The Graveyard Spiral of Walton’s ‘New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis’

This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 48, number 03 (2025).

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Summary Critique

New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis:

Advances in the Origins Debate
John H. Walton, with Contributions by J. Harvey Walton
IVP Academic, 2025

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John Walton’s most recent book, New Explorations in the Lost World of Genesis: Advances in the Origins Debate (IVP Academic, 2025), is the latest in his Lost World series that focuses on the Old Testament, and, as its title indicates, this work centers on updating his earlier Lost World of Genesis One (LWG1) and Lost World of Adam and Eve (LWAE) books.¹ New Explorations differs from his typical format of presenting propositions and answering questions; each chapter here begins with a brief summary of his earlier positions before delving into his new thoughts and then answering questions. The text uses footnotes rather than endnotes, a stylistic improvement that helps one follow his important parenthetical remarks and citations.

It is worth noting that Walton is now an emeritus (retired) professor at Wheaton College, which gives him some freedom from institutional doctrinal standards. This freedom may influence the direction of his conclusions, many of which, to me, reflect a graveyard spiral² that I sadly observe often in contemporary evangelical scholarship. Walton’s conclusions in New Explorations definitely spiral in the theologically liberal/critical scholarly direction: “As mind-blowing on the one hand and perhaps disturbing on the other as this is for readers entrenched in traditional theology, it should only prompt us to dig deeper” (p. 183). Heeding his prompt, we will dig into Walton’s re-interpretations of Scripture to see whether we indeed must abandon some core tenets of traditional theology.

Revisiting Adam and Eve’s Role. On several points, Walton moves in what I think is the right direction: he revises his idiosyncratic idea that God is “assigning functional roles” to things in Genesis 1 to argue now that God is ordering his creation (72). While I do not think that this helps him in avoiding any form of material creation, it does better fit the narrative’s sense of initial disorder or non-order becoming increasingly structured, which many scholars accept. Walton also retracts his proposal that Adam and Eve functioned as priests in the Garden, which he formerly interpreted as a “Cosmic Temple.” This change recognizes the lack of textual support for a priestly role for Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 and minimizes ANE temple imagery, where humans functioned as slaves serving divine needs, in contrast to Genesis 2’s focus on humanity’s direct communion with God in the pre-Fall state. However, he continues to insist that Genesis 2:7 does not have the material origin of Adam in view, noting the lack of a preposition “from” or “of” in the verse, and proposing the translation: “The LORD God formed the (identity) of the (archetypal) human — dust of the earth” (156ff.). However, this reading goes against the standard view that a Hebrew verb of “making” used with two accusatives is giving one as the material and the other as the product.³ While one can get into the weeds over grammatical technicalities, Walton’s concern about the lack of a preposition in Genesis 2:7 is resolved easily by reading further, since the “from” prepositions appear in 3:19, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken” (ESV, emphasis added), and in 3:23, “therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken” (ESV, emphasis added). Strikingly, Walton chooses to ignore ancient Near Eastern (ANE) parallels to the biblical creation of man from clay, such as Enkidu’s formation in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the human creation narratives in Atrahasis and Enki and Ninmah, and Khmun fashioning man from clay in Egyptian mythology. Given his passion for drawing upon ANE parallels to illuminate our understanding of the Old Testament, his omission of data that does not fit his thesis — that the ancients had no interest in material origins — is glaring.

A Radical Reinterpretation of Genesis. However, the truly mind-blowing views in New Explorations come from J. Harvey Walton (John’s son, who is pursuing graduate studies at St. Andrews University and has an MA from Wheaton College Graduate School), which John fully embraces. These appear in the latter half of the book, where the Waltons indeed paint a very different picture of the Garden of Eden from what most Christians are familiar with:

• Rather than Adam and Eve being created in a pure state and enjoying direct communion with God, we are told that “Genesis does not begin with humanity in an ideal state of any sort, let alone a perfect state” (177).
• Adam and Eve being “naked and not ashamed” means “uncivilized,” “indecent, and shameless” (164). In other words, they were savages.
• Rather than narrating humans’ first rebellion, the key point the writer of Genesis 3 makes is that Adam and Eve “learn that they do not belong there [in the Garden]; order for humans is not to be found by dwelling in the divine realm” (146).
• Moreover, “The godlikeness Adam and Eve acquired (Gen 3:22) was not wrong for them to have; it was inadequate to achieve their desired outcome” (182).

Harvey Walton’s thesis is that early Genesis is a story of humans looking for social and political order (137) in all the wrong places, and not finding it in the divine realm (the Garden), in godlikeness, in agriculture, or in civilization, moving towards the covenant being introduced in Genesis 12 as the desired alternative (182). John himself candidly states that early Genesis is not historical: “I view Genesis 1–11 as offering vignettes to explore the human search for order, not as the story of human history” (52). Their new approach avoids the Fall, the need for Adam and Eve to be historical people (a significant change from LWAE, in which see pp. 101–103), and the idea that there was a very good initial creation state from which the world degenerated.⁴

Theological and Scientific Implications. As the book’s subtitle Advances in the Origins Debate indicates, the Waltons cash out their new understanding of early Genesis in scientific terms. However, their discussion here is very brief and disappointing because there isn’t much to say: there is now nothing in early Genesis that touches the domain of science; Christians may fully embrace the consensus evolutionary paradigm, as long as we allow God to designate human’s role in the world as the “image of God” (this is the only “act of special creation” that the Waltons refer to in the book) (158, 219).⁵

Is such a radical reinterpretation of Genesis 2–3 warranted? Have Christians been mistaken for thousands of years about a creation–fall–redemption–consummation biblical theme that is anchored in early Genesis? The Waltons’ argument is not coming entirely out of a vacuum: it is certainly true that being unclothed is seen negatively later in the Bible and in some ANE literature (they cite Enkidu in Gilgamesh, although Noah would suffice), and that people who live in cities have always regarded themselves as higher beings than “uncivilized” rural folk (compare our own American “fly over country” attitudes). But in Genesis, “naked and unashamed” is used in the context of a marriage relationship, where these physical and mental states are desirable, and in relationship with an all-seeing and all-knowing God, where most think they reflect purity and innocence.⁶

Critically, when the Waltons assert that humans are not comfortable in the divine realm, they ignore the pre-Fall context: Adam seems quite comfortable working with God in naming the animals, in receiving Eve from God as his wife, and indeed it appears that the couple normally communes and walks with God in the cool of the evenings in the Garden. Genesis 2–3 reads like God created the Garden as a home for mankind, not Himself,⁷ where all their needs would be met, where they were given the task of managing it (and possibly expanding it), and where He would commune with them in person (via theophany).

To strengthen their dismissal of a pre-Fall paradise, the Waltons assert that the idea of a past golden age is not found in ANE literature but occurs only in later Greek Platonic myths (177). I would be more cautious in assuming this idea is totally new to Greek times: ancient Sumerian literature has some memory of Dilmun, “the place where the sun rises,” which may be a fabled paradise.⁸ Harvey does note correctly that generally in ANE literature, humans are not comfortable around the divine, but this is because the ANE gods are annoyed with people and only tolerate them because they need human slaves for food and clothing. The biblical picture of God is the exact opposite: God has no need of anything from us, but desires a relationship with us, although our sin creates a barrier (Isaiah 6:5).⁹ Certainly, Adam and Eve are uncomfortable around God after they disobey Him, but there is no inkling of discomfort in the text before this. Thus, insisting on this foreign ANE “parallel” that humans are uncomfortable in the divine realm (Garden) directly contradicts the immediate context of God, Adam, and Eve’s initial relationship. Even after Adam and Eve disobey, the text does not say they are uncomfortable in the Garden itself, only when God is present there.

Unfortunately, in the book, the Waltons do not explore the eschatological implications of their thesis that humans are uncomfortable in the divine realm. Will we feel at home in heaven? What about the new heavens and new earth, where “the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them” (Revelation 21:3 NASB1995)? The Psalms refer to “dwelling in the house of the Lord” as a blessing (Psalms 23:6, 27:4, etc.). Moreover, the “walking with God” motif is carried on with Enoch in Genesis 5:24, Noah in Genesis 6:9, and is promised to Israel in Leviticus 26:11–12: “Moreover, I will make My dwelling among you, and My soul will not reject you, I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be My people” (NASB1995). Ignoring Adam and Eve’s close pre-Fall relationship with God and asserting that “The divine realm is not where human order can be found or the desirable state of human existence can be achieved” (137) seems incoherent both in early Genesis and in the broader biblical context.¹⁰ What may be true with other ANE gods is not true with the God of Israel — John knows this difference (see 10–11), but it appears not to temper his assimilation of conflicting ANE perspectives.

In Genesis 3, clearly God’s commune with people (walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening) was broken by something, but according to the Waltons, there never really was a “Fall” (179) (they inform us that this term never occurs in the Bible, although I note that “the Trinity” never does either).¹¹ We are left to conclude that people are naturally sinful (true enough today), and there never was a time when they were not so.

The “exegetical payoff” (143) of this no Fall interpretation is that Adam and Eve can conveniently disappear into the archetypal void where their historicity and individuality do not matter, thus relieving us of the burden of trying to explain their origins in any way that might differ from consensus science. If the apostle Paul or later writers of Scripture thought of Adam and Eve as historical people, which Walton accepted in LWAE (101–103), that now is of no consequence:

He [Paul] uses them anecdotally as types rather than etiologically. That is, his comments are based on a traditional story found in his people’s literature of the past (compare how we might talk about King Arthur), in that way reflecting on a literary Adam rather than commenting on the nature of all of us….Paul may well have considered Adam and Eve historical, but his opinion on that does not matter any more than his opinion about whether the earth is flat. (167)¹²

The Waltons’ are similarly dismissive of sola scriptura approaches (using Scripture to interpret Scripture, rather than preferring outside authorities like the Church Fathers [or supposed ANE parallels]) and any use of other Bible passages, such as the Book of Revelation, that bring Garden themes back in the future state, which might help us better understand the intent and meaning of the Genesis text. All that seems to matter to the Waltons is their reconstruction of a hypothetical, universal ANE mindset, specifically the human quest for order and civilization, which allows them to ignore even the immediate context of biblical passages and dismiss the insights of the inspired writers of other biblical texts.

In deconstructing the standard creation–fall–redemption–consummation narrative by asserting that Genesis 3 is not about sin or punishment (235) and arguing that later writers of Scripture are of no use in understanding earlier texts (239), what of the traditional Christian message is left? The Waltons propose that the failed human quest for social and political order that is told in Genesis 1–11 leads to the Genesis 12 covenant offer as an attractive alternative (189). Unfortunately, New Explorations does not cover their view of the significance of the Abrahamic covenant, but it is hard to see this contract as desirable in their model. It had no immediate social/political cultural impact, as it addressed only one person (Abraham) and his descendants, and is of no clear benefit to any others alive at the time. Moreover, God tells Abraham to leave civilized Mesopotamia and head off to a rural area, where he lived in tents. Yet in Abraham’s day, the human quest for social and political order (civilization) actually was doing very well (if we associate him with Ur of the Chaldees in southern Iraq during the Ur III period),¹³ so moving to the outback in Canaan doesn’t seem desirable or progressive.¹⁴

One of the major emphases of evangelical Christianity is that of a personal relationship with Christ and God. Adam and Eve in the Garden seem to enjoy that deep bond until they chose to attempt to be like God themselves, after which the relationship was broken. The rest of the story of the Bible is about God seeking and working to restore that broken relationship, first through the curse on the serpent (Genesis 3:15, although the Waltons deny this messianic interpretation), then through the promise to Abraham and his descendants, then ultimately through Christ’s sacrifice making us “children of God” (1 John 3:1). John Walton supports “Immanuel [God with us] theology” (235) in his conclusion, but he appears not to realize how discordant this sounds alongside “The divine realm is not where human order can be found or the desirable state of human existence can be achieved” (137).

While reading this book, as noted above, it felt like I was watching an airplane in a graveyard spiral, a deadly situation where the pilot is disoriented due to low visibility and cannot sense that they are turning at an ever-increasing rate, until they crash. Important data are ignored if they conflict with the desired result, and parallels are forced even in areas where Israelite culture clearly contrasts with that of her neighbors. What makes this a graveyard spiral rather than mere scholarly acrobatics is that the conclusions drawn in the Lost World series over time are increasingly in the skeptical, critical, theologically liberal direction — the way of spiritual death. No history in Genesis 1–11? No Adam? Whatever Paul thought doesn’t matter? I read such in liberal scholarship all the time, and it is disappointing to see an evangelical scholar draw these same conclusions as he winds up his career. I am reminded of the late Howard Van Till of Calvin College/University, who was an able spokesperson for theistic evolution but increasingly came to see God less involved in “coercing” nature. A few days after retiring from Calvin, he dropped his church membership and announced he was a free thinker.¹⁵ The pressure is certainly intense in the academic world today to cave in to consensus secular views about the Bible, naturalism, and whatever the latest political correctness is, but it grieves me to see colleagues failing in their final lap.

Sound Approaches to Genesis. There are better ways to wrestle with early Genesis. William Lane Craig gives an excellent theological defense for a historical Adam in chapter 7 of his In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration (Eerdmans, 2021), and in chapter 6, he gives great warnings about reading the text in overly wooden terms, before falling prey to that problem himself in dismissing “fantastic elements.”¹⁶ I commend the works of C. John Collins,¹⁷ for example, in defending Genesis’ historicity and connections with science, while recognizing its universal, literary, and motivational intent. While the early Israelites lived before the time of the hard sciences, God can still convey to them a sequence of events in a culturally universal, language-of-appearance style that everyone, including scientists today, can make sense of. Increasingly, even secular scientists are recognizing that the fine-tuning of the universe and the immense complexity of biological systems call for more than naturalistic answers. This is hardly the time to attempt to “advance the origins debate” by arguing that science has facts, but religion only values, and the Bible has nothing to contribute to the dialogue. —John A. Bloom

John A. Bloom, PhD, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Biola University and continues to teach in the MA Science and Religion program there, which he founded. He has published numerous articles on the relation of science and faith.

NOTES

1. John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (IVP Academic, 2009), and The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2–3 and the Human Origins Debate (IVP Academic, 2015). I comment on these works in John A. Bloom and C. John Collins, “Creation Accounts and Ancient Near Eastern Religions,” Christian Research Journal 35, no. 1 (2012), https://www.equip.org/articles/creation-accounts-ancient-near-eastern-religions/, and John A. Bloom, “The Lost World of John Walton,” Christian Research Journal 38, no. 3 (2015), https://www.equip.org/articles/the-lost-world-of-john-walton/.
2. A graveyard spiral is a deadly situation where a pilot becomes disoriented due to low visibility and begins flying in a circle of decreasing altitude, although they feel like they are flying in a straight line. The illusion can result in a fatal crash, perhaps most famously with the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife in 1999. Pilots must learn to trust their instruments, not “the seat of their pants,” in order to fly safely in clouds. See “Spatial Disorientation,” Federal Aviation Administration, accessed June 27, 2025, https://ift.tt/QIkJMEs, and the Moody Science video Signposts Aloft, John Smith, September 14, 2012, YouTube, video, 28:02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osRleVraVcE.
3. See Wilhelm Gesenius, Gesenius’s Hebrew Grammar, ed. and enl. Emil Kautzsch, trans. Arthur Ernest Cowley, 2nd English ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), §117–hh, “The Direct Subordination of the Noun to the Verb as Accusative of the Object. The Double Accusative,” available at Wikisource, https://ift.tt/ofG085Y, and Takamitsu Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew (substantially revised and updated translation of P. Joüon’s Grammaire de l’hébreu biblique), 2nd ed. (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2006), §125–v.
4. I agree with the Waltons that Eden need not be a place of absolute perfection without pain or death before the Fall. God’s pronouncements of “Good” and “Very Good” need not mean perfection. See Mark S. Whorton, Peril in Paradise: Theology, Science, and the Age of the Earth (IVP, 2005).
5. Because the Waltons see day six in Genesis 1 as referring to a population of humans made in God’s image, and Genesis 2 referring to a later couple, they believe that “image of God” applies to humanity as a whole, so no individual can claim to be the image of God (92).
6. In the traditional interpretation, there are not yet other people around, as Eve is called the “mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20), so modesty and privacy are not yet concerns.
7. Many interpret Genesis 2 as a “zoom in” on the creation of mankind on the sixth day but presented in logical/priority rather than chronological order: Adam, the focus of attention here, is created “first,” then a place for him to live (the Garden). The Hebrew verbs are stative, meaning they convey a state of affairs rather than a time sequence. The Waltons see the Garden as a divine “sacred space” for God, but many understand it as a protected habitat for humanity, an initial home for Adam/Eve.
8. See, for example, Enki and Ninhursag, Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, accessed June 24, 2025, https://ift.tt/moikqF5. However, it is clear that Samuel Noah Kramer was imaginatively seeking biblical parallels by over-reading early Genesis into this epic, and this epic actually has few, if any, connections to Genesis: Lines 11–28 are describing a “not yet” state, not an existing condition. But the Sumerian Noah (Ziusudra) is sent to live in Dilmun as an immortal, and Gilgamesh visits him there, so there seem to be hints that “the place where the sun rises” was special.
9. A further biblical insight is that ANE gods are demons and evil spirits who do not have the best interests of people in mind, so humans understandably fear and avoid them.
10. Harvey draws his conclusion by focusing on biblical passages that emphasize the holiness of God (elders of Israel at Mt. Sinai [Exodus 24:9–11], Isaiah in Isaiah 6:5), which certainly is an issue for sinful creatures, but he does not balance these with the Bible’s many nurturing-shepherd and loving-father passages.
11. See Jack Collins, “May We Say That Adam and Eve ‘Fell’? A Study of a Term and Its Metaphoric Function,” Presbyterion 46, no. 1 (2020): 53–74.
12. For the record, Greek philosophers had good arguments that the Earth was a sphere and had even made good estimates of the Earth’s diameter centuries before Paul. Being raised and educated in the Roman city of Tarsus, Paul would likely be familiar with this. Walton’s comment here is a Red Herring, as there are no geographical statements made by Paul or elsewhere in the Bible that imply the Hebrews thought the Earth was flat.
13. André Parrot, “Abraham,” Encyclopedia Britannica, June 6, 2025, https://ift.tt/PhK0plk.
14. The quest for order and stability is certainly a human trait, and civilization (living permanently in villages and cities, instead of being a wandering nomadic hunter-gatherer) is the preferrable ANE lifestyle. Cf. W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard, Atra-hasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood (Eisenbrauns, 1999), 18: “From Sumerian literature to Berossus it is everywhere assumed that the human race was at first and naturally barbarous. Civilization was a gift of the gods, and that is the way to understand kingship coming down from heaven [as in the Sumerian King List]. The gods gave it as an institution for regulating society.” In early Genesis, the advantage of cities is more dubious since the descendants of Cain first built them.
15. John G. West, “The Slippery Slope of Theistic Darwinism: The Sad Cases of Howard Van Till and Karl Giberson,” Science and Culture Today, February 4, 2025, https://ift.tt/0y81igG.
16. I also think that Craig places Adam in the too-distant past by advocating for a Homo heidelbergensis Adam. While this does solve the Neanderthal–Modern Human interbreeding question, it is too generous in assessing pre-H. sapiens abilities and culture. See Fazale “Fuz” Rana, “Who Was Adam? A Book Review of In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration by William Lane Craig (Eerdmans, 2021),” Christian Research Journal 41, no. 1 (2018), https://www.equip.org/articles/who-was-adam-a-book-review-of-in-quest-of-the-historical-adam-a-biblical-and-scientific-exploration-by-william-lane-craig-eerdmans-2021/.
17. It is hard to list a preference here, but noteworthy are Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?: Who They Were and Why You Should Care (Crossway, 2011), Reading Genesis Well: Navigating History, Poetry, Science, and Truth in Genesis 1–11 (Zondervan Academic, 2018), and Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (P&R Publishing, 2011).

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