THE FIRST WEEK Gen 1-2:4a

        CONTEXT:  A creation story allows a narrator to illustrate the nature of the world and how it works. Order and purpose stand out in “The First Week.”  In remarkable contrast, “The Garden” opens a string of stories about trial-and-error steps and a chaotic sort of causality.  In the former, the seven day week, ending in Sabbath, exemplifies the teachings of the postexilic, priestly writer, “P,” in perhaps the late sixth century BCE.  In the latter, complexities of human relations, especially sex, are the interests of “J,” the “Jawhist” narrator of the tenth century BCE.

                  Gender language is unavoidable in Hebrew verb forms and pronouns, and the verbs and pronouns for God are masculine, singular. The character of the divine protagonist differs in the creation stories.  In “The Garden,” the character of Yahh seems distinctly male but “The First Week” states the point that God is neither (or both) male or female. Hence I depart here from the simple rendering of “He/His,” rendering the pronoun as definite article, “the.”

                  Note instances of “spontaneous generation” (Aristotle’s term for an earlier notion of how life came to be) in which, by divine word, the land gives rise to plants and later to animals, and the waters to living creatures.

            In the Shabbat section, most translations read וַיְכַל as a form of  √כלה, same as וַיְכֻלּוּ in the preceding verse.  This would say that God “completed” the work on the seventh day, though the last of creation took place on the sixth. Could Shabbat be said to have been created on the seventh? Yes, but that seems to me a stretch. Notes penciled into the margins of my Kittel Bible recall some long ago lecture or reading where I learned that Tur Sinai suggested reading וַיְכַל as a form of √כול , meaning “measure” as in Isaiah 40:12. The root also denotes “contain,” suggesting that God “took it all in.” A rabbi might be forgiven for understanding God’s Shabbat activity to be the archetype of the Jewish practice of taking a walk and just looking, particularly when the reading has Tur Sinai on its side.

            Audio: https://soundcloud.com/davidlkline/the-first-week-genesis-1-2:4

                                            IN THE BEGINNING

God Created The Sky And The Land

²The land was all formlessness and chaos: darkness over the face of the depths, with God/wind, hovering over the face of the water.

³And God said: “There shall be light!” And light came to be. ⁴And God saw the light as good. And God distinguished between the light and the darkness: ⁵God called the light, “day,” the darkness, “night.” And evening came to be and morning came to be, day one.

⁶And God said: “There shall be a plate in the middle of the water, that it be a distinguisher between water and water.” ⁷Thus God made the plate. It distinguished between the water that was under the plate and the water that was above the plate. ⁸And God called the plate, “sky.” And evening came to be and morning came to be, second day.

⁹And God said: “The water that is under the sky shall gather into one place and the dry shall appear.” And so it came to be. ¹⁰And God called the dry, “land,” and the gathering of water, “seas.” And God saw it as good. ¹¹And God said: “The land shall sprout shoots of self seeding, grain bearing grass, fruit trees producing fruit by species, each containing its seed for the land.” And so it came to be. ¹²The land sprouted shoots of grain bearing grass, by species, and fruit bearing trees each containing the seed of its species. And God saw it as good. ¹³And evening came to be and morning came to be, third day.

¹⁴And God said: “There shall be lights in the plate of sky to distinguish the day from the night. And they shall be indicators for sacred seasons, for days, and for years. ¹⁵And they shall shine on the land.” And so it came to be, ¹⁶that God made the two great lights: the greater for governing the day, the lesser, and the stars, for governing the night. ¹⁷And God set them in the plate of the sky to shine on the land, ¹⁸to govern by day and night and distinguish between the light and the darkness. And God saw it as good. ¹⁹And evening came to be and morning came to be, fourth day.

²⁰And God said: “The waters shall swarm a living, breathing swarm; and fowl shall fly over the land and within the spread of the sky.” ²¹And God created the great sea monsters and every living, breathing thing that moves, so that the water swarmed with their species, and every winged fowl by its species. And God saw it as good. ²²And God blessed them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas, and the fowl multiply on the land. ²³And evening came to be and morning came to be, fifth day.

²⁴And God said: “The land shall put forth living, breathing things by species, beast and mobile, land living animals by species.” And so it came to be, ²⁵with God making land living animals by species, the beasts by species and all that moves on ground by species. And God saw it as good.

²⁶And God said: “We shall make humanity in our image, as our likeness. They shall dominate the fish of the sea, the fowl of the sky, the beast: the whole land and everything mobile that moves on the land.”

²⁷And God created the human in the image –

In the image of God, created,

Created them male and female.

²⁸And God blessed them:

“Be fruitful and multiply.

Fill the land and conquer it.

Dominate the fish of the sea, the fowl of the sky,

 And all life that moves on the land.”

²⁹And God said: “See, I have given you every self seeding, grain bearing grass over the face of the land and every fruit bearing tree, self seeding. They shall be yours for food. ³⁰And for all land living animals and all fowl of the sky and all that moves on the land, for all that lives and breathes the green grass shall be for food.”

And so it came to be. ³¹And God saw all that was done: Yes! It was very good! And evening came to be and morning came to be, sixth day.

^2:1And complete now were sky and land and all their hosts. ²God surveyed on the seventh day the labor that was done and desisted from all labor. ³And God blessed the seventh day and made it kodesh, “special,” for on it ceased all the labor that God had done in creation.

⁴This is the story of the sky and the land in their creation.

To hear this story read:

© Rabbi David L. Kline            http://good-to-be-a-jew.blogspot.com/