Holy Trinity

Human dominion over God’s good order

Commentary on Genesis 1:1—2:4a

Neal Walls

Genesis 1 narrates God’s magisterial creation of our universe in a grand liturgical style, even as it leaves readers with many interpretive possibilities.

Awe and wonder

I encourage preachers to approach this overly familiar account with a renewed sense of awe and wonder concerning the universe and our place within it. God’s fantastical tour of a truly fearsome creation in Job 38–41 leaves humans feeling small and insignificant, but the first chapter of Genesis proclaims human dominion over God’s good order in its sweeping vision of the cosmos in both space and time.

Readers should also be humbled by what we do not understand in Genesis 1’s narration. For example, what was God doing before deciding to create our present heavens and earth? Was an infinite God not content with Godself and so risked creating something new and independent? Did God perhaps desire to be in relationship with other beings? And who exactly is this “God” character, so abruptly introduced in 1:1?

Genesis does not address these questions, so later readers strain to fill in these blanks. This interpretive work is at times a playful endeavor for readers with a sense of the poetic, but others may feel some frustration at the text’s ambiguity. Christians often read these verses through the lens of later New Testament and patristic traditions. Rabbinic Jewish tradition also speculates about universes that God created and destroyed prior to Genesis 1:1 and other topics of this chapter, as Louis Ginzberg conveniently summarizes for English readers.¹

At first, chaos

The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition translates, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth” (1:1), which is an improvement over the older New Revised Standard Version’s less precise “In the beginning when God created.” The Hebrew of 1:1 is the beginning of a long temporal clause that describes the chaotic nature of what existed when God first spoke an ordered creation into existence in verse 3. Verse 1 thus ends with a comma rather than a period, according to most modern translators.

Verse 2 describes the “complete chaos” of this pre-creation cosmos as a swirling mixture of matter, water (the Abyss), darkness, and wind, a more terrifying scenario to an ancient reader than our modern understanding of a “void” suggested by the King James Version or the creatio ex nihilo of medieval philosophy.

The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition reads in verse 2, “A wind from God swept over the face of the waters,” but offers options in a footnote: “the spirit of God” or “a mighty wind.” Each of these translations of what is soaring or sweeping over the waters is grammatically correct, since the Hebrew word ruach can in context refer to the movement of air as a wind, breath, or animating “spirit.” Theologians seeking a more definite statement concerning the Holy Spirit may be disappointed, but the imagery is most likely that of chaotic swirling based upon the verb employed.

Order and structure

Genesis 1 portrays creation without opposition as God merely speaks things into existence: “Let there be light,” et cetera. This sovereign image contrasts with the literary portrayal of the Lord in Genesis 2, who gets his hands dirty molding the first human “from the dust of the ground.” It also contrasts with the common depiction of a warrior god who violently subdues a primordial dragon in ancient Near Eastern creation myths (but note Isaiah 51:9; Psalm 74:13–14; Job 26:12–13). The account in Genesis 1 instead portrays a transcendent deity, “above the fray,” who creates by simply commanding distinction, order, and structure.

Second Temple Jewish traditions describe a feminine Wisdom working alongside God in these creative acts (see Proverbs 8:22–31; Wisdom 7; Sirach 24). The prologue to the Gospel of John (1:1–5) uses Hellenistic philosophy to interpret this creative act of speech or “word,” logos, as the pre-existent Christ, leading to later Trinitarian formulations.

While God does “create,” bara’, in verse 1 and again in verse 27, most of this account focuses on God’s act of “distinguishing” between or separating things (light from dark, waters from waters, dry from wet, day from night) into a harmonious order.

The divine image

When God proposes, “Let us create humans in our image, according to our likeness” (verse 26), to whom is he speaking? Later Christians may apply a Trinitarian interpretation to this verse (as in verse 2), but ancient Israelites (and Jewish readers through the ages) more probably would have understood an angelic court setting, as in Job 1, Isaiah 6, and 1 Kings 22:19–23.

And what does God’s “image” or “likeness” denote? The words could imply a physical form, spiritual identity, or moral attribute, to name but a few possibilities. What these attributes are and with whom we humans share them remains undefined and a bit mysterious in these verses. It is entertaining to ponder which attributes humans share with God (and the angels; Genesis 6:1–4), as opposed to which attributes we share with the animals (Ecclesiastes 3:18–22). However we answer such questions, the vision of Genesis 1 emphasizes the unique and blessed place of humans in God’s created order as those sharing in divine relationship and authority (see also Psalm 8:3–8).

In verse 27, the usually terse narration goes out of its way to emphasize that both males and females (and other humans) share equally in embodying the divine image: “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Blessings abound.

God then provides a vegetarian diet for all humans and animals in verses 29–30, after having established human dominion over all of God’s very fine creation in verse 28. Note Psalm 104 for an even more ecologically sensitive description of God’s gracious care for both animal and human life. And finally, God provides rest for his creatures with the Sabbath in 2:1–3.

Reflection

How one approaches the question of the Trinity in Genesis 1 reveals much about one’s theology. While Christians may take poetic license with the Hebrew text and imagine God, the Holy Spirit, and Christ as co-creators in one sense or another, we are wise to always show deference and respect to the ancient Israelite context and modern Jewish traditions to avoid the sins and errors of supersessionism in reading our shared scriptures.