Doctrine of Creation (Part 2): Does Genesis 1 Teach <em>Creatio Ex Nihilo</em>?

Does Genesis 1 Teach Creatio Ex Nihilo?

We saw that Gen 1.1 is an independent, not a subordinate, clause. As important as this conclusion is, it doesn’t decisively decide the question in favor of creatio ex nihilo. For now we have to consider the relationship between verse 1 and verses 2 and 3.

(1) Arguments for a title

Some interpreters take verse 1 to be a sort of title for the chapter, or a kind of heading for the chapter, which summarizes everything that is in that chapter. It would be, as it were, like a subheading in a study Bible, which is not part of the text but summarizes what is going to follow. Similarly, verse 1 on this reading might be taken to be a sort of title or chapter heading for the description of the creation of the world. On that reading, again, creation would really begin only in verse 3 with God saying, “Let there be light.” So verse 1 does not entail creatio ex nihilo.

Proponents of this view point out that defenders of creatio ex nihilo might think that verse 1 describes God’s creation of the raw material or the stuff from which then the world is fashioned in verses 2 and following. So in the first verse you have God creating the raw material ex nihilo, and then in verse 2 he begins to fashion a world out of this stuff. But there are two problems with that hypothesis. First of all, the expression “the heavens and the earth” doesn’t denote simply the stuff or the material out of which something is made. Rather, it already denotes an ordered cosmos – the heavens and the earth. This is an ordered cosmos, not just raw material. The second problem would be that creation of chaos would seem to be a contradiction in terms. When the story describes the condition of the Earth in verse 2, you seem to have a chaotic state, which would contradict God’s creation as a God of order.

(2)  Argument for an opening sentence

Against this understanding of verse 1 as a title or chapter heading, I think it can be rightly objected that the grammatical relationship of verse 1 to verse 2 would become an insuperable problem if you take it to be merely a title or heading. Verse 1 cannot be merely a heading for the rest of the chapter because it is connected to verse 2 by the Hebrew word “and” or waw in the Hebrew. This often isn’t in your English translations, but it’s in the Hebrew: “In the beginning God, created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void.” So it’s not simply a title for the chapter; rather, there is a connection here that refers in verse 1 to God’s primary act of creation and then in verse 2ff his subsequent acts of creation. This has been demonstrated more rigorously by computer-aided grammatical analysis which Old Testament scholars have carried out. This computer-aided grammatical analysis has shown that whenever you have a construction which consists of waw plus a non-predicate (like a subject, for example, of the sentence) plus a predicate (so like a subject and a predicate preceded by the word “and”) then what is expressed is either background or circumstantial information. If this construction precedes the main verb, as it does in verse 3, then what is given in the prior clause is background information. On this understanding, the content of verse 1 is not just a title of the chapter; rather, it is the background for what happens in verse 2: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and then the earth was without form and void and so on and so forth. So the interpretation of verse 1as a title faces insuperable grammatical difficulties.

Moreover, v. 1, if taken as a title, would be inaccurate, since the ensuing account does not, in fact, describe the creation of the earth (v. 2). The earth already exists in v. 2.

(2) Resolution of arguments for a title

So the question then is: how do we resolve those two arguments that we just reviewed for this being a title or a chapter heading? You’ll remember the first of these was that the expression “the heavens and the earth” is already describing an orderly cosmos and therefore it cannot be prior to what happens in verses 2 and 3.

This tension between verse 1 and verse 2 could be simply due to the fact that the author of Genesis took the traditional material of verses 2 and 3 (as we saw last time) and then prefixed it with verse 1 which states creation out of nothing, and that he doesn’t try to resolve the tension. He just leaves the tension to exist there. But the theological sophistication of Genesis 1 might lead us to wonder whether or not there might be some consistent interpretation of this chapter that would resolve the tension.

For example, suppose we take verse 1 to be universal in its scope – “in the beginning God created the universe” – and then with verse 2 the focus dramatically narrows to the planet Earth – “and the Earth was without form and void.” Then the remainder of the chapter describes how God made the Earth into a habitable place for man. There is no reason to think that such a two stage creation had to involve first formless raw material and then its being shaped into a cosmos. So what you have in verse 1 is the description of God’s creation of the entire cosmos, and then from verses 2 and following his transformation of the Earth into a habitable ecosystem for human beings to live in.

As for the second objection, that God’s creation of a chaos is a contradiction in terms, the expression in the Hebrew for “without form and void” – tohuwabohu – does not connote a chaos in the Greek sense of the word “chaos” – a sort of lawless, disordered state. Rather, tohuwabohu in the Hebrew denotes a desert waste or an uninhabitable place. In contrast to a chaotic state, the state of the primitive earth in Gen 1:2 is not an undifferentiated unity or chaos (despite the careless statements of many commentators), but just a primaeval ocean cloaked in darkness. It is not unbounded but exists on the Earth, covering the land that will eventually emerge from it and having a surface over which wind is moving (cf. 7:18; 8:1). It is not characterless but is the same water that will eventually fill the seas, in which marine life will thrive, and that will fall from the sky as rain. It is not unordered or chaotic but has the properties of ordinary water with which ancient Israelites would have been familiar, such as liquidity, weight, surface tension, buoyancy, solvency, and potability. The primaeval ocean is no more a chaos than is a war-ravaged landscape, also described as tōhû wābōhû (Jer 4:23), i.e., uninhabitable desolation. David Tsumura rightly concludes that the phrase “has nothing to do with primeval chaos” but simply refers to the earth as an unproductive and uninhabited place.[1] Just how wrongheaded it is to call the primaeval state “chaos” is evident from the story of Noah’s flood (Gen 7:17–24), which returns the earth to its desolate condition but is obviously not a state of chaos.

An ancient Israelite would probably have pictured the state described in Gen 1:2 to be like a pitch-black night out on the Mediterranean Sea when no moon and stars were visible, a condition that both seafaring peoples known to Israel (Gen 10) and, during the monarchy, Israeli sailors themselves (1 Kgs 10:22) would have experienced. Indeed, the primordial state described in Gen 1:2 more closely resembles the primordial condition of the earth portrayed in North American Indian creation stories than in Egyptian myths.

In summary, it seems to me that in verse 1 we have described the creation of the entire universe, and then in vv. 2ff the focus radically narrows down to the planet Earth, and what is described then is how God transforms the planet Earth into a habitable place for humankind. In that case, God’s creation of the universe in verse 1 would imply creatio ex nihilo because it would be the beginning of all of physical reality. This is, I think, the natural interpretation of verse 1. If we’re to take it in some weaker sense there would have to be powerful evidence in favor of that which I don’t think there is.

Later biblical authors

Later authors, I think, certainly did understand Genesis 1:1 in terms of creatio ex nihilo. For example, Isaiah 44:24 where God declares, “. . . I am the Lord, who made all things, who stretched out the heavens alone, who spread out the earth—Who was with me?” The implicit answer is no one was with him. God was alone in pristine isolation, and he then made all things, according to Isaiah 44:24. Isaiah, I think, could never have countenanced the idea that existing alongside of God there was some kind of primordial matter or stuff which he did not create. Look also at Isaiah 45:18, “For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, he formed it to be inhabited!).” God is the one who has made both the heavens and the earth. He is the creator of all things, according to Isaiah.

Similarly, in the creation Psalms we find that God is described as the creator of everything, and the implicit assumption is that there’s nothing alongside of God which he did not create. For example, Psalm 33:9: “For he spoke and it came to be. He commanded and it stood forth.” Here is creation simply by God’s almighty word – his command – and there is no recalcitrant stuff that he has to work with in order to create the world. Similarly, Psalm 90:2: “Before the mountains were brought forth or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.” God here is the only everlasting being, without beginning from eternity to eternity, and everything else, even the mountains, which seem so steadfast and firm in their existence, are created by God and therefore transitory, unlike God himself. It would be unthinkable that there would have existed some uncreated stuff alongside God. Creatio ex nihilo is, I think, the implicit assumption of these creation Psalms.

Job is more explicit. Job 26:7 says, “He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the Earth upon nothing.” So here God is described as creating the world. He hangs the Earth upon literally nothing.

Proverbs 8:22-31 is an extremely interesting meditation on Genesis chapter 1. In this Proverb, God’s Wisdom is personified as a female personage, and she speaks and says, “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth” (Proverbs 8:22-24). Here Wisdom is created by God before the beginning of the world. I think especially significant is the claim that God’s Wisdom was with the Lord even when the depths were not yet in existence. It is precisely the depths which Genesis 1.2 describes when it describes this primordial sea over which the Spirit of God was hovering. The author of Proverbs says before the depths were brought forth, God existed with his Wisdom. It is God who created the depths, and then in Proverbs it goes on to describe how God took their measure and prescribed their limits.

So much for the Old Testament material. By the time we get to the intertestamental period it’s generally agreed that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo does find expression. For example, in the book of 2 Maccabees 7:28 we read, “Observe heaven and earth, consider all that is in them and acknowledge that God made them out of what did not exist, and that mankind comes into being in the same way.” Maccabees is an apocryphal intertestamental book. Catholics include it in their canon, but Protestants do not. But it does bear witness to what Judaism believed during that intertestamental period. And in 7.28 you seem to have a statement of God’s creation of the universe out of nothing.