The Feeling of Creation

The gods made me teach Genesis on my third week of class in a new school in a new country in a new world. The gods toy with humans whereas God instructs the humans, and I felt I was being toyed with to instruct a class of thirty highly intelligent Muslim women the Judeo-Christian rendering of creation. After Gilgamesh, though, Genesis was the next thing in the book, and I thought it would be nice to compare the descriptions of the great flood in Gilgamesh to the great flood in Genesis, not really thinking about the implications--religious, secular, and scholastic.

Mind you, teaching Genesis is already perilous waters to a bunch of Judeo-Christian evangelicals, which is what I did in Iowa. When Christian students go into Genesis without the guise of a course entitled "Bible as Literature," they often resist any treatment of the Bible as anything other than a sacred instruction manual. To "analyze" it is to desacralize it, they often think, although, I explain, the sacrament is precisely an analysis of material objects. Last time I taught Genesis, I had three students that had visited the Creation Museum, an Evangelical tourist attraction in which dinosaurs and humans inhabit the same chronological space, and evolution is nothing more than a change of outerwear. But, on the other hand, American university students are very much used to the free exchange of ideas, whatever the implications of those ideas are, and so while I had no interest in disabusing anyone of the notion of creationism (that is not my job), I certainly encouraged us to read the creation story with great attention to the way it is depicted in strange, ambiguous, even vague words, telling us nothing so that it might tell us everything. I have always loved the way Genesis explains it all while explaining very little--it is the nature of a sacred text to simultaneously bequeath and abscond, give and withhold.

But this was different. I am the new professor, the one fresh off the boat with wide eyes and bad cowboy clothes. The one with little knowledge of what constitutes freedom of expression in Kuwait and very little caution in his casual statements. My mouth runs faster than I have strength, and I often find myself trying to verbally erase a previous comment, like a politician without the politician's skill for actually doing it. But I needed to teach it, and this is what I knew about my students in preparing:

• They are all Muslim, with an intimate knowledge of the Koran. They were raised in school systems that teach Islam, Arabic, and the Koran as a course just like any other.
• They observe varying degrees of orthodoxy. Some are Shiite while others are Sunni. Some wear the Hijab while others do not, althoguh I have quickly learned that it is no use to judge a person's fundamentalism based on what they wear.
• The women are incredibly sharp, willing to engage with texts on an intimate level but never allowing me to dictate too much about what to engage with.
• The Koran is usually not taught in English because translation is already a form of interpretation, and the Koran must be pure because it contains the actual words of God.
• The Koran contains most of the same stories found in Genesis, albeit with some minor changes in the details.
• There is a degree of reverence for the Old Testament, not because of its sacred power but because it contains different accounts of the same stories from the Koran.

What I did not know was exactly how much I was allowed to treat the Old Testament as a literary text, or the figure of God, Adam, Eve, Abraham, and Ishmael (more important in the Muslim tradition than in the Christian) as characters. What was I allowed to say about God, the same God that "regrets" his creation of the humans and repents? This was, and is very much considered to be, the same God as Allah, and to speak for him, around him, and about him in human assumptions is akin to blasphemy.

I should confess something, though, which might help explain why my words often precede my thoughts. I live for these kinds of situations--I find that the only way to have a memorable experience is to operate freely within certain bounds, strict dogmatic ones at that. There is no thinking outside the box when there is no box, and there is no expansion without something to expand. I can't lie: I was really excited about teaching the Bible.

We began at the beginning: "Let there be light." Why does God say this, I asked, why can't he just think it? If God can create with nothing more than words, why does he even need words? Hands shot up, and immediately several students began chattering about the word of God in the Koran, the sacred speech act of God speaking. By the word, things appear. Fair enough, I said. I do, I will. Speech Act Theory. H. L. Austin. The Word. "But then," I asked, "Who is God speaking to?" This one was met with less enthusiasm, maybe something closer to surprise. "The elements," one student said, "the universe," said another. "And while we are at it," I added, "Why does he say "Let"? Why not just say "Lights!" or "Be light" like when he tells the humans to "Be fruitful"? I assume, I told them, that "let" has some important sense in Hebrew, one that I am not familiar with, but we are reading the English so let's treat it as if God is speaking in a universal language to be translated so all can understand.

"But Professor, God speaks in one language at one time, and all meaning depends on the grammar of each language."

Indeed, I thought, that is an incredibly sophisticated response, one that distills decades of translation theory into a single theological utterance. "But then, who is God speaking to, and why does he need to use Hebrew?"

Another student tried to answer: "Genesis is narrated, though, not spoken directly by God, so it is in the language of the narrator."

"Right, so again I ask, why quote God? Who is God speaking to?

"And for that matter, consider this, at the end of Chapter 1: 'And God saw all that He had done, and, look, it was very good.' Who is doing the 'looking' in that sentence?"

A student in the front: "the commas around "look" mean that it is a command to the reader, or whoever the narrator is addressing."

Who is the narrator addressing?

"Us."

Then something weird happened in class. Everyone was silent, and they actually looked at each other, and saw, I think, that it was good.

That sequence of events was interesting enough, and the silence lasted until I, Silence-Breaker, offered this: "And before this only God saw that 'it was good,' but now the narrator asks us to "look" and to see what God sees and, not only that, but to judge the way that God judges, and to judge that it was very good. We stand with God, and we, the readers, see that it was good alongside him. And we, as readers, have effectively participated in creation, so whether this is a history or an allegory, we had or have something at stake."

I went on, And why is "look" in present tense, and why do the quotation marks disappear, and who is the narrator, and why does God say that we must create man in our image, and why must we determine whether it is good?

And a student, on the lefthand corner of class, answered: because this is a "sacred" text, so it is not a history but for all time. And it is also a group text--it needs participation from readers for it to have meaning and value. When God speaks, someone needs to be there to listen, so that is why it is repeated through time.

Did that student know how far into the history of ideas she had come? Did that student know how much pressure she had put on herself as a reader, a reader of a "sacred" text? Did that student know she was quoting Ben Jonson describing Shakespeare's work? Whatever she knows or knew or didn't, she had an advanced understanding of the way sacred texts work as if it were ingrained, even as if she were taught a sacred text from an early age.

At one point during the class (what I just described occurred only in the first twenty minutes), a student asked, "Do students in the U.S. read the Bible from an early age the way we read the Koran?" "No," I responded, "first of all because many people in the US are not Christian and this is deemed a Christian text, and also because there is a separation between the practice of religion and what is taught in public schools."

The student then said, "They should read it because it would allow an understanding of how words work, like the Koran does for us."

Indeed, I think now, but I am not sure a Bible as Literature class would get passed anywhere outside of Texas, and Texas would make you take out the "as Literature" part. I guess I would take out "as Literature" too, but only to reduce redundancy.

At the end of this class, several students came up to my desk, thanking me for the class--a practice that is refreshingly common in this culture--but two of them lingered, and one said she wanted to thank me for allowing the "sacred" into the classroom, and the other said that her reverent feelings towards the actual words of the Koran were deepened by our discussion. For some reason, and from somewhere, I felt the spirit too.