lizards) more than themselves. How horrible is that? How much shame must
exist, for something like that to be true? What could it be about people that
makes them prefer their pets to themselves?
It was an ancient story in the Book of Genesis—the first book in the Old
Testament—that helped me find an answer to that perplexing question.
The Oldest Story and the Nature of the World
Two stories of Creation from two different Middle Eastern sources appear to
be woven together in the Genesis account. In the chronologically first but
historically more recent account—known as the “Priestly”—God created the
cosmos, using His divine Word, speaking light, water and land into existence,
following that with the plants and the heavenly bodies. Then He created birds
and animals and fish (again, employing speech)—and ended with man, male
and female, both somehow formed in his image. That all happens in Genesis
- In the second, older, “Jawhist” version, we find another origin account,
involving Adam and Eve (where the details of creation differ somewhat), as
well as the stories of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Tower of Babel. That is
Genesis 2 to 11. To understand Genesis 1, the Priestly story, with its
insistence on speech as the fundamental creative force, it is first necessary to
review a few fundamental, ancient assumptions (these are markedly different
in type and intent from the assumptions of science, which are, historically
speaking, quite novel).
Scientific truths were made explicit a mere five hundred years ago, with
the work of Francis Bacon, René Descartes and Isaac Newton. In whatever
manner our forebears viewed the world prior to that, it was not through a
scientific lens (any more than they could view the moon and the stars through
the glass lenses of the equally recent telescope). Because we are so scientific
now—and so determinedly materialistic—it is very difficult for us even to
understand that other ways of seeing can and do exist. But those who existed
during the distant time in which the foundational epics of our culture
emerged were much more concerned with the actions that dictated survival
(and with interpreting the world in a manner commensurate with that goal)
than with anything approximating what we now understand as objective truth.
Before the dawn of the scientific worldview, reality was construed
differently. Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.^31