Creation – Day One (Take 2)

Reading through the story of creation

We’ve now worked very carefully through the first paragraph of Version 1 of the creation story, bringing Day One of creation to an end. As I wrote earlier, one of the things that prompted me to start this series was my puzzlement at the quite different ways creation happens on the different days. So let’s take a careful look at what we’ve seen so far on Day One. Here’s a quick summary:

• v. 1 is more or less the title of this entire section, Gen 1:1-2:3

• v. 2 shows us what the world was like as the curtain rises on our story

• v. 3 describes the first two actions of the story: God “says” (that is, decides) and light “is” (that is, comes into being)

• v. 4 describes two more actions: God “sees” (that is, evaluates) and “separates” (that is, distinguishes)

• v. 5 describes one more action: God “calls” (that is, names) the two (!!!) things there now are in the universe

• v. 6 describes the next two things that occurred: first an evening “was” (came into being, the same terminology used for the light) and then a morning “was”

• one more isolated phrase announces: Day One

If you have joined us more recently, please do go back to the earlier posts to see the discussion that this brief survey is based on, including the reasons I’ve translated the text as I have. Here it is once more:

1 When God began to create the sky and the earth —

2 at the time the world was a tohu-bohu, with darkness over Deep and a God-wind hovering over the water — 

3 God thought, Let there be light, and there was light. 

4 God saw that the light was good, and God distinguished light from darkness. 

5 God named the light Day and the darkness Night.  There was an evening and there was a morning: Day One.

You will find the Hebrew text and my recording of it in this earlier post.

The overall perspective on Day One, as I’ve come to see it in this discussion, is as follows:

Something already exists when our story begins, but there is no obvious realm in which life as we know it can dwell. God decides to create that realm. “Light” — from a 21st-century perspective, energy — comes into being, but we are not told how. The apparent result is that, with the creation of light, time begins.

So! Can the creation described here be a creatio ex nihilo, “creation out of nothing,” as it is often called?

It might be! As our story begins, there is something rather than nothing, but we also realize that we are not reading the very beginning of the story. The darkness that we see when the curtain rises may have existed eternally, but the presence of Deep (tehom) suggests that something has already happened that we are not being told about. Creatio ex nihilo may have occurred already without our being told anything about it.

What about light? Was it created out of nothing? Light is not “made” (עשׂה) or “fashioned” (יצר), nor does anything “bring it forth” (הוציא), as happens with other things in the first chapters of Genesis. Nor is it “created” (ברא), with the famous verb that begins our story. It just somehow comes into being, and apparently as a result of God’s decision that it “should be” (יְהִ֣י). It does not appear to be produced from any kind of pre-existing material, but since the process occurs inside a kind of black box, it may have been.

An even shorter summary of Day One, then, is this: Time begins and therefore creation can occur.

Next time, we’ll do something I have sneakily evaded until now, and discuss the verb ברא (bara) ‘create’.