GEN444 (Continued from [[GEN8]] GEN 1:1 create PASTIMP 134-5) … the relationship between creation and revelation may be viewed as correlative and complementary.   From this perspective, creation and revelation are separate but related modes through which God’s will is made known to the world.  Creation establishes a normative world that retains its own integrity even after the Torah is given.  Thus, God’s engagement with the world does not involve a simple progression from creation to revelation or from humanity as a whole to the chosen people, but rather operates differently in different spheres and among differnet peoples.  This point of view has been expressed most cogently by David Novak: “even though the covenant between God and Israel transcends nature, it still accepts nature as a limit (peras) and its own precondition. Jews are human beings who have been elected through the covenant, but they are still human beings within the natural order of things.  Nature, constituted as the covenant’s general background and horizon, is not overcome.”  [Novak, Jewish Social Ethics, 74-79]. It follows that Jews have a double relationship to God, first as human beings and second as members of the covenanted community.  Those who adopt this view of creation and revelation, then will necessarily be inclined to stress the similarities as well as the differences between Israel and the rest of humanity.  While this position is not developed explicitly within classical sources, it may be inferred from a number of texts.  At the conclusion of the creation story, God says, “Behold, the man has become like one of us knowing good and evil,” [this verse] suggesting that moral discernment of a certain sort is universal and derives, not from God’s revelation to Israel, but rather, in mythic terms, from the first human’s eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good an evil.  PASTIMP 135-6