THE LOST WORLD OF GENESIS ONE
By John H. Walton
IVP. 192 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978 0 830 837 045
Every once in a while a book is written that forces you to reassess your understanding of a key passage of Scripture. One must then consider whether a shifting of understanding is justified in the light of what is being proposed and how it harmonises with the rest of Scripture.
The Lost World of Genesis One by John H. Walton, Professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College, is such a book for me. Based on comparative analysis of Genesis 1, with other ancient Near East cosmologies and writings, Walton suggests that the people of that time did not think of origins in terms of what the material origin was, but looked for answers in terms of how things function and what their purpose was within an ordered system. Neither did they have the concept of a natural world to be contrasted with a supernatural realm.
