Dust From the Ground

The Genesis accounts of creation are the ground for a number of reflections on the nature of reality and our place in it. I am struck with how Genesis 1 and 2 hold together in a creative tension three sets of assumptions that are in opposition to one another in the fragmented character of modern thought. There is the dominant idea of nature as dead stuff there for us to manipulate which assumes our separation from the created order, there is the equally powerful idea that simply collapses our humanity into nature without regard for what makes our humanity distinctive and thus fails to provide any account for human actions - we are just acting naturally. And there is the idea that words are essentially meaningless and have no reference to anything outside of our own minds, paradoxically this leads to the reactionary power games of those who want to control words and assume that their words create reality.

The Genesis accounts argue that our humanity has a special relation to God, on the one hand, and is connected to everything else in the created order, on the other hand. In Genesis 1 God speaks the world as a whole into being. John in the Prologue of his Gospel will argue that God is Word, the Word which is life and light without which nothing exists. This is particularly important with respect to the understanding of our humanity which is said to be made in the image of God. In the Greek text of Genesis 1, the verb for making is poiesis, from which we get the word poetry: God is the poet-maker of all things, and, especially, the one who makes our humanity in his own image, and thus in the image of his speaking all things into being.

Yet human speech is not the same as divine speech. As the scholar and ethicist, Leon Kass notes about the first instance of divine speech in Genesis 1, there is “absolutely no difference between the utterance and the thing called for. In this one perfect case, there is a complete identity of the divine speech and the creation act that went with it: word and thing, word and deed are exactly the same. No human speech is like that” (Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, 2003).

The second chapter of Genesis complements Genesis 1 with a more mythological and anthropomorphic picture of God. Here God is said not to speak our humanity into being but to form our humanity from the dust of the ground. In the Greek, this is about molding, an image of God as being like a potter shaping our humanity as Jeremiah will suggest. This shows our essential connection to all other created beings, from dust to angels, we might say, though emphasising especially our bodily and material being. But it also emphasises that God is the very life of our being. We are the dust into which he breathes his spirit, literally “the breath of life”, and thus ‘Adam “became a living being”. The term ‘man’ is still generic and refers to our humanity in general. Our humanity is ‘adamah, from the ground but as molded or shaped towards God, hence the idea of our being upright and thus able to look up to the source and principle of our being and life.

What follows are some of the most powerful and suggestive poetic and philosophic images in the story of our humanity. God plants a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he puts man, ‘Adam, whom he had formed.  And we are given a purpose to till and keep the garden which complements the idea of caring for creation as God does. A description of this garden ensues; it will become known by an ancient Avestan or Persian word for an enclosed garden, Paradise. Most intriguing for the understanding of ourselves in relation to God and the created order is that the garden contains amidst the multitudes of trees and plants for food - we all begin as vegetarians in Genesis - two trees that are singled out as critically important.. The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. 

The passage continues to provide a kind of geographical location to this paradisal but essentially mythological garden by way of four rivers that flow out of it, two of which are easily recognizable - Tigris and Euphrates. The four rivers take on a remarkable symbolic force as representations of the four classical virtues (temperance, courage, prudence, and justice) that contribute to a philosophical tradition that understands our humanity in terms of body, soul, and mind. But what is of greatest significance for our understanding of ourselves in relation to nature and God is that our humanity is given a commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The fact that we are given a commandment speaks to our being as intellectual and moral creatures capable of grasping ideas and capable of realising that we are the creatures of God who exist in obedience to the principle of our own being and knowing.

This is crucial in two senses: first, God will allow ‘Adam to name the creatures of the world which he has called into being. Our naming of things does not create but at best reflects something of the mind of the maker, a naming that reflects something of the nature of things shown for instance in etymology - word origins. Our words are not like God’s word. They do not create things. Our making is only as secondary creators, creating out of our being in the image of God. When we forget this we fall into disarray and confusion, into the problem of reification, presuming to turn words into things. This is reductionism which reduces rather than enhances our understanding of what it means to be human. Secondly, this commandment not to eat is crucial for the account of evil and suffering, in short, the story of the Fall. At once a negative it marks the profound moment of our coming to self-consciousness, a positive.

The images presented in the Genesis accounts of creation are profound and have, at the very least, contributed to a rich tradition of philosophical and religious thought that perhaps, just perhaps, has the power to speak to our contemporary world simply through the questions which they present.