Order and chaos belong together in God’s creation, but potential chaos of another kind was introduced when God created human beings endowed with freedom.
It is difficult to make sense of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in a world filled with terrible violence, evident recently in the assassination of a peace-maker, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At times it seems that the powers of chaos have the upper hand.
In the Genesis creation story, God does not eliminate chaos. Rather, God pushes back the waters of chaos and interposes a separating barrier so that the earth becomes green with vegetation and is habitable for animals and humans (Genesis 1:6–8). If God did not sustain this cosmic structure, the earth would be threatened with a return to pre-creation chaos. According to the biblical story, such a cosmic catastrophe almost occurred at the time of the Great Flood, when waters of chaos poured down through the sluices of the firmament and sprang up from the fountains of the deep (Genesis 7:11).
In an illuminating and provocative book, Jon Levenson argues that the biblical portrayal of creation and chaos helps us in the post-holocaust era to understand how God copes with evil.1 Taking issue with the “triumphalist” interpretation of other Jewish interpreters, especially Yehezkel Kaufmann, Levenson maintains that the basic scriptural view is not of God’s unlimited sovereignty but God’s “mastery” over opposition. At creation, the recalcitrant waters of chaos were not overcome but were only confined or domesticated. Consequently, the threat of chaos (understood as evil) persists and God has to regain mastery again and again. In its liturgy, the worshiping community “awakens” the “slumbering” God to new combat.a The conflict will continue until the end-time, when God will finally be victorious over all opposition and “God will become God” indisputably, as Levenson puts it.
This view may have been present in an early version of the biblical creation story, which was influenced by the ancient myth (found, for instance, in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish) of the creator’s battle with the powers of chaos.2 But, despite vestigial remains of the old myth in the final (biblical) form of the story, the prevailing view is that God creates in absolute sovereignty, without any obstacle or conflict. God’s executive command is immediately accomplished—a view echoed by a psalmist:
[God] spoke, and it came to be, he commanded, and it stood firm.
(Psalm 33:9 [NRSV])
At no point does the biblical story equate chaos with evil. Rather, chaos is primeval disorder, symbolized by turbulent waters and uncreated darkness. Order and chaos belong to the creation, which, as a whole, the Creator perceives to be “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Perhaps this portrayal is compatible with a new revolution in science in which the Newtonian view of a static, ordered cosmos is superseded by that of a complex, dynamic universe in which chaos and order belong together.3
Furthermore, in the mythopoetic view the triumphant creator establishes boundaries for chaos. According to the magnificent creation poem, Psalm 104, which in some respects parallels the Genesis creation story, the insurgent waters “fled” to their assigned place at the Creator’s “rebuke.”
You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth.
(Psalm 104:9 [NRSV])
The waters of chaos have their proper place in creation, but they cannot overflow the banks of God’s sovereignty (Proverbs 8:29). The cosmos, despite chaotic elements, is stable. There are regularities (we call them “laws” of nature) that express God’s faithfulness to the covenant (Genesis 8:22). In Psalm 29, an ancient poem that Israel may have adapted from Canaanite culture, God is portrayed as enthroned triumphantly over the unruly forces of nature, or in mythopoetic terms, “mighty waters,” “the flood”:
The Lord sits enthroned over the flood; the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.
(Psalm 29:10 [see also Psalm 93:2–3])
Following the sequence of the biblical narrative, we find that a new dimension of potential chaos was introduced when God created human beings who were endowed with freedom—freedom like God’s creative freedom. The reason for the Great Flood, so we read, was the increase of violence (hamas, Genesis 6:11) rooted in the misuse of God-given freedom, as evident in fratricide in the first family, Lamech’s limitless revenge on enemies, and the strange story of heavenly beings seizing and having sexual relations with beautiful human women. The unfolding biblical narrative does not suggest that evil is rooted in 044residual powers of chaos in God’s creation or in unruly forces of nature. Rather, evil comes after God’s good creation. In the Paradise story, human beings are seduced by the serpent, which suggests that hostility to God is “out there” in the world, but even this antagonist is described as one of God’s creatures, characterized by uncanny craftiness (Genesis 3:1). In any case, the blame falls exclusively upon human beings, God’s noblest creatures: “What is this that you have done?” (Genesis 2:13).
We see, then, that in the Bible chaos has two dimensions. One is the disorder found with the order of God’s creation. This primeval chaos is not intrinsically evil, although human beings may experience it as such when it hits us in various ways, such as “earthquake, wind [hurricane], fire [lightning]”). God is sovereign over this chaos, taming it for beneficial purposes (Psalm 104:10–13) or using it in the continuing creation of “new things” (Isaiah 48:5–7).
The other dimension of chaos is the disorder that results from the misuse of creaturely freedom, specifically the “violence” manifest in expressions of human power: wars, exploitation, oppression, sexual abuse and so on. This disorder may be so pervasive and global that apocalyptic visionaries portray it as a worldwide and history-long kingdom of evil, under the dominion of Satan, the arch-enemy of God. This evil, however, is post-creation, as symbolized by the myth of Satan as a fallen angel.
How does God deal with this kind of disorder? That is a question that deserves special exploration.4 In a moving poem, the prophet Jeremiah envisions the inevitable result of a false lifestyle: the ominous return of the earth to pre-creation chaos, to the “waste and void” of Genesis 1:2. In one sense, according to Jeremiah’s preaching for repentance, this will be the consequence of human behavior; in another sense, it will be the terrible judgment of God.
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and from.
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger.
(Jeremiah 4:23–26 [NRSV])
This poetry speaks to the foreboding of many people today, who sense the ominous results of a lifestyle that fills the earth with violence and pollutes the environment. One is reminded of the imaginative portrayal of the Flood story, in which an ecological catastrophe, resulting from a lifestyle of violence, is interpreted as divine judgment that threatened the earth with a return to chaos.
It is difficult to make sense of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in a world filled with terrible violence, evident recently in the assassination of a peace-maker, Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. At times it seems that the powers of chaos have the upper hand. In the Genesis creation story, God does not eliminate chaos. Rather, God pushes back the waters of chaos and interposes a separating barrier so that the earth becomes green with vegetation and is habitable for animals and humans (Genesis 1:6–8). If God did not sustain this cosmic structure, the earth would be […]
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Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988).
2.
See the essay by Hermann Gunkel, “The Influence of Babylonian Mythology upon the Biblical Creation Story,” a translation and abridgment of his classic work, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit, in Creation in the Old Testament, ed. by Bernhard W. Anderson (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 25–52.
3.
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987). “To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being,” Prologue, p. 5.
4.
In the next editorial column, I plan to deal with God’s sovereignty and human freedom.
