Modern Science and Allegory in the Early Stories of Genesis

In my 30s I had a mighty religious crisis. This was the time that I realized that however one looked at it the first creation story at the beginning of Genesis made no sense scientifically.

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But how could the Torah, which I regarded as nothing less than the word of God, be off the mark? 

As a teenager, had been fascinated by the correspondence between the biblical creation account and science. I went to talks about the Genesis story, some of them given by physicists. I read the book of Gerald Schroeder on this topic.1 When I was a lot older, I invited him as a guest speaker to our synagogue. I also devoured books about the Big Bang and astronomy.

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When I read Schroeder’s paragraph about the convergence between the creation account and modern science regarding the creation of light on the first day of creation I was enthralled:

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When the universe was very young, it was also very small.  All the energy that today is spread over the reaches of space was concentrated into that confined, primordial volume. . .  Several hundred thousand years passed. Temperature and photon energies had continued to fall in proportion with the universe’s expansion. When the temperature fell below 3000°, a critical event occurred: light separated from matter and emerged from the darkness of the universe. . . . The light of Genesis 1:3 existed prior to the Divine separation of light from darkness, which is described in Genesis 1:4. Both the Talmud and cosmology acknowledge that this first “light” was of a nature so powerful that it would not have been visible by humans. We have learnt from science that the “light” of that early period was in the energy range of gamma rays, an energy far in excess of that which is visible to the naked eye. As the thermal energy of the photons fell to 3000° K  . . .  they became visible as well. Light was now light and darkness dark, theologically and scientifically. With an understanding that light was actually held within the primeval mass until being freed by the binding of electrons into atomic orbits, the enigmatic division by God between light (which is totally composed of photons) and darkness takes on a significant meaning consistent with its literal meaning.1

 

Despite this, the more I thought about the creation story, the more I began appreciating the huge gulf between the biblical creation account and the scientifically accepted version of the creation of the universe and planet earth.

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To review the scientific version in brief:

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In the beginning, some 13.8 billion years ago, there was a Big Bang. Within the first few minutes of time zero, protons and neutrons combined to form the nuclei of light elements, primarily hydrogen and helium. Hundreds of millions of years later, regions of gas began to collapse under the influence of gravity to form the first stars and galaxies. Within the core of these stars, nuclear fusion created heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen. When massive stars ended their lives as supernova explosions, heavy elements were thrown into space and this material also became part of new stars.

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The sun began as a giant molecular cloud of dust and gas, primarily hydrogen. As the temperature of this protostar increased, nuclear fusion occurred and the hydrogen nuclei began fusing to form helium. This led to the release of vast amounts of energy. At the same time, leftover material of dust and ice stuck together and coalesced to form the planets of our solar system. These included our earth, moon, and asteroids.

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It is generally believed that simple plant life such as photosynthetic bacteria and algae appeared around 3.5 billion years ago and more complex plant life, such as terrestrial plants, evolved later. Animal life, starting with simple organisms, began in the oceans around 600 million years ago and became more complex over time. The scientific story is one of initial simplicity, with increasing complexity developing over billions of years.

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Genesis I is very different from this. It begins when earth is already formed, but all is chaos.2 God’s role is to organize this chaos in a systematic way so as to make it habitable for human life. Animal life is only created once all plant life is fully developed and ready to be consumed.

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There is, of course, no reason why the Genesis account should have included any modern science. The Big Bang and evolutionary ideas would have been inexplicable to people living in the ancient world.  It would also have contradicted the “science” of their day. However, to my mind, the least God could have done was to write Genesis I in such a way that it contained no contradictions with modern science.

Both earth and the sun are parts of the solar system. The formation of the sun preceded the formation of the earth. However, in the Torah, primitive earth was created on day 1 and not until day 4 was the sun created. Vegetation was created on day 3, which is before the creation of the luminaries on day 4 and the animals on day 6. Moreover, in the Bible, a firmament called heaven is created on day 2 wedged between two layers of water. This space could represent the earth’s atmosphere. However, modern science recognizes no layer of water in the upper regions of outer space.

 

Furthermore, when talking about billions of years of creation, it makes little sense to talk about days of creation, even if they are considered to be periods of time. Gradual processes extending over billions of years cannot be chopped up neatly into seven periods of time.

 

So, this is where I stood for many years — professing a belief in the Divine nature of the Torah but harboring doubts that this was truly the case. Genesis I seemed to be an account written by humans that was framed in the “science” prevalent at that time. Whether I wanted to or not I was gravitating towards the Documentary Hypothesis and its idea of there being different authors of the Torah writing from their own perspectives of reality.

 

Some years later I was directed to the works of Nahum Sarna3 and Umberto Cassuto4 on the Bible and they provided me with a new perspective on the early chapters of Genesis. Both proposed that many of these stories had an underlying foundation of mythology. Mythology was important to the people living at that time since it provided the framework for understanding the world in which they lived, just as the Bible does for us today.

 

Sarna is his book “Understanding Genesis”3 proposed that the early chapters in Genesis were polemics against paganism and the way of thinking of Mesopotamian society. Nevertheless, these biblical stories were written in the same format as the original mythological stories and can be considered as anti-myths.

 

A corollary of this has to be that many, if not most, of the early stories of Genesis are not historical accounts but allegory.

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According to Jewish tradition, Adam is regarded as “adam harishon,” the first man. But the Bible never calls him this. Cain after killing Abel complains to God that “whoever meets me will kill me” (Genesis 4:4:14). But who in the world can kill him? According to the Bible there are only four people left on earth — Adam, Eve and Cain himself. However, the Torah does not deny that there are other people around. It must be that these four people are character sketches about four allegorical individuals at a certain time in history, namely when man had ceased to be a hunter-gatherer and was firmly engaged in the Agricultural Revolution and the onset of civilization.

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The Torah does not hide the allegorical nature of these early stories. It is clearly there for all to see. Consider the following biblical description of the Garden of Eden:

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​A river issues forth from Eden to water the garden and from there it is divided and becomes four headwaters. The name of the first is Pishon, the one that encircles the whole land of Chavilah, where the gold is. The gold of that land is good; bdellium is there and the shohar stone. The name of the second river is Gichon, the one that encircles the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Chidekel, the one that flows towards the east of Ashur; and the fourth one is the Euphrates (Genesis 2:10-14).

For us moderns, this geographical description of the Garden of Eden is puzzling. However, someone living at the time of the Bible would probably have been familiar with the location of these four rivers and would have been aware that not all of them joined up in Mesopotamia.

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​The river “Chidekel” is usually identified with the Tigris, which was known in Mesopotamia as “Idiglat”1 and this river does indeed join the “Euphrates” near the Persian Gulf. However, this is nowhere near “the land of Cush.” The “land of Chavila” is mentioned elsewhere in the Bible as being where Ishmael’s progeny lived and is far from Mesopotamia — “They dwelt from Chavila to Shur — which is near Egypt — towards Assyria” (Genesis 25:18).5 Mesopotamia was, and still is, poorly endowed with mineral wealth, but the upper reaches of the Nile were well known for their “gold”, and “Pishon” and “Gichon” may well be two tributaries of the Nile in southern Egypt.

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What the Bible is doing here is describing a fictitious place in which the most desirable water and mineral resources of the known world were located together in a sublimely fertile and rich paradise.

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The villainous walking-talking snake in the Garden of Eden story is also difficult to accept other than allegorically. Medieval Jewish commentators have been bound in the main to a literal understanding of this snake, as well as to the entirety of the Garden of Eden story, but many have been prepared to accept that the serpent represents evil. However, a snake with understandable speech, that had limbs enabling it to walk, and that could at a moment’s notice be transformed into the crawling snake we recognize today has to be an allegorical representation. What this is precisely we will discuss in the relevant chapter. 

 

Moreover, many of the names of the characters in these early stories seem symbolic. The name Adam probably means red, or ruddy from the Hebrew word adom, although it also come from the word “adama,” meaning ground. The Hebrew for Eve is Chava. The Bible explains that this is because she is “the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). Cain, or Kayin in Hebrew, means one who acquires or creates, from the Hebrew word liknot (Genesis 4:1). Abel comes from the word hevel, which means nothingness, vanity or a breath of wind (Genesis 4:2). Noah is the reverse of the word chen, which means grace. Shem means a name or reputation.

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Noah’s flood is also difficult to accept literally. Flood layers have been found in the Tigris and Euphrates basins in archeological surveys, but a flood that reached as high as the peaks of the mountains of Armenia would have flooded the entire Near East. Of such a flood there is no archeological evidence.

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Noah’s ark as a functional boat also stretches the imagination. It cannot be that all living things would fit into an ark measuring 470 feet in length, 78 feet in width, and 47 feet in height (300 x 50 x 30 cubits), which is about the size of 1½ football fields (Genesis 6:15). Most zoos in the world are much bigger than this and contain only a miniscule sampling of the earth’s moving population. The ark would also have had to contain a year’s worth of food for all these animals. The reality is that people in the ancient world would have found this tale as incredulous as we do. However, unlike today, they were familiar with these types of allegorical accounts. The popular Gilgamesh myth, for example, similarly has an ark and a flood and was also not intended to be taken literally.

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​One might say that for an orthodox Jew like myself to label these stories allegoric is apologetics, a way of preserving belief in the truth of the Torah in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I cannot deny that in the depths of my consciousness there may be an element of this. However, this is not the reason I adopted an allegorical approach to understanding these stories.These allegories probe the relationships between God, humanity, and the Jewish people and in so doing open up new vistas in ethics and philosophy in ways that no other ancient, or even modern texts, could have done.

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​Admittedly, the majority of Jewish commentators have viewed these stories as historic and factual accounts and have gleaned ancient midrashim for the ethical messages contained within them. However, if a story is allegorical, it has to have meaning. An allegory without a readily discernable message is a failed allegory. Hence, if the early stories in the Torah are allegorical, then a huge section of Genesis is pregnant with meaning just waiting to be interpreted.  

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​Given all the evidence in favor of allegory, why did the Jewish sages of Mishnaic and Talmudic times, as well as the majority of medieval commentators, feel compelled to interpret these stories literally? 

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An issue is that once one adopts an allegorical approach to the stories of Genesis, the boundary between allegory and history in subsequent stories becomes very blurred. In other words, where does allegory stop and history take over?

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Was there an historic Abraham, for example, or was he an allegoric invention? And if he was an imagined person, what are we to make of the promises made to him by God and to his son Isaac and grandson Jacob? Is there any validity to promises made to imaginary persons? And what about Moses? Is he also fictitious? And if so, is there any historical basis to the Exodus and the subsequent settling of the Land of Canaan? 

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​I, for one, cannot accept allegorical forefathers and an allegorical Moses. I take it as a matter of faith that the promises made to our forefathers were real and that the Exodus happened just as the Bible says it happened. By the time of Abraham, history had taken over from allegory. Cain and Abel may have been fictitious, but Abraham was a very real person. 

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Nevertheless, matters may not be quite as simple as this. ​Many of the Genesis stories contain highly formalized constructs, such as chiastic structures. Nachmanides has proposed the principle of ma’aseh avot siman lebonim, that the deeds of the forefathers are signs to their children.6 In other words, the actions of the forefathers foreshadow future events that will shape the destiny of the Jewish people.

​But ordinary lives have no signs for the future, and most lives do not proceed in formalized and stylized ways. Does this not mean then that in the end we have to admit that there is some allegory in the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?

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One way of resolving this issue is to say that if one puts all one’s efforts into pursuing a life of meaning that is in accord with God’s values, then heaven will respond to this. The Jewish sages summarize this by saying that “the reward of a mitzvah is another mitzvah.”7  Hence, meaning and significance become apparent for the highlights of one’s life. The forefathers functioned at such a high spiritual level that they became almost prophets, or close to this. They experienced visions from God, while Jacob experienced periods of prophecy (Genesis 48:19 and 49:1). This means that God became very intimately involved in their lives and may even have directed their lives in certain directions. The alternative, of course, is to say that there are indeed allegorical aspects to the lives of the forefathers. In the final analysis, however, I cannot agree that they were imaginary people.

 

Nahum Sarna3 and Umberto Cassuto4 surmised that the early biblical stories were written on a foundation of well-known mythology as polemics against paganism and the ideas underlying paganism. R’ Menachem Leibtag has another idea, and this is that these mythological accounts are reworked to illustrate the need for a person such as Abraham, and then the need for an Israelite people and a Covenant at Mount Sinai. In other words, the Torah is a continuous story that begins on a mythological basis and ends with the Jewish people about to enter the Promised Land. This aspect is presented by means of two names for God, YHWH and Elohim.

 

It is a novel idea that has much to recommend it. It does not, of course, negate the ideas of Sarna and Cassuto. All that remains is to prove it, and this I will attempt to do in the chapters that follow.

 

​References:

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1. “Needed, a Big Universe” in “Genesis and the Big Bang. The Discovery of Harmony between Modern Science and the Bible” by Gerald L. Schroeder, Chapter 5 p89, Bantam Books. 1992.

2. The notion of chaos is reflected by the word “tohu” and “vohu” in Genesis 1:2 although their translation is unclear since these words are not found elsewhere in the Bible other than as an allusion to Genesis. Rashi following a midrash translates it as “astonishment and amazement” or “astonishingly empty,” this being the reaction a person would have at the void. Targum Yonasan translates the words as “emptiness and desolation” and the Kuzari as “absence of form and order.”

3.   Creation, Genesis 1-4 in Understanding Genesis. The Heritage of Biblical Israel by Nahum M. Sarna, Schoken Books, New York. 1970.

1. A Commentary on the Book of Genesis. Part One. From Adam to Noah and Part Two. From Noah to Abraham by U. Cassuto, he Magnes Press, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 1998.

5.   Nachmanides (commentary to Genesis 2:10) considers the Land of Chavila to be to the north and east rather than the south and west of Israel, and therefore dismisses the sentence about Ishmael’s progeny (Genesis 25:8) as being irrelevant to the location of Chavila as described in the second chapter of Genesis. In support of his position is that an individual named Chavila is mentioned twice in Genesis, once as the grandson of Ham and nephew of Mizraim (Genesis 10:7), and also as a sixth generation of Shem and grandson of Ophir (Genesis 10:28). The descendants of Shem dwelt in “the mountain to the East” (Genesis 10:30). The phrase “where the gold is” could identify this particular Chavilah as being in the territory of Ophir, which is mentioned as being a source of gold at the time of King Solomon (Kings I 9:28). On the other hand, Nachmanides does accept the Pishon as being the Nile (commentary to Genesis 3:22), and interprets the confluence of these rivers in a symbolic manner. 

6.    See for example Nachmanides commentary to Genesis 12:10 where he explains that        Abram's journey to Egypt due to a famine and his subsequent experiences there portend the future descent of his descendants, the Israelites, to Egypt and their enslavement. Regarding Genesis 26:1, he discusses how Isaac's encounter with a famine and his interactions with Abimelech mirror similar events in the lives of his descendants. With respect to Genesis 32:4-13, he interprets Jacob's preparations and prayers before meeting Esau as prefiguring the future struggles and strategies of the Israelites when confronting hostile nations. In Genesis 37:15-17, he views Joseph's journey to find his brothers as indicative of the future journeys of the Israelites in search of their destiny and their encountering various challenges. For Genesis 47:28, he sees Jacob's insistence on being buried in Canaan as a sign of the future importance of the Land of Israel to his descendants and their eventual return to it. And in Exodus 1:1-7, Nachmanides interprets the multiplication and prosperity of the Israelites in Egypt despite their hardships as a precursor to future periods of growth and flourishing under challenging conditions.

7.   Mishna Avot 4:2