1When God began to create heaven and earth, 2and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, 3God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. 4And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. 5And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And it was evening and it was morning, first day. 6And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let it divide water from water.” 7And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was. 8And God called the vault Heavens, and it was evening and it was morning, second day. 9And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered in one place so that the dry land will appear,” and so it was. 10And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering of waters He called Seas, and God saw that it was good. 11And God said, “Let the earth grow grass, plants yielding seed of each kind and trees bearing fruit of each kind, that has its seed within it upon the earth.” And so it was. 12And the earth put forth grass, plants yielding seed, and trees bearing fruit of each kind, and God saw that it was good. 13And it was evening and it was morning, third day. 14And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the heavens to divide the day from the night, and they shall be signs for the fixed times and for days and years, 15and they shall be lights in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.” And so it was. 16And God made the two great lights, the great light for dominion of day and the small light for dominion of night, and the stars. 17And God placed them in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth 18and to have dominion over day and night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19And it was evening and it was morning, fourth day. 20And God said, “Let the waters swarm with the swarm of living creatures and let fowl fly over the earth across the vault of the heavens.” 21And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that crawls, which the water had swarmed forth of each kind, and the winged fowl of each kind, and God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the water in the seas and let the fowl multiply in the earth.” 23And it was evening and it was morning, fifth day. 24And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts of each kind. And so it was. 25And God made wild beasts of each kind and cattle of every kind and all crawling things on the ground of each kind, and God saw that it was good. 26And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth.
27And God created the human in his image,
in the image of God He created him,
male and female He created them.
28And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it, and hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth.” 29And God said, “Look, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the face of all the earth and every tree that has fruit bearing seed, yours they will be for food. 30And to all the beasts of the earth and to all the fowl of the heavens and to all that crawls on the earth, which has the breath of life within it, the green plants for food.” And so it was. 31And God saw all that He had done, and, look, it was very good. And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day.
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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2. welter and waste. The Hebrew tohu wabohu occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Tohu by itself means “emptiness” or “futility,” and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.
hovering. The verb attached to God’s breath-wind-spirit (ruaḥ) elsewhere describes an eagle fluttering over its young and so might have a connotation of parturition or nurture as well as rapid back-and-forth movement.
5. first day. Unusually, the Hebrew uses a cardinal, not ordinal, number. As with all the six days except the sixth, the expected definite article is omitted.
6. vault. The Hebrew rakiʿa suggests a hammered-out slab, not necessarily arched, but the English architectural term with its celestial associations created by poetic tradition is otherwise appropriate.
24. wild beasts. Literally, the phrase would mean “beast of the earth,” but the archaic construct form for “beasts of,” ḥayto, elsewhere regularly occurs in collocations that denote wild beasts. In verse 25, the archaic form is not used, but given the close proximity of ḥayat haʾarets there to ḥayto ’erets here, it seems likely that the meaning is the same.
26. a human. The term ʾadam, afterward consistently with a definite article, which is used both here and in the second account of the origins of humankind, is a generic term for human beings, not a proper noun. It also does not automatically suggest maleness, especially not without the prefix ben, “son of,” and so the traditional rendering “man” is misleading, and an exclusively male ’adam would make nonsense of the last clause of verse 27.
hold sway. The verb radah is not the normal Hebrew verb for “rule” (the latter is reflected in “dominion” of verse 16), and in most of the contexts in which it occurs it seems to suggest an absolute or even fierce exercise of mastery.
the wild beasts. The Masoretic Text reads “all the earth,” bekhol haʾarets, but since the term occurs in the middle of a catalogue of living creatures over which humanity will hold sway, the reading of the Syriac version, ḥayat ha’arets, “wild beasts,” seems preferable.
27. In the middle clause of this verse, “him,” as in the Hebrew, is grammatically but not anatomically masculine. Feminist critics have raised the question as to whether here and in the second account of human origins, in chapter 2, ʾadam is to be imagined as sexually undifferentiated until the fashioning of woman, though that proposal leads to certain dizzying paradoxes in following the story.