Genesis 1:9-26

Recommended Resources:

Sea Monsters in the Bible: Did God Fight a Literal Serpent at Creation? Article by Michael S. Heiser

Commentary:

1:9- When you read the Bible, try to read as if this is your first time ever approaching the text at hand. As much as possible, ignore everything you know about the passage and see what stands out. Reading the KJ, I noticed that “land” was oddly italicized. (The KJ translators often italicized words that were not in the original language but had to be added in to make the translation flow better, a necessary translation practice.) I’m not honestly sure why they thought they had to italicize “land.” The Hebrew word הַיַּבָּשָׁ֑ה means dry land. But it did lead me to realize that this is not the normal word for land from earlier in the chapter (the one usually translated earth, הָאָ֙רֶץ֙). It’s a word that only appears a few key times in stories that hyperlink back to the Creation narrative (i.e. Exodus 4:9, 14:29, Jonah 1:9, Isaiah 44:3).

The waters being gathered together below allows for the possibility of Pangea. It can’t really be proved one way or the other Biblically, but it is within logical grounds.

1:10- A lot of translations capitalize Earth here because God is naming aspects of creation, not because it refers to the planet. (i.e. Day and Night are capitalized in verse 5 and Heaven in verse 8) This word (הָאָ֙רֶץ֙) still means land.

We’ve touched before on how compact Hebrew is. (i.e. “God said, ‘Light be.’ And light was.”) At the end of each day, the declaration of good is similarly brief. It literally reads, “God saw, indeed good.”

1:11- Herbs means general vegetation.

Of all the trees the author could focus on, why might fruit trees be emphasized here? God created a variety of plant life. Why just focus on fruit trees? Does any one particular fruit tree end up being a problem later in the narrative? The focus is on the parts of creation that will affect the upcoming story. Thus, fruit trees alone are focused on.

Day 3 includes the longest narrative so far. The Day begins with forming dry land but also contains a bonus second act of creation—fruit trees with seed in them. In classic Hebrew symmetry, Day 6 will also include a longer narrative with a bonus second act of creation.

Did you notice the recurring mentions of seed in verses 11-12? Will seed be an important concept later in the story? (Hint, read Genesis 3:15.) Continuing the parallelism, Day 6’s bonus creation is of human with seed in him as well.

1:14- Ancient Near Eastern cultures often considered light to be an independent entity from the sun. Most ancients did not think the sun was the main source of light, hence how you have light created on both Days 1 and 4. From an ancient mindset, they were not the same lights.

Signs means miracles, proofs, or symbols. It’s an indication of something beyond itself. Seasons is not the four seasons like we think of them. It means festivals. Just based on this verse, it doesn’t really seem like we use the stars for their intended purposes. While we do base our calendar on the movements of celestial bodies, at least in our circles, we tend to avoid anything that could remotely feel like astrology. Yet the Biblical picture of astrology is arguably more charitable than the positions we often hold. Some scholars believe Joseph dabbled in astrology (Genesis 44:15). Daniel was compared to the astrologers of Babylon (Daniel 1:20) and may have even formed a school of astrologers which would later lead to the astrologers who testified of Jesus’ birth in Matthew 2. It’s notable that those astrologers are portrayed in a positive light in the narrative. Even Jesus spoke of the sun, moon, and stars having signs for humanity (Luke 21:25) as did John in Revelation 12:1.

The Tanakh does contain a couple references that sound negative about astrology, but a closer evaluation shows the problem is not with astrology as we think of it today. Rather, those passages offer warning about trying to communicate with the spirit realm. Such actions can open a door most people aren’t prepared for.

1:15- As noted last week, the lights are placed in the raqia (firmament). So, the common view of the raqia being a pre-Flood dome that kept rain out doesn’t work. You certainly can’t have stars that close to earth. Remember that verse 8 defined the raqia as the skies themselves. It’s good to keep in the front of our minds that we’re dealing with an ancient cosmology under no requirement to follow our modern understandings of how the world works.

1:16- Notably absent is God’s naming the greater and lesser lights here. Though those terms do refer to the sun and moon, they are not called such in this passage. Given Genesis’ place amid other ANE creation stories, it seems most likely that this omission is intended as slight against the gods of Canaan. The ancient Canaanite gods of the sun and moon were called the exact same thing as the Hebrew words for sun and moon. To use their names in the Genesis story could make it sound like God was favoring those two specific Canaanite gods. The author of Genesis is trying to avoid any connection with the gods of the ancient cultures. He is specifically crafting this story to tell you that this God is nothing like the gods of the other cultures. Therefore, the sun and moon are immediately established as creations of Yahweh rather than deities worthy of worship as many ancient cultures believed.

1:17- Again, this would put outer space under the water that is above the raqia. I know I keep stressing this, but it’s important to grasp how different the ANE understanding of how the world worked was compared to ours.

1:18- God delegates for the first time in the story so far. He assigns separating and ruling to the lights. Up until this point, He has been the one personally separating and ruling. Day 4 would have been very important to the ancient Israelites who based their liturgical calendar on these lights. Their feasts were rooted in when the sun, moon, and stars were in certain parts of the sky.

The concept of the sun and moon ruling over day and night feels a little weird to us, but the ancients linked celestial bodies with supernatural beings. It appears that even in the Biblical story, God gives supernatural beings authority over parts of Creation.

1:20- Some have seen the “bring forth” terminology the KJ uses and imagined it to mean that the sea itself generated life. The word really just means to swarm or teem or have in abundance. The waters were not bringing forth life as much as providing a place for life to multiply.

Note how water is mentioned as the realm for both aquatic and aerial creatures. We would not think of birds as living in water, but when you remember that the skies were considered to be the waters above, it makes more sense.

1:21- What the KJ translates as “great whales” is the Hebrew word tananim, meaning sea monsters. It’s the same word for the creature that Moses’ rod became in front of Pharaoh in Exodus 7. See our class on that passage for more on the significance of chaos sea dragons in ancient cultures.

1:22- The first blessing in the Bible is for animals to reproduce. God was praising the beauty of His creation, encouraging it to continue His creative work. Part of the human blessing will be to make sure that the rest of creation can freely live out its blessing.

While we often think of filling the earth as a reference to having lots of offspring, the word can also mean to consecrate in the way a priest would consecrate a temple. This dual meaning will come into play again in verse 28 with the blessing to humans.

1:24- Creeping things aren’t just insects. They’re more like reptiles. It’s a catch-all category for animals that don’t walk, fly, or swim.

1:25- Beast is just a general animal term meaning “living thing.” It doesn’t have the same violent connotation our modern English word has, although it would come to have a negative connotation throughout the Bible story as humans act more like the animals they were supposed to be ruling over.

1:26- In Hebrew, the word for human is the word adam, the same as the name. This leads to a bit of a translation difficulty where you have to determine in the first 3 chapters of Genesis if any given use of adam means humanity in general or Adam the person. The easiest way to distinguish (though there’s room for argument) is to look for the definite article (the word “the”) in Hebrew. As in English, Hebrew names don’t take definite articles. We don’t say “the Colin” or “the Janna.” So, when the word adam appears with the definite article before it (in Hebrew), it can mean humanity as a whole, not just the person Adam.

At first, this can sound like unnecessary hairsplitting, but it does make a difference. We have to remember not to read chapter 2 into chapter 1. They are separate imaginings of the Creation account. In Genesis 1, man and woman are not created separately. Humanity is created, and humanity is both male and female (Genesis 1:27) at the same time. This leaves the door open for more humans than just Adam and Eve to exist at this time. We’ll touch more on this debate when we get to the end of chapter 4, so tuck that away for later.

Next week, we’ll pick up with the debate on what it means to be the image of God.