The narrative

First account: Creation week

• First day: God creates light ("Let there be light!")—the first divine command. The light is divided from the darkness, and "day" and "night" are named.

• Second day: God creates a firmament ("Let a firmament be...!")—the second command—to divide the waters above from the waters below. The firmament is named "skies".

• Third day: God commands the waters below to be gathered together in one place, and dry land to appear (the third command). "Earth" and "sea" are named. God commands the earth to bring forth grass, plants, and fruit-bearing trees (the fourth command).

• Fourth day: God creates lights in the firmament (the fifth command) to separate light from darkness and to mark days, seasons and years. Two great lights are made (most likely the Sun and Moon, but not named), and the stars.

• Fifth day: God commands the sea to "teem with living creatures", and birds to fly across the heavens (sixth command); He creates birds and sea creatures, and commands them to be fruitful and multiply.

• Sixth day: God commands the land to bring forth living creatures (seventh command); He makes wild beasts, livestock and reptiles. He then creates Man and Woman in His "image" and "likeness" (eighth command). They are told to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it." Humans and animals are given plants to eat. The totality of creation is described by God as "very good."

• Seventh day: God, having completed the heavens and the earth, rests from His work, and blesses and sanctifies the seventh day.

Literary Bridge

Second account: Eden narrative

Painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

• —the second half of the bridge formed by the "generations" formula, and the beginning of the Eden narrative—places the events of the narrative "in the day when YHWH Elohim made the earth and the heavens..."

• Before any plant had appeared, before any rain had fallen, while a mist watered the earth, Yahweh formed the man (Heb. ha-adam הָאָדָם) out of dust from the ground (Heb. ha-adamah הָאֲדָמָה), and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. And the man became a "living being" (Heb. nephesh).

• Yahweh planted a garden in Eden and he set the man in it. He caused pleasant trees to spout from the ground, and trees necessary for food, also the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (An unnamed river is described: it goes out from Eden to water the garden, after which it parts into four named streams.) He takes the man who is to tend His garden and tells him he may eat of the fruit of all the trees except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "for in that day thou shalt surely die."

• Yahweh resolved to make a "helper" suitable for (lit. "corresponding to") the man. He made domestic animals and birds, and the man gave them their names, but none of them is a fitting helper. Therefore Yahweh caused the man to sleep, and he took a rib, and from it formed a woman. The man then named her "Woman" (Heb. ishah), saying "for from a man (Heb. ish) has this been taken." A statement instituting marriage follows: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh."

• The man and his wife were naked, and felt no shame.

Genesis 1-11: Primeval History

Ancient Near East context

Cosmology

Religion

Scholars of the Ancient Near East see Hebrew monotheism as emerging from a common Mesopotamian/Levantine background of polytheistic religion and myth. The narrative elements of draw specifically from four Mesopotamian myths: Adapa and the South Wind, Atrahasis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish. These myths share similar motifs and characters with Genesis 1-11, with Genesis challenging the Babylonian view point..
According to the Enuma Elish, which has the closest parallels, the original state of the universe was a chaos formed by the mingling of two primeval waters, the female saltwater god Tiamat and the male freshwater god Apsu.. Through the fusion of their waters six successive generations of gods were born. A war amongst these gods began with the slaying of Apsu, and ended with the powerful god Marduk killing Tiamat by splitting her in two with an arrow. Marduk then used one half of her body to form the firmament of the heavens and the other half to form the earth; the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers emerged from her eye-sockets. Marduk then created humanity—in seven pairs, male and female, and from clay mingled with spit and the blood of another slaughtered god—and placed them on the earth to tend the Earth for the gods, while Marduk himself was enthroned in Babylon in the Esagila, "the temple with its head in heaven."

Genesis 1-2 parallels the Enuma Elish, not only in its creation myth, but also in its religious message, which sets up one specific god as Creator and ruler over all things. The Enuma Elish promotes the power of Marduk, patron god of Babylon, as king over all gods and people, while Genesis 1-2 places Yahweh Elohim as king over everything.

Exegetical points

"In the beginning..."

The first word of Genesis 1 in Hebrew, "in the beginning" (Heb. b^erēšît בְּרֵאשִׁית), provides the traditional Jewish title for the book. The inherent ambiguity of the Hebrew grammar in this verse gives rise to two alternative translations, the first implying that God's initial act of creation was ab nihilo (out of nothing),Wenham, Gordon. Word Biblical Commentary Vol. 1 Genesis 1-15. Word, 1987. ISBN 0849902002 the second that "the heavens and the earth" (i.e., everything) already existed in a "formless and empty" state, to which God brings form and order:Harry Orlinsky, Notes on Genesis, NJPS translation of the Torah

• "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void…. God said, Let there be light!" (King James Version).

• "At the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, when the earth was (or the earth being) unformed and void . . . God said, Let there be light!" (Rashi, and with variations Ibn Ezra and Bereshith Rabba).

The name of God

Two names of God are used, Elohim in the first account and Yahweh Elohim in the second account. This difference, plus differences in the styles of the two chapters, as well as a number of discrepancies between them, formed one of the earliest ideas that the Pentateuch had multiple origins. These ideas were instrumental in the development of source criticism and the documentary hypothesis.

"Without form and void"

The phrase traditionally translated in English "without form and void" is tōhû wābōhû (). The Greek Septuagint (LXX) rendered this term as "unseen and unformed" (Greek: ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος), paralleling the Greek concept of Chaos. In the Hebrew Bible, the phrase is a dis legomenon, being used only in one other place. There Jeremiah is telling Israel that sin and rebellion against God will lead to "darkness and chaos," or to "de-creation," "as if the earth had been ‘uncreated.’"

The rûach of God

The Hebrew rûach (רוּחַ) has the meanings "wind, spirit, breath," but the traditional Jewish interpretation here is "wind," as "spirit" would imply a living supernatural presence co-extent with yet separate from God at Creation. This, however, is the sense in which rûach was understood by the early Christian church in developing the doctrine of the Trinity, in which this passage plays a central role. Most English translations render this phrase as "the Spirit of God."

The "deep"

The "deep" (Heb. תְהוֹם t^ehôm), is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world. These waters are later released during the great flood, when "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth" from under the earth and from the "windows" of the sky. The word is cognate with the Babylonian Tiamat, and its occurrence here without the definite article ha (i.e., the literal translation of the Hebrew is that "darkness lay on the face of t^ehôm) indicates its mythical origins.

The firmament of heaven

The "firmament" (Heb. רָקִיעַ rāqîa) of heaven, created on the second day of creation and populated by luminaries on the fourth day, denotes a solid ceiling which separated the earth below from the heavens and their waters above. The term is etymologically derived from the verb rāqa (רֹקַע ), used for the act of beating metal into thin plates.

Great sea monsters

Heb. hatanninim hagedolim (הַתַּנִּינִם הַגְּדֹלִים) is the classification of creatures to which the chaos-monsters Leviathan and Rahab belong. In , the proper noun Leviathan is missing and only the class noun great tannînim appears. The great tannînim are associated with mythological sea creatures such as Lotan (the Ugaritic counterpart of the biblical Leviathan) which were considered deities by other ancient near eastern cultures; the author of Genesis 1 asserts the sovereignty of Elohim over such entities. The NJV translates it as "sea monsters".

The number seven

Seven denoted divine completion. It is embedded in the text of Genesis 1 (but not in Genesis 2) in a number of ways, besides the obvious seven-day framework: the word "God" occurs 35 times (7 × 5) and "earth" 21 times (7 × 3). The phrases "and it was so" and "God saw that it was good" occur 7 times each. The first sentence of contains 7 Hebrew words, and the second sentence contains 14 words, while the verses about the seventh day contain 35 words in total.

Man and the image of God

The meaning of the "image of God" has been much debated. The medieval Jewish scholar Rashi believed it referred to "a sort of conceptual archetype, model, or blueprint that God had previously made for man;" his colleague Maimonides suggested it referred to man's free will. Modern scholarship still debates whether the image of God was represented symmetrically in Adam and Eve, or whether Adam possessed the image more fully than the woman.

Structure and composition

Michelangelo's painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel shows the creation of the stars and planets as described in the first chapter of Genesis.

Structure

Genesis 1 consists of eight acts of creation within a six day framework. In each of the first three days there is an act of division: Day one divides the darkness from light; day two, the waters from the skies; and day three, the sea from the land. In each of the next three days these divisions are populated: day four populates what was created on day one, and heavenly bodies are placed in the darkness and light; day five populates what was created on day two, and fish and birds are placed in the seas and skies; finally, day six populates what was created on day three, and animals and man are place on the land. This six-day structure is symmetrically bracketed: On day zero primeval chaos reigns, and on day seven there is cosmic order.

Genesis 2 is a simple linear narrative, with the exception of the parenthesis about the four rivers at Genesis 2:10-14. This interrupts the forward movement of the narrative and possibly is an expansion on the spring or stream mentioned in , which waters the ground "on the day when Yahweh Elohim formed earth and heavens."

The two are joined by , "These are the tôl^edôt (תוֹלְדוֹת in Hebrew) of the heavens and the earth when they were created." This echoes the first line of Genesis 1, "In the beginning Yahweh created both the heavens and the earth," and is reversed in the next line of Genesis 2, "In the day when Yahweh Elohim made the earth and the heavens...". The significance of this, if any, is unclear, but it does reflect the preoccupation of each chapter, Genesis 1 looking down from heaven, Genesis 2 looking up from the earth.

Composition

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam (1512) is the most famous Fresco in the Sistine Chapel

According to the Jewish tradition the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses. Today virtually all secular scholars accept that the Pentateuch "was in reality a composite work, the product of many hands and periods.” In the first half of the 20th century the dominant theory regarding its origins was the documentary hypothesis, which supposes that the Torah was produced about 450 BC by combining four distinct, complete and coherent documents, with Genesis 1 from one source (called Priestly source [P]), and Genesis 2 from another (Jahwist [J]). Since the last quarter of the 20th century there has been renewed interest in alternative theories which see [P] (Genesis 1) as an editor adding to an existing [J] document, rather than as a complete and independent document; like the documentary hypothesis, contemporary theories also see Genesis 1-2, with their strong Babylonian influence and anti-Babylonian agenda, as a product of the exilic and post-exilic period (6th-5th centuries BC).

Theology and interpretation

Questions of genre

Genre means, roughly, a "kind" of literature: biography, for example, is of a different genre from romance, poetry a different genre from history, and the reader expects different things from different genres. The genre of Genesis 1-2 (and Genesis 1-11, the larger whole to which the two chapters belong) remains subject to differences of opinion, and modern scholars can only make informed judgments. One inevitable conclusion is that Genesis 1-2 represent theology: the chapters concern the actions of God, and the meaning of those acts. Possibly the authors also believed they were writing science, in the sense of an accurate description of the cosmos and its beginnings as known to them and their contemporaries—a flat earth surrounded by infinite water, with a solid sky-dome set with stars—"a scientific description of Creation from the perspective of ritual, and without myth," according to a recent study of the numerological basis of Genesis. The story is also presented with a clear chronological progression, as part of a history which leads from the moment of first creation to the destruction of the First Temple, leading Thorkild Jacobsen to classify it as "mythical history".

The theology of Genesis 1-2

The "Creation week" narrative forms a monotheistic polemic on creation-theology directed against pagan creation myths, the sequence of events building to the establishment of the Biblical Sabbath (in Hebrew: שַׁבָּת, Shabbat) commandment as its climax. Where the Babylonian myths saw the world as beginning negatively (man began as nothing more than a "lackey of the gods to keep them supplied with food." but becoming increasingly better Genesis starts out with God characterizing creation as "very good" with man and woman at the apex of created order. Things then fall away from this initial state of goodness. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree "in the midst of the garden" in disobedience of the divine command ("lest [they] die"). Ten generations later, in the time of Noah, "the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." God resolved to destroy his world by returning it to the waters of chaos, but sparing one family which was not evil and from whom a new creation could begin.

Creationism

Creationism springs from the belief that should one element of the biblical narrative be shown to be untrue, then all others will follow: "Tamper with the Book of Genesis and you undermine the very foundations of Christianity...If Genesis 1 is not accurate, then there's no way to be certain that the rest of Scripture tells the truth." Thus a literal genre—Genesis as history—is substituted for the symbolic—Genesis as theology—and the text is placed in conflict with science. "Young Earth" creationists believe that the seven "days" of Genesis 1 correspond to normal 24-hour days, while Day-age creationists, more willing to reconcile their religious beliefs with modern science, hold that each "day" represents an "age" of perhaps millions or even billions of years. Creationists read Genesis 2 as history, holding that God breathed into the nostrils of a being formed out of dust, and from whose side (or rib) the first woman was formed.

See also

• Enuma Elish

• Creation myth

• Sacred history

• Biblical criticism

• Documentary hypothesis

• Timeline of the Bible