Genesis 1-2: Introducing Symbols.

 I am excited to at last start a week by week blog about the Come Follow Me reading assignment.  This week is Genesis 1-2.  If you have been following my blog, you know I have already dealt with a lot of ideas from these chapters, but here is one more.  I must acknowlege that some of these ideas came from Tim Mackie's lectures on the Pentateuch available on Youtube.

One thing that Moses does in Genesis 1-2 is to set up symbols that stand for ideas that are going to show up over and over in the stories that follow.  In order to understand both the Old Testament and the New, we need to understand these symbols because they were an integral part of Hebrew culture and those who wrote the Old and New Testaments expected the reader to pick up on the symbolic meanings.

The seven days of creation contain several of these important cultural symbols.  The first few days teach us symbols of order vs chaos which is associated with good vs evil. Light vs darkness, deep water vs dry land, wilderness vs a garden; all of these are symbols that will be used in later stories.  As an example, think of the Exodus story.  When Moses leads the children of Israel the Lord parts the water (=chaos/evil) and the Israelites cross on dry ground (order/good).  Then a pillar of fire (light=order/good) leads them through the wilderness (chaos/evil).  

We also learn in Genesis 1 about the Lord's Spirit or רוח (ruach), which is a word that also means breath, or wind.  It will come up again in the story of Noah where the wind dried up the flood, and in the story of Joseph as the "spirit" that impelled Pharoah to look for an interpretation of his dream.  Often when you see this word show up, the message is that the inspiration from the Lord is at work. (even our word, inspiration, contains the root word that means to "breath".)

There are more, but you get the idea. With the creation story we are literally and literarily setting the scene for the rest of the Bible.