How to read Genesis 1 in its ancient context

Most arguments about Genesis 1 today are about science. Was the world made in six days? How does the chapter fit with the age of the universe? Those are real questions for many readers, and people of faith answer them in different ways. They are also questions the chapter's first audience never asked. To hear Genesis 1 the way it was first heard, the place to start is the world it was written in, and the stories it was answering.

This guide walks through that world one step at a time. It follows the same approach as STRATA's free reading of Genesis 1, which sets the history beneath each day of creation before it asks what the passage means.

Who wrote it, and when

Jewish and Christian tradition long credited the first five books of the Bible to Moses, and many readers still hold that view. Modern biblical scholarship, across a wide range of confessions, has mostly concluded that the Torah was assembled from several older sources over centuries. Genesis 1 is usually assigned to the source scholars call the Priestly writer, a circle of priests and scribes whose work took its final shape around the time of the Babylonian exile, in the sixth century BCE.

That date matters. In 586 BCE the Babylonian army destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, and much of the city's leadership was taken east to Babylon. The people who shaped this chapter had lost their land, their king and their sanctuary. They were living inside the most powerful empire of their time, surrounded by its temples, its festivals and its account of how the world began.

The story Babylon told

Babylon's great creation epic is known today by its opening words, Enuma Elish, "when on high." It was probably composed in the late second millennium BCE, and it was recited during Babylon's New Year festival. In it, the world begins with two primordial waters, Apsu and Tiamat. Generations of gods are born, conflict breaks out, and the young god Marduk goes to war against Tiamat. He kills her, splits her body in two, and makes the sky from one half and the earth from the other. Humanity is then made from the blood of a defeated rebel god, so that people can carry the labor of the gods and the gods can rest. The poem closes by exalting Marduk and his city, Babylon.

Set Genesis 1 beside that story and the differences stand out at once. There is water at the beginning of Genesis too: "darkness was over the surface of the deep" (Genesis 1:2). The Hebrew word for the deep, tehom, is related to the name Tiamat, both going back to a common Semitic word for the sea. In Genesis, though, the deep is simply water. It is no goddess, and it puts up no fight. There is no war at all. God speaks, and things come to be.

Most scholars do not think Genesis 1 is a direct reply to one copy of one poem. The chapter draws on a picture of the world that the whole ancient Near East shared, and it reworks that picture in its own direction. The contrast with Enuma Elish is useful because it shows what the writers could have said, and chose to leave out.

A world shaped like a house

Ancient readers pictured the world as a flat earth under a solid dome, with waters above the dome and waters below the earth. Genesis 1 uses that picture without apology. On the second day God makes an "expanse" to separate the waters above from the waters below, and the Hebrew word suggests something hammered out and firm. The chapter speaks in the cosmology of its time, the same way it speaks in Hebrew.

Look at the order of the days and a design appears. Days one to three make spaces: light and dark, sky and sea, dry land. Days four to six fill those spaces in the same order: lights for the day and night, birds and fish for the sky and sea, animals and people for the land. The refrains ("And God said," "And it was so," "And God saw that it was good," "And there was evening, and there was morning") give the chapter the rhythm of a liturgy. It was written to be heard, and very likely to be recited.

Some scholars go further. John Walton, for example, has argued that Genesis 1 describes the world being set up and given its functions, much as a temple was dedicated in the ancient world, with God taking up his rest in it on the seventh day. You do not have to accept every part of that argument to notice how much the chapter cares about order, place and purpose, and how little it says about materials or mechanics.

The demoted sky

On the fourth day comes one of the chapter's quiet surprises. "God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. And He made the stars as well" (Genesis 1:16). The ordinary Hebrew words for sun and moon are missing. In Babylon the sun and moon were gods, Shamash and Sin, and the stars were read closely for omens. Genesis declines to name them and gives them a job instead: to mark days, seasons and years. The stars, so central to Babylonian divination, get a single clause.

The fifth day does something similar with "the great sea creatures" (Genesis 1:21). Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, in poems such as Psalm 74 and Isaiah 51, the same word names monsters of chaos that God subdues. Here they are simply animals God makes, blesses and calls good.

The image of God

Then comes the line that has shaped more ethical thought than almost any other in the Bible: "So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27).

In Egypt and Mesopotamia, the language of being a god's image belonged above all to kings. The king stood for the god on earth and ruled in the god's name, and royal statues set up in conquered lands marked his authority there. Scholars such as J. Richard Middleton have argued that Genesis takes this royal title and gives it to every human being, male and female, with no rank attached. For a people living under a foreign king who claimed the favor of the gods, that was a striking thing to say. In Enuma Elish people were made to do the gods' heavy work. In Genesis they are made to represent God and to care for the world.

The same idea returns after the flood, where the protection of human life rests on it: "for in His own image God has made mankind" (Genesis 9:6). STRATA's reading of Genesis 9 follows that thread.

Rest at the end of the week

The chapter does not end with humanity. It ends with the seventh day: "Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on that day He rested from all the work of creation that He had accomplished" (Genesis 2:3). In Babylon's story the gods rest because humans have been made to work for them. In Genesis, God rests, and the day of rest is the first thing in the Bible called holy.

For exiles with no temple, a holy day had a particular gift. It could be kept anywhere. The Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of the Sabbath as holiness built in time rather than in space, and the idea fits the setting of this chapter well. The sanctuary had been burned, and the week still had a seventh day.

Then a second beginning

Read on into Genesis 2 and the style changes. From Genesis 2:4 the narrative uses a different name for God, "the LORD God," and tells a different kind of story, earthy and close, in which a human is shaped from dust before the plants and animals appear. Most scholars see an older account set beside the Priestly one, and the editors kept both. Reading them as two portraits that complement each other, rather than forcing them into one sequence, is one of the oldest habits of careful readers. STRATA's reading of Genesis 2 takes up that second account.

What this does for a reader today

Reading Genesis 1 in its ancient setting does not settle every modern question about it, and it is not meant to. What it does is let the chapter make its own claims. In a world where the powers overhead were feared, it says the sky is a calendar. In a world where kings alone bore a god's image, it says every person does. In a world where humans were made as labor for the gods, it says God made a good world and then stopped, and blessed the stopping.

Those claims are still worth hearing. To go further, the free readings of Genesis 1–11 take each chapter in four layers: the history, the meaning, the turn toward your own life, and a question to answer. They end where the primeval history ends, at Babel, which is the Hebrew name for Babylon, the city in whose shadow these chapters took shape.