This article is the first in a seven-part series exploring the Genesis 1 creation account. Examining the text through a historical-critical lens, this series will unpack the original Hebrew, the impact of ancient translations, and the profound theological meaning of each day of creation.

When reading the first chapter of Genesis, one immediately notices a striking rhythm. The text relies heavily on repetition and structured formulas: “And God said…”, “And it was so,” and “And there was evening and there was morning.” Because of this highly ordered, poetic structure, historical-critical scholars generally agree that Genesis 1 is a liturgical text. It was not written to be a dry historical record; it was intentionally designed for memorization, public recitation, and communal worship. In the ancient world, reciting this text was a powerful way for the community to publicly declare that their God was the supreme author of order.

Here is how that order begins on Day One.

The Hebrew Text: Organizing the Chaos

The opening line of Genesis is arguably the most famous sentence in the Western world, traditionally translated: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

However, when examining the original Hebrew, a different picture emerges. The first word, Bereshit, is grammatically a construct state. This means it is better translated as a dependent clause: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth…” This grammatical nuance is massive. It means the text is not describing a pristine universe blinking into existence out of absolute nothingness. Instead, when God begins to act, unformed matter already exists. The text describes this pre-creation state using a rhyming Hebrew idiom: tohu wa-bohu, which translates to “formless and void” or “wild and waste.” It is a state of absolute, watery non-order.

The text also notes that darkness was over the face of the “deep” (tehom). For the ancient Israelites, the deep was a dark, lifeless, chaotic ocean waiting for a divine command.

The Influence of Later Translations

If the Hebrew text describes the ordering of existing chaos, where did the popular idea of “creation out of nothing” come from?

The shift began centuries later when Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, creating the Septuagint in the 3rd century BCE. They translated Bereshit with the Greek phrase En archē, which carries a slightly more absolute philosophical weight (simply, “In the beginning”).

As early thinkers began interacting with Hellenistic (Greek) philosophy—which debated the eternal nature of matter—they increasingly leaned on this Greek translation to argue that God created the very material of the universe from absolute nothingness (creatio ex nihilo). While this became a foundational pillar of later Western theology, it is not the primary concern of the ancient Hebrew author of Genesis 1.

The Meaning of Day One

If the author is not giving a material, scientific explanation of physics, what is the text actually doing? In the ancient Near East, existence was defined by function and purpose, rather than material properties.

On the first day, God commands, “Let there be light,” and then separates the light from the darkness, calling them “Day” and “Night.” To a modern scientific mind, it is confusing to have light before the sun is created on Day Four. But to the ancient author, the physical source of the light is irrelevant right now.

By creating alternating periods of light and darkness, God is doing something much more profound: He is creating the concept of Time. The first day conquers the chaotic, timeless void by establishing a temporal order. God speaks, and the rhythm of history begins.

This concludes Part 1 of our series. By separating light and darkness, God has successfully established the domain of Time. In Part 2, we will explore Day Two, where the Creator carves out physical space within the cosmic waters.