Alan Jacobs

The story begins with creation, and creation is largely a matter of dividing: dividing the region of order from the region of chaos (tohu wabohu), then light from darkness, then the waters above from the waters below, then the waters below from the dry land, then “the lights in the vault of the heavens to divide the day from the night,” then the system of division that we call time (“the fixed times and … days and years”).

Once this creation (bara’) is complete, nothing like it ever happens again. The Lord himself does not create any more, but rather engages in yatsar – making or fashioning or fabricating, that is, working from pre-existing materials. He is now no longer a Creator but a Craftsman. He “fashions” a man from the dust of the earth, and then a woman from the rib of the man. (“The LORD God built the rib He had taken from the human into a woman.”) He also names what he has fashioned.

After fashioning and naming, he gives commands, which are disobeyed – and with that we have the elemental axes of the first eleven books of Genesis:

• making/naming
• commanding/disobeying

Almost everything that happens until the appearance of Abram can be understood in these terms. When Eve gives birth to her first son, she declares “I have got me a man with the LORD,” and Robert Alter (whose translation I am using here) points out that the verb “got” can connote “make” – like God himself, Eve may be saying, I have made a man. Cain’s name means “smith,” and so the third human being becomes the first technologist: the builder of a city (4:17) whose descendants include “the first of tent dwellers with livestock,” “the first of all who play on the lyre and pipe,” and one “who forged every tool of copper and iron”: the pastoralist, the artist, the metalworker, all people dependent on technology, though very different technologies. Makers and doers.

It is perhaps significant that this first technologist and first urbanist is also a disobeyer, indeed a murderer. (Did he use a tool to murder his brother, I wonder?) Later, in Chapter 11, when we see the massive coordinated effort to build a great Tower that reaches up to Heaven, we see perhaps the inevitable tendency of technological urbanism, as Garrison Keillor suggested many years ago in a piece on the Tower Project:

In answer to concern voiced by personnel about the future of the Super-Tall Tower project, the Company assures them that everything is fine. Also, all questions raised by Tower Critics have been taken care of: 1) While it’s true that money is needed for cancer & poverty, it will create 100,000 new jobs. 2) We’ll be able to see more from it than from any other tower. 3) With the Communist nations well along with the development of their tower, national prestige is at stake, & our confidence to meet the challenges of the future. 4) In answer to environmentalist groups, there is no viable data on which to base the whole concept of the “unbearable” hum of the elevator; anyway it would provide a warning to migrating birds. The problem of its long shadow angering the sun can be taken care of with certain sacrifices.

Re: building and making, we may – employing the strategy of division and distinction that characterized the Creation – say that the kinds are:

• What the LORD himself makes
• What He commands people to make (the Ark being the first example; there will be others)
• What he allows people to make (e.g. clothing woven from fig leaves to cover their nakedness)
• What he punishes people after the fact for making (e.g. a Super-Tall Tower)
• What he pre-emptively forbids people to make – e.g. a graven image to worship – after which he punishes them for making it anyway

In any case, these are the great themes, as I see them, of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.

I might add one more theme (one which appears in Chapter 10), a development that will fundamentally shape the Patriarchal narratives: the rise of a diversity of human cultures, including the Sea Peoples, the Babylonians, the Ninevites, Sodom and Gomorrah (the “cities of the plain”), etc. This diversity is counterbalanced by the fact that there was on the earth only one language (11.1). When that changes, then diversity forever after exceeds commonality. And thus confusion and mistrust grow.

Angus, enjoying the return of the air conditioning. (As you would, were you a longhaired dog living in Texas.)

I decree this Take Your Dog To Work Day, because (a) it’s Sunday and there’s no one else around and (b) at home we’re nearing 60 hours without electricity. Air conditioning is a great thing. And Angus is enjoying the wide open spaces of the Honors Program suite.

Adam Roberts: “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and that counts double if a thing was never worth doing in the first place.” This could be Adam’s career motto!

We’ve been 36 hours without electricity, and as the temp climbs towards 90 I am getting frayed about the edges. Also I’m realizing how many stupid things in my life have batteries that must be charged.

Since Elon Musk talks a lot about Iain Banks’s novels about the Culture, I am forced to recommend my own essay on those novels — from fifteen years ago (!), but I think it holds up well, and offers a more complex account of those books that Elon gives.

Kim Hong-Joo

I was disappointed by Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis, though that may have less to do with the quality of Robinson’s book than with my way of thinking about the Bible. Robinson proceeds by a kind of Lockean association of ideas: on one (typical) page a thought about Joseph and his brothers reminds her Adam and Eve, who remind her of Jacob and Esau, who remind her of Hagar, who leads her back to Adam and Eve … the connections are of course perfectly legitimate, but to treat the text in this leaping sort of way causes me to lose sight of the actual linear development of the narrative. My buddy Austin Kleon has taught me in these circumstances not to take out my frustrations on the book but to say with a gentle shrug, “It wasn’t for me.” 

So I thought I should take this as a Divine Hint: I decided to go back and, for the first time in many years, read Robert Alter’s translation of the Pentateuch. I am not sure I have ever read it cover-to-cover. I see that I have a good many notes inscribed in my copy … notes I don’t remember making; and almost all of these are from his introductions to the books. So perhaps I have never read the actual translation, and I certainly haven’t done so from beginning to end.  

Anyway: I’m going to read Alter’s Pentateuch — just that: no commentaries, no scholarly treatises — and I’m going to blog about reading it. Intermittently, maybe. But if you’re interested, stay tuned. 

App-based authentication assumes that you have your phone at hand always. But I don’t and won’t. The primary alternative is a hardware key, but then you have to keep that key at hand always, and I would definitely leave it in yesterday’s trousers and have to dig around in the dirty clothes for it. I could keep it on my key ring, but then I would have to carry that with me at all times. All of these “security solutions” suck.