Parts one and two focused on how the first three lines parallel the structure of the creation poem as a whole. I glossed over a couple of important points in the process of making that clear, and now it's time to go back and fill in the details.
In writing about those first three lines, I've been using the word "God" without any reflections or qualifications. Most of you have assumed that you understood the word—that it means pretty much what it would mean if a modern evangelist, or a character in a situation comedy on television, used it.
But of course that's far from true. The twentieth century Judeo-Christian idea of God—insofar as pastors, priests, rabbis, and others even agree—is not at all the idea of God that a priest of ancient Israel would have had.
For one thing, the ancient Israelites lived in a world where there were many gods. Israel had only one god, but the other nations that they traded with, and went to war with, had other gods. Israel was well aware of this. Monotheism, insofar as it existed in the ancient world—was a feature of the state religion, not a belief about the nature of the universe. The very idea of a god who was not associated directly with a state, through a state religion, would have been rare.
"Hear oh Israel. The Lord your God is one God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me." is a command that assumes the existence of other gods. So do the commands that follow—not to bow down to those other gods, or to worship them. The idea isn't that only one God exists, but that Israel has only one God.
The name of the God of ancient Israel was Yahweh. That name appears in the second chapter of Genesis, but not here. The word we have been translating as "God" in chapter one is not Yahweh, but Elohim. It's the same word used for "gods" in the command, "you shall have no other gods before me."
The word is not, strictly speaking, a name. It's a plural, and means, simply, "gods". But in this passage it is used with singular verbs. Because of the peculiarities of English grammar, this is hard to translate in the past tense. But ancient Hebrew didn't actually have a past tense, so we can get some of the feel of it by using the present perfect:
In the beginning, gods has created the heavens and the earth.
A little strange, and, in a passage where, as we've already seen, everything is very carefully thought out, probably the strangeness is significant. The question is why the author would have used such strange wording, when the word "Yahweh" was right there, ready to hand.
Most commentaries on this passage—written by believers, of one stripe or another—have ways of explaining this phenomena away. Most of those explanations are based on very slim evidence, and, in most cases, it turns out that the explanation leads to a meaning that just happens to fit perfectly with the theology of the explainer.
I'd like to suggest that we just take it on face value. The author is intentionally referring to all of the gods here, and is also treating all of the gods as a single unit. In order to remind ourselves of this unusual choice, I'll italicize gods from now on, so we can remember that the word is plural, but used as a singular.
There's evidence in chapter two that the author (or the editor who put these two versions side by side) sees gods as connected to Yahweh, the god of Israel. We'll talk about that later, but language is linear. It's important, if we really want to understand a text on its own terms, to put ideas together in the order they arise.
The first chapter does not mention Yahweh, just the gods.
We'll learn some more about how the text defines gods as we move through the passage, but we've already run across the word/spirit model which the ancient Hebrews used to understand almost everything, and it's clear that the author applies that model to gods in this passage.
The second point that I passed over the first time through was the verb of the sentence: "created" (or "has created"). The word is only used of God (or "gods" ) in ancient Hebrew, and so automatically brings up an idea of some kind of godly intervention.
On the other hand, as we will see, the author chooses to alternate the use of this word with another word for making, which was used of humans as well. So there seems to be an intention to connect gods and humans through the idea of making, as well as through the ideas of word and spirit.
Finally, there's one point about the sentence structure that I skipped over earlier.
Possibly I should have mentioned it right at the start. The oddity of the word order in this sentence is the biggest clue to the author's intentions in the structure of the whole passage.
But I want to preserve some of the excitement of a first reading for you, so I'll only tell you a bit more about the first line for now, and explain how that parallels the rest of passage when we get there.
The normal word order for the first sentence , in ancient Hebrew, would put "in the beginning" at the end of the sentence. This has caused all kinds of theories to be raised, in order to correct this anomaly, and drag it back into linguistic conformity.
On the other hand, we can ask ourselves why an unusual word order might have been intentionally chosen by the author.
In English verse, poets often arrange their words in unusual order. The reasons vary, but one is quite common: the poet rearranges the words in order to get the line to rhyme. Ancient Hebrew verse didn't rhyme, but it did use parallelism—which was based, in part, on the order of ideas.
If we ask what changes are made in the order of the ideas by moving "in the beginning" to the front of the sentence, it turns out that there are two main effects. The first is that instead of the order space—earth—time, which a normal sentence would provide, we have time—space—earth, which perfectly parallels the structure of the whole chapter. You already understand the importance of that.
The second effect is that the kernel sentence, "gods has created," now creates a break between the time idea, and the other two ideas. Instead of space—earth—time, or even time—space—earth, we get time—/break/—space—earth. Later we'll see how this break is reflected in the structure of the passage, as well.
I've done quite a bit of jumping around in this part, in order to get you ready—but now, you are. Next time, we'll begin reading the poem straight through, the way it was meant to be read. And I promise, it's really good.
