Review of The Lost World of Genesis One, Part Six

Proposition six picks up where the previous one left off, emphasizing that the fourth, fifth and sixth days in Genesis 1 are about the installation of “functionaries”. Here too, one finds problems from a scientific perspective if the focus is on material creation, and not problems that have to do with evolution. The text says that the lights which are created are placed (i.e. embedded) in the physical dome or “fimament”. If the text is about material origins, then it is wrong. But once again it is possible to treat such elements as part of the text’s broader cultural and historical setting rather than something it wishes to teach as doctrine, as it were.

In this chapter too the reader is provided with quotations from relevant parallels from the literature of other societies in the ancient Near East. Hebrew terms for creation/making are also discussed. Humanity is described, as far as their physical make-up is concerned, in a manner akin to what is found elsewhere in the same part of the world in that time (p.69). But the emphasis on being made from and returning to dust (Genesis 3:19) indicates that, just as the humans created here are archetypal, so this experience of decomposition after death is archetypal. It is about mortality and not materiality.

It is worth mentioning that Walton, by focusing on function rather than material, is able to assume that the land is the location of the origin of various life forms, rather than having to understand the reference to the earth bringing forth living things as a reference either to some evolutionary process or to spontaneous generation. Although the evidence that I’m aware of is less than decisive in favor of ancient Israel and other peoples of the ancient Near East having held a view akin to “spontaneous generation”, I’m not sure why Walton is so eager to deny it, since it doesn’t seem to me to be any more problematic than the dome. Perhaps it is simply because the origin of living things is both a touchier subject for conservative Evangelicals and an area of significant gaps in our knowledge and uncertainty when it comes to our scientific understanding.