Lecture 9: Reading Genesis 1 to 11 as History: Days, the Image, the Seed, and the Flood

The lecture, section by section

1. Tools, not crutches

   Be Bible readers, not commentary readers: commentaries help you understand the text, and even the expositions of the seminary's own president are tools, never scripts to be preached word for word. Essex sorts the shelf into three kinds: exegetical commentaries that assume a working knowledge of Hebrew, where Wenham and Hamilton are the two great evangelical works on Genesis, with Essex leaning toward Wenham; English interpretation commentaries, which explain the text for readers without the languages, modeling exactly what a preacher does in the pulpit; and expositional works, sermons and preaching helps that add illustration and application, from Hughes's printed sermons to volumes like Ross and the bridging-the-contexts format.

2. Studying for the pulpit

   Essex admits his own library left seminary top-heavy with exegetical volumes, and forty years of ministry have shifted the weight toward exposition, because the goal is never an exegetical dump but taking what the text means and making it understandable and applicable, first to yourself, then to the people God sends you to. There is no greater ministry given to any human being than the stewardship of proclaiming and explaining God's word.

3. Myth, fiction, or history?

   The first interpretive issue of Genesis is the literary nature of chapters 1 through 11. Fiction, the claim that it is unhistorical and valueless, survives only in university classrooms; no preacher holds it. Myth treats the stories as vehicles of truth whose historicity is immaterial, whether Adam lived making no difference to the lesson. And the evangelical variant, symbolic theology, holds that the account is rooted in history but is not history, a position Essex confesses he cannot distinguish from myth beyond its more comfortable name.

4. The case for history

   Genesis 1 through 11 teaches theology, and it happened. There is no discernible literary difference between the first eleven chapters and the last thirty-nine: the same narrative style, not poetry. The text bristles with historical anchors, sixty-four geographical terms, from the Tigris and Euphrates that flow on through Scripture to Revelation 16, eighty-eight personal names, dozens of generic and cultural items, metals, buildings, instruments, all things Israel on the plains of Moab knew. And the New Testament confirms it: Jesus spoke of Adam, of Noah, of creation and flood, and Jesus spoke truth, not accommodation to error.

5. Day one: the grammar of Genesis 1:1 to 5

   The gap theory's reading, that verse 2 describes the earth becoming formless after a prior creation, sits poorly with the Hebrew: verse 2 is a circumstantial clause setting the scene for the events of verses 3 to 5, and the whole of verses 1 through 5 is best taken as day one, the original creation of the universe, not a re-creation, exactly as John 1 echoes it: in the beginning. The days then unfold in a real correlation, what was formless given form on days one through three, what was empty filled on days four through six.

6. Spirit, not wind

   Ruach can mean spirit, wind, or breath by context, and in the flood narrative God does cause a wind to pass over the waters. But in Genesis 1:2 the verb decides: wind does not hover, brooding like a bird over its nest; the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And a pastoral caution follows: though God, Spirit, and the divine word all stand in the first three verses, do not preach the Trinity from them, for Israel on the plains of Moab had no revelation yet to hear it. The New Testament will show the Father as planner and the Son as the Creator through whom all things came to be; Genesis 1 could not have said that to its first audience.

7. The days of creation

   In evangelical circles the live options have narrowed to two, and both agree that yom in Genesis 1 means a twenty-four-hour day. The question is whether the days are history or literary framework. The majority reading across Jewish and Christian history has been ordinary days, for plain reasons: each day closes with evening and morning, a numbered day with yom in the Torah always means a single day, and Exodus 20 grounds Israel's six days of labor and seventh of rest in God's own six days of work. The framework view takes the same days as a literary device rather than a record; Essex answers that the pattern is real but the history is too. Moses, under the Spirit, selected and arranged, just as the plague narratives will show a deliberate pattern, and a patterned account of real events is still an account of real events. Literary does not mean ahistorical, or the whole Bible is ahistorical.

8. The image of God: reflection and representative

   Is the image of God man's reflection of God, or his role as God's representative? Essex answers yes: both. Man reflects God in his endowments, the capacities to see and hear, to reason, to will, to feel, because his Maker sees, hears, thinks, wills, and loves, and he bears those capacities in order to represent God, ruling the earth in God's stead. The ancient world knew the idiom: a conqueror set up images of himself in conquered territory to declare, in his absence, that he ruled. Man is God's living image planted in God's world.

9. The seed of the woman

   Genesis 3:15 sets enmity between the serpent's seed and the woman's seed, and the pronouns narrow to the singular: he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel. The classic Christian reading sees the cross: a heel wound, real but not final, absorbed by Messiah, and a head wound, lethal, dealt to Satan. Essex adds a possibility from within the Torah itself: the crushing of the head reappears in Numbers 24, where the star out of Jacob crushes the heads of his enemies at the end of the days, so the verse may look to the second coming and Satan's final instrument. Either way, the first promise of the gospel stands in Eden: the woman's singular seed will destroy the serpent's.

10. The sons of God, and the hidden realm

    On Genesis 6 Essex stands with the angelic-beings reading, but with an honest concession: it is clear from the New Testament, not from Genesis 6 itself, because the first eleven chapters say nothing explicit about the angelic realm at all. Even the serpent is introduced as a beast of the field, and Essex doubts it spoke by its own nature, since speech belongs to the image of God; Eve's first response should have been to exercise dominion over a talking animal, not debate it. The veil over the unseen realm lifts only at Genesis 18 and 19, where the angel of the LORD arrives with two companions.

11. The extent of the flood

    Essex holds the flood worldwide, for reasons inside the text: all flesh under the heavens died, which a local flood cannot accomplish; an ark was pointless if Noah needed only to move; water stood above the high mountains, and water above the highest point cannot stay local; and the flood endured a hundred and fifty days. Later Scripture testifies the same. He adds an observation offered as interest, not proof: flood traditions have been found in more than two hundred cultures worldwide, even on islands in the middle of the ocean.

12. Why Canaan, not Ham

    Noah's curse falls on Canaan though Ham sinned, and Essex reads Noah here as speaking prophetically by the Spirit. The curse is localized in one line of Ham's descendants, an echo of the Noahic covenant's restraint against total judgment, and the choice of Canaan looks ahead: the Canaanites are the people whose land God would give Israel and whose judgment Israel would execute. The curse culminated in the conquest, and it authorizes no notion of cursed peoples on the earth today; the rest of Ham's descendants were never under it.

1. Essex tests every interpretation by asking what Israel on the plains of Moab would have understood. How would adopting that question change the way you read a difficult passage this week?

2. A patterned account of real events is still an account of real events. Where else in Scripture have you noticed deliberate literary artistry, and why is it a false choice to pit artistry against history?

3. You bear God's image in order to represent him where he has placed you. What would it mean this week to treat your capacities, thought, speech, will, affection, as equipment for representing God?