Should Genesis Be Taken Literally?

Russell Gregg, creation.com, 2023

Creationists are often accused of believing that the whole Bible should be taken literally. This is not so! Rather, the key to a correct understanding of any part of the Bible is to ascertain the intention of the author of the portion or book under discussion. This is not as difficult as it may seem, as the Bible obviously contains:

• Poetry—as in the Psalms, where the repetition or parallelism of ideas is in accordance with Hebrew ideas of poetry, without the rhyme (parallelism of sound) and metre (parallelism of time) that are important parts of traditional English poetry. This, by the way, is the reason why the Psalms can be translated into other languages and still retain most of their literary appeal and poetic piquancy, while the elements of rhyme and metre are usually lost when traditional Western poetry is translated into other languages.
• Parables—as in many of the sayings of Jesus, such as the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:3–23), which Jesus Himself clearly states to be a parable and about which He gives meanings for the various items, such as the seed and the soil.
• Prophecy—as in the books of the last section of the Old Testament (Isaiah to Malachi).
• Letters—as in the New Testament epistles written by Paul, Peter, John, and others.
• Biography—as in the Gospels.
• Autobiography/testimony—as in the book of Acts where the author, Luke, after narrating the Apostle Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus as a historical fact (Acts 9:1–19), then describes two further occasions when Paul included this conversion experience as part of his own personal testimony (Acts 22:1–21; 26:1–22).
• Authentic historical facts—as in the books of 1 and 2 Kings, etc.

So the author’s intention with respect to any book of the Bible is usually quite clear from the style and the content. Who then was the author of Genesis, and what intention is revealed by his style and the content of what he wrote?

The author

The LORD Jesus Himself and the Gospel writers said that the Law was given by Moses (Mark 10:3; Luke 24:27; John 1:17), and the uniform tradition of the Jewish scribes and early Christian fathers, and the conclusion of conservative scholars to the present day, is that Genesis was written by Moses. This does not preclude the possibility that Moses had access to patriarchal records, preserved by being written on clay tablets and handed down from father to son via the line of Adam–Seth–Noah–Shem–Abraham–Isaac–Jacob, etc., as there are 11 verses in Genesis which read, ‘These are the generations [Hebrew: toledoth = ‘origins’ or by extension ‘record of the origins’] of … .’¹ As these statements all come after the events they describe, and the events recorded in each division all took place before rather than after the death of the individuals so named, they may very well be subscripts or closing signatures, i.e. colophons, rather than superscripts or headings. If this is so, the most likely explanation of them is that Adam, Noah, Shem, and the others each wrote down an account of the events which occurred in his lifetime, and Moses, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, selected and compiled these, along with his own comments, into the book we now know as Genesis² (see also Did Moses really write Genesis?). 

Chapters 12–50 of Genesis were very clearly written as authentic history, as they describe the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and his 12 sons who were the ancestral heads of the 12 tribes of Israel. The Jewish people, from earliest biblical times to the present day, have always regarded this portion of Genesis as the true record of their nation’s history. 

So what about the first 11 chapters of Genesis, which are our main concern, as these are the ones that have incurred the most criticism from modern scholars, scientists, and skeptics? 

Genesis 1–11

Are any of these chapters poetry?

To answer this question we need to examine in a little more depth just what is involved in the parallelism of ideas that constitutes Hebrew poetry. 

Let us consider Psalm 1:1, which reads as follows: ‘Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.’ Here we see triple parallelism in the nouns and verbs used (reading downwards in the following scheme):

walks	counsel	wicked
stands	way	sinners
sits	seat	scoffers

As well as this overt parallelism, there is also a covert or subtle progression of meaning. In the first column, ‘walks’ suggests short-term acquaintance, ‘stands’ implies readiness to discuss, and ‘sits’ speaks of long-term involvement. In the second column, ‘counsel’ betokens general advice, ‘way’ indicates a chosen course of action, and ‘seat’ signifies a set condition of mind. In the third column, ‘wicked’ describes the ungodly, ‘sinner’ characterizes the actively wicked, and ‘scoffers’ portrays the contemptuously wicked. 

Other types of Hebrew poetry include contrastive parallelism, as in Proverbs 27:6, ‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful’, and completive parallelism, as in Psalm 46:1, ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in time of need.’³. 

And so we return to our question. Are any of the first 11 chapters of Genesis poetry? 

Answer: No, because these chapters do not contain information or invocation in any of the forms of Hebrew poetry, in either overt or covert form, and because Hebrew scholars of substance are agreed that this is so (see below). 

Note: There certainly is repetition in Genesis chapter 1, e.g. ‘And God said …’ occurs 10 times; ‘and God saw that it was good/very good’ seven times; ‘after his/their kind’ 10 times; ‘And the evening and the morning were the … day’ six times. However, these repetitions have none of the poetic forms discussed above; rather they are statements of fact and thus a record of what happened, and possibly for emphasis—to indicate the importance of the words repeated

Are any of these chapters parables?

No, because when Jesus told a parable He either said it was a parable, or He introduced it with a simile, so making it plain to the hearers that it was a parable, as on the many occasions when He said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like … .’ No such claim is made or style used by the author of Genesis 1–11. 

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