Excursus on the Origin of Life and Evolution of Biological Complexity (Part 6): The Literary Framework Interpretation

The Literary Framework Interpretation

Today we turn to a new interpretation of Genesis chapter 1 which is called the literary framework interpretation. The literary framework view has been very ably explained and defended by the French biblical scholar Henri Blocher in his book In the Beginning.[1] According to this view, the author of Genesis is not interested in chronology. He is not attempting to relate one day after another in a chronological fashion. Rather, the days serve as a sort of literary framework on which he hangs his account of creation. He wants to describe how God creates all of life, all of the world, and he uses the framework of a week of six days as a literary structure on which to hang his account. But he doesn't intend for this six-day week to be taken literally in a chronological fashion.

Now, ever since the Middle Ages, commentators have noticed that there seems to be a sort of parallelism between days 1 to 3 and days 4 to 6. Blocher maintains that on the first three days God creates the domain (or the space) for a certain thing to inhabit, and then on the second three days he creates the occupants of that space or domain. So, for example, on day 1 he creates day and night, and then on day 4 he creates the sun, moon, and stars. On day 2 he creates the firmament which separates the waters above from the waters below. Corresponding to this is day 5 when he creates the sea creatures which will live in the waters below and the birds which will fly in the sky above. And then, on day 3, we have the creation of the dry land as well as the vegetation, and parallel to that is day 6 in which God creates the terrestrial animals and finally man. So 1 and 4 are correlated, 2 and 5 are correlated, and 3 and 6 are correlated. Notice that on days 3 and 6 you also have a parallel in that you have a double creation on those days. On 3 you have both the dry land and the vegetation created by God, and on day 6 you have both the terrestrial animals as well as man created.

So the contention of the literary framework hypothesis is that the first three days describe the habitats or the domains, and then the second three days describes the inhabitants or the occupants of those domains. So the creation account is not intended to be chronological. It’s thematic. The creation week is a sort of thematic or literary framework on which the author hangs a non-chronological account of creation.

What might be said by way of assessment of this interpretation? Well, I think we have to admit that this is an extremely interesting view which deserves careful consideration. But I have to confess to being skeptical about the alleged parallelism between days 1 to 3 and days 4 to 6. A closer reading of the text seems to reveal that these are not, in fact, exactly parallel. For example, what corresponds to God's creating the sun, moon, and stars on day 4? It's not the separation of day and night. True, one of the functions of the astral bodies is to mark the difference between day and night, but day and night doesn’t specify a domain. Rather the domain is the firmament created on day 2. On day 2, God creates the firmament. On day 4 he places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament. The verbal connection between the two is indisputable. So really day 4 describes the inhabitants of the domain created on day 2, namely the firmament. Moreover, what corresponds to the creation of the sea creatures on day 5? Well, again, it's not the waters above and the waters below. It's the creation of the seas on day 3. Now, admittedly, there are waters above and waters below that are separated on day 2, but the waters below are not gathered into seas until day 3 when the dry land appears and the water then gathers into seas, and it is in the seas that the sea creatures are created. Therefore, it’s day 3 and day 5 that describe the parallel between the domain and the inhabitant of that domain. Finally, on day 3 we have God’s creating not only the dry land but also the vegetation, which seems to be the inhabitant of the dry land. Both of them are created on the same day. I think it would be a real stretch to say that vegetation is the domain that's inhabited by animals and man. My complaint isn't that there is no correlation here between days 6 and 3, but that the correlation is more naturally between the second element of 3 and the first element of 3. That's where it seems to me you have domain and then the inhabitant created. The vegetation seems out of place if we're talking about domains and the thing that fills the domain.

It seems to me that therefore that the  parallelism that has been constructed is not something that's really there in the text but rather is imposed on the text by the mind of the interpreter.

Fortunately, I don't think that the literary framework interpretation stands or falls with whether we see the framework in terms of parallelism of domains and inhabitants. When we get to the functional creation interpretation we'll see another option for understanding the correlation between the days.  But for now it does not seem that Blocher’s interpretation is one that does justice to the text. Nevertheless, I do think that the general idea of a literary framework is interesting and deserves consideration.

Moreover, I'm not convinced that the chronology in the narrative is not to be taken seriously. The chronology on the literary framework view is meaningless, but surely the idea of numbering the consecutive days with ordinal numbers (2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th) and the progression from desolation and lifelessness up through life (plants, animals, and then finally man) does seem to suggest chronology. There seems to be a temporal development going on here. I think it's hard to resist the impression that the narrative intends to portray a temporal progression that finally ends with God's resting from the work of creation on the seventh and the final day. Blocher admits that creation over a period of time is a common motif in ancient creation myths, so why think that the motif is here non-chronological? Mere parallelism between the days doesn't suffice to disprove any interest in chronology on the part of the author.

So, for those two reasons, I find myself rather skeptical of the literary framework hypothesis.

7. The Functional Creation Interpretation

Let’s turn to the next interpretation, which is called functional creation. The Old Testament scholar John Walton in his book The Lost World of Genesis One[2] has defended a view which he calls functional creation. Walton maintains that the notion of creation in the ancient Near East has been universally misunderstood by contemporary scholars. We understand creation to be about how material things come into existence when, in fact, in the ancient world it was really about specifying the functions that material things should carry out. It wasn't about the creation of those material things, but about specifying the function they would fill.

Walton gives the very engaging illustration of a restaurant. He asks, when does a restaurant begin to exist? He would say it is not when the original building was constructed. That building might have been originally a warehouse, for example, but now  the building has been renovated and turned into a restaurant. The restaurant begins to exist when that building starts to function as a restaurant – when it gets a license, opens the doors, and begins to carry out the functions of a restaurant. And to say that the restaurant began to exist in, say, 2023 doesn't mean that that's when the building was created. It may have been there for a long time.

Walton’s claim is that Genesis 1, similarly, is not about God's bringing the earth, the land, the vegetation, the animals, etc. into existence. Rather, it's about his declaring their functions in the created order relative to humanity. The seven days are taken to be literal consecutive days during which the universe is inaugurated to function as God's cosmic temple in which he will dwell. The seventh day is the climax of this inauguration. When God comes to reside in his temple, it is not the end of God's creative work whereby he has brought these things into existence. Rather, it is that the functions of everything have now been fully specified, its functionaries have been installed to carry out those functions, and so now God comes to reside in his cosmic temple, which is the world.

Walton claims that the functional creation interpretation is a literal interpretation of the text. It is not figurative or literary. It is about seven literal consecutive days of creation. It's just that creation didn't mean what everyone has taken it to mean. Genesis 1 is to be literally interpreted, but it is wholly about functional creation – about specifying the functions that things should fill, and it is not about the creation of material things.

What might be said by way of critique about the functional creation interpretation? First of all, I think there is a desperate need for terminological clarification concerning this view. Walton draws a very firm dichotomy between what he calls material ontology and functional ontology, or between material creation and functional creation. Unfortunately, this terminology is nowhere clearly and carefully defined, and as a result it tends to be extremely misleading and inaccurate. When Walton talks about material creation, it is far from clear exactly what he understands that to be. One might think that he means simply the coming into being of a physical object through God's causation. God causes the physical object to come into being. But it seems that Walton means more than that by material creation. He seems to think that if God creates a material object, he must do so ex nihilo; that is to say, out of nothing. Material creation for Walton seems to mean not merely that the object comes into being at that point but that it comes into being from nothing.

It seems to me that this is obviously mistaken. For example, when a carpenter makes a chair, he is the efficient cause of the chair, but the lumber is the material cause of the chair. Now, the question before us is not whether God creates the various organisms in Genesis 1 ex nihilo. There's no reason to make such a claim. On the contrary, in fact, God says of the plants and the animals “let the earth bring forth, etc.” And the creation of man described in Genesis chapter 2 involves God's forming the man out of the dust of the earth. So there isn't any reason to think that apart from v.1 creation in Genesis has to be creation ex nihilo. Rather, the question that we're interested in is whether Genesis 1 describes God as the efficient cause of the objects described, regardless of whether he uses pre-existing material to make them or not. Or does God merely specify the functions of objects that are already there? Do you see the question? The question is whether Genesis 1 describes God as bringing into being the things that are described, or whether it describes God’s merely specifying the functions for things that are already in existence.

I think that we have to guard here against erecting false dichotomies. Just because a text speaks of God’s specifying an object's function doesn't exclude efficient causation as well. To make his case, Walton has to show that the text of Genesis 1 is concerned exclusively with functional creation. It is not enough to show that functional creation is involved. He has to show that efficient causation does not come into the picture at all, for if God is the efficient cause of the objects described, then they do come into being when God creates them, whether he creates them ex nihilo or out of existing matter. So when we clarify the terminology, I think you can see that Walton has a considerable burden of proof if he is to justify his interpretation. He needs to show that Genesis 1 involves only the specification of functions for things that exist and not God's bringing them into being at that time.