Series: Animal death before the fall

Part 3

Creation was not a paradise; the garden of Eden was

Continued from part 2, on the provision of plans for food

That’s wild-ness, not wilderness; and what I mean is that the prelapsarian world of Genesis is presented as far wilder than we might realize as we sit in our artificially-lit modern homes and churches, reading English translations of the text.

Wilder, I think, than a 3P reading of Genesis can bear.

I pick out three broad ways in which this wildness is presented:

1. Tanninim (sea monsters)

On the fifth day, “God created the big dragons, and every living lifebreath that crawleth, that the waters teem with” (Genesis 1:21). This is interesting because, while every kind of aquatic creature is included here, only one kind is expressly called out: in Hebrew, what is called a tannin gadol, which I have translated “big dragon” for want of a better term, but in some versions is rendered “great sea-monster.” This refers primarily to a powerful creature like a serpent, crocodile, or Leviathan itself. In Ezekiel 29:3 Pharaoh is depicted as a Nile crocodile, “that big dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers;” and in Isaiah 27:1 we read of Leviathan, “the twisting serpent…the dragon that is in the sea.” Similarly, in Psalm 74:13 tannin takes on the implication of a primordial chaos demon.

This is drawing on common ANE religious symbolism, in which the sea was an eternal or primordial chaotic abyss; the domain of a great coiled sea monster. In Cana’an, its name was Yam, the adversary of Ba’al. In scripture, it came to represent the gentile nations, ruled by Satan, the great serpent. This is why Moses chooses the word tannin to describe the serpents in his contest with the priests of Pharaoh, rather than picking any one of the more mundane terms for snakes. Given how he parallels tannin with peten in Deuteronomy 32:23, we may infer that probably these staff-serpents were asps (Egyptian cobras)—but he chooses the term tannin because of its symbolic import in representing the cosmic powers opposing Yahweh, of which Pharaoh and the cobra goddess Wadjet were figureheads.

Reading back to Genesis, we may therefore infer that its focus on the creation of these kinds of creatures, these tanninim, is polemic: the point Moses is making is not so much about the natural world, but the supernatural one. In contrast to ANE creation myths, there is no epic battle here where Yahweh must subdue a terrifying monster in the deep. Neither does he create anything divine. There is no chaos deity. Indeed, not only is the Leviathan a creature under God’s dominion—and by extension under ours through Genesis 1:28—but there is nothing unique or special about him at all. He is not just one creature; he is one of a great, swarming multitude. So this is a polemic against pagan creation myths, and a reassurance that even the seemingly mysterious and untamable sea is entirely under God’s control.

[sidenote]This is not to deny that Leviathan in Job represents Satan. But Genesis is not Job.[/sidenote]

But—and this is a big but—Moses’s theological point here requires the material reality of these sea creatures. Without these reptilian monstrosities, there is nothing for the spiritual motif to trade on.

The problem for creationists is that Genesis gives no hint whatsoever that tanninim are anything other than powerful predators. Remember, the word in context refers to what you might call “sea monsters” (so Gen 1:21, ASV). A Hebrew would primarily have associated it with sea serpents and crocodiles—animals that he would know are meat-eaters.

Moreover, as I mentioned in the previous installment, there is no provision of vegetation for the diet of sea creatures, and they are excluded from God’s later provision of meat. So even if you want to read those provisions as creationists do—though I think I’ve shown that fails to properly explain them—the sea creatures are exempt.

If the first principle of interpretation is to ask how the original reader would have understood the text, in this case we are forced to conclude that in the absence of qualifying statements or explanations, the original reader would have understood tanninim to refer to predatory aquatic animals. But there are no qualifying statements or explanations in the text to suggest that these creatures are not predatory—or that they only became so after the fall. Neither is there anything in the curse itself to suggest this, as I’ll discuss in a future installment. Indeed, the force of the theological polemic here trades on understanding tanninim to be predatory creatures rather than gentle seaweed eaters.

Now the issue here is simple: if the sea is created wild, why not the land too? If predation was occurring in the depths on day five, why not in the heights also on day six? What principled difference is there between a wild ocean and a wild earth?

Which leads to my second point…

2. Dominion

Evangelical Christianity mutes the commission God gives Adam by speaking in terms of “stewardship”. But while it is true that Adam was a steward of creation, that is not the connotation we find in Genesis.

The term translated “rule” or “have dominion” in Genesis 1:26, 28, means to reign—it refers to kingly authority, often backed up by the might of an army, and often with messianic overtones (compare the same term used in Numbers 24:19 and Psalm 72:8–9). By the same token, the term translated “subdue” in Genesis 1:28 is elsewhere used of enslavement and conquering (see, for example, 2 Chronicles 28:10; Numbers 32:22, 29).

I’ve made the point before that although God did not create us to have a combative relationship with the world, Genesis clearly does imply that the world was needful of taming—and not just taming, but subjugation. Eden was a sanctuary—but Moses does not suggest the rest of creation was similar. God does not plant a garden throughout the world, but only in Eden. The rest of creation was not gentle or soft; the implication is that it was wild and even hostile, with Adam being made to bring it into submission. The garden was, perhaps, a model for Adam of how things should look once he was finished with subduing and ruling the world.

This, in turn, meshes well with what we know of Yahweh in the Old Testament, and Jesus in the new. If Adam is made in God’s image, and that image cashes out in terms of dominion—as it unquestionably does in Genesis 1—then how God exercises dominion should tell us a lot about how he expects us to image him. Both Yahweh and Jesus are represented as warrior kings. They are not, of course, tyrannical kings, nor vicious warriors—but they are not ashamed of exercising their power, and they do not apologize for subduing their enemies by force. Revelation presents us with a picture of eschatological peace through superior spiritual firepower.

Commensurate with this model, there is no hint in the Bible (to my knowledge!) that man’s natural aggression and competitiveness is a result of the fall. Rather, it is a design feature which, though it is easily corrupted by sin (eg James 4:1), is nonetheless how we image God; it helps us fulfill the commission of striving with, overcoming, and harnessing the world he created for us.

3. Wild animals

Why, in Genesis 1:25, does Moses draw a distinction between domestic animals, and beasts of the field? Any reader, whether modern or ancient, would know that non-domesticated animals can be dangerous. Indeed, even domesticated animals can be dangerous because domestication is not their natural state—it is something imposed on them. It is an act of dominion.

It seems to me that the distinction between livestock and beasts of the field is not there to establish some kind of prescientific taxonomy—as if God created some animals already domesticated and others not. Should we imagine that he created goats, for example, “predomesticated”, but elephants the way we find them today? Did goats only become wild later? I think we should reject obviously ad hoc and incongruous hypotheses. No, the point of Moses drawing this distinction in Genesis 1:25 isn’t that livestock were created fundamentally different to other animals; rather, he is simply organizing his description according to the natural categories his audience already used. He is grouping animals in the same way an ancient Hebrew would naturally group them in his mind. If he were writing to us today, he would probably include pets as a separate group as well.

But clearly there’s a problem for creationism if Moses is relying on the naturally-occurring categories that animals fell into within an Israelite’s own, post-fall world—rather than the categories they fell into prior to the fall. He is, in other words, presupposing a fundamental continuity between the animals an Israelite knew, and the animals God made. He is saying that God created those animals which man has domesticated, and also the wild animals. That’s the point of organizing them into post-fall groups. But then Genesis 1:25 is describing the same animals which, for example, God tells the Israelites are so dangerous that he won’t drive out the people of the land too quickly, lest tiny Israel get overrun and eaten (Deuteronomy 7:22).

There is more we could say here, but I think this effectively sketches three lines of evidence that run firmly against the grain of creationism. As well as the evidence implicit in Genesis 1, there are plenty of ways the natural world in general points to prelapsarian wildness and predation. But I want to canvass all the biblical evidence before moving on to general revelation; so I’ll leave this for another time. The point I want to make here is simply that Genesis does not distance the original creation from the creation its post-fall readers knew; rather, it appropriates vocabulary associated with especially savage, predatory creatures, and seems to presuppose a wild, untamed creation in need of forcible subjugation by man. That is the very purpose for which man was created. And it’s a purpose that bends creationism to breaking point.

To be continued in part 4, on what we can infer about death and predation from the curse…