In the beginning, God Created the Heavens and the Earth. And then the earth forgot he existed….
No wait, that's not how it goes, let me try again,
In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. You are certainly familiar with this line, it is the opening phrase of Genesis, in the Hebrew it reads.
“Bereshit bara Elohim ‘et hashamayim v’et ha’aretz".
It is a very simple phrase linguistically, simply one subject ‘Eloheim’, two enumerated objects ‘hashamayim’ and ‘ha’aretz’, or the heavens and the earth, a preposition, ‘Bereshit’ - the beginning, or In the Beginning, and an action verb, ‘bara’, created.
But it is not a simple phrase theologically. In its time, it was a very distinct and meaningful difference, to the Sumer-Akkadian and Egyptian creation myths from which much of the literature in Genesis is derived.
Bereshit, The Beginning. Time has a beginning, a starting point, a moment where once there is nothing, and then there is something. Ancients did not hold this view until recently (on the anthropological timeline). From circa 8000 BC (following the end of the last Ice Age in Europe), until around the 3rd millennium BC (although this widely varied by geography), it was understood that time was circular. It repeated itself, when one day ended, another began, created from the ‘dead’ day before. Years were simply repetitions of the previous year, there was no consecutive nature to calendars, only nested circles of repetition. Stonehenge is such a calendar. The first word of genesis stands as an abject refutation of this notion. There was A Beginning. This means there must be An End. Time, and therefore humans, are finite.
Eloheim. God. One God, singular. There were monotheistic leanings in both the Sumerian and Egyptian traditions around the time of the Exodus (as held by the Hebrew timeline), with Osiris, Horus, and Isis forming a pre-Trinity of sorts in the Pyramid Texts, and Marduk emerging as the clear victor of the gods in Enuma elish. However, This God, in genesis, is nobody’s child, and is both creator, and God. Most ancient stories have a dead or non-embodied god as the creator (Apsu in Enuma elish, and Osiris in the Egyptian tradition, even the Nordic Eddas have this structure), and a secondary son of god, or rival but less powerful god, gets on with the actual business of being a god, with dictums, rites, and required sacrifices.
Bara. Created. Again, we have a new idea. God does not become the created world as Apsu does, and many ancient gods like him. God Creates! We find out that his method of creation is Logos, or creative speech, as understood by the Hellenistic tradition that informed the early Christians. No war is fought over his dead body to cut out the islands, God simply creates.
Hashamayim, and Ha’aretz. The Heavens and the Earth. Again, we have something novel. God does not make one creation, but two-in-one. A place for himself, the ultimate ideal, the incomprehensibly vast universe of the almost infinite, and the finite, small, and fragile earth. A place for man. Later on he creates a firmament, an early idea of an atmosphere, that separated the infinity of heavens, from the finite earth. To best understand this idea, simply look out onto a still lake on a clear night with no moon. You will observe what appears to be one thing. The heavens above meet the earth. Something ineffable, and ethereal, separates them. You can’t ever reach the stars, but they are always one horizon away. - the firmament, or expanse, dividing the waters, from the waters. The notion that the universe is made of water was ubiquitous, but the Egyptians held that the Sun had a home on earth. Gilgamesh visits the hole in the ground where the Sun rises from each day, again we have a clear difference in the positioning of the Sun, moon, and stars in the Hebrew Cosmogony, than in contemporary ‘Pagan’ cosmogonies. (Much later the Classical and Medieval worlds would erect the celestial spheres as a further refinition of this same division).
And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved, on the face of the waters.
This appears to be a liturgical artifact from the Sumer-Akkadian tradition. It is almost the same phrasing that describes Tiamat ‘moving on the side’ of Apsu, before the Hieros Gamos - sexual act of creation. It is an ancient Hebrew idea that the act of creation was a disturbance in the equilibrium of God’s timeless goodness (associated with the negative connotation of sexual acts), a tragedy then, necessarily. The Spirit of God, an acting element, but not the totality of God (first hint at the trinitarian idea) engages in a localized and conscious movement, that is distinct from the stillness before it.
In all my studies of physics, science, and engineering, I have not found a more accurate or profound statement of how the universe came to be, than what God does next.
“And God said, ‘Let there be Light’,
And there was Light.
And God saw the light that it was good,
And God divided the light from the darkness,
And the evening and the morning was the first day.”
We know today after a century of quantum physics that information, carried by light, is the foundation of the rules of physics. I say rules, because they are really regularities, and not ‘laws’ as we came to call them in the deterministic age of classical physics. More profoundly, it is the consciously observed information carried by photons that cause matter to exist in time.
God speaks, - information. He does not simply imagine it and it is so. He must speak. The thought must be expressed into reality. It enters a timeless formless state, at a point in time, giving it form.
Reality reacts (think wave-function collapse). The state of ‘nothingness’ many have speculated existed before the universe began collapses into a state of something-ness! Observation, is suddenly possible. All the potential contained in the formless void universe explodes. In the early stages of the Big Bang, it has been shown that there was nothing but photons. More profoundly, there is not yet distinction between particles of light, and ‘darkness'. There is light, but not yet matter.
God observes the response of reality,
God compares the observation to Himself.
This is a conscious act! He is not simply observing as a mirror does, he is comparing his observation to a previous observation of himself, Goodness. This observation enables the next act, for he has localized light! He creates individual photons from the sea of pure energy.
“And God divided the light from the darkness.”
Boom, there you have it. Particles. We know that light must interact with matter to express it’s particle nature, in this statement we have not only the creation of photons, but matter itself…
You could entirely remove God from this equation, and you would have the result of centuries of mathematical physics. However the physicists would have no universe to study, and no equation to remove God from, without this initial creative act…
I have never really understood why so much tension exists surrounding the timeline of creation. Some fight that every day in genesis must be 24 hours, others claim it is all simply a poem, not representative of anything but the purely metaphorical aspects of creation.
Consider this, if you were to observe the night sky right now, you are, in your eye, creating billions of years of time. By observing a photon from a star 7 billion light years away, you are creating 7 billion years of time! The photon literally does not experience any time at all, it simply jumps from one point in spacetime to another, YOU, perceive the time involved.
When God observes his creation, the time involved in that creation is implicit! According to Special relativity, simultaneity is a matter of perspective. God is observing the universe from the perspective required to enable the simultaneity of those events that produced the reality we now observe. But I understand not everyone can wrap their heads around this, and I think that’s why the text has a simple story contained in it. Everyone can understand something from it in a fractal sense.
This notion still holds if God exists in the mind of creatures alone. By observing the world consciously, they cause it to come into being. Unlike God however, they have no Good, with which to to compare it… and no light, with which to see it.
At the very least, the opening of the Genesis saga can be interpreted in consistence with (continuously changing) modern science, which is something that should be deeply taken to heart. Even if it is a matter of interpretation alone, not intended in the original story (which it certainly could not have been in 600 BC), the flexibility of the events to encompass the truest aspects of modern cosmology, is astonishing. Humans, are not that good at anything. Read anything else written in 600 BC (approximately when the current version of Genesis came to be) and this will be more than obvious…
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