One of my cousins tried to write down these relationships in the form of a genealogy that stretched at least ten feet long on butcher block paper. But when I looked at it closely, I could see how many mistakes he had in just my own immediate family.
And so I can imagine the mistakes that might have been made when the authors of Genesis attempted to write down their ancestry (through only males, by the way) as it came down to them in several traditions (the Priestly and the Yahwist) about a time existing long before the monarchy in Israel when they were writing—a time that we now call “pre-history.”
As I was about to leave the reunion, one of my cousins called me aside for a private conversation. He had some questions about my father, my uncle and my grandfather that he thought I might know the answers to. Their relationships were important to him.
Similarly, the relationships of Israel to her neighbors were extremely important to her. The Genesis stories are replete with rivalries between brothers, beginning with Cain and Abel, and extending to Joseph and his brothers. And in between were the brothers sired by Noah. The very first story after the departure from Eden involves one brother murdering another. Some brothers get blessed and some get cursed.
God is pictured as experiencing the same anguish that he foretold women would suffer during childbirth when he sees the bottomless pits of evil that his human beings are capable of. And after he “recreates” the world following the Flood, there are lots and lots of examples of war, violence and killing among people who supposedly descended from the same ancestors. But there is also that wonderful image of the “bow” in the sky. The bow was a weapon, sometimes described as a weapon of the gods, but here it is, in beautiful color, offering a promise of peace and an alternative way to solve what seem to be inevitable conflicts among brothers.
In his textbook on educational philosophy (Gutek, G. (2009) New Perspectives on Philosophy and Education), Gerald Gutek has a chapter on “ethnonationalism” which shows how ethnic groups build a common history, purpose, and a great deal of patriotic fervor on the stories of their ancestors and their past history. These stories don’t have to be all that factual; they just are the accepted stories of the tribe or nation. They often convey: “Our family is the best!”
If we can remove ourselves from the need to find Noah’s Ark or to trace the genealogies historically or to place the exact coordinates of the garden of Eden,
we can start to appreciate the spiritual richness of the Genesis stories. They explain about the evil that is in the heart of man; they show examples of working out conflict without violence, and above all, they exhibit a strong faith in a Creator God, who again and again can’t leave these flawed humans alone; can’t bear to destroy them all; wants to be their God and even enter into an agreement with them.
The message ringing through these first chapters of Genesis may still be sounding for us in 2011: “We are brothers and sisters, and there is hope for us all!” Genesis does not offer proof that God exists; it offers an invitation to believe.
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