Creation 1-Starting at the Beginning?
©Lawson G. Stone, 2005
Recent conversations with friends about the issues surrounding creation prompt me to post some thoughts about the interpretation of Genesis 1-2. My thoughts here are not especially novel, but they might be, coming from someone who is unwilling to surrender a fully evangelical commitment to biblical trustworthiness and reliability. For this article, I simply treat a point regarding Genesis 1:1. By the way, the next paragraph could be pretty obscure for those who have not studied Hebrew. See the "links" section on the right for a brief, less-technical discussion that (I hope) will help you understand this article better.
First, the opening phrase, traditionally translated "In the beginning, God…" Preachers love to hit this hard, but in fact the translation has never been fully adequate. The opening expression does not contain the Hebrew definite article, and in isolation would be considered a contstruct form better translated "In beginning of…" In fact, every one of the 51 or so occurrences of the term for "beginning," re'shith in the Hebrew Bible, is in the construct state, usually indicating the first in a series, that is, a relative beginning point, not an absolute one. What throws us, though, is that we are accustomed to seeing constructs followed by noun phrases not finite verbs. In fact, though, the semitic languages do allow words to be in construct with a clause. Akkadian displays this phenomenon frequently, and it is even documented in Biblical Hebrew. Ironically, the other term for "beginning" illustrates the point. Hosea 1:2 reads "literally" beginning of spoke Yahweh in/to/by Hosea. Here the term "beginning" (tehillat) is indisputably in construct, and indisputably followed by a finite verb. At least 35 examples, probably more, can be adduced in which a construct form has as its nomens rectum an entire clause which functions essentially in a genitive case relation to the construct form. So quite woodenly, Genesis 1:1 reads "In beginning of created God..." so that the sense is "When God began to create the heavens and the earth…"
Seeing Genesis 1:1 as a temporal clause fits well with the common semitic, and distinctively Hebrew, pattern for beginning a narrative. Almost anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, and equally common in other semitic narrative, a story begins with a temporal clause, a series of circumstantial clauses sketching in the setting, and then a well-defined verbal construction that begins the main narrative sequence. Genesis 1:1-3a certainly does this. Verse 1 provides the temporal clause "When God began to create the heavens and the earth." Verse 2 then gives us the circumstantial clauses, clearly noted by the construction of the clauses in Hebrew: "the earth was formless and void, darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God (or a mighty wind) was fluttering over the surface of the water." Then verse 3 inaugurates the main verbal sequence: then God said…" Any good Hebrew syntax textbook can document this narrative pattern.
So what? The consequence for understanding this text is significant, but perhaps not what some would think. First, the construction does not convey the idea of an absolute beginning, but a relative one. The text speaks not of the beginning, but of the start of God's work in creating the present order in which we live. The text here does not convey the concept of creatio ex nihilo or "creation out of nothing" that we love to find there and use as a jumping off point for our preaching. It is a relative beginning that is spoken of here, the beginning of the economy in which we live, sin, and find redemption.
Does that mean a denial of the concept of creatio ex nihilo? Not at all. Here is the point where I don't go down the path that others do who see this grammatical point. I am convinced that Hebrews 11:3 articulates the concept of God's ultimate creation of all that exists out of nothing. But that does not necessarily imply that Genesis 1:1 is speaking of the same thing. Hebrews reaches back earlier than Genesis 1:1, indeed, claiming that we know this (creation out of nothing) "by faith" rather than simply reading it in the scriptures. So creation out of nothing is the truth, but it probably is not the text's message in Genesis 1:1. This verse does not give us the "year zero" for, say, calculating the age of the earth, nor does it give us some peek into "eternity past." As usual, the Bible is not about satisfying our curiosity, but rather it speaks to our need for redemption.
The relative beginning set forth in Genesis 1 also raises the disturbing possibility that God could have had a history with the created order older than the one we know of from the Bible. What a shock: God had a life before us! We are part of His story, and not vice-versa!
The idea is not really that new. In the early 20th century, most conservative exegetes from G. Campbell Morgan to the Scofield Reference Bible subscribed to what was called the "gap theory" of Genesis 1:1-2. They held that Genesis 1:1 described the ultimate creation at the very beginning of time, and that Genesis 1:2 described the results of some catastrophe that marred the creation, with Genesis 1:3ff describing God's renewal and refurbishing of the world. This allowed early 20th century conservatives to affirm the great age of the earth as demonstrated by geologists, and to equate Genesis 1:3ff with the era starting roughly with the emergence of literate civilization in the ancient Near East. While the gap theory didn't finally win the day--based as it was on a wrong reading of Gen 1:1 and a specious and eccentric handling of the verb in verse 2--it nevertheless seemed to grasp intuitively that our story is not an attempt to tell us everything that God ever did with this created order. God's creative action in this chapter has a past, a prologue not provided for us, but whose possibility humbles us and reminds us that God's life is about much more than us!
The amazing thing is, an ancient reader accustomed to the creation stories of antiquity would probably not have read Gen 1:1 as the ultimate beginning either. Ancient pagan creation accounts presented a sequence beginning with a primal matrix of generative power which birthed deities (theogony), who then came into conflict with each other (theomachy). The great battle that followed deeply altered the cosmic order, leading to the creation of the world and humanity (cosmogony). So the actual creation of the order in which we live was step three in the list. An ancient reader approaching Genesis 1:1-2 would immediately be struck that the story starts in the middle and that the prologue seems to be missing. What would amaze and startle them would be the absence of any other gods and the absence of any conflict or war, and more importantly, the absence of any primal matrix of being out of which deity emerged. The absoluteness of the one God would dominate the whole narrative, and the creation of our world as his choice, not as a bi-product of some cosmic war, would be more amazing. In addition, the presence of terms like "formless and void" (Hebrew tohu wabohu even imply that God's creating is already an act of redemption, an act of re-ordering something that had in fact fallen into disarray
The last article talked about the likelihood that the opening phrase of Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning…" refers not to an absolute "year zero" but to a relative beginning. This observation carries significant implications, but maybe not what we expected. First, this does not eliminate creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) from biblical theology, but only from Genesis 1, which appears more concerned with the meaning and purpose of the current order in which humans live.
Second, if Genesis 1:1 does not define the absolute beginning of the entire creative work of God, then perhaps we can be more flexible and open minded about the question of the age of the earth and the universe. That is, Genesis 1 does not commit us to a "young earth" position. Indeed, often the OT uses the great age and apparent permanence of the earth as an image for the eternity of God and the reliability of his word. These statements would not have much significance if the earth had not been around very long.
One matter that always comes up in connection with the idea of creation out of nothing is the meaning of the two terms used in Genesis 1. Two Hebrew words appear. The first, bara', is traditionally translated "create," and we render the second, "'asah" with "make." A common claim made in popular literature and preaching is that the first term, bara', actually means "create out of nothing" while the second term, 'asah, means "make (out of something)."
This distinction simply cannot hold up when we look at how the terms are actually used in the Bible. The term 'asah has the broadest possible use, covering everything that might be possibly claimed as "doing/making." The real concern is the term bara'. The final authority, linguistically, on word meaning is the way the term is actually used in context. A quick survey of the approximately 53 occurences of bara' in the OT reveals that bara' simply cannot mean "create out of nothing." Take, for example, the creation of humanity. Genesis 1:27, where bara' is used three times in one verse for the creation of humanity in God's image, as male and female. The preceding verse (26) has God saying "Let us make ('asah) humanity in our image…" If these two terms differed so dramatically, why would the inspired author use them both, in consecutive verses, for the same creative act? If we bring in Genesis 2:7 and 2:21-22, we learn that the man was formed from dirt, and the woman was "built" (Hebrew banah) from a longitudinal section of the man. In neither case does God make them ex nihilo and yet, Gen 1:27 uses bara' three times to describe the creation of sexually differentiated humanity in God's image.
Other examples abound. God "creates" the wind (Amos 4:13) and claims to have "created" Jacob (Isa 43:1) who was born by natural processes, not created ex nihilo. Isaiah 43:15 notes that Israel was created/bara' by God, but Israel emerged as an ethnic group and nation by the normal processes of reproduction and demographic expansion. One very sad implication of the persistent claim that bara' can only mean "create out of nothing" is that no human being can claim to be created by God, since none of us comes into this world ex nihilo! And yet the Bible affirms that humans are, in fact, created by God (Gen 6:7, Isa 43:7, 54:16). Clearly, the term has a much broader sense than the narrow idea of "create out of nothing."
Etymology also needs consideration. Hebrew actually has two forms of the same root br'. One is translated "create," but is used in a neighboring semitic language (Old South Arabic) for "build" and even in a noun form meaing "building." A second root, which is etymologically indistinguishable from the first, means "to shape by cutting" and appears in the OT denoting sculpting and clearing forest. The latter idea resonates with Genesis 1. To clear forest is to create a space in which to live, and in Genesis 1, God creates a space in the mass of primeval water in which to make his world. In any event, no etymological background of bara' that I can find inherently includes the notion of ex nihilo creation.
Now you might be asking, "Okay smarty pants! You took away one of my favorite preaching points! So what DOES the word mean?" That's worth looking at, and the answer comes from the same source that gave us the first point: how the term is actually used in the Old Testament. At least three distinctive features appear from a survey of the occurrences of bara' in the OT.
First, and perhaps most importantly, this word, when it means "create," always only has God as its subject. The term is never used for human creativity. That means that whenever the inspired authors use this term they identify the action involved as an act of making that distinctively and unambiguously expresses God's agency. Since humans can "make" as well, and since humans, in God's image, display remarkable creativity, the biblical writers clearly needed a simple way to identify certain creative acts as uniquely divine. So when the writers use bara', they are telling us in no uncertain terms that the action is "a God Thing." So in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, three events appear with the term and thus appear as uniquely Divine acts. First, the very making of the heavens and the earth involve God's bara'-ing. The expression "heavens and earth" denote much more than "sky and ground." Scholars call the phrase a merismus, a pair of words that express "everything in between." English expressions like "from soup to nuts" or "lock, stock and barrel" which express "everything" serve a similar role. So the term "heaven and earth" is the Hebrew way to say "the entire cosmos." Thus the phrase appears in Gen 1:1, and then again in 2:3-4a when the writer summarizes the entire account. So Genesis emphatically attributes the existence of the whole cosmos to the one creator God it proclaims.
How different from ancient pagan accounts! Whether we turn to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, or to the various Egyptian cosmogonies, we find first and foremost that the primal, original reality is not a creator God, but rather a vast, impersonal field of power, a primal matrix of generativity, usually consisting of a male power and a female power, whose co-mingling generates the deities (theogony). These deities in turn multiply and come into conflict, leading one of the primal powers--usually the power of chaos--to seek their destruction. The gods respond by choosing a champion to do battle with the chaos monster (theomachy). Upon defeating the chaos monster, the victorious god uses the dead body to fabricate the world and claims total authority over it, creating humans as an afterthought to attend to the "care and feeding of the gods." The point here being that, for Israel's neighbors, the actual structure of the universe exists outside of and prior to the deities known as creator gods. The gods are many, diverse, limited, sexually generated, and will ultimately dissolve back into the primal matrix that generated them in the first place. But Genesis 1:1 and 2:3-4a know of no realm of power outside God and announce that the whole structure of the universe, the whole order of being, is a God thing, his unique handiwork. While the pagan gods had to submit to the order of being into which they were born, the God of Genesis 1 is the author of the order of being into which we are born. And since Genesis only knows of one, supreme God, this means that no alternative orders of being exist. Only God can establish the framework for life and existence, and if we reject him as our creator, we will only fail as we try to construct other "worlds" in which to live.
Second, a survey of the occurrences of bara' in the OT reveals it always names the making of something that is unprecedented, genuinely new and fresh. In Gen 1:21 the text says God created (bara') the sea monsters. The first emergence of animal life represents a fresh point of departure, a new thing, in the narrative of creation. Note that they are not created ex nihilo. God commanded the waters to "swarm forth" with these animals, and probably the sense should be causal, "cause [sea life] to swarm." It appears that when "swarm" has animals as the subject, it refers to movement, but when an environment is the subject; the contexts seem to imply that the environment has somehow generated these animals. This could be questioned, even though it coheres well with other emphases in the story. The point here is that bara' is used not because sea life is somehow more complex than, say, land animals (for which bara' is not used). The point is that here for the first time in the narrative we have animal life appearing. The next time we see bara' is in Gen 1:27 with the creation of humanity. This identifies humanity also as a fresh, distinctive point of departure in the narrative, another order or step in the chain of being. While the text certainly notes humanity's continuity with the rest of creation in the command to "be fruitful and multiply," nevertheless humanity has a distinctive role consisting in being in God's image. This image finds fundamental expression in humanity collectively as male and female being called to "rule" the creation, to "subdue" it (about which more in a later article), and to make use of it for food. Again, the point is not a false dichotomy between bara' and asah. Note Gen 1:26 says, "Let us make (asah) humanity..." Nor is the point that God made humanity out of nothing--Gen 2:7 will tell us humanity was molded from the ground like the animals. The point is the radical, new, fresh point of departure represented by humanity, whatever the means by which God worked.
Third, none the occurrences of bara' appear with a grammatical feature known as the "accusative of material." That is, while materials for the creation may appear in the larger literary context, never does bara' appear grammatically bound to a construction that would be like we see in Gen 2:7, "Yahweh God molded the man [out of] the dust of the ground." The phrase "out of dust" which appears in Hebrew with no preposition would be called an accusative of material. So while bara' does not mean, "create out of nothing," it still seems to resist grammatical connection with statements about materials. What does this suggest? It suggests that bara' is not about the how of creation, but about the what. The word stresses the naked fact of a fresh, new, distinctively divine creative act. Rather than plunge into mechanics and processes, bara' simply stands back and says "Whatever the materials, whatever the processes, what counts is the single fact that GOD CREATED."
I imagine we could all profit from that shift of focus.
