I gave my second Institute lecture on the early chapters of Genesis this week, and laid some important groundwork.

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The crucial thing for understanding Genesis, as well as the most important take-aways from my classes on it, are the principles and assumptions that get identified and named. I led the audience through several, applied them to Genesis, and set the stage for next week.

  1. Revelation is Adaptive.
    1. Revelation often creatively adapts, updates, reinterprets, recontextualizes, or integrates elements of the prophet’s culture and environment, giving these elements new meaning and significance in the process. God rarely seems to create meaning ex nihilo, out of nothing.
    2. Example: In John 4, the wedding at Cana, Jesus didn’t produce wine out of nothing, but from water; he transformed what was around him into what was needed.
    3. Isolated Genesis application: We’ll see in upcoming lectures how Genesis both adapted from, responded to,  and argued against the Babylonian Enuma Eliš which describes creation (and other things) from a Babylonian perspective.
    4. For more on Adaptation, see my post here on Adaptation and the Temple, and this talk at FAIR (video and transcript)
  2. Revelation is Accommodated
    1. God “speaks in the cultural context of the life and time of a person or people. He communicates according to their understanding…. the Lord kindly condescends to communicate His will in their language and culture so He can instruct and succor them.” (D&C 1:24, 2 Nephi 31:3) –Holzapfel, “The Lord Guides His Church According to Our Language and Understanding,” Liahona, August 2022 
    2. “Accommodation is God’s adoption… of the human audience’s finite and fallen perspective. Its underlying conceptual assumption is that in many cases God does not correct our mistaken human viewpoints but merely assumes them in order to communicate with us.” – Kenton Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words, 230-1.
    3. Accommodation, then, describes both content and, for lack of a better word, perfection of a revelation. Another word sometimes used is condescension, i.e. God comes down or descends with (con) us, comes down to the human level in both how he communicates and the toleration/inclusion of less-than-eternal ideas, practices, etc.
    4. Example: In Matthew 19, Jesus is asked if divorce is lawful. Jesus says, in effect, “no.” But if that’s the case, how does the inspired Torah, the Law, explain how to get divorced? (Deu 24:1-4). Jesus responds with the principle of Accommodation. “It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives…” Divorce is an accommodation to human hard-heartedness.
    5. Isolated Genesis application: the cosmology in Genesis is not a modern heliocentric solar system. (In Galileo’s day, he invoked accommodation to defend his heliocentric model; scripture, he argued, was to teach how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.) Genesis doesn’t even present a Ptolemaic or  earth-centric solar-system. Rather, the cosmology in Genesis is a flat disc Earth with a solid domed sky which restrains the chaotic cosmic waters surrounding the earth.
    6. The principle of accommodation is found in the OT, NT, Book of Mormon, and D&C, in foundational Jewish and Christian interpretation, and also taught by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. For more and citations, see this FAIR talk (text, audio, video).
  3. Revelation is Responsive.
    1. Revelation typically comes in response to a question or need, due to circumstance or situation. And therefore,  the details of that revelation are often tied to the specific time, place, and setting of that situation, the bounds of that question or circumstance.
    2. Example: D&C 8:2-3 “I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart… this is the spirit of revelation; behold, this is the spirit by which Moses brought the children of Israel through the Red Sea on dry ground.”  Elder Holland explains,

      Why would the Lord use the example of crossing the Red Sea as the classic example of “the spirit of revelation”? Why didn’t He use the First Vision? Or the example from the book of Moses we just used? Or the vision of the brother of Jared? Well, He could have used any of these, but He didn’t. Here He had another purpose in mind.

      Usually we think of revelation as a downpour of information. But this is too narrow a concept of revelation…. revelation almost always comes in response to a question, usually an urgent question—not always, but usually. In that sense it does provide information, but it is urgently needed information, special information. Moses’ challenge was how to get himself and the children of Israel out of this horrible predicament they were in. There were chariots behind them, sand dunes on every side, and a lot of water immediately ahead. He needed information to know what to do, but it wasn’t a casual thing he was asking. In this case it was literally a matter of life and death.

      You will need information too, but in matters of great consequence it is not likely to come unless you want it urgently, faithfully, humbly.

  4. Revelation has Implicit Contexts
    1. That is, revelation to people in a particular time, place, culture, language, and circumstance doesn’t need to make explicit what “everybody knows” in that time, place, culture, language, and circumstance, so those elements can go “without being said.” But what happens if you read that revelation and no longer share the common knowledge of that particular time, place, culture, language, and circumstance? There is key information to understand that you don’t have and might not even realize you’re lacking. Modern readers walk away either confused OR they unconsciously fill in the gaps with their own modern assumptions and understandings.
    2. Illustration: Sports reporting assumes you understand the rules of the game, they go without being said. So imagine you know English well but absolutely nothing about sports, let alone American football. How might you understand the phrase “The Giants defeated the Cowboys”?
    3. Scriptural example: D&C 76, AKA “The Vision” records a revelation of the three degrees of glory. There is nothing in the revelation itself about what prompted this vision. If you read Church history, you’d know. But our chapter headings— technically extra-scriptural and uncanonized— now include that implicit context.
    4. The Church has also provided books like Saints and especially Revelations in Context to help fill in those implicit contexts.
    5. From a biblical perspective, see Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible
    6. For LDS examples and teaching examples, see the post here and here, and to a lesser extent here for NT examples.
  5. Taken all together, revelation is accommodated, adapted, responsive, and has implicit contexts.  As applied to Genesis, here’s what that looks like.
    1. Genesis responds to particular human need or questions in particular circumstances [Responsive],
    2. though without recording those particular needs or questions [Implicit Contexts],
    3. in a way the people at that time and place could understand [Accommodation],
    4.  by adapting things they were already familiar with [Adaptation.]
    5. And here I’ll repost my title, which should make more sense in light of all that.  Understanding who Genesis is to tells us what Genesis is for.
  6. With a large dose of intellectual humility and in the absence of anything else, we can “reverse engineer” some of this by asking, “what questions does this chapter/verse/section/story answer for ancient audiences?” However, combined with the recovered historical, religious, linguistic, and religious contexts of Genesis— and the Bible in general— we can now state with some confidence that the needs and questions of the Israelites were emphatically not abstract questions about the age of the earth, or natural history, or evolution. Cosmology is not what Genesis is attempting to reveal; indeed, the cosmology in Genesis was one common to the ancient Near East, and God accommodated its scientific wrongness to teach more important theological truths.
  7. Rather than scientific questions,

    what pressed on [Israelite] faith from all sides, and even from within, were the religious problems of idolatry and syncretism. The critical question in the creation account of Genesis 1 was polytheism versus monotheism. That was the burning issue of the day, not some issue which certain Americans 2,500 years later in the midst of a scientific age might imagine that it was….The temptations of idolatry and syncretism were everywhere.

    – Conrad Hyers’ fantastic little paper

  8. Thus, the pressing Israelite needs and questions which Genesis is responding to are these:
    1. What is the nature of the god or gods who created? Genesis has a lot to say about this in contrast to other ancient Near Eastern material.
    2. What is the nature of creation?  Genesis has a lot to say about this in contrast to other ancient Near Eastern material.
    3. And what is the place of humans in that creation and relationship to God? Genesis has a lot to say about this in contrast to other ancient Near Eastern material.

We’ll start looking at those questions in Genesis in the next lecture. (I addressed them briefly in this video.)

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