Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
What does bara do?
The verb for create is used only of God. What it takes as its object is the argument.
Genesis 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what kind of making is "create"? She created a garden. She did not make the dirt. She may have planted every plant herself, or she may have laid out the beds and decided what goes where. English create covers both, and the sentence does not say which. The Hebrew word has its own range, and the argument is about which end of it Genesis 1 sits on.
The Hebrew verb bara is often taught as the special word for creation out of nothing. Whether that is what it means, or what it can mean, depends on what the verb is used with across the whole Old Testament, not on how English hears "create."
Bara occurs about fifty times. God is always the subject, or the implied subject when the verb is passive, and every commentator agrees on that. No materials are ever mentioned with it. Its objects include the heavens and the earth, people, Israel, a pure heart, darkness, disaster, praise, Jerusalem, the north and the south, and a blacksmith.
Lennox agrees the verb is used in the Bible mostly with God as subject and treats Genesis 1:1 as primary creation. In a note he points out that bara does not always mean direct primary action: Amos 4:13 has God creating the wind, which Lennox reads as God working through natural processes he set up. The material creation of the heavens and the earth is the plain sense of verse 1 on his reading.
Walton's table of every object of bara is the core of his case. None of them, he argues, clearly demands a material reading, many are ambiguous, and a large share require a functional one. He turns the old argument around: scholars took the absence of materials as proof of creation out of nothing, but that only follows if creating is already assumed to be material. If bara assigns function, nobody would expect materials to be named. He is explicit that God is responsible for material origins and that they do involve creation out of nothing at some point. His claim is that Genesis 1 is not the text that says so.
Walton's own data does not prove a functional meaning, as he says himself. It shows support. Lennox, for his part, relies on bara meaning material creation in 1:1 without engaging the full list of objects, several of which (a pure heart, disaster, Jerusalem as a delight) are hard to read materially.
Not a denial of creation out of nothing. Neither pole denies it. The question is only which text teaches it.
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), proposition 3, Table 1
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 3, n. 43
