In the beginning, people tell me, God created the heavens and the earth. So John was wrong: In the beginning was God, not the Word, unless we take him to mean that God didn’t exist until after language did, which would be ridiculous, because God created the heavens and the earth upon which language would one day be invented.

But because language (and particularly writing) must have come after creation (according to those two links, roughly 500 years after), we have quite a conundrum:

In the at least 500 years between the divine creation of the earth and the origin of writing, people could have forgotten a bunch of shit about how the earth got made. (Proof: What did you eat for lunch last Tuesday?)

And so we have two options: Either we assume that people did, indeed, forget bunches of shit, and that they didn’t think they would, because the creation of Earth is real important, so the creation story in Genesis is simply inaccurate; or people knew they would forget shit, so they used mnemonics to ensure that at least the important parts of the story would be preserved, even if the details got a wee bit muddled.

The first option isn’t useful at all, and in any case Genesis exudes a sense of intentionality which would be incredibly unlikely to result from 500 years of simple forgetfulness. And so let’s explore the second option: What kind of mnemonic would they use? To what could they reasonably relate creation?

After some thought, the best I’ve got is in the words: Universal creation has two obvious possible meanings: The creation of the universe, or a creation in which all things participate. And so the second meaning is most likely to be picked to serve as a mnemonic to the first and vice versa: Genesis’ first few chapters lay out the ancient Jews’ concept of child development, and it’s not too far from ours.

It’s a bit far from orthodox, but think about it: As a kid pops out its mom, the first thing it can see is light. But it doesn’t just take in light. It creates it, otherwise we would talk of blindness as a characteristic of the environment rather than of people. The first thing said by the brain of the kid, then, might be, “Let there be light.”

Now that the child has light and can, little by little, differentiate the light to shapes, it begins to categorize the things it sees: “Here is a room,” it tells itself, “a tree, a beetle, the parent whose genital “breath of life” allowed formerly dead particles to pump my blood.”

It categorizes these, at first, in an unwritable pre-cultural language, only a set of inborn indicators: Here is a set of barriers in which I lay and breathe, and bright lights shining from above, and vitally warm things under me, with no quotation marks, rather than “Here is a hospital room, and I’m laying in my mother’s arms.”

But first, to categorize these, the child must have some presentiment of a place in which all these exist. And so first it must create a space, undifferentiated, then little by little learn the boundary between the “firmament” and the earth with its waters, then apply to those spaces the things that live in each.

So, as God supposedly does in 1 Genesis (see the first link), the kid divides the firmament from the waters, gathers the waters into their places, and then creates the plants, animals, and people that inhabit its new earth.

Now that the kid has developed a system of categorization, it quickly splits the living things on the earth into those that communicate with it and those who don’t, and it feels the impulse to learn their system of communication. Otherwise how’s it gonna insert itself into its world?

We say that it learns the names of “all cattle, the birds of the air and every beast of the field,” but we’re off the mark: It creates those names itself, as, after hearing them, it must decide for itself what the names mean, and the set of things that it associates with each word (in our usual sense of “word,” as opposed to “the Word,” which is the pre-cultural internal language we talked about earlier) is not the same as the set of things that its parents associate with the words.

Their words have different meanings; they are different words. The child has built its own proprietary language, and it further subdivides and defines the world.

It refines that language as it grows and meets new things that require new words and new meanings for the old words, and all the while the world is shiny and new; barring some tragedy—abuse or negligence—it lives in paradise, its morals taught by instinct and by its guardians, to whom, in their capacity as a moral force, Genesis refers collectively as “the Lord God.”

But slowly, as it interacts with more and more people and gets acquainted with conflict, the kid—now nearing adolescence—becomes self-aware. It gains the ability to question the morals set out for it and to guide itself not by instinct but by critical thought, and at around the same time it begins to develop adult physical characteristics, sexual maturity and the ability to work.

By its self-awareness it has developed explicit knowledge, as opposed to the implicit impulses that guided it in paradise, as it can now converse with itself. This new knowledge grants it autonomy: It can observe itself and decide whether it wants to be what it is or not.

That is, the kid has developed ethics, or “the knowledge of good and evil,” and has separated itself from the Lord its God, the combination of external forces and intuitions that guided its choices in the now-lost Eden.

It has now become “like God, knowing good and evil” and has lost its childhood ignorance: Adolescence is the totality of the fall: The development of self-aware, consciously malleable morality, along with awareness of the fact that it “shall surely die”, sexual development (so as to know that there is some significance to being caught in a garden naked), and the abilities to make more babies and to do meaningful manual labor.

By self-awareness and maturity the child has left Eden, but with consolation: It is now itself a god. It can realize itself as the creator of its internal self and knows its new potential to breathe the breath of life into new creators.

Of course, this has all been a thought experiment: The Bible is, after all, literally true in every case, and people could remember way more things back in 4000 B.C. when they lived to be 900 (fuck a lunar calendar) and could talk to snakes, so Genesis is perfectly accurate.

But ain’t it way more interesting if it’s a view into how the ancient Jews thought about growing up? And isn’t it better to be interesting than to be accurate?