Reading Genesis 1 brings back fond childhood memories of listening to and occasionally joining in discussions (yes, I was and still am a nerd at heart) about the origins of the universe. Is the earth 6,000 years old or 6 billion? Are the “days” of Genesis 1 literal, 24-hour spans of time, or are they simply a literary device meant to hold the story together? The opening lines of the Bible have been dissected with scientific rigor and made to support one argument or the other.
But you wouldn’t use bunsen burners and microscopes to analyze Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot. And that’s what the opening lines of the Bible are. Genesis 1 reads more like poetry than prose — and definitely more like poetry than scientific text.
Which is pretty cool, really. For Jews and Christians, whatever else these words may be, they are in some way God revealing himself to us. God decides to start a conversation, and his first words take the form of a poem.
When I read Genesis 1, it hits me: the God behind these words is a God who values beauty. Not just beauty in what he creates (which the text calls “good” not once but seven times — very significant to Jewish readers); he values beauty in the description, too.
The first words of the Bible are not that concerned with the how of creation. They’re all about the who (God) and the why (for us). The details are carefully arranged not to make a scientific point but a theological one — about who God is and the way the world was meant to be.
(Although, if theology is the study of God and how he relates to the world, then a point about theology is a point about everything, really.)
God begins by creating a world that is formless and empty. It’s dark. Unfit for human (or any other) habitation. But his presence — the spirit hovering over the deep places of the world — changes everything.
The progression of creation is significant — again, not for scientific but theological reasons. The world is formless, so God starts off by giving it form and definition — light/dark, water/sky, sea/land. It’s also an empty world, so then he goes about filling with all kinds of living creatures — plants, birds, fish, wild animals. (You get the idea that God likes variety.)
The acts of creation are arranged in order of importance; the last thing created is the most important, the crowning achievement, the reason for everything else. Which, if you’re a woman, should make you feel pretty good about being created second in Genesis 2’s version of the story.
Back in Genesis 1, though, it’s not until human beings appear that the writer is able to say creation isn’t just “good.” It’s “very good.”
God is making a habitat suitable for humans. And then, like a landlord closing the deal with his tenants, he hands over the keys and tells Adam and Eve to take good care of the place.
Which is one of the things that fascinates me about this chapter. The Bible’s first command to humans, sometimes called the “cultural mandate,” is a command to look after the planet. Scholars will tell you that the Hebrew concepts of “subduing” and exercising “dominion” over the earth have more to do with stewardship than endless consumption. The image here, literally and figuratively, is one of cultivating a garden, not pouring concrete. (Not that I’m against concrete.) And cultivation is not just about what you take from something; it’s about what you put back into it, too.
So wherever we stand on the causes of climate change or the politics of environmental regulation, words like “eco-friendly” and “sustainable” are Genesis 1 ideas.
Something else fascinates me about Genesis 1, something I noticed for the first time when reading it this week. The very first blessing spoken by God in all of the Bible wasn’t given to humans. It was given to fish and to birds. It’s same word, barak, that appears a few lines later when God blesses human beings. Which has me thinking about something I saw on TV this weekend…
Channel 4 just finished re-airing Hugh’s Chicken Run, a documentary exposing the realities of intensive (battery) chicken farming. When it dawned on the presenter, a UK celebrity chef named Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (which is just fun to say), that intensive chicken farms weren’t about to open their doors to him and his film crew, he decided to build his own farm, raising intensive and free-range chickens side by side.
Intensive chicken farming isn’t pretty. Thousands of bird crammed into a windowless barn 24 hours a day, with practically no room to walk around and no opportunity to be outside in a chicken’s natural environment. They spend all day and night standing or sitting in their own feces — legs burned and bodies blistered by the ammonia.
Around 95 percent of the chicken we we eat is farmed this way.
Not long ago, this wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. My reaction would have been, “Who cares? They’re chickens. Food.”
But in Genesis 1, chickens get the first blessing. So maybe we ought to ask: is this how we were meant to treat a creature blessed by God?
I don’t consider myself an animal rights activist. I’m an enthusiastic meat eater. There’s a (free-range) chicken in the oven as I type this, and in the end, he met the exact same fate as his intensively farmed cousins. I’m OK with that. But many cultures before ours believed that it was important to respect the food they ate. When did that change?
Something about a chicken existing in its natural environment before it ends up on my dinner plate seems to fit the created order of Genesis 1 better. Maybe that’s because one of the lessons of Genesis 1 is that it matters how we treat the creation, how we treat other living things blessed by God — even if they were put on this earth for our benefit.
After all, this is God’s planet. And how we treat an object is an extension of how we treat the object’s creator or owner. What we do with this earth reveals what we think of its maker.
(They won’t all run this long, I promise.)
P.S. Another reason to eat free-range chickens? A side-by-side nutritional comparison with intensively farmed chicken showed that free-range birds have higher protein content and less fat.
