An Unbeliever Explains Creation (Part 2)

If you read the first post on creation, you learned about parallelism, the basic poetic technique of ancient Hebrew.

Parallelism is actually more than a poetic technique, though, because rather than playing on sound, like rhyme does, it plays on meaning, and can consequently affect the ideas of a poem as much as it affects the feel of the poem. In fact, it unites the feeling and meaning in ways that are just not possible with techniques like rhyme.

And, luckily for us, it has the added advantage of surviving translation.

The interplay between lines is based on a combination of similarities and differences—in meaning, in sentence structure, and in vocabulary. So, for example, in a pair of lines we've already looked at:

God called the light day,
And the darkness, he called night

"God called," appears in both lines, but comes at the beginning of the first line, and in the middle of the second. "Light" comes in the middle of the first line, and its opposite—"darkness"—comes at the beginning of the second. "Day," comes at the end of the first line, and its opposite—"night"—comes at the end of the second.

The beautiful thing is that once your ear is sensitized to parallelism, you don't have to do that kind of careful analysis—you can just "hear" it, the way you hear rhyme.

But, just as it takes some work sometimes to follow a really intricate rhyme scheme, it can sometime take a little work to follow more elaborate example of parallelism. We saw something of that last time, when it wasn't immediately obvious that the first verse paralleled the structure of the first three, and then the second three, days:

It's the kind of thing that's invisible until you see it, and then becomes unmistakable.

The next parallel pattern in the chapter is like that, as well. It begins with the second and third line, which, in themselves, require a bit of explaining:

The earth was formless and empty,
And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

In order to see the parallelism in these lines, you have to know a little something about the ancient Hebrew conception of chaos, and in order to understand chaos, you must first understand word and spirit—so we'll begin there.

I've talked elsewhere about models: concepts based on analogies that we use to plumb the mysteries that surround us. We understand how light and sound work, for example, by analogy to water waves. We build our conception of gas pressure by thinking of atoms as little billiard balls. We analyze the behaviors of countries as though they were people.

The ancient Hebrews used an analogy based on the human voice to understand multiple parts of the world. They noticed that speech could be broken down into two parts: articulation and breath—or, to use the more common translations, word and spirit.

When we speak, we must provide the energy and content of the sound through breath, or spirit. It's completely impossible to make a sound without breath. I can articulate all I want, but without the energy, the actual sound and substance of speech which comes from breath, I am simply miming, not speaking.

On the other hand, I must also articulate if I am going to form speech. I can breathe all I want, and as violently as I want, and never communicate a thing. It takes word, as well as spirit.

The ancient Hebrews generalized this idea to other areas, just as we generalized the idea of a wave to light and sound and radio. They began with human behavior: behavior requires the energy of emotions (spirit), which empower it and give it content, and behavior requires that the energy be structured (word) into specific acts.

If I give my wife a dozen roses, the spirit of the gift, the energy and the content, is my love for her. The word of the gift is the structure of that energy and content: driving to the flower shop, picking out the roses, paying for them, writing the note, etc.

They generalized this idea even further, to human personality in general. A human's spirit was the total of his or her emotional life—the force which animated all behavior, the breath of life. A person's word was the total structure of that behavior. And this was extended, in turn, to the community as a whole. The word of the king (or the word of the Lord) was the procedure or structure prescribed for public events. So it was the kings "word", in the book of Esther, that whoever came into his presence was killed unless he extended his staff. We tend to assume that kind of phrasing merely means "command", but a better translation would be "custom", or "procedure", or "way". What is being referred to is the structure.

They also generalized the models of word and spirit to creative acts, which brings us back to this passage. Everything that existed, consisted for them of word (structure) and spirit (energy, or content).

It's interesting, from a modern viewpoint, that they saw energy and content as the same thing, because of their original speech model. We now see matter as structured energy, within our scientific models, and mass is equivalent to energy in those models. We could easily make too much of this, but it is roughly parallel, which again brings us back to the text.

They used this division of structure vs. energy/content, not only to analyze everything that existed, but also to analyze that which does not exist.

You heard me. The ancient Hebrews had a philosophical model which allowed them to analyze nothing. A pretty neat trick.

That is what the priest or priests who wrote the two lines above are doing: they are breaking nothing, chaos, down into it's component parts.

If everything consists of word and spirit, or structure and content, then nothing is precisely that which lacks both word and spirit, both structure and content. So, the earth was formless and empty—formlessness and emptiness being the components of nothing.

And, immediately, the next line parallels this idea by moving to metaphors for emptiness and formlessness: "darkness was upon the face of the deep".

Darkness was, of course, a metaphor for emptiness—in this case, emptiness of light. The deep was another model, a model of formlessness based upon the dangerous and ever-shifting sea.

That model pops up elsewhere, and gives us some insight into the mythological models of ancient Israel. The deep is the source of the waters in Noah's flood, and therefore refers, not to physical flood waters, such as would leave sediments with various types of fossils behind, but the great formlessness of chaos—which preceded creation. The story of the flood is about the partial undoing, and then redoing, of creation. In modern parlance it's the equivalent of a story about a recurrence of the Big Bang, after the advent of humans.

The deep is also the name given to the waters of the Red Sea. As a symbol of chaos, it is also a symbol of destruction and danger to Israel.

But for now, it's enough to see how these ideas fit together in the two lines we're considering:

The earth was formless and empty,
And darkness was upon the face of the deep.

Notice how the ideas switch places, for poetic effect, and how the second line moves from the abstraction of the first to concrete symbols that we can picture and feel.

It certainly makes a more powerful impression than a simple concept like "nothing" or "chaos". But the poet had another reason to break chaos down into formlessness and emptiness. By bringing the ideas of form and content to the fore, the author has once again paralleled the structure of the six days of creation—this time from a different angle:

In the first three days, the form of the world is put in place: time, space, and the land environment.

In the second three days, this form is given content: the lights in the sky populate time; the birds and fish populate the sky and the sea, and animal life populates the earth.

In the first three lines of the poem, the poet has paralleled, in two different ways, the structure of the whole.

Pretty remarkable writing.

And there's more...