My usual blogging day is Saturday but I’ll be at the Printers Row Book Festival in Chicago – so I’ll post this a day early.
I have the privilege of teaching ‘The Bible as Literature’ at my college. It’s an 8-week intensive online course that I guide nearly every summer. Each time I do, I’m struck again by the artfulness of the Scriptures, the craftsmanship.
Genesis chapter one is an exquisite poem, a liturgical hymn using the distinctive traits of Hebrew poesy: repetition, parallelism, and symmetry. It stands in sharp contrast to the raucous epic poem ‘Enuma Elish’ that describes a war among Babylonan deities that resulted in the world being fashioned from the defeated goddesses’ corpses (with the blood drops being made into humans to serve the winning gods as slaves). Instead, Genesis One features a single creator who speaks the worlds into being with a simple majestic word, bringing cosmos (order) out of chaos, methodically making three environments and then populating those 3 environments in the same sequence to achieve a purposeful cosmos that is balanced, beautiful, harmonious, and good. Humans stand at the pinnacle of this order as God’s own representatives and partners charged with the stewardship of the creation.
Then comes Genesis chapter two and three, an alternative creation account in the form of a folksy story, complete with a talking (and walking) serpent and even a little humor. It’s a very ancient tale that pre-dates Genesis One, but the editors, to their great credit, decided to keep both accounts side-by-side and not toss one away. There’s much to be said about the genius of this short tale: the development of character and conflict, the use of dialog (and puns), the importance of setting and the careful structure, and maybe I’ll discuss these another time.
Suffice it to say here that I’m always inspired to do my best in my own writing when I read the Scriptures in this ‘literary’ way. Not that my work can ever be considered ‘sacred writ.’ But when I observe the deliberate artfulness in the narratives and poems of God’s Word, I’m motivated to please God with my attention to craft and, like the Psalmist, offer my work to Him: “May the worlds of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, my Rock and my Redeemer” (Ps 19).
