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I have written many blog articles defending The Functional Origins/Temple Inauguration interpretation of Genesis 1. This is the view most commonly associated with Professor John Walton of Wheaton College and is defended in his books “The Lost World Of Genesis One” and “Genesis 1 As Ancient Cosmology”. This view holds that Genesis 1 is not about material origins, but about functional origins. The days are 7 24-hour days, and over the course of these 7 days, God ascribes functions to everything in the universe. Moreover, God prepares the cosmos to be His dwelling place, sacred space, or in other words, His “cosmic temple”. Walton (and myself) defend these points by looking at the content of the Genesis account, looking at other creation myths in the Ancient Near East, and looking at how the creative verbs “Bara” (create) and “Asa” (made) were used in other parts of The Bible. I myself go further than Walton in saying that an additional reason for Genesis 1 being written was to not only tell the reader what purpose God gave to everything and to inaugurate the universe as His temple, but the author also takes jabs at the creation myths of Israel’s neighbors. In other words, Genesis 1 is a polemical work.

I gave a lengthy defense of this myself in the essay “Genesis 1: Functional Origins, Temple Inauguration, and Anti-Pagan Polemics” here on this blog, not to mention my responses to critics of the view such as William Lane Craig (here and here and here), Hugh Ross, Thomas Purifoy Jr., Noel Weeks, David Tsumura, Lydia McGrew, and several others.

I have seen the view put under an immense amount of scrutiny over the course of my studies, and I’m not convinced that this view is false. If anything, reading all of these critics have made me even more convinced that it’s true!

Nevertheless, what if I were one day convinced that this Waltonian interpretation is wrong? What view of Genesis would I hold? It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. For many years, I was a concordist and held to the “Day-Age View”. In a nutshell, this is the view that each “day” in Genesis 1 is a long period of time. Through reading blog posts on BioLogos.org, I was convinced that concordism is a categorically wrong way to approach the text. ^[1]Concordism is the view that The Bible and Science are in concord with each other, hence the name. However, if that’s all the term meant, then there wouldn’t be a problem. There is a sense in … Continue reading If concordism is inherently eisegetical, ^[2]This is just scholar babble for reading your own meaning into the biblical text. This is in contrast to exegesis, in which you’re reading the author’s intended meaning out of the text. then the Day-Age theory automatically loses. For a while, I didn’t know what to make of the text, but I looked at several non-concordist interpretations until I eventually landed on the view I hold now. I would hate to have to go back to being in interpretive limbo. So, it’s important that I have a fallback position just in case.

Proposition 1: A Theology Of Material Creation, Not An Account Of Material Creation

The thing I can imagine being most easily talked out of is the idea that Genesis 1 is not about material creation at all, but functional creation. This is, I admit, a bizarre notion and is the number 1 thing critics of The Lost World Of Genesis 1 aim their cannons at. I will also admit that while the Ancient Near Eastern and biblical evidence for this proposition is strong, it is the weakest link. Material Ontology is the most natural reading for a 21st-century modern Westerner like me. It’s hard for me to imagine what a convincing argument for material origins would look like as all of the ones I’ve surveyed aren’t convincing. Nevertheless, I’m always willing to change my mind in the face of good evidence.

My fallback position would probably be to say that Genesis 1 contains a theology of material creation, just not an account of material creation. That is to say, just because Genesis 1 is teaching that Yahweh is responsible for the material origins of the sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and humans, this doesn’t mean we should treat it like an account of natural history, such that we either become Young Earth Creationists or Day-Agers reading a science textbook in one hand and The Bible in the other, and trying desperately to harmonize the two.

Now, why do I say this? Am I just saying this because I want to continue to be a Theistic Evolutionist? No. There are good reasons to think that Genesis 1 is not trying to summarize 4 billion years of Earth history (OEC) or give a literal chronological account at all.

1: The Bible Is Not A Science Textbook. God Accomodated To The Scientific Understanding Of The Israelites.

For one thing, at this point in my studies, I take Galileo Gallilei’s witty statement that “The Bible intends to tell you how to go to Heaven, not how the heavens go.” to be axiomatic. The Bible is not a science textbook. If The Bible intended to teach scientific truths, then inerrancy must go out the window. This is because there are many concepts in scripture which are demonstrably scientific nonsense. The most famous example is “Dome Cosmology”. The biblical authors (not to mention Ancient Near Easterners in general) describe the sky as being a solid dome that held back cosmic waters (Genesis 1:7-8. Job 37:18, Exodus 24:10, Ezekiel 1:22-26) over a flat round disk of an Earth (Isaiah 40:22, Job 26:10, Proverbs 8:27), and the solid dome sky had windows that opened and closed to let rain fall on the Earth (Genesis 7:11, 8:2) and was held up by “pillars” (1 Samuel 2:8). ^[3]All of this information can be checked out in Kyle Greenwood’s book “Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible Between the Ancient World and Modern Science,” Part 1 of Greenwood’s book walks … Continue reading Old Testament scholar Ben Stanhope has a graphic of this cosmology on his website. Click here to see it. And so, while I describe myself an an interrantist, it’s only because I no longer think cosmology is what The Bible intends to teach. As I like to say “The Bible is inerrant in all that it intends to teach. It’s just that science was not on the curriculum.”

Rather, God accommodated His divine message to the Israelites’ understanding of what the world looked like. Rather than take the time to correct their cosmology, Yahweh communicated theological truths in scripture which rode on the back of scientific concepts that Israelites previously held. For example, in Job 38:4-7, when God asks Job “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (ESV) The point is not that the Earth has foundations, nor that the morning stars are angelic beings (Sons Of God) rather than burning balls of gas. Rather, God is rhetorically asking Job if he is as knowledgeable about the created order as He is. Since Job thinks he can scrutinize God, he must know better than God, and ergo he should be able to answer these basic questions (and more). And the obvious answer is no, Job didn’t exist when God first created the world, and he has no understanding of these things. And these rhetorical points would be lost on Job and the audience if God stopped to do a little excursus on astrophysics. Rather he assumes Job’s understanding of what the world is like to mount his rhetorical questions. Likewise, in Genesis 7:11 we read “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.” (ESV). The point is not that there are literal windows. The Holy Spirit (through the human author) is simply telling us that God caused it to rain, and assumes that ANE understanding to convey that. Again, it would have been distracting (at best!) if The Holy Spirit stopped to give a lesson on meteorology.

The more I think about this aspect of my theory of inspiration, the more sense it makes. Think about it; God had a hard enough time keeping Israel from falling away as it was. If He had communicated how the world really worked through the prophets, that would have confused them at best and made them distrustful of Yahweh at worst. “What!? The Earth is round?! How do people not fall off?” and “What do you mean the sky is just empty space? What’s holding back all the water?” “What’s this whole evolution thing you’re talking about Moses? My ancestor wasn’t a monkey!” Even many fundamentalist Christians today have a hard time wrapping their minds around that last one. Do you think an Ancient Israelite would do any better? They would have, at best, been so distracted by trying to figure out heliocentrism and evolution and cumulous clouds that they’d miss what God was trying to tell them. At worst, they would have said “Yahweh clearly can’t be the Creator of the heavens and the Earth. He would know better than to say such nonsensical things! Let’s go worship Baal!” Not only would this probably have been counterproductive to God’s goals, but God has foreknowledge (e.g Psalm 139:1-4), so He knew that we would figure things out eventually on our own through the scientific method.

There are other places where God accommodated to ancient understanding. I talk about several of these in Episode 169 of The Cerebral Faith Podcast.

Given that The Bible has been shown to not be concerned with teaching science elsewhere, we should probably not view Genesis 1 as intending to give an exact chronological account of how and when everything came into being, even if material origins is the point of the passage. Whatever chronological errors the biblical skeptic wants to argue are in there, we can simply chock up to the theory of accommodation.

2: There Are Reasons To Think Genesis’ Chronology Is Literary

Everyone knows the old puzzle of light being created on Day 1, but the sun not being created until Day 4. Rather than think the author of Genesis was stupid or forgot what he previously wrote, I think the best explanation is that the author did this on purpose for a literary reason. As I argue in my lengthy paper, the Hebrew word for “sun” and “moon” sounded very much like the names of pagan deities who supposedly controlled the sun and moon. Ergo, the Hebrew author doesn’t even use these terms, but calls them “The greater light” and “the lesser light” respectively. This is that anti-pagan polemic I was talking about. He dishonors these deities by refusing to even name them in the account. Moreover, they are so unimportant as to not even warrant mention until half of the creation week is over!

Moreover, many commentators have noted that when the 6 days of creation are divided, the first three seem to describe the areas of habitation that correspond to the second set of three. So, on day 3, land and plants are created. On Day 6, land animals and humans (who, obviously, live on land, are created), for examples.

Moreover, as I have argued in previous articles, I think the reason why humans are last in the list is because they were made “In God’s image” (1:26-27) and installment of the idols were always the last thing to be installed in an ANE deity’s temple before the deity came to dwell there.

And so, even apart from concerns of harmonizing Genesis 1 and evolution, I still have solid exegetical grounds for saying that even if Genesis 1 were about material origins, that wouldn’t imply that it’s an account of material origins, in the sense that, say, Darwin’s “Origin Of Species” is. It is simply teaching the theological truth that God created everything. Or as John 1:3 says “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (ESV)

Proposition 2: Genesis 1 Is Still About Inaugurating The Universe As God’s Temple

While I can imagine myself being talked out of the Functions-Instead-Of-Material-Origins aspect of Walton’s view, one thing I can’t imagine is being persuaded away from the temple aspect of the thesis. Not only do I think the evidence for this is very strong, but more biblical scholars are on board with this view than they are on the functional origins idea. Off the top of my head, some of the Old Testament scholars who teach that Genesis 1 is about temple inauguration are Ben Stanhope, J. Richard Middleton, and the late Michael S. Heiser. ^[4]Ben Stanhope actually does agree with John Walton that Genesis 1 is not about material origins though, but the latter have expressed skepticism concerning this. For example, see Heiser’s … Continue reading

Allow me to briefly rehash some of that evidence here.

1: The Ancient Near Eastern Creation Texts Closely Link Temple Creation and Temple Building.

As J. Richard Middleton explains “The notion of the cosmos as temple has its roots in the ancient Near Eastern worldview, in which temples were commonly understood as the royal palaces of the gods, in which they dwelled and from which they reigned. Furthermore, creation, followed by temple building and then divine rest, is a central theme in Mesopotamian, and perhaps Ugaritic, mythology (both Marduk and Baal have temples built for them after their conquest of the chaos monster).” ^[5]Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image (p. 81). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

We should observe that two ANE gods in two creation narratives — The Gudea Cylinder (2125 BC) and Ugaritic Texts (KTU 1:4:VII 16-40) respectively — end their work of creating with the establishment of temples, thus lending corroborative evidence from the cultural cognitive environment to support the proposal that this is what is going on in Genesis as well.

Other Ancient Near Eastern Creation Texts strongly hint at the same.

The Temple Hymn Of Kes:

” House …… inspiring great awe, called with a mighty name by An; house …… whose fate is grandly determined by the Great Mountain Enlil! House of the Anuna gods possessing great power, which gives wisdom to the people; house, reposeful dwelling of the great gods! House, which was planned together with the plans of heaven and earth, …… with the pure divine powers; house which underpins the Land and supports the shrines! House, mountain of abundance which passes the days in glory; house of Ninhursaja which establishes the life of the Land! House, great hillside worthy of the purification rites, altering (?) all things; house without whom no decisions are made! House, good …… carrying in its hands the broad Land; house which gives birth to countless peoples, seed which has sprouts! House which gives birth to kings, which determines the destinies of the Land; house whose royal personages are to be revered! Will anyone else bring forth something as great as Kec? Will any other mother ever give birth to someone as great as its hero Acgi? Who has ever seen anyone as great as its lady Nintud?” ^[6]http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr4802.htm

In many creation texts describe the absence of a temple as a major part of the pre-cosmic condition. This is clearest in the preamble that concerns the founding of Eridu.

“The holy house, the house of the gods, in the holy place had not yet been made; No reed had sprung up, no tree had been created. No brick had been laid, no building had been set up; No house had been erected, no city had been built; No city had been made, .no creature had been created. Nippur had not been made, E-kur had not been built; Erech had not been created, E-ana had not been built; The Deep had not been created, Eridu had not been built; Of the holy house, the house of the gods, the habitation had not been made. All lands were sea. At that time there was a movement in the sea; Then was Eridu made, and E-sagil was built, E-sagil, where in the midst of the Deep the god Lugal-dul-azaga 1 dwelleth; The city of Babylon was built, and E-sagil was finished.” ^[7]The Seven Tablets of Creation, by Leonard William King, [1902], at sacred-texts.com, http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/stc/stc15.htm

Then Marduk settles the gods into their dwelling places, creates people and animals, and sets up the Tigris and Euphrates.

In a prayer to dedicate the foundation brick of a temple, it is obvious that the cosmos and temple were conceived together and thus are virtually simultaneous in their origins.

“When Anu, Enlil, and Ea had a (first) idea of heaven and earth,

They found a wise means of providing support of the gods:

They prepared, in the land, a pleasant dwelling,

And the gods were installed in this dwelling:

Their principle temple.” ^[8]As cited in The Lost World Of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and The Origins Debate by John Walton, page 79, IVP Academic.

2: In The Bible, The Number 7 Is Frequently Associated With Completion And Is Used In Religious Practitioner Settings (Tabernacle, Temple).

*The construction of the Tabernacle was completed in 7 stages (Exodus 40:19-32).

*The ordination of a priest was 7 days (Leviticus 8:33-35).

*Solomon’s temple was constructed in 7 years (1 Kings 6:38)

*Dedicated to God during a 7-day festival on the seventh month (1 Kings 8:2, 65)

*Even Solomon’s dedication speech was given in 7 petitions (1 Kings 8:31-35).

3: The Bible Uses Temple Imagery To Describe The Cosmos Outside Of Genesis.

J. Richard Middleton wrote “In the Old Testament, perhaps the most important text for our purposes is the oracle recorded in Isaiah 66:1– 2. Attributed by many scholars to Third Isaiah, this oracle calls into question the postexilic attempts of pious Jews to rebuild the Jerusalem temple (which had been destroyed by the Babylonians):

‘Thus says YHWH: Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool. Where could you build a house for me? What place could serve as my dwelling? All this was made by my hand, And thus it all came into being —declares YHWH.’

The text does not say that God has no need for a temple, merely no need for a humanly constructed one, since God has already (by his own “hand”) built a cosmic sanctuary, and that should be sufficient. And this sanctuary in which God dwells is also portrayed as God’s palace, from which God reigns— hence the language of throne and footstool. The cosmic temple, in other words, is clearly equivalent to God’s kingdom.” ^[9]Middleton, J. Richard. The Liberating Image (pp. 81-82). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition

Psalm 132:7-8 says “’Let us go to his dwelling place; let us worship at his footstool!’ Arise, O Lord, and go to your resting place, you and the ark of your might.”

This passage refers to The Temple as God’s “resting place”. God “rests” in the temple. God “rests” in Genesis 1, at the end of the creation week. And since we know from Isaiah 66 that God considers the cosmos His resting place (He considers the heavens His throne and the Earth His footstool). In light of this, a strong inference can be made that God considers the cosmos His temple, and what happens in Genesis 1 is the creation of His temple, in which He “rests” at the end.

Temples don’t exist unless the deity has come to take up his rest in it, and religious rituals are being performed. Without the deity and the rituals, all you have a physical building. Even if Genesis 1 were about the material manufacturing of the cosmos, I would still hold that God materially manufactured the cosmos to serve as His cosmic temple. I have only scratched the surface here. There is plenty of other biblical arguments for thinking Genesis 1 is a temple inauguration text. Ben Stanhope talks about many of these in his book “(Mis)Interpreting Genesis: How The Creation Museum Misunderstands The Ancient Near Eastern Context Of The Bible”.

Proposition 3: Genesis 1 Would Still Be A Polemic Against Israel’s Neighbors

I got a little ahead of myself and already briefly touched upon this, but let me go a little deeper here. It’s actually a widely held view among Old Testament scholars that Genesis 1 intends to be polemical. As the late Dr. Michael Heiser wrote “What’s happening in Genesis 1-2 is very obvious to anyone who works in the original text (beyond simplistic word studies) and (important) is familiar with ancient Near Eastern creation stories. The beliefs of ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Canaanites all have shots taken at them. The biblical authors are clever and fearless in putting forth their fundamental theological claim: the world all of us humans experience is the product of the creative power of the God of Israel and no other god, period. They skillfully backhand other gods with textual eye-poking that anyone living in the ancient world would have readily discerned…” ^[10]Dr. Michael Heiser, “Genesis 1-2 As Polemic”, June 20th 2014, — https://drmsh.com/genesis-1-2-as-polemic/

One example I have pointed out in the past is a subtle one. When God begins creating in Genesis 1:2, He hovers over the surface of the waters. In creation myths like The Enuma Ellish and the Baal Cycle, Marduk and Baal respectively have to conquer a sea dragon before they can get down to the task of creating. While the Leviathan gets mentioned in the book of Job and Psalms, Genesis makes no mention of such a battle. Even though in Psalm 74:14, we read that God crushed the heads of Leviathan, ^[11]Contrary to what many Young Earth Creationists claim, there is no reason to believe that this is a dinosaur. There is every reason to believe that it’s a mythical chaos monster. For a detailed, … Continue reading in Genesis 1, no battle takes place. Nevertheless, the domain of Leviathan is still referenced. From this, I think we can infer that the author is trying to say, in a sense, that Yahweh is so powerful that unlike Marduk and Baal, he didn’t even need to fight the chaos monster to win. All he had to do was step into the ring, and Levithan was too terrified to even rear his ugly heads!

Another example would be that God acts alone in Genesis 1, and that he simply speaks things into being. Old Testament Professor Gordon Johnston sums this point up nicely. He writes “Genesis 1:1-2:3 portrays Elohim as creating the cosmos by his spoken word. Although the creation of man and woman becomes God’s crowning achievement in his creation week, the specifics of how he made them receives little mention other than their creation as the image of God. For a more detailed account of man and woman’s creation, the reader must consult the second Genesis creation account. Genesis 2:4-25 shows Yahweh-Elohim creating man and animals from the earth. Yahweh-Elohim forms man out of the earth and breathes into him the ‘breath of life.’

Through the two creation accounts, Yahweh-Elohim is shown to be superior to the gods of Egypt. He creates by divine word, yet remains transcendent. Unlike Ptah, he does not have to embody the creation to command it, neither does he require assistance from another god or demiurge. He simply speaks and/or acts, and the creation is completed. He also creates by forming man out of the earth. Unlike Khnum, he does not require the aid of a consort. He creates the man and breathes life into him. Thus, through the two creation accounts, Yahweh-Elohim demonstrates his ability to perform all the creative acts of the Egyptian gods.” ^[12]Gordon Johnston, “Genesis 1-2 In Light Of Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths”, a paper presented April 18th 2005 at Dallas Theological Seminary. — … Continue reading

Conclusion

As you can see, my fallback position on Genesis 1 is only marginally different than the view I hold now. I can more easily see myself being talked out of the most controversial aspect of John Walton’s thesis. If I were ever convinced that Genesis 1 is indeed talking about material origins, I would adjust my interpretation accordingly. I would say that based on Dome Cosmology, not to speak of The Sperm Hair thing in 1 Corinthians 11 and “evil eye magic” talked about in the biblical text, The Bible is not interested in teaching science, and rather that God accommodated His message to the cosmology of that period. Moreover, there are good reasons to take Genesis 1 as a literary structure wholly apart from these scientifically nonsensical ideas. Therefore, I would say “Genesis 1 is a theology of material origins, but not an account of material origins.”

I would still hold that Genesis 1 is a “temple text” and is meant to be polemical towards Israel’s neighbors. At this point, you might be wondering “Well, what if you were talked out of even these aspects of your view?” Then my answer would be that I’d just fall back on the classic Framework Hypothesis. But in no case do I see the worst-case scenario happening; being a concordist again and having to fret over how to harmonize Genesis 1 with what science has discovered about our origins. No, I think my days of worrying about whether The Bible and science conflict are behind me for good.