Two

The Primeval Revelation

We are told by John that “the true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world” (John 1:9), but apart from the statement of Romans 1:19, 20 the Bible gives us little more than hints as to what knowledge this enlightenment may bring with it. It is not unreasonable, however, to see in Genesis 1-11 an outline of that basic knowledge that man should have of God, quite apart from the revelation contained in the Bible.

I am making no suggestion that the literary form of these chapters is earlier than Abraham. However we may imagine—for know we never can—the way in which the revelation of Genesis 1:1-2:3 was given, there is no evidence whatever that it ever existed in any other language before Hebrew, and there are few conservatives who would attribute it to a lesser figure than Moses. The position is other, when we turn to the other stories in these chapters, viz. Eden, the fall, the flood and the Tower of Babel. There are grounds, linguistic and others, for thinking that Abram brought them with him, not necessarily in written form, when he came into Canaan from Haran, and that they go far back long before his time. To avoid misunderstanding, let me stress that while I believe they are in essence the world’s oldest stories, yet in the form we have them in the Bible they are as much the result of the Holy Spirit’s inspirational activity as any other part of Scripture. I am not prepared to argue the possible but improvable assertion that only among the ancestors of Abram were these stories preserved in pure form, but merely that the Holy Spirit saw to it that in their recording all error was eliminated. That awaited their being written.

When we look at these stories without going into detail, we see that they teach the existence of a creator God and of a golden age. This was ended by the fault of man, who made a barrier between him and God. This was followed by rapid moral deterioration, which ended with an outstanding judgment by God. Finally, God placed the punishment of futility on man, so that he should never achieve his purposes, thanks to the division between man and man, nation and nation.

Many books have been written to show that these truths, though not necessarily these stories, belong to the heritage of the human race. Sometimes they have become atrophied, sometimes they have taken on strange, twisted forms, which make the original truth almost unrecognizable, but they have provided some point of contact, when the truth of Christ has been proclaimed.

Its Place in the Old Testament

We are not concerned with the history of these truths among the nations. Paul tells us how they reacted to the standing revelation of God in nature (Rom. 1:19-23), and so the memories of the primeval past also lost whatever power they might have possessed. Genesis 1-11 stand in the Bible as an integral and essential part of the