Bible Stories

We begin then by looking at creation from the differing perspectives of the biblical narrative and some other ancient stories.

This will help to show the distinctiveness and power of the Bible’s account of creation.

Creation in the ancient Near East

The recitation of creation stories in the ancient world bore little resemblance to our detached discussions on creation today. To these ancient peoples it was a matter of worship. Their sagas were not like the telling of fairy tales, but recitations of the annual religious festivals. Recounting these stories had the serious purpose of seeking both to preserve the order of society and to guarantee order and life before the threats of chaotic forces.

Their interest in creation stories was not then the intellectual interest of how-it-allbegan, but the desperate desire to continue to triumph over the hostile gods and fates that constantly threatened them with death. Through ritual drama, the primordial events recorded in the myth were brought back into action. These people believed that, when they enacted the creative deeds of the gods at the appropriate season, and recited the proper formulae, the renewal and revitalization of nature was assured. These creation myths served to reactivate in a magic way the first acts of creation.

These ancient stories range in time from the myths of the Sumerians, in the fourth millennium BC, to the Canaanite texts found at Ras Shamra, written in about 1400 BC. They concern such subjects as the origin of the gods; the defeat of hostile forces of chaos by heroic gods who then release the forces of life; the upholding of order by kingly figures in a world ever on the verge of chaos; the emergence of the world as it is from a primordial state in which earth and sky were unseparated.

The Genesis account

There are certain points of resemblance between these ancient near-eastern stories and the Bible’s account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis. How far do these stories go back to a common faith — the events of which Genesis tells? It is impossible to know.

The differences, however, far outweigh the resemblances. The primary motive for the creation stories of the ancient pagan world was human preservation in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Human anxiety was an important ingredient; the basis of these creation stories was how to survive in a threatening world.

The biblical purpose and narrative of creation is very different. There can be no question of the origin of the gods, for the first words are: In the beginning, God.’ He has no antecedents, no origin. The power of the word in pagan thought was inherent; it goes forth in its own power. The power of the word in the Bible is according to its source, so that when ‘God speaks, it is done’. When God speaks it is not some kind of physical emanation, but the spiritual expression of God’s will. Creation then is related to the conscious, moral, personal reality of God himself.

The creation narrative opens with a description of how things were ‘in the beginning’, when the earth was ‘without form’ and ‘void’. Here, unlike the myths of the ancient world, chaos has no divine power, nor does it represent any threat, even when ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep’.

For the ‘Spirit of God‘ broods over it all, as the moral governor of the universe, in omnipresence and creative power over all ‘the waters‘.

This prelude sets the theme for the following two sets of ‘creation days‘, three in each:

God ‘forms’ in the midst of a world ‘without form’

Day 1 Division of light from darkness (verse 4)

Day 2 Division of lower waters from upper waters (verse 7)

Day 3 Division of lower waters from dry land (verse 9); creation of vegetation (verse 11)

God ‘fills’ in the midst of emptiness (void)

Day 4 Creation of light in the sky (verse 16)

Day 5 Creation of water animals and birds (verse 4)

Day 6 Creation of land animals and man, and the provision of food (verse 29)

The six days of creation focus on the sabbath day, the day by which all the work of creation is over. As the day of rest, God reveals the purpose of the sabbath as a day’of celebration and worship of a good God who has made all things ‘good’.

Unlike the Babylonians who saw the seventh, fourteenth, twenty-first and twenty-eighth days of the month as days of ill omen, when mankind lived in uncertainty of the fates, the Hebrews rejoiced in the sabbath as evidence of the sovereign power and goodness of God. The ‘days‘ of creation begin with the sunset rather than the sunrise, perhaps to indicate that every day begins with God and not by the natural agency of the sun. The practice of Israel was to start the sabbath as a holy day with the sunset of the previous day.

There is no reference to any cause other than God’s word. Several points follow this fact:

The unargued cause is God. No proof is given of the Creator. He lives outside all explanation. Indeed,

• God is not an explanation, as philosophers would like to make him. Rather he is a reality to be confronted and his creation is a fact not a consequence. He will not be bound by human explanations. Likewise in the Bible, creation is assumed and not explained. The Hebrew word for ‘to create’, which is used of both creation and redemption, is uniquely God’s activity.
• The story introduces an indefinable era:the absolute beginning of all things. Since space and time are both God’s creation, the event includes the creation of time also.

The Genesis account does not say whether anything existed before creation. The prelude tells us how God formed and filled the formlessness and void that came into being in his first act of creation. But it is not revealed what, if anything, he used to create the universe. To safeguard the reality of a God above and beyond all material things, the church fathers developed the notion of God creating ‘out of nothing’ — uninfluenced, unrestricted, uncaused by anything. It is a form of theological shorthand to indicate that God is sovereign over creation. Thus God’s creativity is quite unlike ours. Human beings depend on materials, musical notes, words, for their artistry; God created when nothing was to hand for him to work on.

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