For many Latter-day Saints, the opening chapters of Genesis, with their creation accounts, are a battleground. We try to map the “days” of creation onto geological eras, reconcile a localized flood with global stratigraphy, or fit evolution into the rib of Adam. But what if we are asking the text to do something it was never designed to do? In a refreshing and technically grounded new interview over at the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, BYU ancient scripture professor Avram R. Shannon suggests that the key to understanding Genesis isn’t to force it into harmony with 21st-century science, but to let it be what it actually is: an ancient, edited, and composite text that cares far more about our covenant relationship with God than the physics of the cosmos.
The Tale of Two Creations
One of the first things Shannon points out—a fact he quizzes his own BYU students on—is that Genesis doesn’t offer a single, seamless narrative. It presents two distinct accounts (Genesis 1:1–2:3 and Genesis 2:4–2:25) that differ in style, scope, and even the order of creation.
The first creation account contains the separation of creation into creative periods … Human beings are made in God’s image, and males and females are created simultaneously.
In the second creation account … The order of creation is first the male human, and then the rest of the animals, then the female human … This is the creation account where humanity is made from dirt.
Rather than seeing these as contradictions to be “fixed,” Shannon frames them as complementary theological pillars. He connects them to what Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf calls “the paradox of man.” The first account (God’s image) teaches us we are everything to God; the second (dust) teaches us we are nothing without Him. We need both stories to understand who we really are.
I’ve written about the implications of these being two separate accounts in a previous series that I wrote about the Contradictory Commands to Adam and Eve:
Letting Ancient Books Be Ancient
Perhaps the most important part of the interview is Shannon’s insistence that we stop expecting Iron Age authors to understand DNA or astrophysics. He discusses the “firmament” (Genesis 1:6–8) not as a poetic metaphor for the atmosphere, but as what the ancient authors actually believed it was: a solid dome holding back cosmic waters.
It’s really a question of expectations. We want to be very careful when making scripture do something it is not trying to do …
There is no possible way for an author in the Mediterranean Iron Age to even have the tools to articulate what DNA is … It would be unfair of us to expect it of them. Sometimes it is helpful to just let ancient books be ancient.
He argues that this doesn’t invalidate the inspiration. Citing Nephi, he reminds us that God speaks to people “according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3). God worked within the ancient Israelites’ geocentric, flat-earth worldview to teach them saving truths about the Covenant, just as He works within our incomplete scientific models today.
Joseph Smith’s Creative Engagement
Shannon also dives into Joseph Smith’s famous King Follett Sermon to illustrate a uniquely Restoration approach to the text. Joseph didn’t feel bound by the standard translation—or even the standard Hebrew grammar. Shannon unpacks Joseph’s reading of the first verse of Genesis, where the Prophet altered the Hebrew word reshit (“beginning”) to roshit (“head”) to argue that “The Head One of the Gods brought forth the Gods.”
On a purely grammatical and text-historical level, this does not reflect the Hebrew text we have received at all…
[But] this is a tricky question, in part because Joseph Smith is reflecting on the Hebrew Text—but he is also emending it.
This shows that for Latter-day Saints, the text is dynamic and open to prophetic expansion, not a static prison of literalism.
Conclusion
Shannon ultimately argues that Genesis is a prologue to the Exodus—a setup for the story of Israel, not a textbook on biology. By accepting its ancient nature, we can stop fighting with the text and start learning from it.
Recognizing that the ancient authors were not doing twenty-first-century science helps me to focus on what they are doing rather than potentially remonstrating against them for what they are not.
For more on how to read the “firmament,” the specific Hebrew grammar of the King Follett sermon, and the role of the Redactor in Genesis, head on over to the Latter-day Saint history blog, From the Desk, to read the full interview about the two creation accounts in Genesis with Avram Shannon.
Comments
6 responses to “Dirt, Divinity, and DNA: Avram Shannon on the Two Creation Stories of Genesis”
Great supplement for next weeks lesson and what I’m reading in the Oxford Bible right now on how two narratives are being combined.
Going through the D&C and other JS related scriptures, documents, and books I found it interesting how often he returned to the origins and genesis in his thoughts and expansions throughout his life.
It’s interesting how much Catholics and Protestants read the Trinity and ex Nilo creation into the narrative while Latter Day Saints use the origins to expand on the pre existence.
Thanks for the write up, Chad. I wish I’d known about the reshit/roshit example a few years ago when I wrote my posts about the translation of the Book of Abraham.
Very good points.
Chad, maybe “begging the question” isn’t the right term, but you seem to butting up against the question of how important the historicity of Genesis is to LDS theology.
Whether Adam and Eve are historical or not, they seem to be fundamental to LDS understanding of exactly why we need Jesus as a Savior. If this is all just allegory or a primitive explanation of how things were created, how much of what we call the Plan of Salvation is an inaccurate attempt to help us understand our relationship to God?
Is this something akin to Newtonian vs. the theory of relativity where our Plan of Salvation is a “good enough” explanation for the “low velocity” at which we operate in this life or is it really just a 19-20th century attempt at an explanation that we shouldn’t judge too harshly just like we shouldn’t judge their Bible-writing forebears too harshly?
I would say that a lot of the dependence on the literal Fall to explain the Atonement of Jesus Christ is more of a mainline western Christianity problem than an LDS problem due to the doctrine of Original Guilt that was articulated by figures like Augustine after the Great Apostasy had already set in.
When Latter-day Saints have said similar things about the Fall and Atonement (the Three Pillars and similar thoughts), to me, it’s been the result of exposure to and borrowing from Protestantism rather than a critical analysis of our theology, including our belief in a fortunate Fall. In many ways, the Plan of Salvation in Latter-day Saint theology as a progression of spirits from a premortal state on into the eternities makes it so that we’re less dependent on a literal Fall than most other Christians. (I don’t think I’ll be able to adequately explain the thought in a comment, but it’s something Terryl Givens has discussed before in Wrestling the Angel and possibly the God Who Weeps (which he coauthored with Fiona).)
I recognize that there is a lot that Latter-day Saints have said (including Church presidents) that assumes a literal Adam amd Eve that complicates the situation (I shared some thoughts on that here a long time ago:
https://archive.timesandseasons.org/2021/10/adam-shall-come-to-visit/).
You probably hit on how I view the issue when you said, “our Plan of Salvation is a ‘good enough’ explanation for the ‘low velocity’ at which we operate in this life” or it is a “19-20th century attempt at an explanation that we shouldn’t judge too harshly just like we shouldn’t judge their Bible-writing forebears too harshly.”
Ultimately, the further we get from our immediate experiences, the more I treat things with a grain of salt. So, whatever happened at the dawn of the human species is a bit too far removed from current experiences for me to treat stories about it with certainty, even if I enjoy exploring that type of thing intellectually.
Seems to me that Joseph Smith mostly dealt with that in the 2nd Article of Faith: we need to be saved from our own sins, not Adam’s transgression.
I see the garden as a type story, if not a straight-up parable (with real historical figures cast as characters–something that’s familiar from the temple). The garden represents our premortal existence with God, Adam and Eve represent all of us, and the choice to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents the choice we made to enter mortality and learn about good and evil from our own experience. “The fall” is thus being born into a mortal body on a flawed world. Adam and Eve eating the fruit and being cast out of the garden is a type of the real fall.
It seems to me that God is happy to let us try to figure out “why” and “how” questions on our own—and sometimes get them wrong, and sometimes disagree with each other—as long as we accept the fundamentals and are willing to act on them. He wants us to learn to think for ourselves. That everyone sins and everyone dies is an obvious empirical fact, and our need to be saved from them does not depend on why we think that is.
Rest assured I feel the need for a Savior very strongly even though I don’t think it was Adam and Eve who put me in that state.