The Old Testament Word: Creator et Redemptor?

By Eugene H. Merrill

[Distinguished Professor of Old Testament, Dallas Theological Seminary]

Introduction

From the earliest days of the Christian Church a theological linkage has been made between the word of creation uttered by God in the creation narrative of Genesis 1:1–2:3 and the word of incarnational redemption proclaimed by John the Evangelist in John 1:1–18. The question raised repeatedly since then—and if anything more insistently in modern times—is what hermeneutical and theological warrant justifies this linkage? Is it at all defensible and if so on what grounds? This paper is a modest attempt to address these profoundly important questions.

The New Testament Evidence

Central to the heart of the Christian faith is the confession that Jesus is the incarnate Son of God, the Word of God made flesh. This dogma of the Church, hammered out as a tenet of orthodoxy in early church councils,[1] is not merely a theological deduction or inference but one founded squarely on the New Testament text itself, notably on the Prologue to the Gospel of John (Jn. 1:1–18). In no uncertain terms the evangelist proclaims that “The Word became flesh and took up residence among us. We observed His glory, the glory as the One and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (v. 14 HCSB).

To this testimony John adds the astounding idea that the Word incarnate in Jesus did not come into existence at His birth but existed in the beginning (ἐν ἀρχῆ) with God and, in fact, was identical to God Himself (θεος ἦν ὁ λόγος) (Jn. 1:1). Moreover, “All things were created through Him (δἰ αὐτού), and apart from Him not one thing was created that has been created” (v.3). Though John most clearly articulates this notion, other NT texts join their voices to the Johannine witness.

Luke relates that Jesus’ listeners were “astonished at His teaching because His message (λόγος) had authority” (Luke 4:32; cf. v. 36). The powerful authority inherent in His words is explicitly affirmed in Luke 24:19 where Jesus is described as “a Prophet powerful in action and speech (λόγος).”[2]

The author of Hebrews comes close to personifying the word by declaring that “the word of God is living (ζῶν) and effective” (ἐνεργῆς) i.e., it possesses both ontological and functional features (Heb. 4:12).[3] The latter of these, Peter says, is evident in the fact that “long ago the heavens and the earth existed … by the word of God (τῷ τοῦ θεοῦ λόγω)” (2 Pet. 3:5).[4] That same word, he goes on to say, is holding in store all of creation until the day of judgment (v. 7). The unambiguous testimony of the Apostles is that Jesus is God. John carries the idea forward that He was manifested as the Word and as such was involved in both the creation and dominion over all things.

The Old Testament Witness

By what authority, however, can such extravagant claims be made? Did the early Christian apologists draw their inspiration vis-a-vis the incarnate Word from Greek philosophical speculation or even Jewish tradition? The answer clearly is No, though nuancing of the idea may be indebted to some of these non-canonical streams.[5] Without question, the Logos concept springs from OT roots, first and primarily in Genesis creation texts and then others that expatiate upon these pristine accounts. We shall address Genesis as a separate sub-topic presently, for now giving brief attention to other OT texts that tie creation and the word together in such a manner as to presuppose the more ancient Genesis traditions.

Psalm 33:6 attests that “The heavens were made (עשׂה) by the word of the Lord, and all the stars, by the breath (רוּח) of His mouth,” thus equating the word with God’s breath or Spirit.[6] Akin to this is Psalm 148:5 which, referring to the heavens and all their hosts, reveals that God “commanded, and they were created” (בָּרָא). The command conveys the idea of the powerful word which, spoken by God, results in the emergence of all that exists (cf. Psa. 104:30). As Delitzsch put it, “His hand provides everything; the turning of His countenance towards them upholds everything; and His breath, the creative breath, animates and renews all things.”[7] That same power is celebrated by Isaiah who, in the words of the Lord, testifies that “My word that comes from My mouth will not return to Me empty (רֵיקָם, “without success,” HALOT, 2:1229), but it will accomplish what I please” (Isa. 55:11). To Jeremiah, the word is like both a fire and a sledgehammer, able to destroy as well as to create (Jer. 23:29).

The Creative Word in Jewish Exegesis

The Dead Sea Scrolls attest to God’s creation of all things but not in terms of a spoken word. Hodayot (1QH) is especially allusive so our comments will be limited to this important poetic treatise so expressive of the theology of the community that produced it. Speaking of the world and everything in it, the poet says “before yet Thou didst create them, Thou knewest all their deeds” (1QH i 7).[8] He then asserts that “Thou has stretched out the heavens for Thy glory; all [therein] Thou [hast prescribed] at Thy will and mighty spirits (Thou hast established) in their prescribed courses” (1 QH i 9–10). He continues by proclaiming that “The seas and the abysses… their [depths] hast Thou established in Thy wisdom and all therein Thou hast pre[scrib]ed at Thy will” (1 QH i14-15). Finally, he affirms that “by the skill of Thy knowledge Thou didst establish [the] destiny [of all things]” (1 QH i 19). While no reference to the creative word occurs here, the document is filled with the concept of wisdom and divine will as lying behind God’s work of creation.

Bereshit Rabbah has a great deal to say about Genesis 1:3, but makes only one statement about the implicit role of the word and that is in a quotation of Psalm 119:130. Parashah ::1 reads: “R. Isaac commenced discourse [by citing the following verse]: The opening of your words gives light, it gives understanding to the simple’ (Ps. 119:130).”[9] Clearly the emphasis is not so much on the word as a vehicle of creation as it is on its production of light, that is, insight. The Mishnah is somewhat more conducive to establishing a linkage between creation and the word that produced it, but even here there is more inference than explicit affirmation. Aboth 12b relates that “With ten [divine] utterances was the world created. And what is this scriptural information [meant] to tell, for surely it could have been created with one utterance?” Hagigah 12a cites the Rab who pointed out that “By ten things was the world created: By wisdom and by understanding, and by reason, and by strength, and by rebuke, and by might, by righteousness and by judgment, by lovingkindness and by compassion.” By “ten things” is probably meant the words that expressed these phenomena but creation by a spoken word is certainly not at the forefront.

The New Testament teaching of the word as God’s agent of creation—to say nothing of its incarnation as the Word—finds therefore little sourcing in extra-biblical Jewish literature. It is clearly a theological advancement to be attributed to John alone as he was directed by the Spirit of God.[10] Even Philo, to whom some turn for the origination of such a concept, understood logos in the sense of reason, wisdom, or mind, and not word. To him, the word was a philosophical principle that effected creation but not as an incarnate being: “To his chief messenger and most venerable Logos, the Father who engendered the universe has granted the singular gift, to stand between and separate the creature from the Creator. This same Logos is both suppliant of ever anxiety-ridden mortality before the immortal and ambassador of the ruler to the subject. [He is] neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as you, but midway between the two extremes” (Her. 205).[11]

Much closer to the biblical concept is the occurrence of the Aramaic term memra (“word”), a word (along with debura) common in the Targums, one suggesting the means by which God not only created but accomplished many other works (cf. Gen. 7:16; 17:2; 21:20). In Exodus 19:17 Moses “brought forth the people to meet the Word of God.” Though this appears to approach the idea of incarnation, careful study of the term elsewhere shows it to be a metaphor for God, a way of distancing God in all His holiness from mere mortals.[12]

The Creative Word in Early Christian Exegesis

It is impossible here to do more than provide brief samples of the opinions of early Greek and Latin fathers on the subject of Christ as Creator and Incarnate Word.[13] And in all fairness, it is admitted that the following snippets should be viewed against the fuller writings of each one cited in order to understand their teachings in context.

Irenaeus (c.180), speaking of the Father, said that “With Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things. He speaks to this one, saying, ‘Let Us make man after Our image and likeness’“ (Ante-Nicene Fathers 1:488). He went on to speak of Christ as follows: “By this work of His, he confounded the unbelievers, and showed that He is Himself the Voice of God, by whom man received commandments” (1:545).

Clement of Alexandria (c. 195) described Christ as “the Wisdom in which the Sovereign God delighted. For the Son is the Power of God, as being the Father’s most ancient Word before the production of all things, and His Wisdom” (2:525). Tertullian (c. 207) observed that “In the Gospel, moreover, I discover a minister and witness of the Creator, even His Word” (3:490). Finally, Victorinus (c. 280) confessed that “The author of the whole creation is Jesus. His name is the Word. For thus His Father says: ‘My heart has emitted a good word.’ Therefore, John the evangelist says: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’“ (7:342). The connection between the word of Genesis and the Word of John seems to be one strongly held by these early shapers of Christian theology.

The Creative Word in the Ancient Near East

Ever since the recovery of inscriptions from Egypt and the ancient Near East, scholars have drawn attention to the concept of the powerful word of the gods, especially in creation contexts.[14] The so-called “Theology of Memphis” recounts how Ptah, the “First Principle,” created the gods “through what [his] heart thought and [his] tongue commanded.” The text then goes on to maintain that “all labor, all crafts are made, the actions of the hands, the motion of the legs, the movements of all the limbs, according to this command which is devised by the heart and comes forth on the tongue and creates the performance of every thing.”[15] A hymn to Amun (ca. 1375 B.C.), the sun god of Egypt, speaks of him as the creator “who spoke the word and the gods came into being, Atum, who made the people.”[16]

The evidence from Mesopotamia is less direct. Though the Sumerian and Babylonian traditions are replete with creation myths, creation by the spoken word is only obliquely attested. Most famous is the epic poem Enuma elish which celebrates the ascendancy of Marduk to the head of the Babylonian pantheon. The gods declared to him “Your destiny, O Lord, shall be foremost of the gods’; command destruction or creation, they shall take place. At your word the [afore-mentioned] constellation shall be destroyed; command again, the constellation shall be intact” The poem goes on to recount that “He commanded and at his word the constellation was destroyed, He commanded again and the constellation was created anew” (Enuma elish IV, 20–26).[17]

A Au-illa prayer to the moon god Nanna (Sin) tells of his word which causes lesser gods to prostrate themselves before him, fructifies the land, makes fat the livestock, and ensures truth and justice. The poet exclaims, “Thou! Thy word which is far away in heaven, which is hidden in the earth is something no one sees. Thou! Who can comprehend thy word, who can equal it?”[18] It is true this piece has nothing to say about creatio ex nihilo by the spoken word, but it parallels much OT thought concerning the powerful word. For the biblical concept of the creating word, we now turn our attention to Genesis 1:1–2:3, the so-called cosmological account of creation.

Genesis One and the Word of God

Ever since the emergence of modern archaeological research more than 150 years ago, scholars have debated the role it plays in illuminating, corroborating, or even “proving” the reliability of the Bible, especially as a record of ancient history.[19] They have also noted correspondences of literary thought and expression that have raised questions as to the relationship between the great civilizations of the ancient Near East and that of Israel as reflected in the Old Testament. How can one explain these commonalities (and differences)? Are there evidences of dependence one way or the other or even mutually?

In light of the antiquity of ancient Near Eastern mythical and epical traditions, most earlier scholars opted for the view that the biblical tradents, consciously or not, “borrowed” their stories of creation, the flood, and other cosmic, legendary events from these larger surrounding civilizations. Hermann Gunkel, for example, proposed that “As Israel assimilated to Canaan’s culture, it became acquainted with [the Babylonian myth of the world’s creation] along with other ancient myths.”[20] To Gunkel and other scholars it seemed reasonable that a tiny, insular community like Israel could not have originated such traditions but could only have imported them from more ancient and sophisticated cultures. Added to this was the prior development of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment historical criticism which viewed the Pentateuch as a late, even post-exilic non-Mosaic composition and which reconstructed the history of Israel’s religion along evolutionary developmental lines characteristic of 18th and 19th century rationalism.[21] Israel was thus perceived as a back-water society, culturally and religiously indebted to the peoples around them.

Conservative scholars have consistently challenged this hypothesis both on grounds of the lack of objective evidence for it and from a faith stance that confesses the OT to be the word of God and therefore to be trusted in its portrayal of the ancient past, a portrayal that understands Israel to be the heir of narratives originating with their patriarchal ancestors from primeval times and handed down to them as sacred scripture.[22] The similarities of some of these accounts to those unearthed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and other places can, in this view, be best explained in the case of the former as (distorted) reflections of actual events filtered through the prism of increasingly perverse articulations of pagan cosmology.

This paper proceeds from the assumption of the Mosaic authorship (or editorship) of the book of Genesis and its creation narratives, though this attribution little affects the main thrust of our study, namely, the exegetical and theological significance of the creative word of God to NT Christology. What does the narrative of Genesis 1:1–2:3 say and mean and to what extent (if any) did the NT make its case for Jesus as the Incarnate Word in conscious dependence on that passage?

At the outset, it is striking that no Hebrew term for “word” occurs in the creation account at all though the two most common (מֶר/אֹמֶר and דָּבָר) occur more than 80 and 1400 times respectively elsewhere in the OT. Thus, the Greek NT word used in John’s Prologue to speak of Jesus as the Word (λογος), usually a translation of Hebrew דָּבָר, finds no explicit grounding in the creation narrative. However, such a lack by no means vitiates the case for a conceptual linkage between John and Genesis for the latter employs the verb “to speak” (אמר) no fewer than 10 times (1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 28, 29). To speak presupposes words; moreover, the action-packed nature of the Genesis 1 version places great emphasis on God’s activity as opposed to the product of that activity, an aspect more fully developed in Genesis 2:4–25. Westermann says of the phrase “God said” that it introduces a command. “It is not any sort of talk,” he says, “nor is it a question of the abstract idea of ‘word’; it is rather a definite, concrete happening—there is speech and its function is to command.”[23] The point is that God speaks and things happen. And what God speaks is the powerful and effective word that brings to pass all of God’s good pleasure. The following table traces the occurrences of the divine speech and its effects:

The limits of the paper preclude lengthy analysis of these data, but it is of interest to note that the first seven occurrences of God’s speech are in the volitive (jussive) mood.[24] It is as though the potential of what is requested is already there in the fundamental act of creation (v. 1) and just needs to be coaxed out by the spoken word. The last three occurrences pertain to man’s creation and consist of a cohortative (“let us make”), an imperative (“be fruitful and increase”), and a declarative (“I have given to you”).[25] In the first seven instances the word is an instrument, a powerful tool whereby God achieves a desired end. In the last three there is a personal involvement by Him in the action precipitated by the word. The “let us,” the command, and the “I”—all link what God said to His own activity. The speaker of the word has become connected to it in such a manner that it is no longer a mere instrument but almost a constituent part of who He is.[26]

The Creative Word in Biblical Hermeneutics and Theology

One must not, of course, assert that there is any hint of incarnation on the surface of the text of Genesis 1 or even deep within it at an exegetical level. However, a fully canonical (OT and NT) hermeneutic and biblical theology should not shy away from the idea that what the text contains in nascent form points the way toward the Johannine conviction that the Word was at work in creation and, indeed, was the Creator Himself.[27] The same, incidentally, may be said of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity which obviously does not lie before us in full-blown garb in the text but does reside there in potentia, ready to provide NT writers with a conceptual framework within which they could formulate a Trinitarian theology.[28]

The preceding observations give rise to the thorny issues of intertextuality on the planes of both hermeneutics and theology. By what warrant can one (1) read the Genesis narrative as anything other than a report on how the heavens and the earth came into existence and (2) derive from it deeper or fuller meaning than the author intended? As to the interpretive aspect, texts and the authors who composed them have a right to be taken at face value. They knew their own intentions and have done their best, one would think, to communicate them as clearly as possible.[29] Moderns who read into or out of their words something alien to the texts themselves are guilty of the worst kind of arrogant manipulation. At the same time, authorial intent transcends the human dimension when it comes to texts acknowledged by the believing community to be the very Word of God. The phrase “Word of God” means exactly that. The Bible, written by men ages ago as expressions of their own thought and intentions, is also the product of the divine mind and will and is therefore communicative of His meaning as well.[30] Whether labeled “secondary meaning,” “double fulfillment,” or sensus plenior (none of which does justice to the complexity of the problem), the fact remains that the Author and the authors worked hand in hand, collaborating on texts that may and should be said to have one meaning—not many and certainly not self-contradictory—but a meaning infused with ramifications far beyond anything envisioned at the outset.

John therefore had every right to mine from the language of the creation narrative—with its fixation on the word spoken—concepts and terms compatible with his own attempt to understand Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Word who, as God, spoke everything into existence.

A holistic hermeneutic that views the entire Bible as a progressively unfolding revelation of God undergirds a biblical theology that sees each and every part of the canon as a contribution to the God-intended message as a whole. Such a theology can brook no disconnect between the OT and NT in terms of the overarching creation and eschatological purposes of the one God of the Bible. As trite and simplistic as it might sound, the old observation that “the New [Testament] is in the Old concealed and the Old is in the New revealed” is patently true. Even within the Testaments this hermeneutical-theological principle is apparent. As we noted above, Psalm 33, a hymn celebrating creation, declares that “The heavens were made by the word of the Lord” (v. 6a), a clear allusion to the Genesis 1 account. But the psalm elaborates on the Genesis text by affirming not only that God spoke but that the word was an instrument by means of which (thus the particle n) He brought creation to pass. The idea is rather like that of Proverbs 8:22–31 where personified wisdom speaks of her primeval origins and her role as a “skilled craftsman” (אָמוֹן) who was beside (צֶל) the Lord when He created all things (v. 30). The psalmist adds to the accumulating revelation of the word and creation by viewing the word as distinct from the Lord, as it were, according to it a discrete functionality.

John, conversant with the cosmological texts of the OT, was emboldened by such sentiments as Psalm 33:6 to exceed them by asserting that not only was the word eternal and with God—it was God Himself (John 1:1)! Only a keen sense of theological integration and openness to progressive revelation could permit the Evangelist to make such audacious claims.[31] To cap it off, he goes so far as to transmute the inanimate word to the personal Word, He in whom is found life (v. 4), who gave the right to be children of God to those who received Him (v. 12), who became flesh (v. 14), and in whom is the fullness of grace and truth (v. 14).[32] Most pertinent, this word to John was the one of whom he could say, “the world was created through Him” (v. 10; cf. 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2).

Conclusion

The transition from the ancient OT text to and through the NT and on to the world of today is fraught with dangers of all kinds. Among these are ignorance or disregard of the historical, cultural, and religious contexts in which texts originated; insensitivity to the modes of interpretation practiced by both the Jewish and Christian communities of the First Century; and a denial or at least diminishment of the need for texts to be viewed theologically as parts of accumulating revelation that can be properly understood and applied only against the backdrop of God’s total revelation in Christ. The Word of God is His word, His communication to us of His creational, redemptive, and eschatological purposes. It is therefore of one piece—unified, consistent, self-interpreting, and authoritative.

This said, the leap from the OT effectual word by which God called everything into existence to the identification of that word with Jesus Christ in the NT should not be viewed askance. Indeed, the fullness of biblical revelation, whose metanarrative is dominated by the person and work of the Triune God, prepares the way at every turn for the disclosure of the ontological nature of that God. Luke recounts Jesus’ encounter with the disciples on the road to Emmaus and observes that “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, [Jesus] interpreted for them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Luke 24:27). This surely included His self-identification as the word of creation (Gen. 1:1–2:3), the Word of incarnation (John 1:1), and the coming King “whose name is called the Word of God” (Rev. 19:13).

Notes

1. For the so-called “Athanasian Creed” and its expression of the incarnation at the Council of Chalcedon in A. D. 451, see J. L. Neve, A History of Christian Thought. Vol. 1, Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1946, 116–117, 134–135. The phrasing relevant to the incarnation speaks of Jesus as “one and the same Son and only begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.”
2. These texts and others like them in the Synoptics fall short of equating Jesus the Incarnate Word with the written and spoken word He proclaimed. Nevertheless they make clear that the word He spoke must be understood as having authority precisely because of the nature of the speaker Himself. As John develops the connection later, the word spoken cannot be divorced from the Word who spoke it. For Luke’s emphasis on the divine authority of Jesus as proclaimer of the word, an emphasis that paves the way toward an incarnational theology, see I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke. A Commentary on the Greek Text. NIGCT. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978, 191–192; Darrell L. Bock, Luke. Volume 1:1:1–9:50. BECNT 3A. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994, 430.
3. Bruce cautions against an over-personification of the word here, but does draw a comparison in this connection to Wisdom 18:15–16 where the Logos is not just a sword but its wielder (“Your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne, a stern warrior, into the midst of the doomed land, carrying for a sharp sword your undisguised command, and stood still, and filled all things with death, and touched heaven but walked upon the earth”). F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews. NICOT. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964, 80–81; cf. B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews. London: Macmillan, 1892, 101: “the truth that Christ is the Gospel which He brings is present to the writer’s mind and influences his form of expression.”
4. Long before Peter penned these words, ben Sirach, speaking of the Lord, said, “At his command the waters stood in a heap, and the reservoirs of water at the word he uttered” (Ben Sirach 39:17; cf. Wisdom 9:1; 2 Esdras 6:38).
5. H. Kleinknecht, TDNT 4, 1967:77–91.
6. H.-J. Kraus, Psalms 1—59. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993, 376.
7. Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Psalms. Vol. III. Trans. Francis Bolton. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans (reprint, n. d.), 135.
8. The translations here are from Menahem Mansoor, The Thanksgiving Hymns. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961.
9. Jacob Neusner, Genesis Rabbah. Vol. I. Brown Judaic Studies 104. Atlanta: Scholars, 1985,27.
10. Ed. L. Miller, “The Johannine Origins of the Johannine Logos,” Journal of Biblical Literature 112/3 (1993): 445-457.
11. David Winston, Philo of Alexandria. Ramsey, NJ: Paulist, 1981, 94.
12. B. F. Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John. London: John Murray, 1892, p. xv. For an important and illuminating study by a modern Jewish scholar, see Daniel Boyarin, “The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John,” Harvard Theological Review 94/3 (2001): 243-284. For possible earlier Greek philosophical currents informing Philo and even early Church fathers, see J. D. Gericke, “The New Logos Theology of Heraclitus and Its Influences on Later Philosophical and Christian Thought,” Acta Patristica et Byzantina 7(1996): 68-80; Daniel Lucas Lukito, “Logos Christology: an Interaction between Early Christian Beliefs and Modern Scholars’ Attempts to Relate Them to the Asian Context,” Scottish Journal of Theology 1/2 (1993):105-121; Joel Letellier, “Le Logos chez Origene,” Revue de Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques 75/4 (1991): 587-612.
13. See David W. Bercot, ed. A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998; Everett Ferguson. Church History. Vol. 1, From Christ to Pre-Reformation. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005, 75–77.
14. Frederick C. Moriarty, “Word as Power in the Ancient Near East,” A Light unto My Path. Ed. H. N. Bream, R. D. Heim, Carey Moore, ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974, 345–362.
15. John A. Wilson, “Egyptian Myths, Tales, and Mortuary Texts,” Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Ed. James B. Pritchard. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955, p. 4; Miriam Lichtheim, ed. Ancient Egyptian Literature. Vol 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, 54, 55.
16. Walter Beyerlin, ed. Near Eastern Religious Texts Relating to the Old Testament. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978, 26.
17. Stephanie Dalley, “Epic of Creation,” The Context of Scripture. Vol 1. Ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. Leiden: Brill, 1997, 397.
18. Ferris J. Stephens, “Hymn to the Moon God,” ANET, 386.
19. Eugene H. Merrill, “Archaeology and Biblical History: Its Uses and Abuses,” Giving the Sense: Understanding and Using Old Testament Historical Texts. Ed. David M. Howard, Jr. and Michael A. Grisanti. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2003, 74–96.
20. Hermann Gunkel, Genesis. Trans. Mark E. Biddle. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997, 132.
21. See already Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes. London: George Routledge and Sons, n. d., 120–132. Karl Graf, from whom Wellhausen claimed to have “learnt best and most,” viewed the development of the P document in the post-exilic period as the final level of Israelite religious achievement and thus the linchpin to the Documentary Hypothesis brought by Wellhausen to its classic form. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. Cleveland: World, 1957, 1–13.
22. For a recent and convenient example, see Duane A. Garrett, Rethinking Genesis. The Sources and Authorship of the First Book of the Pentateuch. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991, especially 83–87.
23. Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary. Trans John J. Scullion. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984, 110.
24. See U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis. Part I. From Adam to Noah. Genesis I—VI 8. Trans. Israel Abrahams. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1961, 14–15.
25. Wenham observes that verses 3–5 “record the first of the ten words of creation and contain the seven standard formulae that comprise the description of each stage of creation”: (1) announcement, (2) command, (3) fulfillment, (4) execution, (5) approval, (6) subsequent word, and (7) day number. Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis I—75. WBC 1. Waco, TX: Word, 1987, 17.
26. Gerhard von Rad, Genesis. Trans. John H. Marks. London: SCM, 1961, p.55.
27. John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology. Vol. 1. Israel’s Gospel. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003, 49–50.
28. Eugene H. Merrill and Alan J. Hauser, “Is the Doctrine of the Trinity Implied in the Genesis Creation Account?” The Genesis Debate. Ed. Ronald F. Youngblood. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990, 110–129; Gerhard Pfandl, “The Trinity in Scripture,” Journal of the Adventist Theological Society 14/2 (2003): 80-94.
29. Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. Toward an Exegetical Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981, 106–114.
30. As Francis Watson observes, “If the object of biblical theology is the Christian Bible in its integrity, and if the two Testaments are constituted in dialectical interdependence by their relation to a single centre, then it is theologically unacceptable to construe the two Testaments as separate, self-contained collections of writings.” He goes on to argue that “the Old Testament must be interpreted in consistently christological perspective” and that “biblical theology must be christocentric (emphasis his) if it wishes to reflect the fundamental structure of the Christian Bible.” Francis Watson, Text and Truth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, 13, 14.
31. Willem VanGemeren, The Progress of Redemption. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988, 54–55.
32. The idea of the Word as Person transcended any such notion in post-biblical Jewish wisdom literature or in Philo and the Alexandrian school where logos was viewed not as an incarnation but as a divine instrument, “the first order of creation” as Borchert phrases it. Gerald L. Borchert, John 1—11. NAC 25A. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1996, 105.