Genesis 1:1-5

Recommended Resources:

What is the Relationship Between the Creation Accounts in Genesis 1 and 2? J. Richard Middleton article

Dropbox Link for Additional Resources (https://tinyurl.com/OBBCGenesis)

NOTE: When talking about the title of the psalms being considered the first verse in Hebrew, I misspoke in saying that this happens in Psalm 2. Psalm 2 does not have a title in most of our English Bibles.

Key Points:

1:1- Notice how the book begins— “In the beginning.” What kind of books begin that way? Stories, narratives, novels, etc. This should clue us into the fact that we’re stepping into a story. That is not to say that Genesis is untrue or untrustworthy, but that its genre, its method of storytelling is going to come across differently than that of a theology textbook. It’s not trying to answer all the questions modern Americans have. It’s telling a story within an ancient context.

That word beginning refers to the start of a particular story. It does not of itself mean the ultimate beginning of all things. The same word is used in Genesis 10:10, Job 8:6-7, Jeremiah 27:1, and several places to describe the start of a particular time period. This is important because it’s likely that verse 1 is not the start of Day 1 of Creation but rather a title, a prologue, describing what is about to happen in the next verses.

While that can be hard to wrap our minds around at first, it’s not unprecedented within the Bible. It’s common for stories in the Bible to begin with an introductory verse. In Hebrew, the titles to the psalms are usually considered verse one. Furthermore, Genesis 1-2 includes two separate creation accounts. Genesis 1:1-2:3 is one story, and Genesis 2:4-3:24 is another story from a slightly different point of view, a different perspective on the events of the Creation week. The second story has an introductory title verse (Genesis 2:4). So it would make sense for the first story to have an introductory title verse as well.

We tend to assume a lot when we read these chapters. The various stories and sermons we’ve heard over the years blend together into a hodgepodge, merging details that can obscure key points of the story. A number of details stand out in their absence when you read the narrative more slowly, like it’s your first time with the text. For example, in chapter 1, humanity is immediately created male and female and we’re not told how. In chapter 2, they are created separately and by different means. “Genesis 1 has water first, then land, followed by plants, animals, and finally humans (’adam, consisting in male and female together). By contrast, Genesis 2 begins with the existence of land, then comes water, followed by a human, then plants, animals, and finally a woman.”

You may hear some preachers say that the word for create (bara) means creation ex nihilio, out of nothing. While many conservative Christians do believe that God created the earth from nothing, the word itself does not have to mean “to make from nothing.” It often means to make something out of preexisting materials (cf Genesis 1:27 where God bara’s humanity even though Genesis 2 says He formed them from preexisting dirt in the man’s case and the man in the woman’s case, Psalm 51:10 where bara’ing a clean heart is set in parallel with renewing the spirit David already had, and Isaiah 54:16 where God is said to bara a person who was born by natural means). Etymologists believe the word comes from a root that means to cut or divide substances that were already there. That would make sense here because God is dividing things throughout this chapter—light and dark, water above and below, water and land, etc.

God’s purpose in Creation is to take disorder and make it orderly for the sake of another. He’s turning this world into a place where creatures can thrive. The theme of chaotic water and orderly land will show up often in the Biblical story. The heavens (skies) are God’s space, the earth (land) is humanity’s space, and the waters are nobody’s space. Humans don’t live there, and God is usually associated with the heavens even though He owns it all.

As an aside (and a bit of a spiritualization of the text), heaven (skies) in Hebrew is in the masculine gender while earth (land) is feminine. Even at the very start of Creation, God forms male and female and then unites them. Thus, history is a love story. God is trying to unite heaven and earth. He did that in the Garden, and today He does that through the lives of His children when they serve Him and others.

1:2- Remember that the earth isn’t the globe. It means land. Formless and void as the KJ puts it conjure up images of an amorphous blob floating in space, but the Hebrew words tohu vavohu mean something quite different. Think of tohu as “wilderness, desert, lifeless, chaotic, desolate state.” Think of vohu as “purposeless, meaningless, and without function.” The words rhyme in Hebrew and are arguably best translated into English as “wild and waste,” to carry over some of the poetry with alliteration. The land was wild and waste. That’s a very different picture than formless and void. Biblical authors even use tohu and vohu to describe people wandering without a purpose or not living up to their purpose.

We think of creation as being from nothing to something. Ancients would have thought of it as being from a disordered something to an ordered something. We think of waters as something, but the ancients would have viewed it as representative of nothing since no one can live there. Lots of water and no light are kind of like two ways of saying the same thing--there was no way life could flourish here until God stepped in. The waters and darkness are obstacles that God steps in and works strongly against in human history. Even Egypt and Babylon used the same descriptions for non-creation.

That leaves open where the chaos water and disorderly land came from. The Bible doesn’t tell us. It’s just there in our story. The first three days of creation deal with the enemies listed here (waste, darkness, water). See below:

Day 1: Light contains the darkness

Day 2: Waters separated and ordered

Day 3: Dry land and edible plants emerge from the waters

1:3- This is the first of 10 times God will speak in this narrative, beginning a minor theme of God speaking 10 times (Think 10 SignsPlagues and 10 SayingsCommandments).

Hebrew is a very compact language. It would literally read, “And God said, ‘Light, be!’ And light was.”

1:4- God keeps dividing to give different parts of creation specific roles, even down to Adam and Eve, but then the ultimate goal is for all the parts to come together again and work in unity and oneness together.

1:5- Part of God’s creative process is naming. Adam got to mirror that when he named the animals and the woman. We get to mirror that every time we name a new baby or even a pet or create something and give it a title.

Notice that God doesn’t call the light the sun. The sun isn’t created until Day 4. That opens up a debate of how days were measured if the sun didn’t yet exist. While it’s a good question, the Bible doesn’t address it. In the ancient world, the sun was not known to be the main source of light for us. Light and the sun were considered separate entities. So at this point, light as a functioning entity is created but not in the concentrated form of the stars as we understand it today.

Note as well the order of evening and morning. In the Jewish framework, a day begins at sundown. This is why Jewish holidays are often said to begin the night before what we’d consider the actual holiday. To them, each day begins at night. While that feels backwards to us, there’s something refreshing about starting your day with rest. We don’t have to take on that framework, but it’s not a bad reminder for us to prioritize rest as needed.