Walton’s thesis is that the ancient Near-Eastern world was concerned about functionality in creation, rather than our present concern for material. That is, for us (and even beginning in the late Roman period) we focus on the creation of the material world, how the physical things of the world were created. This focus on material aspect of creation is even more prominent since the advent of the focused investigation of the material world which is science. However, the ancient Near-Eastern world was not concerned with how matter came to be—of course it was created by God, or by the gods—but their focus was on the creation of the functional world: the creation of stable, livable land out of the chaos of the waters; the creation of ordered time (“day and night”), the seasons (“the sun and moon in their course”), the creation of food (“green plants” and livestock), etc. The important aspect was not that God or the gods created matter—that was assumed—the important aspect to them was that God or the gods created the orderly processes that sustain human life.

Walton supports his thesis in two ways. The first is analysis of the Hebrew word used for “create”, bara. He shows that this word is not used for creating material things, but rather for creating functional things. The second is by citing a number of major Near-Eastern creation accounts. While we cannot know how the ancient Israelites or the writer of Genesis thought, we can get a reasonable idea by looking at creation literature of similar cultures. He quotes Egyptian and Sumerian creation accounts specifically, noting that, like Genesis, they also focus on the functional aspects. In fact, the Sumerian one is even more clearly functionally oriented, saying that there was no high priest, no rites performed, and the earth did not produce anything.

He notes that even our material-focused culture has functionally-focused areas. Does a restaurant really exist if it has a location, dishes, employees, food, but is not licensed to sell? Perhaps it exists to the owner, but to the rest of the world, it is creating the corporate structure and getting the licensing that creates the restaurant. Similarly, a college with a curriculum and professors does not really exist if there are no students, because the function of a college is to educate students. (As a professor, Walton observes that a college campus even feels very different during the summer when the administration and staff are working but there are no students.) Likewise, the new course schedule does not really exist until it goes live and students can actually register for classes.

Walton proposes that Genesis 1 is not attempting, and is not even interested, in describing how God created the material world. Instead he proposes that Genesis 1 is a temple text, that describes the creation a temple. So the text shows God creating all the things necessary for people to flourish: light, time, seasons for growing crops (and astronomical markers to know when to do that), food, etc. From a functional perspective, of course, the temple is not actually created until God inhabits the temple, which he does on the seventh day, when he rests. Walton persuasively argues that the word “rest” does not mean a Sabbath of not working, but rather, indicates a finishing of the creation process and a beginning of his normal operations in the world which was the whole point of the creation. He notes that this usage of rest is frequent in the Old Testament: the Lord gives David “rest” from his enemies, which does not mean that David relaxes for the rest of his reign, but rather than he can focus on the purpose of being king: running the kingdom. This is similar to the creation of a new college: you build the buildings, you hire professors, you create curriculum, you create a course schedule, and you enroll students. The staff of the college do not stop working on the first day of classes; rather, they “rest” from the preparatory work into the work that the preparations were intended to enable.

Another argument in favor of a functional perspective is that Adam and Eve serve as archetypes of men and women, rather than as a material origin. After the first five chapters of Genesis, Adam and Eve are not even mentioned in the Old Testament (except in a genealogy in Chronicles), and are definitely used archetypically in the New Testament. “In both male and female forms, humankind is connected to God in whose image all are made. As such they have the privilege of procreation, the role of subduing and ruling, and a status in the garden [temple] serving sacred space (Gen 2:15)” (70)

The cosmos is, in fact, a temple. The Babylonian Enuma-Elish describes Marduk building the world as his temple. Sumerian and Egyptian texts says that the sun rises from the temple. Isaiah 66:1-2 reinforces this, where God says that heaven (presumably the material heaven) is his throne and earth is his footstool. So the world itself is God’s temple, and the actual temple is a microcosm. The horizontal axis of the temple visualizes the vertical axis of reality. Coming in from the outside, the first thing one comes to is the bronze sea, representing the waters surround the land. Then there are the two pillars, which hold up the firmament. Inside the temple is the ordered world: the lampstand which represents the light that God created (the word “light” in Genesis 1 and for the purpose of the lampstand in Exodus are the same word), and the bread represents the food that God gives. The incense is a cloud, perhaps, and the veil separats the material world from the Beyond [my wording] where God dwells, with the Ark of the Covenant being the footstool of God’s throne.

Walton argues that the seven days of creation are likely seven days of the temple inauguration. Some other Near-East cultures had an annual celebration of the god coming into the temple. Solomon’s inauguration ceremony was seven days long (also a common Near-East length of temple inauguration, although by no means the only one). Scholars have long debated that Israel might have had an annual enthronement festival, and Genesis 1 could possibly be the liturgy for it, or derived from the original liturgy.

While Walton does not think that the purpose of Genesis 1 is to be found in the contrast between the biblical creation account and the accounts in the ancient Near-Eastern milieu (such as Sarna proposes in Understanding Genesis), he does note one difference. In the non-biblical accounts, the gods create the world to serve their needs, with humanity being part of serving the gods. (Walton is not interested in discussion the next step here, as Sarna does, but the king was usually seen as the son of a god, and humanity served the king; the parallel is convenient for a top-down king.) However, Israel’s God does not have any needs, and so he creates the world for humanity, and his rulership of the material world is through us.

Having presented his argument that Genesis 1 represents the functional creation of God creating the world for the purpose of dwelling within it with his people, Walton now moves to the Genesis 1 in the context of the Creation/Evolution debate. He argues that taking Genesis 1 literally with a material-oriented perspective is, in fact, not taking the text at its face-meaning, but abusing the text. The perspective of finding modern science in the text (e.g. Hugh Ross), is even worse, since it is reading into the text our modern scientific perspective, which is always under revision (as is the scientific method), so how can we possibly know that the original author meant it that way. The gap-theory compromise approach is no better; it still uses the material perspective alien to the original author. The original author, having a functional perspective, is simply not interested in material creation.

This is freeing, because it means we are free to adopt the scientific consensus of how the material creation came to be, because Genesis 1 has nothing to say about that. While Walton lauds the people of the other approaches for honoring the text as God’s, interpreting the text with the wrong cultural assumptions abuses the text. This was less of a problem until recently, but one of the main approaches, the “literal” approach (which Walton repeatedly asserts is not at all literal, since it uses cultural assumptions that are incompatible with the author’s cultural assumptions) ends up effectively requiring young Christians into the (false) dilemma of choosing either their faith or the well-founded, empirical approach of science. In reality, the intent of Genesis 1 is to talk about God’s purpose, something which science cannot speak to, since it studies only material processes and purpose/meaning is at a higher level.

Now, in fact, the scientific community and its diaspora frequently do have a view on purpose: dysteleology, or the assertion that there is no purpose. (“Teleology” refers to purpose.) This is, actually, not scientific; science specifically limits itself to the study of material processes and thus is agnostic on purpose or even whether there is a purpose. So, since Genesis 1 is talking about purpose and science is talking about something unrelated, Christians should have no problems accepting that the earth is old—God frequently uses long processes to accomplish his desires, such as the story of creation of Israel (25 years after God promised Abraham a child, then Isaac and Jacob, and then 430 years in Egypt), or the redemption of humanity via Israel and the Messiah Jesus. Similarly, Christians can have no difficulties in accepting evolution as the means by which God created the diversity of life on earth, and even his people. The problem is with Evolutionists, who go beyond the scientific observation that a) we see micro-evolution happening on human timescales, and b) there is increasing evidence of smooth transitions between many species, to say that there definition was no God and no purpose behind these transitions. That is unscientific: we cannot tell why the transitions happened simply because we observe that they did.

So Walton suggests that Christians adopt a more culturally accurate view of Genesis 1, drop the current text-abusing views, which means that we can adopt the scientific consensus with no problem. There is no need to try to push these deficient theories into education. At the same time, he suggests that the people who hold to science plus dysteleology (no purpose) be honest and not conflate science and teleology. Education should be limited to science, and teleology, if taught, should be done by teleologists, who should present the multiple possibilities.

I read this book on a recommendation after asking about books that described the cultural assumptions and values of the cultures that wrote the Bible—I had come to Walton’s view that we cannot properly interpret the Bible without understanding the cultures that wrote it, and since those are 2000 - 3000 years away from us, a modern American and a modern Chinese person probably have more cultural similarity than an American and ancient Hebrew. The first part of the book does, indeed satisfy my request, at least as far as creation narratives and temples are concerned. (Namely, creation is about the creation of the world as a functional system, about the world as the temple and resting place of the divine, and the physical temple being a microcosm of the world.)

Neither the recommendation nor the title of the book prepared me for half the book being about Young-, Old Earth Creationism, and Evolutionism, at topic which I find uninteresting. Genesis 1 is a two or three thousand year old piece of poetry (the NIV even indents it as it does the psalms), and interpreting poetry literally is exactly what you cannot do with poetry (let alone expecting such an old poem as having anything meaningful to say about modern scientific understanding). Walton refers to more scholarly books that he wrote, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament and Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, which is probably more what I am looking for. His purpose in this book is clearly to persuade evangelicals and fundamentalists that any of the modern interpretations are incorrect and create a completely unnecessary divide between modern science and Christian faith. He does this gently, but with good evidence, good analysis of the actual conflict (between Christian teleology and a science-addon dysteleology), and good argument. I think such readers will find the book helpful in providing a richer cosmology, richer biblical understanding, and richer faith. Readers such as myself will still find a easily-read but non-academically thorough presentation of evidence for a culturally different, but more textually resonant perspective on the cosmology of Genesis 1.