“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
I used that line because it captures something I have spent years trying to understand in history, scripture, nations, and the human soul. We are trained to think of cracks as failures: contradictions, fractures, hypocrisies, interruptions in the smooth surface of the thing we are trying to preserve. But the older I get, and the deeper I go into Genesis and the larger biblical story, the more I suspect the cracks are not incidental.
They are revelatory.
That is one reason my conversation with Gary Rendsburg mattered so much to me. He gave me a more disciplined way to say something I have long sensed: the Bible’s so-called “problems” are not always defects to be explained away. Very often, they are part of the architecture.
Two creation stories. Different legal emphases. duplicate tellings. narrative “hiccups.” nineteenth-century scholarship often treated these things like embarrassments to be solved with source theories and literary scalpels. Gary does not deny the tensions. He names them plainly. But he refuses the modern demand that sacred truth must present itself in a perfectly flattened, rationalized, Aristotelian form.
Instead, he sees a text that holds together holistically, even where it does not behave according to modern expectations.
That resonated deeply with me because People of the Sign is, in part, an exploration of fracture and coherence. The fracture of memory. The fracture between what we say we believe and how we live. This also plays out at a global level, in the parable of the Sheep and Goats, where the returning Son of Man, in His Glory, judges the nations on their hypocrisy. And yet also the coherence underneath—covenant, sign, pattern, judgment, mercy, recurrence. The Bible, especially Genesis, does not give us a polished marble monument. It gives us a living structure with seams, layers, echoes, and tensions. Not less true for that reason. More alive.
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are the perfect place to begin.
They are not the same story told the same way. In the first, God speaks the cosmos into order: light, sky, seas, land, life. In the second, God stoops into dust, forms Adam with His own hands, and breathes life into him. One is majestic and cosmic. The other intimate and earthy. One gives us transcendence. The other gives us touch.
For years I have mined those differences not as contradictions to be feared, but as clues. Two angles of vision. Two modes of disclosure. Two ways of telling us who God is and what humanity is for. Gary helped sharpen that instinct: the cracks are not necessarily where the text fails. Sometimes they are where the architecture opens.
And what it opens onto, in the opening chapters of Genesis, is one of the most radical ideas in human history:
God is the God of time, not territory.
That is not a throwaway insight. It may be one of the most important theological revolutions in scripture.
In the ancient world, gods were tied to place and force. Sea gods. Storm gods. Fertility gods. Mountain gods. River gods. Sun gods. Moon gods. Sacred spaces. Sacred territories. Sacred precincts. Religion was geography with divine names attached.
Genesis breaks that frame.
As Gary pointed out, the text is so careful that it will not even use the common names for the sun and moon. Why? Because those names were already entangled with surrounding pagan deities. So the writer strips them down and demythologizes them: the greater light and the lesser light. Not gods. Lights. Appointed objects in a created order.
That is not merely literary elegance. It is theological warfare.
And then comes the seventh day.
The first thing in the Bible explicitly called holy is not a temple, not a shrine, not a mountain, not a holy city. It is time. The Sabbath.
That matters immensely to me, because the themes of sign, covenant, history, and time run all through People of the Sign. The Sabbath is not just an ordinance. It is a declaration about reality itself. It says the world does not belong to appetite, production, conquest, or efficiency. It belongs to the One who made it, ordered it, and sanctified time within it.
The nations around Israel sanctified space. Israel sanctified time.
And that distinction changes everything.
A territorial god can be lost when territory is lost. A sacred mountain can be conquered. A temple can be razed. A city can fall. But a God who works in time and history can be remembered in exile, obeyed in dispersion, trusted through generations, and recognized in covenantal rhythm even when the people are scattered.
That is why Sabbath is so much more than rest. It is a sign. A mark in time. A recurring witness that history is not random and that human life is not reducible to labor, appetite, or empire. In that sense, Sabbath sits right at the center of what I have been trying to trace in the trilogy: how God teaches people through signs in time, not merely through doctrines in abstraction.
This also helps explain why such a small and politically marginal people produced literature of such enduring force.
Gary put the question pointedly: how did a relatively insignificant people, without Egypt’s monuments or Babylon’s architectural scale, produce the greatest literature of the ancient world?
His answer was simple and profound: Israel’s genius was not in architecture or empire. It was in storytelling.
That too belongs in People of the Sign. Empires build stone. Covenant peoples preserve memory. Empires glorify themselves. Scripture exposes its own heroes. Egypt leaves pyramids. Israel leaves Jacob the deceiver, David the adulterer, Saul the evader, siblings at war, fathers failing sons, sons betraying fathers, nations rebelling, prophets warning, and God still speaking through the wreckage.
That is why the Bible still feels alive. It is relentlessly human.
No imperial propaganda would tell the truth the way the Bible does. It would not leave David exposed. It would not preserve Saul’s evasions. It would not show Jacob reaping what he sowed by being deceived in turn. It would not let the founding stories remain morally complicated. But scripture does. It tells the truth because truth is part of covenant.
And that brings us to another point from Gary’s interview that fits naturally into the trilogy’s larger concerns: the stories we inherit and the stories we sanctify.
His suggestion that Genesis may have taken shape in something like its national form under David and Solomon as a unifying narrative is fertile ground. Twelve tribes, varied origins, one kingdom—what do you need? A common story. Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. One line large enough to gather a people.
Gary’s Thanksgiving analogy was helpful here. Not every American is literally descended from the Mayflower passengers, but the story still functions as a shared inheritance. It helps bind a people together. In the same way, not every ancient Israelite needed to be genealogically “neat” in order for the ancestral narratives to function as covenantal identity.
That matters because one of the recurring questions in People of the Sign is when a story becomes a sign of covenant and when it becomes Babel. Stories can bind a people together in humility and truth, or they can bind them together in pride and illusion. The Tower of Babel is a false unity organized around self-exaltation. Genesis as covenantal history is trying to do the opposite: to gather a people under the sovereignty of the God who speaks, remembers, judges, and redeems in time.
One architecture is designed to reach heaven by human ambition. The other is designed to receive meaning through remembered covenant.
And still, because scripture is honest, even covenant people fail.
This is where Gary’s contrast between Saul and David becomes so important. Saul sins and evades. David sins and says, simply, “I have sinned.” That difference, Gary noted, is decisive. One hides inside power. The other breaks open in confession. One protects the self. The other lets the crack widen enough for mercy to enter.
Again, Cohen’s line comes back: there is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.
The Bible knows this. It begins in original goodness, descends quickly into fracture, violence, exile, rivalry, shame, and confusion, and yet never quite surrenders hope. That is why it still feels alive. It knows us better than we know ourselves. It knows how quickly human beings deform gift into grasping. But it also knows that brokenness is not abandonment.
From the rainbow after judgment to the Sabbath built into the structure of time; from Jacob’s reckoning to David’s repentance; from prophetic warning to eschatological hope—the text keeps insisting that humanity is fallen, yes, but not forsaken.
That, to me, is one of the deepest through-lines of People of the Sign. History is fractured, but not meaningless. Nations are hypocritical, but not beyond judgment. The human soul is cracked, but not beyond light. Covenant remains possible because God remains faithful in time.
That is why the opening chapters of Genesis still matter so much.
They are not primitive relics for modern people to patronize. They are theological interventions. They tell us what kind of world this is, what kind of creatures we are, why time matters, why signs matter, why fracture matters, and why the architecture of revelation includes precisely the places where the surface appears to break.
The cracks are part of the architecture.
And if Leonard Cohen was right—and I think on this point he was—then maybe that is also how the light still gets in. Thank you Gary Rendsburg, for dedicating your life to help us see the light that emerges through these cracks. If you’d like to learn more from Gary, check out his Great Courses on Genesis and the Dead Sea Scrolls, or his online mini-course, “The Bible and History” (free and available to the public at large) available through the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University (2022).
Join The online mini-course and the Great Courses series:
The online mini-course - Bible and History
The Great Courses - The Book of Genesis
The Great Courses- The Dead Sea Scrolls
Sneak Peek
Next week, that same search continues from two different directions: with Jason Heinrich on walking away from building our own kingdoms to seek God’s, and with David Truong on exile, survival, gratitude, and purpose forged through adversity. Different stories, same question: what signs in time are teaching us how to live?
