Before God Made Anything, He Built a Temple w/ Dr. John Walton

Johnny Ova: Welcome back everybody to the Dig In Podcast. Today my guest is Dr. John Walton. Dr. Walton, thank you so much for your time today.

Dr. John Walton: Glad to be here. Always fun to have conversations.

Johnny Ova: I'm looking forward to this one, so let's jump right in. Dr. Walton, you've spent decades studying Genesis in light of ancient Near Eastern backgrounds. What first drew you into this world, and what made you realize most modern readers were missing something critical about Genesis 1?

Dr. John Walton: I was really drawn into it during my doctoral work, learning all about the ancient Near East. As I started to understand the documents we find there, the literature and the worldview, I began to recognize that we might be making some misjudgments when we read the biblical text, if we try to read it in light of our own world instead of the world the Israelites lived in.

Johnny Ova: That has to be pretty difficult, and maybe hard to hear for some people: I have to go back into their mindset, what they were living with and dealing with. How does that even begin for somebody wanting to know this?

Dr. John Walton: That's very difficult. I use a couple of metaphors to help us understand the concepts. One is a cultural river. In the modern United States, we're in a cultural river with all kinds of ideas about economics, politics, religion, values and society. The Israelites don't know that cultural river, so we shouldn't assume they're somehow addressing ours. Another metaphor I've been using lately is backpacks. Think of us as having a backpack for something like time. How do we think about time in our world? If we looked through the backpack labeled time, we'd find all sorts of things about how we measure time, value time, commodify time, keep time and what time means to us, and that goes for both the clock and the calendar. But if you looked in the Israelites' backpack labeled time, you'd find all kinds of different things that reflect how they thought about it. The same is true for something like creation.

Dr. John Walton: These are ways we recognize that yes, we do think very differently than they did, and we need to read their texts in light of their backpacks and their cultural river. As you mentioned, it's challenging to get into, but there are many resources available today that weren't there twenty or thirty years ago. A good place for your listeners to start is the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. All the notes right there in the study Bible deal with how people thought in the ancient world and how we can understand that world better. It's a very easy start.

Johnny Ova: That's great. You make a distinction between functional ontology and material ontology. For someone hearing that for the first time, what does that mean, and what does it change about how we read the creation account?

Dr. John Walton: Those words will confuse almost every listener, and that's understandable. The question I ask is, what kind of creation account do we have in Genesis 1? Most people never ask, because they think there's only one choice, that any creation story has to be about material origins. I ask, what's in their backpack when they think about origins? Are they thinking mostly about material? I present the alternative that maybe they're not. I think there's a lot of evidence, in the Bible and in the ancient Near East, that they thought more about bringing order as the most important act of creation. That's what I call functional ontology: making things function, ordering the world.

Dr. John Walton: Another metaphor I use is that we think of creation as a house story, thinking of the universe as a house and creation as building it. Whereas I believe the ancient world, Israelites included, thought of it more as making a home. Making a home is just as important an act of creation as building a house. It just depends on what you want to focus on. So when I talk about function versus material, I'm really asking what's in their backpack. I think they're telling a home story, and they're more interested in ordering than in manufacturing objects.

Johnny Ova: So instead of the creation of all material things, you're talking about the ordering of all material things.

Dr. John Walton: Well, ordering, but not just with material in mind. Even in that wording you still had material in there. I think it's more like how the world works. Another metaphor: if you're being oriented to a new job, you come in on the first day and they say, here are your hours, here's your office, here's the break room, here's when the building is open. That's not really about materials. It's orienting you to your new workplace and your job. You want to see the organizational chart. You don't want to see the architectural plans for the building. It's not about material. It's about how things work and how they're ordered to work. Of course, we need to be clear: God certainly created the material world. The Israelites knew that, and we know that. But the question is what kind of story they want to tell, what the most important story is for them. I think it's about order, function, role and purpose more than objects and stuff.

Johnny Ova: I wrote down another analogy of yours: a restaurant doesn't exist when the building is finished. It exists when the owner opens it for business.

Dr. John Walton: Right, the menu and things like that. There are all kinds of analogies. Sometimes I ask this: you get to the theater late for a play, intermission comes, and you ask the people around you, how did the play begin? One person might talk about the script, another about building the set, another about choosing the cast. But what you really want to know is what happened since the curtain opened. Those are all right answers, all good answers, but they're different answers. Just as we can have different answers to how the play began, we might have different answers to how the world began.

Johnny Ova: Fantastic. Walk us through the seven days. If they aren't describing the material manufacturing of the universe, what is actually happening on each day?

Dr. John Walton: Again, they deal with the question of order. On day one, God creates day and night. He creates time, and that's not material. There was darkness, and he brings light to set boundaries for the darkness, because darkness is non-order and light brings order. On day two he creates place, a space for people between the waters where people will live. On day three it doesn't say he made the dry land. He did, by the way, but that's not what it says. It says, let the dry land emerge. Again, the waters are non-order, and the dry land is where order takes place. So the place for order emerges, and then it talks about the growing of food. That's all about order.

Dr. John Walton: On day four we read that God made the great lights. We see the word "made" and think of material objects, but an Israelite would not have read it that way, because an Israelite does not know that the sun, moon and stars are material objects. In the ancient world as a whole they thought they were gods. Israel doesn't believe that in its best moments, but they also don't know that these are just material objects, a burning ball of gas, or a rock in orbit reflecting the sun. They don't know them as objects. They know what they call them: lights. It's a different thing to say God made that burning ball of gas than to say God made a light. And it tells us he made them to rule. That's their function, their role. So even where it looks to us like manufacturing a material object, that's not how an Israelite would have read it.

Dr. John Walton: We have to read it the way they read it, because that's what has authority. Everybody has to understand this. It's Scripture, the graphe, the writings, that is inspired and has God's authority, and the authors of Scripture put that meaning there, God moving them to do it. We have to know what meaning they put there. We can't know God's message except by going through the human author's message, and their message assumes their culture, because culture is a silent partner in every conversation. So we have to read it the way they read it.

Dr. John Walton: On day five we have whole populations, birds and fish, that are basically the furniture, the decoration, the wallpaper, the environment. It's not saying God made each little bird. It says populations. Finally, of course, God makes the animals, but he has them come forth from the ground, and he makes people to be his image bearers. That means we are order bringers: subdue and rule. All the way through, it's dealing with order and purpose, and that comes to its conclusion on day seven, which has nothing material going on at all.

Johnny Ova: I feel like this is where your point really lands, on day seven, because you argue that rest doesn't mean inactivity. What did divine rest mean in the ancient world, and why is it the climax of the whole account?

Dr. John Walton: Correct. Throughout the ancient world they understood the idea of the gods resting, and they had a place where that happened: the temple. Everybody in the ancient world believed that gods rest in temples. Temples are built for gods to rest in. So the minute they talk about God resting on day seven, every Israelite is thinking temple. Just like if we say "in the ninth inning," everybody thinks baseball. You don't have to say baseball. If we say Super Bowl, you don't have to say football. In the same way, when they talk about divine rest, everybody in the ancient world is thinking temple.

Dr. John Walton: And when gods rest in temples, whether it's Israel or Babylon or Egypt, they're not resting in a bed. They're resting on a throne. That means their rest is the equivalent of their rule. That means engagement, not disengagement. When the president sits down at the desk in the Oval Office, he's not disengaging because he's resting on a chair. He's sitting in the chair because that's the place from which he does his presidential role. So day seven is key, because God is resting in his temple, taking up his rule of the world he has ordered with purpose. That's the climax of the whole thing, and we tend to just skip it. Some people even call it the six days of creation, skipping day seven altogether, because they don't understand it. We really have to work with the ancient world to understand it well.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Walton, you just made a quarter of the Christian population upset, because when they're sleeping till one in the afternoon they say, even God rested on the seventh day. That is not what he's doing.

Dr. John Walton: That is not what he's doing. God's rest is engagement in the ruling of the world, not disengagement by taking a nap or finding leisure time.

Johnny Ova: You've even said the cosmos itself is a temple, a pretty massive picture. What's the evidence from ancient Near Eastern texts that creation and temple building were in the same category of thought?

Dr. John Walton: Many texts in the ancient world that talk about creation end with building a temple or with bringing the god into the temple. Since they all treat creation as order bringing, the whole idea is that the god brings order and then sits on his throne, which is in the temple. Order bringing, and then ruling over that world. Those two are connected in all kinds of texts, Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian, and that idea is reflected in the idea that the cosmos is somewhat like a temple.

Dr. John Walton: By the way, I just recently published another Lost World book, New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis, and in it I tried to bring some nuance to the cosmic temple idea. Some people objected, and legitimately, that the image of a temple has walls, an enclosure with God inside, and then an outside. There's an inside and an outside. They asked, if the whole cosmos is a temple, there's no outside, so how does that work? I wasn't trying to address that particular point. That's true. I was using temple because a temple is considered sacred space, because God is there. That's what I was getting at. So these days I talk more about the cosmos as sacred space, because God enters into it, rather than talking about the cosmos as a temple, which some people found confusing. It's the same concept, just a small change in wording to try to be clearer.

Johnny Ova: I'm going to link your books in the description, so if anybody wants to grab a copy, feel free, because this is definitely a worthwhile study and conversation. I want to talk about the Hebrew word bara, B-A-R-A, traditionally translated "create," which is central to your argument. What does this word actually do in the text, and why have we been reading too much into it?

Dr. John Walton: When we look at Hebrew words, people have to understand that we don't have an ancient dictionary defining them for us. We only know what words mean by how they're used. So if we want to understand a Hebrew verb like bara, we have to look at all the places it's used. I track these in my first book, The Lost World of Genesis One. There are about fifty occurrences. What we find is that God is always the subject, so it appears to be a divine activity. The question is whether it has to do with materiality or something else, because we usually assume it's material. When God creates, he makes stuff. But I looked at the usage and found many, many places where the word is used and nothing material is going on. There are places where God creates darkness. There are places where God creates the nations. That's not material stuff. Something else is going on. As I look at the profile of the direct objects, what it is that God creates, I see a wide variety, and much of it points more readily to the concept of ordering than to manufacturing.

Dr. John Walton: So I open up the possibility that the verb bara, when it talks about creating, means bringing something into existence. In the ancient world, something doesn't exist just because it has material properties. It exists because it has a role and a function in an ordered system. Egyptians, for instance, would say that the sea does not exist and that the desert does not exist. That doesn't mean they aren't there or aren't material. Their whole idea of existence, what's in their backpack labeled existence, is different from ours. If bara means to bring something into existence, and existence is defined by being ordered, then bara has to do with ordering, not with manufacturing. That's the direction of the case I make.

Johnny Ova: Really fascinating. I'm bridging the gap here. I pastor a church on the island, and a lot of people who watch the show are new Christians, engaged Christians, skeptics and pastors, a wide variety. I think one of the most misunderstood, unexplained ideas is "I need a word-for-word translation of the Bible, this is the way the Bible is and always was." A word like this is exactly why we thank God for translators, because with some ancient Hebrew and Greek, there are no matching words in English. You really have to do what you did. There isn't an English word that properly describes it, so how do we use English words to describe what's going on? I think that concept is often missed.

Dr. John Walton: I think you're absolutely right. People think there's a one-to-one correspondence between every Hebrew or Greek word and an English word, and that's just not true. We don't have words for some of the things they have words for. That puts us in an awkward spot in translation, because we either use an inadequate word or end up with a two-sentence explanation, which doesn't work in a translation. When people talk about a literal translation, they might say, it says create and it means create. But they're saying create the way they think about creating, not what's in the Israelite backpack. So there's already a problem to overcome.

Dr. John Walton: The other problem is that a literal reading technically has to mean understanding it the way the author intended it to be understood. Everybody knows that. When we read a parable, we don't go trying to interview the Good Samaritan. We know it's a parable, and you read it literally when you recognize it's a parable. With a metaphor like "God is my rock," we don't ask whether it's igneous or sedimentary. We know it's a metaphor, and a literal reading means reading it as a metaphor. So we have to read in light of what the words meant to an ancient Israelite. We can't just take our English word "create" as if that's the literal meaning and use what create means to me. It doesn't matter what it means to you. It matters what it meant to them.

Johnny Ova: Off of that, I love this phrase. I've used it myself, and I know you use it a lot: the Bible was written for us, but not to us. From your perspective, what does that mean, and why is it important for how we approach not just Genesis but all of Scripture?

Dr. John Walton: It's an important issue of interpretive method. Some of your audience will know the word hermeneutics, and it's part of that. It captures the idea that we are not the primary intended audience of the author. The Bible is written by insiders to insiders, specifically insiders to Israelite culture, but also to the broader ancient culture. The author assumes the audience understands all the cultural and historical information that goes without saying. They don't have to say it, because the audience knows it. So in that sense it's written to them, to insiders who are assumed to have insider information. It's not written to us. It's not in our language. It doesn't assume our culture, and it doesn't explain their culture. We read it as outsiders, so it's not to us. But because it is Scripture, we believe it is for us. God has provided this revelation for our benefit. But to understand what it means for us, we first have to understand what it meant to them, because it's not in our language, it's in theirs, and it's not using our culture, it's using theirs. That's the idea behind it.

Johnny Ova: That's great. One more on this. I know I'm asking similar questions in different ways, but I want the audience to really bite down on the concept, because a lot of this is new for people. They were never taught to read or understand the Bible this way, and anything contrary to what we've been taught is blasphemy, you're a heretic. Another interesting topic is that we engage with Scripture very differently than, say, the first century did. But I digress. If Genesis 1 isn't giving us a science textbook or a material origins account, what does it actually tell us about God, about humanity and about our place in the cosmos?

Dr. John Walton: That's more what the text is trying to do. It's not trying to talk to us about the scientific origins of the universe. It's trying to help us understand the nature and identity of the universe, and especially, as you said, our place in it. In my understanding, God created by bringing order. Then he delegates to humanity corporately, as his image bearers, to be order bringers alongside him. That gives us our role. If we're working alongside him, doing the job he's doing, that implies a relationship. And it tells us our role, which is to subdue and rule, ways of talking about this order-bringing activity. That's what we're supposed to be doing. So it gives us our place in the cosmos. It's not meant to give a scientific account of origins. I like to say that rather than a discussion of origins in this seven-day account, it's a discussion of identity.

Dr. John Walton: Again, think of an orientation to your workplace: here's the workplace I've created for you, here's the job you have to do, here's your team. But don't forget what it's all about. God is the one who brought it about. So it tells us about God as the order bringer and as the one working alongside us, and about us as his image bearers and order bringers, which gives us a particular role we're supposed to understand. And it tells us that God rules this world. That's day seven. I think it covers much more important things than who made all these objects.

Johnny Ova: That makes sense. Your work has also gotten serious pushback from some young-earth creationists and conservative evangelicals who say you've disconnected the text from real history. How would you respond?

Dr. John Walton: Absolutely. The question is whether the text is trying to give us some kind of real history, or whether it's meant to give us identity, who we are and where we fit in. That's much more philosophical than historical. That doesn't make it any less real or true. Reality and truth are bigger than a purely empirical approach to things. This is reality: God is the one who made the world. He made it for us, but he rules over it, and we're in relationship with him. These are important theological truths. I'm not denying any historical idea about God making the world. Of course he made the world, and in fact he made it in every way. But the text is telling a particular story for a particular reason, and we need to understand that. Sometimes I'm criticized for supposedly not taking the text literally. I think I'm taking the text as literally as it can be taken, because I'm trying to read it the way the author understood and intended for it to be read.

Johnny Ova: Again, it's breaking that framework. It's such a difficult thing for people. It took me forever to understand it. We treat the Bible differently today than they treated it then, so any thinking outside that one way is a big leap for some people.

Dr. John Walton: People criticize me for bringing in all this ancient Near Eastern material. They say, that's pagan literature, that's mythology, why would you drag it into the Bible? The reason we do it is that we need to understand the ancient backpack and the ancient cultural river. These texts are windows that give us glimpses of the issues that affect how the Israelites thought. It's true that the Israelites didn't think like the Babylonians or Egyptians about the number of gods and who the powerful god is. Granted. But how did they think about time, about all the issues in their world, about the past? Those are areas where they thought pretty much like everybody else in their world. The things God was changing were largely theological. Genesis 1 makes significant changes. First, there's no battle in creation. He doesn't have to fight chaos monsters. Second, it's God, Israel's God, who is the creator and the order bringer. Those are the issues that count.

Johnny Ova: You've also been open about the fact that your framework doesn't require rejecting scientific findings on the age of the universe or biological development. How do you navigate that tension in evangelical circles?

Dr. John Walton: Sure. The first thing to say is that if I'm correct, and of course that's up for decision, that this is not an account of the scientific origins of the material world, then it has nothing to do with the age of the earth, because the age of the earth is a material question. If the text isn't dealing with material issues, it isn't weighing in on that question. So I would say the Bible has nothing to say about the age of the earth. It's not a question they were asking or answering, and we shouldn't read it into the text, because again, it's dealing with order, not material.

Dr. John Walton: Second, I think we can see compatibility between the Bible and scientific approaches when we think about what each is doing. The way I describe it, the Bible is most interested in agency. God is the agent of creation, the cause, the creator. That's a question of agency. The Bible isn't much interested in mechanisms: how he did it, where he did it, over how long. So the Bible is doing agency, not mechanisms. Science, for instance evolutionary models, is interested in mechanisms. That's what change over time with modification refers to. And science can say nothing about agency. Some scientists still try to say, this proves there is no agent. Sorry, you can't do that. That's not science any longer. Scientists aside, science can't say anything about agency. So if the scientific models are talking about mechanisms and not agency, and the Bible is talking about agency and not mechanisms, they're not making competing claims. No problem. If God chose to do creation using processes we identify with evolutionary models, he could do that.

Johnny Ova: Totally agree. You recently published New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis. What's new? What have you refined or pushed further since The Lost World of Genesis One came out in 2009?

Dr. John Walton: Fifteen years have gone by. I've been on the road a lot giving seminars on this, teaching it, thinking about it and processing it. This is not a revised edition, just so that's clear. Over time I've come up with better terminology, like using "order" instead of "function," and better analogies and metaphors, like the ones I've used here. I've engaged with critics and with friendly conversation partners, for instance about using sacred space instead of temple. I've been thinking about how to communicate this clearly, what the best terminology is and how to convey these ideas. There's also new data I've been able to work with, and I've engaged with the conversation as it's gone on for these fifteen years. There are a couple of places where I've changed my mind, and that's discussed too. But one thing I think people will like most is that it has over sixty FAQs, the questions people have asked me year after year, through emails, at presentations in the Q&A, in book reviews or wherever. I lay them out, give my answer, document it as best I can, and hopefully that gives people something tangible. They can say, I had that question, and now I can see how he answers it.

Johnny Ova: Like I said, I'm going to link everything, and I highly suggest people start studying this and open it up in their understanding of the Bible, God and the ancient culture behind the Scriptures. Last question. After forty years of teaching and writing on the Old Testament, what do you wish every pastor and every Christian understood about Genesis that they probably don't?

Dr. John Walton: It's a phrase we've already covered: the Bible is written for us, not to us. If we're really going to use Genesis in our modern conversations, we have to start by reading it the way the author intended it to be read. Here's another way I'd put that important idea: the authority of the text is invested in the author's intentions. It's God's authority, but if he chose to work through these human instruments to convey his authoritative message, that's where we have to go to get it. We have to go to the author's intentions. We can't make the words say whatever we want them to say. We have to understand them as saying what the author intended, and that means working with language, literature, literary forms and culture, because all of those are part of the author's intentions. So we focus on the author's intentions to get the authoritative message, understanding the text in their world, their backpacks, their cultural river. I address this in a book coming out in November called Crisis of Biblical Authority, with IVP, where I talk about where we find authority and how that has to shape how we interpret the Bible.

Johnny Ova: Awesome. Dr. Walton, this has been a fascinating conversation, and I thank you for your time today.

Dr. John Walton: You're quite welcome, Johnny. Glad to put this information out there.