How to Read the Bible's Creation Stories: Seven Preliminaries

David R. Larson
May 27, 2026

1. Unlike the ancient Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle, the ancient Hebrews did not write plays and treatises, They expressed their views in stories, poems, witticisms and the words and deeds of prophets. This is why people call what they said and wrote "narrative theology."
2. They did not say and write these things to entertain. They did so to address issues people were experiencing in their everyday lives.
3. We can make an educated guess as to what issue a story addresses even if we aren't specialists in Biblical scholarship by asking a simple question: "If this is the solution, what is the problem?"
4. We should not approach the story with our issue in mind. We should approach it with their issue in mind. It is always the case, though, that their issue turns out to be an issue for us as well even though it might be a different issue for us than the one we anticipated.
5. The stories they told typically had one message to which all of the details pointed, rather than each detail of the story having its own independent meaning.
For instance, the donkey in the story Jesus told about the Good Samaritan helps make his point that our "neighbors" are not those who are close to us in one way or another but those who need our help.
To create an extreme example, this differs from saying that the donkey's two ears represent Adam and Eve, its two eyes the Old and New Testaments, its mouth the preaching of the Gospel, its four hooves Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, its skin the robe of Christ's righteousness, its mane and tail the enticements of evil and what comes out under its tail the Devil's deceits.
6 Things can become complicated because in the Bible the same story can be told with different messages. This is why the message of a story in the New Testament sometimes greatly differs from the message of the same story in the Old Testament.

Like some others in their time and ours, many of the first Christians did not believe that the message of a text is limited its author's intent. They valued using old texts in new ways. They even gave different messages to some of the stories Jesus told according to what points they were making. This means that the message of a story in the Bible is primarily to be found in how the story is being used in uts specific passage. 7. One detects the message a story has in its context by repeatedly reading the whole of it preferably aloud, because the earliest recipients of these materials did not read them but heard others read them.

So............... The best way to understand the message of the Bible's creation story in Genesis 1:1–2:3 is to read it aloud ten or so times and then ask 1. What is its message? 2. If this is the solution, what is the problem? 3. What are the parallel problems in our time and what solutions does the Biblical story offer?