Genesis or Creation

The Priestly Account

Divine Fiat

Heaven and earth, centre and circumference were made in the same instance of time and clouds full of water and man was created by the Trinity on the 26th of October, 4004 B.C., at 9 o'clock in the morning.

Dr. John lightfoot, 1654.

This was priestly knowledge of Creation in the seventeenth century A.D. What then of the seventh century B.C.? It should be understood that there was at that time no knowledge of man's natural development — anthropology, or of the creative process — cosmogony. To its priestly scribes this world was the center of the universe and man the sole concern of its Creator. That there were other worlds and galaxies was quite beyond their comprehension.

So let us realize that priests are not revealers of truth but only keepers of traditions, and that the purpose of both the scribes and their later translators was not to reveal the truth but to lay the basis of a theistic religion, based on the supernatural and the terrifying. This accounts for the presence here of the awesome word God. The original Hebrew did not use this singular word, or its equivalent, but the plural Elohim, many gods or aspects. Had this been followed, the mental darkness of monotheism might have been dispelled. It should also be noted that the word genesis does not mean "something out of nothing." It is a derivative of the word gene, the life germ, thus implying generation, growth. This is the key to the Mystery and if we would solve it we must make a clear distinction between the God of religion and the Creator of worlds. The one is a human ideal, the other a cosmic principle. These things understood, the interpretation offered here will not seem so preposterous.

We will not bore the reader with a verse-by-verse analysis but as with the Bible it seems a good way to begin. And so to Genesis 1:

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

This very first verse disqualifies the Bible as authority, for it implies the aforesaid lack of knowledge. The author did not know how the world was created, and so he said a God created it. This is ignorance's way of explaining what it does not understand. The author's resort to it here is reminiscent of something a literary critic once said: "Whenever an author introduces a Chinaman in his story, I know that he is then writing about something he knows nothing about — 'the inscrutable Chinee.' "So with the author here: he too is writing about something he knew nothing about, namely, Causation and Creation, "revelation" to the contrary.

2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

"The Spirit of God" is a false term due to the idea of a personal Deity. The Creator, on the contrary, is not a spirit, nor has it a spirit; it is spirit in the sense of substance, a morally unqualified principle, whose modus operandi is that of violence. Here it moved very gently upon the waters. No mention is made of the violence involved in the creation of a world which includes the sun period, nor the trillions of years of time. No word of a "war in heaven," as of John the Revelator, nothing about a beast, a devil, a Satan-opposer — just peaceful creation by word of mouth. This is woeful ignorance of cosmogony.

In all other ancient cosmologies we find the Creator battling with some cosmic monster, out of whose body the world was formed: Sosiosh with Tiamat, Odin with Ymir, the Rig-Veda gods with Parusha, etc. This we say is pagan ignorance and Genesis the Hebrews' superior wisdom. This, for instance: "Where the Babylonian poet saw only the action of deified forces of nature the Hebrew writer saw the working of God. And that insight was Inspiration." And right there natural creation became supernatural, and that "inspiration," superstition. The result was twenty-five hundred years of benighted worship instead of welfare. This is the error and the evil this book fastened upon Western man and only now are we beginning to suspect it.

By the time this account was written the Hebrews had lost all knowledge of Causation and Creation and Genesis 1 is the result. In writings much older than this we find their Yahweh battling with Leviathan, the dragon, the serpent, Isaiah, 27:1. Psalm 74 reads thus: "Thou breakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness." And in the Apocryphal Book of Enoch we read: "In that day shall be distributed for food two monsters; a feminine monster, whose name is Leviathan, dwelling in the depths of the sea, above the springs of waters; and a male monster whose name is Behemoth. ..." In job41:10, God and Leviathan are as one: "None is so fierce that dare stir him (Leviathan) up: who then is able to stand before me?"

Why then is this aspect absent in the Priestly account? Besides the fact that the priests needed the divine, the perfect, the supernatural for their religion, its absence is due to the translators' ignorance of the words they were translating, words such as bara tebom, tohu, bohu, and others. These do convey a hint of warfare and violence. The original Hebrew reads thus: "In the beginning Elohim (many gods) bara (not created, but cut out) the heavens and the earth. And the earth was tobu and bahu, and darkness was on the surface of the tehom"

Tebom is the primordial...