Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between
Guelph, Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high
school English, Latin, Greek and science, and served
as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve,
retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. His latest
book, Don't Throw Out Your Bible, is now in
print.
The
only thing that stops God from sending another flood
is that the first one was useless.
Nicolas Chamfort
Scene: A coffee shop of unknown brand, somewhere in
the afterlife. Moses has invited Charles Darwin for
latte and a piece of birthday cake.
Darwin:
Good afternoon, Moshe.
Moses:
Good afternoon, Charles. Happy 206th!
Darwin:
Thanks. But it doesn’t seem right to be celebrating
a birthday when I’m dead.
Moses:
Dead? Just a state of mind, old fellow. Wrong mind, at
that.
Darwin:
Yeah, well, never mind that. But it's jolly decent of
you to wish me anything after the damage that my book
did to yours.
Moses:
Actually, old fellow, it didn’t. Except in the minds
of a bunch who weren’t likely to believe me, anyway.
But as for your stu?, I’ve never had any quarrel
with it.
Darwin: Really? But everybody said I ’d taken God
out of Creation. I’d even come to think that way
myself. It made my Emma so distressed.
Moses:
Well, you can blame Bishop Ussher for that. 4004 BC, indeed!
What humbug!
Darwin:
Humbug, to be sure. But I don’t know how you can
say that. You’re the one who gave Ussher the tales
out of which he invented that humbug.
Moses:
Sorry, old fellow. It ’s not my fault he had no
literary sense. Surely by 1658 the Church ought to have
known better than to let bishops exposit Scripture, anyway!
Darwin:
Hold on! What’s that you slipped in? “No literary
sense”?
Moses:
No, none at all! Hadn’t a clue where those “tales”,
as you call them, came from, nor why I used them.
Darwin:
So now I suppose you’re going to explain it to me?
Don’t forget, there’s a one-hour limit on
co?ee drinkers here. If we run out of time, you’ll
have to buy me supper.
Moses:
The birthday’s yours. The treat’s on me. You
see, Charles, Ussher missed the fact of where I was coming
from. Literally. That crew that followed me out of Egypt,
what a bunch of woosies! Complained about the lack of
meat. Complained about the lack of water. Complained about
tramping around the desert for 40 years. So I go up the
mountain to get some answers, and when I come back down
they’ve got a party going on—a religious party,
mind you, but they’d made a forbidden image. Even
my kid brother and my big sister got into it. I was furious!
Darwin:
What did you do?
Moses:
Let’s just say it wasn’t a pretty scene. But
after my time with Him—up the mountain, I mean—I
knew what they needed—a theistic political philosophy.
Darwin:
A what?
Moses: A the . . . . Oh, yes, you dropped out of seminary,
didn’t you, before you joined The Beagle?
Darwin:
Yeah. So?
Moses:
Never mind. They wouldn’t have understood “theistic
political philosophy” either. That’s why I
had to work with stu? they knew. So you see, when Avram
Avenu left . . . .
Darwin:
Who?
Moses:
Avram Avenu. Abraham our ancestor. When he left Mesopotamia
400 years earlier, he brought with him the family records—genealogies,
mainly (Oh, the Mormons would have loved him!)—and
a bunch of yarns that got passed down orally about mythic
characters with names like Tiamat and Enkidu and Gilgamesh
and Humbaba.
Darwin:
The stu? Layard dug up in Ashurbanipal’s library
about the time I was writing?
Moses:
Right! But earlier versions of it. Anyway, that stu? was
polytheistic, and parts of it were pretty gross. Not at
all like Him. Not like Him whom I met at the Burning Bush.
Man, that Burning Bush encounter was enough to turn a
chap into a Presbyterian! No, not like Him whom I met
on the mountain, and later in the Tabernacle. Not like
Him who followed us everywhere we went, like a pillar
of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. None of
those tales were anything like Him. They don’t even
come close.
Darwin:
So you’re saying that Abraham brought written records
and oral traditions with him from Ur to Egypt and they
got passed down through 400 years until you got your hands
on them. And they had survived intact for four centuries.
Moses:
Right. Ancient cultures, as you know, were pretty static.
Read Qoheleth—ah, that ’s Ecclesiastes in
your Bible—and see what he says about the age-old
frustration of same-stu?-di?erent-day. Qoheleth wrote
a thousand years after I did, but societies were still
pretty static.
Darwin:
OK, so is there any reason why Bishop Ussher ought to
have twigged to the fact that you were using extant traditional
tales?
Moses:
Well, maybe. In my book, “history”, as you
understand that word, starts with Abraham. Everything
before him is prologue. Of course, when I say “history”,
I mean the history of my people, and their place in His
world.
Darwin:
So it’s history from a skewed perspective.
Moses:
What history isn’t?
Darwin:
Touché. So what about the prologue?
Moses:
That’s the first eleven chapters. Chapters! Hmph!
Didn’t need any chapters in my day. Didn’t
need punctuation, neither. Not even vowels, just consonants.
Just strung one letter after another and one word after
another without any spaces in between and it all made
perfectly good sense. Couldn’t a?ord to waste parchment,
you understand. Anyway, as I said, much of that prologue
depends on written sources. You may have noticed that
seven times in those first eleven chapters I use the line,
“These are the generations of . . . .” In
one instance, I even say, “This is the book of the
generations of . . . .”
Darwin:
And by “book”, of course, you mean “scroll”.
Moses:
Right! Nowadays that recurring line is called a “colophon”.
A title, so to speak, written at the open end of a scroll,
so that the librarian can find out what’s in it
without having to unroll the whole thing. So the good
Bishop might at least have figured out that I was citing
sources.
Darwin:
But that wouldn’t . . . .
Moses:
No, that wouldn’t have given him any literary sense.
For that he would have had to recognize my Sitz im Leben.
Darwin:
Your what?
Moses:
That ’s “higher critical” jargon for
knowing what was going on when I wrote that stu?.
Darwin:
Ah! So what was . . . .
Moses:
Well, try to get the big picture. There we were having
just crossed a river that swallowed up our pursuers. I
met Him on that mountain, and He gave me a covenant that
we had to keep in gratitude for His rescuing us from Egypt.
And why, you ask, did He want to rescue us? Not because
we were better than anybody else. But because the whole
world was, as you English like to say, going to hell in
a hand-basket. So if He hadn’t rescued somebody,
if He had given us all our just desserts, there’d
be nobody left.
Darwin:
I notice that you spent five of those eleven chapters
on the Noah story. Must have been a big deal. But needing
more space than the Creation story?
Moses:
Certainly bigger in the minds of that lot who crossed
the Red Sea with me. Try to imagine what they felt passing
through the shallows, and then watching the tide change
just as the Egyptian chariots rolled down the West bank.
Darwin:
Scary stu?. So the rescue of Noah reflects their rescue
at the Red Sea?
Moses:
Right, again! You would have done well if you had stayed
in seminary, Charles.
Darwin:
But the Noah story was just a myth all along?
Moses:
Not at all! The Noah story is not only true, but true
on several levels at the same time. First, there really
was a flood. Several of them, actually, but one that stood
out in the popular memory. Certainly in Mesopotamia, maybe
farther afield. If it didn’t cover all the world,
at least it covered all the known world, which to their
minds was pretty much the same thing. There are so many
flood myths—hundreds of them, like Gilgamesh, like
Deucalion and Pyrrha—they can’t all be idle
tales. But that was before my time. Perhaps around 5000
BC.
Darwin:
I remember about fifteen years after I published, a German
chap named Schliemann discovered Troy, and . . . .
Moses: Actually, eleven Troys, each one built on the ruins
of the one below.
Darwin:
Yes, and between levels two and three he found a layer
of flood silt.
Moses:
So maybe The Flood involved not only the Tigris and the
Euphrates but also the Black Sea.
Darwin:
OK, so we’re agreed that there must have been a
flood of sizeable proportions. How else is the Flood story
“true” besides the fact that one or more floods
actually happened?
Moses:
Well, the stories that I knew portrayed it as a judgment
that the gods . . . .
Darwin:
But you didn’t believe that stu?.
Moses:
Well, not exactly. Or at least, not the gods. But Him.
Oh, Him! What He did to those Egyptians was a judgment,
to be sure. Plague after plague, and still they wouldn’t
listen. Then, “Pharaoh’s chariots and his
host hath He cast into the sea.” And a well deserved
judgment it was after the way they treated us in Egypt.
Darwin:
So the Noah story not only reflects an historic flood—or
perhaps we should say, a prehistoric flood—but it
also helped the escaping Hebrews to understand that they
were being rescued as Noah had been.
Moses:
Oh, well done, Charles!
Darwin:
What about the rainbow?
Moses:
Ah, the sign of the covenant.
Darwin:
By “covenant” you mean a contract, right?
Moses:
So I do. But a contract with Him is unlike any other.
He sets the terms. You don’t get to vote on them.
He is not a Democrat.
Darwin:
Nor a Republican, either, I hope?
Moses:
How could the King of Eternity be a Republican? Forced
to relinquish the throne of heaven after two four-year
terms? So that we could elect a replacement deity more
to our liking?
Darwin:
But what about the rainbow? Surely there were rainbows
before the flood?
Moses:
Of course there were. That’s precisely the point.
Whenever you can see raindrops after a rain, you’ll
see a rainbow. Happens without fail. Because He made a
law-abiding universe. A reliable universe. Just as He
is reliable. So in the Flood story he can invest the rainbow
with new meaning for the survivors: As reliable as the
rainbow after the rain, so is His promise not to destroy
the known world with another flood.
Darwin:
Yeah, but so what? The prospect of another global flood
is just a straw man—unless global warming takes
hold with a vengeance.
Moses:
The meaning of the story is not in the rainbow, Charles.
That’s just the symbol of the meaning. The meaning
of the story is in the fact that He made a covenant. Just
as the Flood reflects what happened at the Red Sea, so
the rainbow reflects the covenant that He gave me on the
mountain.
Darwin:
So you were trying to show that there’s a pattern:
that He forms relationships with his creatures by way
of a covenant.
Moses:
Spot on!
Darwin:
But a single instance of a covenant has no statistical
value, and two instances—that’s all we’ve
adduced—could be mere coincidence. You need at least
one more instance to establish a pattern.
Moses:
Well, Jeremiah quotes Him as saying, “Behold the
days are coming when I shall make a new covenant with
the house of Israel and the house of Judah . . . .”
But that prophecy, as you know, wasn’t fulfilled
until 1400 years after my time. In the meantime, it’s
your book and my book—not the New Covenant book—that
we’re discussing here.
Darwin:
Right, we’re getting o? track. Specifically, then,
it’s your prologue that’s the bone of contention.
So what about the two Creation stories and the Tower of
Babel? They seem to be the other focal points in that
section.
Moses: Well, since the Creation stories are our real concern,
let’s deal next with the Tower of Babel and save
the best for the last. About 40 years after you arrived
here . . . .
Darwin:
You mean “died”.
Moses:
If you insist. Anyway, about 40 years later, a fellow
named Wooley excavated the Great Ziggurat of Ur, where
Abraham came from. You can still see nearly three dozen
of those things throughout what are currently called Iran
and Iraq. Great stepped towers they are, like pyramids,
but with no caverns inside. So the so-called Tower of
Babel was likely still standing in my day, though I never
saw it. I could never a?ord time o? to take a sabbatical
in Ur. In your day, it was buried and had to wait another
40 years for excavation. Seems like just about everything
takes 40 years, doesn’t it?
Darwin:
OK, so we have a thing still standing that’s called
a ziggurat, that would have been familiar to Abraham when
he lived in Ur. Why did you include it in your prologue?
Moses:
Y’know, Charles, if I could do as well at biology
as you’re starting to do with this Biblical interpretation,
we could make a team. Well, I included it because the
confusion of languages at Babel reflected what we experienced
with the tribes that lived in Sinai and Canaan. Their
languages and customs were strange to us, and we were
strange to them, so they became pretty hostile. We found
much the same thing everywhere we went, and whenever you
can catch a bit of Earth news up here you can see that
it still hasn’t changed. I’m not sure it ever
will. But it a?ects more than just competing tribes and
languages; it’s at work everywhere, even inside
the most religious households. I tell you, Charles, there
were days when Zipporah and I could not speak a civil
word to each other. When we got like that, no matter what
one of us said, the other could turn it into a quarrel.
Theologians call it our “fallenness”. The
20th Century called it “alienation”. Either
way, it means we’re not in touch with one another
because we’re not in touch with Him.
Darwin:
The selfish gene?
Moses:
Ah, I see you keep your reading up to date. No, I don’t
think Dawkins got the whole story. Maybe his theory works
for dogs, but Zip and I knew we were expected to do better.
I think at least a part of the human problem falls outside
the realm of genetics.
Darwin:
So the Babel story portrays not just an incident in time
past but also a present state of a?airs.
Moses:
Exactly. It portrays a state of a?airs that Abraham left
Ur to get out of; it portrays the state of a?airs that
we faced when we left Egypt; and it portrays the state
of a?airs that has prevailed in that part of the world—and
in varying degrees in every part of the world—ever
since.
Darwin:
Which takes us, I suppose, back to Adam and Eve.
Moses:
Yes, indeed. Adam and Eve. Earth-Man and Life-Giver. Bearers
of the divine image.
Darwin:
But surely you never intended us to buy that apple nonsense?
Or the talking snake?
Moses:
Actually, Charles, I never said “apple”. I
wrote about a forbidden fruit. The bad apple got in there
through mediaeval Latin as a kind of theological pun.
Long-a malum, pronounced mahlum, means an “apple”.
Short-a malum, rhymes with “pablum”, means
“evil”. But it ’s a good pun, if you
think about it. After all, how many things that look “pleasant
to the eyes” turn out in the end to be a snare?
And how often, after we have succumbed to such a snare,
do we hide from Him, knowing that we are indeed naked?
Darwin:
And how often did I complain unfairly about Emma, the
way Adam complained that “the woman whom You gave
me, she gave it to me”?
Moses:
And Zip would undoubtedly excuse herself with, “The
serpent tricked me . . . .”
Darwin:
So Adam is Everyman.
Moses:
And Eve is Everywoman.
Darwin:
And the story is psychologically true.
Moses:
Profoundly so. And if it’s psychologically true,
then it’s true about people, which means that in
some sense it’s also historically true. Not just
at one point in time, but at all points in time—notwithstanding
the fact that somebody, or somebodies, had to be first.
Darwin:
And that, I suppose, is what makes it His truth.
Moses: Just so. And when you follow that same thread of
an idea through the Noah story and the Babel story, and
a couple of the smaller anecdotes in between, you can
see how things could get so bad that Abraham had to get
out of Ur, and that we had to get out of Egypt.
Darwin:
OK, I follow your pattern. But in Chapter 1 He says He
saw everything He had made and it was “very good”.
Moses:
So it was. Until we screwed up. But you have to understand
that what I was describing, even in the Adam and Eve story,
is an etiology. But not just an etiology—it ’s
also a present general condition.
Darwin:
Not an eti-what?
Moses:
An etiology. An etiological tale is a tale that purports
to explain where something comes from or why something
is the way it is. But usually what such a tale really
does is describe a present and ongoing state of a?airs.
Darwin:
“It is a people that do err in their hearts, for
they have not known my ways”?
Moses:
Careful, Charles, your Anglicanism is showing.
Darwin:
“Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should
not enter into my rest.” Emma knew that stu? by
heart. I never understood why she found strength in it.
Moses:
Because it ’s true, Charles. It was as true of my
crew in the desert as it was of the Egyptians and the
heathen tribes that plagued our exodus. And it’s
equally true of the modern church in its modern desert.
Of course, some of your Anglicans dropped those lines
from Morning Prayer in the twentieth century. Said they
didn’t want to recite words that might o?end us
Jews. Frankly, I think the words hit too close to home
for their own people.
Darwin:
So what about the “very good”? And the six
days? And the talking snake? And while you ’re at
it, the change in the divine Name from Chapter One to
Chapter Two?
Moses:
At least you didn’t ask me where Cain got his wife.
Darwin:
Married his sister, of course!
Moses:
Whew! OK, let ’s start with the divine Name. You’ve
noticed, as Astruc did a century before you, that in Chapter
One I refer to Him by the generic Elohim, while in Chapter
Two I refer to him by the personal name YHVH.
Darwin:
Which, they say, shows that we have two separate Creation
stories by two di?erent authors.
Moses:
Not quite. You see, I was the sole author of Chapter One,
but I inherited the material in Chapters Two to Eleven,
so I had to edit and sanitize them before they could become
His word. But it’s not really two stories, or at
least not anymore. In Chapter One, I give the “big
picture”; in Chapter Two, I zoom in specifically
on His image-bearers. The two stories are rather like
a set of carved Russian dolls: you open up one and find
another inside. You’ll find extensive use of the
same technique in the Apocalypse that John wrote on Patmos
1500 years later, and . . . .
Darwin:
Don’t get o? track. What about the Names?
Moses:
Well, the stories I inherited had all sorts of names—not
names that He would ever own. But at the Bush—oh,
my, at that Bush, He revealed to me the Name that is above
every name. Who are you? I asked Him. I am who I am. I
will be whoever I will be. I am the self-su?cient, self-determined
one. So I held o? using His personal Name until Chapter
Two, where He has personal dealings with His human image-bearers.
After that, I used both, sometimes to emphasize the personal
or not, sometimes just for variety.
Darwin:
In science, we sometimes feel awe at the majesty of what
we come to know. You felt awe at having caught a glimpse
of the Unknowable.
Moses:
Thou art not far from the Kingdom, friend!
Darwin:
What about The Snake?
Moses:
Read D. H. Lawrence.
Darwin:
But he——
Moses:
I know. But he also understood what a powerful symbol
it is and what a range of meaning it’s capable of.
Darwin: And the six days?
Moses:
Another etiology. They already had a seven-day week in
Ur long before Abraham. So it was a simple enough matter
for us to set aside one of those days for holy things—as
He showed me on the mountain—so I patterned Chapter
One accordingly.
Darwin:
Then the question, “How long was a Creation day?”
has no scientific answer?
Moses:
How many foot-pounds of thrust does Santa get out of eight
flying reindeer?
Darwin:
And all the e?orts to rationalize your sequence of events
with modern science?
Moses:
Don’t even bother.
Darwin:
Because?
Moses:
Because that’s not what it’s about. I didn’t
set out to tell How, but Who.
Darwiin
So He doesn’t mind my telling How?
Moses:
Doesn’t mind? He encourages it! “It is the
glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings
is to search out a matter.”
Darwin:
But my “How” seems to exclude Him.
Moses:
Not at all. As long as you fellows are describing the
How of a thing or, in Aristotle’s material or instrumental
sense, the Why of a thing, you’re doing Science.
It’s when you venture into agency and teleology
that you’re out of your depth.
Darwin:
Why out of our depth?
Moses:
Because you can’t fit Him, the Agent, into a test
tube or under a microscope. Because you can’t compel
Him to replicate experimental results. Neither the Red
Sea nor the Resurrection was a parlor trick to be repeated
on demand. And the fact that you, or we, cannot fathom
his purposes—what we call “teleology”—doesn’t
mean that those purposes don’t exist. It just means
that His ways are higher than our ways, and His thoughts
than our thoughts.
Darwin:
So if I get your drift, science can carry on doing its
thing oblivious to the existence of, ah, Him, because
He is somehow outside it.
Moses:
But outside it—remembering the problem of analogy
that we spoke of—the way that an envelope is outside
a letter. You can read the letter without referring to
the envelope, but the letter didn’t get delivered
by itself. You may need to keep the envelope to confirm
the Sender’s address. When Paul was preaching on
the Areopagus, he quoted Epimenides: “In Him we
live and move and have our being.”
Darwin:
Which means that, as a scientist . . .
Moses:
. . . you have no more grounds on which to discuss the
existence of Him than has a Hottentot bushman. But once
you decide—as a man, not as a scientist—that
He does exist, or to be more precise, that you exist in
Him, then as a scientist—as someone who understands
the How—you have infinitely more grounds on which
to marvel at the brilliance of his craftsmanship.
Darwin:
But, Moshe, as brilliant as it is, it’s a flawed
craftsmanship. Nature is “red in tooth and claw”.
Moses: Yeah, that’s a problem. The old legends spoke
of a golden age, followed by a silver age, and a bronze
age, and finally an iron age. Genesis 1 portrays the golden
age. Was it "just" a myth? Somehow, I don’t
think so. Else how could we be held accountable to a standard
that never was?
Darwin:
Entropy, old chap. The battery runs down; the spring unwinds.
It happens in the moral realm as in the physical.
Moses:
Havel havelim; kol havel.
Darwin:
Eh?
Moses:
I said, Mataiotes mataioteton; ta panta mataiotes.
Darwin:
OK, I ’m lost.
Moses:
Vanity of vanities; futility upon futility; Murphy’s
Law of Murphy’s Laws; the bread always lands jammy
side down.
Darwin:
Got that right!
Moses:
"For the Creation was subjected to mataiotes—to
futility—to Murphy’s Law—not of its
own will but by the will of Him who subjected it in hope;
because the Creation will itself one day be set free from
its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of
the children of God."
Darwin:
That’s the “thorns and thistles” in
Genesis 3 you’re talking about, right?
Moses:
Right. The way we are now must be either normative, or
not. If it’s normative, then we have no prospect
of anything better. But if it’s an aberration—even
if it’s a humanity-wide aberration—then there
may be a chance that it’s not forever. And that’s
why the golden age, whether historical or etiological,
is so important. You can’t remember Woodstock, because
it happened about a hundred years after you came here,
but those hippies got it right—even if they didn’t
understand what it meant when they sang, “We’ve
got to get ourselves back to the Garden."
Darwin:
But, Moshe, getting ourselves back is the very thing we
can’t do!
Moses:
Oh, very good, Charles. That’s very good, indeed.
That ’s precisely what my book—or His book,
if you will—was meant to say.
Darwin:
I sure wish we'd had this talk before I started writing.
Moses:
I understand what you mean. But, actually, it shouldn’t
have mattered. Because if you scientists would confine
your e?orts to writing about science instead of drawing
inferences about topics for which your methods cannot
provide the data—and if those of us who write about
Him would resist the temptation to pronounce on matters
on which we have no expertise—then together we might
proclaim that every truth is consistent with every other
truth, because all truth is His truth.
Waiter: You’ve been here over an hour, gentlemen.
May I take your order now?
Darwin:
Burger platter, please.
Moses:
Do you serve kosher here?
Author's note: Most scholars think that
the Pentateuch, i.e., the Books of Moses, were actually
compiled some centuries after Moses, and that the first
of the two Creation stories may have been composed during
the Exile. Even is this is so, it need not substantially
change the interpretive framework that Moses offers
to Darwin in the dialogue above. Besides, Numbers 33:2
is like an academic footnote indicating Moses as originator
of one of the source documents.
