Yahweh revealed himself to Israel as the great Creator in the course of delivering to Moses the ten commandments. Amidst trumpet blast, fire and smoke he told them: six days you shall labour and do all your work, but on the seventh you shall do no work, for in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them, and rested the seventh day. The seven-day week goes back to the fourth commandment, in 1446 BC, at which time it was a new idea; no other people known to archaeology ordered their calendar by such a rhythm.

Today, while we still have the week, we no longer, as a society, believe that God made the heavens and the earth in six days. But how much of this non-belief is due to misunderstanding? This article offers a short commentary on the text that sets out what happened on each of those days, and concludes with two key points:

• Nothing in the universe exists now as it existed in the beginning.

• Partly because of that, the perceived problem of reconciling the account to what we know about the world’s evolution since the beginning is not solved by arguing that the six days were not literal days.

In the beginning

The account, in the first chapter of the Bible, of how God made the world begins with the statement that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. In Hebrew there is no distinction between ‘heaven’ and ‘the heavens’ – both translate the dual word shamayim – and while ‘heaven’ can mean just the region immediately above the earth, in other contexts it has the sense of everywhere above, without limit. Here the phrase ‘heaven and earth’ means the whole universe.

No pre-existing raw material is mentioned; instead, the opening line implies, without stating, that God brought the raw material itself into existence. The idea is implicit in the word for created, bara; as in English, it has more pregnancy than the word ‘make’, asah. Creating includes the idea of making, but making does not necessarily include the idea of creating.

The newly created heavens are in darkness. There are no stars, and the earth is formless and empty, enveloped in water. The spirit of God hovers over the water – the invisible spirit, though the verb metaphorically suggests the fluttering movement of a bird. In Hebrew ‘spirit’ (ruah) also means ‘breath’ (as in Gen 6:17) or ‘breeze’ (3:8). The supernatural wind that moves over the waters at the Creation parallels the natural wind (8:1) that passes over the waters after the world’s destruction, when it begins to regenerate.

‘In the beginning’ is an indeterminate span of time and has a dual reference, referring to the time preceding the first day and to the whole period down to the seventh day. In the initial period God creates the universe out of things invisible; in the days following he completes the work of creation by giving it form and life, the earth until then being without form and void of life. So the account opens with a statement of the first work of God and a summary of all his work

Without light, time cannot be measured in days, months and years. The days of creation are each defined by the phenomena of nightfall and daybreak (not evening and morning). The Israelites may have been the only people to reckon the day, against common sense, as beginning at nightfall. Presumably they did so because of their tradition that the days of the original week began then. They distinguished two such moments: the point when the sun set and the point when it was fully dark – hence the instruction to sacrifice the Passover lamb ‘between the two evenings’ (Ex 12:6).

The first day

The pattern of the other days shows that the text describing the first day does not begin with ‘In the beginning’ but with the phrase, ‘And God said.’

As with the law of Moses, there are ten commands, beginning with the command to let there be light. It is sometimes said that Genesis tells us about the ‘why’ of creation and science the ‘how’, but the truth is the reverse. Genesis tells us nothing about why God created the world (there are some functional explanations in verses 14 and 29-30). The how, however, is clearly stated. Things take shape or come into existence not of themselves, through some intrinsic capacity to become ever more organised, but in response to a supernatural voice. As Psalm 33 puts it: ‘By the word of Yahweh were the heavens made, and all their multitude by the breath of his mouth. … He spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood fast.’ This was creation, not evolution. Evolution is the realisation over time of whatever potential for change the things created had from the beginning. It therefore follows creation.

What the source of the light was, we are not told, but it must have been something material, for the text goes on to explain that God separated the light from the darkness, calling the light ‘day’ and the darkness ‘night’. Since it cannot have been the sun, created on Day 4, it must have been a light source from beyond the solar system. But it also cannot have been other stars, for we know from astronomical observation that stars form naturally and indeed still form today.

To get some view of what the early universe was like, astronomers probe the heavens for objects that are furthest away from us, since light travels at a finite speed and what we see are those objects as they were when the light left them, not as they are now. Amongst the most distant objects are quasars, massive bodies that can be hundreds of times more luminous than entire galaxies are. In Big Bang cosmology they are thought to be powered (paradoxically) by black holes and to lie at the centre of primeval galaxies, but at this distance the reality is impossible to determine. It could be that they were the ultra-energetic nuclei of what would only later become galaxies. What we do know is that as we travel further back in time, quasars become both more luminous and more numerous, suggesting that the present universe is much darker than it once was.

As quasars are the only source of light in the universe apart from stars, it must have been a quasar that illuminated the Earth on the first day: the primal ancestor of the luminous black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The quasar shone with so much energy that one side of the Earth was lit up, just as if the Sun was shining. Similar quasars blazed with light throughout the universe.

This understanding of the text opens up a new way of understanding the origin of galaxies. Galaxies come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Among the most common are spiral galaxies. Since their coiled form clearly implies a history, there are two possible explanations for their evolution. One is that matter, from a centre of origin somewhere else, has been spiralling inwards. The other is that matter began by issuing outwards from multiple centres of origin. Either:

• atoms of hydrogen gas clumped together after the Big Bang to be sucked gravitationally into ever growing ultra-dense concentrations of matter at the nucleus.

Or:

• concentrations of rotating hydrogen gas ejected jets that became the arms of galaxies as they centrifugally wound around the nucleus.

A naturalistic cosmology is obliged to go for the first option, but the observational evidence tends to favour the second. As one goes back in time galaxies become more compact, not diffuse, they become more energetic (with the star formation rate increasing) and, while image resolution is insufficient to discern the form of the earliest galaxies, they seem to be increasingly dominated by ultra-luminous quasars, or superquasars that spawned whole clusters of quasars. The quasars have masses equal to billions of suns, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that they are the source of the billions of stars that make up the galaxies we see. Most spiral galaxies show two main jets streaming out of the nucleus – an interpretation that most obviously suggests itself in the case of barred spirals. Note that the example illustrated, NGC 1300, is not thought to have a black hole at the centre.

Whether the age of the universe is to be measured in terms of billions of years depends on whether the speed of light has been constant over time. If it has been slowing down (for which there is some evidence), then the light from progressively more distant stars would be shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, and redshift would be the effect of light decelerating rather than an initial Big Bang. In that case radiation from the most distant stars might not have taken billions of years to reach us. Because of the intimate connection between the velocity of light and nuclear energy, stars would have gone through their life cycle much more quickly than their current consumption rate.

As the quasars ignited, the heavens ceased to be dark and formless. Most of the light reaching the Earth, close to the edge of the present Milky Way, came from one direction, the galaxy’s centre. And as the Earth revolved before the light, there was nightfall and there was morning, one day. The text expressly defines the period as one revolution of the earth.

The Israelites seem to have had a surprisingly advanced conception of the earth as a globe suspended in space. Job says:

A verse in Proverbs (8:27) paints a similar picture. The ‘circle’ here is the continually moving dividing line between night and day on the earth’s sphere. Most ancient peoples thought of the sun as revolving around the earth, inferring that motion from the rising of the sun in the east and its setting in the west. With such a view it was possible to think of the earth as a plate rather than a sphere. The Israelites had a different conception. In their view the first light, and the daily rhythm of light and darkness, did not derive from the luminary that rose in the east and set in the west. It derived from an unknown source beyond the solar system, in relation to which the earth rotated.

The second day

God issues a command to separate the waters surrounding the earth, so that in the midst of them there is a firmament, called ‘heaven’. Previously ‘heaven’ referred to the entire universe, just as ‘earth’ referred to the whole planet; here it refers to an outer space bounded by terrestrial waters below and celestial waters above. There was also, in the Hebrew conception of the universe, a further region, called ‘the heaven of heavens’. This was the universe beyond the firmament (Deut 10:14, I Ki 8:27). So the heavens in their totality consisted of two regions, the immediate neighbourhood bounded by an envelope of water, and the region of outer space where the stars shone. In Psalm 148 the singer cries:

The purpose of the waters was to shield the Earth from the radiation emitted by the Milky Way and other galaxies at a time when cosmic radiation was much more intense.

Elsewhere on this website it is suggested that at the time of the Cataclysm a shock front produced by an ejection of dust and gas from the nucleus of the galaxy caused the envelope of water vapour to collapse. Additionally, water may have been mixed in with the cloud that passed through the solar system. Torrential rain drenched the earth for 40 days.

The third day

The terrestrial waters are gathered together into one place, and land appears. The waters gathered together are called ‘seas’ and the land ‘earth’. As with ‘heaven’, ‘earth’ here has a limited meaning: the dry terrain which will constitute the environment for the animals created on Day 6. Other texts help us visualise the arrangement. Genesis 7 refers to springs supplied by water from the great deep. In Psalm 24 we read that the earth was ‘founded upon the seas’, ‘established upon the rivers.’ Since the deep already covered the earth, the one place into which its waters were gathered must have been under the land. The deep fed the rivers that flowed out of Eden before there was any rain. The land rested on foundations sunk into a subterranean ocean.

In response to another command the earth puts forth vegetation: seed-bearing plants and fruit-trees with seed in their fruit, each according to its kind. Note that terrestrial plants and trees are the earliest organisms to be created. In the fossil record they do not appear until after bacteria, marine algae and marine animals.

The stage is set. The universe is illuminated, but it is empty. The earth has been divided into sea and land, but it has no life. Days 4-6 parallel Days 1-3 by describing how the new environments are now filled, whether with celestial bodies, as in the case of the illuminated space created on Day 1, or living souls, as in the case of the seas, the firmament and the land created on Days 2 and 3.

The fourth day

God commands that two luminaries be placed within the firmament. Sooner or later another light-giver will be needed to provide the difference between day and night. It will also be needed to determine the seasons, days and years by which time is measured and to provide regular warmth. (The latter function is not mentioned, possibly because the celestial waters radiated back most of the earth’s heat.) Just like the unnamed source of light on Day 1, the unnamed sun now separates light from darkness. God names the day, the night and the heavens but not the sun or the moon, as if to emphasise that these are just objects, not deities, despite the use of the word ‘rule’. The greater luminary rules (controls) the day, and the lesser luminary rules the night. The ‘stars’ are also formed. In ancient Hebrew, as in any language before the age of modern astronomy, the word ‘star’ meant simply a light-giving celestial body, be it a fixed star, a wandering star (i.e. planet) or a shooting star (a meteor). Here the context shows that planets are signified. Stars in the modern sense can and do form naturally by condensing out of clouds of galactic gas. As far as we know, they do not exist except as a constituent of galaxies. There are no isolated stars in the space between the Milky Way and the galaxies nearest to it to suggest that they could have been created independently.

The sun, the moon and the planets are set in ‘the firmament of heaven’ formed on the second day.

Genesis does not say how many planets there were originally. However, Joseph’s dream of the sun, the moon and eleven stars bowing down to him (37:9) seems to be drawing from a belief that there were originally twelve. Similarly, in Revelation 12 there is a vision of the sun, moon and twelve stars. Four of the stars are swept down and crash on the earth. Evidently these are not other suns in the galaxy but disintegrating planets, fragments of which strike the earth in the form of asteroids and comets. That such events have occurred from time to time – most catastrophically at the end of the Hadean period – was unknown to science until the 1970s, but now we know what the Bible means when it refers to stars of heaven falling to the earth like figs blown by a gale from a fig-tree (Rev 6:13, alluding to Isa 34:4). The stars are asteroids and the gale is the shock wave from an exploding star beyond the solar system.

The fifth day

God commands the seas to abound with teeming life: with the tannim and everything that moves in the waters: sharks, fish, cephalopods and every other kind of sea creature, down to the microscopic protozoa. The exact meaning of the word tannim is difficult to determine, let alone translate; ‘monsters’ is inaccurate because there is no implication of great size, while ‘whales’ has the additional fault that these – like ichthyosaurs and other marine reptiles and mammals – are known to have evolved from land animals. In other contexts a tannin (singular) can be a serpent (Ex 7:9) but, like the English word, it is not the normal word for snake (which is nachash), though an actual snake-like animal does seem intended (cf Deut 32:33). In Ezekiel (29:3, 32:2) it appears to denote a crocodile.

There is a tendency to assume that ‘waters’ mean ‘oceans’, but the text itself is less specific. The waters include lakes and rivers, with ‘seas’ themselves being simply large bodies of water, including lakes. So tannim may have been non-marine creatures rather than marine. The term here is a general designation, a collective noun like the other designations of animals in the creation account, even though in other contexts it may refer to a particular type of animal. The point – vitally important in the midst of a world that understood one tannin, the ‘dragon’ Rahab/Tiamat, as a deity – is that they are created beings, as are all living ‘souls’ (nephesh in vv. 20, 21, 24 and 30, the normal word for ‘soul’).

Unfortunately English texts often fail to convey the proper meaning of key words even when appropriate translations are available. The animals created on Days 5 and 6 are living souls – a more challenging combination of terms than ‘living creatures’. They are animate beings that have in them the breath of life. ‘Life’ is not something material; it comes directly from God, and both animals and human beings have it. When God creates man, he forms his body from the dust of the ground and breathes into his nostrils the ‘breath of life’; only then does he become a living soul (2:7). ‘Breath’ here is neshamah, functioning exactly like ruah, the word used in 6:17. God is the ‘God of the spirits of all flesh’ (Num 16:22). In the words of Ecclesiastes:

They all have the same breath. … All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth.

In gestation similarly: we do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child (Eccl 11:5). All we know is that it does. The spirit is not a mere ‘epiphenomenon’ of matter. The coming into being of every child – indeed every animal – requires the direct input of God (cf. Ps 139).

The experience of every person that he is a conscious, living being, the instinctive acknowledgement that the taking of life is wrong and not something to be justified by a ‘survival of the fittest’ principle, the truth that one relates best to fellow human beings on the basis that they too are living souls, all accords with this understanding of reality. It does not accord with the dogma of academic science, which makes no distinction between life and non-life and denies the reality of spirit. When biologists speculate about the origin of life, they refer to the origin of bacteria, which do not have a capacity for voluntary movement at any point in their life cycle. They are not living souls. When evolutionists speculate that all organisms are ancestrally connected to a single ‘tree of life’, they include all organisms: microbes, fungi, plants and protists as well as animals. They do not have to consider how the spirit of a fish, say, evolved into the spirit of a human being because for them it is a non-question; fishes, like human beings, are merely biological automatons.

Another mistranslated word is owph (v. 20 etc). It designates any animal with wings, not necessarily just a bird (for which Hebrew has a separate word). Winged creatures might also include pterosaurs and various kinds of insect as well as various kinds of bird. They are each made ‘according to their kinds’, and their assigned environment is ‘above the earth, across the face of the firmament’. The face of the firmament, as one looks up, is the lower part of the sky.

Genesis says nothing about ‘fixity of species’ – the idea that everything in the world is as it was when it was created. ‘Kind’ in the text is a more general word than ‘species’, the lowest unit in biological classification. ‘Species’ implies the contemporaneous existence of genealogically related species, but of course in the beginning, with the first generation, there can be no such implication. The text tells us only that within each category of plant and animal there were numerous kinds, and the kinds were distinctive.

Plants and animals change over time (as presaged by the curse on the snake, condemned to lose its legs), and they can give rise to new species. Originally there was just one species of beetle, whereas today there are over 350,000, and the oldest fossil beetle is as much a beetle in form as a modern one. The same is true of pterosaurs and the various other orders of insect: we know of no transitional forms leading up to their first appearance. The palae- ontological evidence suggests that the original species ancestral to each order was unique.

On all this life God commands a blessing, and says: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let the flying animals multiply on the earth.” He could have created a world that was fully populated from the beginning and without the ability to reproduce, so that there would have been but one generation, potentially living forever. But he didn’t. He engineers animals so that they can procreate: within them they have seeds of life, not unlike the seeds produced by plants. They are endowed with the ability to reproduce and to colonise new territory, thus implicitly with the ability to ‘evolve’, to diversify as they multiply and spread into diverse ecological niches. Nonetheless, although they can reproduce their kind, it is God who animates the embryos, because ‘life’ is distinct from what is in the seed. In that respect every new creature requires his involvement. Every naturally born animal is a fresh creation. The created world is autonomous, but not independent of its Creator. ‘If he were to take back his spirit and gather his breath to himself, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to the dust’ (Job 34:14f).

The sixth day

The earth now brings forth animals: beasts (behemah, not ‘cattle’, which are first mentioned in 4:20), creatures that creep (snakes, millipedes and the like) and animals of the earth (worms and other burrowers) – again, each according to its kind. As before, the distinctions are those of environment: the beasts move clear of the ground, the creeping animals creep along the ground, and the animals of the earth live under the ground. There is no distinction between wild and domestic animals, or between mammals and reptiles.

Finally, and on the same day, God makes man – one male and one female. He makes him ‘in our image, after our likeness’, male and female together reflecting his nature. As the plural now unexpectedly reveals, God has been speaking to someone when he issued his commands. We can easily forget here that a command implies someone to whom a command is given. One of the attributes of God is that he speaks, even before he creates a human being who can speak, and he creates by speaking. But it is only with the incarnation and revelation of Christ that we learn that it was he who performed the commands. He was in the beginning with God (John 1:2). All things were made through him, and nothing was made without him.

In him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of the cross.
Colossians 1:16-20

So it was the Son obeying the Father who executed the commands, the Son being by nature also God (‘And God said… And God made’).

In his body man is to reflect the form which God himself takes when he appears in bodily form (so Gen 3:8, 18:1f, Ezek 1:26). He is to have a god-like spirit and to exercise a god-like function, having dominion over the earth and everything that lives on the earth. He can understand speech. On the man and the woman God commands a special blessing, and explains what they may eat: “See, I have given you every seed-bearing plant that is on the face of the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. And to every animal of the earth and every winged creature of the air and everything that creeps on the earth – whatever is a living soul – I have given every green plant for food.” There is no death in the original food chain. The animals are designed to eat only plants, which are non-living: God makes certain plants specifically for food, and they will provide nourishment enough.

And God looks over everything that he has made, and sees that it is very good, for the heavens and the earth are now finished. The sixth day passes. And on the seventh God rests, blesses it, and makes it holy, because on that day he rested from the work he had done.

The sequel

If this had been the end of the story, we could plumb the lowest strata of the earth, investigate the moon, consider the origin of plants and animals and assess the veracity of the tradition according to whether they all look as if they had been supernaturally created. But it was not the end of the story. As we read on, we find that man – innocent and unknowing – chose a path on the eighth day that was contrary to the will of his Creator. He listened to a voice tempting him with the thought that, if he acquired the knowledge of good and evil, he would be like God. So he tasted evil, and consequently he did acquire a knowledge that he did not have before. But it was a corrupting knowledge. He found sin now couching at his door, desiring to be his master, and, if he was to be like God, he had to overcome it.

In practice he became its slave. The first fruit of Adam’s loins was murdered, further down the line a polygamous Lamech boasted that he had killed a man, and eventually the wickedness of Adam’s descendants was so great that God could stand it no longer. He was sorry that he had made man. It grieved him to his heart. The creation of man had been the climax of his work, and everything in a sense had been made for his sake. Now through man everything was corrupted.

So God said to Noah, a man blameless in his generation, “I have determined to make an end of all flesh; for the earth is filled with violence through them; I will destroy them with the earth. I will bring a cataclysm of waters to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven. But I will establish my covenant with you.” And that is what happened. The cataclysm razed even the highest mountains. It blotted out all flesh; every creature that moved on the earth perished.

It was little less than an undoing of the whole creation. The earth returned to a state of formlessness, being overwhelmed by water. The subterranean deep burst through the springs that had drawn from it, the envelope of water around the solar system collapsed, and the sky was penetrated by destroyed planets. As has become apparent from exploring other parts of the solar system, the cataclysm was the selfsame event as caused the moon to be bombarded. Traces of exotic elements found in meteorites show that a great cloud of dust and gas shot through the solar system, possibly originating from the Milky Way’s nucleus. The convulsing nucleus was metamorphosing into a star-studded galaxy in the same way as other quasars in the universe were. Heated up by stupendously higher rates of radioactivity, the moon had already been smothered in lava kilometres thick. So had Mars, Venus and Mercury, as well as being pummelled by the same storm of asteroids that hit the moon and the earth. In one way or another every body in the solar system was affected, and the effect of these convulsions was that the original face of the creation ceased to be visible. What we see now has a history, and that history leads back to a moment of destruction, not creation.

In a sense, that is the world’s ambiguity: the creation is hidden, just as its Creator is hidden. We see him only if the heart desires to see him, ‘for now we see in a mirror dimly’ and understand only in part. It is by faith that we understand that the world was fashioned by the word of God, from things invisible. The Creator has so ordered the world that we have to look beyond what can be seen, for only thus can we know him spiritually. It is the same with the fossil record: we can trace the lineages of organisms, if at all, only so far back. Some kinds have forms that change little from how they look now; a few undergo radical transformation. Not by any stretch of the imagination do they all present a single tree of life. But nor can we trace their lineages back to the creation, or even close to it. An entire world was expunged, along with the earth itself. A much eroded and much deformed stack of geological strata exists only because after that cataclysm the world had to start afresh, this time by natural means. The world had to regenerate itself, and re-creation was a process due to take tens of thousands of years, not six days.