The world is made, and called good

Genesis 1

Timeabout 8 minutes

First, read it

Genesis 1

Read it before the notes below. They are worth more once you have your own impression of it.

Watch forCount how many times someone stops to look at what has been made and says it is good. Seven. Watch for the seventh — it is about a different thing than the other six.

Open Genesis 1

What happens

Before anything, there is nothing to look at. No light. No sky. No sea. Nothing with edges.

Then God speaks. Not builds, not carves — speaks. Let there be light. And there is light.

It goes on like that. Light, then sky, then dry ground and sea, then plants, then sun and moon, then fish and birds, then animals. Each time, God stops and looks at what has been made and says the same short thing: this is good.

On the sixth day God makes people. And here the story says something it has said about nothing else — not the stars, not the sea, not the lion. It says people are made in God's image. Something of God, walking around in the world, in every single one of them.

Then God stops. Not out of tiredness — nothing here is tired. He stops because the week now has a shape, and the shape ends in rest.

The thing most people walk past

Nobody has to earn being here

Read the order again. The world is called good before anyone has done anything — before a single rule, a single prayer, a single mistake. Whatever else this book will ask of people, it starts by saying that being here is good and that they belong in it. That is not a small thing to build a religion on.

If you want to go further

None of this is needed to understand the chapter. Open it if you are curious.

It is written as a poem, not a report

Days one to three make the spaces: light and dark, sky and sea, dry land. Days four to six fill them: sun and moon into light and dark, fish and birds into sea and sky, animals and people onto the land. Three empty rooms, then three rooms furnished, in the same order.

That shape is deliberate, and it is a clue about what kind of writing this is. It is patterned, rhythmic, built to be said aloud and remembered. Reading it as a laboratory report asks it a question it was not written to answer, and most arguments about this chapter come from doing exactly that.

'In the image of God' was a political sentence

In the empires around ancient Israel, the phrase image of the god belonged to the king, and to him alone. He was the god's likeness on earth; everyone else was labour.

Genesis takes that phrase and hands it to everybody — men and women, slave and free, in the first chapter, before any king exists. Every later argument in this book about murder, wages, courts and the treatment of strangers is drawing on this line. It is the root of the claim that a person is worth something regardless of their usefulness.

What the first word actually says

The Hebrew opening, bereshit bara Elohim, is famously hard. It can be read 'In the beginning God created', which is how most English Bibles have it. It can also be read as a dependent clause: 'When God began to create...' — which makes verse 2, the earth being formless and empty, the state of things when the story opens rather than something God made.

Jewish commentators have argued both since at least the eleventh century, when Rashi argued for the second. The tradition did not settle it, and this site will not either. It is worth knowing that the very first sentence is contested, because it sets expectations for everything after it: this is a text people argue with, not one they only receive.

One word of Hebrew

טוֹב

tov — good

Not 'well behaved' and not 'morally correct'. Closer to: this works, this is right, this is as it should be. It is the word a carpenter uses looking at a finished table.

The middle letter, vav (ו), started life as a drawing of a tent peg or hook — the thing that holds something in place. Several Hebrew letters began as little pictures like this: alef (א) was an ox's head, bet (ב) a house, mem (מ) water.

And one question

The world is called good before anyone has done anything to deserve it. What would change in how you treat people if you actually believed that about them?

Nobody is marking this. Sit with it on the way to work.

All fourteen days Day 2What a person is