Joyful Moments in Christ

When trying to understand what the Bible has to say about modern scientific topics, it is important to look at different literary devices that are used in the Bible. God is the master author, historian, poet, and linguist. As we consider his word, it is important to avoid misinterpretations by making an effort to understand the intent of each passage.

As we discus science and the Bible, this idea will primarily come into play as we try to figure out the exact meaning of Genesis 1 and 2. While much of the Bible is a book of history and means exactly what it says, there are also passages of poetry, songs, parables, metaphors, simile, analogies, symbolism, personification, allegory, hyperbole, idiom and more. As we read the creation story, we need to understand the literary devices used to be able to make a careful analysis of the text.

To start, let’s step away from controversial topics and take a classic example of Biblical metaphor to highlight the point that the Bible is not always 100% literal: “Jesus is the cornerstone.” Does this mean that Jesus is an actual piece of stone and placed as a support in the corner of a building? Of course not. The author clearly does not mean this, instead, it is a metaphor that is meant to open our minds to an important concept of Jesus being the most important piece in the puzzle of Christianity. We find the first references to this concept in both Psalms 118:22-23 and Isaiah 28:16. Jesus himself quotes the Psalms passage in Matthew 21:42, and 1 Corinthians 3:11 specifically says that Jesus is our foundation. 1 Peter 2:4-8 calls Jesus the living stone that was rejected by humans, but chosen by God, and then goes on to quote the Psalms passage. There are more passages in Acts, Romans, and possibly other books that deal with this concept.

When trying to find the highest percent of non-literal passages, Psalms is an entire book that is dedicated to poetry and song and is an excellent place to see various literary devices. Psalm 23 says that “the Lord is my Shepherd.” Even though Jesus was actually a carpenter, the idea of Jesus as a shepherd who faithfully guides and protects his flock is a powerful image that is used throughout the entire Bible. While it is not historically accurate, it makes an important point through an illustration that is not completely literal.

In Psalm 121 (ESV), it says that “The Lord will keep you from all evil.” I can think of plenty of evil that has come to me! Does this mean that the entire Bible is not true? Again, this should be clear that this it is simply a poetic over-simplification that likely means that Jesus will set things right in the end.

Psalm 85 (ESV) uses personification when it says that “steadfast love and faithfulness meet.” Neither love nor faithfulness are real people, yet they have the human characteristic of meeting together. Read through the Psalms and see how many times you can find literary elements that don’t mean exactly what the words say.

Moving back to the new testament, Jesus make frequent use of parables, fictional stories that illustrate a religious lesson. While each of these stories are told in a mostly literal way, the stories are fictional and are not real events. Both readers and listeners should quickly understand this from the language used in each story. If you want some good examples of this literary device, some of Jesus’ most famous parables include the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Parable of the Sower, the Parable of the Talents, and the Parable of the Mustard Seed.

In Matthew 13:10-17, Jesus’ disciples ask him why he speaks in parables. He tells them that not everyone has the ears to hear the stories. Those who are intended to understand, will, but those who are not ready for understanding will simply see the parable as an interesting story. This concept of certain people’s ears being closed to God’s word disturbs me a little, but I am thankful that the Bible contains both the stories and the interpretations.

When we start to get into topics of literary devices used in scientific topics, many Christians are quite divided. There are those who insist that the entire book of Genesis is a literal history book and needs to be interpreted according to the Young Earth philosophy: as a completely factual source of information where Christians have to believe that the earth is only 6,000 years old and that everything was created in 6 days.

In contrast, Christians that subscribe to the Old Earth philosophy typically say that the first chapter of Genesis was a non-literal style of writing and make claims similar to the secular world: that the earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and that homo sapiens came into existence about 300,000 years ago. While Christians have many different theories from here, I subscribe to the belief that the original homo sapiens did not have souls and that it was only when God breathed life, or a soul, in to Adam, that the Bible really began.

One of these theories about the age of the Earth is probably mostly right, and the other probably mostly wrong. No matter which side you are on, if you have read this article this far, there is a good chance that you have a strong opinion one way or the other. If you have been reading my series on Science and the Bible, you probably know that I am in the Old Earth camp. As described in my first post on this topic, there are some problems in the ordering of creation during the first 6 days that point to this chapter of the Bible being in a different genre from a 100% factual history chapter. Once we get to the second chapter of Genesis, the creation story repeats and the language changes to read more like a history.

Read: Science and the Bible: An Introduction to the Creation Story

In my second post, I talked about the implications of being created in God’s image and how we can look at how the minds of the bests scientists, engineers, authors, poet, and others work to get a better image of God’s person and character. By evaluating these characteristics and adding the characteristics found in the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control) as well as the Godly characteristics of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, we can have an idea of what God’s thought process may have been as he created the world and wrote the Bible. It won’t be perfect or 100% accurate, but it should get us closer than a blind evaluation of a few pages of the Bible.

Read: Science and the Bible: Made in the Image of God

Based on these two ideas, when I take a deeper look at Genesis 1, Genesis 2, other pieces of scripture, standard literary techniques, and modern scientific evidence, it leaves a large seed of doubt that Genesis 1 is a completely factual book of history.

Let’s look at the literary devices used in Genesis 1. Some people claim that Genesis 1 is poetry, but while it has some similarities, it doesn’t really read that way. In Tim Keller’s article: “Creation, Evolution, and Christian Laypeople,” it is claimed that the writing style is “exalted prose narrative.” Other people have called the style “poetic prose.” Either way, the idea is that it contains elements of poetry in a style of prose.

Keller claims that the use of “refrains” points to the idea that this chapter is to be read as one would read a poem, and that it is important to read a passage as the author intended. I agree! The refrain: “And there was evening and there was morning, the _____ day,” is repeated 6 times. If this is intended to be read as a poetic division in concepts, it is also possible that day doesn’t actually mean day, but instead is intended to simply be a beautiful divider between concepts.

So, what are these concepts that are being divided? In the first three days, we see that God creates light, air, sea, and land. These could be considered kingdoms. Similarly in days 4-6, we see that God creates the sun, moon, stars, birds, sea creatures, animals, and humans. Each of these could be considered kings. In days 1 and 4, the sun, moon, and stars are kings of the light. In days 2 and 5, the birds and sea creatures are kings of the air and sea. In days 3 and 6, the animals and humans are kings of the land. The use of parallelism is quite striking and is a common poetic element, further reinforcing the claim of poetic prose.

While this poetic element is quite beautiful, the order of events is slightly problematic. Light is created before the light source. Vegetation is created before there is a sun. While it isn’t strictly necessary that God’s creation immediately follow the natural order of things, it does lend to the belief that the ordering may be an artifact of the literary devices that were chosen, rather than being completely historical and factual. If these items were put into the correct historical order, it would break the pattern of parallelism and the concept of kingdoms and kings. When considered with all of the other elements, this again points to the use of poetic prose in Genesis 1.

On the other hand, many people say that since this particular style of writing is used nowhere else in the Bible and that it was not a common way to use the Hebrew language, that it must be literal. One might then ask why God should be forced into a box of things he can and cannot do? My opinion is that God was trying to describe a very difficult scientific topic to people who knew very little about science. To do this in a way that made some semblance of sense, he decided to use a very beautiful one page story that painted a very broad picture that captured the main ideas, but was not 100% historically accurate. I can’t think of a better way to do this than what God actually chose. Remember that he is a master author, poet, and linguist, and can use whatever style he chooses, even if it doesn’t fit with the style of the person writing God’s word onto a piece of parchment.

Additionally, God knew that we are created in his image and I believe that he also knew that one day we would be ready for the full story. Human scientists, engineers, authors, and linguists would be able to make discoveries that would begin to unravel the mysteries of creation and the words of Genesis. He didn’t need to spell everything out for the Ancient Israelites. In Jesus’ day, the people were unraveling the mysteries of the Messiah. In our day and age, we understand many of the mysteries of the Messiah and are now unravelling the mysteries of creation. What will people be unraveling in another 2,000 years?

Read: Science and the Bible: Made in the Image of God

The first two verses of Genesis 2 wrap up the first account of creation. In verse 3, the second version begins. In this version, we see that it begins with the “logical” order of creation where the author chooses to explain that plants could not grow until they had a water source. Why does the author feel the need to explain the natural order of creation? My guess is that this is the literary transition point from a creative account of the creation story to a historical account. The oddities in Genesis 1 are subtle, but they are there. At the time of writing, the readers knew nothing about cell structure or chlorophyll, so the author might have decided to avoid this topic and instead include an object lesson that acknowledged the issues that were of interest to the readers of the time, rain being something that may have captured their attention and understanding.

The author then moves onto the creation of Adam, but hand waves the details, simply saying that Adam was created from dust and given the breath of life. While God could have snapped his fingers and made it happen, my guess is that he took a lot longer and used scientific and engineering methods. Remember that we are created in God’s image, so it is entirely possible that the methods that he used are very similar to the methods that a human scientist and/or engineer might use. My guess from what I know about science is that God created a single grain of dust, used that grain of dust to create the universe as described in the Big Bang Theory. From there, he may have created single cell organisms, modified them into multiple cell organisms, then continued to build upon his designs until he had created many different species. When it came time to create Adam, I have a lot of theories on how God could have used evolutionary principles while remaining true to the words of the Bible, but that is a time for another post.

The key thing to see with Genesis 2 is that it reads like a historical account and continues into Genesis 3 and all the way to the end of Genesis 50. The question then becomes whether Genesis 1 is poetic prose and Genesis 2-50 is literal, or is Genesis 1 literal and Genesis 2-50 poetic prose? When we combine what we know about the discrepancies between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, the various literary devices, and scientific discoveries, it takes significant faith to believe that Genesis 1 is literal, the world was created in 6 days, and most of the modern scientific theories are wrong. Instead, it is much easier to believe that Genesis 1 is poetic prose, the creation of the world mostly followed the principles outlined in modern scientific theories, and Genesis 2-50 is a literal historical account.

No matter whether you agree or disagree with my theories on creation, let’s do it in a way that is pleasing to God, does not cause division in the church, and does not cause people to turn away from Christianity. This is not a salvation issue, so let’s use grace as we agree to disagree. One day, God will tell us how he created this wonderful masterpiece, and we can nod our heads and admire his genius!

Reflection Questions

1. When you compare the creation accounts in both Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, what discrepancies do you notice?
2. How can you resolve these discrepancies with what you know about God, the Bible, literary devices, and scientific principles?
3. What extra information do you need to form a theory of how God implemented creation?
4. No matter whether you subscribe to a Young Earth philosophy or and Old Earth philosophy, how can you communicate your thoughts without causing division in the church or causing people to turn away from God?

Respond

As you consider the theme of non-literal literary devices used in the Bible, are there any particular passages that came to mind? If so, add a comment at the end of this post!

Related Resources

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English Standard Version (ESV): Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.