New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis [a review]
Fifteen years ago, John H. Walton published a small but significant work: The Lost World of Genesis One which intended to shake up the stultified debate about the contentious chapter by looking at the cultural context of the Ancient Near East. His core claim in that book is that the chapter reads quite differently when you realize that its audience wasn't interested so much in material origins as much as functional origins. That is, the questions they were asking were about why the world exists, what it is for, and what we are for. Those are significantly different questions than what modern people tend to ask, such as how old the earth is, whether human beings evolved from simpler organisms or not, etc. The chapter is not about whether the earth is 6000 or 4.5 billion years old; it is, in Walton's view, about what the world is for. Based on the text itself, Walton's argument back then was that Genesis 1 paints creation as a sort of "cosmic temple" where God could meet with his people.
The success of that book kicked off a flurry of other "Lost World" books, all aimed at the same general premise of recovering the forgotten context of various aspects of the Old Testament. Now, fifteen years later, Walton (along with his son, J. Harvey Walton) has written New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis: Advances in the Origins Debate. It's a summary of what he's previously written, an explanation of how he's adjusted his argument over time, and a response to the various critiques he's received.
Adjustments
One fairly notable adjustment Walton has made is to move away from "cosmic temple" language toward "sacred space" language. this largely cashes out to the same thing in the main, but it does does relieve him of the pressure to paint Adam and Eve as "priests" that "temple" would necessitate. One of the major questions Walton's work had raised was, "Why are Adam and Eve singled out as individual characters in the text if not to answer the question of human material origins?" His previous answer to that question was their function as priests within the cosmic temple, but this obviously no longer works. So now his position is the relatively less controversial position that they are simply named archetypes. It is not their biology that is significant in the story, but rather the way in which they act out their humanity. The choices they make and the way in which they carry themselves is representative of the human story in general.
Walton's tone in the book is generally irenic, and he does not seem to be trying to use the exegetical conversation as a thin prooftext for some other axe to grind. He remains agnostic to a lot of the hot button questions, leaving space for Christians of good faith to draw varying conclusions. For example, he suggests that Adam and Eve as archetypal figures doesn't preclude the possibility that they were also real, historical individuals. He isn't insistent on his readers adopting an old earth creation. His argument doesn't hang on whether the reader believes in evolution or not.
That being said, his interpretation of the texts at hand do indeed open the door much wider for Christians adopting such views, and it seems like a lot of the criticisms he's received hinge on that fact. As a reviewer, I can't speak to what Walton's end game is here, but I'll say that to me it seems that no matter what our slippery slope fears may be, we should not let the tail wag the exegetical dog. Even if we fear what evolution might imply, the questions at the heart of biblical studies and scientific inquiry have always been, "What is true?" rather than, "What fits our existing system?" If Genesis 1 is indeed an ontological rather than material origin story, then we can't force it to be about origins anyway.
Another significant shift in Walton's thinking (spurred by the work of his son) is that Genesis 3 is not about punishment, and it's not even about sin. He considers the chapter to be a divine warning against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the resulting consequences when they do end up eating it, but he holds that it is not until the NT that this is reimagined as a sin and resulting punishment. The famous "curse" of Genesis 3 is not so much divine retribution for disobedience, and it's not even aimed at the humans themselves. Instead, it's the reintroduction of disorder and chaos into their community as a result of their decisions. This is fairly obviously difficult to square with the evangelical imagination, for which Genesis 3:16 is a keystone of the Creation-Fall-Redemption frame. Not only that, but it's also uncomfortable for the average evangelical to conceive of the NT as recasting an OT text from what it originally meant.
Evaluation
It should be said right away that this book is really only for those who, like me, are nerds for this kind of thing. The book isn't going to make a whole lot of sense unless you're already familiar with Walton's other work. It's mostly an academic retrospective rather than anything remotely standalone.
That leads me to my biggest critique of this book, which is that I think it would've been served well by a slightly different format. This isn't just a retrospective on The Lost World of Genesis One, but on all seven of the Lost World books as well as on what he's written in his Genesis commentary, his OT hermeneutics textbook, and others. If you're familiar with all of that as I am, then this relatively light summary of shifts and adjustments is fairly easy to follow. But I think it could have been a lot stronger and more accessible if it didn't assume so much prior context. Ironically, all those other books are driven by the Ancient Near Eastern cultural context that we don't have contained within the Bible, and here we have a book that really only makes sense with a ton of Waltonian context that isn't contained within.
What I would love to see is a single-volume Lost World of Genesis that draws together his main insights from the other books into something that is still roughly the same size. Those books have meaningfully shaped the way I see the text and think about the question of origins, but it's difficult to refer them to folks ("Just read these 7 Lost World books, this commentary on Genesis, and this textbook on Hermeneutics and then let's resume this conversation!").
As mentioned above, I'd recommend this book if and only if you're already familiar with Walton's work and you're curious how his mind has shifted over time. It's a good book, but it needs a lot of context in order to make sense.
DISCLAIMER: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for the purpose of a fair, unbiased review.