Michael Zank

This morning I learned something new about the well-known story of creation of Genesis. It was my friend John who taught me, as we were walking our dogs in Franklin Park. He mentioned something he’d noticed in Carl Jung’s book on Job that he had recently found and read again after many years. (Goes to show: don’t sell your college textbooks if you can help it.) Jung observed that the only work of creation God does not consider “good” is on the second day, when he separates the waters below from the waters above and makes a firmament to keep them apart. In this case, it doesn’t say “and God saw x and it was good.” John recalled that Jung thought this was because God had created a dualism that he didn’t consider good.

I was surprised to hear it. I had never even noticed that the expected note of approval was missing from the works of the second day. I checked the passage on my phone in English, and indeed the comment was absent from the verses in question. I observed that it said, God “made” the firmament rather than “created” it and argued that the separation between waters above and below weren’t the first duality or dualism, as there was already the difference between light and darkness established on the first day. In any case, after some more conversation we parted and I went home, to look up the passage in Hebrew.

Here is what I found. The works of the second day start with Elohim’s exhortation (presumably to himself) that there be a firmament (rakia’) in midst of the waters that was to divide or distinguish (mavdil) between water and water or separate water from water. God then goes on to make rather than create such a firmament (make=ayin-sin-he, create=bet-resh-aleph) and he separated the waters above the firmament from the waters below the firmament. God then called the firmament “therewaters” (shamayim). God refrains from looking at, and approving of, this work of his hands. Instead it becomes evening and morning, a second day.

So what is this about?

Some modern commentators have argued that the creation of Genesis 1-2:4a (in Hebrew “works of the beginning” or ma’aseh bereshit) ushers in a grand disenchantment of the natural world. Genesis 1:6-8, the creation of “therewaters” (aka heaven) may well be a case in point. Remember the heading of the chapter and hence the first statement in the Torah: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. Or: When God began to create heaven and earth. Heaven and earth is the duality that matters, and heaven (“therewaters”) is the first object of God’s creation as stated in Genesis 1:1. But instead of being the first of his works we hear that before God creates the firmament he will call heaven the earth was tohu va-vohu, an inhospitable mess, and that God’s wind or spirit was hovering over tehom. Scholars tell us that tehom is a Hebrew cognate of Akkadian Tiamat, great goddess and wife of Apsu. In the Babylonian creation hymn Enuma elish (“Before on high”) Apsu represents sweet water, while Tiamat personifies the destructive salt waters that must be contained so as to make the cultivation of the land between rivers possible. It was Marduk, champion of the gods, who slew Tiamat and built the habitable world from her carcass. Alive or dead, the waters above and below are now ordered, built from divine stuff, and while the immortal gods are apparent in sun, moon, and the constellations, the earth becomes Marduk’s footstool and Babylon his habitation. (Human beings are fashioned from the blood of vile Kingu, Tiamat’s consort, and exist to feed the gods.)

Keeping this in mind and following rabbinic comments on the opening sentence of Genesis, I would render the opening passages of Genesis as follows.

When God began to create therewaters and land the land was an inhospitable mess, while God’s spirit was hovering over (the slain carcass of) Tiamat. Then God said, Be light! And light was. And God saw the light, because (it was) good. And God separated (!) between the light and the (antecedent) darkness. Then God called the light “day” and the darkness he called “night” and it became evening and it became morning, one day.

Note that this was the first act in which God “separates” one thing from another. The objects separated are unequal, of different provenance, incongruent. Unlike water and water, light and darkness are of different origin. One is spoken into being, the other preexistent. Only this created light is called “good.” The duality of light and darkness does not receive divine approval. Day and night are “ontologically” of a different quality. Night or darkness is now defined by a created other that it is not. Darkness is not an adversary that has divinely sanctioned being but an absence of light. Whether or not darkness or night is associated with evil is not clear, but the tohu va-vohu of earth, which also seems to have preexisted the divine actions described in Genesis 1, clearly indicates a deficiency that is overcome by God’s acts of creation. The God of Genesis 1 fixes a deficient preexisting universe about whose origins we know nothing.

This is how it continues.

And God said let there be a firmament in midst of the waters and let it divide between water and water. [No ontological difference, only a practical arrangement.] And God made the firmament and he separated between the waters below the firmament and between the waters above the firmament and so it became. And God called the firmament “therewaters” and it became evening and it became morning, a second day.

God called the waters above the firmament shamayim, which is a pun that literally translates as “Therewaters.” There are similar puns in other passages in Genesis 1-3, where the names of the first human being, “Adam,” alludes to the dust of the earth, literally the “ground” (adamah), from which he was taken and to which he will return. The creation of woman from man (ishah from ish) is a pun on the grammatical feminine derived from the grammatical masculine. Names and grammatical form thus provided the learned authors of Genesis with material to play with as they crafted a text that aimed to sever the customary connection between the natural phenomena and divine personae. By drawing attention to the names of things, the (divine) nature and origin of those things is deflected. Reverence and gratitude for the wise arrangements of things is directed toward the one who made heaven and earth what they are: a hospitable place where plants and animals have their habitats and humans were meant to live and thrive, in harmony with one another and with the other works of creation.