In reading scripture, look less for settled answers (on which generations of readers have failed to agree in any case) than for guidance in exploring the questions of human existence and faith that are always with us. What you will then find is pointed reminders of important things we would rather ignore.

Genesis is a good place to begin because it embodies one of the most fundamental tensions in the whole of scripture—the tension between God as the God of all creation and God as the God of a particular human group. It’s foreshadowed in the two creation stories that begin the work.

In the first (1:1-2:4), God is remote and transcendent: creating by means of pure Word, towering over the creation even when expressing satisfaction with it, fashioning a complete world with all its elements in place and no real reason to expect anything more to happen. Since it is perfect, why should there ever be anything new under this sun?

In the second (2:5-25), we see instead a God who works up close—willing to get dirty in the mud, breathing God’s own breath into the mouth of a clay figure, lingering in Eden to associate with Adam and Eve as friend and companion. And this Eden contains the possibility of change and imperfection—of history, in other words—in the form a tree against which the humans are warned.

The two stories agree on much. In both, God is the one and only source of creative power. Like any ancient monarch, God has assistants in the task (“Let us make man in our image. . .”)—but no independent counterpart, no associate or opponent in the work, no equal. Again, in both, humanity is part of a larger creation—one species among many, albeit with a distinctive role.

Still, the “feel” of these stories is quite different. The first story is more abstract. The relation between God and humanity is described analogically as “image and likeness.” The second is more concrete, treating the first humans as something God has actually handled, breathed on, and befriended. The one is distant, the other intimate. The one abstract and comprehensive, the other concrete and specific.

It isn’t easy to combine the two stories into one. And scholars have long held that they were originally independent stories brought together here by a process of collecting and editing. The editors of Genesis can hardly have failed to notice the difference between them, but they chose to leave it in place rather than harmonize them.

We will find this tension between universal and particular shaping the rest of Genesis—indeed the whole of the scriptures. God is universal, firmly related to the world as a whole and to humanity as whole. And yet, by the end of Genesis, the focus has narrowed first to the offspring of Abraham, then still further to the family of Jacob. Genesis 49, the “Blessing of Jacob,” focuses on the future of Jacob’s twelve sons, eponymous ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. Chapter 50, narrating the burial of Jacob and the death of Joseph, focuses on Canaan as Israel’s true home (largely ignoring the reality that it is already occupied by other people).

Does this narrowing focus mean that the Creator is no longer interested in the other offspring of Adam and Eve? People have often taken such an impression away from Genesis. To do that, we have to set aside the creation stories at the beginning, but we’ve found that easy enough—exactly the sort of failure that makes a new kind of reading necessary.

This kind of failure is hard to avoid. It haunts human existence. Because we are finite beings, we tend to define humanity in terms of the people we know, the people who are like us, our family, our clan, our religious community, our nation. Humanity as a broad category has been only faintly intelligible to us since the time when our first ancestors multiplied and spread to the point that they formed distinct groups, little if at all known to one another. Each group saw itself as the only true humans.

In the same way, people persistently think of God in relation to their particular group. The attention of God in Genesis moves from humanity as such to the descendants of Jacob. Christians, reading in the confidence of our own relationship with God, then substitute ourselves as the privileged group and put even the Children of Jacob in the position of outsiders. And yet, what can it mean for any of us to think of ourselves as human beings unless we can think of other human beings in the same terms?

This is not a tension we can escape. It is built into our humanity. Because we are finite, the things that we see and touch, taste and smell, the things that shape our memories, are more real to us than things we can recognize only through abstract exercises of the mind. This is why the love of nation or tribe so often trumps the love of humanity when push comes to shove. Our concrete, finite, localized existence creates human cultures rich in invention and diversity, but it also makes war, oppression, and violence against “outsiders” easy for us.

If God is equidistant from all, how can God become intimate with any? if God is intimate with a few, how can God be equally the God of all? A God who is equidistant from all risks becoming irrelevant to daily life. Like the High God of ancient religion, such a God may be revered but is too remote to be much worshipped or loved. On the other hand, we demand that the God who is intimate with us take our group’s side against all others. Abraham Lincoln captured the resulting absurdity in his Second Inaugural Address, speaking of the two sides in the hideously destructive Civil War: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”

The genius of Genesis lies partly in the way it hangs on to both sides of this tension. If we read it carefully and remember what we read, it will make it harder for us to let go of either side, however strong the temptation.

This is not, of course, the only important thing to be learned from Genesis, and I expect to return to the book later on. But, in my next post on this topic, I plan to move instead to Amos, who tries to hold the universality and the particularity of God together in a context that radically resisted.