I remember hearing Ethan Dor-Shav give a talk in Jerusalem almost fifteen years ago. It was one of those wonderfully eclectic conferences, hosted by the Herzl Institute, on the Bible and philosophy, gathering a far-flung flock of scholars who wrestled to articulate various philosophies native to the intellectual world of the Hebrew Bible. Ethan Dor-Shav presented a paper examining Scripture’s analogical and metaphysical scheme of the soul. He led with his conclusion: the soul was fire. We got a taste of that paper in his provocative essay on Genesis 1–11.

My initial reaction, as I recall, was something between “this seems crazy” and wondering if the conference itself had lost its way. But as Ethan continued, my reaction changed. He was highlighting chains of word play, repeating references, and working the conceptual angles on what the biblical authors might have assumed about what makes a human a human being. We rode his enchanted rollercoaster, and I was dizzied with new questions about my own methods and thinking. It still seemed a bit too peculiar, but I couldn’t deny that it intrigued me, along with most everyone in the room. It was a view as exciting as it was odd—but certainly not to be discounted.

I find myself in a similar position with Dor-Shav’s essay on Genesis 1–11 as an allegorical account of planetary, terrestrial, and biological evolution. I cannot cover the breadth of my swarming questions that follow every move he makes. But I would like to highlight what I see as questionable aspects of his methodology while recognizing the explanatory power of many of his insights.

Dor-Shav warns us that his proposal will force us to give up our darling views of creation—the Christians their primal sin, the academics their source theories, the faithful their pet readings of Eden as utopia, and so on. My objections are not over losing any of those, and aren’t bound to any particular theological position, whether Jewish or Christian. Instead I want to argue on behalf of two constituencies here that might be sidelined by his approach: ancient Hebrew hearers of Scripture and the biblical authors, whoever they may have been.

First, to whom is Genesis 1–11 speaking? At a minimum, this collection of stories was heard by ancient Hebrews living in the land of Israel and Judah. They exhibit the hallmarks of being crafted to be heard and understood by agrarian subsistence farmers according to the standard logic of literature. The creation, the flood, and the eastward expansion of Noah’s descendants come packaged in infamously tight-lipped and economical genealogies, narratives, poetry, and menorah-like parallel repetitions (a device sometimes called chiasmus). These exhibit coherent literary structures mindfully crafted in order focus the hearer’s thinking.

What am I talking about? When crafting a story, the teller poses a conflict and then moves toward its resolution, and logically so. If the conflict to my story is “John won the lottery last night,” the resolution to that story must logically resolve some tension created by John’s windfall of riches. The resolution cannot be “and he was struck dead by a falling piece of space junk.”

Though we can tell the same story dozens of ways to myriad effects, the conflict-resolution structure of storytelling focuses all those possibilities down to a handful. It does not mean that stories aim at one thing alone. It does mean that the literary structure of narrative imposes constraints and allows us to exclude many other things we might want the story to be about due to the special interests we bring as readers and listeners.

When we see formal narrative frames in the story of man coming to discover his proper ally (woman) in Genesis 2, we understand that the author structured a conflict in logical tension with the resolution to create a story of discovery. The man’s discovery of his mate resolves the conflict, whereas man’s mastery over animals does not. Human authority over animals might feature in the story, as does the detail that animals, like man, are created from the ground and have the breath of life. But the author structures the story’s focus on neither of those.

Munchkin Land was laced with candy and showtunes in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz. As a child, it distracted me greatly, and I was very curious about this very appealing locale, and sometimes frustrated that the movie didn’t include more information about it. But these things were absent because Munchkin Land was not what the story was about. Although one could interpret that film as an allegory about the 1896 presidential election—as some indeed have—the narrative and poetic structures of the film would still drive how the allegory worked. That is, it remains a story about Dorothy, and not about munchkins.

Literary structures indicate deeper conceptual girding, and I argue that failure to heed those structures at some point in one’s reading of Scripture amounts to failing to take seriously the craft of literary creation of which Scripture is a product. (Robert Alter has been saying this for decades, but I think he’s correct in ways that he might not agree with.) In saying this, I am aware that some dominating Jewish and Christian commentary has investigated biblical literature over the millennia without attention to these structures. Sometimes, we see a playful disregard for the crafting of literary structure, attempting to see what else the texts might be saying.

I am not saying that we shouldn’t work all these angles. I see Dor-Shav’s essay as an example in line with much of that commentary, attempting to see what else these texts might say. But working the angles without regard to the internal structures of story or poetry might be akin to trying to do home repairs with a sledgehammer in a darkened basement. The house could collapse, and we wouldn’t know which beam we rattled to bring it down. Even if we believe that Genesis 1–11 is best understood as allegory, the literary structures still determine the focus and force of the allegory. Hence, I am both cautious and sympathetic about trying these examinations out to see if they fit. Mostly, this type of re-framing brings new lights that spot some oddities of the Genesis 1–11 and offers new lenses for viewing. It’s not to be discounted.

And this brings me back to the question that I couldn’t let go of as I read this essay: “To whom is Genesis speaking?” When Dor-Shav claims interpretations such as, “Thus Day Five describes the three branches of marine life . . . ,” I ask, “describes to whom?” Dor-Shav’s answer would seem to be: “to us today.” I cannot get around this approach being a non-naïve form of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” By this I mean privileging the present understanding so acutely that it appears to eclipse the possibility that anyone prior to the 1980s could have ever understood Genesis 1–11 properly.

Dor-Shav’s reading does not appear to allow for a rational Hebrew view of the universe scaled for Iron Age understandings that still adequately grasps something true about the structure and biography of the cosmos. He seems to suggest that allegory offers the best way to understand this text, and the allegory requires that we have the requisite modern scientific consensus—a floating consensus that will, as Dor-Shav acknowledges in the opening paragraphs, inevitably develop and shift in the coming decades and centuries, as historians of science constantly warn us.

This means that Dor-Shav’s attempt to allegorize these texts anew is unlikely to be able to evolve with revisions and re-envisionings of current evolutionary models. As evolutionary biologists themselves acknowledge, some of their current postulates are susceptible to being significantly revised in light of singular discoveries. (Consider, for instance, how significantly our speculations about Neanderthal migration had to change due to finding one fossilized Neanderthal family and sequencing its members’ genomes.) Most of Dor-Shav’s own postulates are general enough that they are probably not in any serious danger, but given that the discovery of plate tectonics, DNA, and the jet stream all happened within my parents’ lifetimes, some tentativeness about the fragility of his arrangement seems appropriate here.

In other words, the recent scientific views that Dor-Shav’s allegory partners with Genesis 1–11 may not be as stable of a match as we would like. And this has been a problem that has plagued similar attempts in evolutionary-creationist treatments among Christians.

Hanging their hat on the then-current conclusions of genetic science, the Christian scholars Scot McKnight and Dennis Venema rejected literal readings that required one man and one woman to be the genetic fore-parents of all humanity. Their rejection was based on a prior view that the human population hit a population bottleneck and which never allowed for a human population of fewer than ten thousand. The then-current genetic sciences ruled out the possibility of “Adam and Eve” being the sole source of all humans. Therefore, McKnight and Venema concluded, we must read that story mythologically or allegorically. This same position was taken by many in the evolutionary-creationist camp, and the largest organization of scientists and theologians, BioLogos.

It was not until the computational biologist Joshua Swamidass aggressively challenged that assumption based on the latest genetic models in the field that BioLogos eventually retracted the necessity of a genetic bottleneck from its evolutionary position statements. Swamidass argued that two humans created de novo in Eden could have intermingled with a population descended from other early hominids and thus become the genealogical ancestors of every human being alive by the 1st century BCE. According to the current models in computational genetics, it would only require that “Adam and Eve” left Eden by 6000 BCE.

I offer this merely as a cautionary tale of wedding specific positions within the evolutionary sciences to a specific allegorical reading. Dor-Shav may have avoided this by keeping his partnerships general, but the scientists would know better than I.

Dor-Shav is direct about it: Gensis 1–11 is allegory and everything else after is history. I’ve frequently heard this claim among Christian scholars attempting to reconcile Genesis with evolution. Unlike Dor-Shav, who carefully engages those chapters of Genesis, some Christian scholars categorize those texts as allegory, functional mythology, or some other fiction in order to replace them completely with the evolutionary creation story. Abraham becomes the token starting point of Hebrew history.

I appreciate that Dor-Shav does not make this move. In fact, he goes in the other direction. Instead of minimizing the text’s ability to speak to findings in the evolutionary sciences, he maximizes it, seeing the text as completely capable of addressing evolution and cosmology. For me, his interpretation errs on the side of being too speculative and not regarding those literary structures that I keep droning on about. But I appreciate that he means what he says: that his is an attempt to “detect the philosophical understanding [the biblical texts] convey.” How I wish there were more who shared this approach!

I would indeed prod us to follow in Dor-Shav’s footsteps and make greater effort to detect those philosophical understandings in Scripture, and I have argued that heeding the literary structures of Genesis 1–11 yields remarkably robust and unique Hebraic thinking about what Charles Darwin would describe as natural selection.

Briefly, if one asks, “who in antiquity is actively thinking about the relationship between food scarcity, on the one hand, and violence, fittedness to environment, and sexual propagation on the other?” then Genesis 1–11 emerges as the singular candidate. Only in the Hebrew Bible do narrative tensions, genealogies, and structured repetition return our attention to the relations among cursed soil that begets food scarcity (Genesis 3:17–19; 4:10–14; 5:29; 8:21), violence that universalizes from this scarcity (6:5–12), and the need for propagating particular lines of families over others (4:25–26). It’s likely no accident that the “tree of life” appears prominently positioned in Darwin’s understanding of natural selection. I make a non-allegorical argument for biblical thinking on natural selection in my book What Hath Darwin to Do with Scripture? Comparing the Conceptual Worlds of the Bible and Evolution. In fact, historians of science have made the case that Darwin’s Cambridge biblical education for Christian priesthood may have influenced how he formulated his tenets of natural selection.

This to say, if we want to detect the biblical authors’ philosophical understandings of evolution, we can begin with Genesis’s historically unique attention to the pressures of natural selection, and the stories they tell, to explain how they think natural selection works. No allegories needed (yet), just attention to the logic of the literary structures they crafted. That approach will not resolve every peculiarity of Genesis 1–11, nor will the ancient Hebrew views on natural selection fit so cleanly with the shifting views in the evolutionary sciences. But I believe this apples-to-apples approach offers us an equally exciting opportunity to explore this fertile soil for cultivating new interpretations of the creation texts. It doesn’t require that we shunt aside the authors who consciously structured these texts or the ancient hearers who could have understood something about natural selection by listening to them.

I must admit that I don’t know how to reconcile allegorical approaches like Dor-Shav’s with an approach that gives credence to the intentional and deep literary structures—structures that would seemingly resist the moves he’s making. I’m grateful for his mind and his approach. I’m also grateful for the creative conceptual translations of Genesis he’s offered, which have broken me out of some well-worn translational ruts. I can only hope to read more analyses in this mold, and hope that someone will come along, informed by Dor-Shav, and attempt just such a reconciliation.