In the following sections, we will read through the text of Genesis and comment on place of interest along the way. It would be helpful to read the lessons that follow with a text of the chapter alongside.
Verses 1:1-2
1. 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.'
a. ‘beginning’: an absolute beginning, in Christian theology this has led to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, or 'out of nothing'
b. ‘heaven and earth’: denotes totality and order — ordered cosmos.
c. This verse functions as a title/summary for the whole chapter. It describes the finished product.
2. 'formless and empty'
a. ‘formless’: waste, nothingness, wilderness, desert, unable to sustain life
b. ‘empty’: void, uninhabited, without life
c. This verse backtracks as it were and presents the disordered and empty chaos which God will then order and fill to make it 'good.'
3. ‘darkness was over the surface of the deep’: darkness and the chaotic sea were standard elements of ancient near eastern cosmogonies (accounts of creation), however, in Genesis they present no challenge to God’s creative activity as they do in other stories from surrounding cultures
4. 'the Spirit of God was hovering over the water'
a. ‘Spirit of God’: the Hebrew word may be translated either wind or spirit, spirit is preferred because throughout the Old Testament [abbreviated OT] where wind is meant it is destructive, where spirit it is beneficient as here
b. ‘hovering’: verb usually associated with the flight of eagles; God hovers over the chaos keeping it under his control, preparing for creative activity
5. Summary: God is presented as the sole actor in the creation of the cosmos. The dual chaotic elements against which the coming creative work will take place are introduced, although these elements readily subject without conflict to the creative word of God.
Verses 1:3-31
1. the first day
a. announcement/command/execution
- creation by fiat: God’s word calls into existence what is not; execution formula, ‘and it was so’ emphasizes the efficacy of the divine command, God orders and it is done
- light: the opposite of the darkness of 1:2; a morally significant term; an appropriate first step in bringing creation from chaos to order; all creation takes place in the light; the source of the light ambiguous, but almost certainly God is to be seen as the source independent of the luminaries, especially of light in its fuller metaphorical, moral sense
b. approval/separation/divine word
- ‘good’: God is from the beginning evaluating, from the beginning he is Judge, from the beginning there is moral differentiation
- ‘separated’: there is also order, God assigns to each its place, that approval precedes separation emphasizes that light is good on its own terms
- ‘called’: naming is an exercise of power and sovereignty in the ancient world, to name is to exercise authority over the thing named
- Creator assigns everything its 'value, place and meaning'
2. the second day
a. ‘expanse’: Hebrew raqia, from verb raqa: ‘to spread out’ (compare Job 37:18); phenomenological language (language of appearance) being used (both stars and birds are said to be in the sky, v. 14, 20); typical ancient Near Eastern (present Middle East) view of the cosmos featured a dome like sky resting upon a flat, circular land surrounded by water
b. ‘water above/waters below’: rain and seas
3. the third day
a. ‘various kinds’: emphasis not simply on classification, but on delineating bounds and implying that bounds are to be kept; ‘kinds’ appears frequently in priestly material along with ‘separation’ both having ethical implications (Lev. 19:19) ; remember the account is prescriptive not merely descriptive, it saying how things out to be, not only how things were
b. The first set of days has progressively focused toward a productive land: heavens and earth/earth and waters/earth and productive earth.