Jenna Burns is a freshman Communication Sciences and Disorders and Spanish student with a minor in Religious Studies. When she’s not researching multilingual speech therapy as an Honors College Fellow, she’s practicing Brazilian Jiu-jitsu down the road from campus or diving into her faith’s foundational text in Dean Coon’s “Bible” Retro Reading course. In this post, Jenna is exploring a particular visual lens to use when reading the first few books of the Bible.
A medieval miniature of the celestial bodies. The caption in Hebrew reads ‘These are a sun and a moon and stars within this wheel.‘ British Library MS Additional 11639 f. 517
Some time ago, I got into a heated argument with my ex about circles. We started some well-intentioned thought-game about how we’d build a kingdom, and I insisted on a circular treehouse kingdom, so everyone was equidistant from the central power vertex. My ex-boyfriend said all he’d need to do to destroy my pacifistic rainforest Eden was “nuke it.”
I did not take his dismissal of my sacred geometry lightly.
The argument wasn’t as bad as I make it sound– we moved on, and the spherical world kept turning. But it made me rethink the lenses through which I see the world; I realized I see everything in circles. In fact, to me, God is a circle, a big symbol of wholeness that encompasses my reality.
So, I propose a lens to read the Pentateuch that I have yet to hear from others: the Pentateuch mirrors Creator, as it moves in circles, not a straight timeline. Specifically, I find it most helpful to see it as tree rings, discrete and historically marked but encompassing one another.
First, Genesis follows a cycle of creation, proliferation, and destruction. We begin in the Garden of Eden, an enclosed ring of paradise, where all creation begins to proliferate (notably, in each “sphere” of the earth, sky, and sea). The Fall of Man occurs in Genesis 3, and that is our first taste of destruction. The cycle begins: the creation of Cain and Abel, the proliferation of Man, the destruction of the first murder; the creation of Seth and Enosh, the proliferation of Genesis 5’s lineage, and then the destruction of the flood narrative; the creation of the Noahic Covenant, the proliferation of Noah’s sons and Babel, and the destruction of the Tower of Babel. The cycle goes on and on.
These cycles become our tree rings. As Creation expands upon the earth, the tree grows bigger, and in Genesis’s beautiful composite authorship the discrete rings form. It reveals both the text and the nature of the narrative itself; we can look at these rings and read the timeline through them, but they all follow the same circular motion as they build upon one another.
There are reasons to believe the circular nature is intentional, scattered throughout the following books of Moses and throughout ancient Jewish history, from the beginning to the Hellenistic Era. In Exodus and Leviticus, Jewish life forms in circles. The encampments described in Exodus 13 would have been set up in a circular shape. In the 1st century BCE, a miracle-working scholar known as Honi the Circle-maker summoned rain by praying inside a circle. Later, Jewish mysticism leaned on circular forms. Priests used ritual bowls inscribed with circular texts as a way to capture impurity or malevolent spirits. The circle becomes a delineating visage of wholeness that encloses the sacred world within its boundaries. Even angels, according to Ezekiel, are shaped in rings. To quote Ezekiel 1:15-21, “As I looked at the living creatures 15… Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel 16… because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels 21.”
Needless to say, circles are important. Circling back to the central proposition of the Pentateuch, we may wonder why this circular format was chosen. I propose that circles are the Imago Dei of Genesis.
Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Circles mimic the spheres of Creation and Creator– and in the beautiful art form of the earliest Jewish narratives, an intimate mirror of God takes shape in the rings of the Edenic tree. Circles are wholeness, creation, Imago Dei, and the visual pupil through which we can read the most central ancient texts of our faith, all within a sacred geometry.
The Bible Retro Reading course centers on this magisterial — yet frequently misunderstood — corpus of sacred scripture. In this seminar, led by Honors College Dean Lynda Coon, students will grapple with books of the Bible, selections from Genesis to Revelation. The goals of the Bible seminar are twofold: to enhance critical reading skills and to augment the understanding of scripture through a deep dive into its complex historical layers.