Read Genesis 1 slowly and you notice what it repeats. God speaks. Something comes to be. God sees that it is good. Evening and morning mark a day. The chapter runs on a refrain, and a refrain is a feature of crafted, memorable speech. Dr. Walter Kim reads that form, alongside the creation stories of Israel’s neighbors, as evidence that Genesis 1 was mainly answering a different question than the one we usually bring to it. Its first hearers wanted to know who rules the world and whether they mattered in it. The chapter tells them, and its poetic shape makes that answer louder without making it less true.
That reading does not require anyone to deny that God could have made everything in six ordinary days. Kim says so plainly: “God could create everything in six literal days. He has the power to do that.” His claim concerns the chapter’s purpose, which in his reading lies somewhere other than the mechanism and the timetable.
What kind of writing is Genesis 1?
Every responsible reading starts with genre. We already do this without thinking about it. Lisa Fields made the point in conversation with Kim: “we don’t read the Psalms like we read the epistles.” A psalm and a letter can both be Scripture and both be true, yet each tells the truth in its own way. Reading a lament as a legal brief would misread it.
Kim argues that ancient storytellers had a refined sense of poetic language, especially in oral cultures where a people’s story was told aloud and passed down. Important things were told in elevated form. “If it was worth telling, it was that important, you would tell it in the forms of poetry.” He adds that “no one was writing a scientific manual in any fashion that would look like or resonate with a modern scientific worldview.” That observation describes the ancient world as a whole. Nobody then wrote the kind of document many modern readers expect Genesis 1 to be.
The text itself rewards attention to form. The chapter opens with a heading over the whole: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Then it moves in ordered stages, each closed with the same formula. The sixth day is sealed with the fullest version of the refrain: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” (Genesis 1:31). Structure this deliberate tells a reader to watch for meaning in the arrangement as well as the sequence.
Kim also points to a contrast inside the Old Testament. The books of Samuel and Kings, he notes, have a different feel. When the narrator tells the story of David and Bathsheba, the prose is concrete and detailed, without the patterned poetry of Genesis 1. In his view, the Bible supplies clues for reading each of its parts, and comparing Genesis 1 with later historical narrative lets that variety teach us how each part works.
Can a reader test the genre claim from the text itself?
A reader does not have to take Kim’s word for it. The next chapter offers a check. Genesis 2 tells of creation again, from a different vantage. The seven-day refrain disappears. The focus narrows to a garden, a man formed from the ground, and a woman made as his companion. The divine name shifts as well, from God to “the LORD God.”
Look at how Genesis 2 introduces itself: “These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4). Right after six numbered days, the text gathers the whole work of creation under a single phrase, “in the day.” The Bible’s own usage shows that the word for day can carry more than one sense depending on its setting.
That observation does not settle how long the days of Genesis 1 were. It does show that the first two chapters were composed with different purposes and in different forms. A reader who sees that Genesis 2 tells the story another way has already started reading by genre, which is exactly what Kim asks for.
What question were the first hearers asking?
Here Kim’s training shows. His doctoral study was in ancient Near Eastern languages and civilizations, and he reads Genesis against the creation accounts that circulated around Israel: the Babylonian Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, Egyptian cosmologies, and the stories of Baal from Israel’s own region. He grants that these share imagery with Genesis, such as a garden, gods speaking to humans, and waters as a picture of chaos. Kim treats those overlaps as the shared metaphors of a time and place. What strikes him is the difference.
His summary of the ancient concern is blunt: “the kinds of questions that they were concerned were more political than they were scientific.” People were not asking how cells divide or how DNA passes between generations. They were asking whether many gods were warring with each other, whether the universe was a safe place, and how a human being could survive in a world where offending one god might bring disaster from another.
Read Genesis 1 with those questions in mind and its details start to answer them. Consider the second verse: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2). Kim notes that water as chaos made sense to people for whom a small boat on the Mediterranean was always a risk. In Babylon’s story, the waters were a goddess, Tiamat, whom the god Marduk defeated and split apart to form the world. In Genesis, the deep is no rival. God’s Spirit hovers over it, and God’s word orders it. Kim reads the chapter’s treatment of the sea, the lights in the sky and the vegetation the same way: each detail is told to settle the fear that the world is a battleground of angry gods.
Kim states the contrast directly: “In that worldview, creation is a product of violence, violent conflict among the gods.” Of Genesis he says, “in the biblical worldview, there is no battle. There is a divine word, and that word is not an act of violence.” The repeated line “And God said” (Genesis 1:3 and following) answers a frightened question. The world came from the speech of one God who calls it good.
Why does the creation of humanity matter so much?
The sharpest contrast, for Kim, comes when humans appear. In Atrahasis, as he describes it, junior gods grew tired of serving senior gods and invented humans to take over the labor nobody wanted. Humanity was an afterthought, made for drudgery. Genesis reverses that picture. In Kim’s words, “humanity is the capstone of creation,” invited into God’s work as a partner.
The key verse reads: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). Kim explains why this line would have startled its first hearers. “In the ancient world, typically only the king was created in God’s image.” And everyone else? “Everyone else bore the image of the king at best.”
He connects this to royal propaganda. The Enuma Elish, by his account, ends by exalting Marduk as Babylon’s god, which in turn justified the Babylonian king’s rule over everything. Religious story became political claim. Genesis 1 also ends with a coronation of sorts, but Kim observes that no single king receives the crown: “it’s humanity itself that gets crowned.” Every person, male and female, bears the image and receives the charge to rule and care for the earth.
That reading takes on weight when you remember where Israel lived. Kim points out that the land was a corridor that empires crossed to reach each other, conquered again and again. For a small, contested people, a creation account that gave royal dignity to every human being was a concrete word to those pushed to the margins: they had equal standing before God. It also explains where the chapter spends its energy. A text built to answer that question would naturally say much about the dignity of humanity and little about the age of rocks.
Does calling it poetry make it untrue?
This is the objection with the most force. If Genesis 1 is crafted, patterned literature, is it just a story? Lisa Fields voiced this worry herself. When she says Genesis is not written like a history book, she is careful to add that she does not mean it is false.
The confusion comes from treating “poetic” as a polite word for “made up.” Scripture does not work that way. The Psalms describe God as a rock and a shepherd, and no one thinks those claims are false because they are figurative. Genesis 1 makes claims about reality: God created everything; nothing in creation is a rival god; the world is good; every human bears God’s image. Poetic form carries those claims.
Reading by genre also leaves some questions standing. Kim grants that people living in a world shaped by science still have to work out how science relates to Genesis. What genre removes is a false burden, the demand that the chapter answer questions about cells and DNA that it was never composed to address. Kim hopes readers unsettled by this will consider that “maybe God is saying more than what I ever imagined.”
What about readers who take the days literally?
The literal six-day reading has real arguments behind it. The refrain “evening and morning” sounds like ordinary days. The Sabbath command in Exodus grounds the weekly rest in creation itself: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day” (Exodus 20:11). Many faithful Christians read these texts together and conclude that the days are ordinary days and the earth is young. Others read the days as long ages. Others, like Kim, see the week as a literary pattern carrying a theological message.
Christians who love Scripture hold all of these views, and the text’s central claims stand whichever one a reader adopts. Every reading shares the point Genesis 1:1 states without qualification: God created. Kim’s genre reading does not prove the days were figurative. It shows that the main point of the chapter survives whatever one concludes about the clock. His posture toward those who differ is open. To those who read the whole account as metaphor, and to those committed to a six-day, young-earth reading, his response is the same: “let’s have that discussion.”
If the days are poetic, was Adam real?
This is the natural next fear. If the creation week is literary, does the garden become a parable too? Kim’s answer is that Scripture gives clues for reading itself. When Jesus tells a parable, the Gospels usually say so. When later Scripture interprets earlier Scripture, it shows how the earlier text was understood.
Asked directly, “did Adam and Eve exist? I think yes,” Kim says, and he holds that there was a real sin and a real fall. He points first to the genealogy that begins “This is the book of the generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1). Genealogies have their own conventions, he grants, but one of their purposes is to locate a story in flesh and blood. Adam is listed in the same way as the descendants who follow him.
His second clue is Romans 5, an epistle, which is read differently from poetry or parable. Paul builds an argument on two Adams, calling the first “the figure of him that was to come” (Romans 5:14). Kim reasons that “as real as the second Adam’s salvation is in forming a new humanity, it presumes the realness of the first Adam.” The weight of interpretation, in his judgment, leans toward a historical first couple.
He describes his position as a complex middle: real history, told in a particular way. “So yes, history was being told, but history was being told in a certain way.” Elsewhere he puts it simply: “It was told in the storytelling way of the ancient Near East.” Not every Christian interpreter draws the line between literary form and historical event in the same place, and that debate continues among people who share a high view of Scripture.
What does reading it this way give back?
Asked what Genesis is ultimately about, Kim answers: “that God is in control, he can be trusted, he loves you.” Those claims are what the chapter delivers, whatever one decides about the days. They also explain why questions about Genesis need not threaten faith. A God who spoke the world into being in order and goodness is not anxious about honest inquiry. Kim’s counsel for anyone wrestling with these questions is direct: “don’t take your questions into the dark closet of your room to hide, but bring them out to the light of God’s grace, but to the light of God’s community as well.”
The deepest result of reading Genesis 1 in its world is that its strangeness comes back into view. To people who lived under warring gods and god-kings, it announced one good Creator, a world without cosmic combat, and a crown on every human head. Arguments about the length of a day can make that announcement easy to miss. Read as it was first heard, the chapter still says something no rival story said.