Reckoning Time in Genesis

Jeffery Leonard ends a Review of Biblical Literature (4/15) review of BC Hodge’s Revisiting the Days of Genesis with this observation:

“While the author does a workmanlike job of demonstrating how various numbers in Gen 1–11 could be interpreted symbolically, it is not at all clear to me that the biblical authors necessarily intended that these numbers should be interpreted in this fashion. It seems just as likely to me, for example, that the ancient Yahwist believed there was a flood and that the rains of that flood lasted for forty days as it does that he intended only to symbolize the trials Noah faced in the ark by supplying the number forty for the days of diluvian rain. Hodge attempts to sidestep this issue in part by arguing that we cannot divine from these texts the biblical authors’ beliefs about history and cosmology because the authors did not intend to teach these subjects; their purposes were theological. Simply asserting this to be the case, though, is not the same as demonstrating that the biblical authors did not place historiographic concerns alongside their theological concerns. A symbolic reading of the text may ease the interpretive task by marginalizing questions of what the biblical authors believed about the actual past. Were it the case, though, that the biblical authors intended their numbers to be understood literally, the comfort of a symbolic reading would be a false comfort that only obscures the real issues involved in understanding the thought world of the biblical authors.”

A good point, to which one might add some glosses: First, that the notion that symbolic and literal are exclusive of one another needs to be defended, rather than assumed; second, that the notion that chronological concerns lie outside or even “alongside” theological issues also needs defense. Perhaps for ancient writers, chronology was theology.