Why Genesis Is the Ultimate Counter-Narrative

Was Genesis written to contradict the creation myths of their pagan neighbors? Yes and no.

If you’ve done much reading recently on the origins debate, you may have noticed that those who want to make room for evolution in Genesis 1-2 have moved past theories like day-age and gap. The new rationale is that Genesis is a creation myth, an origin story written by an ancient people. Other cultures and civilizations had their stories about where we came from, and such stories normally focused more on making sense of the world than they did on the material origin of the universe, or so the logic goes. In such a cultural arena, the story in Genesis is designed to push back against those false claims, not to give us a literal material origin of the universe. Genesis is making theological claims, we are told, not scientific ones.

How does this play out? Maybe it’s better to show you than tell you. As we have discovered more and more of the creation myths of Israel’s neighbors, several things have stood out, commonalities or contradictions that we see in the Genesis account. For example, many of Israel’s neighbors believed that creation began with a dark, tumultuous water from which everything came. That does, in fact, sound a lot like Genesis 1:2, where immediately after we read that God created the heavens and the earth, there is a watery depth the Spirit is hovering over. Ancient stories had a greater focus on organization of the cosmos, and similarly Genesis 1 seems to provide a nice orderly account of how God worked to bring beauty and order to the earth.

But perhaps more interesting than the overlap is the differences. For example, many of the ancient stories began with gods giving birth, and then fighting, and killing one another. In contrast, the story of the Bible tells of no other gods except the God who single-handidly created everything. Ancient stories describe great battles that led to the creation of the world. In the Bible God merely speaks. In ancient cultures, the sun was highly revered and the stars were thought of as divine. In the Bible the word “sun” isn’t even used (it’s called the greater light) and the stars are an afterthought. Ancient Mesopotamian sources also believed that mankind was created by the gods for slave labor. The Bible, on the other hand, teaches that man was made to rule over the earth on God’s behalf. Ancient cultures thought their rulers were the very image of God, but in Scripture every person is made in the image of God by merely existing.

All of this adds up to a very different story, at times using similar language but turning it completely on its head. That different story will lead to a very different outlook on God, the world, and humanity’s role. It is a counter-narrative, a story told for apologetic purposes to help people reorient their way of thinking. Living in the shadow of great empires like Egypt and Babylon, and walking into the land of Canaan, God gave a story to His people to help them reshape their thinking. Therefore, we shouldn’t read this as a literal account, because that misses the point. The point is that this is a creation myth, like the ones around it but also very unlike them.

So was Genesis written as a counter-narrative? Yes and no. Yes, the book of Genesis refutes lots of bad ideas that were current in the day, because it told a very different story of how we got here. A non-Israelite living in 1,000 B.C. would certainly have heard the Bible’s account of creation and been very confused. But was it written to rebut the wrong thinking of the cultures around Israel only? Is it true to claim that this text is making theological claims and not scientific ones?

Well, I would agree that we don’t get a scientific account in Genesis 1-2. The exact scientific processes that God might have used in the creation of the world are not given to us. We learn nothing of string theory or quantum mechanics. But we are given a historical account of what happened. “God spoke and the world came into being” is not a scientific claim so much as a historical claim. That historical claim has scientific implications, for example for the theory of evolution, but I do think it’s more accurate to say that these are historical claims. So let me ask this question, “Is Genesis 1-2 making historical claims or theological claims?” Well, obviously it’s making both.

Are the accounts in the gospels of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus making historical claims, or theological ones? What about the exodus story we find in, well, Exodus? Is that text a historical text or a theological one? The truth is, all of Christianity makes theological claims that it ties to historical claims, from Abraham to Jacob to David to Jesus to Paul. Christianity is unique in that it does not merely tell stories, it tells stories that it claims are true. It would be weird for the only exception to this to be the very first story in the Bible (or if you doubt the historical Adam, perhaps the first few stories).

Yes, the Genesis account has some striking similarities with its neighbors, while also correcting them at certain points. That is because the Bible gives us the true story of where we came from, whereas the nations of the world give us distorted versions that have been confused by the Serpent. So yes, the Bible is a counter-narrative, but not because it was written to respond to the wrong thinking around Israel. It is a counter-narrative because it tells the truth and the truth contradicts the lies. And by the way, it has continued to be a counter-narrative.

During the period of Greek domination, many Jews and later Christians were bothered by the Genesis account, but for different reasons. The Greeks believed that matter was bad and spirit was good, a belief commonly referred to as dualism. To have a good spiritual being create a good material world seemed laughable to Greek ways of thinking, and so thinkers like Philo and Origen buckled under the pressure. They began allegorizing Genesis to make it more palatable to the intellectual elites of their day. But the created world is good, because God said so repeatedly (Genesis 1). Genesis served as counter-narrative correcting Greek thinking on this point, but that meant, of course, if you accepted the text as it stood you would be thought an idiot.

Today, the theory is evolution. We are confidently told that the debate is over, the science is settled, we came from microbes that began evolving billions of years ago. Of course, if you take Genesis 1-11 as real history, there isn’t room for billions of years for things to evolve. Once again, Christians have begun fishing around for another explanation. “Genesis was a counter-narrative!” they claim, and in a way they are right. The story of evolution is the story about how humans came into existence by accident, with no purpose and no destiny, except to eventually die out with the rest of the universe. Morality does not exist, except whatever morality can be derived from the survival of the fittest (and that could lead to some pretty dark places).

But the Bible contradicts this story. We aren’t here randomly, we were created for a purpose and a mission. There is a divine Rule-Giver and a divine judgment coming, so there is a hard and fast morality which we all must obey. And there is an eternal destiny for everyone, both believer and non-believer. Ironically, those who call Genesis a counter-narrative are right. In fact, they are more right than they even realize.