NOTES for Gen 1:1-2:3

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.