In the Beginning

Genesis 1:2 says the earth was formless and void, and those two words are not decoration. They are a job description for the rest of the chapter. Hebrew tohu wabohu, unformed and unfilled, sets two problems, and the six days solve them in order: days one to three give the world its shape, and days four to six give it its inhabitants. Light and darkness are separated on day one, and on day four the sun, moon and stars are set in place to govern them. The waters are divided on day two into waters above and waters below with an expanse between, and on day five birds fly in the expanse and swarming creatures fill the sea. Dry land appears on day three and brings forth vegetation, and on day six land animals and human beings walk on it and are handed the vegetation to eat. Three realms, then three sets of tenants. This pairing is not a modern discovery; it is set out plainly in Umberto Cassuto's commentary and is standard in Gordon Wenham's Word Biblical Commentary volume on Genesis 1 to 15.

Once you see the structure you start noticing how much counting the chapter does. In Hebrew, 'And God said' occurs ten times, though the BSB varies the English. The Mishnah, at Avot 5:1, says the world was created by ten utterances, and the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 32a) reaches that ten by counting nine sayings and treating 1:1 as the tenth, so the two counts are related but not identical. The verdict 'good' occurs seven times, the last of them intensified to 'very good' in 1:31. In Hebrew, 1:1 is seven words and 1:2 is fourteen. The word for God occurs thirty-five times in 1:1 to 2:3 and the word for earth twenty-one times, both multiples of seven. And 2:2 to 3 contains three consecutive seven-word clauses, each of them naming the seventh day. Now the honest qualification, which is more use to you than the list. Cassuto also counted heaven twenty-one times, and if you do the count yourself you will not get that figure: the word for heaven occurs eleven times in the unit, and twenty if you add the nine occurrences of the word for the expanse, which is how Cassuto arrived at it. So some of these counts are solid and at least one of them is not, which is exactly why careful scholars argue about which were intended and which fall out by accident. Count them yourself before you repeat any of them from a pulpit. What survives the recount is still enough to show a composed text, laid out by someone working to a plan.

That matters for how you read the refrains. 'And there was evening, and there was morning' is not filler to be skimmed. It closes each panel the way a stanza closes, and the one day it does not close is the day the chapter is driving at. 'And God saw that it was good' is a verdict passed on the work by the worker, and the reason day two does not get it is worth sitting with rather than explaining away: the separation of the waters is the one act in the chapter that is left unevaluated until the dry land appears on day three and 'good' is pronounced twice in one day, at 1:10 and 1:12. Cassuto's suggestion is that the work begun on day two is not finished until day three, so the verdict waits. Others think the omission is accidental. Note that the Septuagint supplies the missing verdict at verse 8, which tells you an ancient translator found the gap as odd as you do.

One more structural point, and it is the one your students will miss. Genesis 1 does not merely list creatures; it describes delegation. The lights are made 'to rule' the day and the night in 1:16, and 1:18 says they are 'to preside over' them. Vegetation is made to seed itself, so that the ground keeps producing without further commands. Living things are blessed in 1:22 and told to multiply, which means the filling of the world is handed over to the things that fill it. And humanity, in 1:26 to 28, is given dominion. A world in which the sun governs, the seed reproduces, the fish fill the sea and the human rules is a world designed to run, not a world that needs its maker to work the controls every morning. That is a doctrine of providence folded into a structure, and it is there before any theologian writes it down.

Genesis 1 was not written into a vacuum, and the stories in the air around it are recoverable. Enuma Elish, the Babylonian poem named from its opening words, 'when on high', survives on seven tablets from Ashurbanipal's library and elsewhere, and it is a succession story. The gods are born out of the mingling of Apsu, fresh water, and Tiamat, salt water. Conflict follows, Tiamat musters monsters, and the young god Marduk is given absolute kingship in exchange for fighting her. He kills her and splits her body in two, and the poem compares the splitting to the splitting of a fish. One warning about that simile, because you will meet it quoted: the Akkadian word is lexically disputed and the English editions differ, so L. W. King's 1902 translation has a flat fish where modern editions have a fish split for drying. Quote whichever edition you are actually holding, and name it. Tablet four then makes one half of her a covering for the sky, with a bar and guards set so that her waters cannot escape, and her remaining parts become the rest of the world's furniture in tablet five. In tablet six, humanity is made from the blood of Qingu, the god who had led Tiamat's army and is executed for it, and the stated purpose is explicit: the human is created to bear the gods' workload so that the gods may be at ease. Then the gods build Babylon and Marduk's temple, Esagila, as his resting place.

Atrahasis, an older Akkadian epic known from Old Babylonian copies, is blunter still about the labour. The junior gods, the Igigi, are set to digging the rivers and canals and they mutiny: in Lambert and Millard's edition they set fire to their tools and put fire to their spades, and the siege of Enlil's temple happens at night, half-way through the watch, with the god asleep inside and unaware. The crisis is solved by manufacturing a substitute workforce. The womb goddess, who carries the names Nintu, Mami, Mama and Belet-ili, mixes clay with the flesh and blood of a slaughtered god, the one Lambert and Millard read as We-ila, nips off fourteen pieces of clay and produces seven males and seven females, and the shovels are handed over. Later in the same epic humanity multiplies until the noise of them has become, in Enlil's own complaint, too intense for him, and he sends plague, then drought and famine, and finally the flood to reduce the problem. Keep Atrahasis in mind, because you will need it again in the last lesson of this module.

Now read Genesis 1 against those and notice how many of their load-bearing features are simply gone. There is no genealogy of gods, because there is only one God and he is not born. There is no fight, because nothing is old enough to fight him. The watery deep does not threaten; it sits there in 1:2 and is divided in 1:6 without a struggle. The tanninim, the great sea creatures that in Ugaritic and in Psalm 74 belong to the vocabulary of chaos monsters, are in 1:21 reduced to items on the fifth day's inventory and pronounced good. The sun and the moon, which were major deities in every culture around Israel, are not even named in Genesis 1; they are called the greater light and the lesser light, demoted to lamps with a job list, and the stars, the gods of Babylonian astrology, are tacked on at the end of 1:16 almost as an afterthought. There is nothing polemical about the tone, which is why some scholars resist the word polemic. There is a great deal that is polemical about the content.

The sharpest difference is about human beings. In Atrahasis and in Enuma Elish the human exists because a god does not want to work. Humanity is a tool, made from a dead rebel, and its function is to feed the gods through sacrifice and keep the irrigation ditches clear. Genesis makes humanity last, as the climax rather than the solution to a staffing problem, puts the image of God on it, blesses it, tells it to rule, and then feeds it. The direction of service is reversed. Israel's God is never hungry; Psalm 50:12 to 13 makes the point explicitly, and Genesis 1 has already made it structurally by having God give food rather than receive it. If you want a single sentence for what Genesis 1 denies, it is this: that the world is the wreckage of a divine quarrel and that you are here to do somebody else's chores.

On sources, be careful about one thing. Showing that Genesis engages these texts does not establish that Genesis borrowed from them, and the direction of dependence is disputed. The responsible position, held across a wide range of scholarship, is that Genesis 1 is in conversation with a shared ancient Near Eastern stock of cosmological imagery and that it uses that imagery to say something the neighbours did not say. For the primary texts themselves, L. W. King's old translation of Enuma Elish is free online and adequate for getting the shape of the story. If you can reach a library, Stephanie Dalley's Myths from Mesopotamia and Benjamin Foster's Before the Muses are far better, and Atrahasis is in both.

Most sermons on Genesis 1 end on day six, and most reading plans put the chapter break where the modern Bible puts it, after 1:31. Both habits cut the chapter off before its conclusion. The unit runs to 2:3, and the seventh day is the only day the writer treats as different. Nothing is made in it. There is no 'and God said'. There is no 'it was good'. And there is no 'evening and morning', so that the seventh day, alone among the seven, is not closed off. Instead there are three things: God finished, God rested, and God blessed the day and made it holy. 'Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on that day He rested from all the work of creation that He had accomplished.' The BSB's 'sanctified' renders qiddesh, the verb from the same root as qadosh, holy, so the day is made holy. That is the first occurrence of holiness in the Bible, and it is attached not to a place, a person or an object, but to time.

The verb for rest here is shabat, which means to cease or to stop, not to recuperate. Nothing in the text suggests fatigue; Isaiah 40:28 says flatly that the Creator will not grow tired or weary. So what is divine rest? The rest of the Hebrew Bible answers that question with unusual consistency, and the answer is enthronement in a completed house. Psalm 132:7 to 8 and 132:13 to 14 have the LORD arising to his resting place and then choosing Zion as his dwelling for ever. Psalm 95:11 makes the land a rest that the rebels will not enter. 1 Chronicles 28:2 calls the temple a house built as a resting place for the ark. Isaiah 66:1 asks what house could be built for a God whose throne is heaven and whose footstool is the earth. In the ancient Near East a temple was finished, the god entered, and the god then rested, which meant the god took up stable rule from that seat. Enuma Elish ends that way, with Babylon built and Marduk installed.

Read Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 as that kind of account and the seventh day stops being an appendix. The point of making a world is to have somewhere to dwell and rule, and the sabbath is the day the dwelling begins. This is one strand of John Walton's larger argument, and it does not depend on accepting everything else he says. It also explains why the seventh day has no evening and morning: the day God took up residence is not reported as having ended. Hebrews 4:1 to 11 reads the Old Testament exactly this way, treating God's rest as something still open for people to enter, and quoting Psalm 95 to do it.

Then watch what Israel does with this day. In Exodus 20:8 to 11 the fourth commandment grounds the human week directly in the creation week, so an Israelite's rhythm of work is an imitation of God's. In Deuteronomy 5:15 the same commandment is grounded in the exodus instead, so sabbath is also a weekly declaration that these people are not slaves, which is precisely what Atrahasis says humanity is. In Exodus 31:17 the sabbath is a sign between God and Israel, tied again to the seventh day of creation. Leviticus 25 extends the pattern to land, which rests every seventh year, and to debt and property in the fiftieth. Take the whole trajectory together and Genesis 2:1 to 3 turns out to be the seed of Israel's entire social calendar.

There is a pastoral edge here that is worth naming for students who have been formed by a culture of unlimited work. If the goal of creation is a day of ceasing that God himself keeps, then rest is not what you earn by finishing, nor a reward bolted on to productivity. It is built into the structure of the world before any human has done a day's work, since the first full day Adam experiences in the narrative sequence is a day off. Jesus's claim in Mark 2:27 that the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath, is a comment on Genesis 2, and it reads the direction of the gift correctly.

Now the question your students will actually ask, and the one place in this lesson where the responsible thing is to refuse to give you an answer. Christians who hold a high view of scripture and who read Hebrew for a living have landed in four main places on the days of Genesis 1. You need all four at their strongest, with the evidence each one leans on and the objection each one has to live with, and you need to be able to teach all four without your own preference showing. Note in passing that this is also the subject of a full lesson in the Systematic Theology track, where a fifth reading, C. John Collins's analogical days, is set out as well.

The calendar-day or young-earth reading holds that the six days are ordinary days. Its case is linguistic and canonical. The Hebrew yom, when it is paired with a number and with evening and morning, means an ordinary day everywhere else in the Pentateuch, and Exodus 20:11 grounds the human six-day week in these six days, which seems to require that they be the same kind of thing. The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 look like a chronology, and read as one they give a world some thousands of years old. Theologically, Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:21 tie death to Adam's sin, which makes long ages of animal death before the fall a problem. Representative defenders include Douglas Kelly in Creation and Change and Andrew Steinmann on the chronological data. Two further arguments are usually left out when the position is summarised by people who do not hold it. Outside Genesis 1, the noun yom with a numeral attached means an ordinary day in every one of its hundreds of occurrences, which puts a heavy burden of proof on anyone claiming an exception here. And this was the near-universal reading of Jewish and Christian interpreters until the geological debates of the early nineteenth century, so on the history it is the other three readings that are departures. Its standing difficulties are mostly internal to the chapter: light exists on day one and the sun is not made until day four, and the seventh day has no evening and morning. The other three readings add one external objection, the appearance of great age in the physical creation, which the calendar-day literature answers in the way the last lesson of this module describes.

The day-age reading holds that each day stands for a long period. Its case begins with the flexibility of yom, which in Genesis 2:4 means the whole creation period, and continues with the observation that the chapter's sequence broadly tracks the order the sciences describe: an unformed earth, then light, then sea and sky, then land, then life, then humanity last. It can point to Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 for the principle that God's reckoning of time is not ours, and it has a respectable pedigree: Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield both left room for an old earth, and William Henry Green's 1890 article on primeval chronology argued that the biblical genealogies were never intended as a complete chronology. Hugh Ross has defended the position at length in recent decades. Two of its strongest arguments are also usually left out of summaries. The seventh day is never closed off, which makes at least one of the seven unlike a calendar day on anybody's reading. And day six has to contain the forming of the man, the planting of a garden, the naming of every animal, a search for a counterpart that fails, a deep sleep and the making of the woman, all of which Genesis 2 narrates as a sequence and which the man's cry in 2:23, 'This is now bone of my bones' (the Hebrew happa'am is literally 'this time'), suggests took time to reach. Its difficulty is that the correspondence with the sciences breaks down precisely where it is tested, since fruit trees appear on day three before the sun on day four and birds on day five before land animals on day six, and the evening and morning formula sits awkwardly on a geological epoch.

The framework reading holds that the six days are a literary arrangement rather than a sequence, two triads of forming and filling that teach the order of creation topically. Its case is the structure you mapped in the first section, the day one and day four pairing in particular, since the light of day one and the lights of day four are hard to put in a chronological line. It leans heavily on Genesis 2:5, which explains the absence of plants by the absence of rain and of a man to work the ground, that is, by ordinary providence rather than by a special creative regime, which suggests the writer was not thinking of the creation period as suspending normal causes. And it takes the unclosed seventh day as a signal that these are God's days, not ours. The position runs from Arie Noordtzij in 1924 through Nicolaas Ridderbos to Meredith Kline's 1958 article on Genesis 2:5 and his later essay on space and time in the Genesis cosmogony, with Henri Blocher's In the Beginning the most accessible full statement. It also has a precedent older than the geological debates, since Augustine argued in The Literal Meaning of Genesis that the days were not periods of ordinary time, and its best-known modern defender taught at Westminster Theological Seminary, so the charge that it is an expedient invented to accommodate science does not fit its history. Its difficulty is that ordinal numbers normally do indicate sequence, that Exodus 20:11 appeals to the six days as a pattern of work, and that the triads are not quite as neat as the diagram suggests, since day three's vegetation is filling rather than forming and day four's lights are placed in day two's expanse.

John Walton's functional reading, set out in The Lost World of Genesis One and more technically in Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, takes a different line. He accepts that the days are ordinary days and argues that what happens in them is not material manufacture but the assignment of function and the installation of a cosmic temple, so that Genesis 1 reports the inauguration of the world as God's dwelling and says nothing at all about material origins. His case rests on ancient Near Eastern texts in which bringing something into being means giving it a role, on the temple dedication pattern of seven days, and on the biblical usage of divine rest as enthronement which you traced in the last section. Its strength is that it explains the chapter's heavy emphasis on function language, separating, ruling, giving signs and seasons, and that it dissolves the science question rather than negotiating it. Its second strength is the quantity of comparative evidence: temple dedications in that world run to seven days, and accounts of origins there routinely describe the giving of names, roles and boundaries rather than the manufacture of matter. It is also not a back door out of the harder questions: Walton affirms a historical Adam and Eve, he holds that God did create the material world, and he argues the position from the ancient texts rather than from what modern science would prefer. Its difficulty is serious and comes partly from scholars sympathetic to his wider work: critics including Richard Averbeck, Todd Beall and Vern Poythress argue that the functional and material categories are being held too far apart, that ancient peoples plainly did have views about where physical things came from, and that some objects of bara' in the Hebrew Bible are material things.

Four readings, four sets of evidence, four live objections. Notice what they agree on, because it is most of what the chapter says: one God, no rival, a world made and ordered on purpose, matter pronounced good, humanity made last and commissioned, and a seventh day that is the goal. Notice also that the disagreement is about a question Genesis 1 is not obviously asking, and that none of the four is forced on you by the text or ruled out by it. A teacher who tells a class that one of these is the plain reading and the others are compromises has told them something that is not true, and has made it harder for them to keep reading when they meet the evidence for a different one.