In the podcasts, I have talked about being responsible readers of the text. This means we need to pay attention to the ANE (Ancient Near East) context, the type of genre it is, and the meaning of the Hebrew words and phrases.
I've also talked about how God accommodates His communication to His audience. In this case, He is accommodating to an ANE audience. Accommodation involves communicating in a way that ones speech will be apprehended by those in a certain cognitive environment. In doing so, we must look at the intent of the authors. What ideas, themes, truths, etc., are they trying to convey to the audience? Divine accommodation then, is about accommodating to the words, genre, rhetorical devices, etc., in order to communicate these divine themes/truths. This accommodation happens on both the human and divine level. The human author accommodates his way of writing in a way that his audience will understand, and in the same manner, God accommodates His communication through the inspired authors to reveal the divine truth.
Accommodation in language can take two forms- high context and low context. In a high context communication the author and the audience have much in common, therefore hardly any accommodation is needed to communicate effectively. In low context communication, very high levels of accommodation are needed for communication to take place. How does this play out with divine/human communication?
Any human being is always in a low context communication when it comes to communicating with God, therefore much accommodation is necessary. All this means is that for people to understand God, He accommodates to their cognitive environment to communicate His truth. Because of the vast difference between the finite and infinite, communication will always be low context.
When we read Scripture, the communication from author to audience is one of high context communication. This means that words, phrases, and concepts will be relayed without having to be explained. This is what we see with Genesis. Being an ANE document, written to people in an ANE context, much in communication is taken for granted. Fast forward to the 21st century. When we engage the text, we are doing so as low context readers. We are thousands of years removed from this culture. This means, in order for us to fully grasp the authors' intent, we need all the tools we can in order to understand the intended meaning. This is where learning about the cognitive and communicative context of the ANE comes into play. This means that if we are going to understand the truth that is being relayed, we first need to understand the way they are being relayed.
For example, we must seek to understand the words, phrases, and culture, lest we misunderstand the intent of the author and the truth he is trying to communicate. This means that the ideas and truths that are being presented are going to be mediated through genre, syntax, rhetorical devices, etc., of the ancient world and ancient language. It also means that inerrancy and authority are not greatly affected by genre and accommodation. This is because genre itself cannot be errant or inerrant, true or false, etc. It is a mode of communication. Certainly, some genres lend them selves to be interpreted with more factual detail, and others with more of a fictional bent, but ancient genre cannot be easily assimilated by our modern categories. To label them such is anachronistic. We have to thus determine the genre based on the literature itself.
The genre of Genesis is ancient historiography. This means that it is an ancient way of writing history. It includes myth, legend, and genealogies- all ancient ways of writing. The early chapters of Genesis are written in a poetic, narrative style which includes myth, legend, and genealogies. Within these writing styles, much figurative language is used, and it seems that even the author and audience wouldn't have understood these narratives in a "literalistic" manner. As far as the first chapter of Genesis goes, it is best to classify it as ancient cosmology.
Ancient cosmology is "functional oriented." This means that if something does not exists, it is because it hasn't been assigned a role. It has nothing to do with whether it lacks matter. This means that to "create" something in the ANE means to give it a function, not material properties. As I have stated before, this type of mindset permeates the literature of Akkadian, Sumerian, and Egyptian literature. We see this not only in their cosmology texts, but also in their hymnic literature, temple building texts, and ritual texts. As we continue our research of Genesis 1, we will see more and more evidence that it too, confirms to this type of cosmic functional ontology.
In the last post, we looked at how bara (create) should be understood in functional terms. But isn't seeing "create" as material a literal reading of the text, and thus should be opted for? A "literal" interpretation doesn't mean opting for how we "literally" understand a word or concept in our 21st century context. Rather, discovering the "literal" meaning comes by seeking to understand what the words and concepts literally meant to the original audience. This means it is wrong for us to read our material ontology of creation into the functional ontology of the ancient world. This also means that though we would try to make bara mean material creation, the context and cognitive environment of the ANE forbids us to do so. We must seek to understand what existence/creation meant to them. Words have context, and meaning is derived from usage and context. In the ANE context, creation is function oriented.
Would the ancient Israelites have understood bara to be functionally oriented in their creation accounts? From what we looked at last time, the usage of the word lends itself to be functional oriented, since so many of its direct objects are functional in nature. For example, God is said to have "created" Israel (Isa. 43:15). Did God fashion a nation out of material? No, nations are not material. Though they are made of material (people), A nation is function oriented in its existence. A nation is a group of people who are united by location, language, culture, etc. God "created" Israel not by fashioning material, but by calling out and gathering a people around Himself and His laws, with the express purpose of showing His glory. Thus, "create" has a functional meaning. Another passage worth mentioning is Isa. 54:16, where God is said to have "created" the blacksmith. Again, did God create from material right then and there the blacksmith? No, it refers to the function that God has given a human being to operate in. God is also said to have created the "north and south" (Ps. 89:12). North and South are directions, not material, and serve as functions to directionaly orient ourselves. Thus we have function being talked about again with the verb bara. Furthermore, other ANE and OT scholars (besides John Walton, whom I mentioned last time) have discovered this to be true as well. In the book, Reframing Biblical Studies: When Language and Text Meet Culture, Cognition , and Context, Ellen van Wolde did an analysis of bara. What was discovered was that the verb and its cognate form is used in instances of "separating" things. This idea of separating and naming plays a prominent role in ANE, and are functional aspects of creation texts. Therefore not only do we see separating and naming in the creation narrative in Genesis in conjunction with bara, but recent lexical studies confirm this connection with the verb elsewhere. What all this means is that both the context, cognitive environment, and lexical usage all point to bara being functional in nature.
Ok, I know I've said this before, but I promise we will get into the role of Genesis 1:1 next post.