Life is amazing. I mean, a single microscopic cell not only multiplies into more than 30 trillion cells (30,000,000,000,000!) but groups of cells somehow organize into the various organs that make for a functioning human body. Including that most remarkable organ, the brain, that enables us to communicate abstract ideas through arbitrary symbols printed on a page in a book, like the one you’re reading now. It all seems magical, or to use a religious term, miraculous. Through modern science we can break down and examine the many unseen particles and processes that work together, controlled by the laws of physics and chemistry to make life possible, but that makes it no less remarkable and awe-inspiring. It is therefore no surprise that since ancient times humanity has struggled to understand the origin of life. How did the miracle of life originate? Where did we come from? Why are we here?
Of course primitive people did not have the scientific resources we have today, so they mostly had to rely on their creativity and imagination. This led to many creation stories around the world. Often they involve some form of primordial chaos or an expanse of water from which the world arises. The Cherokee tribe in America tells a story of a water beetle that dives down into the water and brings up mud that forms the land on the earth. In Japan light is literally lighter and therefore rises highest into the sky, clouds are not quite as light and so are lower in the sky, and heavy substances form the land. There is an African tale of God creating people, tortoises and stones, but only giving life to the first two. People and tortoises wanted to have children even though it meant they would die. Stones do not have children and therefore never die. (I am not clear why they chose tortoises, but I think I can see why they thought having children would hasten you to the grave!) The Greeks had various versions including one in which two gods emerge from Chaos and use a cosmic egg to spawn other gods and humans. Various cultures depict the earth as resting on the back of a turtle or tortoise (what’s up with the tortoise theme?). Hindu mythology describes four elephants supporting the earth while standing on the back of a sea turtle. There is an old story of a philosopher being asked by his student, “But what is the turtle standing on?” “Another turtle.” “But then what is that turtle standing on?” “Another turtle,” he replies curtly. “But what about that turtle?” The exasperated philosopher replies, “It’s turtles all the way down!”
And no doubt you know that the Bible contains its own creation tale. But are you aware that the Bible actually contains two distinct creation tales, describing not only different creation processes but even different gods? Or at least, a God with a split personality? We’ll get to that in a moment.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
Thus begins one of the most influential books in the history of the world. This is one of the best known and most quoted verses in the Bible. I grew up on the Space Coast of Florida; my dad worked on the space program. I remember Christmas Eve of 1968 when Apollo 8 was orbiting the moon, the first manned vehicle to leave earth orbit and to reach the moon. The crew, Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, read the first ten verses of Genesis 1 to the people of earth. It is a beautiful and poetic story of the creation of the world; it was a beautiful moment for humanity. But the story is not to be taken literally.
There are many books and websites that detail the technical problems with this story, particularly the Young Earth Creationist interpretation that the formation of the universe literally took only six days approximately six thousand years ago. This view is contradicted by all of our physical and biological sciences. God would have to be cunningly deceptive and dark to lead us astray to such a degree. In all fairness, though, the Genesis 1 creation story is more sensible than many other ancient creation myths, which are fun to read but are often so bizarre as to be comical. At least Genesis 1 describes an orderly process, going from the physical world, to simple life forms then ultimately to humans, which is the correct progression, although it gets some of the details wrong. But let’s not beat that dead horse here.
More important in my mind is that the first two chapters of Genesis help us understand where the Bible came from and how it was formed. And most readers are completely unaware of the clues they contain in this regard, in large part due to the translation process. First, take off your critical thinking cap for a moment and just read chapter 1 as poetry (up through Genesis 2:3, where the chapter division really should be). Then read the prose story in chapter 2, starting in verse 4. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
I like the poetry of chapter one; it has a nice rhythm and flow to it. Most people get caught up in the details of the creation stories – either using the details to show the problems within the stories, or trying to find fault with science in order to maintain that the creation stories are true and accurate. In so doing they miss a really important point about how the Bible was written and put together, as will be evident in a moment. As for those who want to view the Genesis creation stories as literal factual accounts rather than poetic fables I would point out that these storytellers believed there was a firmament in the sky which held up the stars, held back the rain waters, across which the sun traced its course each day and above which sat the throne room of God. Are you going to take literally the creation stories of people who had such a primitive understanding of the earth and its solar system? On the other hand, these ancients were smart enough to see a progression of life from the simpler life forms to the more complex with humans at the peak, which is more accurate than most creation stories. Let’s give them credit for that. Their mistake, though, was to couch this idea in a story of six days. Now people are dumb enough to take that literally so as to make the ancients appear just as dumb. Alas…
An illustration of primitive cosmology.
In Genesis 1 the creator, actually the creators are the gods known as the Elohim. “Elohim” is actually a plural word in Hebrew (the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek). It may have originally meant “gods” or “sons of god.” “El” on the other hand means “god” and is incorporated into many Jewish names, such as “Isra-el” [God prevails], “Beth-el” [house of God], “Ezeki-el” [God strengthens], etc. As the Jewish people became monotheistic the plural word Elohim was adopted as a name for their one god, but in many places, including Genesis 1, its true plural nature is evident. Hence, “Let Us make mankind in Our image” in Genesis 1:26. So it is not surprising that the Elohim created both male and female (v. 27) since ancient religions often had both male and female deities. To be clear, in the Hebrew scriptures Elohim is often used as a singular noun, reflecting their developing monotheism, but in many passages the plural origin is clear (I would argue the Genesis 1 use is clearly plural).
On the other hand in chapter 2 the creation is done by the uniquely Jewish god YHWH. This name is referred to as the Tetragrammaton, for its four letters. YHWH was traditionally pronounced “Jehovah” (Y pronounced like J in some languages), but more often now is pronounced “Yah-weh.” It basically means “I am” as Yahweh explains to Moses in Exodus 3:14. Some Jews consider this name so holy that they will not pronounce it out loud. In some translations like the King James and the New American Standard “Elohim” is generally translated as “God,” and “YHWH” (or “YHWH Elohim”) is translated as “Lord God,” so, a careful reader who knows this can see the difference in the stories, but the casual reader is probably going to miss this distinction. Which is a shame because it is a key clue that these stories arose at different times from different cultures that had somewhat different concepts of god. It is not just singular versus plural, but the characteristics of these gods seem different. In the Elohim creation story the gods seems to be mighty and distant, simply speaking things into existence. “And Elohim said, ‘Let there be light’: and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). In the Yahweh version that god literally gets His hands dirty as He plants a garden and fashions the man out of dirt and breathes life into him, like some sort of divine CPR (Genesis 2:7, 8).
Yahweh, in contrast to the Elohim, makes man first, without woman and even before the animals, perhaps reflecting the patriarchal system of the Jewish religion. This time man is not made in the image of gods, but rather is formed out of dirt. In fact, the name Adam means dirt-man.[1] Neither is the woman made in the image of the gods in this story, but rather is made from one of the man’s spare parts, and she seems to be an afterthought, a Plan B. One of the most odd but overlooked passages is in Genesis 2 when Yahweh introduces Adam to all of the animals, expecting Adam to find a suitable companion among the animals. Really? Surely I am not the only person who sees the potential perversity of this? Exactly how did Adam try them out to see if they were suitable? Sex with animals was not unknown in ancient Israel. In Exodus 22:19 and three other verses the Jews found it necessary to ban sex with animals. I guess the lonely life of a nomad may have led to certain practices which the priests found necessary to address in their law four times, but they didn’t entirely edit the idea out of the creation story.
Anyway, Eve gets cloned from one of Adam’s ribs (in the Genesis 2 creation story). Years ago I presented a paper about cloning at a multidisciplinary conference in Crimea, (then) Ukraine. Dolly the cloned sheep was a big news item at that time so people were interested in cloning. Tongue-in-cheek I suggested that Eve was the first cloned human. If Adam had the usual male XY chromosome pattern, then God could take a couple of Adam’s chromosomes to make an XX woman. It wouldn’t work the other way – if Yahweh had started with Eve then there would be no Y chromosome for making Adam! I don’t believe Yahweh really cloned Eve, but it is fun to play with these ideas. Wouldn’t it be weird for your wife to be a clone of yourself? It would be like being married to an identical twin sister (technically not possible in natural pregnancies). The idea of finding a suitable mate among the animals was pretty strange, but I’m not sure that marrying your twin sister is much better.
I am sure you know that as the story continued Eve is tempted by a talking snake to eat from the tree of knowledge that Yahweh had made beautiful and placed in the middle of the Garden of Eden but had told them not to eat from it. The God of the Bible seems to be fond of testing people despite His reported omniscience and this is the first test of humankind. We (they) failed and are cast out of the garden and told that life will now be tough for them and eventually all of us. You would think this event is a major turning point for humankind, but, most oddly, it is ignored throughout the rest of the Old Testament. There are many discussions about evil and sin throughout the Old Testament – the entire book of Job is devoted to the subject – but the authors never point to Adam or Eve as the culprits, the cause of sin or suffering. The thinking seems to be that people are responsible for their own sin and suffering: Adam and Eve don’t get the blame in the Old Testament.
I used to think that Genesis 1 was an older, more primitive creation story, and that the Genesis 2 Jewish god Yahweh story came later. I may have that backwards. Joseph Lam of UNC-Chapel Hill, a scholar in ancient languages and cultures, points out that the Genesis 1 story shares elements with ancient Mesopotamian creation stories.[2] It may be that the Jews picked up this creation story during their Babylonian captivity and integrated it into their origin story. It is interesting that in doing so they retained the plural phrasing of the story. It is also interesting that they placed that story first, as if they wanted it to be the foundational story of humanity. That might help explain why the Adam and Eve story in chapter 2 is basically ignored in the rest of the Old Testament: an amusing instructional story but not intended to be the root story of the human condition. That changes in the New Testament, with the blame particularly falling on Eve, to the detriment of women ever since (note 1st Timothy 2:9-15 where women are basically told to be quiet and pregnant if they want to be saved!).
Another curious aspect of the Garden of Eden story is that it appears that God (Yahweh) lied about the situation while the snake told the truth(!). God told Adam, “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die” (2:17). However, the snake tells Eve, “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil.” (3:4, 5) So what happens when they eat from the tree? God Himself acknowledges, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil,” (3:22) and they do not die but are merely driven from the comfort of the garden. Despite God saying, “…on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.” So the snake was right. Of course, some people try to weasel out of this difficulty by saying that they did die in a spiritual sense, or they went from potential eternal life to eventual death, so in a way they began dying on that day, even though Adam goes on to live to the ripe old age of 930 years! Funny that the same people who want to take the six days of creation quite literally as 24-hour periods will argue that in this case “on the day” does not really mean “within 24 hours.” But we can forgive God for making a slight misstatement. After all, He also expected Adam to find a companion among the animals, and that didn’t come to pass either. Omniscience is not all that it’s cracked up to be.
After Yahweh expels Adam and Eve from the garden they have two sons. Son Cain is a farmer and son Abel is a shepherd. Thus begins the conflict between rancher and farmer that continues until the 1943 musical Oklahoma! I assume you know their story: they each offer a sacrifice of their produce to Yahweh, and Yahweh is only happy with Abel’s, so Cain kills him. When Yahweh asks Cain about it, he issues his famous reply, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Apparently the answer is “yes.” Yahweh proceeds to tell Cain “you will be a wanderer and a drifter on the earth.”
Now a most curious thing is that there is supposed to be only one family on earth at this time, but Cain tells Yahweh he is afraid that “whoever finds me will kill me.” So Yahweh says, “Therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him seven times as much” and Yahweh placed a mark on Cain, so that no one finding him would kill him (Genesis 4:15). Then Cain settles in Nod and builds a city. Even though Yahweh had told him he would be a wanderer and a drifter on the earth. And somehow Cain obtains a wife. If Adam’s family is the only one on earth so far, who is he afraid of, who populated his city, and how does he find a wife? It suggests to me that the ancients telling the story of Yahweh’s creation may have thought that there were other people on the earth, but that Adam and Eve were Yahweh’s special creation, set apart from other humans until they disobeyed Him. It is hard to know, since the story tellers did not explain such details.
In contrast chapter 5 reverts to speaking of Elohim and the male and female They had created in chapter 1. Adam then fathers a son, with no mention of his wife as in the Yahweh account. The son in this account is named Seth and then it tells of the generations that came after, up until the time of Noah. No intrigue in the garden, no talking snake, no Cain and Abel, just a straightforward account of the descendants of Adam. Quite a contrast to the more elaborate Yahweh creation story. That contrast will continue when we get to the story of Noah’s flood in the next post.
Let me throw out this idea about the two alternate stories of creation. Perhaps some early Jews saw them as two parts of the creation story. First the Elohim, the council of gods, created the world and its surroundings. Then the god who became the god of the Jewish people, Yahweh, made a special man out of the dirt, then a woman, and He placed them in a special garden. Thus Yahweh’s special people lived in this wonderful garden while ordinary people lived around the world, until Adam and Eve disobeyed and were cast out into the world with everyone else. That is why their son Cain was afraid of other people, how he was able to find a wife, and how he was able to found a city (hard to have a city without people to inhabit it!) (Genesis 4). So, this might be one way to reconcile the two accounts, but most people in the Judeo-Christian tradition no longer accept that there is any god other than Yahweh, so I do not think it will gain any traction.[3]
In summary, there are two creation stories at the beginning of the Bible, one starring the gods Elohim, and one starring the Jewish god Yahweh. Of course traditional believers hold that there is only one creator god and the two creation stories are just being told from different perspectives of the process. To maintain this is to create a god with a split personality, or what is now called “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). In this disorder each identity may have a unique name and features including differences in voice, gender, and mannerisms. This fits Genesis 1 and 2: in one personality He calls Himself Elohim, a plural name, He can just speak things into existence, and His multiple selves appear to be both male and female. In the other personality he calls himself Yahweh (YHWH), a singular name, He seems to be male, and He gets down and dirty, working with His hands, planting a garden and molding a man out of dirt. Classic DID.
But I believe it is a mistake to think these are two depictions of the same god and the same creation. Suppose I told you this story: There was a scientist named Sheldon who was smart but aloof, who worked as a theoretical physicist, and he took a trip by train to a convention. Howard was an engineer who was personable, liked to work with his hands and put things together, and he went to the convention by plane. Would you think I was telling the same story about the same person, just from different angles? Of course not. Yet when people read the two creation stories that is exactly what they think, even though the creators have different names, have different personalities, and do things differently. This is important. It is a shame that our Bible translations tend to obscure this. The Bible is a collection of stories written at different times by different people with different ideas. To mash the stories all together and pretend they are saying the same thing only in different ways is to miss out on the richness and texture of these stories. Such an approach obscures the origin of these stories. The Bible didn’t pop out of God’s forehead and onto the printed pages. It developed over many centuries as people recounted ancient stories, combined them, altered them, added to them, eventually writing them down and revising and editing them into the book we now have. These stories should not be blindly accepted as straightforward history given by divine oracle. Some religious sects think that of their scriptures, whether it be a prophet translating golden plates with the help of an angel, or one receiving divine revelations with the help of an angel in a cave on Mount Hira. You can make your own judgment on the authenticity of those experiences, but clearly the Bible did not originate in such a way.
There is further evidence of this split God in the story of Noah and the Great Flood. That will be discussed in part 2.
[1] As translated by James Tabor, in The Book of Genesis: A New Translation from the Transparent English Bible, published 2020.
[2] Joseph Lam holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. His course Creation Stories of the Ancient World can be found on Wondrium and The Great Courses
[3] Keep in mind though that the 1st Commandment simply tells the Jewish people that Yahweh is the only god to be worshipped, not that He is the only god. It actually implies there are other gods. Also, there were people known as pre-Adamites that believed that the world was populated before Adam and Eve. There is even a Jewish tradition that there were 974 generations before Adam. Psalm 105:8 say, “The word which He commanded to a thousand generations,” “the word” meaning the Torah. Since Jewish tradition says that the Torah was given to the 26th generation after Adam, i.e. to the generation of Moses, there must have been 974 generations before Adam. (Talk about taking a passage literally!)
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Thinking exercises:
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1. Which do you think is the better description of humanity: we are made in the image of the gods, or we are made out of dirt?
2. Would you want to be married to a clone of yourself? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a thing?
3. Which animal would you pick as your mate, and why?
4. Is your view of God more like the Elohim, having male and female components but more aloof and distant, or like Yahweh, a male father figure who seems more human and relatable? Or something altogether different? Were these ancient story tellers on the right track, or completely off-base?
One response to “1: Does God Have A Split Personality? (part 1)”
Great post!