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186 - Should the Scriptures Be Taken Literally? | Church History Matters I Science & Religion Series
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- [00:00]
A
You can see the temptation for modern people to read Genesis 1 as a science text, but don't do it.
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B
The Bible is the result of a creative collaboration between humans and God.
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A
What about when scientific and religious truths seem to clearly contradict each other?
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B
The early Israelites would have no idea what he's talking about. So he speaks. After the manner of their language, the.
- [00:23]
A
Possibility and the logistics of like gathering two of every kind onto a little boat made of gopher wood, we're ready.
- [00:28]
B
For some pretty sophisticated and intentional things. Theological writing that will blow our minds.
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A
They are not intending their writings to function as modern science textbooks.
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B
People who try to set up a conflict between science and religion by assuming that everything we read in the Bible should be taken literally.
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A
Biblical authors are doing theology, not science.
- [00:53]
B
This is maybe the part where I need to get on my soapbox a little bit.
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A
Scriptures are so cool.
- [01:00]
B
Hello, Scott. We are back. Second episode in our new series on science and religion. And we got some, we got some serious material to chew on today, don't we?
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A
Absolutely. Yeah. We're, we're just going to get into it today talking about scripture and science. So that should be fun.
- [01:22]
B
Yeah. And we should mention you and I are known as church history guys. But we both taught seminary and institute for a number of years and love the Old Testament. And it was a little painful to not do the Old Testament this year. Come, follow me. We were sore tempted I think is the word we would use.
- [01:42]
A
Sore tempted indeed. Yes.
- [01:45]
B
We're going to cheat a little bit today and maybe do some Old Testament texts. So we're trying to have our cake and eat it too, really. But also, these texts are the intended introduction of the scripture. They're the beginning of the scriptures. And so what better place to kind of engage in the wrestle of, well, how do we interpret scriptures like these than Genesis 1?
- [02:06]
A
Yeah, you don't really encounter a conflict between science and scripture until Genesis chapter one, you know, so we thought it would be fun to play in that playground today for a little bit. Okay. So in our last episode, we introduced our new series by discussing the eight age old false binary of science versus religion. You know, the idea that when you enter the science classroom, you got to check your faith at the door, or when you enter a chapel, you need to check your brains at the door. That tension and perceived like incompatibility can feel very real. But we believe that this is unnecessary and that with the right thinking tools and frameworks, we can actually come to see both science and religion as complementary paths to truth. Right, right, right.
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B
And one of the things we talked about is we think that the restoration itself is actually very friendly and open to word science. And this may be at least in part because the restoration happened post Enlightenment, during this time period when science and religion were both flowering, when they were both doing great. An age of enlightenment, a time of scientific progress. So we have the luxury as lat saints of skipping a lot of the baggage from the pre enlightenment Middle ages when state sponsored Christianity was strong and sometimes persecuted scientific exploration while it was still in its infancy. So we get to mostly skip the time when discoveries about how the world and the universe and how they actually work were being made by people like Galileo or Giordano Bruno and led them to being on the out with the Christian church. We don't carry the assumptions that true science is dangerous to religion. In fact, we talked about how the founding revelations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints provide direct encouragement to both research and study and learn both the theory and the principle. These are the words in the revelation. Things both in heaven and in earth and under the earth, things which have been, things which are, things which must shortly come to pass. Things which are at home, things which are abroad, the wars and the perplexities of nations and the judgments which are on the land, and the knowledge also of countries and kingdoms. So God encouraging us to be curious, to seek out knowledge and to do it from a lot of different angles. Like, that's one of the things I love the most about the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants.
- [04:41]
A
Yeah, that list right there. I mean that's kind of 1830s way of saying, like most college subjects today are kind of covered in that list. Yeah, we've never had a scriptural reason to be dubious about science. In fact, one of our core faith claims is to embrace all truth. We believe all truth can be circumscribed into one great whole. We don't care where it comes from. We're convinced that all truth harmonizes when it's fully understood. I mean, Joseph Smith was tenacious about this idea. Right. He said things like this. We believe that we have a right to embrace all and every item of truth without limitation. Win that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same. Okay, so if it's clearly demonstrated to our minds and we have high degree of evidence, then we should embrace it. We should embrace it. According to Joseph Smith. In fact, he called that quote the first and fundamental principle of our holy religion. I love that. Like Unfettered searching for truth is not peripheral to our religion. It's fundamental to it.
- [05:53]
B
Yeah. It's part of our religion. Right. And science is just one super effective way to get at certain kinds of truth. Science excels at answering questions like when, where, what and how, but it's really not ever been equipped to answer the question why. That's where religion and philosophy come in. And one more important point to note from our last episode is that science is agnostic. It's not atheistic. It's not theistic. It's not supposed to convince you God doesn't exist or that he does exist. It's just designed to help us explore the when, where, what and how of the world we live in. It can neither prove nor disprove God. So it's agnostic. We're not using that term in a negative sense. We're just saying it does what it's designed to do. And it's not necessarily the tool to answer the questions of why. That's where religion and philosophy come in.
- [06:46]
A
Yeah, I think that's a good summary of what we talked about last time. So let me kind of introduce the big question for today then, Casey, Let me raise the stakes a little bit here, here, because this general idea of being kind of open to all truth kind of sounds good in theory, and I think a lot of people would kind of nod their head to it. What about when, like, scientific and religious truths seem to clearly contradict each other? Such as, like, like the way that scientific claims sometimes, like, blatantly contradict scripture claims. Like, let me, let me give you an example. Here's a couple examples. Like, like scripture says the Earth was created in six days. Science says that the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old and that the universe is like 13.8 billion or something like that formed through this gradual process like the Big Bang and gradual stellar evolution and stuff like that. Right. So there's a little discrepancy there between six days and 4.5 billion years. Here's another one. Adam was created from dirt and Eve from Adam's ribbon. That's scripture. Science says humans are the result of an evolutionary process spanning billions of years, right from the origin of life and then millions of years for, like, the evolution of our homogeneous, etc.
- [08:03]
B
Right.
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A
Let's see. Let me do another one. How about the flood? The flood in Noah's day, in scripture, in Genesis 7 submerged the whole earth. Genesis 7 says all the high hills and all the mountains were covered. But modern science tells us that there's not enough water on Earth to do that, to cover like Mount Everest, to cover the highest mountains, like we don't have enough water. Also, like the sudden disappearance of that volume of water is inexplicable scientifically, to say nothing of Noah gathering two of every kind of species when there's millions of species that exist on this Earth, the possibility and the logistics of gathering two of every kind onto a little boat made of gopher wood like that just seems scientifically, like wildly unrealistic. Right. We could go on like this. Right. But those are some examples just from the first couple chapters of the Book of Genesis, which I think, you know, show us that from the beginning, from, from Genesis 1, we're confronted with these kind of opposing narratives. Right. So I think that's, that's kind of low hanging fruit enough to sort of illustrate the dilemma that thinking and believing people like confront when you start reading scriptures. Right. So what do we do?
- [09:23]
B
You didn't pull your punches there, did you? You're hard hitting. You may have also picked up on the fact that this is really relevant to what we're talking about. We're recording this in conjunction with the idea that you're going to be studying the Book of Genesis in January 2026. Now, hopefully you'll use this at other times, but your family, when you read the Book of Genesis, is going to be confronted with biblical narratives as you study this passage in the Scripture. So what do we do? Do we just turn off our brains when we're doing come follow me and pretend that science isn't there? No, we feel like there's a better way and it has to do with upgrading our assumptions about the nature of Scripture. So today we want to discuss a scriptural paradigm which once you understand and internalize and use, actually really helps to untangle these seeming science and scripture contradictions.
- [10:24]
A
Here's our sentence that kind of has three component parts to it. Let me read the sentence. Then we'll start to break down each part and kind of explain it and maybe talk some about some examples in scripture. And this sentence is about what can we expect from scripture? Okay, so here you go.
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B
Okay.
- [10:41]
A
Scripture texts are one, the result of a human divine collaboration, two, written by ancient authors embedded in their own cultures, and three, crafted primarily for the purpose of doing theology, not science.
- [10:58]
B
Yeah. So part one, this idea that scriptural texts are a human divine collaboration is actually really supported by restoration scripture. Now we want to fully cite our sources and say we're drawing some ideas from a website you and I are big fans of Scott, which is the Bible Project. They have a ton of great resources on understanding the Bible. They are not Latter Day Saints, but they're faithful, good folks that really do love the scriptures and want to get at the meaning of scriptures. And they introduce this divine human collaboration by saying this. They say the Bible is the result of a creative collaboration between humans and God. By exploring its humanity, we discover its divinity. By confessing its divinity, it transforms our humanity. That's the end of the quote from them. And they're saying in a really beautiful way what Restoration Scripture says too. For instance, in Doctrine and Covenants Section 1, this is written as an introduction to the Doctrine and Covenants. And not surprisingly, the Lord comments on the nature of Scripture in this introductory section for a new book of scripture that's just being published that becomes the Doctrine and Covenants. He says this. This is doctrine and covenants 1:24. Behold, I am God and have spoken it. These commandments are of me and were given unto my servants in their weakness after the manner of their language, that they might come to an understanding. That's a really beautiful way of saying, basically, I meet you where you're at. I'm not going to ask you to understand things you would have no comprehension of. So I'm going to speak your language and I'm going to speak after the manner of your understanding so that you know what I'm talking about and you get the gist of the message. The Book of Mormon says a very similar thing in 2nd nem Nephi 31 3, where Nephi is actually commenting on some of the most difficult scripture to understand, specifically Isaiah. And he says, God speaketh unto men according to their language and their understanding. Which is a nice way of saying he meets us where we're at. He meets us on a level playing field. He comes down to where we are so that we can understand the truths vital to our salvation.
- [13:14]
A
Yeah, and sometimes scholars call this accommodation, meaning that God is accommodating to humans. He's communicating with mortals within the framework of their language, their culture, their understanding, even if these are flawed or are not scientifically accurate. Like a super, super good example of this is Genesis chapter one, where God is just accommodating the ancient Hebrew conception of the universe, of their cosmos. Like, I don't know if you can Google pictures where just kind of type in, let's see, what'd you type in? Like, Hebrew concept of the universe or something like that in Genesis 1. And you'll see like ancient Israelites divided The world into. You had heaven, then you had earth, and you had the sea, and then you had the underworld. Where, like, they view the. It's almost like a snow globe is the best way to kind of describe it. Where there's the sky is literally like. Like a firmament. Like that word that's translated as firmament is like a. It's actually a very firm, tangible, like, ceiling, almost. Yeah. And then there's water above that. Remember in the creation account, it says he divided the waters below from the waters above. That's the rakiya. That's this firmament thing that pushes the waters above. And you've got. I mean, the ancients aren't idiots, Casey. Like, water comes down sometimes from there, right. You look up, it's blue, and sometimes, like, water comes pouring down from there. So there's some hatches up there that can open. And the windows of heaven, they sometimes call. You could open the windows of heaven and water would pour down. So they kind of have this view of water above water down here, land, and then underneath the land is this, like, underworld, this under realm. That was kind of the place you could only get to if you died. It's sometimes referred to as Sheol. And it's kind of a dusty, watery prison that nobody escapes from. And so now, I don't have to tell you, this is not scientific according to our modern understanding. But God's not doing a scientific account. We'll talk more about that in just a minute. But like Genesis 1, he's just accommodating the understanding of the ancients, and he's just using their worldview to tell the creation story in a way that does theology rather than science.
- [15:35]
B
Yeah. And I mean, I've heard some people try to reconcile that by saying, well, by the firmament, he meant the atmosphere. Right. And again, that sort of makes the point to where he. He doesn't use the word atmosphere. He doesn't say there's a layer of gases, including ozone, that shields the sun's ultraviolet rays and things like that, because the early Israelites would have no idea what he's talking about. So he speaks after the manner of their language. This reminds me of that passage in the Book of Mormon where Aaron speaking to the king of the Lamanites, and he says, will you believe in a great Spirit? Yes, this is God. Okay. So I'm going to speak to you in your language. You don't know what the atmosphere is. So I'm going to use your cosmology of the firmament, the waters which Represent chaos and use it to communicate to you what I have done for you. So that leads us to part two of the paradigm, which is scripture authors are ancient people embedded in their own culture. So scripture takes effort to understand, in part because the people who wrote it were ancient and they're embedded within very different cultures than our own. And so they operated with different cultural assumptions than we do. Scripture meant what it originally meant within the assumptions of the time in which it was produced. And we sometimes risk serious misunderstanding when we lift the words of scripture out of their original context and read them through the lens of our own modern assumptions. So we've got to kind of do the work basically to understand their worldview and how they saw things, even down to and including their cosmology, how they imagined the universe, to understand the meaning of what the Scriptures are trying to convey. Like the good folks over at the Bible Project say it this way, the Bible was written in another time and culture. And we need to honor that ancient historical context as we come to understand it better. So as we've said a thousand times, context is king. Right? You've got to understand what's going on when the scripture was received in order to fully understand the scripture. So I like to kind of phrase it this way. Reading scripture is like a cross cultural time travel, right?
- [17:51]
A
That's a perfect, perfect yes.
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B
Yeah. You remember like in Back to the Future when Marty walks in and says, give me a tab. And the guy's like, I can't give you a tab until you order something. And we're talking 30 years of cross cultural difference that that movie is trying to depict. A tab is with money. And in the 80s, to Marty, a tab is a drink. So we believe there's a lot of valuable application in scripture. That's why we take it so serious in our religion. But almost none of it was actually written to us in our current cultural context. Even the Doctrine and Covenants, which we just barely spent a year going through and was written in English and was written in America, where you and I live, Scott, was not written about us. And it really wasn't written to us. It was written to Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. It was written to Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon and Edward Partridge, or elders about to go on a mission, or elders just coming back, or groups of leaders trying to establish Zion in 1830s Independence, Missouri, or in people building a temple in Kirtland, Ohio. And this is the Scripture that's actually closest to us. This is baby scripture. It's less than 200 years old. But there's still this huge cultural gap that we have to navigate. So when we're talking about the gap between us and the people in the Old Testament, this same idea applies, but on steroids, many orders of magnitude greater. We've got to do a little bit of work to make sure that we know how they saw the world. Because God says directly, I speak to them according to their understanding, after the manner of their language. And their language just doesn't mean ancient Hebrew. It means their cultural language, their cosmology, the way they see everything.
- [19:39]
A
Just got to let that sink in for a second. Scripture is relevant to us, but it wasn't written about us, and it wasn't written to us. That kind of goes against what some of my Sunday school teachers have said when they said that the Scriptures were written for us. But I think what they're saying is the principles written in scripture, there's some universal principles that will apply to all people at all times, and those are valuable. We need to study them. We need to learn them. But to your point, it wasn't written to us.
- [20:10]
B
Yeah, and I want to clarify. I'm not saying that some of those things we do, like when you replace someone's name in the scriptures with your own, aren't really useful activities. I mean, of course there's wide applicability, or we wouldn't have hung onto the scriptures as long as we have. But you need to understand also, too. Well, this was written to Edward Partridge, or this was written to Moses. And trying to understand the worldview that they're seeing as well, that just makes the scriptures deeper and more meaningful as we study them.
- [20:39]
A
Okay, let's go to part three here of that sentence. So part three is this idea that scripture authors primarily crafted their texts to do theology to help us understand God's work in the world rather than doing science. Right. This is a really important point. Like, the scriptures are so cool. Like, when you really get, like, kind of nerdy about him. Like, you see there's a beautiful, sophisticated way that they wrote and kind of, like, pieced things together that if you don't read it carefully, you can, like, miss. There's. There's like these seams and there's like, the patchwork and like the. Like, it just seems like there's. There's a unified vision. Oftentimes, even when multiple scripture writers, like, pick up from past scripture writers are kind of riffing off of themes and hyperlinking all over the place in ways that are really quite sophisticated. They'll often use poetic, symbolic, and sometimes hyperbolic language to communicate primarily, again, theological truths, theology, meaning God's actions and God's work in the world. They're trying to help us understand God and his relationship to us, to the world, and how that all works. They are not. They are not intending their writings to function as modern science textbooks and maybe especially in the creation narratives. Like, here's a quote from President Hubie Brown, First Presidency. He said the Scriptures were not intended as texts in biology, anthropology, geology, or any other of the sciences. And another great one from James E. Talmadge, member of the 12 apostles. He said the opening chapters of Genesis and scriptures related thereto were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth science, or man science. And we do not show reverence for the Scriptures when we misapply them through faulty interpretation. Oh, there's so much there. There's so much there. We don't show reverence for the Scriptures when we misapply them through faulty interpretation. So what we're trying to do right now, Casey, we're trying to. We're trying to lay this groundwork of, like, how do you show reverence for the scriptures? Like, honoring what they actually are rather than trying to press them into service to be something that they were not intended to be. But this is kind of hard sometimes. Like, since we're modern people embedded in our own modern cultural context, which is filled with a bunch of modern assumptions about the earth, right? Informed by images of, like, the Hubble telescope and nature documentaries and careful scientific explorations. Like, you can see the temptation for modern people to read Genesis 1 as a science text, right? We almost can't resist. But don't do it. Elder Talmage is saying, don't do it. Do not disrespect the Scriptures. And you would disrespect it by treating it for that it isn't. Rather than trying to get into the world of those who wrote it and see what they were actually trying to do. We must resist the temptation to impose our assumptions on the text. We fail to do so at our own peril. So just kind of let this be the drumbeat in the back of our head, okay? Biblical authors are doing theology, not science, not archeology, not anthropology, not meteorology, etc. They are writing sophisticated ancient literature, often using poetic, symbolic, sometimes hyperbolic language to communicate theological truths about God's engagement in our world, right? So sometimes you'll see exaggeration. That's normal. Sometimes they play fast and loose with the facts and some of the details in order to score theological points. And that was totally fine and a respectable way of doing it anciently. And so we can expect that kind of thing. So I don't know, maybe it would be helpful to do a clear example. Okay, so we've already started with Genesis chapter one. Maybe we can do Genesis one for today's episode. And then maybe if it'd be helpful, we can workshop a couple others in our next episode.
- [24:35]
B
Yeah, and again, Genesis 1 is a specific type of genre, right? It's a creation story. There's some stories in the scriptures that I think are more historical, more concrete. This one, if you just look at the way that it's written written, it's theological, it's literary, it's highly structured, it's majestic. It's a rhythmic piece of theological narrative written primarily to define who the God of Israel is, what their relationship is to him, what their stewardship is from him. And also it introduces practices like why they have the Sabbath day. It's intending to do all those things and not intending to provide a scientific or probably literal timeline of material creation of the earth. It's also purposely written as a strong critique of the prevailing polytheism of Israel's ancient Near Eastern neighbors at this time. So let's examine both of these. First, the literary and the theological structure. All right, Genesis 1 employs a deliberate, symmetrical literary structure that emphasizes order, intention and completeness. A seven day framework where chaos, which the wording in Hebrew is dahu wa bohu, formless and vo, tohu wabohu.
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A
It's so funny.
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B
Tohu wabohu, wabohu, tohu wabohu. Work that into a conversation today which is translated in English as formless and void chaos, essentially. And it's replaced by function and order by the one true God. So that's where we're starting from here. And Scott, walk us through the narrative then.
- [26:15]
A
One thing I find so fascinating and beautiful about this is that the six days of creation are divided into two kind of symmetrical panels. You can almost do like a T chart, just like a line above, and then just like cross it down the middle and do day 1, 2 and 3 on the left side and then day 4, 5 and 6 paralleling. So day 1 and day 4 parallel, day 2 and day 5 parallel, and day 3 and day 6 parallel. So days 1 through 3 create these functional spaces, light and dark spaces, water spaces, water above, water below spaces. Right. And then dry land spaces. So days one through three is spaces. Then days four through six are where God creates the things that fill those Functional spaces from days one to three. So in day one, light and darkness. Day four, he puts the sun and the moon and the stars. A scientific critique on this would be, you can't have light without stars. First, like, he puts light and darkness, and then he puts the sun and the moon and the stars in those spaces. Understand what he's doing? There's a theological point he's making. We'll build to this in just a moment. Day two, waters above, waters below. Day five, he puts birds in the waters above, and then he puts fishes in the waters below. Day three, dry land. And we get land animals on day six to fill in that dry land space. And then at the very end of day six, we get mankind just laying out the panels like that. Like, you see that it's symmetrical and it's poetic in kind of the way that it balances like, functional spaces and then the functionaries that fill those. Those spaces. And the theological implications of this structure is that the cosmos is not the product of a random chance or a conflict like some of the Babylonian narratives about creation, but it's actually a perfectly ordered system designed by a single sovereign mind, or you could say a dualistic being, right? Because Genesis 1 says, Let us go down and make man in our image. So there may be a team working together here, a team of gods, but everything, the point is that everything has its proper place and function from the very beginning, right? The birds in the sky, the fishes in the sea, the land animals on the dry land. He's setting it up and talking about himself as the sovereign of creation, right? But then things get exciting when he talks about the creation of mankind.
- [28:44]
B
This is maybe the part where I need to get on my soapbox a little bit and say Latter Day Saints also don't have to play by the rules that other Christians do. We have multiple accounts of the creation. We have the book of Genesis. We have the book of Moses, which is the Joseph Smith translation of Genesis. Then we have the Book of Abraham, which is a whole other thing, talks about a council of gods. And then we have the account in the temple, which we'll talk about to the degree we feel is appropriate here. We're not going to talk about it too much because it's sacred and special to Latter Day Saints. But let me just illustrate one point. When we get to human creation, there's kind of a climax. God is talking about his creation. Then on day six, his purpose in creating man in Genesis 1:26 is stated as follows. And God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the fowl of the air, over the cattle, over the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So what's our function? To have dominion not just over water animals and not just over sky animals, and not just over the animals on the Dr. Land. We were created to have dominion over the whole of God's created cosmos as his image bearers, to rule over all creation with godlike or righteous dominion. Let me just add too that when it mentions the creation here, it says, so God created man in his own image, and the image of God created him. Male and female created he them. The book of Moses actually takes this idea idea further. The same passage in the book of Moses reads, and I God created man in mine own image, in the image of mine only begotten, created I him, male and female created I them. Suggesting we're not just created in the image of God, we're created in the image of Jesus Christ, his only begotten son. And then it gets really interesting in the book of Abraham, which describes a council of gods creating the earth, which we're never elaborated on. This could be in the temple. It mentions several beings collaboratively working together to create earth. But an interesting Passage here, Abraham 4, 27, implies that there are women assisting in the creation too. It reads, so the gods went down to organize men in their own image in the image of the gods to form they him male and female to form they them. That one makes the most sense from the pronoun perspective, I guess you'd say, because you could always look at Genesis 1:27 and say, how does a human he create a female in his image? Where the book of Abraham just basically solves it by saying there's a council, they're working cooperatively. Male and female are formed in their image. And so we can be a little bit more open about this because we have these four creation accounts to draw from. And some of them also solve some of the problems. If you're taking this too literally, like not all of them use the word day when they describe a creation. Or some of them just say directly that they called this act of creation the first day. It doesn't seem like they're talking about 24 hour periods.
- [31:55]
A
If I hear you correctly, Casey, you're suggesting that it might not be until Genesis chapter one that we have a reference to Heavenly Mother in scripture.
- [32:03]
B
Maybe.
- [32:04]
A
Maybe. Yeah. And we're not alone in suggesting that there's actually a Hebrew Bible lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, of all places, a man named Michael Coogan who said this about Genesis 1, verse 26 and 27. 27. This let us make man in our image, and then male and female is the result. He said the general principle here is that humans are modeled on God almost genetically. Humans are modeled on Elohim, he said, specifically in their sexual differences. The Hebrew word Elohim, he explains, is plural in form and is often used in the Bible with the plural meaning gods. Humans are male and female in the image of the gods. Gods, he said, because gods are male and female humans are as well. Close quote. Whoa, that's very latter day sainty.
- [33:02]
B
Abraham for theology there. Isn't it interesting? Interesting, yeah.
- [33:06]
A
So. So some people derive that just from Genesis 1, but we got a little extra help with our, with Abraham, but that's good. I want to bring up one more point about the seventh day. Day, right, because the seventh day is interesting, right, Because God doesn't do any work on the seventh day. He just rests on the seventh day. But it's, but it's written as though the seventh day is the climax of the whole creation story. Right? He rests, he blesses, he sanctifies that day. And there's actually a super cool theological point that grows out of the context in which one of these accounts was written. Like the latest account that we have of the creation, the, the Genesis form of it. The Genesis 1 form seems to have been drawing from other writings of the creation story all the way back to Moses. But the, the way that this one was written, Genesis 1, most Bible scholars believe it was written post Babylonian exile. This is important. This is like, you know how the Book of Mormon begins with prophets warning that the Babylonians will come and export them, and then they actually do. They scatter them. Right. So it's kind of shortly after the Book of Mormon begins, that time period when the Genesis 1 form, as we have it today, was solidified, most scholars think, and that's actually cool because of what this account does in terms of significance of the seventh day. So Bible scholars will say that the major theological point of the seventh day is that creation's like, purpose is not just merely existence, but it's rest and relationship. Okay. And by resting, God establishes the cosmos as a kind of like cosmic temple where he is enthroned as like the king, as like the ruler overall. And then humans, this is wild. We're actually invited into a perpetual cycle of work and sacred rest in the image of God, like to kind of, to image God to sort of model after God, right? In his sovereign rule. Like he asked us to be his image bearers out to creation, right? To have dominion in a godlike way over him, his creations as kind of like his vice regents. Right. And what's interesting about the historical context of the post Babylonian exile writing of this version of the account is that if you think about it from their perspective, they had just lost their king. They just lost a monarch when the Babylonians came into Jerusalem and decimated them, destroyed the temple, and then took them to Babylon. This is like. I mean, think about the stories of Daniel. Think about, like Ezekiel. This is like Jeremiah, like, of that time period. So they lost a monarch and they've lost the temple. Super important. And what this account does really, really well is to say, hey, I am the sovereign. I am the king over all. So you can rest assured in that. And then secondly, you may not have a sacred space to keep some of the commandments I've given you about what to do in the temple, but you do have sacred time. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Right. On the seventh day, God rested. And you can still, still honor me by honoring the sacred time of the seventh day. So it almost becomes like a temple time period. For those who had just lost the temple that had been destroyed, they're now in a foreign land. How can they stay close to God? How could they be God's image bearers if they don't have, like, a temple and they don't have a, you know, a monarch? And this creation account, the way it's written, is a great boon to that people. In that context, they can. They can still emulate God by honoring him on the seventh day and emulating his rest as his image bearers. So this would reinforce their identity as God's covenant people chosen to do a royal priestly work in this world, even when they were not in an ideally situated context to do that? That's a cool scholarly insight about the way this particular version is written, drawing upon more ancient accounts that come from Moses. Purpose of the seventh day, super valuable, right?
- [37:02]
B
And that's a really important part of the context. They're finding new applications for these stories. You suggested one application that comes from the Babylonian exile that makes the stories meaningful to them. Now, another function appears to be that God is speaking in their language and according to their understanding, but he's also trying to fix some things that they've been taught that are incorrect. Genesis 1, for instance, was written in a cultural environment that was saturated with creation myths. For instance, the Babylonian Babylonians had their own creation account called Enuma Elish. The biblical account systematically refutes the core tenets of these polytheistic narratives by helping Israel retain their special faith amidst their Babylonian captivity. And as Latter Day Saints, we can also push back against another narrative that's popular sometimes, which is that Moses just borrowed from other Middle Eastern cultures and created sort of a tossed salad of his own account. The Book of Moses, which is the Joseph Smith translation, clarifies that this account is refuting that particular notion. In fact, it states directly Moses 2:1. After Moses, one gives us the introduction. Moses, I am God. This is my work and my glory. Moses 2. 1 reads, and it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, behold, I reveal unto you concerning this heaven and this, this earth. Write the words which I speak. I am the beginning and the end. The almighty God by mine only begotten. I created these things, and in the beginning I created the heaven and the earth upon which theft standeth. So it explicitly says God is revealing this creation account to Moses. Moses isn't borrowing it from other people and creating his own kind of concept of God. God is reaching out to Moses.
- [38:59]
A
And I like that you're saying that God is actually kind of pushing back against some of the Babylonian creation narratives to sort of set the record straight. That's actually cool.
- [39:10]
B
Yeah. And keep in mind that as we construct this, we're also borrowing from the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, the Temple account, but you can see him addressing a couple things directly. For instance, let's take a look at one example. That's the Babylonian myth, the Enuma Elish, which starts out by describing the cosmos as beginning with multiple gods emerging from sexual union, for example, Apsu and Tiamat. In contrast to this, the Genesis narrative, which we also pull from Moses and Abraham in the Temple, shows God working in collaboration with other beings, such as presented in the Book of Abraham in the Temple account. And there's no conflict between them. They're collaborating, they're working in harmony to create things. The Babylonian account presents kind of a cosmic conflict where creation comes from a violent battle between warring gods like Marduk slays Tiamat the sea monster, to where in the biblical accounts, creation is, is an effortless function of divine speech. God says, let there be. There's no struggle, there's no violence. God's word is sufficient. And creation is collaborative between the divine entities, as shown in the narratives. In fact, another aspect would be deified elements. For instance, in the Babylonian narrative, the sun, the moon and the stars are often referred to as lesser deities or gods. And the Genesis account demystifies this. The lights are stripped of divine power and they're simply referred to as the greater light and the lesser light created by God and his collaborators for this functional purpose of making seasons and time. Then finally, when it comes to humanity's purpose, in the Babylonian narrative, humans are created on the sixth tablet, a function or way of saying day, sort of as an afterthought to serve the gods, to feed them through sacrifice and stuff like that. Where the Genesis narrative places humans right at the center, it says that humans are the climax of creation. They're made in the image of God to act as God's stewards or co rulers over the earth. And this is the reason creation is spoken of as very good. So you can see a lot of these key tenets of the Babylonian creation myth being pushed back by the book of Genesis. And they're basically correcting and saying, no, humans aren't an afterthought. My work and my glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. They're the main point. Point of what's going on. No, creation wasn't a violent act. It was a collaborative act where I organized things and brought them into existence. Again, it's easy to read this and say he's trying to correct the incorrect things in the narratives that the Israelites would have been told to help them understand how things actually are without overwhelming them by changing things too much. He's still meeting them halfway. He's still meeting them where they are.
- [42:15]
A
And those are really important theological points. Who is God? What role does God see humanity playing? Like, are we just created by him as an afterthought to serve him with sacrifices? That's a very different narrative than we are created as his image bearers in order to be co rulers over creation with him. Like. Like one of those is very ennobling and the other one is super condescending. And so again, he's making, it looks like, to our point here, theological points. These are really important theological assertions about the who of God, the who of humanity, and then like the why of creation, the why of humanity, especially right as God's image bearers who are meant to be his co rulers.
- [43:03]
B
These are all theological questions, like, why am I here? What is my purpose? Stuff that science can't necessarily answer. But that's what the Genesis narrative is supposed to do, is answer those philosophical questions that science isn't equipped to answer.
- [43:18]
A
Yeah. And do I know one more cool, nerdy thing that I just love about the image bearer situation. So the story of creation is like we mentioned, it's like creating this like almost cosmic temple, right? That God is like resting on the seventh day over kind of overseeing. He's kind of in the command chair overseeing everything this, this cosmic temple. And in ancient temples, like Israel's neighbors during this time they had temples and in their temples there were images of the God of that temple. Like there's, we can still find pictures of the temple of Marduk, you know, where you have a temple and the way you know it's Marduk's domain is because there's actually an image of Marduk in there. One of the ways that you can tell, like in Greek temples they do this too. You can go into the temple of Zeus, you know, you know why? You know, it's the temple of Zeus.
- [44:09]
B
There'S a big statue of Zeus in there, right?
- [44:12]
A
Big old statue of Zeus there, right. So the image, image inside the temple is the image of the God of that domain, that space. And so what's super cool in that context is that God says, I'm going to make an image of myself as well and I'm going to put him in my temple. And then what he does is he creates male and female and he calls them his image. Like we are like the walking, talking, breathing representation of the God of this domain. I think that's so cool. These little dirt walkers who he breathed the breath of life into. We're not inanimate, we're like very animate. And he says, I'm going to rule the world through you as my image bears. I want you to have dominion over all of this, but do it in a godlike way in my image. And so that's a little bit nerdy, but I think it's a powerful. Again, why, like who are we? Who are humans in God's mind and why are we here? That seed that is planted in the Genesis account that finds full force fruition, I think in our temple theology, right, about this idea that we were created to become kings and queens, right? Priests and priestesses to help God rule this world. When Christ comes, we're going to rule with him. When the earth is sanctified, we're going to rule with him and the Father. That's our Genesis 1 God given vocation from the very beginning. I don't know if theology gets better than that case.
- [45:37]
B
Yeah. And it's an important corrective, right? Because as we mentioned, the Babylonians kind of thought of us as apostles afterthoughts. And the Greeks thought of us as kind of playthings that the gods kind of capriciously just decided they were going to do stuff with. The Genesis narrative plants the seed for us to eventually say we're the children of God and we're intended to become like God, which is a much healthier worldview, and it's the way that it actually is. You can see why the Lord felt he needed to correct this, because otherwise you're going to get off on some wrong tracks about your relationship with God, God and why he cares about you. There's a big difference between a God who's a loving father and a God who's your landlord, basically, and just does what he will with you.
- [46:28]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [46:29]
B
Yeah, you're his gerbil, I guess.
- [46:31]
A
Okay, so we have tried to demonstrate in this episode that when you read Genesis 1 as a theological text, okay, not as a scientific text, but as a theological text, what some scholars will call a theological historiography, that's the fancy language. When you read it the way that it was intended by the authors to be read, then you see that these authors who are embedded in their own ancient cultures, are working with God to craft a narrative using the best available cultural forms around them, in this case, the ancient Near Eastern cosmology, the seven day structure of creation narratives. But what they're trying to do is to communicate revolutionary truths about God and about humanity that the readers can appreciate. And when modern readers read it through the original kind of lenses, the best we can, like we've just tried to do, like, the messages become really profound without demanding a need to conform to modern science. That's not. Again, that was not the intention here. We've tried, probably really imperfectly today, Casey, to show that one sentence because. Can I say it again? Scripture texts are, number one, the result of a human divine collaboration, two, written by ancient authors embedded in their own cultures, and three, crafted primarily for the purpose of doing theology, not science. That's what we've tried to show with Genesis 1.
- [48:00]
B
Keeping those three things in mind as you read the scriptures will help you avoid the science versus Scripture dilemma that have plagued so many modern people and even caused some to abandon their fai. Then once we get past asking the science questions of the text, we're ready for some pretty sophisticated and intentional theological writing that will blow our minds, that will help us actually strengthen our faith in God and understand his purposes. So again, it goes back to what we said in episode one, the right tool for the right job. I don't think the Genesis text, the creation narrative in Genesis, Moses, Abraham, or the temple was intended to really explain how the earth was created. They're intended to answer the question of why the earth was created. That's a really, really important question that everybody wonders about. At some point, we can use science to study the question of how, what, when, where, but we use religion to study the question of why. And once we understand that and read the text, we'll see it for what it's meant to be, and we'll be able to draw a little bit more meaning from it.
- [49:06]
A
Well, that was a whole lot of fun for me, Casey. This is my idea of a good time. And we should do it again next week. How about that?
- [49:15]
B
Yeah, what if, what if we.
- [49:16]
A
What if we tackled like a, like a couple kind of more rapid fire. Let's go through a couple more of these in scripture, maybe do a little workshop of this, of this sentence and kind of show how this, how this works with some of the other kind of big ones, like, I don't know, Joshua commanding the sun to hold still, like, what is that? Or how about the scattering of people at the Tower of Babel as the origin story of the world's 7,000 different languages? Languages like, you know, modern linguists would totally balk at that. Let's do some of these. Let's do the flood narrative, let's do a couple others, and we'll just kind of keep playing with this sentence, right? The scripture texts are a human divine collaboration written by ancient authors embedded in their own cultures, and they're crafted primarily to do theology. We'll play around with some of those that kind of trip modern readers up and have a good time. We'll see if we can succeed or not. I don't know. No promises there, but I can promise that will be fun.
- [50:12]
B
We'll take these ideas for, out for a test drive and see what we can do with them.
- [50:15]
A
There you go. This was just the first chapter of the Bible. And maybe, maybe it bears saying that not every chapter in the Bible is written in the same type of a way as Genesis 1. This was one example of a type of genre. We called it theological historiography. That is one fancy term that Bible scholars talk about, about, but maybe we should talk about. Just as we conclude today that there's actually other forms of genres in the Bible and each one of them is going to take a little different reading, maybe a different skill set to read it, but the paradigm still applies of ancient culture. But different genres. I don't. Do you want to say anything about different genres in scriptural text?
- [51:02]
B
I mean, the word Bible itself. We think of the Bible as one unified book, but really the name itself itself means the books. It comes from biblia, which is the Greek word that just means the books. And it's best to think of the Bible as kind of a divine library, a collection of books that was intended to provide us with guidance and inspiration. But just like a real library, there's different genres that shouldn't all be read the same way. So we've been tackling the Book of Genesis today, which is kind of this historical creation story. They're telling us where things came from, but with a strict emphasis on why. There are other books in the Bible that are more historical that we would take more literally. There are some books in the Bible that are poetic, that aren't intended to be taken literally or historically. They're intended to convey ideas using poetry, through symbolism and simile and allegory and so on and so forth. And we say this because the paradigm that we've set up today works for the Book of Genesis. But we don't want to take it too far. Some people would apply this model to all partial of Scripture and say, well, everything in scripture is metaphorical or symbolic and nothing literally happened when a lot of it literally did happen. There is literally a place called Jerusalem, and you can go there. You and I have both visited. It's been rebuilt and destroyed and rebuilt several times. That's literal history. We also don't want to commit the mistake of somebody saying, well, all scripture is allegorical. So the Book of Mormon is just a big allegory that's supposed to talk about how we overcome the natural man. No, we believe the Book of Mormon is in the genre of history. Now, within the Book of Mormon, there is allegory, like the allegory of the olive tree. There's cosmology, there's apocalyptic literature like Nephi's vision, where he sees the history of the world, but it's presented in highly symbolic terms. What an intelligent reader of the Scripture does is sits down and says, what kind of genre am I reading right now? When I'm reading Isaiah, I'm reading prophecy. When I'm reading 2 Kings, I'm reading history. When I'm reading Genesis, I'm reading theological historiography. And when you recognize that, you kind of know what it's intended for, and then you can use it the way that it was intended to be used, just the Right tool for the right job. The Book of Genesis is telling us why we're here and why the earth was created in beautiful and profound but probably not literal ways. Other books like the Book of Mormon are telling a story in a more literal way. They really did travel to the Americas. There really was a civilization set up here. There really were places like Jerusalem and Zarahemla. It's not an allegory. So again, as we give you these tools, just remember they're tools that work on this specific genre. But there's other genres that you can take more literally, and you should take more literally. They were intended to be taken literally as we go. So keep in mind we're walking into a big library right now and we headed towards the theological historiography section. But over here might be history, over here might be poetry, over here might be prophecy. And each one of those is its own genre that if you study, understand, you'll get more meaningful out of. Like Nephi does a great job in 2 Nephi, giving us a whole set of points to understand Isaiah so that it makes more sense to it. We're just doing the same thing with Genesis and we might take a different approach if we were working with a more literal historical book. But Genesis, as you've mentioned, Scott, is. I think it was nt wright that said Genesis 1:11 is the old Testament's Old Testament. So this is the old stuff, even if you're a writer of the Old Testament. And so looking at it with the intent of what did the author's intent when they originally wrote it.
- [54:50]
A
Yeah. And we've tried to craft our little helpful sentence. We hope it's helpful to you to apply to all of the different genres. Right. And it's a working sentence that we might massage in the future. But no matter the genre, Scripture is going to be the result of a human divine collaboration. God's working through humans, through his image bearers. And those humans are embedded in a collaboration cultural context. And what they're writing is crafted primarily for the purpose of doing theology. Even when they're doing the history books. Right. They're oftentimes establishing some of the credentials of God's covenant people, Israel, what God is doing through Israel in the world. And so even in the historical books, like we're watching claims being made about how God works in the world through his covenant people. And those are highly, highly theological. They're covenantal. When we start getting into the family of David, it's very much about a monarchy, but it's also, it's Also pointing toward the future king that will become the son of David, who will rule Israel forever. We're starting to see little threads being woven through the history that start to point to Jesus as the truth, true Israelite, as the son of David, as the seed of Abraham who's going to bless the world. So the history is always. There's always theology, even in the history, certainly in the poetry, certainly in this early Genesis material, but I would say even in the historical books. So that's kind of fun to look for and to just know what the genre is and then you can go have fun looking for those nuggets.
- [56:33]
B
Yeah. And people who try to set up a conflict between science and religion often try to try to set up a strawman argument by assuming that everything we read in the Bible should be taken literally. Like if the word says day, it means day exactly the way we use it as a 24 hour period when, if you understand the genre of the book of Genesis, that's not really what they're going for. Now, some people do read the Bible very literally, but Latter Day Saints, like we said, don't play by the same rules. And we have a couple things that allow us to take a more sophisticated approach to the Bible to back up, look at what the author is trying to do, understand the intent of the Lord, and also do the work to understand the understanding of the people that God is speaking to and the manner of language which they speak in. So again, this is an approach to the Book of Genesis. The rest of this, we're going to try and arm you with some tools to look around and say, well, is this something that should be taken poetically? Is this something that should be taken literally? Is this history? Is this theological historiography? All of this will help you understand what the purpose is behind the book. And understanding the purpose and the audience helps us understand the meaning.
- [57:47]
A
Well, I look forward to next week, Casey, where we get to take some more difficult Old Testament stories out for a little test drive and try to apply these principles to those. So. Yeah, until then. Until then.
- [58:01]
B
Okay, looking forward to it. All right, see you then, Scott.