the character, erasing it, as he concludes, “And they died.”
Every culture, ancient and modern, tells stories like that. Ours are shared through movies, video games, commercials, and cultural influencers on social media. In other times, minstrels sang them. We record them in books and pass them down in family histories.
Stories are very important. So when God wants to give us a context to understand him, the world he created, and our place in it…he told us stories.
Genesis is not a textbook.
Of course, many readers and commentators spend a lot of time looking into Genesis for science and history. Are they wrong?
Not really.
There is history. Genesis is narrative prose, the biblical form for historical writing. In other words, the Bible is telling us what actually happened. So can we depend on the Genesis account for dates and scientific evidence?
Yes. Sort of.
There is no problem with the desire to date the events of Genesis (like the creation) or to uncover the exact locations it mentions (like Eden) or to prove the science it describes (like the flood). But there’s a big difference between knowing the “God made the world” and saying “God made the world exactly 5760 years before the year 2000” (as orthodox Jews claim). Or “God made the world 4000 years ago, and if you don’t agree, your entire interpretation of the Bible is questionable.”
These discussions are interesting, valuable, and people have written millions of pages on all of those points. So if you’re interested in those things, study them. By all means.
But in all of that research and study, just don’t forget that Genesis is a book of stories first and foremost.
It contains science and history and archaeology. But it is not trying to be a history textbook or a science textbook. It is a story book. And if we let it be a story book, we will learn a great deal about the world, the human race, and the God who made them both. But if we try to force dates and locations and scientific theories into the book, we may actually miss the grand picture, the wild epic, the vast perspective that God crafted this book to reveal. Because…
Genesis is about heroes.
Stories, of course, have heroes. Heroes who illustrate for us the values of a culture. So Genesis, being a story book, is filled with hero stories.
But these characters, these “heroes,” have with one interesting characteristic. Many of them are actually NOT living out values that seem biblical or even religious. They are rarely the kind of people God intended for them to be. These heroes totally screw up. They cheat and lie and give up their wives to save their own necks. They fight with each other; they fight with God. More often than not, they hang with the bad guys and thumb their noses at the good guys.
And as we read the book of Genesis, what we begin to get is a remarkable picture, not so much about these “heroes,” but of the God who continually comes back to them. Even though they totally don’t deserve it, God keeps coming back. He blesses them and covenants with them and engages with them and saves them.
In the book of Genesis, God is the hero of the story. And these characters we call “heroes of the faith” aren’t really the good guys or the bad guys. They’re the secondary characters whose interactions with God, the true hero, help illustrate his character and his plans and his ability to bring those plans to completion, despite our many, many, many, many sins and mistakes and bad choices.
Engaging Genesis means understanding that it is a story book, and its hero is God.
