NOTES for Gen 1:14-23

Today's reading contains a very vivid verse that truly says a great deal about the essence of the human being. "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them". Look: God created the human being, male and female. Elementary knowledge of arithmetic is enough to count: man and woman are two people, not one!

And from this several conclusions immediately follow. First, it is clear that we are speaking about humanity, about people, and not about "one specimen." Second, it is important to God that this humanity could not consist only of men or only of women. Reproduction has nothing to do with it; for God it is no problem to create a being that reproduces by division or budding. The point is precisely that the fullness of human qualities is revealed in mutual complementarity. Third, this clarification of the difference between man and woman is made only for the human being. It is not said of animals, "male and female He created them." And this means that the psychological and spiritual differences between man and woman have greater value and greater significance than the differences between animals of different sexes.

When reading about the beginning of the world, we need to remember that the Book of Genesis, like the whole Bible, is written not about the past but about the present. In a special ancient symbolic language, it reflects truths that will never change, regardless of the development of physics or history. This short account testifies to the inseparable connection between what surrounds us - light, water, earth, trees and grasses, fish, animals, and birds - and the One who stands behind all of it and is not part of this world. How can this mystery be conveyed? The world did not create itself, and we did not create it. There is the One who is responsible for this world, who grants the world existence and rejoices in its beauty, seeing that it is "very good." If we learn to contemplate this mystery, then everything good and beautiful in this world will speak to us about Him, about the One who created the world in the very beginning and gave it to us.

At first glance the biblical Poem of Creation may appear to be a purely mythological text, and many people view it exactly that way, as an ancient myth that entered the Bible because no other versions of cosmogony, the teaching about the origin of the world, existed in antiquity. Conversely, there are also readers who are certain that the biblical Poem of Creation is history that must be understood literally, exactly as it is written.

What, then, does the author of the poem have in mind? And when was it written? The commonly accepted view among Bible scholars today is that this poem, like the entire so-called Prologue of the Book of Genesis, the first eleven chapters of the book, appeared in Babylon during the Babylonian Exile. In those times people already knew enough about the world to reject a mythological picture of it. The issue is clearly not that the author lacked the means to describe the reality he wanted to describe. He simply uses the traditional language of the so-called cosmogonic poetry of his time; in his day there were already poems narrating the origin and formation of the cosmos, and the author creates a Yahwist version of such a poem. It is no accident that he begins the history of the world with God creating "the heavens and the earth." However one understands this "heavens and earth," and people have understood it very differently, one thing is clear: the issue is the universe in all its fullness and wholeness.

One can, of course, destroy this wholeness; the second verse of the first chapter speaks precisely of the "earth" torn away from "heaven," of destroyed wholeness, and then chaos appears in the world. More precisely, it is the part torn away from the whole that plunges into chaos: it becomes formless and without qualities, "formless and void" in the Synodal translation. This is exactly what the "earth" becomes when it is torn away from "heaven," a part of the universe separated from the whole.

Then the majestic picture of creation unfolds, already in space and time, which appear together with creation itself. And this creation contains a certain drama, which the author of the poem does not describe directly, but hints at: at first, on the "first day," all creation is permeated with light, not physical light, but the light of God's presence, which in Yahwist spiritual experience is often accompanied by radiance. But on the "second day" something happens in the world: the radiant "one day" (exactly so: one, not first in a series of other days) is replaced by chaos. Water bursts into the world, the very water mentioned in the description of the "earth" torn away from "heaven," water as a symbol of chaos. God overcomes this chaos by setting a limit to it and creating the world as if anew, inside the water, building there, in the space He created within the chaos, a new world in which we came to live. There, in this new world, the human being will also appear, so that in turn he may take part in the drama of the universe, where he will have a special role, and only on the human being himself will it depend how he fulfills it.

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.