The Solitary God

The most prominent theme in Genesis 1 will have struck ancient pagan readers as a perverse novelty. The creation of the universe, says Genesis, was a solo performance. Behind the entire cosmos, in all its intricacy and variation, there is just one God. To give it a modern philosophical tag, Genesis 1 proclaims an uncompromising ‘monotheism’. It does this in a number of ways. A striking introduction Firstly, our text begins with a striking introduction: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ The writer does not bother to warm up his readers to the notion of one Creator; he puts it on the table up-front. A single God, says Genesis, created not just this particular mountain or that particular constellation but the ‘the heavens and the earth,’ which is the ancient way of saying ‘everything’.

The writer does not bother to warm up his readers to the notion of one Creator

A solo performance

Secondly, the chapter has just one performer. There is plenty of activity in the account - lots of speaking, making, seeing, separating, naming and so on - but only one actor. The second paragraph sets up the pattern well:

And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light 'day,' and the darkness he called 'night.' And there was evening, and there was morning - the first day (Gen 1:3-5).

Compared with other creation accounts of the time, Genesis 1 is a conspicuously lonely affair.

The use of ‘god’ instead of ‘Yahweh’

The third way the passage proclaims monotheism is subtle but highly effective, especially for ancient readers. It has to do with the use, or rather non-use, of God’s personal name. Pagan creation myths always named their gods so that readers could know which god did what. In the Babylonian Enuma elish no fewer than nine separate deities are named in the first two paragraphs.

The ancient Jews also had a personal name for their god: ‘Yahweh’, or the more anglicized, ‘Jehovah’,  and it appears many times throughout the rest of Genesis. What is fascinating is that of the thirty-five references in this chapter to Israel’s Lord, not one employs the divine name. The author simply uses the noun ‘God’ - elohim in Hebrew.  The effect of this is to undercut any suggestion that Yahweh was simply a Hebrew member of the pagan pantheon. ‘There is not Yahweh and Apsu and Tiamat and so on,’ says the author of Genesis. ‘There is just “God”.’ And by repeating the noun thirty five times the writer makes his point loud and clear.

Coherence in Creation

A corollary of pagan polytheism was a belief in the essential incoherence or randomness of the universe. In Enuma elish, for example, the physical world is said to have been fashioned as an after-thought, out of the bloody carnage of the war of the gods. The creation, in this view, is ‘haphazard’ in origin and ‘tainted’ in character. This was the broad viewpoint of ancient societies. By contrast, Genesis 1 insists upon the elegance and intention of creation, in other words, upon its coherence. The universe is not a mindless collection of unpredictable forces, but the ordered accomplishment of a single creative genius. Monotheism in the Creator, says Genesis, results in coherence in the creation. The theme is emphasized by the 1st-century Jewish intellectual Philo in his On the Creation. It is found at almost every point in the biblical chapter.

Genesis 1 insists upon the ordered accomplishment of a single creative genius

The number ‘7’ and wholeness

In a previous article (The Genre of Genesis 1) I mentioned the artful use of multiples of seven throughout the chapter. In accordance with Hebrew literary conventions, this underlines the ordered perfection of creation. Philo devotes fifteen pages to the brilliance of the number seven. He begins: ‘I doubt whether anyone could adequately celebrate the properties of the number 7, for they are beyond all words’ (On Creation 90).

The careful structure of the passage

A more obvious device is the careful literary structure of the passage. Each creative scene follows a deliberate four-fold pattern:
 

	a)    a creative command (‘let there be light,’ for example) followed by, b)    a report of the fulfillment of the command (‘and there was light’), c)    an elaboration of creative detail (‘he separated the light from the darkness’) and,   finally d)    a concluding day-formula (‘and there was evening, and there was morning - the first day’).

This pattern carries on through the whole account. The effect of all this is to underline the order and coherence of creation.  

Repetition of the word ‘good’

The repeated affirmation of the ‘goodness’ of the creation serves the same point. Verses 4, 7, 12, 16, 21 and 25 tell us that what God made ‘was good’. The seventh and climactic reference in verse 31 says that the creation ‘was very good.’ One gets the impression that the author is trying to counter the low view of creation present in just about every pagan culture of the time.

The demystification of the heavens

The final contribution to this theme of coherence is particularly subversive in an ancient context. Many ancient societies worshipped the sun and moon as gods in their own right.  Genesis 1, however, describes these heavenly bodies simply as ‘lights’ - a big light for the day and a small one for the night:

And God said, 'Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.' And it was so. God made two great lights - the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night (Gen 1:14-16).

The author in fact refuses to use the normal Hebrew words for sun and moon, shamash and yarih, which may have been construed as divine names corresponding to Amon-Re in Egyptian tradition. These lights, moreover, are said to have been given by God to serve the inhabitants of the earth, rather than to be served by them. Anyone familiar with paganism will not have failed to see the significance of such comments.

The number symbolism, the careful structure, the affirmation of the creation’s ‘goodness’, and the demystification of the heavenly bodies, all combine to challenge pagan notions of the capricious nature of the physical world. The creation is not random or possessed by spiritual powers, says Genesis 1; it is the coherent masterpiece of one almighty being.

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