Beginnings

The phrase, “Let there be light” has come to refer to a moment of sudden clarity, inspiration, or understanding; a “light bulb moment”. Often we think of Isaac Newton, or Albert Einstein.

Light has long been a rich source of metaphor. Sometime around the 5th century BC, Siddhartha Gautama would seek “enlightenment”–an awakened sense of true reality–through asceticism and meditation. In the 17th century, western philosophers would seek the same through reason. More recently, “light bulb moments” reflect instants both of understanding and of creativity–inspiration.

The start of Bible carries this last meaning, in its fullest sense:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,”

In 1662–the year the Anglican Book of Common Prayer reached its final form–a Danish physician, mathematician and theologian called Thomas Bartholin noted the name, pomum Adami, used at the time for the lump men have in their throat. He explained the name thusly: “the common people believe that by the judgement of God a part of that fatal Apple, was left lodged in Adam’s Throat, and was so communicated to man’s posterity.”

It is common these days to hear Bible stories, especially those in the book of Genesis, described as being essentially mythological. The flood account certainly is widely thought to be mythological, though it is odd how many flood accounts exist in otherwise separate cultures. The Hindu text, the Satapatha Brahmana, describes a man called Manu as the lone survivor of flood, having been warned by a fish. The famous Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh describes a destructive flood sent by the god Enlil, after he gets annoyed at how noisy humans have become. The book’s hero, Utnapishtim, builds a boat and survives.

Plato referred in Timaeus to the “the legend about Deucalion and Pyrrha after the Flood, and how they survived it”, and raised the possiblity that destructive floods caused a regular reset of history: “when, after the usual interval of years, like a plague, the flood from heaven comes sweeping down afresh upon your people,it leaves none of you but the unlettered and uncultured, so that you become young as ever, with no knowledge of all that happened in old times in this land or in your own.”

The Bible’s presentation is uniquely prosaic. “The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Gen 6:5). The flood was a punishment for a society that had lost all humanity. By contrast, “Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God.” (Gen 6:9) God instructed Noah to build an ark–as is typical in the Bible, the instructions are presented in some detail–and load it with animals and food.

After a year or so of flooding, Noah sent out a dove to search for dry land:

“When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth” (Gen 8:11)

Water becomes a rich metaphor in the Bible. The Israelites will walk through the Red sea in order to escape from Egypt, and through the Jordan river to enter Canaan; Namaan is instructed to bathe in the Jordan to cleanse his leprosy; Jesus’ walking on water, and calming the stormy seas, will demonstrate his authority over nature. Christians will be instructed to “repent and be baptised”, the immersion in water representing death to the sinful self, and rebirth as a child of God.

Jesus himself will be baptised in water by John, and we again see a dove:

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” (Matt 3:16-17)

Genesis 11 relates an account often described as an “origin myth of languages”.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.

One of religious history’s bigger subplots is the question of who is a descendent of Abraham, and therefore the heir to the promise God made to him in Genesis 12:

I will make you into a great nation,
  and I will bless you;

The original stairway to heaven, Jacob’s Ladder was a dream experienced by Abraham’s grandson. The second son of Isaac, Jacob had connived his way into receiving the blessing–and therefore inheritance–rightly due to his older brother, the ginger-haired Esau.

The Promised Land is one of the deepest and richest themes of the Bible. The promises to Israel centred on God’s promise to settle them in a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:17). The description is clearly metaphorical (imagine all the ants) but the place is not. Various passages in the Bible (notably Numbers 34) give specific geographical markers that define the boundaries of what would become the land of Israel.

By the time the promise was given to Moses, Jacob’s descendents had formed a significant population. Unfortunately, they were a population enslaved by the Egyptian Pharaoh.