000 Allen FMT (i-xxii) - The Presbyterian Leader

Trinity Sunday/Year A 45
and unjust, and, consequently, God allowed the Babylonians to invade and
conquer the nation, and take many of Israel’s leaders into exile in Babylon.
To some Israelites the gods of the Babylonians appeared to be more
powerful than their own God. When many of the leaders returned from
Babylon, they found the infrastructure of Palestine in disarray, and the
returnees often came into conflict with residents who had remained in
Palestine during the exile. Israel’s life was a kind of chaos.
Genesis 1:1–2:4a asserts the sovereignty of the God of Israel over all
other deities. The Babylonian story of creation, Enuma Elish, told the
story of creation as a fierce battle between Tiamat, ruler of the watery
deep, and the god Marduk, in which the world was created when Marduk
slayed Tiamat and split Tiamat’s carcass in half to form the upper and
lower parts of the universe. The God of Israel, in contrast, creates by
nothing more than speaking. Furthermore, Genesis implies that objects
that were often deified in the ancient Near East—such as sun, moon, stars,
and animals—are simply creatures. People commit idolatry by worshiping
such things.
The Priestly account critiques the Babylonian story by indicating in
Genesis1:1–2 that before God began to create, the universe was a “deep,”
the Hebrew word for which (tehom) is related to the name Tiamat. The
“deep” was a primeval sea that existed before the words of creation. Preachers
sometimes envision “order” and “chaos” as opposites, but here chaos is
a force field whose parts do not work together to serve God’s purposes. The
act of creation reshapes the elements of chaos and brings them into cooperation
with the divine purposes that are spelled out in Genesis 1:3–2:4a.
Such motifs are intended to persuade the community to trust God and
to live faithfully in God’s ways. The text assures the community of the reliability
of divine power. The God who created the world could permit the
exile and could be trusted to restore the life of the community upon return
from exile.
Although the text does not use the words “covenant” or “justice,” Genesis
1:3–2:4a depicts the character of a just, covenantal community.
According to Genesis 1, God intended the created world to be a community
in which each element has its own integrity while living in mutually
supportive relationships with all other elements (including nature). This
world is so absent of violence that neither animals nor human beings kill
in order to eat but are all vegetarian (Gen. 1:29–30).
Human beings are created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). This
image is the capacity to exercise dominion in the way that God does, that
is, by ruling in limited human spheres in the ways that God does in the