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Two Views of Creation

No people seemed to search more for meaning in their lives than did the ancient and classical Greeks. In his superb book The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family, Phillip Slater tells us much of interest about the ancient Greeks. They were as creative a people as have ever lived and seemed to search for meaning in everything they did. They were not content with living simple lives but oftentimes took on gargantuan tasks which resulted in a great deal of upheaval and unpleasantness, and oftentimes to disaster. Slater puts it this way: “The Greeks were quarrelsome as friends, treacherous as neighbors, brutal as masters, faithless as servants, shallow as lovers—all of which was in part redeemed by their intelligence and creativity.”26 Daily life had no purpose for the ancient Greeks; they were searching for meaning in exceptionally difficult tasks.

The biblical human being, in contrast, is not driven to search for meaning in this way. One’s purpose is inherent in daily life. He does not have to search for it. The God of the Hebrew Bible makes the human being, man and woman, in his own image.

And God said: “Let us make man in His own image; in the image of God, created He him,; male and female created he them.27

He then breathes life into man.

Then the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.28

Life has an inherent purpose. Man must be a steward of God’s creation.29

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.30

A passage in Exodus restates the purposeful nature of life. God has a purpose for everyone.

But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.”31

The purposeful nature of life is stated again in the first book of Samuel. We find purpose by serving God.

We fulfill our purpose of glorifying God also by living our lives in relationship and faithful service to Him.32

To gains some perspective on this difference, let us compare the creation narrative in Hesiod’s Theogony with that of the Hebrew Scriptures. These two creation stories embody two radically different worldviews. Nature precedes the gods in the Greek version, but God precedes nature in the biblical account. As Bruno Snell argues, the differences in the respective orderings are not just chronological, but logical and psychological as well.33

The Greek Creation Narrative

According to Hesiod, in the beginning there was chaos, which has often been interpreted as a moving formless mass, from which the cosmos and the gods originated.34 The noun xaos refers to infinite space or time or the nether abyss, while the verb xao denotes “to destroy utterly.35 There is the implication that chaos must be subdued and controlled for the world to be formed. Purpose is not inherent in creation. It must be searched for. The human being must search for meaning!

In this Olympian Theogony, nature exists before the gods. First Sky rules over the entire world.36 Sky (the male Ouranos) marries Earth (the female Gaia) and produces, first the hundred-handed monsters, and then the Cyclopes.37 The family pathology then immediately commences, as the father takes the children away from the mother. “Sky tied them (the Cyclopes) up and threw them into Tartarus, a dark and gloomy place in Hades as far from earth as earth is from the sky and again had children by Earth, the so-called Titans.”38 Such action breeds reaction.

Grieved at the loss of the children who were thrown into Tartarus, Earth persuaded the Titans to attack their father and gave Cronus a steel sickle . . . Cronus cut off his father’s genitals and threw them into the sea . . . Having thus eliminated their Father the Titans brought back their brother who had been hurled to Tartarus and gave the rule to Cronus.39

Father is set against son, and son must rebel against father in his search for meaning. When Earth and Sky foretold that Cronus would lose the rule to his own son, he devoured his offspring as they were born.40 The infant Zeus is saved through a ruse. When Zeus reaches adulthood, he makes war on Cronus and the Titans, and defeats him, fulfilling the prophecy of Earth and Sky.41 The drama of infanticide continues. Zeus himself is informed that his own son would displace him. To forestall this, he devours the mother Metis with the embryo in her womb.42

However, the playwright Aeschylus adds that Zeus is not all-powerful, subject himself to the natural force of Necessity, which itself is controlled by the Fates and the Furies.43

In summary then:

1.Earth and Sky exist prior to the gods and in fact create them. The world begins in chaos, which must be subdued.

2.The Earth-mother is a very ambivalent source. She gives life but also destroys it. Such a view creates an ambivalent human attitude towards her, vacillating between paralyzing idealization of and submission to the earth and rebellious destructiveness with regard to it. We will discuss this in far greater detail in chapter 8.

3.Life is consumed with a search for meaning, not in daily life, but in grandiose tasks and adventures.

The Biblical Creation Narrative

The biblical account of creation is very different. God precedes and indeed creates nature. Nature representing the rules which God has put into place to create some order in the physical world he has created. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” God then proceeds to create form out of the unformed (tohu vovohu)—again, not by subduing chaos as in the Greek account. To emphasize, the biblical unformed is not equivalent to the Greek chaos. Therefore, nature does not have to be subdued, but shaped. God is not seen a tyrant but as a potter.

First, lightness is divided from darkness. God then divides water from the land. At this point, God begins to prepare this world for the entrance of man. First, God has the earth bring forth vegetation. He then places living creatures in the sea and fowls in the sky. Now God places living creatures on the earth, cattle, creeping things, and other beasts.44 The world is now ready for man in God’s plan. God creates the human being, male and female, his ultimate handiwork, in God’s own image and gives them dominion over all in nature God has created.45

The Bible describes the world and all that is in it as created by God in love. Humankind are given dominion over all, and the first people are placed in the garden of Eden “to dress and keep it.” It is incumbent on humanity not to wantonly destroy. Having dominion does not entitle man to misuse nature. Nature is not presented as something alien to man; it is to be neither worshiped nor raped, but instead tended and cared for lovingly and carefully.

The following points stand out in these biblical narratives:

1.God exists prior to the heaven and earth and in fact creates them. The world is unformed (tohu vovohu) and must be given form and structure rather than subdued.

2.Earth is not seen in sexually differentiated terms. There is no sense of an Earth-mother. The earth is not to be ravaged but it also is not to be worshiped. The biblical God creates man and woman to tend and care for the world he has created. People can and do make changes to the world to improve it but must not do this in a callous or needlessly destructive way. This too will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 8.

3.Life is not about a fruitless search for meaning. It is inherently purposeful. One does not have to pursue grandiose goals. Living one’s own life in a modest and purposeful way is sufficient.

26. Slater, Glory of Hera, 4

27. Gen 1:27

28. Gen 2:7.

29. Gen 2:7.

30. Gen 1:26–27.

31. Exod 9:16.

32. 1 Sam 12:24.

33. Snell, Discovery of the Mind.

34. Hesiod, Theogony l.116.

35. Liddell et al., Greek-English Lexicon.

36. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.1.

37. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.2.

38. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.3.

39. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.4.

40. Apollodorus, Library 1.1.5.

41. Apollodorus, Library 1.2.1.

42. Apollodorus, Library 1.3.6.

43. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, ll. 514–17.

44. Gen 1.

45. Gen 1:26.