A Book Report on;

The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1

By Mark Smith

By Adam Cook

The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1

“Do you believe in creation?”  A question I often get when I tell people I am a Seminary student, studying to be a Pastor.  The question is raised as if it is some litmus test that all pastors must partake of and have the same views and answers on.  Being the sarcastic person I am my response is to answer their question with a question “..which one?”  In Mark Smith’s book “The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1” he gets straight to this point of “which one” and explores three creation themes that the Ancient Israelites had floating around in the time of and before the writing of Genesis 1.  Smith seeks to assert creation isn’t the telling of the order in which things came into being, but rather a telling of who did what according to the understanding of God at that time.  This is to say, there certainly was an agenda and how things came to be scientifically was not it.

These three creation themes he works with are: creation as the activity of divine wisdom; creation as a temple filled with the divine presence where the  שכינה of God dwells.  This demonstrated by an assertion for the view that the light on Day One was not part of creation but was the light of God's divine glory.  Also Smith asserts creation as a divine victory over cosmic enemies.  These three themes were not hermetically impenetrable traditions and often blurred into each other.  Smith asserts that Genesis 1 employs insights from all three themes.  Smith also would stand in line with modern scholars who assert Genesis 1 is a later addition to Genesis, by its name, a priestly author.  In this book Smith asserts this and other points that are often, in his and others who stand with his opinions, misconstrued about the creation narratives.  Smith, and his colleges would assert that none of the creation themes in Genesis or in the Ancient Israelite tradition were meant to be understood as an exact science; rather he would assert that these themes had agendas to seek out and prove about the power and deity of Yahweh.   

Smith also seeks to assert that Genesis 1 does not teach  creation out of nothing.  That is, the message is not to inform the reader that out of nothing all of the sudden came something,  but rather  the focus is rather on God's forming a inhabitable location for life out of uninhabitable “chaos”.   He does this in a few different ways, the first being God creates not out of nothing, but by the separation of chaotic elements and setting them to order and operate in such a way that in conducive for life.  He also shows this by stating that the watery chaos from which God creates is not, as it is in other texts, a symbol of evil, but rather a sign of God creating order out of chaos. It obeys God and therefore is used for life.

Another way in which Smith shows this creation out of what is in existence is his exploration of the Hebrew word רוח  or breath or spirit of God that moved over the surface of the deep. He asserts that it conveys both the idea of divine breath as well as a natural wind. This gives introduction to the divine speech aspect he explores as well.  Divine speech is central to Gen 1. Smith seems to see this as precisely linked to the priestly focus on divine speech as expressing divine revelation and authority.  This signifying the author and that of a priest would see his role as a way of speaking the divine words.  God’s divine words created life and a habitat for life to abide, and this would be the role the Priest would see in his preaching of the word.  A priest word preach with the divine authority in which he could declare the divine word and therefore profess to the authority that word has, it created life.  Smith also makes mention to the often debated theory of Humans being created in the image of God in the temple creation theme that spilled over to Genesis 1.  

Smith also asserts time and placement of Genesis 1.  He asserts  that the Genesis 1 creation story was written after the Genesis 2 creation story.  He makes mention that  it was written as a preface to Genesis and as an implicit commentary on the Genesis 2 account, framing it in ways that made it more conducive to priestly interpretation. He explores several aspects of the Gen 1 account which seem to be deliberate references to parts of the Gen 2 account. By being placed at the start of the Bible Gen 1 becomes the master account of creation within the light of which all other creation accounts are interpreted.  Genesis 1 provides the cosmological context for the priestly worldview. He makes mention to the 7 day order and how it coincides with the festival week for Judaism.  This 7 day order also gives proof to a priestly author due to its seemed link to temple life.

In all the case is clearly made that the author of Genesis 1 is a well-educated priest and was written with an agenda.  It was not written with the intent to prove a scientific way in which the world came to be, but rather in a way that attests to the themes that speak to the ethos of God, the pathos and logos of the author.  Genesis 1 is a message of the portrayal of the Israelite God Yahweh that we now know as the triune God.