Creation
How the story begins
As I said in my introductory post, I’m going to begin this Substack with a close reading of the beginning of the Torah, the section that Jews will read on Simchat Torah (this year, on October 18th on the Diaspora calendar and October 17th on the Israel calendat). It is Gen 1:1-2:3, the section that describes the seven “days” in which God created the world.
The Bible begins with two different versions of the story of creation, but that’s not what I intend to discuss, at least not for now. If you are interested, you’ll find a contrast between the two versions discussed in the first post on my Torah Talk Substack. (That post is scheduled to appear on October 19th, at which time the link should become live.) What I’m going to do is read the 7-day version of the story with extreme care.
The purpose of this kind of reading – which I’ve been doing with friends for many years – is to help us focus on the details. That’s because most of us know Bible stories but not the way the Bible actually tells those stories.
A good example is the story of two women with one baby, as told in 1 Kings 3:16-28. Everyone knows it; I read it, if I’m remembering correctly, in the Sunday comics back when there was a “Classic Comix” feature that retold stories from history and mythology. King Solomon calls for a sword to cut the baby in two. One woman agrees, but the other says, “No! Give her the baby, but don’t kill it!” And Solomon gives her the baby.
But that’s not exactly what happens in the actual story in the Bible. (Go ahead and read it now, if you like; I’ll wait.)
The same is true of many biblical stories: Certain details, and sometimes even the overall shape of the story, differ from the way we learned them as children. The story of creation is full of details that a child isn’t ready to learn, and that grownups rarely have the time to focus on. But in this series, we will focus on those details.
I’ve ready the entire Bible multiple times in the original Hebrew. (That’s the Bible we are talking about here; see my Three Different Bibles post for details.)
Not bragging, not at all. My point is that, despite all those years of reading, much of the Bible remains, for me, 2-dimensional. I think of it as a street map. I know how to get from here to there, but don’t ask me what stores or which kind of houses I’ve passed on the way.
Once I study a text with great care and in detail, though, it becomes much more 3-dimensional. I recognize the landmarks and can steer my students through them. As with a painting or a piece of music, the big picture becomes much richer when you understand how each of the details is contributing to it.
A careful hike through Genesis 1 with me will build up your Bible muscles and help you get in shape for a lifetime’s journey through the Bible.
My plan is to have three posts a week, on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday. I’m not promising how fast we’ll move. But I will tell you a story one of my professors told me, about a course he had taken at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The course was on the book of Genesis – and by the end of the semester they had gotten as far as the end of Genesis 1. The professor apologized profusely for moving so fast.
I’ll talk more in the next post about Genesis 1 while we wait to begin our slow, careful read through it on September 25th.