Dr. Andrew Teeter recently presented on the form of Genesis 1 and how it reinforces and illuminates the meaning of the text. He also emphasized that the structure and themes of Genesis 1 echo throughout the Hebrew Bible.
In 2019, we began in Genesis 1, working through the narrative portions of each book and are currently approaching Caleb’s story in Numbers 13. Before we arrive, let’s look back at the themes we’ve uncovered and followed.
The Genesis 1-2 Paradigm
God creates the heavens, waters above and below, and a fruitful land, a well-watered mountain garden.
God populates each domain, yielding correlation between inhabitants of the heavens and the land.
God forms man in the wilderness and places him in the garden, desiring to walk with him.
God gives man purpose and guidance:
-Let us make man in our image (which we’ve interpreted to mean functioning as God’s representatives in the land)
-to rule over the land and the creatures of sea, land, and sky
-Be fruitful and multiply, fill the land and subdue it
-Cultivate and keep/guard the garden
-Eat freely of all the trees, except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
-For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold to his wife and they shall become one flesh. (God separated them, but there is opportunity for them to come together again to be fruitful.)
-On the seventh day, God rested
Conflict in Paradise
As people depart from these standards, the people and land become corrupt. In Genesis 3, after Eve and Adam sin, God declares an enduring conflict between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. Genesis 4-11 clarifies the attributes of each. While the seed of woman holds to God’s Genesis 1-2 guidance, the seed of the serpent embraces opposite behaviors:
-Instead of imaging God, making a name for oneself or family
-Instead of ruling with God’s character, acquiring power to oppress and destroy
-Instead of fruitfulness in right relationship between man and woman, the abuse of women and the vulnerable by the powerful
-Instead of filling the land to bring it into God’s good order, consolidating in cities
-Instead of rest in a well-watered fruitful land, oppressive rule, monumental building, and violent conquest that ruins the land
-The serpent’s actions uncover nakedness. God and his followers cover it.
Cain and his descendants, the sons of God/Nephilim, Nimrod and his followers, Sodom and Gomorrah, Shechem, and the pharaoh of the Exodus display the attributes of the seed of the serpent.
On behalf of the seed of the woman, Noah reenacts the creation story as the water recedes to reveal dry land and he plants a vineyard on a mountain. Abraham builds an altar by a tree on a mountain (or by a well) in place after place as he walks through the land. Joseph and his brothers receive fertile land by the Nile where they can tend their flocks when Jacob’s family moves down to Egypt. God rescues the Israelites out of the spiritual wilderness of Egypt and brings them to the mountain of the Lord at Sinai. Now in Numbers, with the dedication of the tabernacle, God has prepared the Israelites to move from the wilderness to the fruitful land where he will dwell with them.
Judgment
When the seed of the serpent was ascendant and the land was ruined because of sin, God heard the cries of oppressed people, came down, evaluated the corruption, and determined judgment was necessary. Though God desires life and fruitfulness in the land, when corruption threatens his purpose, he assesses exile and/or death to preserve a remnant who he will restore to the land.
When Adam and Eve ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God exiled them to the east. When Cain murdered his brother, God exiled him further east of Eden.
When the land was ruined because of man’s violent oppression, God sent a flood and destroyed all life except that preserved by Noah and his family.
When the people of Babel sought to reach heaven in their own strength, to consolidate rather than filling the land, God exiled them, scattering them across the land.
When the people of Sodom sought to violently abuse God’s observers, God sent death by fire from the sky.
As the Egyptians enslaved and murdered the Israelites, God prepared ten signs to systematically demonstrate his power over the pharaoh and Egyptian gods.
We looked at the pattern of judgment across all these stories and the conquest of Canaan.
Benlin Alexander, 2024
Wilderness to Garden
The Genesis 1 account begins with waters, a formless and empty land, and ends with God at rest in an ordered land filled with fruitful life. In Genesis 2, God forms man in an empty wilderness and places him in the Eden garden. This movement from wilderness to garden recurs as God remembers Noah in a watery waste and delivers him to a mountain where he plants a vineyard. God calls Abram from the spiritual desert of Nimrod’s descendants into a land God promises to give to Abram’s descendants. God calls Jacob’s descendants out of the Egyptian spiritual desert to Sinai, where he is present on the mountain. God then prepares a dwelling place filled with Eden garden imagery (water, fire, pomegranates, menorah as almond tree, cherubim) that will travel with the Israelites from the wilderness into the fruitful land he promised Abram he would give them centuries earlier.
When we meet Caleb in Numbers 13, he is tasked with exploring this new garden land God is preparing for his people to dwell in with him.
Cities and Giants
We first encounter a city in Genesis 4 when Cain, the murderer, builds one and names it after his son. A few generations later, Cain’s descendant Lamech sings a song to his wives about his own brutal violence.
In Genesis 4, the elements of the seed of the serpent paradigm are already evident - making a name for oneself, violence, abuse of women, and (strangely to most modern minds) cities.
In Genesis 6, we don’t find cities explicitly mentioned, but the other elements are present in the story of the Nephilim:
Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years."
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.
The words “saw” “were [good/beautiful]” and “took” are a reference to Eve’s taking of the fruit in Genesis 3, so it is a safe bet that the sons of God are sinning by taking the daughters of men. The result appears to be the Nephilim, warriors who have famous names. Their violence so pollutes the land that God determines to destroy all life to preserve Noah’s family and start again. Who are the sons of God?
The explanation with the most fruitful analogical connections to surrounding stories is that, as in Job 1, 2, and 38, they are spiritual beings whose rightful place is in the heavens. While to modern minds, this is difficult to accept, there are numerous examples from ancient stories - Hercules, Perseus, Heracles, Achilles - of a god impregnating a human woman and producing a son who became a famous warrior. The Bible’s treatment of the offspring of sons of God appears to be a kind of polemic - rather than venerable, mighty warriors, the Bible portrays them as oppressively violent, leading to thorough corruption of the land.
Following the Flood, a new man with the same qualities as the Nephilim arises, Nimrod. He founds cities and acquires a superhuman reputation of violence. His followers at Babel apparently attempt to restore the pre-Flood paradigm before God assesses their actions intolerable and exiles them, scattering them across the land.
After God’s extensive negotiation with Abraham about the future of Sodom (Genesis 18), and in a kind of inversion of Genesis 6, its inhabitants assault apparent spiritual beings who’ve come down to investigate its corruption. Once again, a city is so violently corrupt and sexually abusive that God assesses it must be destroyed with only one family preserved as a remnant. Lot’s family’s story (Genesis 19) following the destruction of Sodom is a close parallel with Noah’s family’s post-Flood story (Genesis 9).
When Jacob’s family returns to the land of Canaan (Genesis 33), one of their first stops is the city of Shechem, ominously named after its prince. The prince kidnaps and sexually assaults Jacob’s daughter Dinah, which incites Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi to deceive and kill the men of the city and plunder and enslave its remaining inhabitants. Deception, abusive sex, violence, and oppression haunt Shechem.
The pharaoh is a kind of ultimate instance of the seed of the serpent attributes we first observed in Cain’s line. He rules the territory along the Nile, enslaves, slaughters infants, and brutally oppresses the nascent Israelite nation and people from many others. In contrast to Joseph, who stored up grain to feed the nations, this pharaoh builds store cities in language reminiscent of Babel (one possibly named for himself). He presents himself as a god, and God punishes him alongside Egypt’s gods.
As we move through Numbers, we will soon encounter the cities of Canaan, some of which are populated by giant Anakim, who Israelites will claim are descended from the Nephilim. In Deuteronomy, we’ll learn that other peoples in the region - Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites - have driven out giant peoples in their territories. It will be the Israelites responsibility to drive them from Canaan.
The history of cities and of oppressive warriors in earlier books should color our interpretation of the cities and peoples the Israelites encounter in Numbers. The context provided by earlier books helps us to see the Israelites’ work in the land as the convergence and culmination of patterns begun early in Genesis.
edited 6/3/2023