Chapter One of Genesis.
The one thing we all know about the Bible account is that God
created the heavens and the earth in six days. Today’s reading gives us a puzzling
account of what God did on the first four days.
First Day. The account says that at first the earth was a “formless
wasteland.” I hadn’t known that, I had thought God just created the world out
of nothing. But no, our account follows the creation stories in all the world’s
regions. They all portray the creation act as being one of bringing order out of
chaos. (Our present phrase of a “formless wasteland” translates the original
Hebrew that was “Tohu-Bohu” which
sounds like clothes tumbling around in a dryer.)
Second Day. Before he created sun or moon, or any source of
light, God said, “Let there be light!” So, the point is just that God wanted to
see what he was doing. Next. Since only the parents of a child or the inventor
of new process can give their creation its name, Genesis, in telling us that
God gave names to night and day, is telling us they belong to him.
Further, on that second day, God was said to have created
sky as a hard dome, capable of supporting a complete ocean above it. (Chapter Seven of Genesis will tell us that in
Noah’s time God brought on the deluge by opening floodgates to let that upper
ocean pour through.)
Third Day. God created all kinds of vegetation, including
seeds with future generations of vegetation
in them. God saw everything he created as good. (From the Persian prophet Zoroaster
in the sixth century B.C down to the Cathars a thousand years later we had to
contend with people who insist that there is a second creator of everything evil.)
Fourth Day. The idea that
the heavenly bodies are put up there “to mark the fixed times” is a clue to the
human authorship of this First Chapter. It was composed by the priests who valued
fixed seasons for their religious observances.
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