Fr. Stephen De Young: So we will go ahead and get started, and when we get started in just a moment, we will be picking up in Genesis 2:4.

Last time, God created the heavens and the earth. Quickest summary ever! [Laughter] Genesis 1:1-2:3, as we saw, were the description of the creation of the heavens and the earth in terms of the structure of six days. We talked about how that's really sort of two groups of three. At the beginning of the book of Genesis there are these two problems, where the earth is formless or chaotic and then that it's void or empty. And on the first set of three days, God puts everything in order, separates things out and makes these spaces, and then on the second set of three days he fills those spaces. The two sets of three corresponded. He fills those spaces with life.

And then we talked about how on the seventh day— Famously it's translated as he "rested," but this isn't "rested" like he needed a break to sit down because it had been super difficult to make the world, but that this was about him being enthroned then. "Rested" as in he came to rest; he sat down on his throne to rule over the creation, that being at the end of the week. We talked briefly at the end about how that was sort of this future promise of the kingdom and how that then gets moved to the first day of the week in Christ's resurrection, but I won't go through all that again. But that was the quick version of the recap, and there will be a— As we go through chapter two tonight, there will be some repetition here and there from the first chapter, so we'll come back to some of those other things as we go.

Unless there are any questions or comments left over or imperial plans, we'll go ahead and get started in Genesis 2:4.

"This is the book of the genesis of heaven and earth, when they were made, in the day the Lord God made heaven and earth." We'll pause there. Did they stick with that in the Orthodox Study Bible? Okay, so I think they used the term "genesis" there just because it's the book of Genesis maybe. We talked about how, internally, the book of Genesis is structured around this phrase that is better translated "this is the book of the generations of (fill in the blank)." They may have— We'll see as we go on, but they may have used "genesis" here because in the other cases where that is used, it's used to refer to people. This is the book of the generations of this person, and often that's connected to a genealogy, so it's like the generations of a family, whereas this is the generations of the heavens and the earth. That seems less prone to a generational kind of thing. Nevertheless, it's the same phrase here as it is in those other cases. "So why translate it differently?" I ask. [Laughter] And that, as we said, is in Hebrew—I said back in the introduction—ella towldowt, if you want to learn two more Hebrew words.

Q1: This happened at the beginning where it's like a summary statement about what's going to happen next?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Q1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: You notice we didn't have that phrase in Genesis 1:1. Genesis 1:1-2:3 is sort of functioning as a prologue. Then we get: This is the book of the generations of the heavens and the earth. And we're going to see as we get to Genesis 4, we're going to have it again, and then later on as we go through, and it's going to be for a different figure. This is sort of like the way— To analogize to a modern book, Genesis 1:1-2:3 is like the introduction, and then this phrase marks the beginnings of chapters, like if it was written in that kind of modern way. We're going to see most of them—when we get to one that this isn't true of we'll talk about it, but most of them function very much that way. You have that sort of a complete story, and then you get another one. There are exceptions to that, but we'll talk about those when we get there.

Notice, as we talked about the last couple times, the whole temporal issue, the issue of time, in Genesis 1 and the days. We talked about how you have light and you have night and day, evening and morning, and then on the fourth day you have the sun and moon created and it's like: Well, now you can measure time, on the fourth day. [Laughter] So we talked about how literally that should be taken. But notice the phrase that occurs here in 2:4: "In the day the Lord God made heaven and earth," "the day," singular, because in Hebrew, yom that means day can mean a literal day, like a 24-hour period, or it can mean— And we use it this way, too. Old fogeys like me will say, "In my day…" [Laughter] And that doesn't mean there was some particular day, like 24-hour period in the past, that was mine somehow, referring to, and so that's the same kind of thing here, obviously. In the day when God created the heavens and the earth: in that time when he created the heavens and the earth. This is not saying he created the heavens and the earth in a single 24-hour period, contra what you just read. So neither of these is trying to give us an exact, precise timetable.

As I mentioned in the introduction, when we see that, that there's not an attempt here to give an accurate, precise timetable, that should tell us that that's not part of what God is trying to teach us here, so we shouldn't try to warp Genesis around to try and make it into that. This seems kind of obvious, that we should let the Bible tell us what it is, but it is not obvious! [Laughter] And this is not a thing with "conservatives" and "liberals" or even Protestants and non-Protestants or whatever. This is just an issue with folks in general, that people tend to come at the Bible backwards, in the sense that they say, "Well, here is what I believe about the Bible," and that may or may not be based on what the ecclesial body they're a part of teaches. It might just be based on their own opinions; it might be based on the way they're used to reading other books; it might be more specific than just the Bible.

It might be: "This is my view. This is what I've been taught. This is what I understand history is. So if these books are history then they have to be XYZ, because that's how history works." But we bring that to the Bible and then either people notice that the Bible doesn't fit those preconceptions and so they reject it—and then you end up like my friend Bart Ehrman who leaves Christianity, because he was raised as an Evangelical Christian and he was told, "This is what the Bible is and this is how it works," and he went to university and he went to grad school and he studied the Bible, and he said, "No, it's not." And so there goes Christianity. Or they try to force it to fit; they try to hammer the square peg into the round hole, like: "I'm going to get it there!" And then you get Ken Ham, where it's like: "No, this has to be scientifically precise, otherwise you have to throw out the whole Bible, therefore it must be scientifically precise." Or "If this isn't modern history"—and by "modern" I mean 19th-century German [Laughter]—"if this isn't modern historical writing, then it's worthless— It's the Bible therefore it has to conform to modern historical writing."

So what's the alternative? Well, the alternative is that we, as Orthodox Christians, have received a certain group of texts as the Scripture. That's how we know what the Scriptures are. No matter what people's theories about the Bible are, no one actually sat down and collected every ancient document still extant and personally decided which ones were Scripture and which weren't for themselves. That never happens. We've received a certain group of texts: this is the Bible.

In terms of deciding what the Bible is and how it functions and how it says what it says, we derive that from the Bible. The Church has told us this text has authority, but having authority does not mean it has to be a certain kind of text, because there's lots of different kinds of texts in the Bible, the Old Testament especially. There's wisdom literature, like Proverbs. There's poetry, like Psalms. There's basically ancient—not modern history, but ancient history in the books of the kings. There are all these different things. And the Prophets are somewhere in between poetry and bits of narrative, and they are what they are, and we have to let them be what they are. These are the texts God has given us; we let them be what they are.

And so, in this case… I don't want to belabor this too much. I always feel like I'm belaboring it, but every time I feel like I'm belaboring it, someone else sends me a question: "So are you saying that…?" or "Well, how old do you think the earth is, then?" and I'm like: I don't care. [Laughter] So what Genesis is not doing is trying to give us a blow-by-blow account so that, like, Matthew Henry and his commentary, who has on this page, "April 12, 4004 BC," nailed down the date. [Laughter] That's not what Scripture is trying to give us. If Scripture wanted to give us that, it would be very easy, surprisingly easy, to just give dates on the Jewish calendar. They had one, you know. They could give dates. They could say how many years it was. They don't. It's not there, so that's not what is important.

Why am I going back at this and doing more belaboring at the beginning of chapter two? Well, because what we're about to read— So we just read this is going to be the book of the generations of the heavens and the earth, which, if we take it kind of in the same way that the other places that phrase occurs functions, we'd be like: "So this is, what, a genealogy of the heavens and the earth?" And based on that and based on honing in on these detail things, like "Here it says one day and we just saw it was six days…" There's more coming. People will say, "Okay, these are two different creation accounts that came from two different places and that were brought together here, and apparently the literary genius who brought them together here did not notice that there are any conflicts. It took us till the 18th century to look at this and figure out: Hey, some of the details don't match up. All those dummies for all those centuries." [Laughter]

If you approach the text the way 18th- and 19th-century scholars did, then that's the conclusion you come to. The reason "no one noticed" those discrepancies before that is they were not approaching the text in that way. They did not think that Genesis 1 or Genesis 2 was trying to give us a literal blow-by-blow account of the creation—how exactly plant life came into existence. That's going to be one of the next "contradictions." I'm doing air-quotes for the recording! [Laughter] That "no one noticed it" because no one was reading it that way. Yes, sir.

Q1: I've always—? Any time anyone's said that, I'm always like: I didn't know that was problematic, because I've always… You have the opening vista of a movie and then you're at the main character. That's kind of how I've always seen it. It's like a transition from big lens to… You know?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and broadly that's true in that chapter two is going to focus on the creation of humanity, which of course was mentioned on the sixth day. But if you're detail-oriented with this, we're going to find out there's no plant life at the time humanity's being created, and you'll be like: Wait, that was on the third day, and that was on the… And even— This wasn't just, as much as I like to pick on 18th- and 19th-century scholars—especially Germans— [Laughter] This isn't just that. I mean, this is— Contemporary "conservative" scholars will use that to say, "Well, one of these is literal and the other one, therefore, is figurative." Because being "conservative" means they have to think one of them's literal! Which is… I was going to say it begs the question. I know that's not the fallacy, but the name of the logical fallacy actually fits that better than what it actually is. Anyway. [Laughter] Why does one have to be "literal"?

And "literal" is one of the slipperiest words in the world. So a lot of our friends 'round these parts will say, "Well, I take the Bible literally." What does it mean to take a poem literally? What does it mean to take a proverb literally? What does it mean to take a commandment literally? I'll use that as an example. Well, taking a commandment literally, if we use "literally" the way it's used in Genesis 1 and 2, then taking a commandment literally would be like: "Well, I'm not allowed to covet my neighbor's wife or his house or his ox or his donkey, but I guess I could covet his car and his kids, because those weren't mentioned, and I could covet his yard and his golf clubs, because they're not mentioned and I take the Bible literally." So "literally" makes no sense in most of the Bible, and we all acknowledge it, so that kind of "literal" doesn't make sense here either.

And there is a certain preciousness, shall we say, about it, where people will sort of feign being confused. "Oh wait, now it says God created in a day whereas before it was six days," like anyone is honestly confused by that use. [Laughter] "Well, here the plants haven't been created yet. What's going on!?" Like, no one… Anyone with enough education to be able to read the text is not really super confused by it. This is manufactured kind of confusion based on a way people have decided to read the Bible, either because that's the way it has to be read or because they're deliberately setting out to debunk it and make it incoherent and make it contradict itself.

Yeah, so in terms of these being two separate creation accounts, in the sense that you're being told one story about how the big thing happened and then another story about how the small thing happened, yes, technically, that is two different stories: the text is not identical. [Laughter] But that does not necessarily mean—even if their details are different—that one of them is not true. Belaboring this now, maybe I'll have to belabor it a little bit less, like when we get to 1 and 2 Chronicles and the gospels, the gospels being of course the other place where they do this. And St. John Chrysostom made a great observation about the gospels when he said if you ask four different eyewitnesses to an event to tell you exactly what happened, their testimony will not agree, and if you take their testimony completely literally, it will even contradict—they'll contradict each other. Do you conclude from that that the event did not happen? He says no. He says in fact, if you ask four different eyewitnesses separately what happened, and they all told you the exact same story, then you would know it didn't happen, because that would mean they all got together and concocted their story.

So these… When we get later on, to 1 and 2 Chronicles compared to 3 and 4 Kingdoms (or 1 and 2 Kings), then we have stories that are passed down by oral tradition. If you study oral tradition at all— People appeal to oral tradition all the time when they talk about the Bible, but most of them have never actually studied it. If you actually study it, what you find is that in repeated tellings of a story, there are differences within the same person telling it and two different people in the same community telling it. And sometimes these differences are massive.

If you look at studies, there's a famous study, anthropological study, of these two storytellers in an oral culture, where one person told this story and it lasted about 40 minutes, and the other person told it and it lasted two hours. And so they took the person who had told the two-hour version and brought him to listen to the other person tell the story, and he told it again and it was about 45 minutes that time. And they said to him, "Did he get the story right?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, that's exactly the story." They said, "Did he leave anything out, like from the way you tell it?" He's like: "No! He covered everything." [Laughter] Because the story within an oral culture like that is meant to convey certain truths and certain ideas and certain information; it's like a container. And as long as those are intact, the details of the container are not important. What's important about the container is transmitting those ideas.

Now, in the case of Genesis 1 and 2, as we've said, everything before Genesis 11, or everything before Genesis 12—so the first eleven chapters of Genesis—traditionally in the Orthodox Church, how did Moses know any of this stuff? The position of the Church has not been that Moses made this stuff up or that Moses crafted this literary masterpiece. The position of the Church has been that this is a vision Moses had, so it's more like Revelation that we just finished reading and less like, say, the book of Joshua.

So that being the case, if Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are two visions or two parts of a vision, one extended prophetic vision, is a correct way to interpret a series of prophetic visions to try to match them up? Remember when we were reading Revelation, there were those cycles, those repeated cycles? Did we go and try to, like, overlay them and match up the details? "Oh wait, are these giant locusts the same as these things over here?" [Laughter] "We've got to work out the details!" No, it's a vision, and so the vision is conveying certain things.

The first vision that we have in Genesis 1 through chapter two, verse three, is conveying certain things that we talked about last time, about the creation of the heavens and the earth. There's a structure there. There's those two problems. There's the two sets of three days. It's a structured account that's conveying certain things.

Now we have this vision of the creation of humanity, which is intending to convey certain things—not the exact same things. And so the vision, the story, in order to communicate those other things is going to be structured differently, is going to be told differently, may have things in a different order, to make a different point. And that's only a problem if we show up to the text before we read it, saying, "No. This has to be a literal blow-by-blow, objective historical account in both cases, and therefore it has to match perfectly or it's not true." And none of those assumptions are warranted by anything other than modern Western custom.

But more than that, no one analyzes any other book of ancient literature that way. Nobody picks up the Epic of Gilgamesh and says, "I need to determine whether this is factually accurate and true," in that sense. Was there a historical Gilgamesh and Enkidu? [Laughter] Did Humbaba really exist in the forests of Lebanon? No one does that! They understand it as a literary piece that is trying to convey certain truths about certain things. Even when we're actually reading a historical document from the ancient world, whether it be from the Ancient Near East, or go to Herodotus, Thucydides—they're not giving an objective, blow-by-blow account. They're recounting these stories with a point, to make a point, and what they include and what they leave out and how they color things and that kind of thing is based on the point they're making, what they're communicating. They're using the historical accounting as the container for what they're trying to communicate.

Hopefully that will be enough belaboring of that point. I'm sure I'll sharpen some other— grind some other axes later on, and/or beat dead horses. [Laughter] But because it's so widespread that there are "two different"—I'm doing scare-quotes again—"two different contradictory creation accounts in Genesis"—you hear that all the time—I feel like I have to say something about it, because it's nonsense.

Verse five: "Before any plant of the field was on earth and before any herb of the field sprang up, for God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to till the ground—" We'll pause again. So this is now framing the story we're about to be told, and again there's two issues, but they're a different two issues. The issue here is that the earth has not brought forth life. So we're in the "void" part. [Laughter] So that's not totally dissimilar to what we read in the first chapter. But here the reason why the earth has not brought forth life is, number one, it hasn't rained, and, number two, there's no humans to work the earth.

This tells us something about humanity by negation. Part of the reason in this story that humanity—at least part— the reason humanity's going to be created is to bring forth life, to work with God in fixing that void, that emptiness, of the earth.

Verse six: "But a fountain came up from the ground and watered the whole face of the earth." So there's part one. There hasn't been any rain; we'll fix that. God brings this fountain up, brings water up, flows out in rivers. We'll get more details about that in a minute. So that takes care of the rain problem.

And then verse seven: "Then God formed man out of dust from the ground and breathed in his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul." A little wonky translation: "breathed in his face." [Laughter] That just sounds kind of uncouth, especially in our post-COVID era. God forms man out of the ground, and there's a little bit of a pun here in Hebrew, because the word for man is adam, and earth or dirt is adama. So there's a little bit of a pun with—his name is mud, basically. [Laughter]

So he's formed. You have his physical form, which is made out of the elements of the earth itself, and then you have the breath of life. It actually talks about in the Hebrew, breathing into his mouth the breath of life, not just blowing in his face. But that word for breath is the same word as the word for spirit. So he breathes the spirit into him. Then he becomes a living soul, which is actually a very direct translation from the Hebrew to the Greek to the English. Becomes a living soul.

So this reflects a difference from the way we may be used to thinking about humans. The way we often think about humans, post-Plato, is that there is this soul that is this sort of thing, this reified thing.

Q1: The whole thing smells of the version I was told a long time ago...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And then that's equated in modern times with "the self" the way we think about that in modern times, like that's your "inner self, the real you, your identity" is that soul, and that that's inside a physical body.

Q1: The man inside the meat.

Fr. Stephen: Ghost in the machine, yeah. [Laughter] Good old Cartesian dualism! And so then, depending on your point of view—you may, like Plato and Calvin, say that the body is the prison-house of the soul, the soul's like imprisoned in the body and then you kind of want to die so your soul can be set free. But that's not what's in view here, because it says he became a living soul after the spirit was breathed into his physical body.

Q1: Are "soul" and "spirit" different words in Hebrew?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, ruah and nefesh in Hebrew. And it's pnevma and psyche in Greek, so they're different words in both.

But the way they're being used here is that a "living soul" is a physical body composed of material elements that is indwelt by and made alive by spirit. So you can't really separate soul and body in the way to say one of those is the person and one isn't. This is a radical difference with Greek and Roman thought. That's why they cremated everybody, and Jewish folks and Christians didn't. The body is the person just as much as the spirit is. The soul is the life of a living being. Remember, we mentioned on the fifth day in Genesis 1 when God created the birds and the sea life, that it literally said "the souls" that swim in the waters. I mentioned at the time everything alive from this perspective has a soul; that's what makes it alive, as opposed to inanimate, pun intended, because anima is the Latin word for soul.

So that's what makes us alive, and when the spirit departs from our body, we're now dead. For us to be alive again, those two things have to be reunited. That's where the understanding of bodily resurrection comes from. Resurrection has to be bodily from the Jewish and Christian perspective, because if you don't have a body you aren't a living soul. [Laughter] You are not a living being; you're a spirit, which is something different, but you're not a living being; you're not a human being.

Now, the other piece of this is that—and we were kind of talking about this earlier, indirectly—is that what we see here with him breathing, God breathing the spirit into this body formed form the material elements of the earth is a direct parallel to a ritual that was done in ancient cultures when they put the idol or image of the god in the temple. One of the last steps when they built a temple, when they built a pagan temple, was they would bring in the image of the god, and they had a ceremony called either the opening of the mouth or the opening of the nostrils, where the spirit of that god or that being was seen to, with that ritual, enter into—in some cases be trapped—inside that image. And then that meant: "Okay, now we can interact with this god. We can do other rituals to get it to do what we want."

So this language gets repurposed here in exactly the opposite way. Humans don't create an image of God to use to manipulate God and to get God to do what they want; God creates his own image. He creates an image of himself, as we saw in chapter one: humanity, male and female, is made in the image of God. God makes his own image, breathes life into it, to represent himself in his creation. So it's basically idolatry turned on its head. It's idolatry exactly inverted. So this is part of— Using this language is part of that image of God language that the human being is a physical and spiritual image of God in the world. And that, then, instead of us trying to get God to do what we want, being the image of God in the world gives humans certain responsibilities in imaging, as we said, in that kind of active way, like a verb, being God's image, by patterning our way of life and our way of being in the world after him and after his being in the world. And that's where all of the commandments we're going to get later in the Torah are going to proceed from that. They're going to be describing the shape of that, of how we do that: accurately reflect the image of God in the world.

But in short form, in those couple of verses, it's two problems: no rain, no humans. So, water, humans: now we're ready to go. [Laughter]