Like a Hen Brooding Over Her Eggs (Day 1: Roots & Shoots)

A Note Before We Begin: Turning the Gem

As we start this journey, I want to share a concept that informs how I read the Bible. It’s an ancient Jewish teaching called Shivim Panim LaTorah—”The Torah has seventy faces.”  

The idea is that Scripture isn’t a flat, two-dimensional instruction manual with only one surface reading. It is a gem. To truly see it, you have to turn it over and over in your hands, letting the light hit it from different angles.

I am not offering these reflections as the “final word” on these stories. But I’m also not saying that “anything goes.” We test every angle by the light it reflects.

Some interpretations of these stories have historically been used to harm people or to paint God as a monster. Those are not facets; they are distortions. In this series, we are going to turn the gem specifically looking for the facets that catch the light of Shalom. We are looking for the angles that reveal a God of justice, mercy, and faithful love.

So today, let’s pick up the very first story—Creation—and tilt it just a few degrees to see if we can catch a glimmer we might have missed before.

Day 1: Like a Hen Brooding Over Her Eggs

• The Ornament: The Earth / The Globe
• The Scripture: Genesis 1:1-2:4

The Surface Reading

It is tempting to read Genesis 1 as a manufacturing log—a literal checklist of what got built when. When we bring our modern obsession with facts to an ancient text, it’s easy to get stuck on the mechanics. We count the days. We categorize the plants and animals. We look at the picture of the globe on our ornament and think, “God made the world. Nice.”

But by focusing on the mechanics of how the world was made, we often miss the radical claim of why it was made.

A Closer Look

Guides: Pete Enns / Margaret Nutting Ralph / Lisa Sharon Harper

To read this “literately” rather than just literally, we have to ask what the ancient authors were actually doing. They weren’t writing a science textbook; they were writing a protest poem against the dominant culture of their day.

To understand the power of this poem, we have to know what the neighbors were saying. The Babylonians had a creation story called the Enuma Elish, in which the world is created through a violent war between the god Marduk and the sea-monster Tiamat. In their story, the earth is fashioned out of a bloody corpse, and violence is baked into the DNA of the universe.

Genesis 1 is a direct response to that worldview. The Hebrew word for “the deep” (Tehom) is linguistically related to the chaos-monster Tiamat. But as Lisa Sharon Harper reminds us, God’s ruwach (a feminine word for Spirit) doesn’t kill the chaos. Instead, She moves* over the waters, brooding like a hen over her eggs. She engages the darkness, yes, but Her strategy isn’t war; it is birth.

God is presented not as a warrior slaying a monster, but as a Mother bringing Order out of Chaos. The days aren’t timestamps; they are stanzas in a sacred hymn—each day a life-giving breath in the birth of creation.

While the neighbors said the world was born from blood and war, Israel said the world was built on a foundation of interconnectedness and wholeness (Shalom). The universe is not a crime scene; it is a Temple.

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*The Hebrew word used here for move is the same one used to describe a hen brooding over her eggs.

The Lens of Shalom

Guide: Lisa Sharon Harper

In this Temple, everything is meant to be connected.

Throughout the poem, God calls things “good” (tov). But Lisa Sharon Harper teaches us that for the Hebrew worldview, “good” doesn’t just refer to the goodness of the object itself; it also refers to the ties between things.

A tree is “good” not only because it is tall, but because it is connected to the soil and the water. If you sever the tree from the water, it ceases to be “good”—it dies. Creation is a web of interconnected relationships where everything relies on everything else to flourish.

But notice: God doesn’t call it “very good” (tov me’od) until after humanity is created. Why?

It’s not because humans are the “kings” who get to do whatever we want. It’s because the web needed a caretaker. Harper reminds us that the command to “have dominion” isn’t a license to exploit; it is a call to serve. We were created to be the gardeners who maintain the connections between the soil, the water, and the animals.

The world was “very good” because the circle of relationship was complete. The rest of the Jesse Tree is the story of how we broke that web, and how God is devoted to mending it.

The Question

When you look at your life right now—your relationship with God, with your neighbor, with the earth, and with yourself—where do you most experience Shalom (connection and wholeness), and where does it feel thin or broken?