Genesis1chapter 1

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning: Time itself starts in this sentence. Scripture opens with no argument for God and no defence of him, simply the announcement that when anything began, he was already there. John takes these same three words and puts Christ inside them, saying the Word was in the beginning with God and that all things were made by him.

Genesis 1:1

God created: The Hebrew word here is bara, and in the Old Testament it never takes any subject but God. The name for God is Elohim, a plural form carrying a singular verb, which Wesley read as the first quiet hint of the Father, Son and Spirit at work together. The verb says the work is his alone, and the name says he was never alone in doing it.

Genesis 1:1

The two words together are the Hebrew way of saying everything there is, the way we might say from top to bottom. Nothing existed for God to work with, which is the point JFB presses when they say he made it not out of pre-existing material but out of nothing. Paul says the same of Christ, that by him were all things created, whether in heaven or on earth.

Genesis 1:2

The Hebrew pair is tohu wabohu, and Isaiah and Jeremiah both reach for the same two words to describe a land after judgment has fallen on it. Most readers take verse 2 as the raw state of the world God then shapes over six days. Some hold instead that the verb should read "became", placing a ruin between verse 1 and verse 2 which the six days then repair, a reading held by G. H. Pember, the Scofield Reference Bible and Chuck Missler.

Genesis 1:2

The verb is merachepheth, and Moses uses it again in Deuteronomy of an eagle fluttering over its nest. JFB read it as brooding, the way a bird sits over eggs until life comes out of them. The Spirit is not watching the dark water, he is working over it. Genesis later tells the flood in the words of this verse, since the deep covers the earth a second time and God makes a ruach pass over it in chapter 8, after which the dry land comes up again as it does here on the third day.

Genesis 1:3

God speaks and the thing exists, with nothing standing between the word and the result. This is the pattern for the whole chapter, and it is why the psalmist says he spoke and it was done. Paul takes this verse as the picture of conversion, that the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness has shined in our hearts.

Genesis 1:4-5

God does not destroy the darkness, he separates it and assigns each one its bounds. Naming the day and the night is an act of ownership in Hebrew, since the one who names a thing has authority over it. The rhythm of evening and morning that closes each day begins here, and it is the measure the whole chapter keeps.

Genesis 1:6-8

The Hebrew word is raqia, from a root meaning to hammer out, as metal is beaten thin into a plate, and JFB give exactly that sense when they call it an expanse and a beating out as a plate of metal. Ancient readers and the older translations took it as something solid stretched over the earth, which is how the Greek stereoma and the Latin firmamentum came to stand in for it. Modern translations render it expanse, meaning the open sky. What the text says plainly is that God set a boundary in the middle of the waters, and that the boundary holds because he put it there.

Genesis 1:9-10

The water is gathered into one place and the ground comes up out of it, so that a world which was all sea becomes a world that can be lived on. God calls the result good, which in this chapter means it does what he made it to do. Job hears God ask who shut up the sea with doors and said this far and no further, and the answer is in this verse.

Genesis 1:11-13

The phrase runs through the rest of the chapter like a refrain, ten times over, and it says that what God made reproduces along its own line. The earth is given the power to bring forth, but the seed is in itself, which is to say the capacity was put there rather than arising on its own. The same phrase is what walks into the ark in chapter 7, two of every sort after their kind, so the lines drawn on this day are the lines God carries through the judgment. Life on the third day is fruitful before there is a sun to grow it, which is the first sign in the chapter that the order here is not the order a modern reader expects.

Genesis 1:14-15

The word for seasons is moadim, and Moses uses that same word in Leviticus for the appointed feasts of the Lord. So the lights are not only a clock, they are the calendar God's own appointments are kept by. The sky was made to tell his people when to come before him.

Genesis 1:16-19

two great lights: Moses does not use the ordinary Hebrew names for the sun and the moon anywhere in this account, and the nations around Israel used those names for gods. He calls them the greater light and the lesser light, and says they were made, which puts them among the creatures rather than above them. The gods of Egypt are quietly demoted to lamps hung in a ceiling to serve the people who read this. The sun and the moon stand together again only once more in Genesis, in the dream Joseph tells in chapter 37, where his father hears them at once as himself and Rachel bowing to their son.

Genesis 1:20-21

The word rendered whales is tanninim, used elsewhere of the great creatures of the sea, the ones the surrounding nations told stories about as monsters of chaos. Genesis puts them in a list of things God made and called good. Whatever else is out there in the deep, it is his, and it is not a rival.

Genesis 1:22-23

This is the first blessing in the Bible, and it is spoken over fish and birds before it is ever spoken over a man. To bless here is to give the power to increase, so the blessing is not a wish but a grant. God says the same words over man six verses later, and says them again to Noah in almost the same order on the morning the ark opens, which tells the reader that the world after the flood is being started again on the terms of the first one. Jacob hears them a third time at Bethel in chapter 35.

Genesis 1:24-25

The land animals come out of the ground, which is the same source man will be taken from a few verses later. JFB read the three groups here as the cattle, the creeping things and the wild animals, covering everything that walks. Man and beast share an origin in the dust, and the difference between them is about to be stated in one sentence.

Genesis 1:26

Let us make man in our image: God has spoken in the singular through the whole chapter and here he says us. This site reads that as the Godhead speaking within itself, Father, Son and Spirit, which is how Wesley and the older commentators took it and how the New Testament reads the Son's part in creation. Two other readings are held by serious men: that the plural is a form of royal speech, and that God is addressing the heavenly council which Psalm 82 and Job 38 describe, a reading argued by Michael Heiser.

Genesis 1:27

So God created man in his own image: Paul builds on this verse twice and both times he reads the first man forward. He calls Adam the figure of him that was to come in Romans 5, and calls Christ the last Adam in 1 Corinthians 15, so the New Testament itself makes Adam a pattern of somebody later rather than only the head of a family. Paul then says of Christ that he is the image of the invisible God, which puts the word of this verse on the one who came at the end.

Genesis 1:27

Genesis says this two more times and both are load-bearing. The family list in chapter 5 opens by repeating that God made man in his own likeness, then says at once that Adam begot a son in his own likeness and after his image, so what runs down the line after the fall is described in the same words with a man's name now standing where God's had been. After the flood the image is the reason given for why a man's blood may not be shed, which makes it the ground of what a human life is worth rather than a compliment paid to the species.

Genesis 1:27

The word for image is tselem and the word for likeness is demut, and together they say that man is made to represent God on the earth as a son resembles a father. Male and female are both named in the same breath as the image, so the image is not carried by one of them alone. Jesus reaches back to this verse twice when he is asked about divorce, saying that from the beginning God made them male and female, which is the one place in the chapter he quotes directly.

Genesis 1:28

Be fruitful, and multiply: The first word God speaks to man is to multiply, and the book that follows makes that the hardest thing in it. Sarai is reported barren at the close of chapter 11, before God ever promises Abram a great nation, so the obstacle is set in front of the promise. Rebekah is barren through the twenty years between Isaac's marriage and the birth of the twins, and Rachel is barren while her sister bears son after son. Every one of those wombs is opened by God and the text says so plainly, which keeps each child who carries this blessing from being anybody's achievement.

Genesis 1:28

The blessing spoken over the fish is now spoken over man, and something is added to it, which is rule. The Hebrew radah is the word for a king governing, and the model for it is the God who has just spent six days making things good. Dominion in this chapter means taking care of what belongs to someone else, and it is answerable to him.

Genesis 1:29-30

God finishes by handing over the food. Man is given the seed-bearing plants and the fruit trees, and the animals are given the green plants, so every creature in the chapter is provided for before it has done anything. Origen already noticed that the grant widens after the flood, when the animals themselves are given for meat with the blood held back, so what a man may eat is settled twice and both times by God. The first thing said to man after he is given authority is that he is being fed.

Genesis 1:31

very good: Six times God has looked at a piece of the work and called it good. Now he looks at the whole of it together and the word changes to very good, tov meod. Everything that is wrong with the world as we meet it in chapter 3 came in later, and this verse is the standard the rest of the Bible measures that loss against.

Genesis 1:31

the sixth day: Everything from the first verse to the rest of the seventh day stands before the book's own dividing line. At chapter 2 verse 4 comes the first of eleven headings that read these are the generations of, and that first one picks up the two words of verse 1, the heavens and the earth. Each heading after it narrows the field, running on through Adam, Noah, Shem, Terah, Ishmael, Isaac, Esau and Jacob, until the book closes on one family living in Egypt. Missler built his whole reading of Genesis on that structure.