In the previous post in this series-long deep-dive into the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we looked at the Genesis 1 creation story as a whole. This study suggested that the story was intended less as an explanation of the world’s origins than it was an act of theological resistance, using the language and motifs of Babylon’s creation myth(s) to define the God of the Israelites against the gods of their Babylonian conquerors. Over the next few posts, I’ll be looking at the details of this story, to dig down further to just what it is trying to say about God and the world God made. Today this starts with Genesis 1.1-2, a short preamble describing the state of affairs before God’s creative act.
(As a reminder, this series makes rough use of my Integral Hermeneutic method, which involves the five steps of: Experience, Encounter, Explore, Challenge, and Expand.)
Text
[1.1] In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, [2] the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (NRSV)
Experience & Encounter
These two verses mark an interesting start to the passage, especially in this translation. I experience them as a great mystery. The text paints a vivid, if confusing image of a primordial state in which everything is an undifferentiated, watery mass. We ‘meet’ God here, but not really. We are told this God will create the heavens and the earth, but it hasn’t happened yet. All we have is a snapshot of the universe in its pre-created state and a promise of things to come. I also can’t help but wonder about the translation here compared to the more famous one that sets 1.1 as its own complete sentence; why the change? And does it matter? And, as a Christian, I’m also used to the ‘wind’ in 1.2 being understood to be a reference to God’s Spirit, which makes me wonder what’s happening here.
And so these are the questions that will guide the ‘Explore’ section of today’s study:
- What’s happening with the syntax of 1.1 and does it matter?
- What is the meaning of the mysterious way 1.2 talks about the pre-creation world?
- What is happening with the wind in 1.2, and why might this translation be preferred over ‘Spirit’?
Explore
The strange syntax of 1.1
One of the fascinating things about reading ancient texts is how much strangeness — and scholarly debate about that strangeness — our translations hide. This first verse of the Bible provides a great example of this. Its grammar is very strange — so strange that comment about it is not just a new phenomenon, but has been consistently discussed since Ancient times. At the heart of the question is whether 1.1 is an independent clause, or whether it’s dependent on 1.2. The difference is that between the more familiar English translation, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” and something like what we see in the NRSV above, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was….” The former reading has been preferred in many circles historically because it may more readily allow for a “creation out of nothing” interpretation (though it doesn’t require it). But that’s not a question the text itself seems to care about, and if it did care, it would have found a clearer way of saying it. (If you are interested in this debate, see Barton & Muddiman 42, Walton 124f, Sarna (JPS) 5, Smith 45, and Carr.)*
While I don’t think which option we choose makes much of a difference, I do think there are a couple of things that make me prefer to take it as a subordinate clause. First, the word reshit, ‘beginning’, both elsewhere in the Bible and in texts in related languages, refers almost exclusively to the first part of something, for example the start of a king’s reign (Jeremiah 26.1 etc.) or the firstfruits of a harvest (Exodus 23.19, etc.). So it’s not talking about a beginning in abstract terms, but as the beginning of something, namely God’s creative activity. (See any of the Walton commentaries in the bibliography for more on this). And second, there was a convention in Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) creation myths, including the Enuma Elish, which as we saw last time provided source material for Genesis 1, to begin with a subordinate clause describing a primordial state of affairs (Sarna (1989) 5, Carr). So it could be that the confounding grammar of Genesis 1.1 may have been a clumsy attempt at recreating such an opening. If this argument seems like a stretch, perhaps a contemporary analogy might help: Imagine you encountered a text in a foreign language that appeared to be based on “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” You notice that this foreign story starts with a strangely worded expression that could be translated as “Once upon a time.” Knowing that not only does Goldilocks start this way but also that it’s the conventional way of starting a fairy tale in English, it would make a lot of sense for you to decide that this is what was intended. That’s essentially what this argument is saying about Genesis 1.1.
Before moving on to the next question, there are a couple other details about this verse that have caused a lot of scholarly comment. First, 1.1 refers to God by the generic word Elohim instead of YHWH, the personal divine name associated with the covenant with Israel (and conventionally not spoken in Judaism, and translated as ‘the LORD’ in English Bibles). This is notable because the distribution of these two ways of talking about God within the Pentateuch was one of the original observations that led biblical scholars to posit that the Pentateuch made use of earlier source documents. The presence of Elohim here here is one of a few reasons why scholars generally assign Genesis 1 to a priestly editor, since this way of talking about God aligns well with the themes associated with this tradition (see Smith for a discussion of Genesis 1 as a ‘priestly’ text.). Connected to this, this choice could also be an implicit claim to monotheism — the point of the story is not that YHWH — and not any other god — created, but that the one and only God is the creator (Smith 48, Sarna (1989) 5, Carr). It’s also notable that this creator God is introduced as a given of the situation, without preamble or origin story; this sets Genesis 1 apart from its ANE precedents, which go into great detail about the origins of the gods (Sarna (1989) 5).
Second, there has also been a lot of commentary on the word translated as ‘created’, bara’. What’s curious about this verb is that within the Old Testament it is used exclusively with God as its subject (Barton & Muddiman 42, Sarna (1989) 5, Walton 128, Smith 48). It is used five times in the Genesis 1 story: here at the start, in the creation of sea monsters (and other creatures of air and sea) (1.21) and humanity (1.27), and then twice at the end in 2.3-4. Other, more common terms for creation are used elsewhere in the passage. While across history, some of suggested this word implies creation out of nothing, this seems unlikely, for a few reasons. First, Hebrew had a limited vocabulary, relying a lot on metaphorical extension for even basic terms, so it would be very surprising for it to have a word denoting such an abstract idea. Second, creation out of nothing is not a clear teaching of the Old Testament, and feels out of place here where it is followed in the next clause by a description of the primordial elements out of which God would create the world. And third, likely Semitic cognates do contain connotations of manufacture (e.g., paring a reed for writing or making an arrow from a stick). But, for whatever reason, it does seem that the word took on a strong sense of divine uniqueness in Hebrew. If nothing else, the use of bara’ signals God’s transcendence and ‘wholly-otherness’. (For more on this, see Sarna (1989) 5, Smith 49).
What God creates is described as “heaven and earth,” a common grammatical construction that uses two extremes to refer to the whole range of things in between and encompassed within them. (NIV BTSB, Sarna (1989) 6, Smith 48).
With all this in mind, we’re ready to see what 1.2 has to say about the state of things before God’s creative acts.
The Pre-Creation World
Genesis 1.2 describes the state of affairs before creation. As much as “creation out of nothing” would become important in later centuries, it is not really in view here. Rather, the world already ‘existed’ in some manner, but is described as a “formless void.” The Hebrew expression behind this is tohu wabohu. The rest of the verse further describes or define this state of affairs: “darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.“ There’s quite a bit to unpack here!
Tohu wabohu
By the standards of biblical Hebrew, tohu was a fairly common word, showing up roughly twenty times. It’s variously translated by such concepts as futility, emptiness, vanity, waste, wilderness, desolation and confusion. The tie that binds these ideas appears to be a lack of function: a path that doesn’t lead anywhere, a judge that does not uphold justice, land that is not usable, or a city laid waste. Bohu (the wa- is just a conjunction meaning ‘and’) is far rarer, appearing only two other places. One of these, Isaiah 34.9, fits very well with the semantics of tohu described above. The other, Jeremiah 4.23, pairs it with tohu just like we have in Genesis 1.2. So, this could be an example of Hebrew parallelism — a common poetic feature of the language, which pairs near synonyms — or a hendiadys, a common rhetorical device in which two words are used to describe a single concept (e.g., “The soup was nice and warm”). The exact parallel in Jeremiah is significant, as it draws a direct comparison between the state of the land of Judah after the Babylonian invasion and the un-created state of the world. The direction of the comparison is difficult to know, since both texts likely date from the sixth century BCE. Either is striking: If Jeremiah is alluding to Genesis, it’s saying the destruction of Jerusalem is akin to a return to a world outside of God’s intentions and plan; if Genesis is alluding to Jeremiah, it’s a bit more hopeful: if God can create something good from disorder and confusion once, God can do it again! So, we leave talk of tohu wabohu with a hypothesis that it refers less to emptiness than it does to a lack of purpose: The world was tohu wabohu in that it was not good for anything. Let’s see what the rest of the verse might have to say about this idea.
Tehom, the Deep
As noted in the previous post, tehom, the word translated as ‘the deep’ or ‘the abyss’ in English translations, refers to a primeval ocean that in ANE cosmology was believed to have covered the world before creation. The word is cognate with the name of the Babylonian goddess Tiamat, who was the great antagonist of the Enuma Elish (Walton & Keener, Carr, Sarna (1989) 6, Walton 145; Barton & Muddiman 42 reject this connection, but offer no evidence in support of their determination). But in Genesis 1 what Sarna described well as “the female dragonesque personification of the primordial salt-water ocean, representing the aggressive forces of primitive chaos that contended against the god of creativity” is here “thoroughly demythologized” (Sarna (1989) 6), and becomes nothing more than “a passive precursor to creation” (Carr). Interestingly, tehom is personified elsewhere in the Bible (Genesis 49.29, Deuteronomy 33.13, and Habakkuk 3.10); this, combined with some odd grammatical particularities in which the noun behaves like a proper name, suggests there may have been some remnant of a deified primordial ocean in ancient Hebrew culture, and only makes the thoroughness of the demythologization here more compelling (Sarna (1989) 6).
Beyond the connections with the Enuma Elish, there are also parallels here with Egyptian mythology. This stands to reason since, from the time of the Patriarchs through until the rise of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires, the Levant was largely within Egypt’s sphere of influence. One such text imagines a pre-creation state in which nonexistence is described in terms of two primordial elements of chaos: water and darkness. While creation brought order, purpose, and destiny to the world, this disorder continues to be present in the ocean depths, the darkness of the night, and desert wastelands (Walton and Keener) — all three of which we see here in Genesis 1.2. So here we have another creation myth from the region in which creation is contrasted to that which is unusable or purposeless, using the same symbols and language as 1.2.
Creation as Destiny
All this seems to support the initial hypothesis that the contrast Genesis 1.1-2 sets up (and which is fulfilled in the rest of the story) is less between non-existence and existence or evil and good than it is between disorder and order, which are understood to mean purposelessness and functionality. In starting with a primordial state that is without structure or function, it sets up the rest of the story to provide the world identity and destiny (Walton and Keener, cf. Smith 50, Barker, Goldberg).
Wind or Spirit (or Breath)?
I’ll say at the outset here that this is a question of translation, not of meaning. The Hebrew word here, ruaḥ, means ‘spirit,’ breath,’ ‘wind’, and less commonly ‘force’. It isn’t that it has three or four distinct meanings, but that it has one meaning, but English does not have a word with a wide enough semantic range to encompass it. So those of us who think in English are left in a difficult position: Whether we translate it as ‘wind,’ ‘breath’, or ‘spirit’, we’re bound to lose something in translation. With that in mind, let’s look at some considerations for what ruaḥ means in this text.
It’s probably safe to say that the arguments in favour of translating ruaḥ as ‘wind’ are primarily archaeological and comparative. Just as primordial watery chaos was a feature in creation myths across the ANE, so too are winds. In the Enuma Elish, the god Anu creates four winds, which Marduk later uses to trap and “stir up” the primordial ocean, Tiamat. This image is almost identical to that found in Daniel 7.2, where Daniel dreams of “the four winds of heaven, stirring up the great sea,” strongly suggesting this was an image that had some cultural currency among Jews of the Exile. Also promoting a ‘wind’ interpretation for Genesis 1.2 is the common motif, found in Babylonian, Canaanite, and even in Psalm 104, of a creator god who fights the forces of disorder in a chariot that rides upon the winds (Smith 54, Walton). Also in this vein, Baal, a Canaanite sky god, whose iconography is very similar to what we find for YHWH in excavations of Israelite and Judahite cities, was surrounded by a full meteorological entourage, including winds. So it would be no surprise at all if God had a divine wind at hand to help in the creation process (Smith 54f).
If the arguments in favour of ‘wind’ are primarily comparative, those in favour of ‘Spirit’ are primarily theological. As we saw extensively in our recent series on the Holy Spirit, there has been a long and honoured history of associating God’s Spirit with creation. We see this particularly in the Wisdom Literature (which many biblical scholars assign to the same priestly school of thought as Genesis 1), and in later reflection in the Second Temple period, and, for obvious Trinitarian reason, among the Church Fathers. Most of these reflections understand the Spirit of God to be synonymous with the breath of life (a theme to which I’ll return shortly), but Job 26.12-13 stands out. Here God’s ruaḥ is paralleled with God’s power, skill, and piercing hand, all words denoting strength.This brings to mind all of the places in the Old Testament in which the presence of God’s Spirit imparted some special ability or strength (e.g., the story of Samson in Judges 13-16).
But the heavy weighting of these creation-centric Wisdom texts to understanding the Spirit of God as the breath of life leads us to the third candidate for translating ruaḥ here, ‘breath’. This has had virtually no representation in English translations, but has a lot to commend it. The breath of God is, in fact, commonly associated with creation in the Bible:
- “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.” (Psalm 33.6)
- “When you send forth your breath, [the animals] are created, and you renew the face of the ground” (Psalm 104.30)
- “He sends out his word, and melts [the waters]; he makes his breath [or wind?] blow, and the waters flow” (Psalm 147.18)
Reading ruaḥ as ‘breath’ here could also tie this primordial state in with the divine speech act that will follow in the rest of the story (Smith 56, Carr). This in turn would fit in with all the places in the Scriptures where God’s ruaḥ is paired with God’s word. In this way, all of creation could be said to be infused with ruaḥ by means of divine speech. This is an interesting approach not only in light of Christian Trinitarian thought, in which God’s Word and Spirit are seen as “God’s two hands” (to quote St. Irenaeus of Lyons), but also to medieval Jewish mystical traditions which involve sacred, mystical, creative speech.
Again, all this is a problem of translation more than interpretation. The different nuances of the Hebrew all add something important and they flow easily one into the other. The best option I can think of in English that might start to do justice to the breadth of the Hebrew is something like “life-force,” even if it feels a bit artificial as a translation.
No matter how we translate it, God’s ruaḥ is said to be “moving” or “hovering” over the waters. This is another idea that is hard to translate into English. The word, meraḥepet, is connected in Hebrew and closely related languages with the action of birds. Syriac uses it to describe the protective, brooding, action of a mother hen, an interpretation which has been seen in Christian circles since ancient times (Walton, ACCS). The Ugaritic however, uses it to describe the action of circling vultures — a rather different connotation (Walton)! The latter might be more appropriate if we a connection between the ruaḥ’s movement and the violent winds of Babylonian mythology. It’s really hard to know which road to take. Perhaps it’s best to split the difference and interpret it as describing God’s undefined presence hovering over the waters — perhaps menacing, perhaps comforting. To risk eisegesis here, we might say that God’s activity is always for good, but it doesn’t always feel good. Perhaps the same can be said for God’s presence in the moment of full potential and possibility before creation begins.
Expand
So then, how does this contribute to our understanding of creation? I’ll answer this in the form of a targum, a loose, interpretative paraphrase of a text:
At the start of when God created the heavens and the earth and everything in between, the earth was a wasteland, without order or function, and darkness covered the primordial abyss, while God’s life-force hovered and moved upon the waters.
It’s a scene that remains full of mystery, but is also full of potential. In the next post, we’ll start looking at how God brings out that potential.
* For more information, see the series bibliography.
Matthew Root 
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