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| Diagram showing what God made on each of the 6 days of creation. Image source. |
I've been reading the book "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles," which IS AMAZING. One of the chapters is called "Conflating Creation, Combining Christmas, and Ostracizing the Other," by Mark Roncace. Let's talk about it.
So, this chapter is about how the bible has 2 different creation stories- Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. And 2 different stories about Jesus birth, found in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2. Roncace examines many different children's bibles to see how they handle these stories. Do they tell only 1 of the creation stories, or both? Do they combine them? Same for the Christmas stories.
Here's how the chapter is introduced (p 193):
The Bible is a collection of books written by many different people in a variety of places over a long period of time in multiple languages to diverse audiences in a plethora of social, religious, political, and economic contexts. Children's Bibles are different. They, generally, present the Bible as a single book and are written by one person in one place, time, and language to a fairly specific audience. Moreover, while the canonical Bible naturally features a diversity of stories from multiple points of view, children's Bibles do not. Instead, they harmonize the canon's disparate voices. This ubiquitous tendency among children's Bibles thus eliminates one of the richest and most pertinent aspects of the Bible: its inherent otherness.
Bibles for children are, of course, shorter than the canonical version, so it is to be expected that some of the diversity will be lost. ... But still, abridged children's versions have plenty of opportunities to make the Bible's diversity apparent to its younger readers. Instead, they purposefully eschew such opportunities by blending the different stories or presenting only one of them.
!!!!!! Oh my goodness, this!
Children's bibles are NOT the bible. That has been pointed out by many of the essays in "Text, Image, & Otherness," and I'm so glad I read this book because it's such a good point. In this chapter specifically, we discuss how children's bibles are not the bible because the actual bible has different parts that disagree with each other, but children's bibles are "harmonized" so that the whole thing tells one consistent story throughout. No contradictions.
In this blog post I'll just talk about the creation story. If you want to hear about the Christmas part too, let me know in the comment section~
So, the 2 creation stories in the bible are:
Genesis 1: This is the story about the 6 days of creation. For each day, it says which things God created on that day. Day 1 is let there be light, etc etc etc, Day 6 is the creation of land animals and people. Male and female are created in the image of God.
Genesis 2: This is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Adam is created first, but none of the animals are found to be a good partner for Adam, so God creates Eve from Adam's rib.
These are 2 different stories.
When I was evangelical, I had no idea that these were 2 different stories. I had read both of these in children's bibles, and also in the actual bible, many times. If you had asked me what Genesis 1 says, and what Genesis 2 says, I totally could have told you which parts were in which chapter. I knew these chapters very well. I totally never viewed them as being separate, contradictory stories though.
It just totally never occurred to me. I believed the bible stories were true- that they really happened in the same universe that we live in- so obviously they both fit together onto 1 timeline.
From time to time, I would come across lists of supposed "bible contradictions," and the issue about 2 creation stories would be on those lists. I thought, "No, these aren't 2 stories. Genesis 2 is just giving more details about Day 6 of Genesis 1."
And actually, some English translators also try to pass these off as 1 non-contradictory story. In Genesis 2, after God creates the man, verse 8 says, "Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed." This is the NIV translation of the bible- but "had planted" is a choice- I have heard that "planted" would make more sense as a translation. (I don't know much about ancient Hebrew so I'm not sure I'm getting the details right, but this is what I've heard about the translation.) So if it's "planted", then you have a story like this:
- First God creates Adam
- Then God creates plants, and plants a garden, and puts Adam in the garden
But if it's "had planted", then Genesis 2 reads like this:
- First God creates plants, and plants a garden
- Then God creates Adam and puts him in the garden
So if you're translating the bible, and you really really believe it's all true and can't possibly have contradictions, you will translate it as "had planted" even though "planted" might be the expected translation of that word.
Take a look at this link to see how different versions of the bible translate this verse.
(Another way to reconcile this difference is to say that God created plants on day 3, then made Adam on day 6, and put some of the plants into a garden, and put Adam in it- so the planting a garden was a separate thing from when God first created plants. All of these attempts to reconcile the contradiction totally miss the point, though. The point is, it's 2 stories.)
Actually, even now that I've been ex-evangelical for a long time, and I haven't believed in biblical inerrancy for a long time, I still subconsciously think of the creation stories as if Genesis 2 is zooming in on Day 6 of Genesis 1 to give more detail about the creation of humans specifically. I wonder what it would even feel like to really internalize the fact that these are TWO DIFFERENT STORIES.
Page 194 of "Text, Image, & Otherness" says this:
While most readers of the present volume are presumably aware of the two disparate creation stories, the majority of people are not, as professors can attest by their students' lack of knowledge about these supposedly well-known passages. Perhaps children's Bibles are in part to blame, for they inevitably fail to present the two stories independently.
Wow, what would it look like for children's bibles to present these as 2 separate stories? You'd have to pretty explicitly say these are not true stories. I can't really imagine a children's bible doing that.
This chapter of "Text, Image, & Otherness" says that some children's bibles combine the stories- ie, the way I always understood the creation story back then. But, there's this problem (p 195):
Conflating the stories in this fashion omits the profound notion that male and female are created simultaneously and in God's image.
Wow. Hold up.
So, maybe one of the main points of the Genesis 1 version of the story is that male and female are created simultaneously, and that they are both made in God's image.
Wow. I mean, yes I always believed that men and women are both equally made in God's image, but the idea that being created at the same time is a significant detail is totally new to me. It's hard for me to even think in that direction, because I know the Adam and Eve story and I'm always subconsciously filling in Genesis 1 with the details from there.
But what if Genesis 1 is saying that men and women were created at the same time? And that this is important? Not like the woman is an afterthought, right?
I mean, I also feel it's hard to make a big deal about "this is important" because we're very explicitly saying that these are not true stories, so how can you really fixate on details like that and make a big deal out of them?
Anyway, my point is, this biblical-inerrancy fan theory that these 2 stories are happening in the same universe really changes the story. If you believe the fan theory, then you end up imagining a version of the story which isn't what the writers wrote at all.
Then "Text, Image, & Otherness" mentions another way that some children's bibles handle these 2 creation stories. Some children's bibles show only the man being created on day 6. And then God looks at the creation and declares it "very good," and then you move on to the story where Eve is created, OH MY GOODNESS. Whoaaaa, not cool.
Yeah, first you believe the bible has no contradictions, then before you know it you're teaching kids that women aren't part of the "very good" creation God originally made, YIKES.
(Another common way for children's bibles to deal with this is to only tell 1 of the creation stories and just skip the other. Which is okay I guess, but both stories are making different points, so it's nice to have both.)
Then there's this part on p 200:
Finally, a couple of children's Bibles include both stories independently and relatively completely. They are both Jewish, not Christian, Bibles, which is perhaps not surprising since we are, after all, dealing with the Jewish Scriptures, and Judaism has a long, complex history of wrestling with its own sacred text. The only harmonizing redaction by the JPS Illustrated Children's Bible (Frankel 2009) is to retain the name God for the second story. A Child's Garden of Torah: A Read-Aloud Bedtime Bible (Grishaver 1998) significantly summarizes both stories for its audience, but does not blend the two accounts. It also features some surprisingly difficult questions for its young audience-- for example, What do day one and day four have in common?-- but none of these prompts a child to explore the differences between the two versions. In short, out of approximately thirty-five children's Bibles readily available in the United States, I was able to find only two that present both canonical creation stories. The rest conflate and eliminate.
Interesting! There are a few Jewish children's bibles that present the 2 *separate* creation stories, just like the actual bible does. Jewish people have been reading these stories way longer than Christians have, and there seems to be a tradition of really exploring the stories and accepting different interpretations of them- unlike the evangelical Christian approach of trying to make sure everyone believes the "correct" interpretation.
One more quote I want to copy from "Text, Image, & Otherness" (p 205):
In our globalized world, it seems self-evident that cultivating an understanding and appreciation of different views and ideas is an important task for parents and teachers. Children must learn to thrive among people of different races, languages, cultures, and religious traditions. The Bible, indeed, offers a wonderful resource for the facilitation of these skills and habits. Readers learn to listen carefully and attentively, to engage, evaluate, and interact with different voices in the text-- that is, they learn to think critically and to be spiritually and ethically sensitive human beings. But those opportunities vanish when children encounter rewritten versions that conflate stories and omit the various genres present in the canonical Bible. Children's Bibles ostracize the other instead of offering its readers the chance to meet and learn how to treat the other.
This is spot-on, and also very sad.
The bible is so rich and complex. There are so many characters. Writers were writing from different perspectives and for different purposes. Yes, the bible definitely can be a helpful resource for learning to listen to and empathize with a diverse range of people. But wow, that's so not what it was for me. When I was evangelical, everything was so black-and-white... All the violence in the bible that God commands, I had to force myself to believe it was right... God commands his people to commit genocide, to kill every person in the Canaanite cities they conquered, and I was a good Christian who believed all the correct things, and that meant believing that it was right to kill all those people. They were sinners, they deserved it.
This is the exact opposite of learning empathy. If you read about the violence commanded by God in the bible, and you feel sad for the victims, well you need to stop if you want to be a good obedient Christian. God said those people deserved to die. How dare you disagree with God? Kill your conscience if it's getting in the way.
One especially ironic part of the quote above is the idea that children need to learn to accept people from different "religious traditions." Wow, I was very much taught that the bible said THE EXACT OPPOSITE of that. The bible was about how Christians are the only ones who know the real Truth, and everyone else's religion is bad and wrong, and they're all going to hell- we have to convince them to abandon their own religions and convert to Christianity.
Really sad, huh? Reading the bible could have been a way to learn about and value diversity, to empathize with both the winners and the victims of the stories. But no, not if you believe in inerrancy. Then reading the bible is about how we're right and everyone else is wrong, and God can kill you if he wants because you're a sinner.
That's why I'm so interested in feminist readings of the bible now. There's so much there, so much that I was never really allowed to think about when I was evangelical, even though I read the bible every day. I know these stories so well, but I find that if you just turn them at a slightly different angle, there are things that I never noticed before- like Genesis 1 and 2 being two different stories- and it's mind-blowing.
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Posts about "Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles":
"Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles" (I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH)
David and Jonathan's (One-Sided) Friendship
Who Cut Samson's Hair? (a post about reading the bible for what it is)
The way we write children's bibles is "an act of bad faith"
Children's Bibles and the 2 Creation Stories
Related:
If God Metaphorically Made the World in 6 Days, What Does That Even Mean?
"The Wise Men Came 2 Years After the Shepherds" Is Just a Fan Theory
The Bible Stories As I Read Them Were Never Actually In The Bible