Genesis and the Cathedrals

One of the most important characters of Victor Hugo’s great novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is the old Notre Dame Cathedral itself. Hugo calls it “a vast symphony in stone,” composed of many exquisite elements derived from different historical periods, from Roman to Gothic. He compares it to a chimera, the mythic creature made from the parts of various animals: “This central and generative church is a kind of chimera among the old churches of Paris; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the trunk of a third, something of all.” Yet in spite of its diversity, it is not a monster but a perfect hybrid, in which the combined architectural layers yield “the calm grandeur of the whole.” He concludes: “Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.”¹

I think that the same can be said of certain classic books. The Greek Iliad might be one, and the Indian Mahabharata another. The Book of Genesis is yet another. According to our modern understanding of this book, its oldest parts—such as the archaic tribal blessings in Genesis 49—were written in the premonarchic or early monarchic period of Israelite history (11th to 10th century B.C.E.). Its latest parts—including the last editorial touches by writers of the Priestly school—may come from the mid-fifth century B.C.E., the period of the priestly scribe Ezra,² who in Nehemiah chapter 8 reads “the Book of the Torah of Moses” to the people of Jerusalem for the first time, whereupon “all the people wept” (Nehemiah 8:9).³ If this understanding is correct (and there are good reasons to think it is), then Genesis is a vast symphony in writing that took around five hundred years to complete.

Like the great cathedrals, then, Genesis was the work of centuries. It is a hybrid, a chimera, made from a succession and agglomeration of texts that we call by alphabetic abbreviations—J, E, P, R and “other”⁴—rather than by architectural styles (Romanesque, Saxon, Gothic, Baroque). Like the architectural features of the great cathedrals, Genesis was constructed over time, and to the trained eye its different parts and strata are generally easily recognizable. And like the cathedrals, the different parts, each with distinctive voices and styles, can be seen as participating in “the calm grandeur of the whole.” In other words, Genesis is made of different texts, each with their own inner integrity, but the combination is not mere chaos, but rather like the complex harmony of the cathedrals, yielding a flourishing and magnificent whole.

The analogy between Genesis and the cathedrals provides a useful corrective to two views of Genesis that are common in biblical scholarship today. One is the view (let’s call it the documentarian approach) that Genesis can only be read intelligently by remaining within the boundaries of a particular textual source. To read stories from different sources at the same time is like combining Gothic and Romanesque—they operate by different concepts and styles, and their differences cannot be ignored. And yet—here is my point—they are combined in the final text, and this too cannot be ignored. We need to read Gothic, Romanesque and Baroque separately and together, as different and as part of a “vast symphony,” because this is how they exist in Genesis.

The other view (let’s call it the canonical approach) says that it is illegitimate to read the parts as different at all, because the final form overrides all the internal differences. This view would say of the cathedrals that one should not linger on the Gothic, Romanesque or Baroque features, but solely on the way that the individual features fit into the whole. This view says that the prehistory of the building and the inner cohesion of its different layers are simply irrelevant, because the combination is what we have, and it has a compelling authority. But this view is overly simplistic too, since everyone can see that the cathedral—and Genesis—is a complex and grand hybrid, composed of different parts, and these are irreducible features of its nature. Its centuries-long accumulation of branchings and graftings cannot be ignored—they are as real as the grandeur of the whole. The canonical view, by privileging the whole over its distinctive parts, merely inverts the mistake of the documentarian view. Both are wrong in claiming to be the exclusive key to understanding Genesis.

Like the cathedrals, Genesis is a work that exists both in and out of time. It speaks of the timeless and the changeless, yet it speaks in the voices and styles of its own times, and the voices of its various parts speak differently. We need readings of Genesis that attend to the details and nuances of the Gothic and the Romanesque (or, more prosaically, J, E and P) in their individual integrity, and we need readings that see how the different parts reinterpret each other in the complex and synthetic discourse of the whole. Reading Genesis is not like reading an ordinary book. It is a great book, and like other great things it takes a combination of perspectives, an effort and willingness to see it as a magnificent whole that is interleaved with distinct voices. If a cathedral is a “book of stone,”⁵ then perhaps Genesis is a cathedral of words.

One of the most important characters of Victor Hugo’s great novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is the old Notre Dame Cathedral itself. Hugo calls it “a vast symphony in stone,” composed of many exquisite elements derived from different historical periods, from Roman to Gothic. He compares it to a chimera, the mythic creature made from the parts of various animals: “This central and generative church is a kind of chimera among the old churches of Paris; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the trunk of a third, something of all.” Yet in spite of its […]