(BA) Genesis 1:1, sky and earth

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31 July 2022 Navigate 'up' to the Genesis index: index-genesis.

In the Revised Version, Genesis 1:1 reads as follows:

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

The KJV reads "the heavens" instead of "the heaven".

Regardless, this could be misleading for modern readers. In today's English "heaven" tends to refer to "the better place where someone's soul could go when they die" and "the place where God lives." The Hebrew term shamayim, though, doesn't refer to a place where people go when they die, although God is sometimes portrayed as living in the shamayim. Not only God, though. Birds fly across the shamayim, and the stars are up there in the shamayim.

The closest English equivalent we have in daily speech is "sky." Even that, however, doesn't quite match up right, because in terms of the Hebrew Bible's view of the world, the sky is not just the blue-colored atmosphere known to modern science. The sky, as you can see later in the creation story, is a solid thing that holds back an entire ocean of water that exists up there above it, which would crash down and flood the entire earth if it stopped working, as it later does in the story of Noah's flood.

The earth, in English, refers to this ball that flies through space. In Hebrew, though, eretz, translated here as "earth" is something more like "land." So Genesis 1 gives a story of how the universe, a basically three-story world, is fashioned. The story begins with darkness and water, over which the spirit of God, or the wind of God, is moving about.

God moves the waters to expose an area of dry land, and he fashions a sky to hold back the water from above. Out of a pre-existing watery chaos, he fashions a place where humans can live, with dry ground and air. Below and around the land there is water -- the water of the sea around, the groundwater below. Above, the sky holds back the threatening waters above.

In between, God makes a space for humans, animals, and plants to live in. This is the picture in Genesis 1. For English-speaker contemporary readers, mentioning "heaven" in Genesis 1:1 gives the wrong picture.

Even translating "sky and land" as universe gives the wrong picture, because the modern picture of the universe: galaxies and the round planets doing circles around the sun, doesn't match the cosmos as assumed by Genesis 1.