Genesis Creation Narrative - Genre

Genre

See also: Literary genre, Myth (disambiguation), and Narrative

The genre of a piece of writing is the literary "type" to which it belongs. The meaning to be derived from the Genesis creation narrative will depend on the reader's understanding of its genre: "it makes an enormous difference whether the first chapters of Genesis are read as scientific cosmology, creation myth, or historical saga". Misunderstanding of the genre of the text, meaning the intention of the author/s and the culture within which they wrote, will result in a misreading. Bruce Waltke cautions against one such misreading, the "woodenly literal" approach which leads to "creation science" and such "implausible interpretations" as the "gap theory", the presumption of a "young earth", and the denial of evolution. Another scholar, Copnrad Hyers, sums up the same thought in these words: "A literalist interpretation of the Genesis accounts is inappropriate, misleading, and unworkable it presupposes and insists upon a kind of literature and intention that is not there."

Genesis 1 is "story", since it features character and characterisation, a narrator, and dramatic tension expressed through a series of incidents arranged in time. The Priestly author of Genesis 1 had to confront two major difficulties. Firstly, there is the fact that, since only God exists at this point, no-one was available to be the narrator; he solved this by telling his story as an unobtrusive "third person narrator". Secondly, there was the problem of conflict: conflict is necessary to arouse the reader's interest in the story, yet with nothing else existing, neither a chaos-monster nor another god, there cannot be any conflict. This was solved by creating a very minimal tension: God is opposed by nothingness itself, the blank of the world "without form and void." Telling the story in this way was a deliberate choice: the numerous other creation accounts in the bible tend to be told in the first person, by Wisdom, which in these accounts is created first and acts as eyewitness to what follows.

At another it is valid to see Genesis 1-2 as ancient science (in the words of E.A. Speiser, "on the subject of creation biblical tradition aligned itself with the traditional tenets of Babylonian science.") It can also be be seen as ancient history, "part of a broader spectrum of originally anonymous, history-like ancient Near Eastern narratives."

Up to a dozen different definitions or aspects of the word "myth" have been described, and there is no accepted single definition of the word myth: one scholar can say that Genesis 1-11 is free from myth, and another can say it is entirely mythical. Brevard Childs famously suggested that the author of Genesis 1-11 "demythologised" his narrative, meaning that he removed from his source material (the Babylonian myths) those elements which did not fit with his own faith.