The Sixth Day

1:24 “And God said,” ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind…’”

This indicates earth powers under God’s direction, not simply as a tool, For the modern mind filled with ideas of squabbling pantheons of Greco-Roman anthropomorphic deities, superseded by the idea of intelligent design after the craft-industrial-social model, this has often been understood as God at a divine workbench. However, the ancient or primitive mind would most likely read in these words the unleashing of preexisting powers in service to a will that knew them intimately. For the “the earth” to “bring forth” indicates an intrinsic earth power, which would easily be equated with the feminine aspect of divinity by most pre-Biblical people. Also, in the bringing to life of a “creature after his kind” and elsewhere “after their kind,” oft repeated in Genesis 1, the rational reader sees a suggestion of pre-patterned life, of species of known potentialities literally conjured into being by subordinate powers of water and earth at the very word of God, which is then reiterated as an act of creation of various beasts each “after his kind,” not suggestive of a mechanical Creator but of an al-knowing and expectant Eternity, bringing into being life according to pre-patterned forms.

This would find ease of understanding among the scalds of the Beowulf epic, who referred to God by many names and activities, a good who worked a loom, taking aspects of existence and weaving them into the tapestries of life and strife.

The Creation of Man

This is the first pf numerous creation stories concerning the origin of man within Genesis. This in and of itself would encourage pre-Biblical peoples come in contact with Genesis to find common ground with their own understandings of human origins. Whether this aspect of Genesis is simply reflective of various competing relations concerning the creation of man within the Hebrew tradition, or of one or more borrowed accounts, I have no way of determining. The first account here will be quoted in full.

1:26 “And God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepith upon the earth.”

God is clearly not alone when he refers to unspecified powers in “us” and “our.” Furthermore, “cattle” as opposed to beasts, which are also listed in 1:25 indicates that some animals are already domesticated before man is created. This does put the Bible at odds with many aboriginal and heathen views of creation, but is perfectly in line with Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Hellenic visions of creation, in which the heavenly powers grant man already domesticated animals. Also, the first act of creation is the word commanding other powers to act.

1:27 “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

This act of creation, of male and female, is masculine, but according to 1:27 was done cooperatively with at least one other power. I have listened to preachers go on extensively about how multiple powers are one, something that pagans believed as well, and contributed to their conversion, while the modern interpretation denies this ever-repeated fact. Either God is a metaphysic hermaphrodite [not suggested by the triumvirate godhead doctrine], or he was not alone in the cosmos, and like all of the creatures created by “us” “in our image” God interacted with feminine power of some sort “waters” and “the earth” perhaps in the act of Creation.

1:27 is totally compatible with earlier and alien creation beliefs from all over the world, especially among the Arуan peoples, who do not seem to have been among the framers of the Scripture, though they would account for most of the Gospels.

1:28 “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiple, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the sky, and over everything living that moveth upon the earth.”

“Them” meaning man and woman, stands in direct contradiction to the story of Adam and Eve. Whether replenish and subdue the earth are commands to resettle a world that has fallen, has been postulated by many New Age types, but would be in direct contradiction to the earlier passages, so I would take as meaning to heal damage done and to find a way to control the vegetation, which is not put under man’s power like the living things that “moveth” until the following passage titled by the translators the Giving of Food, in which God names the plant life as his gift to man and beast for their “meat.”

The order and nature of this bestowal suggests that man was not granted direct dominion over the plant life and would have to struggle with it. The early Church Fathers of New England regarded the forest as Satan’s realm which sheltered heathens which God would unleash on them as punishments for their sins. Agriculture, regarded as the centerpiece of man’s covenant with God throughout the Middle Ages provided Christendom with a very pious society, with almost total engagement with the Church in its myriad connecting forms.

Is it coincidence that the advent of the Industrial Age took roughly a quarter of Christendom away, to forsake the church life and saw the metamorphosis of European identity from Christian to White?

Is it further an accident, that when Western Man took a second long step away from cultivating the earth as his chief occupation, with the advent of the Atomic or Information Age that participation in church life was halved at least and that now less than a quarter of Western Society has any direct engagement with this book that was its sacred core for about 1500 years to the point where people maintaining a Biblical orientation are now largely regarded as enemies of the Global Supra-State?

1:31 “And God saw everything he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

The Giving of Food comprises the final three lines of Genesis 1, that in this reader’s estimation, would find the most congruent favor with the widest variety of pre-Biblical folk, including and especially Central Americans, as their existing cults were obsessed with covenant relationships regarding food, between man and divinity.