NOTES for Gen 1:1-2:1
The biblical Poem of Creation recalls the cosmogonic poetry of the pagan world. In Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece there were similar works describing the origin of the world, its emergence from chaos and transformation into a cosmos, orderly and harmonious. This process was called cosmogony. At first glance it may appear that the sacred writer simply created a Yahwistic version of an ordinary cosmogonic poem, attributing to God what pagan authors attributed to gods or to the elements of nature. But in reality this is not quite so. The language and symbolic imagery of the biblical poem really do resemble the language and symbolic imagery of Near Eastern cosmogonic poetry. But the biblical poem also differs significantly from pagan cosmogonic poetry.
Above all, the beginning of the poem, its first two verses, stands out. The cosmogonies of the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks all begin with a description of chaos, sometimes in the image of a great ocean existing from eternity. In the biblical author, however, God from the very beginning creates the world as cosmos, not as chaos. The sacred writer speaks of God creating "heaven and earth." Different commentators have interpreted these words in different ways, but in any case it is clear that the expression "heaven and earth" describes the whole universe, and a universe that is not chaotic but fully ordered.
God does not create chaos; He creates cosmos. Images that recall chaos appear only in the second verse of the poem, where it speaks of "earth" considered as if separately from the whole of which it is a part. Here the possibility of chaos really does appear: if the whole universe created by God is torn apart, then chaos can indeed reign in such parts cut off from the whole. But God does not want chaos and does not create it.
His will is constantly present in the world. Each "day of creation" is determined by God's word, which defines His purpose for that day and the meaning of what is happening. Of course, the forces of nature placed in the world by God act within it. But God does not abandon His creation. He is constantly near; the world is always under His attentive gaze. And all its becoming is not an accident, not the play of certain natural forces or spirits dwelling in the world, but the fulfillment of God's purpose for the world, for what it is meant to become.
In this sense, from the very beginning God conceived the world as His Kingdom. After all, what is a kingdom if not the authority of a king extending over a certain place where the laws established by him operate? And from the very beginning the world was precisely such a place. A place where God reigns. And if today the world is not wholly and not always like this, that is not the norm but only a deviation from it. A deviation that God will sooner or later bring to an end. The whole Bible is about this: as sacred history and as the history of Revelation, and also as the history of Salvation.