lkwunhyo blog

It’s incredibly clear that these chapters are dialed in, to the word and syllable, to introduce the very specific themes of the Tanakh.

So the moment readers take these chapters out of the Tanakh and place them in a whole different arena of inquiry and study, it’s important to take precautions in assigning new meanings unintended by the biblical authors.

Yet, this is often a necessary conversation to have, allowing the Torah to shape our perspective and thoughts about modern cultural applications.

This brings about two questions:

“What do you call this kind of literature?”
“How do we begin to talk about historical reference when this is our window?”

To begin, John Walton has an extended quote,

The debate about the literary style of Genesis 1-11 “goes beyond the labeling of a genre of literature; it concerns the process by which literature of any genre is conceived and composed. The ancients think differently; they perceive the world in different ways, with different categories and priorities than we do.

In our culture, we think “scientifically.” We are primarily concerned with causation, composition and systemization. In the ancient world they are more likely to think of the world in terms of symbols and to express their understanding by means of imagery. We are primarily interested in events and material realia whereas they are more interested in ideas and their representation.

[To describe this way of representing history] the word group/image/imagery/imagination/imaginative would work well (though imaginary would be incorrect). A rhetoric using mythical imagery is easily discernible in biblical poetry (e.g., “from the heavens the stars fought” or “crushed the heads of Leviathan” [Ps. 74:14]), and it becomes formalized in the genre of apocalyptic. Nevertheless, it is not absent from prose. To describe this sort of thinking, I would like to adapt the term imagistic.

Rather than attempting to define it, in accordance with true imagistic thinking, I will instead describe it by illustrations. Imagistic thinking and representation would stand in contrast to scientific or analytical thinking. We can see the difference if we compare two visual representations of the night sky — one taken by the Hubble telescope, the other presented by Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night. People would never consider doing astronomy from the van Gogh and could not do so even if they wanted to; the image contains nothing of the composition or position of stars. At the same time, we would not say that it is a false depiction of the night sky. Visual artists depict the world imagistically, and we recognize that this depiction is independent of science, but not independent of truth. The ancients apply this same imagistic conception to all genres liturature, including those that we cannot conceive of as anything other than scientific. Imaginistic history, like that preserved in Genesis, is to history as The Starry Night is to a Hubble photograph…

Imagistic thinking presents difficulties [for modern people]. Israelites found no problems thinking about Ezekiel’s vision of Egypt as a cosmic tree (Ezek 31). This does not warrant labeling the literature mythology, nor does it concern questions of reality or truth. Some might consider the trees, the garden and the snake to be examples of imagistic thinking without thereby denying reality and truth to the account. The author understands trees in a way that does not simply indicate a botanical species of flora with remarkable chemical properties. When we put these elements in their ancient Near Eastern context and reocognize the Israelite capacity, and even propensity, to think in imaginistic terms, we may find that we gain a deeper understanding of important theological realities.

Some scholars today believe that Israel was in the habit of borrowing other people’s myths and transforming them into a mythology of their own. I do not share that perspective. What is sometimes perceived as a shared mythology is more often a shared propensity to think imagistically about the same issues using a shared symbolic vocabulary.
— John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve, 136-139

There is something that the biblical authors believe is real and truthful here, but what makes it difficult is that how they represent truth is so different than how we conceive of historical truth. It’s hard for us not to kill the butterfly as we seek to analyze it.