The following is a brief summary of the First Creation Story. The week of seven days forms a calendar into which the dill'erent successive stages of the work of creation are divided. The creation of man forms the climax and conclusion of the work on the sixth day, while the close of the narrative describes the seventh or day of rest, when J" ceased from His creation- work.
Firti day (Gn 11-*). Light created amid the waste and void of the primal chaos. Division of day and night.
.Second day (vv.*^. Creation of the firmament, dividing the upper from Ihe lower waters.
Third day (vv.y-l^). Dr>- land and seas formed. Vegetation.
Fourth day (vv.i^l»). Heavenly bodies created.
Fifth day (vv, 20-21). Waters swarm with living creatures — flying things, monsters of the deep, reptiles and birds created.
Sixth day (w.2+51). Creation of land animals — cattle, rep- tiles, wild beasts. Man fashioned in divine image and placed as head and lord of creates! things.
Seventh day (21-3). Sabbath of divine rest.
(B) The Second Creation Narrative is the Jahwistic account contained in Gn 2">"', and follows immediately upon the preceding. It belongs to an earlier document, composed during the national and pre-exilic period of Hebrew life, before the Jewish nation became merged in an ecclesiastical polity, and at a time when the traditions of patri- archal story, which clustered around certain sacred spots, were still vivid. Religious conceptions were tlien sini|)le and concrete, and the representations of God were strongly anthropomorphic. The in- terests of the writer are national and human. Not a priestly system, but a people, is the centre of his universe. Moreover, his thought moves along the lines of prophetic rather than priestly ideas. Accordingly, the creation of man plays a much more important part in the Jahwistic cos- mogony. We hear nothing of moon and stars to regulate festival sea-sons, but of plants and animals. Nor is man's position made so distinct from that of animated nature around him (cf. Wellhausen, Prolegg.' p. 32.'!).
It is exceedingly doubtful whether we have the Jahwistic cosmogony complete, and the abrupt introduction to v.» i) rv S:] suggests that some- thing between vv.* and " has been omitted by the redactor, and perhaps also between * and *, either because it repeated or because it was incon- sistent with the preceding creation narrative. The succession of circumstantial clauses in vv.* and ' certainly presents an interesting parallel to Gn 1-. But what we actually ])ossess of the Jahwistic cosmogony in the biblical record is in striking contrast to the work of P. Vv." and * in external form bear a certain resemblance to the ' New- Babylonian version of the creation story,' di.^- covered by Pinches and published in J HAS vol. xxiii. (1891) p. 39311'.
' The sacred hou.se of the gods had not been erected in the Holy Place, No reed had yet budded, no tree had been formed,' etc.
The dryness of the earth before the growth of plants, the mention of the ascending mist, the creation of man, and the descriiition of Paradise in which man wa-s placed, as well as the creation of woman, of which a special account is given in 2'"'-, stAnd in remarkable contrast to the precedin;,' post-exilic cosmogony. In language we speciallj
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note tlie use of ns; (or .•^v) in place of «■;? in Gn 1. (See Dillmann's conunentJary for a complete list of divergencies in style.)
II. We shall now proceed to examine in greater detail the first creation account. The narrative in Gn I'-2" opens with a reference to a pre- existent dark chaos {tohu wabohu). ' In the he- ginning, when God created the heavens and the earth — now the earth was waste and void, and darkness was over the watery abyss (tikum), and the breath of God was brooding over the waters — then God said: Let there oe light.' This rendering, which is adopted by Ewald, DUlmann, and Schrader (following Rashi), regards v.^ as a circumstantial or parenthetic clause. This yields the best construction as well as meaning, and is parallel to the opening of the Jahwistic creation account 2**'- '• ', and also of the Bab. creation tablet to be presently cited. All these are curiously similar in the form of the opening, which consists of a series of temporal clauses.
How long the pre-existing waste and emptiness of chaos existed, and how long the darkness pre- vailed over the primal waters tiefore the quicken- ing spirit or breath of God brooded over its surface, we do not know. The remarkable phrase in the first cosmogony, ' the spirit (or breath) of God was brooding over the waters,' is probably intended to indicate the ultimate origin of the generating in- fluences that operated during creation as grounded in the divine spiritual activity. That the form, however, in which this conception is conveyed was suggested by ancient Semitic cosmogonies, is a fact w-hich we shall subsequently have occasi»n to confirm.
The immediate cause of light, in the mind of the writer, is clearly indicated as the divine word which went forth as a Jiat, and it is this divine word regarded as an agent that ushers in each succeeding act in the divine drama of creation. The creation of light in itself involves a distinction between light and darkness ; but the division be- tween light and darkness in v.* implies that this was a division, not in space but in time, aa the context immediately shows : ' and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.' It was therefore through the creation of light that the first creation-day was constituted. What, then, constituted the night and what the daytime? Was it the primal darkness of chaos that consti- tuted the night, to which day succeeded ? If so, we might compare the conception of the first day and of the succeeding ones to the ecclesiastical day of Judaism, which begins with the darkness after sunset and continues till the sunset which in- augurates the following day. Some colour is given to this view by the specification of evening before the morning in the concluding formula in describing each stage of creation : ' and there was evening and there was morning. . . .' But the difficulties which stand in the way of accepting this view have been clearly set forth in Dillmann's Commentary. He emphasizes the fact that the darkness of chaos lay entirely outside the reckoning of day and night [properly, we might add, outside the actual work of divine creation here recorded]. Evening first arises after light has been created. In fact, the word from its very etymology ("erefi, derived from the root aiy, in Assyrian 'eribu, ' enter,' 'pass under ' * ) implies that 'day' had preceded. Alorcover, the fact that we are reading a post-exilic narrative in which the months of the calendar were regulated by the Bab. system, which reckoned from Nisan (a name of Bab. origin), would lead us to the supposi- tion that the Bab. tradition would also affect the reckoning of the day in the creation account. Now, •n the testimony of Pliny {UN ii. 79, cited by Del.) * Thus erib iamii in Ajerrian means * sunset.*