‘And God said, “Let there be X”. And there was X. And God made X... (here specific details of this particular act of creation are given). ’

Then comes the repeated refrain:

‘And God saw X, that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the nth day.’

Right at the end comes the aftersong, a kind of one-off refrain for the whole poem.

‘And on the seventh day God rested. And God looked at all the things that He had made and behold! It was very good!’

The Genesis poem clearly belongs to the same late exilic/post-exilic world as the writings of Deutero-Isaiah. Here is Judaism as we know it today, a truly monotheistic faith, undoubtedly the first one in human history. Pre-exilic Judaism was a very different kind of beast. From Abraham to the exile, Jews worshipped only one God (for most of the time anyway) but believed in many. They were henotheists rather than monotheists. Jahweh, the LORD, the most powerful of all gods, had chosen them as his special people and ordered them to worship and serve Him alone. But though the other gods were forbidden as objects of worship, no one doubted that they existed. The frequent claims of the pre-exilic prophets (including Isaiah) that Jahweh was Israel’s husband and that worship of other gods amounted to adultery is proof of their reality: you cannot commit adultery with imaginary lovers.

By contrast Deutero-Isaiah, a contemporary of Cyrus the Great, observes paganism with sophisticated mockery. Contempt has replaced anger. How could people be so stupid as to think that a wooden idol was any kind of God? We do not know if it was the shock of exile which created this new vision or whether there was something specific about Babylonian religion that triggered the revolutionary thought, “This is really too stupid to be believed.” but pure monotheism became from that time forward the chief characteristic of Jewish religion. Though there was much political and social corruption in post-exilic Judaism, there was no relapse into paganism. The very thing had become unthinkable.

It is interesting to consider the Genesis Poem as a manifesto for this new religious vision. As C S Lewis has observed, the poem is the first known document from anywhere in the world that presents an act of creation ex nihilo. All the other so-called creation narratives start with a world that already exists (and may have existed for an endless period of time) but that is very different from the world in which we live. It may, for example, be a wilderness of chaotic waters or a rigidly stratified set of elements like the Norse duality of fire and ice. The poets then set out how that world evolved into ours, usually with the help of gods who themselves were born out of that initial universe. I find these myths (the Norse one in particular) strikingly similar to the story some physicists tell about creation: “ In the beginning there were only two things: a quantum vacuum and a set of physical laws that determined its behaviour. Because it was a quantum vacuum and not a classical one, and because the laws of quantum theory make such a vacuum unstable, it exploded (the Big Bang) and evolved into the universe of matter and energy, galaxies and stars that we know today. ” There is of course no explanation of where the quantum vacuum came from or why the laws that governed its behaviour should have taken the form they did. A classical vacuum could not have exploded in this way.

In the Norse creation myth, ice and fire interact to form a mist. Out of this mist a giant called Ymir forms and his body is eventually divided up to form the elements of a universe: earth, sea, sky, mountains and so forth. In some of the psalms, we can catch a glimpse of an early Jewish creation narrative in which God kills a female sea monster (usually called Rahab) and divides up her body to create the world out of its parts. The resemblance to the Babylonian myth of Marduk and the monster Tiamat suggests that both may derive from a common Semitic background. But in Genesis, the primal chaos has become an inanimate thing that God has created as raw material for His further creation and not a hostile living being that he must fight and kill before dividing it up.

A number of points are made by the writer, flowing from this primal insight:

1. One God created everything. I have seen unbelievers leap on this statement with glee as the ultimate cliché. “Is that the best that Christians can come up with? That God created everything? The mountains have laboured and a ridiculous mouse is born!” But they forget that they themselves are the product of centuries of Christianity and the God they don’t believe in is the Judeo-Christian God, the God who created everything; they can imagine no other kind of deity. What seems so obvious to them was far from obvious to anyone in the ancient world. In pagan creation myths, there are usually multiple creative beings, and they are all only secondary creators, shaping a preexisting chaotic material into new forms. So the idea of a single Creator God is revolutionary.

2. What He creates is a cosmos, not a chaos. It has an internal structure. And that structure is quite unexpected: it is the structure of the seven-day week which the Jews shared with the Babylonians (and probably with Semitic people in general). It must have been a great surprise (and perhaps an unpleasant one) to the Jews to discover that their Babylonian captors also had a seven-day week and that the days were associated with the seven planetary powers, the “host of heaven” whom they themselves were explicitly forbidden to worship. For example, the first day belonged to the sun and to the god Shamash, and the third day to the planet that we call Mars and the Babylonians called Nergal. These planetary powers were precisely the gods who had supposedly collaborated on the creation of the world. Nergal, for example (like his Roman equivalent Mars) was responsible for the spring growth of vegetation as well as for war, probably because the metal associated with Mars is iron, which is used to make both swords and ploughshares.

   In the Genesis poem, these pagan associations are systematically dismantled. The poet goes through the solar system and replaces each ‘god’ with the One True God. It is He, not the sun, who is the true origin of light. It is God, not the moon, who controls the movement of the waters. It is God and not Nergal who makes the crops grow in spring. It is God and not Nabu, the god of priestly knowledge, who is responsible for the calendar. Notice that while light belongs to the day of the sun, the sun and moon considered as calendar markers belong to the planet Nabu or Mercury. That is why the sun as a ‘planet’ appears on the fourth day rather than on its own first day.

3. The universe is geocentric but not in the medieval sense. Medieval geocentricism was bad science derived from Aristotle and had nothing to do with the Bible. Scholars believed the earth to be the geometrical centre of the universe because (like the ancient Greeks) they were obsessed with geometry, the geometry of perfect circles in particular. In fact, as any astronomer will tell you, planets do not move in perfect circles but in ellipses and the universe does not have a geometrical centre. But it does have a centre of significance. The centre of signicance of the universe is the cross on which Christ was crucified. The central planet of the universe is therefore the planet on which that cross was raised. The central star of the universe is the star around which that planet circles. And the central galaxy of the universe is the galaxy which contains that star. Note that these are theological statements about the cosmic significance of Christ, not scientific ones about planetary orbits. They are truths that make immediate sense to Christians but which Science by itself could never discover. And because Christ is at the centre, the seven planets of our local star appropriately become the divine pattern for the classification of the entire universe.

4. Each act of creation has a dual character: there is an evening and a morning. The evening comes first because Jewish days begin at sunset (or more accurately when the first stars appear). In each of these “evening sessions”, a particular set of creatures comes into existence as the result of a divine fiat. ‘And God said, “Let there be X and there was X.”’ This is creation seen from God’s point of view, an external statement about what His universe shall contain, not an extended internal process by which that thing might be brought into existence. God is shown as creating things through His Word without any effort. This is deliberately echoed in the New Testament in the first words of St John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made through Him.” Which of course is why all things can be redeemed through Him and in no other way.

   But each of these fiat creation events is then repeated in a “morning” passage for the same day, in which God gets His hands dirty, as it were, by actually making the things in question: “And God made...”. Here we have creation the way a scientist would see it, a process that takes place over time. It therefore makes no Biblical sense to oppose creation and evolution as some fundamentalist Christians do. Evolution is a process that takes place within the created universe and time is part of that universe. Outside the universe, God’s creative acts are timeless, at least as far as we perceive them. Clearly this also precludes any symbolic equation between the days of creation and geological eras. If God experiences anything like the flow of time (and we cannot say whether He does), this is quite different from the time that exists within a world of His creation. This is easy to understand if you consider that some human creations also have their own built-in time schemes not shared with their creators. Did Shakespeare write Hamlet before or after the death of Hamlet’s father? The question is meaningless.

5. Finally, an important feature of this poem is the refrain: “And God saw that it was good”, together with the final verdict: “ Behold, it was very good!”. The word tov which is used here does not always signify moral goodness. Its primary meaning is “good for purpose, well-made”. So this statement does not imply that creation originally contained nothing that we might find distressing. Certainly that was how many of our ancestors interpreted the poem; natural evil, like moral evil, was considered to be the result of the Fall of Man. That view is not consistent with the actual history of life on earth, and it is not necessary as a basis for the belief that God sees his creation as good for its intended purpose. If the purpose of creation was to set the stage for our human drama (a shocking suggestion but quite consistent with the Biblical world view), then the pre-lapsarian presence of suffering and even ugliness becomes necessary to allow mankind to choose meaningfully between right and wrong. To do that, you need to know what “wrong” means, and the most fundamental definition of wrong behaviour is surely actions that make other creatures (and a fortiori other people) suffer. If there was no suffering in creation, nothing that angered or upset us or made us feel that “This shouldn’t be happening!”, we could have no understanding of what pain means and therefore no understanding of sin other than as mere disobedience to an arbitrary command. It would become no more meaningful or serious than the wilful misbehaviour of a child who also does not realise that his behaviour causes harm.

The Bible begins with the creation of the world and ends with its final redemption, but it did not need to begin with this poem. Genesis 2 vv.4 onwards, the original beginning of the collection of folklore known to biblical scholars as J/E, starts with a simple statement of creation: These are the generations of heaven and earth when they were created. This is followed by an account of the creation and fall of mankind. You could say that we do not need the Genesis Poem. But what a wealth of theological insight we would have lost if we did not have it!