"The sky and the land" (Gen 1:1)

Reading through the story of creation

We started our close reading of the creation story with a thorough discussion of just the first two words of the first verse of the Bible. In the next post, we managed just one word, but that word was “God.” Now we’re going to take a deep breath and see whether we have enough stamina to take on four words at once and finish the verse.

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

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

What is going to be created?

The sky and the land. These last four words are et ha-shamayim v’et ha-aretz אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ “The” is ha-, and et marks the object of the verb, telling us what was created. Believe it or not, I could actually write a couple of lengthy paragraphs about that word et – but for now I am going to stick with the bigger words.

We start with ha-shamayim, “the sky.”  This word is sometimes translated “the heavens” or simply “Heaven,” as identifying the location from which God comes down, to which God goes up, and in which God “dwells.”  But the most basic meaning of the word — and certainly when it is paired with eretz – is “sky.”  Note that later in Genesis 1 shamayim is the location that is the home of the birds.  God may dwell in heaven, but birds certainly don’t.

Now, what about “heaven” versus “heavens”?  Which is “correct”?  In fact, shamayim is a grammatically plural word.  That is why some English translations use the plural form “heavens.”  The Hebrew word actually sounds as if it were a “dual.”  That is, it has the special ending that Hebrew uses to describe a pair of things — eyes or ears, pants or tongs, even Egypt, which in ancient times was thought of as a dual kingdom, including Upper Egypt (below Aswan on the Nile) and Lower Egypt (from Aswan north to the Mediterranean).

In the case of shamayim, though, the dual-sounding ending seems to be accidental.  (As we’ll see in v. 2, the word for “water,” mayim, has the same shape.)  Even in legend, there are not two heavens but seven of them.  The Talmudic sage Resh Lakish identifies seven different words for “heaven” in the Bible and understands each of them as representing in some sense a different aspect of the realm in which God “dwells.”  Later thinkers understood the world to be surrounded by “spheres” in which the seven planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) moved, and they picked up on this plural notion of shamayim and understood it to be indicating those seven planetary spheres.

It is clear, however, that in this first verse of the Bible God is already in existence – somewhere – and so shamayim (which has not yet been created) cannot refer to the location where God dwells.  When it finally comes into existence, on Day Two, it seems to be what we now call “the sky,” and that is how I translate the word.

Let’s stop here for just a moment, as we’ll be doing throughout this remarkable story. It is a perfectly reasonable perspective to say, as Ps 115:3 does, “Our God is in heaven [eloheinu ba-shamayim אלֹהֵ֥ינוּ בַשָּׁמָ֑יִם] and does whatever He wants to.” Perhaps most people and even some of the biblical authors did believe that shamayim was a location where God could indeed be found, if only (like the tower-builders of Genesis 11) we could get there. As Robert Browning wrote in Pippa Passes, “God's in his heaven—All's right with the world!” But the Bible starts by telling us that shamayim is a location created by God.

I’m not saying God could not have moved in and then be living there; God (if you’ll excuse the expression) is the original 800-pound gorilla, and can live wherever he wants. At the end of Exodus 40, he will move into a home down here on earth. But remember the tradition we saw in part 1, that the ב that begins the Bible is meant to keep us from probing the nature of things before creation. The conception the Bible starts with is that God is what we might call today “beyond space and time.” It is one of the many mysteries that this text seems to have deliberately provided us with.‏

With the end of v. 1, though, we come down to the earth: ha-aretz.  (The dictionary form of the word is eretz, and that is how I will refer to it; aretz is what is known as a “pausal” form of the word, because éretz, the standard form, is really a kind of contraction. Those who want to learn more about this kind of noun can watch Lecture 12 of my Biblical Hebrew course.)   

This word eretz can refer

• to “earth” as opposed to sky;

• to “land” as opposed to “sea,” the distinction that will be made on Day Three, when the eretz is created;

• to a particular land, that is, what we today would call a country; or simply

• to “the ground.” 

In our verse, paired with shamayim, it is clearly using the first meaning.  And that brings us to the end of Gen 1:1, the first verse of the Bible.

So far in our story, don’t forget, nothing has actually happened. As we saw in part 1 of our discussion, the story has been introduced with the promise to tell us what did happen “when God began to create the sky and the earth.” If you don’t believe me, peek ahead and realize that the sky will be created on the second of the six days of creation, and the earth on the third day. 

Exactly how they are created is somewhat different in each case, and how they are presented to us is different as well.  As we’ll see in v. 4, a major component of creation as described in Genesis 1, though not the only one, is separation and distinction, and the creation of heaven and earth involves separating whatever it is we see when the curtain goes up on our story into these two parts: shamayim and eretz.

What was there to separate, so that creation could get started?  That is what v. 2 of our story intends to tell us.