The first chapter of Genesis has recently been a text, more examined in courts of law and by the media than in churches or synagogues. The arguments in these settings often center around the assertion that the Bible’s description of creation should best be understood as a scientific manuscript, a sort of ancient newspaper account of the first seven days. Ironically, it is precisely this “literal” view of the first chapter of Genesis that trivializes its remarkable philosophy, theology, poetry and its unique vision of the relationship between God and the world He created.

The misunderstanding and trivialization of the biblical creation story is further complicated by the fact that, for most American Christians and Jews, these stories of Genesis are last read or heard when we are children. While many of these narratives are certainly compelling for young people--the man and the woman, fruit tree and serpent, the flood and the animal-filled ark, the tower piercing the heavens, the young boy with his coat of many colors--these stories are anything but children tales. Like all narratives that survive the millennia, these texts can be appreciated on one level by children, but also have more profound meanings only discernible to the adult reader.

What is remarkable about the Bible’s creation text is not its scientific or historical accuracy, but its conceptual profundity.

First, unique in Genesis Chapter One, unlike all other creation narratives of other cultures, God does not emerge from nature, a golden egg, a primal ooze, a merger of bitter and sweet waters. In this text, God transcends nature. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It is this sharp and unambiguous distinction between a single creator and all He created which represents the broad intellectual leap that is at the theological heart of monotheism.

Second in the Genesis narrative, the deity who creates the world is also the deity who rules the world. This is not the case in the non-Genesis creation narratives. For example, in the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation tale, Marduk, the ruling god, creates the world from the bleeding corpse of his own grandmother Tiamat whom he just murdered in a brutal god war. Because in Genesis, it is the one God who creates and rules the world, peace is a natural state, a precondition of creation, and therefore possible for us to strive toward and ultimately attain.

Third, whereas all other creation narratives culminate in the creation of a human being of a particular nation, the first Egyptian, the first Canaanite, the first Fiji Islander, the creation of man and woman, a simultaneous creation in the first chapter of Genesis, is the creation of all humanity. “God created humanity in His image. In the image of God did He create it. Male and female did He create them.”

In Genesis, with all of the sweeping ethical implications, the creation of human beings, that is all human beings, is twelve chapters before there is an Abraham, twelve chapters before there is a Jew.

Last, the Genesis narrative is unique in what it is missing. In all other creation tales, we learn who the god is before we learn about what he does. We know whom Zeus loves and hates, with whom he is in league, what is the nature of his personality. In the Genesis text, we know nothing about who God is, but only what God does--how He divides light and darkness, creates the sun and the moon, the trees and the vegetation, the animals and man. In this Genesis vision of creation, a text of true monotheistic genius, God is a verb, not a noun.

The Genesis creation narrative is a masterpiece of poetry, philosophy, and theology. To reduce this soaring creation vision to “science” is to take God’s creation in vain.

Dennis Shulman is a rabbi and a clinical psychologist-psychoanalyst. He is on the Kollel faculty of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (the Reform seminary in New York City). In August, Rabbi Dr. Shulman was one of the leaders of an interfaith service at Cindy Sheehan’s Camp Casey. His most recent book is “The Genius of Genesis: A Psychoanalyst and Rabbi Examines the First Book of the Bible.” Email to: Shulman@DennisShulman.com

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