BEFORE HISTORY

GOD THE CREATOR AND JUDGE – HEBREW MYTHOLOGY

1-2. 4a GOD CREATES THE WORLD

P

IN reading this story we have to remember that, to the ancient Hebrew, the earth was a nearly round flat surface, supported partly by a sea which completely encircled it and partly by a mass of waters beneath. The stars, sun, and moon were fixed in the solid arch of heaven, the first being infinitesimal in size compared with the other two.

There are eight works of creation. Notice how the second four correspond to the first four:

1st day: Light.
2nd day: Heaven, and division of waters.
3rd day: (i) Land appears. (ii) Vegetation.
4th day: Sun, moon and stars.
5th day: Fish and birds.
6th day: (i) Land animals. (ii) Man (who until after the flood is a vegetarian).
7th day: Rest – the first Sabbath.

Almost certainly, the story is developed from an ancient Babylonian myth, with which it has striking similarities – and striking differences. In the Babylonian version there is no notion of there being only "one God", and the gods come into existence during the process of creation; and creation receives opposition from the demon of darkness.

It is impossible to say when it reached the Israelites. It may conceivably have been in the very distant past, on their original migration from Mesopotamia, round about 2,000 years before Christ. It may have come to them via the Canaanites during the Israelite occupation of Palestine about the twelfth century. But the contact of ancient peoples with each other was such that there are many occasions when it might have been acquired.

Some elements in the story appear also to come from Phoenician and Egyptian sources.

In any case, it got into its present state by a process of purification right up to the time when P handled it in the sixth century.

Why eight works in six days? The answer is that the former are an older element of the story than the latter. The eight works are Babylonian, while the six days, followed by the Sabbath, bear an obviously Jewish stamp.

Chapter 1

1. A summary of what is to follow – a sort of chapter heading.

3. Light is independent of the sun and moon, which are created only on the fourth day to be its "receptacles".

6-8. The waters under the firmament are beneath e earth: from them our oceans well up through openings, The waters above the firmament are above the sky. The sky has windows. When these are open, it rains.

7. "and it was so" – accidentally transferred from the end of verse 6 where it belongs (and where it appears in the Greek version).

16. The stars appear to be an afterthought, perhaps added in the margin by a reader; from there it got into the text – as so often happened in ancient MSS.

Chapter 2

3. The writer is more interested in the institution of the Sabbath than in God resting, which is in any case a strange idea if creation was done only by an act of his will: (it is probably an old part of the story which the writer took over without altering). This is the first of the many "aetiological" stories in Genesis, finding a reason in the past for a custom of the present.