At least among popular level discussion, the question of genre for the first chapter of Genesis is quite a charged one. Surely, depending on the reader’s background, he already has in his mind a forceful answer to this question: “it’s obviously history!” “it’s obviously poetry!” …or something else.
Stepping back for a moment, doesn’t that seem a bit odd? Why would the question of a text’s genre be charged enough to get some kicked out of certain churches? Certainly, given the Bible’s status as the central religious text of the world’s largest religion, the question of whether a certain text is true would be understandably charged. But in this debate both parties could believe that what the Bible says is true, although they differ in understanding as to the mode by which the Bible communicates what is true in this specific instance. “How does the author speak? Is he singing? Does he relate historical events?”
Of course, different understandings of the mode of communication in any instance will result in drastically different takeaways. Imagine if I told you: “I felled the dragon, swift and quick he fell.” If I were in the process of relating things I did that day, along with going to the grocery store, then you’d probably think much higher of my abilities, and you might wonder where I found a dragon, if you believe what I’m saying at all. However, if you noticed that this line was written in iambic pentameter, and it appeared along with other similar lines in a larger composition, you would probably interpret it differently. Perhaps this is imagery, in which “the dragon” is a test in school, and “to fell” refers to me passing that test, the heroic language being employed to characterize this as an epic feat. In this instance, there’s question as to whether there even is a dragon outside of my poem!
And this reality, that form affects content, begins to explain why this instance in particular is so charged. Here we have God creating the earth, the sea, and everything in them, in definite periods called “days” (יום). The creation of the world and the origin of humanity, central to any religion, let alone the world’s largest, is what is at stake.
But furthermore, I think that there is another factor which makes this question so heated in my own American context. Uniquely in the religious history of the United States, we live in the shadow of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, most notably brought to a head in the Scopes Monkey Trial. In this context, and uniquely so, one’s view on Genesis 1 becomes a barometer for one’s larger view on the relationship between science and religion. One extreme, someone who takes the view that Genesis 1 is accurate history may be characterized along with “Flat-eathers” and “Anti-vaxxers,” who ignorantly assert about things they know nothing about, and are perhaps dangerous. On the other extreme, one who views Genesis 1 as poetry may be characterized as a “liberal,” “heretic,” and perhaps dangerous.
What I aim to do in this post is to just let the text speak for itself, as much as possible. I am convinced that in this discussion there is too much dismissiveness from both sides, such that people are driven more by ideology than by God’s Word. Not to come off as the “enlightened centrist;” I’m just convinced that why a position is held is of similar importance to what is held. There are Christians who hold Genesis 1 to be “obviously history” who know absolutely nothing about the Bible. There are likewise Christians on the other extreme, taking the text to be “obviously poetry,” who really only give lip-service to Genesis 1 as Scripture. But I want to cut through polemics a bit and present actual textual data for what I believe to be the case — and this is better for everyone, since, with all the data laid out, an informed decision can be made about the truth value of a statement.
As for the scope of this article, I do not intend to engage with the “science and religion” argument. I simply want to discuss the one specific area of genre. This is, of course, related to that debate, but not inseparably so, so I want to leave such questions out of this discussion as much as possible.
This post also will probably be somewhat of a lengthy one, so feel free to skip around. Also, I’d like this to begin a series of posts where I walk through topics prompted by the text of the book of Genesis, since I’m working through it right now as I practice and get better at Biblical Hebrew. It will be both a motivator for me and something to help me think deeper about what I read. So stay tuned for that.
Background
An important thing to clarify up front is that the Bible is literature. That may seem obvious — you can hold it in your hand, it may have a nice cover, you can flip pages, and read stories — but often we don’t treat the Bible as if it were literature! This has implications in how we interpret the text, namely, we need to understand its conventions in order to interpret it accurately. When I read about the Exodus, the Bible is not acting as a “window” through which I can look to see the event taking place. No; rather, the Bible is telling me a story. The author uses certain literary conventions to characterize that event according to his goals as an author, and what he desires to communicate about his subject matter. It is therefore not our place when interpreting to look at the events and provide our own interpretation of them outside of what the author desires to communicate. To do so would be to subsume the author’s role and make ourselves the author, like butting into a friend’s story and correcting the details, or interrupting his story to tell our own. It’s not wrong to tell our own story based on such events, like what Paul does with Sarah and Hagar in Galatians 4. But in such a case we are telling our own story, not listening to a story being told. To interpret accurately, it is crucial that we act as attentive listeners.
This recognition of the Bible as literature is at the heart of the genre question: it asks the big literary questions of “What are the author’s goals? Why am I being told this?” And these big questions are central to what it means to interpreting the Bible “literally.” “Literal” is a term I on the whole avoid like the plague when discussing Biblical interpretation, since it has a lot of baggage. However, I bring it up here for a purpose. To interpret “literally” is to interpret according to the author’s wishes; so to interpret the Gospels as Greek Bioi (biographies) would be to interpret them literally. To interpret the Revelation of John as an apocalypse would be to interpret it literally. So literality has to do with how well an interpreter matches the expectations of the author. It has nothing to do with how well one understands a text to map onto history. In fact, if those who take Genesis 1 to be poetic are correct, then it is actually the one who interprets it as history who is guilty of not taking Genesis 1 “literally.” Since literality then depends on who in this debate is correct, it cannot be said that one side takes the text more or less “literally.”
The Text
Poetic Structure?
To begin the analysis, I’d like to point out some features of the text which may point to an identification of this text as poetry. I think it’s often the case among those who take Genesis 1 as history that they believe it to be obviously so, so I hope that some of these identifications help provide a bit of nuance.
For starters, perhaps the feature which could most obviously be identified as poetical is Genesis 1’s repeated “refrain”:
וַיִּקְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ לָאוֹר֙ י֔וֹם וְלַחֹ֖שֶׁךְ קָ֣רָא לָ֑יְלָה וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם אֶחָֽד׃
And God named the light “day,” and, as for the darkness, he named it “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning, day one.
Genesis 1.5
Notice the “And there was evening, and there was morning.” This will be repeated for every day in the sequence (except for the Sabbath day, which is exegetically significant). Here it is for the second:
וַיִּקְרָ֧א אֱלֹהִ֛ים לָֽרָקִ֖יעַ שָׁמָ֑יִם וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם שֵׁנִֽי׃
And God named the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning, the second day.
Genesis 1.8
The listing of days creates a certain rhythm to the text which betrays intentional structure. Such structure, by modern conventions at least, is typical of poetry; if you were listing things you did today to your friend, you probably wouldn’t add a refrain, “and I went, and I did it, the fourth task”; it’d be a little odd.
And notice the number seven as central to the entire account. Seven, of course, in Biblical Hebrew numerology, is quite significant, which adds credence to the idea that there is a high level of composition going on here typical of poetry.
Not only this, but there is compositional significance to the ordering of the days themselves; commentaries are quick to point out that there is a certain symmetry to the entire account. God begins by creating a realm (such as day and night, Day One; or the dividing vault, the Second Day), and then in the second half creates a king to rule that realm (such as the luminaries in the sky, the Fourth Day, or the sea monsters, fish, swarmers, and birds, the Fifth Day).
The Biblical Hebrew Poetic System
When discussing whether Genesis 1 is poetic, it is necessary to take into account that Genesis 1 is not a modern text written in the English language. Certainly I, as a native English speaker, could identify certain elements in the Hebrew text which I could imagine also existing in English poetry. However, assuming that Genesis 1 is poetic, it still would not be proper to read it as English poetry, because in this scenario Genesis 1 would be Classical Hebrew poetry. In our analysis, two guiding questions then come to a head: (1) what are the discernable features of Hebrew poetic texts, and (2) does Genesis 1 fit those features?
Let us first establish a few features typical of Hebrew poetry, by taking a look at Psalm 3, a text which would be unquestionably identified as poetic, being part of a poetic book.
וְאַתָּ֣ה יְ֭הֹוָה מָגֵ֣ן בַּעֲדִ֑י כְּ֝בוֹדִ֗י וּמֵרִ֥ים רֹאשִֽׁי׃
But as for You, יהוה, You are a shield about me // my glory, and the One who exalts my head.
Psalm 3.4
First, it is in order to clarify what Hebrew poetry is not. There is no hard distinction of poetry and prose in Hebrew: those texts which are called poetic are those which have a high concentration of features typical of known Hebrew poetry. There are certain texts which are known to be poetic prior to examination, like the “songs” (שירה) of the Bible, such as Exodus 15, and of course the Psalms. Poetry in Hebrew is not metered, so it is not possible to do a scansion of the Hebrew Bible to determine which texts have meter — and are therefore poetry — and which are not.1
The primary feature of Hebrew poetry is the presence of what is called “A-B Parallelism.” This is to say that Hebrew poetry is built off of binary clauses; commonly lines in Hebrew poetry will be two clauses juxtaposed together to create meaning. In the example I gave above, the “A” clause is “but as for you, יהוה, you are a shield about me.” The “B” clause is “my glory, and the one who exalts my head.” The point of the juxtaposition is that the reader is supposed to consider the relationship between the two clauses; specifically, how “B” furthers and heightens “A.” “B” will often also be missing elements which must be provided by “A”; such as above: who David’s “glory” is is not provided in clause “B”; it’s only in clause “A” that the subject, יהוה, is present.
Another feature, which will figure importantly later, is the distribution of tense usage in Hebrew poetry. Hebrew has four tenses for what we might call “indicative” verbs: the qatal (or perfect), the yiqtol (or imperfect), the weqatal (or pefect with waw consecutive), and the wayyiqtol (or imperfect with waw consecutive). Qatal is for background information, yiqtol is for discourse, weqatal is for continuing discourse, and wayyiqtol is for narrative. Without going into a full lesson on the Hebrew verbal system, just keep in mind that the wayyiqtol is rare in poetic texts. They are sometimes present (in fact, the next verse of Psalm 3), but long strings of wayyiqtol are taken almost as a marker of non-poetic texts.
Finally, poetry is given to imagery. In the example, יהוה is described as a shield about David, which is poetic imagery for protection, perhaps alluding to יהוה’s covenant promise to Abram, that He would be his shield (Genesis 15.1), which is later generalized to God’s covenant people, his descendants (Deuteronomy 33.29). I don’t think this point needs much explaining, since poetry in English is also given to imagery.
Application to Genesis 1
It is first notable that A-B Parallelism, as perhaps the feature of Hebrew poetry, is absent from most of Genesis 1. This feature is lacking through Genesis 1.1-26. Genesis 1.27 is a short poem which serves to highlight the creation of humanity (אדם, adam, “humanity”) as the pinnacle of God’s creative acts, the race which resembles God, as His “image” (this word, צלם, is usually used of idols to pagan deities, but humanity itself is God’s true image):
וַיִּבְרָ֨א אֱלֹהִ֤ים ׀ אֶת־הָֽאָדָם֙ בְּצַלְמ֔וֹ בְּצֶ֥לֶם אֱלֹהִ֖ים בָּרָ֣א אֹת֑וֹ זָכָ֥ר וּנְקֵבָ֖ה בָּרָ֥א אֹתָֽם׃
And God created humanity in his resemblance // resembling God he created it // male and female he created them.
Genesis 1.27
(This is actually a rare case in which a Hebrew line has three clauses, but I think the parallelism is nevertheless apparent, as each clause furthers God’s creative act.)
This construction is common in the Penteteuch, and to some extent in the Hebrew Bible as a whole, where a poetic section will be added to interpret something theologically. The next time this happens is in Genesis 2.23:
וַיֹּ֘אמֶר֮ הָֽאָדָם֒ זֹ֣את הַפַּ֗עַם עֶ֚צֶם מֵֽעֲצָמַ֔י וּבָשָׂ֖ר מִבְּשָׂרִ֑י לְזֹאת֙ יִקָּרֵ֣א אִשָּׁ֔ה כִּ֥י מֵאִ֖ישׁ לֻֽקְחָה־זֹּֽאת׃
And the man said,
Genesis 2.23
“this one finally is bone from my bone // and flesh from my flesh!
this one will be named “woman” (אשה) // because from her husband2 (אישה) this one was taken out.”
So it would technically be correct to say that there is poetry in Genesis 1, since there’s this short song towards the end; but the contrast between this one verse and the rest of the chapter begins to tell us that there’s something different between this and what came before.
But what about tense distribution? This is really the nail-in-the-coffin for the hypothesis that Genesis 1 is poetry. Let’s take a look at one verse, which is paradigmatic of the whole chapter:
וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר וַֽיְהִי־אֽוֹר׃
And God said, “let there be light!” And there was light.
Genesis 1.3
Outside of God’s discourse, there’s two main verbs in this verse: ויאמר and ויהי. These are both in the wayyiqtol tense, which is usually translated as “and + verb.” As was mentioned before, this tense is statistically quite rare in Biblical Hebrew poetry, and certainly a long string of wayyiqtol verbs is foreign to Biblical poetic style. That, however, is what Genesis 1 is: a long string of wayyiqtol verbs. In Hebrew tenses are not the same kind of thing as they are in English; the wayyiqtol is the “narrative” tense in Hebrew, the one used when telling a story. Its consistent usage here implies that the genre of Genesis 1 is narrative, not poetry.
Also, there is a stunning lack of imagery in Genesis 1. In the one verse of Genesis 2.23 there seems to be more imagery present than in the rest of the chapter! There, the imagery of being of the same bones as Adam3 points past itself to communicate that there is a unique relationship between Adam and Eve which was not the case between Adam and the other animals — they are of the same “type” of flesh, to use Paul’s language. But when God creates everything, there is little poetic characterization: he creates the luminaries, the stars, the sea monsters, the fish, and so on, up to man; but these are not characterized as images which point past themselves. They do have significance — like God creating the sea monsters, which I take to be indicative of the fact that God created the pagan sea deities, like Tiamat, and is therefore ontologically distinct from and superior to them; or God creating the luminaries (note not “sun and moon”), showing his superiority to them — but this is not the same thing as imagery.
Respondeo
It was discussed earlier that Genesis 1 is highly structured, which could lead one to consider the text poetic. However, it is my contention that these identifications are primarily based upon English poetic style, and not Hebrew. The common refrain and order could perhaps clue us into some form of free-form poetry in English, sure; but we are not reading an English document, and whether Genesis 1 is poetry or not must be submitted to the standards of the source language, Biblical Hebrew, not those of the receptor language, modern English.
It is true that Genesis 1 is highly ordered. One could say that it is “exalted narrative”: it certainly is very intentionally ordered and highly stylized. But this does not change the fact that it is still narrative. A comparison could be made with Hosea 1-3, which is also often characterized as “exalted narrative.” There is much theological interpretation and intentional structure happening in the actions of Hosea marrying Gomer the prostitute, but it is still portrayed as the activity of a prophet.
The presence of the number seven, key to Biblical Hebrew numerology, is interesting here. It certainly acknowledges the Hebrew nature of this document. However, I think that this argument should take a step back and ask why the number seven is significant in the Hebrew Bible. Because I put forward that the number seven is significant precisely because God creates in seven days. I think that seven in Biblical numerology is bound up with the concept of God resting on the Sabbath, and I am convinced this is the reason the Bible itself gives as to why “seven” is significant. Compare with Exodus 20.11:
כִּ֣י שֵֽׁשֶׁת־יָמִים֩ עָשָׂ֨ה יְהֹוָ֜ה אֶת־הַשָּׁמַ֣יִם וְאֶת־הָאָ֗רֶץ אֶת־הַיָּם֙ וְאֶת־כׇּל־אֲשֶׁר־בָּ֔ם וַיָּ֖נַח בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִ֑י עַל־כֵּ֗ן בֵּרַ֧ךְ יְהֹוָ֛ה אֶת־י֥וֹם הַשַּׁבָּ֖ת וַֽיְקַדְּשֵֽׁהוּ׃
For, in six days יהוה made the sky and land, the sea and everything in them, and he rested on the seventh day — on that account יהוה blessed the Sabbath day and set it apart as sacred.
Exodus 20.11
Notice that the very reason that the seventh day is set apart as sacred is not that it is the seventh divorced from any other context. It’s not as if the number seven is meaningful apart from context. It is the creation narrative that is cited as making the seventh day holy, and is therefore the reason why the number seven has any significance. It’s not as if the ancient Hebrews were Pythagoreans who just chose random numbers to make significant. Rather, the number seven is bound up with their creation myth, and therefore is significant. So the fact that God created in seven days precedes and makes seven a significant number, it’s not the other way around, as if the number seven made God’s creating in that many days significant. I think this objection subtly subsumes the place of the author in not allowing him to define why the number seven is significant, overriding his wishes so as to take it upon itself to define why “seven days” is significant.
Conclusions
Genesis 1 as Narrative
Hopefully, this argument has been convincing enough that the genre of Genesis 1 is not poetic by ancient Hebrew standards. If you are not convinced, then at least you now have data to make an informed conclusion; but I think in this case the data is fairly damning to the idea that Genesis 1 is poetic. When compared with the rest of the corpus of Hebrew poetry, Genesis 1 has less in common with them, and more in common with books which would readily be identified as narrative, such as the Former Prophets or the rest of the Penteteuch.
Questions Left Unanswered
The point I’ve made in this post is rather meager. Genesis 1 is narrative, sure, but still we are left with unanswered questions. I make no comment on the relationship between science and religion. I’ve assumed a Christian audience, so I make no argument as to whether the text is true. Furthermore, I’ve avoided using the term history intentionally, preferring the more neutral term “narrative,” because this argument has not proven this text to be history. Narrative and history are not synonyms, but history is a certain type of narrative, among other types. Certainly the Lord’s parables would not be said to be “history,” though they are a certain type of narrative.
The question of historicity, boiled down to more technical language, is this: “what is the relationship between the narrative world of Genesis 1 and the external world?” This is not as straightforward as it may seem, even for those with a conservative view of the Bible’s ontology. Take, for example, 1 Kings 10.24:
וְכׇ֨ל־הָאָ֔רֶץ מְבַקְשִׁ֖ים אֶת־פְּנֵ֣י שְׁלֹמֹ֑ה לִשְׁמֹ֙עַ֙ אֶת־חׇכְמָת֔וֹ אֲשֶׁר־נָתַ֥ן אֱלֹהִ֖ים בְּלִבּֽוֹ׃
And the whole land was seeking Solomon in order to hear his wisdom, which God put in his heart.
1 Kings 10.24
Within the narrative world, the scope is universal: the whole land, everybody, is seeking to hear what Solomon has to say. But it’d be a silly question to ask (unless you’re Mormon, I guess), “what about the native Americans?” They’re simply not in the scope of the narrative. But, at the same time, the text is not incorrect in saying that everybody seeks Solomon. Or, as another example, if I were to tell my friend, trying to convince him to come to a party, that “everybody will be there,” it’d be a silly question to ask, “well what about those in Brisbane?” They’re not in the scope of what I’m talking about, but at the same time I’m not incorrect in saying “everybody” will be at the party (unless I’m misrepresenting its popularity). This is allowable, and in neither case is what is said incorrect, because this is just how people normally speak. It is a byproduct of the Christian doctrine of revelation that the human authors of Scripture actually contribute their own unique voice to what is said therein, and therefore Scripture speaks as normal people would.
That is not to say that Genesis 1 and 1 Kings 10.24 are equivalent cases; clearly there is a massive chasm of distinction between these two in the nature of things being described. However, I bring up this example to say that, even with a conservative doctrine of Scripture (which I hold to unashamedly), the question of the relationship between the narrative world and the external world is not always a one-to-one correspondence. Recall, the biblical narrative is not a “window” through which we see events, but a story.
I may do a post in the future about the relationship between the narrative world and the external world in Genesis 1, but I hesitate to do so. I think there are multiple orthodox views, and, as for myself, I have not clearly defined what view I hold in my own thought process (although I certainly lean towards a more historical view), so it’d take some reading. However, such a post would also be dodging landmines, and I wouldn’t want to make it until I could clearly articulate a well-formed position.
Hopefully, however, this post has been helpful for you as you think about these things. It certainly is an important question, at the heart of how we view the world around us and some of the most basic questions of human existence. So far be it from me to take it lightly. But ultimately I hope, that plumbing some of the depths of the grammar here would help you and I love Scripture more, and the God who reveals Himself in it as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God bless.
Bibliography and Further Reading
- The Tanakh. Sefaria, www.sefaria.org. Translation mine.
- Kugel, James L. The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History. Yale University Press, 1981.
- There is a long history of interpretation dependent upon the so-called “metrical hypothesis,” or the idea that Hebrew poetry has meter. The earliest person to speak of Hebrew poetry as metered seems to have been St. Jerome, in an attempt to save the Bible from critics deriding what they perceived to be its mean style. To this day, there are scholars of the Hebrew Bible who hold to Hebrew poetry as metrical; the primary critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, BHS, actually arrays texts known to poetry as if they were metrical, creating lines and breaks as such where the supposed “meter” would have created a break. Most egregious, in BHS, there are words in the main body of the text marked off in brackets as non-original because they “do not fit the meter” (you’d think words not fitting the meter would cause us to step back and reconsider, rather than taking a knife and “fixing it!”). This is, of course, silly, since this so-called “meter” is a mirage, it simply doesn’t exist. For a good history of the metrical hypothesis, and an argument against it, take a look at Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry in the section for further reading. ↩︎
- “from her husband” according to Septuagint, Targum, and Samaritan Penteteuch against Masoretic Text, which reads “from man.” The text I pasted is actually from MT, because I do not have a digital version of the Hebrew Bible with variants so as to paste the Hebrew behind the other sources. I think the non-Masoretic witnesses are better in this case, because of (1) significant external support against MT (even in Targum, which is by-and-large interpreting proto-MT!), and (2) internally, this reading works better, since it makes the pun make more sense: “woman” and “her husband” are the same consonants (minus a ‘י’ in “her husband” which it could be written without), whereas there is a missing ‘ה’ in “man” (which cannot be left off, like the ‘י’ in “her husband”) of MT, which is not in “woman.” ↩︎
- Although it is not lost on me that, in the narrative of Genesis 2, it is also literally true that Eve came from Adam’s bones. But this is besides the point: in this short little poem, Adam is interpreting this narrative event as imaging their close relationship. ↩︎