Did God Really Create the World “Ex Nihilo” — Out of Nothing?
How most modern readers get the creation story wrong and other things
This is a continuation of my article on Genesis. Earlier, I explained how in properly understanding ancient texts like the Bible we should first abandon modern and anachronistic notions of the universe and instead embrace the cosmological worldview that ancient people had. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend you do so here. In this next article, we will be looking at verse 2 of Genesis 1.
You might have heard the phrase, “creatio ex nihilo.” This is Latin for “creation out of nothing,” suggesting that God created the world not through already existing material, but in the absence of it. Augustine (4th century) has expressed this idea,
“You, therefore, O Lord… did in the beginning, which is of You, in Your Wisdom, which was born of Your Substance, create something, and that out of nothing.” (Confessions)
Every Christian believes that God created everything. That’s a given. We also believe that everything that exists does exist because God made them exist. This, also, is a given. So far, so good. Does the creation account in Genesis 1, however, teach us that God created the world “out of nothing”?
Recent scholarship has highlighted the likelihood that Genesis 1:1’s “In the beginning…” either serves as a “subordinate clause,” as the New Jewish Publication Society’s (NJPS) rendering, “When God began to create…” or a “summary statement” of what God is going to do in chapter 1.
The nuances between these two views are minimal, but the conclusions are the same: Genesis 1:1 should not to be treated as a separate event from that which follows it. There is nothing that separates verse 1 and 2 chronologically as some would speculate (“gap theory”). It has been a temptation for some to insert a hypothetical “millions of years” between the verses in order to at least comply with modern calculations of the age of the earth.
This new interpretative proposal of treating verse 1 as a summary statement not only rests on grammatical grounds; we have a much stronger evidence — context. The heavens (shamayim) and the earth (erets) are only said to be formed in verses 8 and 10 respectively. If I may reiterate it: the heavens and the earth only appear on the second and third day of creation:
And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse… And God called the expanse Heaven (shamayim)… And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And… God called the dry land Earth (erets),” (Genesis 1:7–10)
On the third day, “dry land,” which is then called “earth” (erets) is formed by the separation of the waters in verse 9. So when the word “earth” appears in verse 2, it is defined as a landmass yet submerged underwater. It is technically erets (land) but not erets in the “creative sense” of the word: it is not yet “dry land.” There is therefore no contradiction in the statement that the earth is formed in verse 10 when it already appears in verse 2.
If Genesis 1:1, then, serves as a summary statement, verse 2 is what starts the scene. The creation story begins by describing the condition of the cosmos.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.
Yes and No
Although specific acts like the creation of light (v. 3) assume that it is brought forth out of nothing (God merely speaking it into existence), the narrative at large starts with the assumption that something did exist prior to any of the creative acts. Before God speaks into existence “light,” it presents the reader with an image of a world covered in “darkness.”
Don’t get me wrong. That God created everything from nothing is totally accurate, “For by him all things were created,” (Colossians 1:16) says Paul. It is all but natural to recognize that every single thing that exists does exist because of God.
The existence of any thing requires cause; we know this through the laws of physics. “An object at rest remains at rest unless acted upon by an external force,” states Newton’s First Law of Motion. Going back further into the past, only a supernatural entity independent of the laws of science could create into being the universe that now exists.
Order out of Chaos
The main thrust of the creation story, however, is not about God creating “something out of nothing,” but the act of creating itself. One by one, the author narrates to us a story whereby God makes the world a habitable place, filling it with plants, animals, and eventually, human beings.
But this creation is actuated within the backdrop of a preexisting world characterized by chaos and disorder.
The story of Genesis 1 is a story of how God shaped and ordered the world from a state of desolation into a beautiful handicraft which he eventually calls “good.” Among other things, it is primarily a theological history meant to teach ancient readers about God — a story interwoven throughout the Torah — of how he transforms bad conditions into something that is good.
The idea of an already existing world prior to creation would be hard to grasp if we fail to embrace the mindset of ancient people. In trying to visualize the “universe” we often imagine planets and heavenly bodies as perceived from outer space. But for the ancient man, the point of reference is always, and only, the land he inhabits.
In visualizing the creation story, therefore, one must try to forget all images of the universe learned from school textbooks. The reason for this is that the point-of-view by which we visualize the universe is all too modern and very much unlike how the ancients conceived it. Instead, imagine yourself, a man, situated on the surface of the earth. You stand there. You hear the raging of the waters. You look all around you. You see nothing but darkness.
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2)
Without Form and Void
Verse 2 serves as a circumstantial clause, that is, it presents the reader with the condition of the land from which God begins his work: it is dark, and it is chaotic.
The phrase “without form and void” is in Hebrew תהו ובהו tohu va’bohu. The same construction is found only once outside Genesis, in the book of Jeremiah:
I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void (tohu va’bohu); and to the heavens, and they had no light.
He continues, “I looked on the mountains, and behold, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and behold, there was no man, and all the birds of the air had fled” (Jeremiah 4:23, 24–25).
The prophet here foresees the desolation that is to befall Judah. But notice, Jeremiah perceives all of these as an observer on earth. He describes hills, mountains, and birds. Although quite different from the state of the world described in Genesis 1:2, the point of reference is the same: he describes as tohu va’bohu the condition of the land from the perspective of a man on earth, not a random agglomeration of matter viewed from outer space.
This passage could also shed light on the use of the phrase tohu va’bohu. Since the same wording is used to refer to slightly different conditions, it can be inferred that this phrase acts as an idiom. The alliteration (rhyme) of the words tohu and bohu might play a role in this. Whatever the precise definition might be, it must have included the basic idea of uninhabitability and uselessness.
To the author of Genesis, before God starts his creative act, the land was practically uninhabitable and useless.
The Deep and the Waters
In what way was the land “without form and void?” The author describes the situation: the “waters” fill the land. Notice that the Spirit of God is said to be hovering “over the face of the waters,” not the land, implying that the earth’s surface was all but covered with water. This chaotic state of the world, then, can be pictured as waters overwhelming the land.
It is not surprising, then, that in other accounts of the creation story, the success of God is said to be his control and keeping of the waters in their place so that they do not once again overwhelm the land. Psalm 104 reads:
You covered it with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. At your rebuke they fled; at the sound of your thunder they took to flight…You set a boundary that they may not pass, so that they might not again cover the earth. (v. 6–7, 9)
In this Psalm, the primeval waters were said to stand “above the mountains,” until God acts and begins to set their limits. This precisely is the event described in Genesis 1:9: “And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.”
According to the Bible, then, before “dry land” appeared, the waters were once covering the whole land.
This is understood by readers until at least the 1st century A.D. Notice, for example, how the apostle Peter describes the creation story:
For they deliberately overlook this fact, that the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and through water by the word of God, and that by means of these the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished. (2 Peter 3:5–6)
Peter says that the earth (land) is formed out of water, and through it. He reads the creation story the way pre-scientific people read it (well of course, he is one). According to the Torah, water preexisted the land. Creation starts with it, and the earth (land) comes out of it.
Evangelical scholar Richard Bauckham (1983), in his commentary for the World Biblical Commentary series, writes:
According to the creation account in Genesis l, and in accordance with general Near Eastern myth, the world-sky and earth-emerged out of a primeval ocean. The world exists because the waters of chaos, which are now above the firmament, beneath the earth and surrounding the earth, are held back and can no longer engulf the world. The phrase “out of water” expresses this mythological concept of the world’s emergence out of the watery chaos, rather than [a] more “scientific” notion… the writer means that water was, in a loose sense, the instrument of creation, since it was by separating and gathering the waters that God created the world. This also provides a good parallel with the next verse, which states that by means of water he afterward destroyed the world.
The Deep
There is something else to be noticed in verse 2 of Genesis 1. The author of Genesis mentions that darkness was all over the surface of “the deep.” The word commonly translated “deep” is in the Hebrew תהום tehom. This word appears 21 times in the Old Testament and is used to refer to the deep subterranean waters beneath both the land and the visible seas. To give one example, Job 38:16–17:
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep (tehom)? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?”
God rhetorically asks Job if he’s ever plunged into the deepest parts of the deep (tehom), which, by the way, for the ancient man is practically impossible. What’s interesting here is that the succeeding line, “gates of death…gates of deep darkness,” serves as parallel to “springs of the sea…recesses of the deep,” thus implying their poetic equivalence. There is clear association between the deep waters and death itself.
Fast forward to the New Testament and we find ourselves with John’s vision. Revelation 20 narrates to us a scene where the “earth and sky fled away.” The elements mentioned here are that which we also find in Genesis 1: heavens (sky), and the earth (land).
Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them… And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. (Revelation 20:11, 13)
If we try to visualize John’s vision through a modern understanding of the universe, the vision gets practically messed up. How could we even picture the sky “fleeing?” What’s more, the earth is also said to have fled. Adding to that, in verse 13, John mentions the “sea,” as if the imagery doesn’t get a lot more convoluted — how can there still be sea when the earth is already said to have disappeared?
The Sea
It is only a problem when we approach the text with the presuppositions of modern science. The difficulty easily fades when we actually read it like ancients do and incorporate their notions of the cosmos.
Even with regards to New Testament vocabulary, we should be wary of importing the modern notion of the term “earth” into the text. When we say Earth in the scientific sense of the word, we refer to the entirety of the planet: a spheroidal mass of both land and water. But this is not the way ancients used the term — it basically means “land,” and as the verse 14 points out, is contrasted with the sea.
Notice, for example, how the John differentiates the two in Revelation 14:7:
And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.”
This is why “earth” (Greek: γη gi) should in passages like this be translated “land” to avoid the tendency of reading it through the anachronisms of modern science.
Returning to Revelation 20:11, what “flees” here is not Planet Earth in its entirety, but only the land. Again, this should be visualized from the point-of-view of a man on earth (or at least, somewhere on the earth) as contrasted to looking at it from outer space.
The setting of Revelation 20 becomes similar to that of pre-creation. In the Genesis account, before God starts his creative activity, everything was “waters.” In John’s vision, after the land and the sky have fled, nothing is to be seen except “the sea.”
As an aside, Revelation 21 speaks of the New Creation, comparable, but nonetheless superior, to the first creation of Genesis 1. It’s all creation context.
The absence of the sky (heavens) and earth (land) meant that the sea (waters) are now laid bare. This is why after their departure John now turns his attention to the sea.
Symbolism of the Primordial Waters
John describes what happens next:
And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done” (Revelation 20:13).
After setting his attention to the sea, he beholds it yielding up “the dead.” Now notice the parallelism: “Death and Hades” are said to yield up dead from within them. In this account, the sea and death are treated as parallels.
Various terminologies are used in the foregoing passage, but the fundamental idea is that the sea has associations to the underworld. This concept is not novel to the book of Revelation. Like the previously mentioned passage in the book of Job (38:16–17), the association of deep ocean waters to the realm of the dead is a concept held by ancient people throughout the ages.
The association with death may not necessarily be with the sea per se. But that which is beneath it, sharing the same substance, tehom: “the deep.”
The Deep and the Dead
In ancient Israelite cosmology, tehom is the deep ocean way beneath the surface of the sea. Its association with the underworld could be explained by its geographical proximity. When a person dies his soul is said to descend deep beneath the land. Since ancient Israelites believed that tehom also extends underneath the land (see Exodus 20:4), it can be naturally deduced that tehom “housed” these dead spirits.
This sheds light on the vision of Revelation 20. The sea yielded its dead because it contained tehom.
Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:14)
In this verse, we encounter the term Hades. The KJV translates it “hell,” which in my view is an unfortunate translation. Hades is Greek for the Hebrew שאול Sheol. This word carries with it a neutral concept: it basically means the abode of the dead [spirits].
We read, for example, of Jacob mourning for his son whom he thought had died: “he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave [Hebrew: Sheol; Greek: Hades] unto my son mourning” (Genesis 37:35 KJV). Jacob only meant the underworld, the place of dead, not the place of punishment for the wicked — as how we commonly understand the term “hell.”
The sea, therefore, in John’s vision, contained Hades = Sheol. The association of “the sea” to “the deep,” (tehom) and the deep to the abode of the dead (Sheol), becomes more apparent.
We must, however, take careful attention to the nuances between the associations. We wouldn’t deal with this today, but as a quick side note, the Hebrew tehom is normally translated into Greek as αβυσσος abyssos, where we get the word “abyss.” To give you an idea, abyssos is 7 out of 9 times translated “bottomless pit” in the New Testament, and all these are found in the book of Revelation. As an example, Revelation 11:7:
And when they have finished their testimony, the beast that rises from the bottomless pit (abyssos) will make war on them and conquer them and kill them.
The term “bottomless pit” is in the Greek abyssos, and this word is a common translation of the Hebrew tehom in the Greek translation of the Old Testament in use during the 1st Century. In fact, the Greek of Genesis 1:2 translates tehom (the deep) as abyssos (bottomless pit)!
Darkness Was Over the Face of Tehom
Let us not overwhelm ourselves with these details at the moment. Returning to Genesis 1:2, we now see the significance of “the deep” in the creation story. As tehom as akin to the place of the dead — “Sheol,” it at least represented the forces of darkness. Its existence implied the existence of death.
More than merely containing dead spirits, the waters were also seen as destructive forces, bringing death to mankind. Later in the story (Genesis 6), we read of God who, in his anger, again unleashes these forces. When he decides to wipe out humanity due to their sins, the waters, as a destructive agent, fulfills this act. The boundaries and limits that were set on creation were lifted, and destruction and devastation ensued.
The opening verses of Genesis, then, by relating to us the former condition of the world, tells of how God, by his word, calls these dark forces into submission to his will. It is a testament to power and dominion. Creation stories of other peoples in the ancient Near East describe their gods battling one another which consummates in the creation of the world.
The Genesis story, however, portrays the God of Israel as without equal. No one hinders him from acting. He speaks, and it comes to pass. Far from the destructive waters ruling over the earth, God enforces a boundary and restricts it from overwhelming the land, signifying his rule over the entire world.
God’s control of the primeval waters finds its parallel in Jesus’ rebuke of the raging sea in the New Testament:
And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. (Mark 4:39)
Genesis 1:3 also tells of how God speaks light to a world that is filled with darkness. The writer of the Fourth Gospel must have been alluding to this scene when he applies it to Jesus: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)
The creation story speaks of the God of Israel as being in total control of the cosmos. It also, in a way, speaks of God’s control over the forces of darkness, which the waters and the deep represent. By speaking into existence “light” and ordering and filling the world in the process, Genesis teaches us about a fundamental facet of God’s workings: he is a God who creates order out of chaos, light out of darkness, and meaning out of meaninglessness.
Excursus: An Eschatological Perspective
In the preceding, I tried to elaborate on the theological import of the creation account of Genesis 1. Now briefly on the eschatological (by this I mean that which relates to the unfolding process of prophetic fulfillment).
As wonderful as the story of creation gets, the new creation is infinitely a lot better. The Old Testament hints at this: one day, God will “create new heavens and a new earth” (Isaiah 65:17). This new creation supersedes the previous in many respects.
In Genesis the author describes God ruling over the waters, but Revelation says that sea will be “no more” (21:1). More than just isolating the body of water, the sea will be entirely wiped out and will be totally absent in the new creation. The idea, then, is that in the next world, there will be total eradication of the forces of darkness, destruction, and death itself.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. (Revelation 21:4)
