Content:

It sounds like a paradox that we should read from the Old Testament in order to discover in it the Face of Christ, and in a sense it is. But paradox is of the essence of the Christian mystery: the Increate, breaking into the creative act; the Infinite, giving number and measure to a finite world; the Timeless, yielding to the rhythm of days; the Divine, entering the family of men. The Book of Revelation teaches us that Christ shall be the Last. This demands that we recognize him as the First, for He is the eternal Word by whom all things were made "in the beginning." And it is no mere coincidence that these three words are read in the first verse of Genesis, and in the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John. We reckon by years before Christ, B.C., and years of the Lord, A.D.; the years under the Law, and the years of grace; the Old Testament, and the New Testament. But the Incarnation is more than a serviceable time-divider. The light of the star which rose over Bethlehem is the same light that did shine through darkness on the first day of creation, unto the first man on earth, the fathers of the Old Law and the Gentiles, "every man coming into the world." We have no right to curtail the total perspective of God's revelation. We have been taught to behold the image of Christ in the luminous pages of the Gospel, but we are not therefore to neglect or to despise the rays which have guided the Forefathers and sustained their hope. It is always His Face we should recognize, glowing amidst the shadows of the remotest past, and His voice we should hear in the reading of the sacred page, in Moses or in the prophets, as well as, in the Gospels or in the apostolic writings.

For we should not imagine the divine revelation to be like a flash of lightning which, for a fraction of a second, brings out the minute details of a nocturnal landscape with almost unbearable sharpness, but rather as the gradual unveiling of the mystery under a steadily growing light. The progress of divine revelation is neither uniform nor arbitrary; it does not go by leaps and bounds; the economy of the Providence accommodates itself, by an admirable condescension, to the highs and lows of the human predicament. The Incarnation of the Word marks in fact the last stage of a development of which the Old Testament constitutes the authentic record, but God had manifested Himself from the beginning "at sundry times and in divers manners" (Heb. 1:1), so as never to leave mankind without a witness. The condition for receiving this witness, however, is that we should be both humble and industrious, failing which I am afraid that we would not benefit much more from the reading of the New Testament (i.e., contextually by itself, without integrating/interacting the New Testament with the Old Testament).

The first question we must bluntly ask is: Do we, Orthodox Christians, read from the Scriptures?; and read them as we ought to? I am afraid that we fail on both counts! And worse than that, we are quick to respond with reckless disregard by means of unsubstantiated excuses and outright lies. Not so with the early Christians. Their extreme reverence for the Sacred Scriptures manifested itself in a number of private devotional acts. It is said of St. Caecilia, a Roman martyr of the early third Christian century, who suffered under Alexander Severus and was buried by order of Pope Urban in the catacomb of St. Callistus, that she used to carry on her breast a miniature Gospel Book.¹ We are reminded of the Jews with their phylacteries on which were written the words of the Shema': "Hear Ï Israel, the Lord our God is one God, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.... You shall bind these words for a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes" (Deut 6:4-8).

Scripture reading was recommended to all Christians by the Fathers of the Church, who were prompt in denouncing their charges of negligence. St. John Chrysostom upbraided the Christians of his time who would excuse themselves on account of their many occupations, as busy Americans similarly do.

Note here that it is the private reading, at home, which is recommended in this passage of Chrysostom, and this "not only to all men, but to women as well."³ Around-about the same time, St. Jerome outlined a study program for a seven year old girl, known as the age of discretion. She would learn the Psalter by rote, and "make the Books of Solomon, the Gospels, the Apostles and the Prophets the treasure of her heart."⁴ Writing to a young widow, he advised her to persevere in frequent prayer and in Scripture reading, the lectio divina, declared to be an excellent remedy against the subconscious movements of the passions.⁵

In sharp contrast with the encouragements given to the faithful and with the "Open Bible" policy of the patristic era, restrictive measures were taken by the western mediaeval Church as a protection against heretical sects and lay movements escaping hierarchical control. The sixteenth-century split within western Christianity aggravated the situation still further and resulted on the part of Rome in a tightening of the rules relative to the diffusion or teaching of the Scriptures, to the translation of the original texts or ancient versions into vernacular, and to the reading of the Bible by the laity. The majority of the faithful had to be satisfied with hearing the liturgical sections of the Gospels and of the Epistles being chanted at a Roman Catholic Mass, and commented — sometimes — in the pulpit. Few vernacular New Testament editions could be found in Catholic homes, with even fewer Old Testament Scriptures. Now this does not mean conversely that there is a Bible in every modern Protestant home; furthermore, the mere possession of a family Bible is no proof that it is used on a regular basis outside of solemn circumstances. The starvation diet to which the Roman Catholic laity had been subjected for so long was gradually lifted during the first two decades of this century, when the revival of Biblical studies in institutions of clerical learning began to reach the mass of the faithful. The progress, however, was greatly slowed down in intellectual circles by the modernist crisis and hampered among lay people by the inroads of secularism.

As might be expected, Scripture reading among the Protestants has remained a standard practice, at least in theory. Unfortunately. the negative attitude towards Tradition, due to intellectual depravity of knowledge and understanding, has left Protestantism defenseless against the pressure of passing ideologies and the secularization of our modern, pluralistic society. Hence, a gamut of theological systems evincing or succeeding one another, while paradoxically appealing to the authority of Scripture. It is difficult to see how this diversity of orientations can possibly result in the formulation of workable guidelines for the theological understanding of the Biblical message by lay people.

This leaves to us the task of listening to the Word of God in the ambiance provided by the Church, in the peace of the sanctuary, where the voice that spake of old can still be heard. However, the sad fact is that the majority of Orthodox Christians attitude toward the Bible leaves much to be desired. A vigorous renewal is urgently needed, on the basis of the authentic ancient Tradition of the Church. Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes: "Orthodox theology has never felt at home in modern Biblical scholarship and has not accepted as its own the Biblical problems as formulated within the western theological development.... One can predict that a revival will consist, first of all, of deep reassessment and re-evaluation of western biblicism."⁸

The standard excuse for neglecting the Old Testament is that "It is old; so, why bother with it? The New suffices; the Old has become obsolete, irrelevant." I use this second adjective intentionally, because it is a favorite in the word-list of young Americans who, by a marvelous inconsequence, comb the flea-markets for antiques.

Of course, such a rationalization is specious. There are in the Old Testament, its temporal and special conditioning, elements which are totally foreign to the mentality of twentieth-century men and women, be they Americans, Eurasians, Africans or Orientals. We would expect modern Judaism to be homogeneous with the Old Testament; indeed it is, to a measure. Yet the evolutive process of which it constitutes the present stage and which has been going on for centuries has taken its toll and left the historical field littered with lifeless remains from the past. The early tribal-national cradle of the Hebrew people fell apart in the sixth century B.C.; the early prophetic writings had already denounced the people's blind trust in a covenant of which they fulfilled not the obligations, and the post-exilic prophets looked farther and higher for the realization of Israel's hope; the Temple, deemed to be indestructible, was destroyed and desecrated three times, the Wailing Wall alone subsists today, a relic or a "place of interest" for the tourists; the synagogal institution was forced on the people by the necessity to survive in the Diaspora as a religious community; Zionism emerges as a secular, economic, socio-cultural phenomenon, more than a revival of the ancient alliance. Something died at each of these successive transformations. There is no denying that the Old Testament has been superseded in at least some of its transitory, provisional features; but to declare it worthless or maybe harmful would be a fatal non sequitur. It remains an essential organ of God's self-disclosure and it has its message for today and for the days to come.

We should refrain from quoting out of context such sentences of the Sermon on the Mount as: "You have heard that it was said ... but I say unto you..." (Mt 5:21 ff). Text for text, let us rather hear the formal statement of Our Lord: "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished" (Mt 5:17-18).

The trouble is, we read superficially; we absolutize transitory features, and we find irreducible opposition where there should be harmonious synthesis. We forget that the written Word is in itself an Incarnational reality and, if we be permitted to apply to the Old and the New Testament the terminology of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, we would say that they are to be kept without confusion, mutation, division, nor separation.

We have no right to oppose the Old Testament onto the New, or to choose from either that which appeals to us, and by-pass, neglect or reject the rest, through caprice, or following an attempt at rationalizing our choice on the basis of a preconceived ideology. This would be properly identified as heresy (αιρεσις), and there have been heretics throughout the history of revelation. Samaritans read exclusively the Pentateuch, a heresy by ignorance originating in a defective indoctrination. The Karaites professed Biblical purism to the exclusion of rabbinical tradition — from a Jewish standpoint, a formal heresy. St. Paul had denounced the rise of heretical cliques among the Christians of his time. A century later, a heretical movement threatened to warp irremediably the very texture of Christianity: toward the middle of the second century, a Christian from Asia Minor, Marcion, contrasted the Old and the New Testament in support of his antisemitic bias and of his (justifiable) opposition to groups of Judaizers, heirs to those who had given so much trouble to the Apostle. Marcion claimed that there is an irreducible contradiction between the Old Testament Creator, the jealous God of the Jews, and the God of love who manifested Himself first in Christ.⁷

Toward the middle of the fourth century, the radical dualism of the Manichaeans swept through the Christian world, offering a pseudo-metaphysical theory for a fundamental reinterpretation of Christianity. The opposition between the world of matter, work of a demiurge, and the world of the spirit, God’s world, was seen by them as absolute; there was no reconciling two eternally hostile principles. Repeatedly condemned by the entire hierarchy, their ideology was secretly hidden under a variety of names and aliases during the Middle Ages. ⁸ Working from their axiomatic dualism, they repudiated the Old Testament, sorted out that which could be salvaged or reinterpreted according to their doctrine, and weeded out of the New Testament whatever they decided in compromising with the Old Testament, or by means of contamination by impure contacts.

I am conscious of having ranged far beyond the limits of my object. However, the excursus may convince us of the necessity of aiming to grasp the Scriptures in their totality, as the privileged organ and vehicle of divine revelation. Differences of tonality and perspective between the Old and the New Testament should not induce us into operating a disjunction; we should rather learn to read them in their complementarity, short of which our understanding of either one is bound to remain unilaterally biased. Since we hold the Scriptures to be an authentic record of the divine revelation, running from Genesis to the Apocalypse, it is imperative that we should scrutinize each phase of the revelational process if we are to feel the full impact of the Gospel. This is not a matter of choice. There is only one revelation under two successive dispensations of the same divine condescendence toward men; not as if God, realizing the failure of His original design, had decided upon a new approach to save sinners, but because, having created man in His likeness, He would call him to share in the divine blessedness. Thus was God's eternally Begotten Son born a man, in order that men would be "capable of the divinity" (δεκτικον θεοτητος) .⁹

If positive reasons are wanted to induce Christians into reading the Old Testament, I can think immediately of the following: first, the Old Testament has been the Book which the Lord Jesus learned as a child, read as a man, and lay open before his disciples, in His teaching and in His life. The first episode coming to mind is when He got lost in the throng of the Passover pilgrims in Jerusalem and was found by Joseph and Mary in a hall of the Temple, "sitting in the midst of the masters, listening to them and asking questions from them" (Lk 2: 46); questions about what? — Obviously about the Law or the Prophets, the written Word, which they were reading and interpreting. St. Luke adds that the bystanders were much impressed by the intelligence of His answers and concludes by saying that Jesus "grew in wisdom, age, and grace before God and men" (Lk 2:47-52). This "asking questions" and "growing in wisdom" seems to have puzzled some early Church writers who felt, like Clement of Alexandria, "that no one being greater than the Logos, no one therefore can be a master to Him who alone is the Master."¹⁰ The difficulty is real; we hit again upon the basic paradox of the Incarnation. As God, Jesus Christ knew all things; as a man, during His life on earth, He was subject to the human mode of acquiring knowledge. Had He not learned to read, as a child? Perhaps from his mother, as it was suggested by the locorum monstratores, worthy predecessors of the modern guides of Jerusalem, who unhesitatingly did show to gullible pilgrims the house where the Theotokos had "learned the letters." The balanced formulae of the definition of Chalcedon "according to divinity... according to humanity..." are theologically unassailable, but the problem remains unsolved.¹¹ Any attempt at figuring out what can have been the psychology of Him who was both God and man is, a priori, doomed to failure; but what we should realize here is that the Incarnate Word, when He heard the Law being read by the doctors, was in fact listening to His own voice, to the words He had uttered, to the deeds He had ordered, to the wonders He had wrought, as the eternal Logos of the eternal Father.

Some twenty years after the "Invention in the Temple," a young carpenter entered the synagogue of Nazareth on a Sabbath day, "and He stood up to read, and there was given to Him the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. He opened the Book and found the place where it is written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.’ And He closed the Book, and gave it back to the attendant and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’" (Lk 4:16-21, quoting Is 61:1-2). We may reasonably assume that the inspired Words of the Prophets formed the very program of Christ's preaching in the synagogues of Galilee during the years of His public life, a teaching received with a mixture of wonder and suspicion on the part of His auditors; was He a "blue-collar worker" or a "miraculous rabbi"?

Again, on the evening after the Resurrection, it is the point-by-point exposition of the Scriptures which constituted the essence of the catechesis to the disciples of Emmaus, when the Risen Lord, "beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself," thus unveiling the entire economy of salvation (Lk 24:27). We should not need anything more than these three episodes to be convinced that we may confidently seek the Face of our Christ in the Old Testament as in a magic mirror. The Prophets did speak, but it is, of a truth, the voice of Christ we hear.

This was self-evident to the Fathers of the Church and the early ecclesiastical writers, regardless of their technique of interpretation, whether, like Origen and a majority of Greek and Latin authors, they used the allegorical method for probing and expounding the hidden depths of the Scriptures, or felt it safer to rely on the historical substratum of the revelation, like the Antiochians and their followers. By and large, the latter approach is generally preferred today, as being more "scientific" — it is also more pedestrian! At any rate, an informed and competent study of the letter of the sacred page, both of the Old and of the New Testament, is indispensable as a first step toward total interpretation.

St. Jerome had felt the need of studying the Scriptures of the Old Testament according to the best readings of the Hebrew text. He tells of his heroic efforts at learning a language which he disliked for its structure, its "hissing sounds" and its "throat-flaying gutturals";¹² he hired Jewish tutors at great personal expense,¹³ and was not a little proud of his achievements when, ironically, he boasted: "I am a philosopher, rhetor, grammarian, dialectician; also trilingual to boot: Hebrew, Greek, and Roman."¹⁴

The Tradition of the Evangelists and of the Apostles, and the Tradition of the Fathers merge into the liturgical Tradition of the Church. They form a trilogy which should be a powerful incentive to our reading of the Old Testament, the common source from which they draw abundantly. A mere glance at our liturgical books and, still better, our attendance or participation in the services of our church, would make us realize how dense is the Old Testament atmosphere in which we breathe and live. The same can be said of the liturgical treasury of the Latin Church, whether we open a Missal or a Breviary.¹⁵ The cycle of readings throughout the Christian year, distributed according to the proper genius of the Latin or of the Byzantine rite, confronts us with the entire history of salvation. In the Latin Breviaries, the Old Testament lessons for Matins and the corresponding responsoria prescribed for the various seasons of the year are designated appropriately in the rubrics as the "dominical history" (historia dominicalis). Our Byzantine troparia and kondakia, the poetry of our hymnographs, would be unintelligible without a modicum of acquaintance with the Old Testament, and it is the historical revelation of grace, from Moses to the opening chapters of St. Luke's Gospel, which provided the basic theme of the canons which are sung at the Orthros.

Some may fear that this preponderance of Old Testament material can mute for us the call of the present hour, by making us play a sterile game of archaeology. Not at all! It means rather that, seeing the projection of the Face of Christ through the optics of the Old Testament, we may turn to Him, "reaching forth unto those things which lie ahead" (Phil 3:13), where our expectation shall resolve into the final integration of the mystical body. Let this, from now on, be our constant objective.

There seems to be in our days a renewal of interest in the Bible, in various circles and for various motives. A statistical analysis might be instructive, but we are not competent to undertake it, and it would take us far beyond the limits of this essay. Let it suffice to point to announcements advertizing the Bible as "still a best-seller" and the popularity of college courses on "the Bible as literature," or the listing of the Bible in a curriculum based on the "Great Books."

The trouble is that our contemporaries are supposed to be literate, but in reality they have forgotten how to read. Methods of fast reading, abundantly advertized through the media, may be helpful for locating a passage in a hurry, but running a marathon through the dense pages of the Bible, Old Testament, New Testament and Apocrypha, will only wear out our eyes and leave us intellectually and spiritually starved.

The essential requirement for Scripture reading, as well as, for praying, is that both mind and heart should apply themselves to whatever is voiced, or heard, or sung.¹ It is not immaterial that a number of Psalms are entitled in Hebrew maskil, meaning a didactic poem, and we are exhorted to sing "wisely," ψαλατε συνοτος, psallite sapienter, erudite (Ps 47:6).

It is a matter of common experience that the Word, read or chanted at the lectern or from the ambon of our churches, has a soul-grasping virtue of its own, as if harmonies were awakened, which we would not perceive otherwise. St. Augustine confessed, with the rhetorical pathos customary of him, how deeply he had been moved by the antiphonal singing recently introduced in the western Church by St. Ambrose of Milan: "The voices flowed in my ears, and the truth was poured forth into my heart, whence the tide of my devotion overflowed, and my tears ran down."² One thing is to read the Lamentations of Jeremiah "in the closet," another thing is to let ourselves be carried away by their mournful melody during Holy Week, in a Latin Church. One thing is to read privately the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, another thing is to hear it being solemnly chanted during Great Lent, and to conclude each stasis with an ardent appeal for mercy. It all requires, of course, that priests, deacons, readers, the choir and the faithful, apply themselves in earnest to their office, and do not dispatch it like that reader in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, who went "rattling away the Beatitudes at a speed which suggested that they were well enough known without him."

The message of the Bible is being received, so to speak, on different wave-lengths. From a mere aesthetic point of view, the craving of nineteenth-century artists and poets for the picturesque, the exotic and the esoteric, is perhaps on the wane. We are not impressed any more by the mere consonance of Hebrew words, as was Victor Hugo, who even invented some for the sake of the rhyme. Yet, movie producers and authors of cheap thrillers still fare on the "couleur locale" of Bible stories.

It is generally agreed that the Bible could and should play an important role in modern education. Especially archaeological researches and discoveries in the Bible lands have become part of general scholarship, and also a fashionable parlor topic, in connection with the wholesale awakening of the Near and Middle East, and recent events in those lands. Information about the Bible, ever so rudimentary, is therefore considered as a useful, even indispensable, element of modern culture. Unfortunately, the common trend, rarely opposed, is toward neutralism in matter of religion. Were it not for what derives properly from the Gospel, the program of many a Sunday School could be run equally well in a Reformed synagogue. Doctrinal values receive little or no attention, because doctrine is seen as a cause of division among Christians. Our contemporaries shun rather than seek precision on religious topics because they fear to appear different from their neighbors, or because they feel that doctrine is not necessary for living as a good Christian or a good citizen. We would be the last to deprecate the positive aspects of their Scripture-inspired moralism, even though it be a-doctrinal. We cannot defend ourselves from feeling that, apart from a few notable exceptions, a "modernized" Christianity, is not rooted any more in the absolute truth of divine revelation, and represents a residue which lacks power to regenerate itself in the midst of a secularized, pluralistic society; it has lost much of its radioactivity.

A number of young people, who apparently care little, or not at all, for conventional aesthetics or moralistic indoctrination, are apt to blame the mediocrity of our so-called Christian culture on the ecclesiastical establishment; they denounce loudly the faked respectability of their leaders and of their elders, who proclaim lofty principles and fail to live up to them. What these youngsters seek, in the Scriptures or elsewhere, is definitely not a set of moral standards, but a compensation for their unsatisfied mysticism and a guidance for the immediate realization of their ungenerous, and utopia, desires. The "vibrations," if we may use one of their favorite expressions, are often authentic but, for lack of proper control, result into countercultures, either a self-styled Christian, or wildly radical. There may be a lot of Bible reading, unguided and erratic. Attitudes range from Bible Belt literalism to extreme liberalism, from disregard for articulate thinking to deliberate negation of any clear-cut profile in matters of belief, from untested fits of enthusiasm to esoteric ritualism, with perhaps less consistency than may be found among the youthful members of the Hare Krishna sect, who go chanting and proselytizing in Harvard Square or in the New York City bus terminal, in obvious reaction against the upbringing they received, or failed to receive, in their family. Impressionism or expressionism is not the proper approach to Christian revelation, no matter what the motivation is. We cannot regard the Bible as a mere stimulus to religious thinking and read it to suit our taste. We need objective reasons for setting apart the Bible as unique and demanding our allegiance. There may be other ways than the Biblical way, but the Biblical way cannot be foundationally established on quicksand.

A rigorous historical method is necessary for establishing the study of the Biblical message or, if you wish, of Biblical literature, on firm grounds. Such a necessity derives from the fact that the Bible actually refers to verifiable events which happened in particular places, to nations which appeared, waxed and waned in the course of history, to persons whose activities were recorded, and the records themselves preserved, edited and compiled over a considerable length of time. We are thus presented with a double set of closely related factors: the very substance of all that which is recorded in the Bible, and the manner, the quality and the modalities of the recording itself. It belongs to literary and historical criticism to scrutinize both, and to pronounce over their mutual relationship. What is involved here is the historicity of the Bible, a notion deceptively simple in appearance, yet in fact slippery and extremely complex.

Historicity as such may be described, rather than defined, as that particular quality of documents relative to events of the past, situations, physical or psychological facts, inasmuch as the memory of such, at first transmitted by word of mouth, subsequently consigned in writing and eventually gathered into compilations of diverse age, worth, and purpose, forms the subject-matter of history.

It is obvious that the historical enterprise suffers from limitations imputable either to incomplete information, or to the very nature of some particular object, the essence of which is not susceptible of positive measurement. On both counts, history will never yield an ironclad demonstration of the Christian event or a cold justification of our beliefs. No human method can possibly grasp the revelation result equal to its object, as well as, our understanding of Scripture, no matter how far it progresses along the pathways of history, never allowing us to reach an ever-receding horizon. St. Gregory the Great observes that even the certainty of the sacred language "grows in proportion to the spiritual capacity of the readers." ³

The historical method as it was conceived and expressed in the course of the nineteenth century, bears the imprint of positivism. The emphasis was on the critical examination of the documents from a formal point of view: textual criticism, age and origin of the sources, identification and credibility of authors, editors and compilers, and the like. It submitted the raw material of history to an acid test, eliminating faked or irrelevant documents and retaining only, so to speak, that which would be "receivable in court."

Such a method guarantees unimpeachable conclusions within its own limits. It suffers, however, from an unjustified minimalism, by making little or no allowance for imponderable quantities that resist any kind of regimentation, and are not admissible as factual evidence, yet offering precious information to the historian. We cannot afford to overlook psychological factors more difficult to identify, record, or interpret than external facts and events, nor should we leave untapped valuable sources, because they are deemed extraneous or marginal to history as strictly understood. We eventually learn more from folklore, popular legends and sayings, than from the most exact, matter-of-fact chronicle.

The rigidity of the positive method gradually has been humanized. Most historians today refuse to be laced in the straitjacket of unworkable rules which had been inspired by ideological considerations, rather than by the specific requirements of the discipline. Perceptible regularities of occurrence, which can be statistically ascertained, confront us with a virtually intelligible pattern, with chains of facts and events which cannot be reduced to a mechanistic system of causes and effects. The most skeptical must admit that, beyond the listing of past happenings, history makes at least some sense.⁴

Recent developments in the domain of the philosophy of history, incidentally a discipline which was always regarded with suspicion by "pure" historians, show forth a particular interest in the analysis of the notion of causality as applied to historical happenings. This has led Professor Morton White to categorically reject any tentative monistic justification for historical occurrences, as would be an all-out mechanistic hypothesis, an all-out economic, or political, or ecological explanation. In his own words, "to adopt a monistic theory of the explanation ... in any branch of history is as indefensible as to adopt one in law. It is much like saying that automobile accidents are always to be explained by reference to the icy condition of the road, or to the drunkenness of the driver, or to faulty brakes."⁵ The adjective "historical" is polyvalent; the notion of historicity applies proportionally to the various quantities we call historical, and which, in one way or another, are legitimate objects of history. These considerations may, it is hoped, prevent some misunderstandings and help to clarify what we mean, when we speak of the historicity of the Bible.

As could be expected, the revival of Biblical scholarship from the mid-nineteenth century onward has been conditioned by the parallel development of the historical sciences. The critical method advocated by the early historian theorists had inspired the efforts of western scholars for revisiting the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Radicals eager to free themselves from confessional ties, rejected or bypassed the claim of the Bible to be an inspired writing and an authentic record of the divine revelation. The Old Testament had to be put in its place as just a piece of eastern literature, and Biblical religion as just one more Semitic religion. Catholic scholars countered by trying to use the critical method constructively in order to buttress, rather than to batter, the traditional positions. A certain apologetic overtone is easily detected in Fr. Lagrange's La methode historique, which met, alas, with suspicion and even hostility on the part of ultra-conservative elements in the Roman curia and in the Church at large.⁶ These battles were fought on the terrain of Biblical criticism as such. But criticism is only one part of what we would call "total exegesis"; it is preparatory with regard to the final goal, which is to be reached only through a process of interpretation (the science of hermeneutics) germane to the message conveyed by the text. In conservative circles, Biblical hermeneutics continued to reflect theological formulations having no necessary connection with the Bible text. On the other hand, critically-minded scholars often stopped halfway, being satisfied with the results of their analyses, which enabled them to state what the Bible says, without passing judgment on the implications of what it says. Such attitudes were of course not sufficient for a vigorous revival of Biblical science. This, incidentally, was deplored by excellent scholars who, by reason of life circumstances, had concentrated their efforts on historical criticism.⁷ We too believe that the spiritual interpretation of the message, after the mind of the Fathers — this does not mean servile imitation — should be next in order of urgency, as it is indispensable for the edification of the Church.

The record of Biblical scholarship in Orthodoxy is rather scanty, and this may be explained in part by historical circumstances, namely: the isolation and struggle for survival of the Ecumenical Throne, the problems of the Church of Greece in the midst of national reconstruction and the vicissitudes of two world wars and revolutions, the efforts of Russian theology to purge itself of westernizing influences. There are unmistakable signs of recovery and evidence of growth: the pioneering work of Fr. Florovsky, the initiative taken by Orthodox theologians from Saloniki and Athens to investigate systematically the principles of interpretation which the Bible itself suggests and which guided the Church Fathers. A number of Roman scholars are working toward similar objectives, and are to be commended for the publication of such series as Sources Chretiennes, or the more popular American collections.⁸

The problem before us at this point is: how, and to what extent, can the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, be called historical? More precisely: which items in the Scriptures, either directly or indirectly expressed, qualify as historical records of the revelation, and from which standpoint can they be ascribed the note of historicity? First of all, the adjective "historical," when it is predicated of the Biblical message, calls for a modifier. The Bible is not whatever kind of history, but sacred history, and this epithet is not adventitious, as the product of some afterthought; it is an essential element of the definition. The Bible claims to have been delivered to men under the seal and guarantee of the Holy Spirit, who inspired the human authors.⁹ This claim is stated explicitly in an impressive number of passages diversely worded and endorsed by the Jewish tradition, from all of which it can be inferred that we should regard the whole Book as sacred. The historian, even if he is an unbeliever, has no right to overlook the formal claim of the Old Testament to being the authentic record of the divine revelation, as was acknowledged by the entire Christian Tradition. These are historical factors, and to exclude them, ignore them, or make abstraction from them, is a vice of method. They must be accepted as part of the material evidence laid before us, and they demand to be examined sympathetically. This is a minimum requirement.

On the other hand, the fact that we Christians believe in the reality of the revelation does not mean that we regard the Bible as a monolithic monument, or a forbidding aspect. Even a superficial glance would make a reader soon aware of its composite nature, as a collection of laws, stories, histories, chronicles, oracles, prayers, lyrics, aphorisms from ancient sages, written, edited and compiled at different periods and by a variety of authors, free and responsible agents working under the invisible motion of God's Spirit.

We have described the notion of historicity as polyvalent. It applies, first, to the traditional divisions of the Bible, and, second, to the original fragments and traditions which were gathered in them. The Hebrew divisions of the Bible, the Torah (the Law, contained in the five Books of Moses known as the Pentateuch), the Nebi'im (meaning what we call the historical Books from Joshua to Kings, plus the Prophets strictly speaking), the Ketubim (the "other" writings) — invite us to a discriminate reading of each section in particular, according to its function in the religious history of Israel. It is evident that the narratives of the creation and the origins of mankind, the history of the Patriarchs and of the Hebrew tribes, the promulgation of the Law, the annals of Israel and Judah, the impassionate appeal of the Prophets, the plaint of Job and the disillusioned musings of Ecclesiastes, do not bear the same relation to the totality of the revelation. Historicity, as ascribed to those pieces, is a variable. This does not mean that, as Christians, we are at liberty to distinguish in the Holy Scriptures elements inspired and therefore authoritative, from statements not inspired. The charism of inspiration is such that everything in Holy Scripture is, in some way or other, instrumental to the revelation of the Christian mystery. It remains, however, that not everything is susceptible to be investigated through an historical inquiry.

It is in the claim of the Scriptures to reveal the economy of God's dealing with His creatures, whereby, the key to the discovery of a "constant" under the "variables" brought forth by Biblical criticism is to be discovered. We would like here to use the German term Heilsgeschichte, History of Salvation, with the proviso that "Salvation" is understood comprehensively according to the Tradition of the Church, so as to embrace restoration, integration, and recapitulation — the ανακεφαλαιωσις of St. Irenaeus.¹⁰ The historical synthesis resulting from the application of the above principles should be the antidote to the disastrous impression of fragmentation left on a casual observer by an apparent excess of critical analysis, and it would show how the stage was set for the Incarnation of the Word and the proclamation of the Gospel.

The Old Testament record implies "directionality." It is future-oriented. We read it, so to speak, "downstream." While the headwaters of the stream are inaccessible — so it has been, for a long time, the sources of the Nile — the accessible portions of our stream, its main channel and its stagnant waters can be charted to a reasonable degree of accuracy. To be sure, the mouth of the stream is still beyond our reach, hidden in an inscrutable future. Nevertheless, the general progression of Biblical history can be traced through the Books of the Old Testament, as we read them today.

These last words need underscoring, for the Bible did not fall, ready made, from heaven. Modern criticism does not make it permissible to entertain that kind of illusion any more. We know we have to reckon with miscellaneous traditions, with fragments written at different times and in different places, and gathered into corpora, as are the Books of Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms and the Wisdom writings, the annals of the Hebrew kingdoms, the Temple records, and the documents of the post-exilic restoration. All these have been edited, bound as it were "under stiff cover." Finally, the Hebrew and the Alexandrian canon of Scriptures presented the translators, ancient and modern, with a definitive text to interpret.

The analysis of this process of transmission should not make us lose sight of the organic unity of the Bible as a whole. We believe that it is possible to discern, under the bewildering variety of the original pieces by which the Bible is composed, and eventually diverge from each other, a living Tradition — T upper case — the Παραδοσις, underlying the Scriptural record of the Old Testament. It should not be confused with tradition — t lower case and generally in the plural — meaning habits of understanding or doing things.

Here we must stress once more, to the risk of sounding repetitious, the gradually developing, dynamic nature of Tradition. It is not the mere passing on of a static "given" once and for all. It pulsates with the progress of revelation; it precedes and follows Scripture; it is never an adjunct, nor an adventitious growth; it gives meaning to the vicissitudes of God's people in Old Testament times, and it is ultimately brought into focus in the Church of Christ. The canon of Scriptures closes when the historical task of the Incarnate Logos is fulfilled on earth. Tradition lives forth in the Church of Pentecost, enlightening the minds and shaping the lives of Christians.

The progressive character of the Biblical revelation is not to be understood as uniform. We have compared its progression to the course of a stream, but the stream of Biblical history does not flow evenly. It has its accidents, eddies, wild stretches and meanders. Its course is continuous in time, for it is always God who continues to reveal Himself, but God's self-disclosure is somehow conditioned by the men who are its beneficiaries. The one theme, unchangeable in essence, but developed through the ages, demands successive transpositions, in order to be understood correctly.¹ The messianic theme runs through the entire Bible, but there are three ages of Old Testament messianism. First, the age of the promise to the Fathers, God's blessing upon Abraham and his posterity, the tribes gathered into one nation, settled and flourished in the land of Canaan. Second, the royal messianism, when the covenant with the Fathers is transposed into God's sworn fidelity to David and his dynasty. The third age is marked by a further transformation of the original theme: the messianic triumph is postponed to the last day of history, in the apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The Incarnation of the Son of God brings us back from outer space to our human world, when the Messiah, son of David according to the flesh, inaugurates in His death and resurrection the kingdom which has no end.

The evident growth in explicitation of the divine revelation excludes any conception of history, and in particular that of salvation history as a succession of happenings having mere episodic value. Such could only be described, but they would offer no basis for a qualitative evaluation, nor for an anticipation of the future, otherwise than by mere guesswork or by statistical projection. The entire weight of Scripture and Tradition supposes a τελος, a goal, a divinely appointed objective, toward which rational agents, willy-nilly, converge, as well as, the entire creation. Moreover, the τελος, principle of universal attraction, origin of every motion, must be a personal τελος; He is identified in the Old Testament through His providential intervention in the world of men; He is named in the New Testament, Jesus Christ, the keystone of the entire οικονομια. And the New Testament is called New, not just because it comes after the Old, but because it comes as the conclusion of one single plan, already before us, but awaiting consummation. Salvation history involves essentially an anticipation of the latter things, τα εσχατα; it resolves into an eschatology, not indeed as if the kingdom had been realized, or as if its realization were another worldly dream without consistency. The eschatology of the Bible, as Fr. Florovsky felicitously calls it, is an inaugurated eschatology.

Teleology, viz. the theory of final causation, is admittedly the most maligned part of the mediaeval teaching on the four causes, intemperately exploited by late scholasticism. It originates in Aristotle's speculations on the empirical production of material things: the artist envisions an ideal form and applies himself to realizing it in the material of which he disposes; an inform lump of clay, the "matter," υλη, is being fashioned into a work of art, the "form" of which, μορφη,² corresponds as faithfully as possible to the ideal model which the artist dreamt of as his objective, his τελος. Thus the work of the artist in his studio is set in motion, so to speak attracted, by his ideal vision. Modern philosophers tend to limit the validity of teleological explanations to cases in which a goal is consciously pursued, or to a phenomena suggesting a clear evidence of design. The latter may be observed — and interpreted with due caution — in the domain of biological sciences, where life phenomena, including the adaptation or eventual modification of organs, are manifestly ordained to the preservation of individuals from embryo to adulthood, and to the perpetuation of the species.

Contrary to what could be expected, it is the scientists, rather than the philosophers, who are the least inclined to give up teleology as a valid element of causal explanation, and who are interested in clarifying the conditions of its applicability. While admitting that the hypothesis "God" was not needed for formulating his equations, Einstein just could not believe that God was playing dice with the universe.³ The indefatigable efforts of the late Fr. Teilhard de Chardin for the integration of Christian faith within the evolution of the Universe involved an axiomatic acceptance of teleology. Teilhard, who had little taste for the categories of scholasticism and their derivatives, conceived the evolution of the cosmos from primordial inertia, through developmental stages overlapping at times, "anthropogenesis," "cosmogenesis," "Christogenesis," unto the "pleromization" at the "Omega point," where the tension of mind and matter would be resolved, and where the "cosmic Christ" would be all in all. Everything in his system⁴ postulates an ultimate goal, which alone gives a meaning to the developments of nature. Teilhard was criticized and accused of pantheism, confusion of orders, materialistic monism or personification of the cosmos, universalism, an insufficient doctrine on sin and a defective Christology, through neglect of Scriptural or traditional data. The charges, merciless, may not be totally unjustified; the fact is that Teilhard's incurable romanticism and a terminology of his own invention does not make easy the task of those who undertake his defense.

Teleological explanations in historical disciplines ought to be formulated with utter care, all the more in the history of Salvation, since God's energy is immediately involved here; no human analogy, therefore, can validly apply, but only the analogy of faith.

Mediaeval philosophy used to express the reciprocal relationship between the effective cause and the final cause by the following adage: primum in intentione, ultimum in executione, "that which is first in the order of intention, comes last in the order of execution." The reciprocity of the two orders, however, does not mean that it should be possible, starting from where we stand, to retrace inerringly the mechanism of history, which depends on free agents, confronted with an infinite number of options. Yet it might be possible, in a general way and at our own risk, to work our way backwards. We would direct the beam of light through the twilight of the past ages, which were never in complete darkness, and, instead of drifting down the course of Biblical history, we would, so to speak, paddle upstream. Vistas already known to us would appear in a different perspective; light effects would change; features of which we had caught only a glimpse while floating down the river, would retain our attention; we would meet at each turn with a mixture of newness and of "already seen," and yet it would be the same river and the same revelation. Reading the Bible from the vantage point of the Christian mystery, the Passion, the Resurrection, the effusion of the Spirit at Pentecost, may not teach us more things about Christ Himself, but it will increase our understanding of what we know of Him.

For the early Christians, the Jewish Scriptures were the only record of the revelation. The leaders of the Church were careful to authenticate their profession of faith by calling on the witness of the Old Testament. Hence, in the Gospel narratives, especially in Matthew, Mark, and John, to a lesser degree in Luke, the recurrence of such formulae as: "All of this was done, that (ινα) it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet" (Mt 1:22); "for thus (ουτος γαρ) it is written by the prophet" (Mt 2:5); "then was fulfilled (ποτε επληρωθη) that which was spoken by Jeremy" (Mt 2:17); "for this is he that was spoken of by the prophet" (Mt 3:3), or similar clauses.

The above examples were taken from the initial chapters of the first Gospel, but the same observations could be made on the basis of the other New Testament writings. We admit that the accumulation of these stereotyped formulae may appear suspicious. Yet they are something more than a mere literary device. The Gospel writers and the Gospel preachers of the first Christian generation made use of them, perhaps too lavishly for our own taste, because they expressed their preoccupations, as they were anxious to watch the signs of the times. The problem has been thoroughly discussed by the theoricians of form criticism (Formgeschichte).⁵ We need not be alarmed at the use of the conjunction ινα, "in order that," to express the relationship between Gospel events and the prophecies of the Old Testament.⁶ The point which the Evangelists wish to make is that the economy of the Old Testament finds its achievement in the New.

This, of course, is for us of the utmost importance. It means nothing less than this: by applying ourselves to the reading of the Old Testament in the light of our Christian faith, we may expect to see the Face and to hear the voice of our Lord. We have followed the course of Biblical history down to the days of Christ; now is the time to retrace our steps to the origin of revelation. This is what Fr. de Lubac describes as follows:

We should have no doubt as to the objectivity and effectiveness of our vision of the Face of Christ in the double mirror of the Old and New Testament for, in the words of Hugh of St. Victor (twelfth century), "all divine Scripture is one Book, and this unique Book is Christ, since all divine Scripture is fulfilled in him."⁸

St. Paul wrote to his disciple Timothy: "All Scripture is inspired of God and profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness" (2 Tim 3:16). Indeed! The aim is edification, in the sense of building up the faith. Still, we have some difficulty figuring out the benefit we can draw from a list of obscure chieftains in Edom (Gen 36:40), from ritual prescriptions for sanitizing spots of mildew on a house wall (Lev 14:33), or from the uninhibited realism of stories which would have been censured in the Victorian era, were it not that they are found in the Bible. Surely the profit, if any, which may be expected from reading such Old Testament sections, is rather doubtful. Would it be, then, that they are susceptible of another interpretation, in addition to the obvious meaning of the letter? And how is this other interpretation to be secured? The Fathers of the Church were fully aware of the problem. St. Augustine wrote:

These are brave words, too abstract to be effective; they leave us without a criterion to discern with certitude the sense "intended by the author."

The assumption of a sense, or senses, other than the obvious meaning of the letter, is at the root of the allegorical method of interpretation. In fact this is exactly what the etymology of the word "allegory" suggests: αλληγορια, from αλλος and αγορευω.¹⁰ Mediaeval schoolmen in the West elaborated systematically a theory of the fourfold sense of the Scriptures: "The letter teaches what was done; the allegory what you must believe; the moral sense what you must do; the anagogy whereto you must tend."¹¹ The enumeration varies from one author to another, but the variants do not significantly alter the scheme as a whole.

In fact, the three derivative senses were often grouped together under the general rubric of "spiritual" sense, over against the "literal," or "historical," sense. The latter denomination relates to what mediaeval authors called historia, viz. the recitation of facts. There was a fairly general agreement that in the case of parables, like, for instance, the parable of the good Samaritan, the literal sense is not the story itself materially understood, but rather the point that is being made by the storyteller.¹² The theory of the four senses was used without restraint by the scholastics, and its artificiality provoked a demand for a more realistic attitude. Thus, Thomas Aquinas, while upholding a legitimate recourse to the spiritual sense, insisted that "it is based on the literal sense and presupposes it."¹³ The sixteenth-century Protestant scholars went further, denying the objective validity of the spiritual sense, under pretense of building their doctrine on the unshakable, but too narrow a basis, offered by the letter of the sacred text.

Among the Eastern Fathers and writers, Theodoret of Kyros (ca. 393-460) had been generally successful in finding a middle road between pedestrian historicism and the acrobatics of allegorism:

Allegory ought to be distinguished from one of its subspecies, which plays a major role in traditional hermeneutics and in the liturgical utilization of texts from the Old Testament. Whereas, many allegories are derived from the letter of Scripture by way of rhetorical associations, some are firmly rooted in the very soil of history. They are not arbitrary figures, but objective types. The theological principle involved has been formulated very clearly by St. John Chrysostom (354-407). He distinguished those prophecies which consist of words, δια ρηματων, δια λογου, from the prophecies consisting of things or deeds, δια πραγματων, δια τυπου:

A similar distinction is used by Aquinas, in the article of the Summa quoted above (note 13): "God, who is the author of Holy Scripture, can use things and events to signify truth, as well as, words. The former mode corresponds to the allegorical-typical sense of Scripture; the latter, to the literal sense."

This is foundationally what happens: the Bible presents repeated instances of correlated historical events: the Exodus from Egypt and the new Exodus, viz. the return of the Babylonian exiles to their homeland; the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea, the fording of the Jordan by Joshua and the Israelites on their march into the promised land, and the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, prototype of the sacrament of our regeneration and of our deliverance from sin and death. Thus, the Old Testament types prepare the revelation of the New, and the Gospel illumines the mysterious events of the past. Typology, therefore, appears to be an integral part of the divine economy, essentially linked with the progression of sacred history toward its τελος, its ultimate goal, the kingdom that is to come.

The first condition of validity for typological interpretation is that there be an ontological relationship between the type and the typified mystery, by reason of the gradual realization, within time, of God's eternal design. Fr. de Lubac remarks that the Church Fathers, when they compared the sacrifice of Abraham with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, may have insisted excessively on fortuitous details, but did not err when they saw a link in depth between the two situations.¹⁶

If traditional hermeneutics is carried to its normal outcome, whereby, typology must be involved in the process, which leads it to the discovery of what is described by some contemporary Roman theologians as the sensus plenior, the "fuller sense," not superimposed upon Scripture from without, but drawn from the potentiality of the letter by a process of homogeneous deduction. The neglect or rejection of the typological approach results unavoidably in spiritual impoverishment, and it constitutes a serious fault of method. Some of our colleagues in the teaching profession may be more sensitive to the latter charge because it threatens their academic respectability.

A final remark is in order at this point. Much of what we wrote in the present chapter will not be accepted in principle by independent critics not ready to recognize the validity of the Judaeo-Christian revelation and the authority of Tradition. But traditional hermeneutics is an "engaged" discipline, not a mere academic exercise. For this reason, some Christian scholars have felt impelled to distinguish between the spiritual sense, as an inherent mode of the Scriptural text, and the spiritual understanding of Scripture, as the personal gain of one who applies himself to the study of the message; the latter is indispensable, for only "in thy light shall we see light" (Ps 36:9), and only under the intimate motion of the Spirit who first inspired Scripture, can we expect to discern the Face of our Christ shining amidst the shadows of the past, as it has secretly shone for the Forefathers.

The lengthy introduction which the above three chapters represent was perhaps unnecessary; we hope nevertheless that it may prove useful as a briefing, as we set out for the exploration we are going to undertake in the following chapters, searching the Old Testament for clues to the Christian mystery.

"In the beginning, God created heaven and earth." According to Hebrew tradition — emphatically not a live recording — the appearance of man on earth took place on the "sixth day" of creation, preceded by a period of preparation during which God sorted out the elements of this world¹ and disposed all things in orderly fashion, mustering them like His army (Gen 2:1).² The frame of sea and land, adorned with vegetation and teeming with living things, would be ready for Adam and Eve to dwell and multiply in it, managing the resources it offered according to the design of God. In this first creation account Adam is not a personal name,³ but a generic term, man, matching the categories of living creatures already mentioned: the fish (dagah), the birds (of), and the cattle (behemah), designated in Hebrew by collective nouns in the singular form. No concrete detail here about the creation of the woman; it is only said that God made the first two humans male and female, and that they would have dominion over the entire creation.

It is difficult to see in this narrative, or in the more relaxed story that is told in the following chapters of Genesis, a realistic description of the origin of the human race. What we read is rather a series of statements about the Creator and His economy regarding mankind, as reflected in the traditions of the Hebrew people. We would be very ill-advised to equate the Biblical data with scientific hypotheses concerning the formation of the cosmos and the successive stages of its evolution. Tentative harmonizations are, to say the least, premature, and would result in artificial con-cordism: poor science, and poor exegesis.

There is a general agreement among sober-minded scholars with regard to the composition and age of the Biblical narratives on the creation.⁴ The fact that they are given in the first three chapters of Genesis is no clue to their antiquity. Their attribution to Moses rests on the mere fact that the Book of Genesis was considered as the normal introduction to the description of the Mosaic institutions in their historical setup. In fact, the Book of Genesis, as we read it today, results from the compiling, probably during the post-exilic period, of local traditions, oral or partly written, originating in various districts of the Hebrew land, and conventionally distributed by the final redactor in a sort of genealogical framework, the "generations," toldoth, of heaven and earth (2:4), of Adam (5:1), of Noah (6:9), of the sons of Noah (10:1), of Shem (11:10), of Terah (11:27), of Ishmael (25:12), of Esau "who is Edom" (36:1), and of Jacob (37:2).

The opening narrative (Gen 1 to 2:4), attributed by the critics to a post-exilic theologian, is shaped as a logical, exhaustive classification of created things, which make their appearance on each day of the "first week" from the inanimate creatures, the celestial bodies, the ocean and the dry land, to the living things, fish and fowl, wild beasts and cattle, and up to man, who occupies a unique position between God and the world. It is interesting to compare the first creation story with Psalm 104, and it is not immaterial that the latter was appointed, in Byzantine usage, as the opening Psalm of Vespers, at the liturgical beginning of each new day. A footnote in the Jerusalem Bible remarks that Psalm 104 follows generally the order of the Genesis account. However, the laborious classifications of Genesis 1 stands in sharp contrast with the freer lyricism of the Psalm. Both may well have drawn from a common source.

It may be pure impressionism on my part. I visualize, when the Psalm is read in the church, the unique landscape of Mount Carmel, the lightning and thunder amidst the clouds running low along the range; the fragrant pine trees, the oleanders, the thickets of laurel, ilex and dwarf oaks, offering a shelter to birds and to wild game; the caves and clefts in the limestone cliffs, a refuge for the conies (v. 18); to the west, like the prow of a galley, the sharp profile of the "Sacred Cape," the Rosh qadosh of the Phoenician mariners, the jagged rocks battered by the waves of the sea; toward the rising sun, the villages and the golden fields of the fertile 'Emeq; and above all, the memory of Elijah the wonderworker, champion of the true God over against the priests of Baal.

A thematic similarity between the Biblical narrative and some ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies cannot be denied. Much attention was given during the early decades of the twentieth century to the mythological texts from Mesopotamia, which were considered by some scholars, too hastily, as the sources of the Hebrew stories on creation. More recently, the religious epics discovered at Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast, in the language and the script of Ugarit,⁵ have made us more fully acquainted with the religion of the Phoenicians, thus far known only through the secondhand reports of the Greek mythographers.

The Oriental cosmogonies describe the organization of our world by supernatural, personal beings, the gods; the creation of man out of material elements animated by a vital fluid; and man's station as intermediary between the gods and the animal world. Reduced to these generic elements, the theme of these cosmogonies can be compared with the Biblical theme of the origins.

The resemblance, however, stops here and soon gives way to essential differences: the major gods, who appear from nowhere, having themselves been created, their messengers and satellites, are in a continuous struggle, as they strive to bring order in an eternally preexisting chaos, and vie against each other to gain control of the various departments of the universe and to lord it over men, their creatures, whom they greatly need, for who would offer sacrifices?

In short, a theogony, within the general framework of a cosmogony, the stage being built for the apparition and growth of primitive mankind. Topical features differentiate slightly from the Oriental and the Phoenician varieties; early Mesopotamian civilization arose from the Chaldaean plains: a landscape of sea, canals, marshes, the uncertain contours of alluvial flats perpetually altered by the spring floods of the twin rivers, Euphrates and Tigris, the tidal waves from the Persian gulf, from which strange fish-gods brought arts and techniques to the first inhabitants of the land, the advancing delta.⁷ Towns, temples, and cities were established on higher ground, protected by dikes and levies, the building material being the ubiquitous bricks of sun-dried clay, and the first brick mould serving as a convenient divider between the primaeval chaos and the humanization of the cosmos.⁸ The Phoenician landscape, by contrast, is clear-cut: the mountain rising steep above a narrow coastal strip, and the Tyrian seas swelling against the rocky shores of the Lebanese coast, are the stage set for the conflict of the gods: Aleyn Baal, the storm-god, who reigns on high and rides the clouds, against the forces of the deep, to which he assigns inviolable limits, and who restores life to a land cursed by Mot, his arch-enemy, god of death and drought.⁹

The opposition between the Biblical doctrine and the Eastern cosmogonies, no matter how much the latter may differ among themselves, is radical. It has even been suggested that the scheme of Genesis 1 to 2:4 may have been intended as a polemic statement over against the pagan cosmogonies, an hypothesis not lacking scriptural support.¹⁰ At any rate, the religion of the Old Testament cannot be understood otherwise, than as a straight monotheism. The uniqueness of God is the first dogma of the Biblical faith. We need not be alarmed by the fact that God is referred to in the very first verse of Genesis as Elohim, a plural noun, which has been explained by the grammarians as a plural of majesty. I n fact, Elohim is not a name, but rather a Semitic idiom for the supernatural beings, the gods, of whom El is the father. The God of the Old Testament is and will remain unnamed, because no human mind, no human word can possibly grasp nor express His essence. He reveals Himself as transcendent, not merely first among other gods. He can have no equal, no rival. He is, in truth and super-eminently, κατ’ αληθειαν, κατ’ εξοχην, God.

He is Creator. Creation is a free act of the Eternal who is neither limited nor conditioned by the inertia or the resistance of matter. It means absolute beginning; "before" the creation, God is, nobody and nothing is; when mediaeval theologians speak of God creating the world from nought, ex nihilo, we are not to understand "nought" as a pseudo-being, out of which something would be produced. Something that was not, now is, by God's will and word. This we can understand somehow, for it involves no contradiction, but men need images drawn out of time and space in their attempt to give an account of that which is humanly unaccountable. To that effect, the authors of the Old Testament had to demythologize the cosmogonies of their pagan neighbors and to exorcize their polytheism and its pantheistic implications.

Traces of this cathartic process abound in Scripture. When we read that "the earth was without form and void," in Hebrew tohu wabohu (Gen 1:2),¹¹ this does not refer to the eternally preexisting chaos in which the pagan gods were allegedly created, but to the theoretical stage of the world as produced by God, prior to the distinction and organization of its constitutive elements. It does not designate an actual state of the material universe, which was never without a form, even though that form defies imagination. The Biblical authors did not, or cared not, to eliminate all mythological features, ingrained in the common literary habits of Near Eastern poetry, but these were, so to speak, deactivated. The abyss, tehom in Hebrew, over which darkness reigned, is no longer identified with the "tumultuous Tiamat" of the Babylonian epic,¹² but with the face of the sea, set in perpetual motion by the Spirit of God (Gen 1:2). The demythologization of the heavenly bodies created on the fourth day is complete. Sun and moon, the highest cosmic deities of the Babylonians, respectively Shamash and Sin, have become "two great luminaries in the skies," dividing the day from the night (Gen 1:14-18). As for the phases of the moon, they are much appreciated by the Hebrews for fixing their calendar of months, when the lunar crescent appears in the sky, and the full moon shines over the Passover night. No trace remains of the detailed instructions which Marduk, supreme god of Babylon, gives to the divine NANNAR (Sin), who is ordered, first, to show two horns, then the half of his circular crown, and then to turn himself full-face.¹³ On the fifth day of creation, God makes the huge sea monsters, tanmnim gedolim (Gen 1:21), impressive enough as zoological species (and also as mariners' yarns), but destitute of the semi-divine personality of the linguistically related Tnn of the Ugaritic poems, or of Ltn, which corresponds to the Hebrew Leviathan. The Tannin and the Leviathan have retained some of their mythological flavor in such poetical texts as Isaiah 27:1, "Leviathan the elusive, crooked serpent, Tannin, the dragon of the sea," (cf. Ps 74:14 and Job 3:8). It is interesting to note, however, that Job, in spite of his hyperboles, downgrades Leviathan to the rank of a vulgar crocodile (41:1), just as he does Behemoth, the hippopotamus (40:15 ).¹⁴

Creation, for the Old Testament writers, is not the battlefield of the gods, nor a meaningless turmoil of elements, but a mirror in which we may see, under certain conditions, a reflection of the Face of God. It is therefore possible, on the basis of Genesis, to formalize the doctrinal contents of the Hexaemeron as follows: All things were created by the power of the Word; God said, "Let there be...," "and it was so." The world was created in hierarchic order, each creature being assigned its rank and function. Through His Spirit, God is the author of life, so that the living species, each according to its seed, has in itself the principle and pattern of growth and perpetuation. Man was created last, with unique endowments, in the image and after the likeness of his Creator, unto the fulfilling of his destiny. Theological sidelines are implied, rather than expressed; the author of Genesis suggests indirectly, but clearly enough, that the scheme realized in the space of six days, followed by the Creator's rest on the seventh, is connected aetiologically with typical Hebrew institutions: the perpetual week, liberated from the phases of the moon for the reckoning of time, the Sabbath and its derivatives.

Old Testament monotheism is not to be confused with philosophical monism, which would make the Biblical concept of creation untenable. Either it would "freeze" God in His own essence and make the universe part of his incommunicable being, or make God the supreme abstraction, presiding impassibly over the interactions of individual monads having each one in itself the principle and pattern of its existence and depending on none other for the furtherance of its aims. Instead, the Bible represents God active in the world which He has created, entering in lively conversation with Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, with Moses and the Prophets, and visibly intervening in world events toward the fulfilment of his goals. These, of course, are anthropomorphisms, viz. figurative modes of speaking of God in human terms. But how else could a human being express the fact of his entering into relation with his Creator?

Late Judaism had sensed this particular problem and tentatively thought of the possibility of a contact between the transcendence of God and His creatures, being established by means of intermediaries derived from the divine essence: the Shekhmah (Presence), the Kabhod (Glory), the Shem (Name), the Metatron (Guidance),¹⁵ or by means of attributes conceptually distinct from the Essence, and implying a relation with the creatures. There is a certain similarity between the teaching of the mediaeval rabbis on the attributes of God and the Islamic doctrine of the Beautiful Names of Allah.¹⁶

Exceptionally, a few Muslim thinkers, consciously or unconsciously influenced by Christian thought, have been searching the Quran for possible analogies to the dogma of the Trinity: Allah; Jesus, whom Muhammad acknowledged as preeminent among God's envoys; and a Holy Spirit, life-giver and messenger of God's revealed truth.¹⁷ There is, as a matter of fact, no solution to the problem of communication between the absolutely transcendent and the world of men, except if we conceive God as the Trinity of Persons, in accordance with the unanimous Tradition.

Unless there is found in the Old Testament a valid foundation for the dogma of the Trinity, we would have to acknowledge that there is a theological break between the Old and the New Testament. Such, however, is not the case. The Hebrews could rightly boast that there is no nation whose god "makes himself so near to them as the Lord our God does to us, whenever we call upon him" (Deut 4:7). However they could not penetrate the secret of God's life. The Scriptural passages in which the nature of God's exclusive mystery is implied — not expressed — were due to remain for them riddles, or limited to inadequate analogies, for only in the light of the full revelation of the Gospel can these passages be truly understood; it is as if they had been written expressly for us, who come after the Incarnation of the Son of God.

This should sober us, not make us arrogant. Nor does it mean two grades of revelation, but that God discloses Himself according to what amount of truth men can profitably receive, in substantiated circumstances of their cultural development. In fact, the Hebrews were continually threatened in their monotheistic faith by the polytheism of their neighbors. There are secrets they could not bear yet, and there are secrets which even Christ, according to his humanity — we are thinking here of the date of the Parousia — was not given to share. St. Athanasius, referring to this economy of delayed revelation, remarked that some logia were not pronounced "when the Logos, who was with God, put all things together, nor at any time prior to His being made a man, but only after the Word was made flesh."¹⁸

Extant in the Book of Genesis are a number of verses which have exercised the sagacity of the exegetes, and which early Christian commentators have interpreted as implicit testimonies to the trinitarian nature of the Divine Being. They tell of God creating the Universe and drafting a policy toward His human creatures, just as men would do when they are about to attend to a matter of importance, consider the pro and con, and decide on a course of action. Note the plurals and the forms of the verbs: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26); "Man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" (Gen 3:22); "Let us go down and there confound their language" (Gen 11:7).¹⁹ There is here something more than plurals of majesty. Did God take counsel of His angels, an interpretation suggested by the Greek of Isaiah 9:5, where one of the Messiah's titles is "Angel of the Great Council"? Grammarians consider the formula "Let us" as a cohortative, a technical label which in fact covers a whole philosophy of language: I (subject) bring myself (object) to take such or such decision, and to pass to immediate action, as if the final resolution were taken jointly by several responsible persons. It would be imprudent, of course, to draw a full-fledged theology from these verses. It remains, however, that the Church Fathers, who exploited the theme, did not indulge in a worthless allegorism, but discerned, under these anthropomorphisms, a clue, however faint, of the societal nature of God.

Less striking at first glance, but perhaps more solid, is the fact, already noted in this chapter, that God is said to have created the world by the power of His Word and Spirit, not by separate instruments, not by commissioned agents, not by a Demiurge, not by intermediaries. God's Spirit was "soaring" (merahefeth) upon the face of the deep (Gen1:1), as the universal principle of life. God said the Word, and the world was made (Ps 33:6). Conversely, the world, because it was so created, bears witness to the life of God in the Trinity of Persons.

It all means, then, that the Word, the Logos, who would, in the fulness of time, become man, was present and active "in the beginning." The Gospel of St. John becomes the indispensable key to the understanding of the first chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him, and without him was not any thing that was made.... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:1-3, 14). It is, of a truth, the Face of our Christ which is mirrored in the story of the creation, when God broke the silence of eternity,²⁰ and when the vision of God's eternal Wisdom became reality.²¹ The creative Word is the same as the Incarnate Word, and when Zacharias prophetically hailed Christ as the Rising Sun from on high, we were given to understand that He would run the race for us: as a man goes forth to do his daily work (Ps 104:23), so will the Son of God, sallying forth from His chamber (Ps 19:5), shine upon all who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.

On the "sixth day" of creation, God said: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26). Shall we make a formal distinction between "image" (εικον) and "likeness" (ομοιωσις)? And why is it that the Hebrew uses two different particles: be, "in," and ke, "after," "according to"? It seems that a theological theory developed on the sole basis of such distinctions would be open to a serious charge of artificiality. One thing is certain: the redundant formula, easily explained by the fondness of Hebrew writers for parallelism, means at least that man is related to his Creator by a unique kinship which sets him apart from all other creatures and points to his destiny.¹

What this destiny will be, we learn from the second story on the creation and fall of Adam, and of the first announcement of Salvation, the so-called Protevangel (Genesis 2 and 3). Here, the general organization of the cosmos is taken for granted. A brief summary is given by way of introduction, or rather as a transition between the elaborate scheme of chapter one and the story of Adam and Eve, according to a popular tradition possibly committed to writing some time before the exile. It abounds in picturesque features, as the narrator muses among seemingly irrelevant details.² But, let this not deceive us; our storyteller makes his point at least, as well as, the systematic writer of the Hexaemeron.

The action takes place in the "garden in Eden" (Gen 2:8).³ It is described as a well-watered orchard in the midst of an otherwise arid steppe, somewhere in Mesopotamia, as we may surmise from the mention of the Tigris and the Euphrates, two of the four rivers of "paradise" (Gen 2:14). Imagine a criss-cross of irrigation ditches, the greenery of shade and fruit trees, carefully tended beds of vegetables, emerald patches of late cereals, long after a meager harvest has been gathered from the sun-parched fields round about. Whatever water is left disappears in the sand, where a few reeds absorb the last traces of moisture.

Dramatis personae: God, known from now on as Yahweh, usually rendered in English by "the Lord," or, in composition with Elohim, "the Lord God." He is the master of the garden, in which He loves to stroll in the cool of the evening (Gen 3:8).

Adam, fashioned out of red clay, the adamah — hence his surname — and made into a living creature through God breathing the breath of life into his nostrils (Gen 2:7). Adam will never lose his connection with the earth from which he came and to which he shall return (Gen 3:19). He is appointed responsible caretaker of the garden (Gen 2:15). The entire district is teeming with all sorts of animals; God brings them to Adam, who unerringly identifies them by name (Gen 2:19-20). Obviously, Adam is perfectly attuned to the order of creation, which God has pronounced good, even very good (Gen 1:31). No realistic painting here, nor abstract theologizing. The entire setting reminds one of a Douanier Rousseau painting.

Eve, Adam's wife. God made her out of a rib of Adam, upon whom He had caused a deep sleep to fall.⁴ Thus she is designated as ishah, a wo-man, from ish, man (Gen 2:21-24). She will be called later Eve, Hawwah, because she will become the mother of all living (root h-y/w-h) (Gen 3:20).

The serpent, a strange beast, creeping out of nowhere, unpredictable, repulsive to humans, trying to be persuasive, and described here as unusually crafty (Gen 3:1).

We find in the first three chapters of Genesis the rationale of man's destiny. It is suggested, in the colorful narratives on creation, that man, in the person of Adam, the father of the race,⁵ had been endowed with everything he needed to enter the role assigned to him by the Creator, and to grow, physically and spiritually, so that God's own features would become recognizable in his human icon. Here is how St. Irenaeus, commenting on the text of Genesis, expresses this:

It behoved man, after he was born, to grow: growing, he would come of age; being of age, he would multiply; having multiplied, he would grow strong; being strong, he would be glorified; glorified, he would see his master, for God himself shall be seen of man; now the vision confers incorruption, and incorruption brings one close to God.⁶

Irenaeus' climactic reasoning follows the chronological order, which is particularly germane to our thinking: thus do we refer to Christ, following St. Paul, as the "second Adam"?, who came to consummate the work undertaken at creation. This is the final objective in the light of which we are called to honor the very charter of our existence as creatures, since "Christ, the Logos of God, our Lord, out of overflowing love, has made us what we are, that he may dispose us to be that which he is."⁷ In this consists our Salvation, which must be understood primarily as deification (θεωσις), a participation in the very life of God,⁸ in the measure of our receptivity and of our response.

There seems to have been some confusion in the "stage directions" for the drama of the temptation and of the fall of man: two trees are mentioned in the description of the garden in Eden: "the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen 2:9). Adam is allowed to pick fruits from every tree, except one. But, which is the forbidden tree? Would it be the tree of life? In the temptation scene, Eve seems to think so: there it stands in front of her, in the midst of the garden, where God has planted it (Gen 3:3). Life belongs to God, and God is understandably jealous of His prerogative. After the sin has been committed, he will ironize: "Does that man think he is going to live forever?" (Gen 3:22). Or is the forbidden fruit growing on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As a matter of fact, God had said to Adam: "Thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die" (Gen 2:17).⁹ The difficulty seems to result from the fusion of two different traditions, as the conflate reading of verse 22 might indicate. Taken as a whole, however, textual evidence points rather to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the forbidden tree. Note the italicized words; the tree is not called simply tree of good and evil, for obviously the same tree does not yield two kinds of fruit, some good, some bad. Evil has no place in Eden, no more than in the kingdom that is to come. There can be no experiential knowledge of evil except after sin; prior to the fall, evil can only be conceived as a "possible," contingent upon a morally wrong choice. Adam and Eve in the garden are, in all the senses of the word, two "innocents."

The action in chapter 3, takes the form of a psychological drama. Eve, beguiled by the serpent, induces Adam in eating from the forbidden fruit; Adam blames the whole thing on his wife, and Eve on the serpent. Having heard their statements, God pronounces His verdict in the reverse order: first on the serpent, then on the woman, and last on Adam, who is held accountable for his wife and for those who shall be born from their union (Gen 3:14-21).

The tempter is definitely to be identified with the Evil Spirit in the guise of the serpent. His mysterious personality manifests itself from time to time in the course of the Old Testament under a variety of aliases; Satan, the latest of his avatars, figures only in post-exilic writings, and this being rarely. The pre-exilic writings refer to invisible beings whose hostile, vexatious character God eventually uses for the punishment of evildoers. Oriental influences tend to make the Evil Spirit the Adversary par excellence, the Accuser, the Calumniator, ο διαβολος, "he who takes a bite" (Syriac okhel qarco). His impotent strife against God shall continue to the last day. The Bible, however, shows no trace of the absolute dualism of Iranian thought, with its two coeternal principles whose irreducible opposition rules the events of this world.

It is clear that the temptation which befalls Eve is of Satanic origin. The fall of the first human couple is not presented by the author of Genesis as a natural failure due to ignorance, weakness or common malice, but to downright rebellion: never mind what God ordered or forbade; there is the fruit; they desire it, they bite into it, and that is that!

Some day, Christ, the second Adam, would also be tempted by the devil, after the forty days of His fast (Mt 4:1-11). The strategy of the tempter is consistently clear: in the garden, he cavils on the instructions which Yahweh gave to Adam, and confuses Eve, who does not wish for anything more than to be persuaded, allured as she is by the appearance of the fruit. On the Mount of Temptation, the devil argues from God's Words in the Scriptures — the weapons have been updated — rather imprudently, for Jesus, the Logos, counters with other Words from Scripture, his own words, and cuts short the discussion with a curt dismissal.

God would not have His servants exempt from temptation. Mary, the second Eve, was troubled at the words of the Angel of the Annunciation, but did not allow her anxiety to grow into positive doubt and, after a fleeting moment of indecision, pronounced the irrevocable fiat: "Be it unto me according to thy word" (Lk 1:29, 38).¹⁰ St. Joseph experienced what also amounted into a temptation, when he was thinking of repudiating his bride, and it took the visitation of an angel to make him overcome his doubt (Mt 1:18-21).¹¹

The immediate consequence of the sin of Adam and Eve is the statutory penalty of death, to be personally visited, as well as, their descendants for their own sins, for "the wages of sin is death" (Rom 6:23). Conversely, death, through the apprehension and anxiety it causes in us, is frequently a cause of doubt, despair and sin. Christ, because He is the second Adam, and because He was born to fulfill man's destiny, which cannot be thwarted or forfeited, submitted Himself to death; Mary, His mother, was not excepted; but death, through the death and Resurrection of Christ, has lost its sting (1 Cor 15:55).

Death is not the only consequence. Sin, Adam's sin and our sins have thrown disorder into creation, incoherence, contradiction, hostility. St. Augustine, referring to the world of his sinful youth, calls it regio dissimilitudinis, a land where everything is topsy-turvy, nothing makes sense, nothing is constructive. It looks as if we are witnessing a renewed outbreak of the forces of chaos; after our hymns to progress, we suddenly realize the absurdity of our spiritual, economic, and ecological predicament.

In all that gloom, a voice is heard; it was heard even before the Word of God came upon the Prophets and before He was made man. In the very act of sentencing the culprits, the Judge made it known that the Evil One would be curbed and ultimately defeated, even by those whom he had deceived. "I will put enmity between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel" (Gen 3:15, King James version). Instead of it for the Hebrew hu, indetermined as to gender, the Revised Standard Version has the masculine him, following the Greek αυτος, viz. "a descendant of the woman"; the precision of the Greek, anterior to the adoption of the LXX by the Christian Church, is the basis of the messianic interpretation of the Fathers, in the strict sense. According to the Latin Vulgate, it is the woman herself, ipsa, who shall crush the head of the serpent, and the western Church as a whole has understood that Mary would avenge Eve. St. Irenaeus, commenting on Eve being an Old Testament type of the Theotokos, explains how there has been, so to speak, a "turning about" from Mary to Eve, recirculationem, recircumlationem, seeing that "there is no other way to untie the knots (of sin) than by reversing what was done in tying them."¹² The reading of the Vulgate was used by a number of Roman theologians intent upon developing a Marian theology methodologically autonomous, rather than as a part of the doctrine on Christ.

Genesis 3:15 forms what has been called appropriately the "Protevangel," namely the glad tidings of God pursuing the plan He had eternally conceived and which he would bring to conclusion, no matter what the cost. The Protevangel is definitely not to announce in court of an eventual paroling, contingent upon good behavior, of repentent sinners. It is rather a prophecy, soon to be followed in the Book of Genesis by the symbols of a future deliverance: the dove which Noah let out of the ark (Gen 8:9-12), and the rainbow (Gen 9:13).¹³ In fact, the Protevangel is the first genuine prophecy of the Incarnation of the eternal Son of God, and the unconditional proclamation of his future victory over Satan. The prophecy is long-range; later Prophets would be kept in suspense regarding the time of the Second Coming, and the secret hour of the consummation would be revealed to no one, not even to the Son (Mt 24:36, only in the Greek).

Nothing in the Protevangel is said about death, the penalty of sin, still hanging over us. Yet we hear an accent of elation, the sound of a wild paean at the prospect of the monster's defeat, in spite of its frantic efforts to get at the woman's heel.¹⁴ She will tramp him under foot and crush his ugly head, like the Son of Mary trampling down death by death, as we sing in triumph, θανατω θανατιν πατησας, smertiu smert popravij.

The fourth chapter of Genesis is marked by a slight change in the mode of narration. The authors of the first three chapters pictured the creation of the world, the appearance and the fall of man as they could imagine it. We would not dare to label this as myth, lest we be misunderstood, since "myth" has become, mistakenly, synonymous with pure fiction, a tale without reality. We are dealing here with a literary form, no matter what we call it, the function of which is to give coherent expression to truths and events of a religious nature which cannot possibly be enunciated or described in empirical terms. A radical demythologization — Entmytbologisierung — a term coined by German theologians, with a view of reaching the objective contents expressed by this medium, is neither desirable nor possible, for there is an organic connection between contents and form; the latter cannot be neglected or regarded as of little account without the doctrinal substance being compromised. But it should always be possible to determine what is meant, if we consider positively the figurative details which are the vehicles of truth. We believe that the formulae used by the sacred writers working under the charism of inspiration ought to be interpreted in this way.

The style of the fourth chapter of Genesis is a variety of the literary form of the creation stories; it is properly Urgeschichte, history of origins. Human inventions, institutions, techniques, are traced back to eponym heroes of whom nothing is remembered, but through whom we are informed of the presumed origin of realities which in many instances are still with us. Among the ancients, the context was invariably mythological: thus arts and techniques had been taught to the Babylonians by the messengers of Ea, who emerged successively from the Persian Gulf. In Egypt, Thot and his satellites had instructed the scribes and the builders of temples.

The Biblical account shows nothing of this mythology. We are presented in chapter 4 with a catalogue of all the firsts which occurred in the early generations of men: Cain, the first "tiller of the ground" and Abel, the first "keeper of sheep" (Gen 4:2-3); Enoch, the first to "build a city," a man who "walked with God, and he was not, for God took him" (Gen 5:24); Jabal, the first nomadic herdsman, "father of such as dwell in tents" (Gen 4:20); his brother Jubal, the first musician (Gen 4:21); Tubal Cain "an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron" (Gen 4:22). Not only achievements, but failures are also recorded: thus Cain is the first murderer, and there are a few characters whom we have some difficulty to appraise: Lamech, the first bigamist, a bully bent upon vengeance; now is this the natural violence of a fierce temperament, or the birth of an institution designed to force arbitration on feuding clans? (Gen 4:19-23).

As a matter of fact, the two series do not run parallel: good men, and bad men; good and bad are mixed, until the day when the wheat and the tares shall be separated. But God is at work, invisibly, silently. His Word and Spirit are active in everything that is constructive, over against the recurring forces of destruction. The early Christian apologists, little inclined to find some good outside Christianity, credited the Logos with whatever they approved of among the pagans.¹⁵ St. Justin: "What the philosophers and lawgivers uttered or perceived correctly, this they did by perceiving and contemplating something of the Logos.... Christ was in part known of Socrates, for Christ is the Logos who was and is in all things."¹⁶ And Clement of Alexandria said of the philosophers that they were "dreaming the Truth," οειρωττουσαν την αληθειαν.¹⁷

The description of the early generations of men according to Genesis 4, which we call a history of origins, ought not to be placed on par with Prehistory, Anthropology, or what French scholars call Human Palaeontology. What is common to these disciplines and with the first eleven chapters of Genesis is merely that they deal with the predicament of early man. However, they consider their common object from entirely different points of view. The scientist uses the concept of evolution as a working hypothesis, and tentatively describes what the successive stages of that evolution were, by analyzing and interpreting the prehistoric remains, which are his material. He traces back what presumably is the biological ancestry of modern man, with a view to delimiting as narrowly as possible the margin of passage from subhuman primates to homo.

Biblical scholars and theologians are not directly concerned with these preliminaries to mankind. They take over where scientific procedure leaves off, and, short of blind prejudice, they should have no quarrel with the scientist, nor the scientist with them. Their material is provided by the Scriptural record. They consider man as actually in possession of all his natural endowments, fully accountable for his acts and master of his fate; environmental factors, cultural progress or regress, important though they be, remain incidental. A clue to this may perhaps be the fact that the Bible represents Adam and Eve, in the very instant of their creation, as responsible adults; the human species, in the ancestry which evolutionary theories attribute to it, had not come of age yet, and, as such, is out of the normal range of theology.

Even if theology is kept within its proper bounds, it should not overdraw the distinction between the successive covenants of God with mankind which are reported in the Bible; they are rather modalities of a single economy. To be sure, the covenant with Abraham seems to reduce to the proportions of an ethnic privilege the covenant with Noah, which was open to all mankind; but is it not written that "in Abraham's seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed" (Gen 22:18) ? And what is new in the New Testament, is not the covenant itself, but that the covenant was sealed in the blood of Christ; therefore, the eucharistic anaphora of the Latin Church calls it "the new, and eternal covenant."

Nor should the orders of creation and of redemption be so sharply distinguished as to suggest that, due to the failure of the former, a radically new plan had been forced upon God in order to rescue what could be salvaged of His work.18 God's eternal decision to associate man to His own blessedness is irrevocable, and the Incarnation of His Son is seen as a means of promoting this unique objective. Nevertheless the question has been raised whether, if it were not for sin, the Word of God would have become incarnate? I must confess here that I am little inclined to hypothetical speculations of the type: "What would have happened if ... the situation had been radically different from what it actually was." Surely this is a shortcoming on my part. While the redemption from the penalties due to sin, a ransom, the satisfaction of a debt toward God, what is called "atonement" in the narrow sense, are indeed essential factors in the theology of the Incarnation and the doctrine on the work of Christ, it remains that the Eastern Fathers of the Church generally considered that the deification of man (θεωσις), whether He had sinned or not, justified abundantly that the Logos would be made man. On this we may rest the case.

There are two periods in the development of the Old Testament revelation which, observed from our own station in history, appear especially oriented toward the future: the period of the Patriarchs, precariously living as semi-nomads in the midst of the Canaanite landed peasantry and sustained by the God-inspired dream which had called them out of the land of their origins; and the post-exilic period, when the returning exiles sought vainly an escape from the never-ending problems of the reconstruction. In either case, the Biblical narratives exhibit a thrust forward in time or even beyond time, which somehow contrasts with the account of the day by day struggling of Moses for the establishment of his new nation, or with the illusory stability of the Hebrew kingdoms.

The Book of Genesis describes the age of the Hebrew Patriarchs as the continuous expansion of a privileged group of men, party to a covenant originated by God, and which would receive its charter as a nation in the days of Moses. This process of expansion is correlative, at each generation, with a process of elimination of marginal or undesirable elements, which might have vitiated the entire scheme.

From the very first moment, the terms of the covenant with Abraham provide that its benefits should one day be extended to all mankind; not that the original pact would be denounced or that modifying clauses would be added to it, but rather that its essential dispositions would be transposed from the historical to the transcendent level. Our purpose in the present chapter will be to summarize as concretely as possible, through selections from the narratives of Genesis, God's way with the Patriarchs, without losing sight the final objective of their journey.

The promise, several times renewed in the course of Patriarchal history, is not unilateral. It is rather a solemn pact between Yahweh and the Abrahamides, which is described with a luxury of detail in Genesis 15:7-21. God said to Abraham:

The scene thus described is a Semitic ritual of alliance, a berith. A sacrifice is offered, and the victims are disposed in rows, the larger ones having been previously split in halves, somewhat like the parcels of the prosphorae are arranged on the diskos at the table of preparation. The contracting parties walk ritually between the victims. In the Genesis story, the parties to the covenant are God and Abraham, who is promised a countless descendence and possession of the land under condition of trust and obedience. God appears under the symbols of a divine fire, a smoking firepot and a lighted torch, to which little attention has been paid by my fellow exegetes. This imagery points to a Mesopotamian origin — likely in the case of Abraham, the emigrant from Ur Kasdim.¹

The journey of the Hebrew Patriarchs had begun in the belt of pastures surrounding the irrigated gardens of Ur Kasdim in Lower Mesopotamia, where semi-nomadic tribes grazed their sheep and brought them to the city market. These shepherds were issued from Shem, son of Noah. Yahweh appeared to Abram son of Terah, and ordered him out of the fields of Ur: "Go from thy country, thy kindred and thy father's house, to the land I will show thee. I shall make thee into a great nation and bless thee, and through thee shall all the families on earth be blessed" (Gen 12:1-3). This meant breaking away from the ancestral past. Already Shem, the eponym of the race, had been separated by God Himself from his brothers Ham and Japhet, relegated respectively to Africa and non-descript regions of northern Eurasia (Gen 10:1). The process of selection had begun. In obedience to God's order, Abraham and his family took to the road, frequented by migrating herdsmen, round about the arid steppe of what the Syrians today call the Djezireh.² Further texts of Genesis, as well as, archaeological evidence, suggest a steady acquaintance with the Aramaeans of Paddan-Aram, a district relatively abundant in water: the green belt and the wells of Urfa, the sources of the Balikh, the springs of Arab Punar. They crossed the Euphrates, and we can follow their traces through settled Aramaean districts: Neirab, the "entrance gate," Aleppo, Hama, Damascus, the table-land of Bashan, the notorious Djolan Heights. They forded the Jordan into what was still for them a land of promise. This first water crossing , the "bridge of Jacob's daughters" in modern Arabic lore — is to be the first link in a long chain of types: the miraculous crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites whom Moses would lead out of Egypt; the fording of the Jordan toward Jericho after forty years in the wilderness, and the first act of the conquest and occupation of Canaan; the baptism of Christ in the Jordan, hallowing the waters of the historic river, as the sign and authenticating seal of our regeneration.

Having crossed into Canaan, the Hebrew Patriarchs remained in contact with their Aramaean cousins. Matrimonial ties and treaties of friendship formed between them a permanent, even though loose, bond. The dialect of Canaan would from now on become the language of the Hebrews. The name of Abram, "Exalted is the (divine) Father," became Abraham (Gen 17:5).³ His wife Sarai, "the Queen," became Sarah (Gen 17:15). Two generations later, Jacob concluded with his Aramaean in-laws, after lengthy discussions, bordering at times on the ludicrous, an agreement for the delimitation of grazing rights in Transjordan. The pile of stones which they erected as a monument, yegar shahadutha, "the mound of the witness," would be translated into Hebrew, word for word, Gal'ed, Gilead (Gen 31:47). No repudiation or elimination here, but a sharp distinction, which nothing would obliterate.

Each station on the road of the Patriarchs, on the soil of Canaan, is lightened by an apparition of God, a further step in the revelational process, and a corresponding elimination of "dropouts." Abraham stops at Shechem, where he builds an altar to Yahweh, who had manifested Himself at the oak of Moreh, "the Preceptor" (Gen 12:6). Jacob, revisiting the site on his return from Aram, purchases there a piece of land (Gen 34:19), and buries under the sacred oak the domestic idols which his wife Rachel had stowed away (Gen 35:4; cf. 31:19, 34): a clean sweep of all the pagan past.... One day Jesus, thirsty and weary from a long march, would sit down beside the well which Jacob had dug, and announced His Evangel to a Samaritan woman who came to draw water (John 4:5ff; cf. Gen 33:19-20).⁴

Proceeding southward, Abraham had pitched his tent between Bethel and Ai (Gen 12:8; 13:3). There, a new separation took place.⁵ It was decided by mutual agreement that Abraham's nephew, Lot, who had emigrated with him from Ur Kasdim, would from then on pasture his flocks in the southern part of the Jordan rift and in the 'Arabah described — euphemistically — as a garden of Yahweh (Gen 13:8-12). Lot became the incestuous father of Moab and Ammon, definitely eliminated from the line of succession (Gen 19:30-38). After the birth of Isaac, the long-expected heir born of Sarah in her old age, Ishmael, the son whom Hagar, the Egyptian bondwoman, had borne to Abraham, was exiled in the desert, where he lived as a free bowman, a proud nomad, "a wild ass of a man, his hand against all, the hands of all against him" (Gen 16:12 and 21:20-21). Ishmael would be present at the side of Isaac at the funeral of their father (Gen 25:9) as, one generation later, Esau and Jacob would bury Isaac (Gen 35:29). Radically eliminated are the south Arabian chieftains and the Midianites, issued of Qeturah, whom Abraham had taken for a wife after the death of Sarah (Gen 25:1-4). As for the descendents of the concubines, they are lost from sight, somewhere to the East, under the common appellation of Bene Qe'dem, some of whom would sporadically emerge in later Hebrew literature as paragons of wisdom, challenging even the sages of Israel (Gen 25:6). Of Isaac's two sons, Esau, father of the Edomites (Gen 36:9) — a half-witted, hairy, uncouth wild hunter, who married "out of meeting" Hittite girls who became a "bitterness of spirit" to their mother-in-law Rebekah (Gen 26:35), a con tempter of his own birthright, cheated time and again by his brother Jacob (Gen 25:29ff and chapter 27) — is the last to be ousted from the family inheritance.

This leaves Jacob and his twelve sons, eponyms of the twelve tribes, the exclusive heirs of the promise made to Abraham. They would be gathered into one nation under the name of honor which Yahweh had given to the last of the Patriarchs, Israel, "He who wrestles with God" (Gen 32:28).

The line of election from Abraham to the twelve eponyms of the Hebrew tribes continued under historically conditioned modalities throughout the age of the monarchies, dominated as they were by a messianic conception which the Prophets promoted, worked to purify and gradually to free them from earthly ties, in view of the time when an authentic son of David would appear and inaugurate on earth a kingdom not of this earth.

If we eliminate the casualties left along the road of the Patriarchs, we follow an uninterrupted chain of historical figures stretching through the entire Bible to Jesus Christ in His redemptive Incarnation. These are listed, without commentaries, in the genealogies which St. Matthew and St. Luke placed at the beginning of their respective Gospels. Matthew proceeds in descending order, from Abraham to Jesus, born of Mary (Mt 1:1-16). Luke, in reverse order, starts from Jesus who, "being about thirty years of age, was believed to be the son of Joseph... son of Adam, who was God's" (Lk 3:23-28). The exegesis of the two genealogies is bristling with difficulties relative to their respective objects, methods, and to their discrepancies. The solution to these problems is not essential to the purpose of this essay. Some verses in the genealogy according to St. Matthew are of special interest, inasmuch as they show Christ thoroughly involved in the human predicament, no matter how inglorious. Thus, He happens to be a descendent of Juda by Tamar, who forced Juda, by a rather unorthodox stratagem, to fulfill his own obligations under the Law of the levirate (Mt 1:3 and Gen 38:6-26). Christ descends from Boaz by Ruth the Moabitess, a foreigner (Mt 1:5); from Solomon, by "the one who had been Uriah's wife," εκ της του Ουριυ, ex ea quae fuit Uriae (Mt 1:6, cf. 2 Sam chapters 11 and 12); from Uzziah (Azariah), the leper king, a type of the suffering servant of Yahweh and of the Crucified, disfigured, withdrawn from human society, an object of repulsion, abandoned by friends and kin (Mt 1:8, cf. 2 Ki 15:5 and 2 Chr 26:19-21).

Our liturgies have drawn abundantly from the Biblical motif of divine election, which points persistently to the actual appearance of the Messiah, realizing on the historical level the expectation of all ages. It suffices to recall here the assignment of the two Sundays preceding the Nativity to the commemoration of the Forefathers and of the Ancestors of Our Lord, and, in the western usage, the solemn chanting by the deacon of the genealogy according to St. Matthew for the third nocturn of the Nativity, and according to St. Luke for the Matins of the Epiphany.

The gallery of portraits admiringly and laboriously painted by the Siracide witnesses to the constant Jewish tradition of a succession of men and women who had been God's instruments for the fulfilment of his plan of redemption (Eccli ch. 44 to 50:21). The Epistle to the Hebrews takes up the theme and develops it in connection with the notion of faith as a saving power, stated unambiguously by the author of Genesis 15:6. "Abram believed in God's promise, and it was counted to him as justice."

The section of Genesis in which the geste of the Patriarchs is recorded is among the richest of the entire Bible in Christological applications through typology and allegorical interpretations. We shall select two outstanding examples, both for their intrinsic value as objective types, and for their suggestive power as illustrations of the mystery fulfilled in Christ. The first is the episode of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 22:1-14), a favorite theme of the Fathers in their commentaries and homilies. Abraham is ordered by God to offer in sacrifice, on a hilltop in Canaan, his heir, still a boy, born of Sarah in her old age, through whom the promise of the covenant should receive a beginning of realization. Stunned by the enormity of the demand, the father resigns himself; he saddles the ass, splits the wood for the holocaust; Isaac himself shall carry the logs. This gruesome detail enormously impressed the Church Fathers, who saw in it a figure of Christ carrying His cross up to Calvary. To Isaac's question, "Where is the lamb for the sacrifice?" Abraham answers evasively: "Yahweh shall provide" yir'eh Yahweh. The narrator finds there an etymology of the name of the hill, which from then on shall be called Mount Moriyyah, hypothetically derived from the root r-‘-h.⁶ Now, an altar is built, the wood disposed for the sacrifice, the fire lit, and as Abraham takes the knife to slay his son, the "Angel of Yahweh" stays his hand; a substitute victim is found: a ram caught by his horns in a thicket.

Literary criticism has interpreted the drama as an aetiological legend⁷ destined to explain a later prescription of the Mosaic Law, whereby, every man is under the obligation to put to death the first-born fruit of a domestic animal, in recognition of life being the exclusive property of Yahweh, whereas the first child born to a man must be redeemed by means of a substitutionary sacrifice (Ex 13:llff, 34:19ff, Num 18:15ff). The hypothesis is solid. It should be remembered at this point that one day, in fulfilment of the legal precept, Jesus Himself would be presented to the Temple by Joseph and Mary forty days after His birth, and His messianic identity would be acknowledged and proclaimed by Simeon and Ann the Prophetess (Lk 2:22ff). The Church commemorates this event by the "Feast of the Meeting" the Υπαπαντη. It is known in the West as the "Purification of the Blessed Virgin" or, according to popular tradition, the Candlemas or Chandeleur, in reference to the offering of wax candles for the altar during the celebration of the Mass: "A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel." The typological objective of the Genesis story, once cleared from the unessentials, is that we, the sinners on whose behalf Christ gave Himself in unconditional obedience, shall be saved, as Isaac was saved, when God spared to Abraham the supreme test of his fidelity to the covenant.

Less dramatic, but equally significant, is the episode recorded in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis.⁸ It describes the return of Abraham after his victory over the confederate kings who had raided the region of Sodom⁹ and taken Lot prisoner, Abraham's nephew. Abraham was met by Melkizedek, king of Salem, in the Valley of Shaveh, glossed as "the King's Valley." The Jewish tradition has recognized in him a figure of the Messiah that was to come (cf. Ps 110:4) and the Church saw in him a type of Christ. The identity of this personage and his whereabouts are shrouded with mystery. It was tempting to identify Salem with Jerusalem, as does Psalm 76:2 and the quasi unanimous Jewish and Patristic tradition. The King's Valley is mentioned in 2 Sam 18:18, and Josephus volunteers the information that it was at a distance of less than twelve hundred feet from Jerusalem! Or is Salem the site bearing that name in the mountainous district east of Shechem? This would be more or less on Abraham's road, as he came back from his hot pursuit after the kings, as far as, the region north of Damascus. All that topography is of secondary importance for our present purpose. More revealing is the title "Priest of the God Most High," El-Elion, given to Melkizedek. 'Elion is not the proper name of the deity whom he serves, but rather a divine epithet qualifying the generic name for God, El. Note also the use of the word kohen for "priest," a title not normally