A few years ago, I made a guided set of readings about science and religion, which many have found  helpful. This is my attempt to do something similar but much more compact for Genesis 1.

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As we read and teach these chapters— particularly to our children and in Seminary— I want to remind us that these are fraught chapters, and can build or undermine faith. The vast majority of science-religion conflict people see here is a function of what we bring to the text, not what is actually there.

Moreover, for Seminary teachers, many of their students will head right out on missions, and be asked at random times about the Church’s position on evolution or Genesis; they need to be equipped with the best and most accurate information available, and their most recent detailed source is likely to be their seminary teacher. I have videos about many of these things, some linked below or embedded, but see here for a list. These include things like “how do dinosaurs and cavemen fit into creation”? (I’ll address that more in my second post.)

Who was Genesis 1 addressed to?

Not modern readers or their scientific/material concerns and questions. I’ll get into this more below, but I want to point out that Come Follow Me says,

for the most part, people today aren’t the primary audience of the Old Testament prophets. Those prophets had immediate concerns they were addressing in their time and place—just as our latter-day prophets address our immediate concerns today….when you read ancient prophecies, it can help to learn about the context in which they were written

If it wasn’t addressed to us, then we need to pay particular attention to

plac[ing] things in context…. People in the past had different assumptions about the world than we do…. If we want to better understand the words and actions of those in the past, we also need to understand the culture and context in which they occurred…. understanding historical context helps to keep us from imposing our present views on people of the past in a way that prevents understanding.

-Answering Gospel Questions

So, What IS Going On in Genesis 1? 

Probably not what you think. We read Genesis through a set of modern lenses and assumptions very VERY foreign to the world of the Israelites, AND they had pressing theological questions that don’t even occur to us. The purpose of Genesis 1 is not revealing facts about science and history. It’s not talking about science poetically, not metaphorically, not at all.

Yes, God comes down and speaks at our level (that’s called accommodation, see here and here)  but he’s not simplifying the science of creation for them. Rather, in Genesis 1, God accommodates by using the common ancient Near Eastern understanding of the universe to answer their pressing questions and teach them more important things. I have a short video on that.

Genesis isn’t about science?

Not at all. Because of our Western intellectual inheritance— the Scientific Revolution, the Reformation, the Enlightenment— we tend to think of Truth in terms of Facts, and that means Science and History. The assumption that inspired scripture must speak in scientific terms is called Concordism. It’s a modern assumption very foreign to the Israelites, which we wrongly impose on it.  As Scripture Helps says,

Because we live in a very different world from the people who wrote the Old Testament, we might mistakenly apply our own modern views and cultural standards to what we are reading. This can lead to misunderstandings. Make an effort to see what you are reading from the perspective of the inspired authors in their original context

Genesis is compatible with science, because it generally doesn’t say what we think. Conrad Hyers makes this point neatly. (Hybrid quote from two different publications.)

It is not too much to see in all this a common preoccupation with the scientific method, scientific evidence, and scientific results, which descend upon these ancient pages like a cloud of termites eager to devour and digest the materials in terms of their own appetites. This is not to debunk science or historiography as such. Rather, the issue is one of appropriateness. Our contemporary preoccupations could hardly have been the preoccupations of ancient Israel…. It is quite doubtful that these texts have waited in obscurity through the millennia for their hidden meanings to be revealed by modern science. It is at least a good possibility that the “real meaning” was understood by the authors themselves….

The problem is created, on the one side, by those of scientific orientation who, naturally, tend to look at biblical materials in terms of the narrative accounts of modern science and natural history. Skeptics are not the only ones confused about this. There are also those who try to interpret the creation texts in relation to scientific statements, not in order to dismiss them as pre-scientific, but in order to defend them as scientifically true. Collisions between science and religion are, in large part, the result of religious people insisting that the biblical texts function as scientific and historical reports, and that to interpret them otherwise would be unfaithful to them. To compound the confusion, this supposed scientific and historical meaning is said to be the literal meaning of the texts….

It may surely be said that the Genesis accounts of creation are not in conflict with scientific and historical knowledge. Yet this is not because they can be shown to be in conformity with this knowledge, but precisely because they have little to do with it.

I highly recommend reading Hyers’ clear and concise piece here. On Concordism, see here.

Questions like “how was there day and night without the sun” are concordist, assuming  that Genesis is a documentary of the material creation of the universe. Again, it’s not. Genesis is an ancient Near Eastern, highly literary, theological document, arguing against the polytheism and nihilism of Israel’s neighbors. Again, see my video above, and  here, and here.

So we’re all fine with the science, because Genesis is presenting some theological facts the Israelites desperately needed through the framework of a creation story.

What other assumptions do we bring to Genesis besides concordism?

We always have assumptions, and often our conclusions are dictated by our assumptions. 

Sometimes we assume scripture is effectively dictated by God. It’s clear that is not the case.  (That’s a video link, see here for some of the same quotations in a different context and here as well.) Sometimes we assume scripture is inerrant.  Or we assume prophets are inerrant, and just channel God’s omniscience. What do prophets know ? (A follow-up to that post.)

I’ve talked about some other ones here as applied to Genesis, positively.

So, if it’s not modern science, what was that common ancient Near Eastern Understanding of the Cosmos? 

Essentially, the Israelites and their neighbors conceived of the universe as a watery chaos. The earth was a flat disc, with a solid dome above restraining the cosmic waters.  You can read about this in several essays in this free book (PDF link): check out the essays from Greenwood, Shannon, and Sears. This was also mentioned recently in a Church News interview with an Institute teacher, here. God accommodated their understanding of the cosmos (which wasn’t really important) to answer other pressing questions.

Should We Read Genesis literally?

Yes, absolutely. But that means we need to talk about what it means to do so.

“Reading literally” does not mean “assume it’s history” or “read it at face value, in inherently-flawed translation, without any historical or cultural context.” Rather, reading literally means trying to recover all the contextual knowledge the Israelites understood Genesis with, but which could go without being said. (See here as well for analogy/teaching ideas.) Reading literally means trying to understand it as the author and audience did.

What about the days of Genesis and the age of the earth?

The days of Genesis serve a purpose other than “calendrical documentary of God’s material construction timeline.” The common LDS idea— not original to us— that a day is an indefinite period of time simply doesn’t work with the Hebrew. This is called the day-age view.  I argue that the days are, in fact 24-hour days, but that doesn’t imply anything about the age of the earth. For shorter explanations of why, see this post and this post. For a longer read with a good bit of the interpretive history of all the different views, including the day-age view,  I have a rough draft paper here. (I emphasize that this is a ROUGH draft.)

The Church has recently published four short essays on science and religion, and one said this.

Using reliable methods of measurement, such as radiometric dating, scientists currently estimate the age of the earth to be approximately 4.5 billion years. Some people believe such estimates contradict the scriptural teaching that the earth was created in six days.

It may be helpful to remember that the Creation accounts in the scriptures are not scientific descriptions and that some aspects of them may be figurative. It might also be helpful to note that the book of Abraham speaks of the days of creation as periods of unspecified length.

What’s the relationship between Genesis 1 and 2? 

This question is connected to the next one, and … it’s both simple and complicated. Genesis 1 technically ends in chapter 2:4, perhaps even in the middle of the verse. (The KJV translation obscures this. Compare the NRSV and JPS.) It’s likely that these were two different creation accounts common among Israelites to teach different things, neither of which was “science.”

Because of the way it was heavily emphasized after 1978 or so, most Latter-day Saints read Gen 1 as the “spiritual creation” and Gen 2 as the “physical creation,” even though that doesn’t work very well when read closely. Historically, General Authorities have had lots of different understandings. William Lee Stokes catalogued some of them in a Church magazine article, “In the Beginning” The Instructor (June 1965) 228-233. 

What’s the Relationship between Genesis, Moses, Abraham, and the Temple? 

This is both simple and complicated. Moses is the JST to Genesis; Abraham is an independent revelation connected to the papyri and Genesis and the JST process; the temple is further independent revelation combined with an editing-together of the seven-day structure of Genesis  1-2:4 with the Adam-and-Eve-FALL content of Genesis 2:4— account.  See here and here.

Who Wrote Genesis 1?

Traditionally, Moses, but this isn’t actually stated anywhere. The first five books of Genesis-Deuteronomy  took on the name “The Five Books of Moses,” but that’s tradition.

The LDS Bible Dictionary— which is neither revealed nor doctrinally definitive, per its own introduction and Elder Mcconkie— says this.

The Pentateuch was written by Moses, although it is evident that he used several documentary sources from which he compiled the book of Genesis, besides a divine revelation to him. It is also evident that scribes and copyists have left their traces upon the Pentateuch as we have it today.

But it then goes on to say, “Latter-day revelation confirms that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy (1 Ne. 5:10–11; Moses 1:40–41).”

Does Latter-day Revelation actually do that? And what does “authorship” even mean if Moses used preexisting sources AND it’s been heavily edited since then? I would say that modern revelation does NOT confirm that. See here for 1 Nephi. As for the Book of Moses, we know that Moses 2 onwards is the JST to Genesis, which started with the KJV text.  And Moses 1 was originally a separate revelation which was combined with the JST.

Perhaps more importantly, Scripture Helps: Old Testament, which is decades newer than the Bible Dictionary (which itself drew on a non-LDS Bible dictionary from the late 1800s), says this in footnote 1.

The Bible itself does not identify who wrote the Pentateuch. Many scholars believe that there were multiple writers,  editors, and others involved in producing the text we have today…. the book of Genesis in its current form can be dated back to the Jewish exile in the sixth century BC….Regardless of the complexity involved in the creation of the Pentateuch as we have it today, Restoration scripture confirms Moses’s central involvement in these works of scripture (see 1 Nephi 5:10–11; Moses 1:40–41; 2:1).

This newly approved manual acknowledges the complexity of the issue and that Genesis as we have it seems to have been heavily edited in Babylon by (probably) Israelite priests. (I have made this argument elsewhere.) It echoes the Bible dictionary, but shifts from the idea of “authorship” to “central involvement.”

Acknowledging complexity is really important in teaching.

Who’s the “we” in Genesis 1:26-27? 

I discussed this a bit in the previous lengthy post, but in short, God addresses members of his divine council. On that topic from an LDS perspective, see this article.

Or, open one of your new Bibles 🙂 See the short essay on The Divine Council in the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible (p. 615). Or this excerpt in the Jewish Study Bible at Gen 1:26-28.

The plural construction (Let us …) most likely reflects a setting in the divine council (cf. 1 Kings 22:19–22; Isa. ch 6; Job chs 1–2): God the King announces the proposed course of action to His cabinet of subordinate deities, though He alone retains the power of decision….. Whereas the earth and the waters (at God’s command) bring forth the plants, fish, birds, and other animals (1:12, 20, 24), humankind has a different origin and a different character. In the ancient Near East, the king was often said to be the “image” of the god and thus to act with divine authority. So here, the creation of humanity in God’s image and likeness carries with it a commission to rule over the animal kingdom (1:26b, 28b; cf. Ps. 8:4–9)

The Jewish Annotated New Testament has a short essay on the divine council as well. The idea is baked in to Isaiah 6, Jeremiah 23:21-22, and Lehi’s calling as a prophet. See this essay.

Final takeaway

Genesis is absolutely true. But it’s describing a part of reality different than what our modern scientific minds assume, and different than surface-level context-free readings indicate. Rather, Genesis shows how God is good, creation is divinely deliberate and good, and humanity’s place in creation is elevated, deliberate, and VERY good.  And though I’ll talk about it much more in the next post on Genesis 2-3, there’s much less conflict between science and religion than tradition says.

Flotsam and Jetsam

I haven’t tried to cover everything here, not even close. I have a manuscript I’ve been working on for years, slowly, just about Genesis chapter 1; it’s 200 pages long. But I have written and talked extensively about Genesis here. You can find all my posts so tagged at this link, all my posts on the temple (which is similarly not a documentary) at this link, and all my posts on evolution here.

A number of questions can be answered simply by using another translation: “replenish” just means “fill,” for example.

I’ll do a similar post for Genesis 2-3, and respond to all the evolution-related questions there.

For  lots of suggested resources on Genesis, see here.

Please whatever you do, don’t use the 1980 Old Testament Institute manual. It has… problems.

Good luck!