Genesis 1 as a Theological-Political Narrative of Kingdom Establishment -- By: Bruce R. Reichenbach

Journal: Bulletin for Biblical Research
Volume: BBR 13:1 (NA 2003)
Article: Genesis 1 as a Theological-Political Narrative of Kingdom Establishment
Author: Bruce R. Reichenbach


Genesis 1 as a Theological-Political Narrative of Kingdom Establishment

Bruce R. Reichenbach

Augsburg College

Genesis 1 presents in cosmogonic form a theological-political narrative justifying God’s claim to whatever exists, especially to the land on which the Pentateuch focuses. Behind this expression of a royal land ideology lie presuppositions about divine kingship and the land. I detail how this interpretation helps us understand the first creation account as narrating God’s establishment of his kingdom and creation of stewards and suggest a reason why the author of Genesis may have believed a justification was necessary.

Key Words: creation, kingdom of God, land, imago Dei (image of God), divine kingship

Some have interpreted Gen 1:1-2:3 as serving a quasi-scientific function, others as mythically purveying in theological garb existential concerns about human existence.1 The former view reflects a long tradition of interpretation that treats the text as a primitive “scientific” account of how God originated the universe and its contents. It provides the Hebraic response to the ancient question why things exist and are as they are. “On the whole, events recounted in the Creation and Flood accounts do not belong to the field of historical research at all. Rather, they fall in the domain of the natural sciences—astronomy, geology, and biology.”2 According to the latter

view, characteristic of the critical tradition, Gen 1 and following neither record history nor report science but narrate mythically the ancients’ perception of reality and their precarious place in it. “Out of the questioning of threatened man in a threatened world arose the question about the beginning and end, about coming into existence and ceasing to exist… . The background was an existential, not an intellectual problem.”3

In what follows I argue that the text’s focus on God as the primary actor and its locus preceding both the removal of disobedient or willful persons from the land and the promise and eventual allocation of the land to select persons suggest that the creation narrative of Gen 1 is more than a quasi-scientific account or existential piece. The opening narrative, in detailing God’s kingdom-building, functions also as a theological-political document that describes how the Supreme Monarch establi...

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