Bereshit 5786

Genesis and Ulysses

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I’m also doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Find links to all the posts on Genesis 1 here, then visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here or here to get oriented, or join us in progress here.

Hello again, everyone. This week we are starting the Torah all over again with Parashat Bereshit (Genesis 1:1-6:8), and I’m taking advantage of the new Jewish year to restart my Torah Talk column.

What I’m thinking about this week is the order that the various sections of this part of the Torah are written in — not merely, as you might suspect, because I’ve been thinking about that a great deal on account of the close reading of Genesis I’m doing on my other Substack. I’m actually coming at it this week from the direction of James Joyce’s book Ulysses. I read it many years ago and can’t claim to have understood very much about it, but one of the things about that book that struck so many readers at the time as unusual is that the different chapters are told in different kinds of writing — different voices, as I like to put it when I read the Bible.

You know, of course, that the Torah begins with two different stories telling how the world was created. Each of these two stories also has a very different flavor. They really are two different genres of writing. The first story is quite organized and outlined and scientific — taxonomic, one might almost say — and the second story is much more like the beginning of a novel. It has characters who do things, and there’s a plot. Thinking about Ulysses, I was wondering how our experience of the Torah would be different if those two stories had been reversed.

The structure of Parashat Bereshit as we have it today looks like this:

• Gen 1:1-2:3 — Story One

  • 1:1-5 Day One: light and darkness

  • 1:6-8 Day Two: separation of the waters

  • 1:9-13 Day Three: land and vegetation

  • 1:14-19 Day Four: sun, moon, and stars

  • 1:20-23 Day Five: air and sea creatures

  • 1:24-31 Day Six: land creatures and human beings

  • 2:1-3 Day Seven: completion and blessing

• Gen 2:4 The Hinge

  • … Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created.

  • When the LORD God made earth and heaven …

• Gen 2:5-4:26 — Story Two

  • Ch. 2 The first man and woman are created.

  • Ch. 3 They eat from the tree of knowledge and are expelled from the garden.

  • Ch. 4 Cain vs. Abel; from Adam through Seth to Enosh

• Gen 5:1-32 — The Genealogy of Adam

  • Adam

  • Seth

  • Enosh

  • Kenan

  • Mahalalel

  • Jared

  • Enoch

  • Methuselah

  • Lemech

  • Noah

• Gen 6:1-8 — Adam’s Aftermath

The links will take you to much, much more detail on all of those sections, two years’ worth of writing that covers the same Torah reading that I have just 1500 words to cover in this column.

As you see, the first story is indeed scientifically and taxonomically organized. It has a very clear structure. Each little paragraph ends by summarizing the activity in it as having taken place on a single day. On Day One light and darkness are created, then on Day Two the waters above are separated from the waters down here below by a firmament. (The firmament is that solid blue thing you see when you look upwards on a clear day — in plain English, the sky.) On Day Three the water below clears away, the land appears, and plants begin to grow. On Day Four, we’re back up above, where the sun, moon, and stars are created. Day Five sees living creatures who can move on their own through the sea and through the air; Day Six, creatures that move about on the land, culminating (of course) in us: the human beings. On Day 7 creation is completed by capping God’s busy week with a day of rest. The whole section demonstrates a serious knowledge of science as it was understood in the ancient Near East at that time.

That is followed by 2:4, a transitional verse connecting the two versions of the creation story, which you see above with an ellipsis at the beginning of the verse and another one at the end of it. The NJPS translation, which I’ve quoted, actually starts a new sentence in the middle of the verse, a sentence that’s the beginning of the second story. If you look carefully at the highlighted details in that verse, you see that the second half rewrites the first half but in the opposite order. It’s like tying a knot between these two very diverse versions of the creation story.

In Story Two, beginning at Gen 2:5, we have not a lab notebook but a story with characters and a plot. You all know it: Adam and Eve in the garden; they’re told to not eat from a particular tree; they eat from it anyway on the advice of a snake. (You can’t make this stuff up.) Unlike Story One with its careful structure, it’s not even very clear where Story Two comes to an end — perhaps not until the end of Genesis 4, where Adam and Eve have a son named Seth and then a grandson named Enosh, the ancestor of all of us b’nei enosh, the anashim (human beings) who are telling the story.

Genesis 5 is once again very organized and quite easy to draw an outline of, just like Genesis 1; Genesis 6, which is simultaneously the aftermath of creation and the prelude to the Flood, is much more like Story Two. You can see the connection between Story One and the Genealogy of Genesis 5 by comparing these verses:

• ^{Gen 1:27} And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. ²⁸ God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase …”

• ^{Gen 5:1} This is the record of Adam’s line.—When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God; ²male and female He created them. And when they were created, He blessed them and called them Man.—

In other words, our author is linking the scientific data that fill out Story One to the genealogical data of Genesis 5 by repeating the language of the original creation in this version of the continuing creation:

• in his image

• male and female

• with blessing

Now. What if the two original creation stories were reversed? What if the Bible as a whole began at Gen 2:5, with the Lord planting a garden on the planet and creating a man out of mud; the adventures would happen; and then all of a sudden the text would resume with a discussion, in outline form, of how the entire universe had come into being. It would be a lot more like reading Ulysses than it is the way we have it. We’d be very conscious that the genre of writing had changed and that we had switched out of story format, which I think seems more normal to us. It certainly would not seem normal had we had three chapters of it at the beginning of the Torah and then suddenly switched into the lab notebook material of Genesis 1. I think it would be quite jolting.

In the Torah as we actually have it, Story One has enough plot to let us think we’re reading a story. It’s a little dry, perhaps, but it’s there. We then switch naturally through the hinge verse of Gen 2:4 into Story 2 which is a real story with characters and plot, not an outline. When we get to Gen 5:1, the beginning of the genealogy chapter — yet a third genre of writing, one which might have seemed very strange — it instead seems familiar because it picks up on Genesis 1, even reminding explicitly us of that story. If it has fallen into that somewhat more scientific-sounding format, that’s fine. We’re used to it from Story One, so it seems more natural to us than it otherwise might. After all, it begins with Adam and we know him quite well by now.

In fact, Genesis 5 takes us through the 10 generations starting with Adam, through Seth and Enosh (who are at the end of Genesis 4 where Story Two has led us) but ending with Lemech, who is Cain’s descendant in that chapter. So even though the flavor of Genesis 5 is reminiscent of Story One and refers us directly to it, it’s also picking up on Story Two. That lets it flow naturally into the story-like format at the beginning of Genesis 6, the prelude to the Flood story.

That’s why so many generations of us have been able to read the Torah in a way that’s quite natural to us. If the Torah had begun with Gen 2:5 and then told us what we now have in Genesis 1, I think it would be considered a book almost as strange as Ulysses.

At the risk of spoiling things for those who’ve never read the Bible before, the chapters in Parashat Noach about the worldwide Flood and the subsequent repopulation of the earth also intermingle story with structure, characters and plot with data. If we modern scholars are correct that two different earlier versions of these stories were combined, they were not simply assembled but composed thoughtfully by a literary artist.

We’ll look at more of his work next time. I’m glad to be back learning Torah with you.