The Creation

Genesis begins: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The earth is at first formless and empty, dark and covered with water (Genesis 1:2). Then, over six days, God speaks and things come to be: light; the sky; dry land, seas and plants; sun, moon and stars; sea creatures and birds; land animals and, last, human beings (Genesis 1:3–27). Humankind is made in God’s image, male and female, and is told to be fruitful and to rule over the other living things (Genesis 1:27–28). God sees that everything he has made is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). On the seventh day he rests, and he blesses that day and makes it holy (Genesis 2:1–3).

From its fourth verse the second chapter tells how the first man and woman were made. God forms the man from the dust of the ground and breathes life into him (Genesis 2:7), plants a garden in Eden and puts him there to cultivate and keep it (Genesis 2:8–15). The man may eat from every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; on the day he eats from that one he will die (Genesis 2:16–17). He names the animals, but none of them is a partner for him, so God makes a woman from his rib and brings her to him (Genesis 2:18–23). The narrator adds that this is why a man leaves his parents and joins his wife, and the two become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).

Later Scripture returns to these chapters often. The Sabbath commandment rests on the six days and the seventh (Exodus 20:8–11). A psalm says that the heavens were made by the Lord’s word (Psalm 33:6–9). Jesus quotes both chapters when he is asked about divorce (Matthew 19:3–6). John’s Gospel opens with the words “In the beginning” and says that all things were made through the Word (John 1:1–3), and the letter to the Colossians, which bears Paul’s name, says that all things were created through Christ and for him (Colossians 1:15–17).

Christians have read the six days in more than one way since antiquity. Basil of Caesarea, preaching on Genesis in the fourth century, took the first day as a day and a night of twenty-four hours (Basil, Hexaemeron 2.8). Augustine of Hippo, early in the fifth century, wrote that what kind of days these were is very hard, perhaps impossible, to conceive (Augustine, City of God 11.6). The creed of 381, used in both East and West, opens with what these chapters teach: it confesses God as “maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible” (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed article 1).