cultures and languages and literary styles and so on. But for Christians the biblical writings are more than simply ancient human writings: God worked through their human writers—and indeed still works through their words—so that what they wrote communicated what God wants to say, both to the originally intended readers and to God’s people through history, including today.
Thus it is appropriate—even absolutely vital—for Christians today to continue looking to these ancient human writings, these God-breathed texts, for “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,” to become “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” It is fitting and even necessary for Christians to look to the Bible for guidance in answering the deeply significant who and why questions of human existence, understanding our beginning and our end, our origins and our destiny, where we come from and where we are going, in order to shape how we understand our identity, our purpose, our being and living in the world.
Two of these inspired biblical writings have been especially significant for Christians in looking back to our origins and looking forward to our destiny: Genesis and Revelation, appropriately the first and the last books in the Christian biblical canon. “Genesis” is a book of “beginnings,” a book of firsts for humanity shaped by the tools of an ancient Israelite worldview. “Revelation” is a book that “discloses” or “unveils,” a book of endings for humanity viewed through the lens of an early Christian perspective. Together these biblical writings sketch out a story of God, humanity, and all creation, a narrative that moves from the beginning to the end with ourselves in the middle, a narrative that calls us to live in a certain way, shaping our identity and our values in light of our origins and our destiny.
In the Beginning . . .
No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning.
– native american proverb
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will.
– george bernard shaw (1856–1950)
The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements.
– anais nin (1903–1977)
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
– charles dickens (1812–1870)
If you want to know the end, look at the beginning.
– african proverb
Reading Ancient Origins Stories
Once upon a time . . .
Only four words. Yet these four words, placed at the beginning of a story, are evocative. They set the stage for a story of a princess and a prince, a story of mysterious magic and true love, a story ending with equally evocative words: and they all lived happily ever after.
If you are a native English speaker raised in a Western society, chances are you will immediately know the genre: it is a particular kind of folk tale commonly called a fairy tale, made popular by a wave of animated Disney films over the past century. Not only that, but you will know exactly what to do with this story, how to interpret it. You would not take the opening “once upon a time” literally, as if the narrated events really did happen at a particular time and place in human history. Nor would you put much stock in the final “and they all lived happily ever after”; if you thought about the words at all, you might smile ruefully to yourself, since “happily ever after” is so rare in real life. Rather, you would read the story as a fictional tale intended to entertain or, at most, to reinforce certain social values—the importance of making good moral choices, maybe, or perhaps a societal ideal of romantic love.
But we can look a little deeper. How does truth work in such a story? The fairy tale is not “true” in the sense that it accurately relates events that happened in human history. But the fairy tale does have its own kind of truth: like all texts, its truth is related to its purpose. As we have just noted, a fairy tale is supposed to entertain, or perhaps to support certain social ideals. If the fairy tale does indeed provide the promised entertainment, then in a very pragmatic sense it can be said to be “true.” More significantly, if the values it reinforces are in fact good and useful within the particular society in which the tale is told, then in a more profound sense it can also be said to be “true.”
We can push these reflections even further. How do you know these things? How do you know that this story is a fairy tale—that it did not actually happen, that it should not be taken literally, that it is intended for entertainment or social reinforcement? Again, if you are a native English speaker raised in a Western society chances are you know all this intuitively. Sure, you may have formally studied fairy tales at some point, but quite likely you picked up on most of this already as a child, even if you could not have expressed these ideas at that time in quite this way. If, however, you are not a native English speaker raised in a Western society, you would have to learn about fairy tales in order to make good sense of them.
All this is related to what is perhaps the most crucial key for interpreting any text, whether ancient or modern, secular or sacred. That interpretive key is understanding the text’s genre, or the kind of literature it is.
A genre is like an implied contract, an unwritten agreement, between the author and the reader of a text. The genre establishes a framework, certain conventional guidelines or constraints, for creating and understanding the text. The author of a text works within the conventions of that particular genre, perhaps stretching those guidelines in some new directions, but still in a way that is recognizably that genre. She will indicate the genre through a variety of means—none explicit (the author will not start off announcing, “This is a fairy tale”), but rather implicit: through characteristic words or phrases or topics or themes, or through such features as the piece’s style or length or structure. Once you recognize the genre—whether intuitively or through careful determination—you are better equipped to interpret the text, to discern whatever truth (or even goodness or beauty) it may convey.
So you will interpret a history textbook differently than a historical novel, even if they speak of the same historical setting. You will read a newspaper editorial differently than a front-page report, even if they are on the same topic. A Shakespearean sonnet will make a very different impression on you than a vehicle’s mechanical manual, even if you really love that car. And you will understand and experience the truth of a cookbook in a very different way than you would the truth of a chemistry textbook, even if they describe the same chemical processes.
But if you miss the text’s genre, you will miss the text’s purpose, and that can get you into all sorts of trouble. Woe to those who mistake historical fiction for a history textbook! (Remember The DaVinci Code?)
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Genesis is certainly not a modern folk tale or fairy tale, but what is the genre of Genesis? If you were a librarian 2,200 years ago in the ancient library of Alexandria in Egypt, where would you put your newly acquired scrolls of Genesis? Should it be placed alongside the Greek histories of Thucydides, or with the fables of Aesop, or perhaps beside the narrative geographical sketches of Patrocles?
If you were that ancient librarian, more than likely you would place Genesis alongside writings known today as Enuma Elish and Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh, primeval stories from ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is the
