Speech and Separation: Genesis 1.3-25, Part I

The other day we looked at the first two verses of Genesis 1, which describe the primordial, ‘not-yet’ state of the world before God’s creative acts begin. It sets a mysterious scene, filled with elements that are as of yet unformed and therefore useless, but are also full of potential. Today we’ll look at days one through five of creation, on which we see how God begins to bring that potential to fruition.

Text

[3] Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. [4] And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. [5] God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. [6] And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ [7] So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. [8] God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. [9] And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. [10] God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. [11] Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. [12] The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. [13] And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

[14] And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, [15] and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. [16] God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. [17] God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, [18] to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. [19] And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day. [20] And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.’ [21] So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. [22] God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’ [23] And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day. [24] And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. [25] God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good. (NRSV)

Experience & Encounter

A few things jump out to me upon reading this familiar text again. Overall, we see a systematic movement from disorder to order, with every step building off the last. This is done through speech acts, in which God sorts the primordial elements. I also note the general regularity of the text, with most of the creation events following a set pattern. Finally, the text is clearly working within a different basic understanding of how the world is structured — I’d like to know more about that.

Who we meet here once again is God. What stood out to me on this reading is that this is a God who is in complete control of the situation: God calls, and the primordial elements respond.

These observations set up the questions I’ll focus on in the ‘Explore’ section:

• What is the significance of God creating by speaking?
• What is the significance of God creating by sorting or separating?
• What should I know about the cosmology of Genesis 1?
• How does the conventional pattern of activity in the story contribute to how we understand it?

Due to space considerations, I’ll address the first two of these questions today, and the next two tomorrow.

Explore

Divine Speech and Creation

Associating ‘creation’ in the Bible with Genesis 1, I tend to think of God’s creation through speech as one of the most notable features of the biblical understanding of creation. But, while we do see it also as major element of creation in Psalm 33.6-9 (and in the New Testament, Romans 4.17), it’s not a major theme in the other creation passages in the Bible, such as Genesis 2, Psalms 74, 104, and 147, or Job 26. This sets the Genesis 1 story, and the role of speech in it, apart. As Smith points out, this is the only creation story in the Bible in which God’s creative act involves “speaking, calling, and blessing” (Smith 64).*

Creation by divine speech was not a new idea, being found throughout Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) creation myths (Smith 64). But whereas, for example, in the Enuma Elish, Marduk’s creative speech only starts late in the process, once his victory over his enemies is complete, here it is the sole mode of creation. This absence of conflict in Genesis 1 is remarkable for just how different it is from earlier ANE creation stories — not just the Enuma Elish, but also all of its Mesopotamian precursors, Egyptian creation myths, and West Semitic myths, including those of the Canaanites, Phoenicians, and Hebrews. Primordial violence was one of the most consistent features of creation mythology across whole region: the supreme god had to demonstrate his prowess and authority by conquering his enemies (Walton (2001), Barton & Muddiman 41, Sarna 1966) 22).

Note how I included the Hebrews above. For the Old Testament’s many creation texts exist in a kind of spectrum of violence, with Genesis 1 and Psalm 33 on one extreme, strongly advocating creation by divine speech alone, and Psalm 74.12-17 and Job 26 on the other extreme, being grounded in the regional traditions of creation through divine conflict (Smith 69). These are worth pulling out in contrast to the story being told about God in Genesis 1:

• “You divided the sea by your might; / you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. / You crushed the heads of Leviathan; / you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.” (Psalm 74.13-14)
• “ He binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not torn open by them … The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astounded at his rebuke. / By his power he stilled the Sea; by his skill he struck down Rahab. / By his wind the heavens were made fair; / his hand pierced the fleeing serpent. / … The thunder of his power who can understand?’” (Job 26.8, 11-14)

Even Psalm 104, which is overall pretty peaceful in its vision of creation, describes YHWH as riding on war-chariot made of storm clouds and routing the primordial waters through the intimidation of his thunderbolts! (If you’re interested in these comparisons, I’ve made a chart Comparing Creation Texts.) This is clearly a very different vision from what Genesis 1 is trying to establish. The point is that in Genesis 1, the primordial waters do not need to be routed or divided “by [God’s] might,” nor do the sea monsters need to have their heads broken in; they simply obey. God’s authority is unchallenged and secrure from the start. (Carr, Walton (2001), Sarna (1966) 12). When God speaks, the nascent creation listens. Zooming out from the story itself, this is noteworthy also because it sets the faithful creation apart from humanity, which throughout the Scriptures is shown repeatedly not to listen (Brueggemann).

A related theme to divine speech is the act of naming. This is another feature of Genesis 1 (and, as we’ll see in a future post, Genesis 2) that pulls from common cultural ideas in the region. The Enuma Elish describes the primeval state as “when on high the heaven had not been named, and below the firm ground had not been named;” similarly, an Egyptian creation story describes it as “when no name of anything had yet been named” (Sarna (1989) 7). To name something was to understand it, give it an identity, and therefore a function and destiny. Naming is therefore an essential act of a ruler over their subjects (Barton & Muddiman 43).

So again, the focus on divine speech in Genesis 1, particularly in light of its removal of any trace of conflict from the story, establishes God’s unchallenged authority over everything in creation.

Before leaving the topic of divine speech, it’s important to note that this aspect of Genesis 1 proved to be very fertile in Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity. Putting language at the heart of God’s creative acts, especially with its deep connections to the Wisdom traditions, allowed for interesting parallels with Middle Platonism, in which the Logos, ‘Word’, was understood to be a mediator in creation and to be the reality underlying everything in the world. We see this in Jewish thinkers like Philo of Alexandria (1st C CE) and in the prologue to John’s Gospel, with its direct parallel to Genesis 1.1, “In the beginning was the Word…”. But all that would come centuries later and the idea that the word is the “principle of creation” is most certainly anachronistic and not what Genesis 1 has in mind (Smith).

Creation by Separation

Another interesting aspect of the Genesis 1 creation story is that it has God create primarily by separating one thing from another: light from dark, clouds from water, and land from sea.  It would seem that the motif of separation was more central in Egyptian mythology than elsewhere in the region. Whereas differentiation is only found in Mesopotamia in the separation of the sky from the water, it features as an essential element in Egyptian conception of existence: “In Egyptian accounts existence was associated with something having been differentiated. The god Atum is conceptualized as the primordial monad—the singularity embodying all the potential of the cosmos, from whom all things were separated and thereby created” (Walton (2011) 28)). James P. Allen put is even more simply: “Creation is the process through which the One became the Many” (Allen 57). According to Allen, this in no way diminishes Atum’s unity, but rather realizes his potential: “In creation the Monad is not disintegrated but realized. Atum continues to exist, both as the sum of all creation … and as its continuing source of life” (Allen 58).

There are two things that jump out here. First, in this way of thinking, creation by separation is a natural corollary of the existence of the primordial, undifferentiated mess of Genesis 1.2. If un-creation is marked by disorder, then creation is going to involve sorting and separating everything out to where it should be in order for it to fulfill its divinely-destined purpose. But secondly, there is both potential and challenge involved with this kind of creation. In differentiating one thing from another, God creates the possibility of love but also the possibility of rejection. This theme of the challenge and possibility inherent within multiplicity seems to be common in contemporary Jewish readings of Genesis 1. Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson, for example, reflects: “Creation moves from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to diversity, and, paradoxically, from chaos to order.” And, Rabbi Stephen Greenberg notes:

Creation begins with the possibility of two. Two is a rickety thing, a temptation, a suspicious thing, an ecstatic, thrilling, dangerous thing. Two always have a history. The pain and pleasure of difference, the tragedy and glory of the lines that separate things are the subtext of the first chapters of Genesis. (Greenberg 43)

This is something worth considering further.

Challenge

The idea that creation by separation introduces “the tragedy and glory of the lines that separate things” introduces the first challenge in section in this series. After all, these lines of division are at the heart of much of the postmodern critique of Western culture, and traditional Christianities along with it. While specifics of race, gender, and sexuality will have to wait until future posts, it’s worth looking at the phenomenon of difference as a whole here, “in the beginning.”

Creation starts with God making divisions between light and dark, sky and sea, land and water. It’s through this process that the created environment that will become the home of the plants and animals is made. Later, we’ll see this process repeat itself in divisions between male and female, good and evil, sacred and profane, kosher and prohibited, between Israelite and Gentile, and between the tribes of Israel. Again, all this fits well with the idea that existence in the ANE mindset is about having a function, purpose, and destiny. But, the divisions of the Genesis 1 story are not as tidy in reality as they are in conception. As I previously put it:

Between night and day there is always dawn and dusk, between sea and land there are intertidal zones and wetlands. Among the animal world too, our conceptions and categories fall short: There are mammals that lay eggs, there are fish who bear live young, there are carnivorous plants, fish with lungs, aquatic mammals, and even flightless bats. So diverse and unexpected is the created world that the Church Fathers believed that God created everything that could possibly have been created. So, as much as our Creation narratives love straight lines of division, the fact is, in our world as it has been given to us, when we see a straight line, we know that it is a human hand at work, and not God’s.

The divisions laid out in Genesis 1 are simultaneously essential and insufficient to fully describe the world God has made. For not only do the edges between light and dark, water and land, and so on, exist, but they are the places where God’s creative work is most on display, being the most diverse and fruitful parts of creation.(For more on this point, see the above link, as well as my posts on subversion of expectation and ‘the edge’.)

Expand

There’s much more to say about this passage that will wait until the next post, but what can we say about it so far?

First, we’ve seen that the focus on divine speech in Genesis 1, particularly in light of the complete absence of conflict in the story, demonstrates God’s unchallenged authority. As much as we may have intertextual and theological reasons to talk about the priority of ‘the Word’, this does not seem to be a concern of this text itself. We’ve also looked at the motif of creation by separation, and how it’s a consequence of the pre-existence of the primordial unformed state described in 1.2.

What God does in creation, then, is give unformed, functionless matter form and function, and therefore a purpose and destiny. But we also saw that the neat, straight dividing lines we see in the story are not what we actually see in the created world. The world is full of edges, borderlands, and in-between places, and these are actually the places where God’s creativity is in its most abundant display.

 

* See the series bibliography for full details.