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Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
In the beginning, or when God began?
Is verse 1 a complete sentence or the opening of a longer one, and if it is complete, is it a first act or a heading? Three readings, two questions.
Genesis 1:1-2, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: is verse 1 a sentence of its own, or the opening of a longer one? In the beginning I built the shop. That can be the first thing I did, or the heading over the story of my early years. When I began to build the shop, the lot was mud. Now the same words set the scene for what comes next. Genesis 1:1 has been read all three ways, and the choice decides what exists before God's first word.
Two questions sit under one verse. First, grammar: is bereshit absolute, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," a sentence of its own, or a temporal clause, "When God began to create heaven and earth," with the main clause coming at verse 2 or verse 3? Second, if it is a complete sentence: is it a first act before day one, or a heading over the seven days? The answers decide whether the earth and the deep of verse 2 exist before God's first spoken word.
The Jewish Study Bible notes that a tradition over two thousand years old reads 1:1 as a complete sentence, and that the medieval commentator Rashi argued it is a temporal clause, which is how some ancient Near Eastern creation stories begin, including the account that starts at Genesis 2:4b. The JPS translation follows Rashi. Separately, the verb "created" in verse 1 is a perfect, and the storyline switches to the narrative verb at verse 3. The noun behind "beginning" usually introduces a stretch of time, as in the early part of Job's life (Job 8:7) and the first part of Zedekiah's reign (Jeremiah 28:1).
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Lennox takes verse 1 as a complete sentence and a separate act. Following C. John Collins, he notes that a perfect at the very start of a passage normally denotes something that happened before the storyline gets going, and that the narrative tense begins at verse 3. So the initial creation may have come before day one, and Genesis does not say how long before. On his reading the text leaves the age of the universe open before science is brought in.
Walton keeps "In the beginning" but reads the beginning as the seven-day period itself, not a point before it, matching Egyptian talk of a first occasion and an Akkadian term for a first installment. Verse 1 is then a literary introduction, closed by Genesis 2:1. In the sources checked he does not argue the temporal-clause grammar, but his reading lands near it: verse 1 is not an act that happens before verse 2. His paraphrase: in the initial period, God created by assigning functions throughout the heavens and the earth, and this is how he did it.
The temporal-clause reading, set out in the Jewish Study Bible and the JPS translation, makes verse 2 describe things just before creation began: an earth unformed and void, darkness, and the deep. The note records an old rabbinic unease with that, since it seems to have God working with material already there.
The complete-sentence reading has to explain why other ancient creation accounts, and Genesis 2:4b itself, open with a when-clause. The temporal-clause reading has to accept that the deep and the darkness of verse 2 are simply there when God first speaks, so creation from nothing has to be taught somewhere other than this verse. Walton accepts that cost openly and says creation from nothing is true; Lennox's reading keeps verse 1 as the material beginning but rests on a tense observation he calls plausible though not obvious.
Not the gap theory. Lennox's separation of verse 1 from day one is not a destroyed first world with a rebuilt second one. It leaves time unmeasured. It does not insert a catastrophe.
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 3, with C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4 (P&R, 2006), 51
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), proposition 3
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, ed. John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener, note on Genesis 1:1
- The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed., ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford University Press), note on Genesis 1:1-2
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, proposition 12, Other Theories
- New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, Genesis 1:1
