First Things First

This is an essay written by HaRav Yaakov Homnick Shlita reprinted with permission:


These pages have lately been the preferred venue for hashing out questions concerning the biblical and Talmudic view of Creation. A great deal of confusion tends to attend such discussions. The most menacing pitfall of all is when people begin mentioning particular figures, such as Darwin and Dawkins, and sparring with their contention that the processes of natural development could have occurred without being set in motion and/or guided by a supreme Creator.


Really, there is no more profound waste of time for a serious Jew than to engage such "theorists." It is just as absurd to suppose that the world existed on its own and developed through random evolution as it was when the Greeks maintained that it always existed in its present form without being created.


An honest, healthy mind, fearless of consequences, cannot look at this spectacularly complex world, made up of spectacularly complex subatomic particles, interacting in spectacularly complex couplings, without concluding it was designed to be just what it is. End of conversation.



What is interesting, not in any defensive, threatened or apologetic way, is to determine how closely the scientific information, gleaned through experimentation, mirrors the Torah concepts we have received through revelation.




First we need to establish perspective by seeing how the Oral Law processed the Bible’s presentation. One Mishna encapsulates the entire subject. It begins the 5th chapter of Avot: "The world was created by ten Divine statements. Why was this necessary? Couldn’t everything have been created in one statement? It must be to punish the wicked who destroy a ten-part world and reward the righteous who maintain a ten-part world."




In other words, the surprising part of the Bible’s Creation story is that it has phases. In purely religious terms, we would presume that the world was created at once, since an omnipotent Creator has no need for steps. Had Creation not been mentioned in Genesis, the natural assumption would be that it was done simultaneously. The purpose of the Bible story is to introduce a staged process. This somehow raises the stakes on the table of existence, making the righteous maintenance of the enterprise a more profound achievement.


We can extrapolate from this Mishna to the arena of time as well. The intuitive sense would lead us to think that all of Creation would be accomplished at once. Instead there is a span of development described as seven distinct days, with new components added each day until the full architectural vision is realized at the very end of this schedule. Not only are there stages within the development of matter, there are periods of time that chart signposts of progress.




Again, in the intellectual sense this version of events can be fairly termed more scientific than religious. The faith system not only did not "need" this information, it is to a significant degree undermined by it. As a thought experiment, imagine a Jew in a roundtable debate, about two thousand years ago, against a monotheist who denies the Bible and a Greek atheist who denies Creation. The monotheist will accuse the Jew of selling out to the Greek science. Why impose artificial limits on the Almighty and say He used stages and time periods? It is just a weird and uncomfortable idea to posit an omnipotent Creator who chose to limit the pace of His creating.




Even more mystifying is the insistence in the biblical text that a point existed at which no observer could glean an inkling of where all this was heading. By the eleventh word of Genesis, we have already been plunged into a dark world of chaotic images that defy any decoding.


"A man seeing this vista would be utterly confused by the havoc," Rashi (1035-1105) explains. (The Midrash says it would have been heresy to say this had it not been written.) Try explaining this to the monotheist who has reasoned that the Creator is all powerful and all knowing. What possible purpose would there be in forcing existence to pass through an amorphous state?



The point here is that the Torah is spending all its initial effort on teaching you science rather than religion. The first sentence would have been quite enough. "In the beginning the Lord created the heavens and the earth." Straightforward. Now tell me how to live my life.


Instead, the Jew is being forced to train his mind to relinquish simplistic constructs of how divinity meets humanity. The world was cobbled together, emerging in fits and starts, passing through realms beyond our ken.



To review, the concept of creation taking time was introduced by the Bible, only later – much, much later – to be echoed by scientists. The idea of creation having distinct "ages" along the track to completion was taught here first as well. None of these premises benefited the religious model; if anything, they imported new complications.




The next shock comes when the Bible teaches that all living creatures were somehow fashioned out of the preexisting stuff of inorganic matter.


Creatures of the sea are said (Genesis 1:20) to be spawned from the water. Animals emerge from the instruction (1:24) "Let the earth bring forth…" (The Talmud in Chullin 27b adds that birds combine both water and earth sources.) Then man was fashioned from "dust of the earth" (2:7). This point is important enough to review afterward (2:19): "And God shaped from the earth all the living animals of the field and all that flies in the heavens…"




Once again the basic religious impulse is stood on its head. Every time we are told that God made a new creature, the biblical text hastens to clarify that He used available matter as his clay. No new material is added to make the fish, the birds, the animals or even man. The introduction of life is somehow accomplished without the addition of a single new element. All the ingredients were built into the earth in its initial structure (as Rashi repeatedly reminds us in his commentary).


There is no question that without these verses it would be sacrilege to suggest such a scenario. How dare we suggest that God did not deliver these creatures fully formed out of nothingness?



Compounding this tendency, the Talmudic and midrashic tradition teaches that those instructions were issued by God to mediating forces granted a mind-boggling degree of autonomy in implementation. The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 11a, Chullin 60a) says each creature was created "willingly." Rashi explains in Rosh Hashanah: "They were asked if they wished to be created and they said yes."




The Midrash Rabba even posits the notion that the trees (or the earth producing the trees) deviated from the original plan in some detail. Rashi (Genesis 1:11) quotes this, explaining that the bark was supposed to have some of the taste of the fruit. The Midrash’s text implies the bark would have been somewhat edible. This language is carried as far as suggesting that the earth was later punished for this misjudgment.




The Talmud (Chullin ibid.) says the grasses derived some information about their own layout from the language delivered to the trees. Grasses were not told directly to divide into separate patches for each type, and could have grown on top of each other in unruly entanglements. When they heard the trees being told to grow in distinct areas for each species, the grasses decided that strategy worked for them too; perhaps even better, since trees had less potential for converging on each other.


Not only is the grass described as an intelligent force, an active force and an autonomous force, it is even presumed to have the right to implement a rule gleaned by deduction. Amazing concept: it can overhear an instruction to another, theorize an application to its own situation, then actually put its conclusion into practice.



Whatever all these things might mean literally, their message to us is clear. We are being taught that the creatures we see above the earth and below the sea are the result of some internal engine, some pre-programmed pulse, that somehow generated the inhabitants of the earth from the matter of the earth itself.




As startling as this approach must have been to the assumed orthodoxies in other religions and secular systems, nothing can compare in bombshell status to the biblically hinted, and Talmudically expounded, notion of prehistoric man.


The Talmud in Shabbos (88b) indicates there were 974 generations of prehistoric man. In Chagiga (13b) the Talmud sounds more like those generations were never actualized. The Midrash Rabba (Genesis 28) says they were wiped out.




While it remains somewhat unclear exactly what these 974 generations represent, this seems to be a matter of prime importance that is stressed in two verses (Psalms 105:8, Chronicles I 16:15). These verses point out that the Torah was given to the thousandth generation, which is explained by the Midrash to mean the 974 prehistoric generations plus the 26 from Adam until Moses.


Apparently, this highlights the high level of Torah – that it took a thousand stages in the creation of man, stages designated as "generations," before man could receive such exalted wisdom.



The Jews traveled through history for millennia studying the Talmud and Midrash, comfortable with a unique concept of prehistoric man, a concept that gave that creature (or idea) a 974:26 edge in pre-biblical generations.


If geology and archaeology have indeed yielded specimens that are indisputably prehistoric men (I am not expert enough to be certain of this), they are substantiating one of the most mysterious parts of the Jewish intellectual tradition. (The late David Brown makes this point in a work that received the imprimatur of Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak Ruderman, zt"l, considered one of the supreme scholars of the last generation.)



Even many Jews are not aware that the dating system existed before the seven days of Creation. The tradition (Midrash Pesikta) is that the first day of Creation was the twenty-fifth day of the sixth month, so that man emerged on the first day of the seventh month: hence Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of mankind’s birth. What this suggests in terms of what existed before is left unclear.




Another point relating to time is in the area of compression. Sometimes time seems to accommodate much more than we would expect, as in the Talmudic tradition (Sanhedrin 38b) that Adam was created on the sixth day, Eve two hours later, and their two children were born an hour after that. On the other hand, we find early man living eight or nine hundred years. However these things are explained, the overriding message comes through: do not expect to compute the early time frames for events with great retrospective accuracy.




All this being said, there is one other Mishna which holds another very important key. That is in Chagiga (11b), where it states that the story of Creation should only be taught to one student at a time, not in the classroom. Creation is a matter that must be conveyed with great accuracy and subtlety.


The Talmud and Midrash explain that this is an area in which God hides more than He reveals. We are only getting chapter headings and general categories, not detailed descriptions. Anyone can see that the vast majority of the Bible deals with the life of the Jews after the Exodus from Egypt. Even Genesis itself devotes a great deal more space to the conflict between Joseph and his brothers than it does to the rudimentary sketch of Creation.




Furthermore, we encounter a phenomenon in the Creation story that is inconceivable in other biblical tales. There are entire sections of the presentation that are understood to be conceptual rather than actual.




The Talmud in Brachot (61a), Eruvin (18a) and Ketubot (8a) says the verse (Genesis 5:2) "He created them male and female" refers to a "prior concept" of Creation rather than to what happened in the end, where man appeared without immediately having a companion. Rashi (ibid 1:1) seems to go much further, understanding a Midrash to say that the entire first chapter of Genesis is communicating a conceptual model.




Once again, this type of interpretation is never applied to any other part of the Torah. It is clear that Creation is being transmitted in a unique system, where the principle – not the medium – is the message.




In summation, the Bible does not claim to be presenting a complete version of Creation. No one could possibly tell you for certain what exactly happened to the dust of the earth in the course of its becoming man. What we can derive from the first chapters of Genesis is a broad outline with a few critical high points. Those keystones tend to be supported by the clearer conclusions of science.




Long before modern science, we Jews said it took time to create the world. Long before modern science, we said it was created in stages. Long before modern science, we said living things were developed from preexisting matter.


Long before modern science, we said there was something encoded into the evolving planet to drive it toward perfection. Long before modern science, we said the most sophisticated creatures came last, with man as the climax.

The indications that these claims are accurate serve as a dazzling testimony that our revelation, counterintuitive though it was, was indeed the truth.



To get pulled into haggling over the small change of how long each segment of time was exactly, or how many stages intervened between the dust being dust and its becoming a living creature, is to miss the point by a wide margin, to miss seeing the forest for the trees. We are the ones splitting the atoms; the skeptics are splitting the hairs.




A scientific theory, to be confirmed, must be able to predict outcomes. In applying science to past events, it makes sense to require predictions of what the evidence will show when it is found. Our tradition, more scientific than reflexively religious as we have shown, has been borne out in a very big way, thousands of years after we publicized our assertions.


Those primitive religionists who mocked us have been upstaged. Those secular cynics who challenged us have been undermined. Our oil is still burning, long after it was predicted to go out.