Understanding Ancient Narratives’ Intended Relationship to Science
For over a hundred years, growing mountains of mutually reinforcing evidence have exponentially increased our knowledge of biology, geology, and astronomy. This has brought into ever-clearer focus a natural history seemingly impossible to square with the Genesis accounts of the Creation, Eden, and the Flood. Bible believers have responded to this in a variety of ways. All too commonly, some simply stop believing in the Bible and leave the fold altogether. Others have invented implausible new interpretations in an attempt to “update” Bible understandings to fit new scientific information. More conservative believers rightly see such updated readings as veering wildly from the text’s plain meaning and improperly evading scriptural authority. However, a laudable desire to stay true to scripture has also unfortunately led many faithful down the specious dead-end paths of creationism and “intelligent design,” which require wholesale denial of vast swaths of well-attested evidence. Anyone wishing to both hold to Biblical reliability and accept scientific discoveries is left in a pickle, with seemingly nowhere very satisfying to turn. As a Brigham Young University professor who has taught courses on the Bible as well as on human evolution, I have never been satisfied telling students, “There indeed seem to be stark differences between science and Genesis. I wish I could point you to a good harmonization. But the attempts I know of embarrassingly botch either the science or the Bible or both. Since both science and revealed religion regularly incorporate new insights that overturn old understandings, I trust a sensible reconciliation will someday emerge.” Fortunately, I don’t tell my students this anymore because now I have John H. Walton’s books to point to.
It would be an overstatement, but only a slight one, to say that Walton’s assembled evidence neatly dissolves most issues inherent in wishing to take both the Bible and science seriously. Walton and his collaborators draw on hundreds of years of accumulated scholarship to read scripture and understand the cosmos through the eyes of the Bible’s writers and earliest readers. His approach seeks neither to “resolve contradictions” nor to “find common ground.” And unlike creationists’ attempts to propose alternate answers to science’s findings, Walton has no beef with science and leaves it alone to do its own thing, unafraid of what it might discover. Neither does he subject the Bible’s authority to “scientific oversight.” Instead, he employs a radical literalism (“out-literaling” the literalists) in reconstructing the Bible’s earliest cultural and literary context. He uses this lens to bring into focus the most likely earliest meanings of Genesis and—like a Boy Scout with a magnifying glass—vaporize a host of incorrect interpretive traditions.
Walton starts with two simple premises. First, we should pay close attention to what the Bible actually says, not ignoring anything that is there and not imagining the presence of anything that is not there—especially not today’s cosmology, familiar to any grade-school student—namely, that the earth, moon, and sun are all spheres; that the earth orbits the sun; and that stars are other suns—giant burning gas-balls separated from each other by unimaginably vast distances. None of this bears any resemblance to what Bible authors wrote. It is simply not there in the text.
Second, we should discern the Bible’s most likely meanings through the eyes of its earliest readers’ cultural, literary, and cosmological understandings. (To Latter-day Saints, this may sound like a “restoration” of original meanings and a co-witness to our belief that the Lord speaks to people “according to . . . their [own] understanding” [2 Ne. 31:3].) By following this method, and by setting aside some hoary interpretive assumptions (that may seem as old as scripture but are not), Walton shows that scientific discoveries in no way preclude a wholehearted and serious acceptance of the Bible’s earliest and fullest meanings. In fact, this method allows the Genesis accounts to become even more robustly alive and relevant to readers today.
Walton doesn’t claim that the Bible proves any scientific discovery, only that what it does claim leaves plenty of room for many possible explanations for the material creation of the world. This includes the scenarios that science has uncovered. According to Walton, Genesis was not intended to be a description of how God created the material world and cosmos, but it does touch on why he did and what the world is for. Genesis does tell the story of God establishing on Earth the conditions necessary for our salvation.
Walton’s approach differs from paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s famous plea for “non-overlapping magisteria”—an expedient truce where science and religion each stay in their own lanes, with religion sticking to the spiritual and science to the material. Instead, Walton persuasively demonstrates that Bible authors never even sought to tell a story about natural history. (So how could they be wrong about something they are not even talking about?) They just used their day’s common worldview as a backdrop on which to present the more important story they really wanted to tell.
Walton’s approach also differs from efforts to “update” traditional Bible interpretations to conform them to scientific findings. Walton would have no part in such an endeavor. He is an Old Testament professor at Wheaton College, one of American Evangelicals’ premiere higher-education institutions. He has impeccable credentials within conservative religious circles as well as in the secular world of ancient Near Eastern scholarship. He rejects the view of creationist readings of Genesis as necessary because the Bible itself makes such readings extraneous.
Walton does not attack or even mention creationism’s problems. His findings don’t actually preclude the possibility of creationism’s validity. Walton’s findings only render the creationist enterprise completely unnecessary and irrelevant to interpreting the Bible properly, regarding it as factually authoritative, or giving it its due deference. It is just not needed. Some fundamentalists may not appreciate Walton thoroughly undercutting any perceived obligation to expend any more energy on a project into which they have sunk so much for so long. (Unfortunately, creationism has undermined Christian moral witness in many arenas beyond science. It is not a hold-fast continuation of ancient understandings, as its proponents imagine. It is actually a recent innovation responding to and incorporating core aspects of modernity. Our age’s recently emerging conceits about what narratives are for, how to present them, and the ostensible necessity of fixing them at some point along a linear conception of time would all have been alien to ancients who thought of time as cyclical. For example, the earliest Christians lived long before anyone had an inkling of organic evolution, making belief or disbelief in it a spurious litmus test for Christian authenticity.) While fundamentalists may dislike Walton’s results, they cannot so easily reject his interpretive method—since it is the very hermeneutic that conservative Protestants have always promoted as the most reliable one.
Ancient Worldviews and the Plain Meanings of Bible Creation Narratives
The following is an example of Walton’s method in action. A close reading of Genesis chapter 1 shows God forming the earth as a flat land separated from a vast expanse of unformed watery chaos (“the deep”) that surrounded it (Gen. 1:2, 6, 10). He put an expansive dome, like a giant slab or upside-down bowl (a “firmament”), over his creation that kept out the watery chaos pressing in from all sides (Gen. 1:7). God called this firmament “Heaven” (Gen. 1:8), leaving one to wonder where he resided before he created it. The Lord had already separated light from darkness before he divided day from night (Gen. 1:3–5). And only after this did he set the sun and moon on tracks that went around the inside of the dome and affixed the stars on it as pinpoints of light (Gen. 1:14–18). When it rains, literal “windows” of heaven (a better translation might be “floodgates”) open in the dome to let water gush in and down to the earth below. During the Deluge, God also opened the “fountains of the great deep” to let the all-encompassing waters burst up from below as well (Gen. 7:11; see Mal. 3:10).
Has your modern education made it difficult to see the sky as the inside of a dome? If so, simply go outside and take a look. You will quickly grasp why the sky has often been so conceived. Also ask yourself if the stars at night look like pinpoints of light or giant burning balls of gas? The ancient Hebrews were not alone in such conceptions. Norse mythology saw the sky as the inside of a slain frost giant’s skull. Presumably, that is why it is blue, as well as concave. In depicting the sky, Bible authors have written not only to their own times but to the widely held understandings of virtually everyone who has ever lived, except for those few of us with modern Western-style educations, in this last eye-blink of world history.
The idea of creation beginning with the gods forcing back the all-present churning chaos (and the identification of the sea with the vast unformed primordial turmoil) was the prevailing understanding in many ancient Near Eastern societies. Since the days when German was the leading language of ancient Near Eastern scholarship, scholars have called this episode the Chaoskampf, or “struggle against Chaos.” Compared to the long-winded creation accounts of Babylonian, Egyptian, and Canaanite mythology, the ancient Hebrews’ relatively demythologized and sparse narrative assumes a familiarity with, but does not much elaborate on, these common cosmological concepts. The Bible even makes numerous references to Leviathan, or Rahab, the primordial monster of many mythologies, associated with—or the symbol of, or the embodiment of, or perhaps even the very same as—“the deep” of Genesis 1:2. The gods fought and subdued this unruly monstrosity to begin creating and bringing order to the world. Again, the Bible does not much develop a distinctive Hebrew conception of Leviathan but assumes readers will be familiar enough with this trope to catch its references’ significance.
In comparative mythological perspective, perhaps the most noteworthy feature of Hebrew scripture’s version of the Chaoskampf is the ease with which it is accomplished. (Surely this is a sly dig at other nations’ feeble gods, who needed to exert considerable effort to create.) Genesis 1 depicts no epic-length recounting of a titanic battle where the gods mightily fought to subdue the deep (or its avatar). The Bible’s creator-god simply speaks, and the waters instantly obey his will. Also, except for one cryptic reference to making humans in “our image, after our likeness,” the God of Genesis also seems perfectly capable of working alone. Though “the deep” implies Leviathan’s presence, that Chaos Monster—that we know Hebrews knew about from frequent references elsewhere in the Bible—does not even overtly show up in Genesis 1’s depiction of the big “fight day.” Perhaps Leviathan was too scared to come out of the water. In Job 41:1–11, the Lord fills in some details missing from Genesis 1 when he asks Job if the puny man is like God, a being who can catch Leviathan with a fishhook and lead him around by the nose, making the fearsome sea monster into a pet or plaything—like a goldfish in a bowl, perhaps. Comparative ancient Near Eastern mythology is Walton’s area of particular expertise, and he provides an extensive bibliography on the subject.
According to Walton, reading scripture through the eyes of its earliest audience should also centrally inform our understanding of the Bible’s Flood narrative. The Deluge covered “the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 8:9) as certainly as a firmament or dome held back the waters that caused it. This is literally true according to the understandings of the text’s authors and earliest readers. To ask whether authors intended Australia, the Americas, and Himalayan peaks in their conception of “the face of the whole earth” verges on silliness. Earliest Bible audiences had no conception of such places, which have only recently come to figure into Bible readers’ guesses as to what “the face of the whole earth” might mean. To the first writing civilizations—which emerged from the oft-flooding, but very fertile, Nile and Euphrates flood plains—“the face of the whole earth” was these flood plains. To them, believing the Bible’s Flood narrative would hardly require the leap of faith it does for us. There is a good reason they are called “flood plains” after all.
Ancient narratives around the beginnings of the known world—sometimes called “myths” by scholars, not to disparage them, but as a technical term for a narrative genre—are not only true because they happened once a long time ago, but much more importantly, they are true because they illuminate what is happening, all of the time, over and over again. Myths contain foundational truths about the nature of the world and the human condition. The Genesis Flood may well have covered the whole planet as we conceive it, but we perhaps ought to hesitate before conscripting the Bible into any fight for the necessity of this belief. Bible authors likely did not seek to address any anachronistic issues, such as what a “planet” is or whether the term “earth” refers to anything remotely like what we imagine today, when they used the phrase “whole face of the earth.”
None of this means that Bible authors intended to tell the story of a local flood. They didn’t. In fact, they are clear in a number of places that they very much intended to convey the idea of a flood that uniquely, just this once, engulfed all of Creation (Gen. 6:1, 13, 17; 9:11, 15). They are kind of over-the-top about it, actually. But their conception of how large an area Creation entailed was simply smaller in size than what we imagine today. Nevertheless, what the Bible portrays is far more dramatic and total even than today’s rather circumspect literalists’ assertion that the flood waters only formed a relatively thin film over the surface of only one small planet out of billions and billions in the vast openness of an impossibly huge universe. To ancients, the whole of Creation was one tiny bubble precariously surrounded by vast, unformed, uncreated, roiling, thick, watery chaos. The Great Flood popped this tiny bubble, thoroughly filling it, and dissolved it fully back into the vast measureless deep out of which it was formed—like it never existed. Think of Noah’s ark like a Jaredite barge, fully surrounded not just by the sea but by all the water that was now all of everything, until God began to create again, making a new tiny bubble by separating “the waters from the waters” a second time (Gen. 1:6).
However, in attempting to convey totality, Bible authors were probably using hyperbole for the rhetorical effect of making a theological point—demonstrating God’s all-encompassing authority over, and purposes for, his creation. This is not downplaying or modifying the Bible’s original meaning to make it fit with science. It is a return to the Bible’s original intended meaning by acknowledging that hyperbolic “exaggeration for effect” was a common rhetorical tool, knowingly used by Bible authors and understood as conventional by its earliest readers. To ignore the Bible’s use of hyperbole and insist on its sober accuracy in passages where this was not its purpose takes us away from the text’s intended meaning.
If hyperbole seems to us disingenuous or bad historical writing, we should realize that this does not mean the Bible is either of these things. Instead, we should check our own presentism in anachronistically projecting our own era’s narrative conventions and expectations back in time onto people who did not use them. Reading the Bible is like going to a foreign country with a vastly different language and culture. We should always remember that it is we who are the visitors bringing strange conceptual baggage along with us. To understand the Bible as it was originally intended, we need read it through ancient eyes and try our best to leave the distorting lenses of our modern science-informed notions stowed away in our pocket, not because these ideas are wrong, but because they are alien to how the ancients wrote and hinder rather than help us understand the Bible.
Today’s Bible readers miss the text’s plain meanings about the Creation and the Flood when we read through the eyes of our modern cosmological conceptions and recent literary conventions. Walton’s point is not that the literal readings above can be made to resonate with natural history (this is an effort totally beside the point) but that these understandings are what the narrative actually says and are thus where we need to start. The perceived need for Bible narratives to harmonize with scientific conceptions is itself a recent extrabiblical conceit not required anywhere in the Bible. In light of the Bible’s most likely earliest plain meanings, virtually nobody today, except perhaps flat-earthers, seems nearly as literalist as they may want to imagine themselves to be.
Temple and Cosmos
If the Genesis Creation accounts are not meant to be always-and-forever guides to cosmology, what are they then? Intriguingly for Latter-day Saints, Walton sees them as transcriptions or reworkings of orally transmitted dramatic presentations that, in earlier versions, would have been performed by people with speaking parts, with audience participants invited to see themselves as Adam and Eve. The whole point of this practice was not to provide a science-conforming account of the earth and cosmos’s material emergence but to remind people of what God had done for them and of covenants they had made with him. What God did was establish and consecrate the whole earth as a temple in which he could reside and upon which humans could do the work he set out for them. Temples built by humans would be representations and reminders in miniature of this overarching cosmic conception of the whole world as a temple.
(At this point, it should probably be stressed again that Walton is not a Latter-day Saint and does not mention, or likely does not have much particular interest in, our temples and practices. He is merely gathering up and reporting for a mostly Protestant audience what the long-accumulated findings of secular ancient Near Eastern scholarship have revealed.)
Walton uses the analogy of a company to help demonstrate why Genesis more likely recounts the functional rather than the material creation of the earth. Like a temple, a company—a restaurant, for instance—really only comes into existence when it is dedicated as such, is staffed with cooks, waiters, and hosts—each fulfilling their particular roles—and is frequented by paying customers. Merely constructing a building does not a restaurant make. If a restaurant relocates to another building, we routinely regard it as the same restaurant. But if one establishment shuts down, and another opens in the same building, we do not see it as the same restaurant. The restaurant is the functions of the processes operating in the building, not the material edifice. So a restaurant’s creation story is unlikely to be primarily about erecting a building to house it. Instead, it might recount the owner establishing a business model and corporate vision statement, deciding what food to serve and how to prepare it, and training and directing staff in setting up for the grand opening and operational kickoff—in other words, its actual creation story.
As has often been rightly said, Genesis was never intended as a science textbook. It was intended to tell the story of God setting up the functions the world would serve. Walton believes this absolutely and literally happened, perhaps even in six actual days. But he also wants us to know that God had Bible writers tell this story using a setting composed of commonsense understandings familiar to people at the time. This in no way diminishes the Genesis Creation narratives. Rather, hereby they enjoy full reign to show forth their wonderous grandeur on their own terms—magisterial, timeless, eternal, unbeholden, and freed from improper expectation to harmonize with ever-changing scientific conceptions, however increasingly accurate these may be.
This being the case, Walton has little use for the few “resonances” some readers think they have discovered between natural history and Genesis, notably that the animals appear in roughly the same order—but not over the same time span—in Genesis 1:20–26 as they do according to the geologically stratified fossil record. Latter-day Saints might appreciate that Walton would also brush aside any supposed similarity between the ostensibly ex nihilo creation described in Genesis 1:1 and the Big Bang—the universe-creating “something-from-virtually-nothing” event whose after-effects have been observed by astronomers. Walton sees these as meaningless pseudoparallels, a few of which should be expected to emerge by random chance when comparing any two datasets as vast as the Bible text and the accumulated scientific findings on natural history. Because science developed many hundreds of years after the Bible took its final shape, it is unlikely that Bible authors’ original intentions included harmonizing their writings with science.
Furthermore, while orthodox Christian theology might hold to ex nihilo creation, the Bible text itself is, at best, an unsure source for this belief. The narrative order of Genesis suggests that the formless earth, “darkness,” and “the face of the deep” all existed before God’s spirit hovered over “the waters,” and God began creating by famously saying, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:1–3). Scholars have long regarded the King James rendering of the Bible’s opening line, “In the beginning God created,” as a theologically motivated choice from among several plausible translations. Another valid wording is the Common English Bible’s “When God began to create,” which conveys a much less ex nihilo vibe.
Presumably, God might have chosen to reveal to Bible writers an account of material creation that corresponded to natural history at some point in our developing scientific understanding of it. However, this would have been incomprehensible and would have seemed preposterous to ancients and to most of humanity for generations. It then would have quickly become outdated as science progressed. What use would this really be in the more important task of impressing on us our need to repent and align ourselves with God and his plan for this world that he set up for this very purpose (however it was that he did it)?
The Reception History of the Genesis Creation Accounts
A reader of Walton might complain, “Well, shouldn’t Genesis be an account of material creation, because it is obvious from the fact that we have read it as one for so long that we want it to be?” If followers of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have learned anything over the last few thousand years of worshipping him, it is that he does not always tell us everything we want to know, right when we want to know it. And it is usually not a good idea to “steady the ark” by conjuring up our own notions and treating them as doctrine in place of yet-to-be-revealed truth (D&C 85:8). His ways are not our own and are often inscrutable. So what if he chose not to give us an account of material creation? He instead gave us something far more valuable—an account of who we are, what creation is for, and how our relationship to him can be developed to bring about our eternal joy.
Instead of impiously inventing meanings his revelations did not intend, perhaps we should instead be more appreciative for what we have in the even more marvelous gift he did choose to give us. Considering other important Bible narratives and the genre conventions they employ, perhaps it should not surprise us that Genesis does not even seek to conform to how we currently understand history, geology, biology, and planetary science. Some of the most beloved and important narratives in the Bible have been almost universally understood by earliest recipients, as well as modern scholars and lay readers, to be nonhistorical. Think, for example, of Jesus’s parables.
Reading Walton’s books, one might wonder, “If his understandings are so straightforward and evidence-backed, why has nobody thought of them before now?” and “How did we get so far off track?” The Latter-day Saint ideas of apostasy and still-unfolding restorative revelation come to mind as possible explanations. Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve may also help fill in some of the picture. This book traces the reception history of the Eden story from its first appearance to the present—looking at the ebb and flow of the esteem in which it has been held and the various ways in which it has been interpreted.
We know very little about how the two creation narratives that currently comprise Genesis 1 and 2 came to be. Scholars’ best guess goes something like this: Almost certainly many different versions—orally recited, performed as dramatic presentations, and written—circulated before, and influenced the writing of, the Creation and Eden accounts as they appear in the Bible. Genesis 2 took its canonical form, more or less, somewhere around the time of the United Monarchy (traditionally 1047–930 BCE). Later, probably during the Babylonian captivity, redactors may have further modified it and also developed Genesis 1 as we now know it with its focus on priestly concerns. Redactors presumably placed both narratives together in early formulations of the Hebrew canon. The two Creation accounts have been side by side for so long that they have come to be seen as a single account. But from a literary perspective, they are clearly two distinct compositions emerging several hundred years apart. (None of this is necessarily incompatible with the traditional view that Moses was the primary vector of early versions of what is now in the Pentateuch.)
Creation and Eden are barely referenced elsewhere in the Old Testament and did not seem to figure particularly prominently in ancient Israelites’ religious consciousness. Rather, Hebrew scripture’s literary structure makes Exodus its historical and narrative fulcrum. Everything before the Exodus serves to set the stage for it. Everything after the Exodus reminds readers of the Israelites’ (oft-overlooked) need to remember it. Themes and phrases regarding their deliverance from Egypt reverberate throughout the New Testament as well. Jesus is described in familiar Passover terms as the sacrificial lamb of God, whose blood saves from the destroyer.
We have little evidence that the earliest Christians made Creation and Eden central to their religious practice either. Though if they were part of a secret tradition, we would likely not know much about this by definition. When the early Church fathers did broach the subject, a number of them saw the Bible’s Creation account as a kind of philosophical puzzle, like an extended perplexing Zen koan (that is, a paradox), that told an unusual story that was set at the time of Creation but was probably not meant to literally be a historical explanation of how it happened. As Walton might suspect, first- and second-century Christians did not seem to turn to Eden for an explanation for humans’ material creation. Instead, the Garden episode provided fodder for deep pondering on the nature of the human condition, good and evil, and our relationship to God—not too unlike how we still mull it over in Sunday School today.
Origen, for example, suspected that some story elements may have even been purposefully included to dissuade readers from overly literal readings that might distract from its true purpose. “For who that has understanding will suppose that the first and second and third day existed without a sun and moon and stars and that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? . . . I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally.”
This early Christian tendency for figurative interpretation changed dramatically in the AD 400s under the powerful influence of St. Augustine. To him, a literal reading of Genesis 1–2 was absolutely essential. If you have ever heard, “No Adam? Then no Christ!” as an argument for why literalism is critical here, the original purveyor of this notion was Augustine. He, perhaps unwisely, hung the legitimacy of the whole Christian message on the peg of the literal historicity of Genesis. If the peg doesn’t hold fast, you might as well abandon the whole thing. Sadly, many people throughout the centuries, given only these two options, have done just that—abandoned the whole thing.
Augustine was centrally responsible for the orthodox Christian notions of creation ex nihilo and the Fall being an act of the most depraved disobedience—a calamitous disaster for all of humanity that broke completely from what God desired. Augustine’s conception of the Fall as unfortunate was a primary influence on the Reformation luminary John Calvin, who promoted the idea of humankind’s utterly depraved inability to choose the right, as well as the related predestinationist doctrine of a sovereign God’s irresistible fiat election of everyone to either salvation or the eternal torment of damnation. Thankfully, the Restoration’s revealed doctrines of individual moral agency, vicarious work for the dead, and a fortunate Fall as an essential part of our loving God’s plan all sweep aside such horrific philosophies. With no revealed timeframe, one wonders when the Great Apostasy began exactly. Was it before or after the early nonliteralist Church fathers in AD 100–300? Augustine, in the 400s, seems almost certainly to have done his writing well into the Great Apostasy’s onset. If not, it seems safe to point to him as a primary instigator. This fuller contextualization of Augustine’s theological legacy might be important for us Restorationists to keep in mind when deciding how much credence to give to his absolutist insistence that accepting or rejecting his own personal interpretation of the Creation and Fall present a “high-stakes” “make-or-break” proposition for the whole of the Christian gospel.
How Does the Bible Present Adam and Eve, Our First Parents?
Augustine’s problematic promulgations notwithstanding, do not misread Walton as claiming that a nonhistorical read of Eden means that Adam and Eve were fictional characters. Perhaps a better way to describe his position is that, following common contemporaneous literary conventions, Genesis 1–2 cast these once actually living people in a mostly nonhistorical narrative context in order to serve a more important purpose than merely recounting how things happened. This might also be a wise approach to a number of famous figures sometimes dismissed as fictive figments. Ancient stories often use literary conventions unfamiliar to us. Or they answer questions and follow narrative presentation devices completely unrelated to modern historians’ and science writers’ preferred practices. But this does not necessarily mean that the characters in such stories never existed. This mistake has been repeatedly made in the past with figures as diverse as King David, King Arthur, and Leif Erikson. They all have been dismissed as fictional, only to have archaeological evidence emerge to shift their possibility of historicity in scholars’ eyes from “hardly likely” to “quite plausible.”
Personally, I would be dismayed if anyone used my own work on the orally transmitted anecdotes surrounding J. Golden Kimball as evidence that he never existed. This story cycle is frequently revealing of human nature, often morally instructive, but also floridly imaginative and sometimes self-aware of its own fictionality. Significantly, despite no sane person doubting that “Uncle Golden” once lived, the oral narrative cycle about him bears little resemblance at all to his historically documented life and sermons.
As with interpretations of the Creation and the Flood that fail to start with Bible authors’ most likely original intended meanings, Walton suggests that traditional Eden interpretations assuming Adam and Eve to be the sole biological progenitors of the whole human species who stood alone as the first and only two humans on earth at the time may also be more recent inventions than we suppose. This notion, while dear to Creationists, is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Bible. (Hence, by their own preferred hermeneutic, it has no sound justification.) This notion also creates the obvious but totally unnecessary and disturbing question of “With whom did Adam and Eve’s children have children, exactly?” Historically, this has often been answered in the only—and supremely creepy—way possible, if one assumes Adam and Eve were the only living people at the time. Neatly dispelling this issue entirely, Walton proposes that Adam and Eve were intended to represent the earliest ancestors of the Hebrews with whom God made covenants. Hence, indeed, they are the sole apex progenitors of the spiritual family of God. (Walton’s contention is interesting to contemplate in the light of Restoration understandings of Adam and Eve’s pinnacle place in our theologies of sealing and adoption.)
However, the Genesis text is silent about any other possible ancestors for biblically unmentioned peoples who may have existed before or alongside Adam and Eve. A main theme throughout Hebrew scripture is that just because a covenant people should not intermarry with noncovenant peoples, doesn’t mean that they don’t—or that noncovenant people cannot be integrated into the covenant family, like Ruth or Rahab the Harlot. This would have been good news for any of Adam and Eve’s children who might have wanted to marry someone other than a sibling! Just as the Book of Mormon’s silence about other possible Native American ancestors (in addition to Lehi’s group and the Mulekites) has been increasingly seen as not ruling out the possibility of their existence, perhaps “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” in the Bible’s case either.
An even more important issue here is to understand that Adam and Eve’s primary narrative function likely had little to do with providing a comprehensive genealogy for all of humanity—a genealogy historically accurate by modern reckonings that were unknown at the time. Rather, our first parents’ narrative function was to serve as proxies for each of us individually, and all of us collectively, as we enter a covenantal relationship with God. This role is evident in the wordplay of their names. “Adam” and “Eve” are unlikely to be the first names given them. According to a common ancient narrative convention, these were more likely new names given to them for their starring role in the Bible drama of God setting up the whole world as a cosmic temple. “Adam,” being a Hebrew word that can mean “red earth,” is likely a reference to the ground from which he was formed. “Adam” can also simply mean “man,” as in “humankind.” In another grammatical form, Adam can mean “the man.” This makes “the man, Adam” a curious repetition, perhaps for emphasis, that could mean “the man, the man.”
Eve’s name in Hebrew sounds similar to, and may actually have an etymological connection to, the root of the verb “to live.” By semantic extension, this makes her the “mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20), reinforces her identification with this role, and highlights our own situation as connected to her as part of “all living” through being her progeny. Here again, the importance of reading through the lens of prescientific mindsets, as well as biblical Hebrew’s literary conventions, is key in unlocking scripture’s earliest meanings. For ancients, such reflective riffing on words’ sonic similarities was not an example of groan-inducing punning, as our age might regard it. Rather, to ancients, the presence of such onomastic sound-parallelisms served as flag-waving indicators of auspiciousness. According to ancient conventional wisdom, there are no mere coincidences when words sound similar to each other in a story—especially with names. Such wordplay tells us, “Pay attention reader! See? God’s hand is at work here.”
According to Walton, the Eden narrative’s main purpose was not, and could not have been, to provide a prosaic account of human origins that we must accept over biological evolution. Actually, its purpose was to present our first covenanting foreparents as models for us, who demonstrate how we can respond to the world around us and to our own weaknesses by turning to a loving God who uses our first parents’ story as a vehicle to extend covenants that allow us to return to his good graces. I imagine that the Lord could have chosen among many historical backdrops to do this. The received text’s Eden setting seems not only just as good, but likely far more lush and evocative than many other possible options.
What’s in All This for Latter-day Saints?
If this cursory examination of a few John H. Walton books has sparked your curiosity, rejoice, there are more! You might also find engaging the following titles in his “Lost World of . . .” series, which also take on topics often difficult for us post-Enlightenment moderns to make sense of: The Lost World of Scripture: Ancient Literary Culture and Biblical Authority; The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest: Covenant, Retribution, and the Fate of the Canaanites; and The Lost World of the Torah: Law as Covenant and Wisdom in Ancient Context.
These titles attest that the series’s main premise is that many scriptural truths—perhaps one might even say “plain and precious” truths (1 Ne. 13:26–40)—have been lost or crusted over with understandings not from revelation itself but from somewhere else. “The philosophies of men” maybe? If this series is indeed onto something, their conservative Protestant authors—who might well be surprised at who some of their fans are—could well be pointing us to information relevant to Latter-day Saint edification. Relevant, that is, if we follow Joseph Smith’s dictum: “One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may.”
In the end, as fruitful and legitimate as Walton’s hermeneutic might be, the scrupulous search for most likely earliest meanings is not the only, or even most important, way to read scripture. The Church teaches that the most significant benefits we can gain from it are the personal revelations of life, direction that only the Spirit can reveal as we read. Scholarship’s best guesses about earliest meanings may be enlightening but are not required. They are no substitute for direct prompting by the Holy Ghost. As Elder Dallin H. Oaks taught, “A specific verse of scripture that was spoken for quite a different purpose in an entirely different age will, under the interpretive influence of the Holy Ghost, give us a very personal message adapted to our personal needs today.” Perhaps for some of us, on occasion, that need is to be able to sort out in our own minds a plausible way to remain committed to accepting truths “from whence” they may come as revealed by science and also by the Bible.
