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The earliest chapters in the Bible may be familiar to us because of the stories they contain: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel. How can these ancient tales have a message for us today?
Moreover, the account of creation has often generated much controversary and debate. Too often Christians have read Genesis as if it orginated in the nineteenth century as a counterblast to the theories of Charles Darwin, and treated it as a modern scientific textbook. This can lead to a sterile debate, fixating on one issue alone, the text forgotten as various pet theories are aired.
How much richer perhaps, to read Genesis in the setting it was originally written. We might then see how it apes the ancient creation stories of other cultures, imitating their style yet providing a different focus: the purposeful and ordered activity of a single Creator God, rather than the random chaos of many gods with humanity as an accidental afterthought.
Rescuing Genesis is an exploration, attempting to move away from creation/evolution debates and looking more deeply at what the text actually says, to its original readers and thence to us today. It introduces who God is, who we are and how the world is. After all, the author did not write these chapters to generate controversy but to teach us about God. Wonderful surprises await!
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