from human to creation of humans)
Steck admits that this observed pattern in 1:6–31 does not have the same balance as the 3+3 day scheme advanced by others. Nevertheless, he argues that it avoids the strange parallel in the 3+3 pattern between the making of the plate on day two and the creation of sea and air creatures on day five, and it better fits the actual sequence of the creation account as it builds, step by step, toward the creation of humans as its crowning element. Most particularly, Steck’s proposal highlights the human-oriented organization of the quite similarly-structured creation acts in 1:6–31.119
That said, Steck’s grouping of the creation of day and night (1:3–5) with the Sabbath that it prepares for (2:2–3) does not acknowledge the way God’s ceasing from work in 2:2–3 relates to all six days that precede, 1:3–5 along with days 2–6. All six days follow a similar pattern that contrasts with that in 2:2–3, and all six are concluded on “the” sixth day in 1:31. In this sense, Steck’s overall proposal, though rightly recognizing some kind of a special connection between days one and seven, clashes with the overall Sabbath structure (six days of “work,” מלאכה in 2:2, one day of rest) that day one makes possible and day seven concludes.
In sum, Gen 1:1–2:3 seems characterized by multiple structural frameworks—highlighted by Herder, et al. on the one hand and Steck, et al. on the other.120 Each framework connects with important aspects of the text, and no framework fully accounts for all of the existing text.
Synthesis
Genesis 1:1–2:3 within Its Priestly ContextAs read above, Gen 1 represents a powerful response to both non-biblical (esp. the Enuma Elish epic) and biblical (Gen 2–3 along with Psalm 104) textual precursors, taking up elements of each in the process of presenting its distinctive picture of a solely dominant God, who surpasses Marduk, making humans as divine images for godlike dominance over creation. This presentation of God’s creation of humans as god-imagesHumans as God’s image is as close as the Bible gets to the sort of theogonies that were common in Egypt and Mesopotamia. As discussed above, these humans are godlike in only a qualified sense, and they are presented in Gen 1 as enjoying a power purely derivative of their sovereign creator. Nevertheless, insofar as the six days of creation in Gen 1 are ultimately focused on God’s creation of humanity as God’s three-dimensional representatives on earth, this account represents a distinctive Judean alternative to ancient, non-Judean worldviews focused on multiple deities who were represented on earth by manufactured statues and (occasionally for high gods) human kings.121 Within this perspective, all humans are given a highly elevated, semi-divine status, and their fertile multiplication is seen as divinely empowered, rather than—as, e.g., in the Atrahasis Epic—being a feature that continually annoys the gods.
Rest and the SabbathThis creation account (at least in its present form) is articulated in an implicitly Sabbath-focused six-day structure that leads up to God’s seventh-day ceasing from God’s work, which in turn corresponds to the “rest” in temple sanctuaries typically enjoyed by gods in Near Eastern cosmogonies. Within Gen 1 itself, however, the word “rest” is never used for what God does, and there is no explicit reference here to a sanctuary distinct from the cosmos that God just created.122 Rather, that sanctuary only emerges in P toward the end of Exodus with the making of the wilderness tabernacle and God’s climactic descent to dwell in it (Exod 25–31, 35–40). At this juncture we see the reemergence of the Sabbath theme so crucial to the broader structure of Gen 1.
Cosmogony and TempleThe tabernacle sanctuary, however, only emerges as a concluding divine response to profound breaks after God has finished God’s “very good” creation (Gen 1). In this respect, the broader Priestly narrative of which Gen 1 is a part diverges profoundly from the Enuma Elish epic (and comparable non-biblical cosmogonies) that describe the creation of temples as the concluding act of the cosmogony proper. To be sure, Gen 1 itself can be read as a description of God’s creation of the whole cosmos as a temple-like structure, starting with the roof-plate on day two (1:6–8), continuing with the earth floor sprouting with plants on day three (1:9–13), and also featuring lamps in the roof-plate on day four (1:14–18).123 Nevertheless, this is quite a different concept from the special sanctified space (within the broader world) of a temple or tabernacle. Within P, the need for such a tabernacle within the world only occurs when the earth of God’s very good creation is corrupted by violence (Gen 6:12), thus causing God to make it uninhabitable through covering it again with the primeval ocean (תהום; Gen 7:11; cf. 1:2), and thus killing all life on the earthly biome that was not on the ark. The priestly tabernacle, with its echoes of Gen 1, is part of a series of divine provisions on the other side of this destruction to regulate the violence that has emerged in God’s creation (e.g., Gen 9:2–6; Lev 17) and create a space within the broader earthly biome where God can again “go around” in the human world (now with Israel), as God once did, pre-flood, with Enoch and Noah (Gen 5:24; 6:9).124
A traumatic background for P’s creation narrativeWe will return to Priestly emphasis on themes of violence in the commentary on the flood narrative. For now it is just relevant to note that some kind of experience of social violence, perhaps the trauma of the destruction of Jerusalem and exile in Babylonia, likely stands in the background of the Priestly document’s split between a pre-violence cosmos in Gen 1 and the corruption of the earth and subsequent developments seen in the rest of P.125 Moreover, either the Neo-Assyrian or Neo-Babylonian periods form a likely context for the engagement with and opposition to the claims of the Enuma Elish epic in Gen 1.126 Though debate continues about the dating of P, one’s interpretation of Gen 1 as part of P can be enhanced through a non-reductionistic understanding of its picture of God’s absolute dominion and original cosmic peace as addressing some kind of Judean experience of communal trauma.
Creation as prologueTurning to the literary context of Gen 1 in a broader Priestly document, this implicitly Sabbath-focused Priestly cosmogony in Gen 1 represents the introduction to a longer Priestly work that originally extended at least up to the Sabbath-focused, Priestly description of the making of the tabernacle in the wilderness (Exod 25–40).127 Functionally, this broader Priestly work (up through Exod 25–40), and not Gen 1 alone, is the full counterpart to the Enuma Elish epic. Through this whole narrative, P offers an “etiology” of God’s dominance and God’s dwelling within an earth corrupted by violence, to compete with the Enuma Elish epic’s etiology of Marduk’s dominance and Marduk’s Esagila temple in Babylon. Within this broader context, Gen 1:1–2:3 depicts God’s originally intended, peaceful and orderly perfect cosmos, presided over by godlike humans.
Creation as anticipationThese anticipations of the wilderness tabernacle in P point to other ways that Gen 1 introduces multiple themes that are developed in later Priestly texts, often through intensified application to ever narrowing circles of Abraham and his heirs in the “children of Israel.” The multiplication blessing given to humanity at the outset (1:28) is echoed in multiplication commands given to Noah and his sons in the wake of the flood (9:1, 7) and even applied to the animals who lacked such a blessing in the initial creation (8:17b; cf. 1:24–25). Then, in the ancestral history, this multiplication promise is specifically applied to Abraham (17:6),
