Hail and welcome. I’m happy to report that my relocation across the country has been successful. This isn’t the first time that I’ve moved but it’s the first time I’ve done so on this scale: two people, a cat, a music studio, and the better part of a household’s worth of goods approximately 2000 miles from my original location. It’s been arduous, to say the least, and I’ve learned a lot about myself, a substantial part of that things that I’m not at all happy about. I’d gotten comfortable and complacent and I’ve since been reminded that I have some work to do.
In the mean time, I’m getting back to work on this project, trying to pick up more-or-less where I left off with my research on ecumenical phenomenology, but since this move signals a new start for me, I thought it might be fun to revisit the topics and themes of my earliest episodes, starting with my first essay, “Six Days of Creation and the Sabbath.” It’s been almost five years now and both my knowledge and my writing skills have improved immensely, and my perspective and positions have shifted as well. The circumstances certainly warrant a second look at things.
So we’ll start again back at the beginning, focusing even more narrowly than that first episode did, on the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, verses 1 through 5. We’re going to look at the history behind the text and analyze the original Hebrew in which it was written, and when we get down to the interpretation, I want to look at the text from a few different perspectives. One of the problems of reading an ancient text about God is that we tend to come at it with a host of semantic baggage, various presuppositions about what it is that the words and sentences mean, and I’d like, so far as is possible, to catapult us past all that to try to understand the text in its own terms.
We’ll start with the history. Tradition dates the composition of the Book of Genesis and the other four books of the Torah to the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE, during the time that the nations of Israel and Judah existed as a unified kingdom under the kings Saul, David, and Solomon. Some even ascribe authorship directly to Moses in the 13th century BCE, which is rather bizarre given that Deuteronomy 34:5-7 describe Moses’ death and burial. Neither of those datings are likely to be correct: the text identifies certain themes, concerns, and knowledge of the world which date it to the 8th century BCE at the earliest and the 4th at the latest. Present scholarship accepts what is called the documentary hypothesis, which asserts that the Torah as it exists in the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the texts which were translated into the Christian Old Testament were based on compilations of at least four separate documents, referred to as the J, E, D, and P sources, composed in different eras and reflecting the very different ideas and concerns of the people who wrote them. There’s substantial disagreement among scholars as to what the various original documents are and when they were written, but the base hypothesis is widely accepted. Atheists often take this as a strike against the Bible in terms of its being a document with any credible authority; I take quite the opposite view: while it would have been preferable to have each of the biblical sources in their original form, what we have today is a text of astonishing richness and complexity, given that we take it in terms of what it is—a kind of digest of four centuries of Hebrew religious and political thought—rather than as a single coherent and unified narrative, which to me seems trite and banal by comparison.
Quite a lot happened in the Ancient Near East over the Torah’s period of authorship. The aforementioned Iron Age Kingdom of Israel split into the Samarian Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 720 BCE and Judah survived under subjugation as a vassal state until the Assyrians fell to the Neo-Babylonian empire, at which point the Babylonians conquered Judah and deported its citizens, a period known as the Babylonian captivity. This ended in 539 BCE when the Babylonians were overthrown by a rebel coalition of Persians led by Cyrus the Great, who allowed the captive Judeans to return to Judah, ruled as a province (called Yehud) of the Persian Achaemenid Empire until its conquest by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE. Yehud was secured by the Achaemenids, and consequently the Yehud period was one of relative safety after several centuries of general turmoil and major threats to the Israelite way of life in the form of conquest and subjugation. At the same time, they were still ruled during this period by a foreign power (a status quo which would continue all the way up until 1948 and the founding of the modern Israeli State), and they had also, as a result of the captivity, been more directly exposed to other religions, cultural traditions, and founding myths. It’s entirely reasonable, then, that they would want to consolidate various texts and narratives into a clear statement of their identity as a people, a statement reflective both of the unity and the diversity of their thought.
With that in mind, let’s look to the text, starting with the original Hebrew of the first verse. I’ve been working on my Greek and Latin and there’s a technique used by some of my textbooks that I’d like to adopt here. The text is first presented in transliteration (when necessary) and then in different glosses that initially reflect the structure of the original and progress to reflecting a more idiomatically-English rendering. So, Genesis 1:1: bereshit bara elohim et ha-shamayim wa-et ha-ares. Gloss 1: “In beginning created God the skies and the land.” Gloss 2: “In the beginning God created the skies and the land.” And finally the King James translation: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” I’ve gone with “sky” and “land” in my translation to avoid the aforementioned baggage associated with “heaven” and “earth.”
The word we really have to pay attention to here is elohim, which is the plural form of the masculine noun eloah, typically translated as “god” in the general sense. But the verb bara is conjugated in the perfect singular, and that usage is consistent throughout the Torah by way of distinguishing the God of the Israelites (Yahweh, by name) from other gods. A 4th-century BCE Israelite is going to be looking at the word in those terms, understanding the text along the lines of “Our God created the world,” and that proposition is going to exist in a social understanding of who and what God is. Now, at this point in history, the Israelites are strictly monotheistic. That wasn’t always the case, but that’s how an Israelite from that era is going to be reading the text. An Assyrian noblewoman of the same era, on the other hand, is going to be coming at the text from a polytheistic perspective. We’ll assume she’s able to read the untranslated Hebrew, Hebrew being very close to her own language of Aramaic. Assuming she has no deep knowledge of Israelite religion, she would likely compare the text to the creation myths of her own people and assume that it is referring to Tiamat, the primordial creator goddess of Mesopotamian religion.
The modern secular perspective has the really interesting view; we could even imagine such a person who lacks a prior understanding of what a god is. That person would have to infer from the text, in which case they’ll take God as being that which created the world. And what, from the scientific perspective, is responsible for the creation of the world? We don’t have an ultimate answer to that question but our best proximal answer is gravity. The force of gravity, the self-attraction of mass, is what pulled the nebulous matter of the galaxy into an accretion disk which in turn formed the Sun and planets. There are some interesting connections here: the first emergence from gravity is fire, as gravity pulled the hydrogen and helium of the early universe into sufficient densities to initiate the fusion reactions of the first stars, and fire is both a source of light (which will be relevant a few verses ahead) and a process of significant theological interest during the eras in which the Bible was written. The Church Father Origen said that the substance of God is fire. Thermodynamically-speaking, fire is a radical entropic polarization. It splits the energy of its fuel into the high-entropy output of heat and the low-entropy output of light.
From our modern perspective, it’s hard not to read the opening chapter of Genesis as talking about God as conceived by the modern Christian, as the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent personal deity who incarnated in the world as Jesus of Nazareth and sacrificed himself to himself in order to redeem the world from sin. But there’s really no reason to read all of that baggage into the text at this point. Certainly the original authors weren’t thinking of God in those terms. They have their own baggage, of course, but as a purely empirical matter, we can clearly say that the universe manifests a principle of self-organizing creativity. Nature is habitual, as the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce would say, and the very first point the authors of Genesis wanted to make about God was to identify God with this creative principle.
Moving on. Our first gloss of Genesis 1:2 reads: “And the land was chaos and empty and darkness over the face of the deep, and breath of God hovering over the face of the waters.” Again, I’m attempting to choose words with a minimum of baggage. Moving directly to King James: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”
Modern Christian doctrine holds, in contradiction to what we have just read, that God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. This doctrine dates to the 2nd century writings of the Church Father Theophilus of Antioch in the letter he wrote—his only surviving writing—defending Christianity to someone named Autolycus. Theophilus cites Genesis 1:1, which, as we’ve seen, states clearly that God created the world but doesn’t say from what or out of what God effected that creation. We might suppose that God did first create the raw materials from nothing, but that position is strictly extra-biblical. What Genesis 1:2 tells us of the entities or substances present in the beginning is that they number three or four, depending on how you count: the primordial chaos, the primordial waters, and God, with the possible addition of the breath or spirit of God if you consider those separately. I have a theory about that but I’ll get to it a bit further on.
The Hebrew word tohu is translated in a variety of ways: formlessness, chaos, confusion, unreality, emptiness, meaninglessness. It is paired in this verse with tehom, meaning “deep” or “depths.” So on the one hand a chaotic field of possibility absent purpose or meaning and on the other a vast, simple unity. It is the Greek sage Parmenides from whom we quote ex nihilo nihil fit: from nothing comes nothing. Parmenides asserted that all apparent change in the universe is illusory, and this is reflected in the unilluminated unity of the primordial depths. Contrasting Parmenides’ view is that of Heraclitus, who said that everything in the universe is in constant flux. Both views are present in Genesis 1:2, and God’s breath moves between them, keeping them separate. The Assyrian noblewoman would certainly read this verse and think of the cosmogeny of her own people, the Enūma Eliš: the creator deity Tiamat is a goddess of chaos and salt water who mates with Apsu, the primordial fresh waters. The secular modern perspective might think of a Leyden jar, an early form of capacitor which imbues separated layers of metal foil with opposite polarities of electrical charge in order to store energy. God, then, would serve as both a separation and a connection between opposing forces, between stasis and flux, between being and becoming, between chaos and unity. Thermodynamically-speaking it’s an interesting configuration because we’ve got fields of both maximal and minimal entropy present together in the beginning with God. And what happens when the circuit is closed, when a conductive path is created between the layers of the cosmic Leyden jar, when Tiamat mates with Apsu?
Genesis 1:3, going directly to the King James this time: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Let’s think about this, because it’s really very interesting. Verses 1 and 2 are just setting the scene; this is where the action begins. One of the central matters of this podcast is that Christians are often very mistaken or even lie outright about what’s in the Bible, and that what the Bible actually is is far more interesting than what it is often made out to be. This is a great example. If the Bible is the divine word of God then God is just telling us what was created first, which may well have been an arbitrary decision. But if we look at it as what it is—a people telling us about their understanding of the Sacred—then whole new dimensions of meaning open to us. The Israelites of the 6th century BCE are recovering from a brutal catastrophe and looking at their sacred stories and texts and deciding what is most important to say. They are reaching across a span of twenty-six centuries to tell us something about God. Why did they want to tell us that God created light first?
The whole scenario is especially interesting from the thermodynamical perspective that would certainly be considered under the modern secular perspective. We have on the one hand a formless chaos, a high-entropy state, so heterogenous that nothing can be known about it; and on the other hand a great depth of water, a unity, a very low entropy state, something so homogenous that there is nothing to know about it. And between them, the breath of God.
Here’s another perspective to consider: that of Plato, presented by the character Socrates in Book 6 of Plato’s Republic. This follows a long discussion in which Socrates, with the help of Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus, explores the question of whether it is better for someone to be just or unjust. Central to the question is the matter of what it means for anything to be good or bad. Socrates, reasoning by analogy, compares the Good to the Sun:
Let’s say, then, that this is what I called the offspring of the good, which the good begot as its analogue. What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things.
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In other words, it’s good that we can see, because sight allows us to find things and appreciate beauty and create internet memes and whatnot, but the more fundamental good is that which allows for even the possibility of sight: the sun and its light. Similarly, it is good for us to know what virtue and justice are, but the Good itself is that principle which permits the possibility of this knowledge and of knowledge in general, the principle of intelligibility.
Returning again to the epistemological landscape of Genesis 1:1-2, we have the unintelligible information of pure chaos and the intelligible depths about which there is nothing to know because of its simplicity and unity. When I read Genesis 1:3, I picture God connecting the two, and the result, like a discharged Leyden jar, is a spark and a release of light.
Moving on to Genesis 1:4. Gloss 1: “And saw God the light from its being good and divided God between the light and between the darkness.” This is a tricky one because there’s a preposition (ki) that implies a copula but the copula itself is dropped. The preposition ki can mean “from”, “that”, “who”, “which”, “of,” “because…” in general marking something belonging to something else or being signified by something else. Gloss 2: “And God saw the light to be good and God divided between the light and the darkness.” King James: “And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
We note first that God did not create goodness but rather evaluates the light according to a standard which, evidently from the text, exists prior to God. If we continue to evaluate this verse with our epistemological frame then there’s a tantalizing symmetry between God’s identification of the light as good and Socrates’ metaphor comparing the Good to light. It seems to me that the unification of opposites, of the chaos and the depths, has established the first possibility of knowledge, and then God’s assessment of the light as good is a self-reflection: the divine intellect turns in on itself and is able to cognize its own intelligibility, which is the very form of intelligibility itself and thus identical with the Good.
I mentioned earlier that I have a theory about the entities present in Genesis 1:2. If we jump ahead to Genesis 2:7, when God creates Adam, we read that God “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” The breath of God is the sufficient condition for the lifeless form to become a living being, a person: the breath is prior to the becoming alive. And in Genesis 1:2 we have the chaos, the depths, and the breath of God, ruach Elohim. Genesis 1:1 is a frame for the whole narrative; it’s the big picture view. Then Genesis 1:2 sets the scene with the initial presence of those three entities and only those three entities: the breath of God but not God. I think Genesis 1:3 marks the transition between two radically different configurations: chaos, the depths, and the breath of God in the first; light, darkness, and God in the second. I think that these verses are telling us that the full and proper entity of God is co-emergent with light and darkness at the moment of creation. The breath of God becomes the speech of God—creation through speech being a common trope in the cosmogenies of the ancient world—and pushes the initial configuration into a phase transition, resulting in a new configuration in which has emerged a new capacity or affordance: intelligibility.
God separates the light from the darkness. I’ll be explaining this more in coming episodes, but what we have here is the creation of the sacred, sacred meaning “set apart.” But there’s an interesting distinction here between the Hebrew of Genesis 1:4 and the King James translation. In King James, the light is made sacred by being taken away from the darkness, but in the Hebrew, the light and the darkness are set apart from each other, and thus the Sacred emerges as the relationship of separateness between the two.
Last verse for today, Genesis 1:5: “And called God the light day and the darkness he called night and there was evening and there was morning, day the first.” King James: “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.” What’s especially interesting here is that land is created on the third day in verse 9 and the Sun and Moon in verse 16 on the fourth day. Verse 17 specifically states that the Sun and Moon are there to “give light upon the earth,” which clues us in to the more esoteric meaning intended by verses 3-5. In verse 5, we see light and darkness set into a cycle, a cycle which is prior to the cycle of day and night as signalled by the motions of the heavenly bodies. In the first chapter of Genesis, that motion does not cause the underlying time cycle but rather exists as a reflection or manifestation of it. It is through this cycle that the world comes into being, each thing a necessary condition for what follows. Light and darkness such as they were created and delineated in verses 3-4 here become the constitutive structure of a generative cycle of creation. As God continues to create the world in the subsequent verses, it is through this cycle. Verse 5 depicts the creation of time itself, but not time as being merely the passage from one moment to the next. Rather, time is the unfolding of the intelligible.
You might be asking me at this point whether I really think that’s what the ancient scribes had in mind. No, not exactly. But I think they were on to something. It’s safe to say that I’ve learned more about the world than an Israelite priest could possibly have known that far in the past, but at the same time, I think they were expressing their own perspective on rational and empirical phenomena equally accessible in any time period. In the same way, the ancients wrote about the stars, not knowing that they’re spheres of hot plasma held together by gravity, but they were seeing the same thing that I see when I look up into the night sky. But the phenomena we’re dealing with here are of a more occult nature—occult in the sense of hidden or obscured—and their observations serve as useful guides.
Bear in mind that I’m not taking any of this as being doctrinal in the dogmatic sense. Rather, the Bible serves for me as a hermeneutical frame, a way of symbolizing the structure of human reality at a level for which everyday language is ill-suited. Genesis 1 depicts a conceptual reality into which physical reality emerges; it thus depicts the nascence of conceptualization itself, and language is always already beyond its own generative impulse. We must thus approach the matter orthogonally. We noted earlier that the Good is prior to God but also identified the Good as the principle of intelligibility, which we associated with the light of creation which ontologically follows God in the text. This contradiction isn’t a problem for us because we’re not looking to establish a coherent ontology for ourselves but rather to understand the broad themes regarding what this narrative meant to the ancient Israelites and how those themes might serve to deepen our understanding of the Sacred, expanding its discursive context within the structure of our language.
So when we ask the question, “Where does Satan fit into all this,” the straightforward answer is that the text doesn’t identify any such thing at this point. Indeed, the Hebrew word satan only appears in the Torah in Numbers 22, where it’s used as a generic noun meaning “adversary.” But we do note a process of overturning which inheres in creation: darkness is a property of the initial configuration of verses 1-2, a property which is sublated—both suspended and preserved—in the second configuration of verses 4-5. With the presence of light, darkness becomes not a void or a nothing but a negation with intentional content, and the play between light and darkness is a motion from which emerges the whole of creation. This motion structures God, which is at the same time the illumination of the mind of God, and this structure is oppositional—not in the moral sense of an enemy but in literal sense of something set against something else, like boards set against one another to structure an A-frame, or the outward force of energy generated when gravity creates masses of sufficient density. There is thus an opposition within God and it is here that we can first identify not Satan but the satanic itself.