This week’s Torah portion, Noach (Genesis 6:9-11:31), begins:

These are the histories of Noach: Noach was a tzadik man; he was tamim in his generations; Noach hithalekh God. (Genesis/Bereishit 6:9)

Noach (נֺחַ) = rest, resting-place; “Noah” in English.

tzadik (צַדִּיק) = in the right, just, God-fearing, innocent.

tamim (תָּמִים) = whole, intact, unblemished, perfect, unobjectionable.

hithalekh (הִתְהַלֶּךְ) = walked around with, went around with, followed around.

Is Noach being praised as a morally and religiously superior person?

Tzadik could mean righteous, or merely innocent. Tamim could mean perfect, or merely unobjectionable relative to others. The verb hithalekh could mean that Noach followed direct instructions from God, but did not take initiative to follow the spirit of God’s directives like Abraham and Hezekiah, who “walked around in God’s presence”.¹

As the story of the flood unfolds, Noach does everything God tells him to. But does this make him virtuous? Or is he merely resting, like his name, because it is easier not to think for himself?

Not too awful

Just before the Torah portion begins, the text sets the scene:

Then God saw that great was the evil-doing of the human on the earth, and every shape of its conscious planning was only evil all the time. And God had a change of heart about making the human on the earth, and [God] felt mental anguish. And God said: “I will wipe out humankind, which I created, from the face of the earth, from human to beast to crawling thing to flying thing of the sky, because I have had a change of heart about making them.” But Noach found favor in the eyes of God. (Genesis 6:5-8)

(See my post Noach: Spoiled on why God wipes out all the other land animals, as well as human beings, except those on Noach’s ark.)

In the context of massive evil-doing by nearly all human beings, it need not take much for the God character to view Noach favorably. At least Noach is innocent and unobjectionable, and takes orders.

According to Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, “So, here, God chooses Noah, not because he has achieved significant wisdom or virtue, but because He seeks to convey to some one the knowledge of Himself.”²

I find it hard to believe that out of the entire human population, Noach is the only family head who is innocent, unobjectionable, and obedient (and has some carpentry skills). Surely there must be a few other meek and non-violent men. So why does God choose Noach?

According to Daniel Feldman, God chooses Noach because he is calm. “… the prized attribute he possessed is hinted at in his name, Noach, which suggested calmness. In other words, he was in control of his temperament, and did not give himself to anger … On the other hand, a failure to anger can sometimes reflect a failure to respond to, or even to notice, injustice and immoral behavior in one’s orbit. Accordingly, the source of Noach’s chein [favor] may equally have been the source of his criticized passivity.”³

Noach’s silence

Noah is minding his own business when God suddenly speaks to him.

And God said to Noah: “The end of all flesh is coming before Me, because the earth is filled with violence because of them. So here I am, ruining them along with the land. Make for yourself an ark of gofer wood …” (Genesis 6:12-6:14)

Noah listens silently to the instructions of the voice in his head, and follows them to the letter.

And Noah did everything God commanded him; that is what he did. (Genesis 6:22)

Another person might ask why God plans to drown all the animals on earth except for those in the ark: eight humans (Noah, his wife, their three sons, and the sons’ wives) and one pair of each of other species.⁴ Even if almost all adult humans are violent and do evil, some of them might repent if they were warned. Some children might learn better behavior. And what about all the non-human animals God has doomed?

But Noah only does what he is told.

Then God said to Noah: “Come into the ark, you and your whole household, for I have seen you are a tzadik before me in this generation.” (Genesis 7:1)

The “you” in this sentence is singular, not plural; it does not seem to matter whether Noah’s wife, sons, and daughters-in-law are innocent.

After giving some additional instructions about animals, God says:

“For in another seven days, I will be sending rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe out everything that exists, that I made, from the surface of the land.” (Genesis 7:4)

Apparently this explicit warning still does not inspire Noach to speak—either to question God, or to tell any humans outside his immediate family what is about to happen.⁵ The text only repeats:

And Noach did everything that God had commanded him. (Genesis 7:5)

Failure to question or pray

According to one 18^th-century commentary, Or HaChayim, “Noach became convinced from what God told him that any prayer of his would be futile, that the fate of these people had been sealed beyond reprieve. All of this is contained in the words: ‘the end of all flesh has come before Me, here I am about to destroy them.’”⁶

Another 18^th-century commentary, Kedushat Levi, attributed Noach’s decision to remain silent to his own self-evaluation: “Now even though Noah was a great and blameless tsaddik, he was very small in his own eyes and did not have faith that he was a powerful tsaddik with the ability to annul the decree of the flood. In fact, he thought of himself as being equal to the rest of his generation. …Therefore, he did not pray to save the people of his generation.”⁷

But this is a poor excuse, wrote Arthur Green. “The question is whether we choose to stand up and act for the good, even while knowing that we may not succeed and that our actions will be imperfect.”⁸

Modern commentator Norman Cohen, on the other hand, wrote that Noach is passive because he is self-centered.  “Noah saw the world through the narrow prism of his own life and his own needs. He was concerned only with himself—a trait evident in most young children. He seemed to show a lack of compassion for all the rest of humanity, which was about to be destroyed. All that mattered to him was that the ark would guarantee his survival and that of his household.”⁹

Failure to warn

The same explanations for why Noach fails to speak up to God also apply to the question of why Noach fails to warn other human beings.

Irreversible fate. Just as God seems adamant about wiping out all humans and land animals except for those on the ark, Noach’s neighbors might seem unyielding in their determination to do wholesale violence. He might believe that warning them about their fate would be useless, since they would never reform. (He might also think that even if a few people did repent, God would not let him smuggle them on the ark, or let them build their own boats.)

Low self-esteem. Just as Noach does not believe God would listen to him, Noach would not believe that other people would listen to him. A low self-opinion makes everyone else look more powerful. Feldman wrote: “In order to react proactively to injustice, one must first have faith in their own ability to make a difference. A lack of such faith can result in the perception that all reaction is futile, and not worth the effort.”¹⁰

Egocentrism. If the problem is that Noach is so self-centered that he lacks compassion, he has no motivation to go to the trouble of warning people about the coming flood. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg wrote: “It is not surprising that he is not effective in swaying his contemporaries. … Noah’s silence, I suggest, is essentially a metastasis of the sickness of his time. He is incurious, he does not know and does not care what happens to others. He suffers from the incapacity to speak meaningfully to God or to his fellow human beings.”¹¹ Zornberg added that Noach’s time in the ark teaches him about compassion, since he and his family must spend all their time feeding the various animals. “… there is feeding, the acute awareness of timing and taste in nurturing the other. I suggest that feeding animals becomes a year-long workshop in … kindness.”¹²

Noach’s name means “rest”. When he is born, his father, Lemekh, gives him that name as an expression of hope, saying:

“May this one give us a change of heart from our labor and from the toil of our hands, from the ground that God cursed.” (Genesis 5:29)

Eight long generations after God cursed the ground so that Adam would have to work hard to farm it,¹³ Lemekh is fed up with the endless labor and wants some rest.

We all want rest from hard labor, time off to do the things that please us. Over the millennia, humans have found ways to reduce the hardship—through inventing technologies, yes, but mostly through cooperating and helping each other. When we engage in too much violence, the system falls apart and people starve. The cure for a world of violence, as the God character realizes at the end of the story of the flood,¹⁴ is not to make an ark to rescue a select few and start a new world. The cure is the mutual aid that can only happen if we are not like Noach—only if we care about our fellow creatures, and do not rest silently in the belief that our efforts would be futile.

1. Noach and Enoch (Genesis 5:24) “walked around with God” (et ha-Elohim hithalekh, אֶת הָאֱלֺהִים הִתְהַלֶּךְ). The Hebrew Bible also refers three times to walking around in God’s presence (lehithaleikh lifnei Elohim, לְהִתְהַלֵּךְ לִפְנֵי אֱלֺהִים), by Abraham in Genesis 24:40, Hezekiah in 2 Kings 20:3 and Isaiah 38:3, and the psalmist in Psalm 56:14. The injunction to “walk humbly with your God” in Micah 6:8 uses the infinitive kal form of the verb halakh (lekhet, לֶכֶת = “to walk”), rather than the infinitive hitpael form of the verb (hithaleikh, הִתְְהַלֵּךְ = to walk around).
2. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, Doubleday, New York, 1995, p. 41.
3. Daniel Z. Feldman, “Noach: Of Rage, Rainbows, and Redemption”, Mitokh Ha-Ohel: Essages on the Weekly Parashah from the Rabbis and Professors of Yeshiva University, Yeshiva University, New York, 2010.
4. Genesis 6:19-20.
5. See my 2013 post Noach: Righteous Choices.
6. Chayim ben Moshe ibn Attar (c.1718 – c.1742), Or HaChayim, on 6:13, translated in www.sefaria.org.
7. Levi Yitzchak of Berdyczow (1740-1809), Kedushat Levi, translated by Arthur Green in Speaking Torah: Vol. 1, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 2013, p. 90.
8. Arthur Green, Speaking Torah Vol. 1, commentary on Kedushat Levi, p. 90.
9. Norman J. Cohen, Voices from Genesis, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 2001, p. 52.
10. Feldman, ibid.
11. Zornberg,p. 58.
12. Ibid, p. 61.
13. Genesis 3:17.
14. Genesis 8:21.

Simchat Torah (“Joy of the Torah”) is the day when, besides dancing with the Torah scroll, Jews read the end of Deuteronomy/Devarim, then roll the Torah scroll all the way back to the beginning and start reading Genesis/Bereishit. The annual cycle of Torah portions begins again!¹

Then for Shabbat this Saturday morning we read from the first Torah portion in Genesis. In this blog post, let’s look at the darkness at the beginning of the book.

Darkness before light

The book of Genesis begins with a grand poetic work describing six days of creation and a seventh day of rest. It opens by stating the subject of the composition:

At the beginning God created the heavens and ha-aretz. (Genesis/Bereishit 1:1)

ha-aretz (הָאָרֶץ) = the earth, the land, the ground; the world.

In Genesis 1:1 it means “the earth”, since the heavens and the earth together make the created world. In the next verse, we learn that God does not create the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. What already existed before God begins to speak was dark, shapeless, and watery.

And ha-aretz had been² undifferentiated unreality, and darkness over the face of tehom; and the breath of God hovered over the surface of the water. (Genesis 1:2)

In this verse, the best translation for ha-aretz is “world”, since it refers to what existed before there was a solid mass of earth (or, in today’s terms, a planet). “Undifferentiated unreality” is one translation for tohu vavohu (תֺטוּ וָבֺהטוּ). The “breath” of God is one translation for God’s ruach (רוּחַ). (See my post Bereishit: Before the Beginning for alternate translations of tohu vavohu and ruach.)

The Hebrew word for darkness is choshekh (חֺשֶׁךְ), which captures both the literal usage and many of the same metaphorical usages as in English. But the darkness is over the surface of something else: tehom.

tehom (תְהוֹם) = a source of deep water, i.e. an underground spring; the subterranean water beneath the earth.

In the second verse of Genesis, tehom probably means infinitely deep water, since the breathof God hovers “over the surface of the water”.

(As in much literature from the Ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible pictures the universe as having four layers. The bottom is tehom, the water below, which extends downward infinitely, but is capped at the top by a layer of solid earth (with some rivers, lakes, and so forth). Above the earth is air and sky, the lower part of the heavens. The upper part of the heavens consists of more water: the water above, which extends upward infinitely.)

Both darkness and God’s “breath” are described as being over, or above, the tehom. So even though everything is undifferentiated unreality before God begins to create, there is in fact one distinction before creation: above and below. Either God is one of the things in the undifferentiated unreality above the tehom, or God is another category altogether, and only God’s hovering breath is there above the tehom.

Having established the situation before God begins to create, the text continues:

And God said: “Light, be!” And light was. And God saw the light, that it was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness night. And it was evening and it was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:3-5)

The separation of light from darkness creates the first day, consisting of a period of light (newly created) and a period of darkness (already there before God spoke).

So what does “darkness”, choshekh, mean in the first five verses of Genesis?

Is darkness visible?

Does “darkness” mean the absence of light, or is it something that is present, the way light is present? The clause “… and darkness was over the face of tehom …” implies that there was something above the surface of the water. If darkness meant the mere absence of light, the Torah could have said “… and nothing was over the face of tehom …”.

Furthermore, the curious sentence “And God separated the light from the darkness” implies that when light popped into being, it was mixed together with darkness at first. Then God began creating the orderly world by separating these two opposites, in time if not in space. The next verse says: “God called the light day, and the darkness night”.³

When God creates the plague of darkness in the book of Exodus, darkness seems like a visible and tangible substance.

And God said to Moses: “Stretch out your hand up to the heavens, and darkness will be over the land of Egypt, and [the Egyptians] will feel darkness!” And Moses stretched his hand up to the heavens, and gloomy darkness was in all the land of Egypt three days. A man could not see his brother, a man could not get up from his spot, for three days. But for all the Israelites, light was in their dwelling-places. (Exodus/Shemot 10:21-23)

The poetic image is of a darkness so dense that it presses against the skin. But then it becomes clear that the Egyptians are totally blind for three days, while the Israelites can still see light.

One tradition in Jewish commentary is that darkness did exist before God spoke light into being, but the darkness was invisible. (This begs the question of whether something can be invisible if there is nobody to see it.) The writer known as Pseudo-Philo, who lived circa 70-150 C.E., imagined King David singing: “Darkness and silence were before the world was made, and silence spoke and the darkness became visible.”⁴

This implies that God was the primordial silence, and darkness was the primordial light. First God changed, by speaking. Then God’s first words, “Light, be!” changed darkness into light, making it visible.

In the 12th or 13^th century, Radak wrote that the darkness before God spoke was actually a type of fire, but it was invisible because it could not produce light. He added that this invisible fire is still present at night. “If this primordial fire would give off light, we would be able to see at nighttime. The night would appear to us as if it were aflame.”⁵

Is darkness bad?

And God saw the light, that it was good … (Genesis 1:4)

Does that mean merely that God identifies light as good? Or does it mean that darkness is bad by contrast?

The implication that light is good and darkness is bad appears as early as Second Isaiah, written in the 6^th century B.C.E.:

Forming light and creating darkness, making peace and creating evil—I, God, am doing all these. (Isaiah 45:7)

But many commentators have objected to the idea that God creates, or created, evil. They take the view that there is only one God and God is good, so therefore evil must come from a different source. But what is the source? One common answer to the “Problem of Evil” is that God gave human beings free will, and therefore we sometimes choose to commit evil acts. But this does not explain another category of evil: the natural causes of diseases and disasters that make innocent people suffer.

One solution to the problem is that our world is “the best of all possible worlds”, the explanation of Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 book known as the Theodicy. But the first chapter of Genesis indicates a different solution. Israel Knohl wrote:

“In my view, the Priestly description of Creation is an effort to solve this fundamental dilemma. The primeval elements tohu [undifferentiation], choshekh [darkness], and tehom [water below] all belong to the evil sphere. The three elements comprising the preexistent cosmic substance are the roots (put another way, the substance) of the evil in the world. At the conclusion of the Priestly account of Creation, it is written: ‘And God saw all that He had made, and found it very good’ (Gen. 1:31). All that God had made was very good. Evil was not made by God. It predated the Creation in Genesis 1!”⁶

But S.R. Hirsch pointed out that if we assume that God did not create darkness, we end up limiting God’s abilities:

“If matter had antedated Creation, then the Creator of the universe would have been able to fashion from the material given Him not a world that was absolutely good, but only the best world possible within the limitations of the material. In that case, all evil—natural and moral—would be due to the inherent faultiness of the material, and not even God would be able to save the world from evil, natural or moral.”⁸

Since Hirsch could not accept the idea that God is not omnipotent, he insisted that God created everything that ever was, including the darkness that existed before God created light. Then he maintained that God is omnibenevolent, and this is not merely the best of all possible worlds, but the only ultimately good world.

“This world—with all its seeming flaws—corresponds with the wise plan of the creator; He could have created a different world, has such a world corresponded with His Will. … Both, the world and man, will reach the highest ideal of the good, for which both were created. They will achieve this level of good because God, Who has placed this goal before them, has created them both for this goal, in accordance with His free and unlimited Will.”⁹

Assigning a goal to not just human beings, but the whole natural world, strains credulity. Is it worth denying the plain meaning of Genesis 1:2—that chaotic undifferentiation, darkness, and the mysterious deeps existed before God started creating the world—in order to defend the post-biblical belief that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent?

The beginning of Genesis does not say that God created darkness. Nor does it say that darkness is evil. Darkness is just there, like God’s hovering breath. Evil does not come into the picture until after God has created humankind.

After all, we humans decide what we classify as evil.

1. Some congregations read an entire Torah portion each week, while others read a third of the Torah portion on that week. (One year it is the first third, the next year it is the middle third, and the third year it is the last third.) By either system, Jewish congregations finish Deuteronomy and start Genesis again on Simchat Torah.
2. In Genesis 1:2, the noun ha-aretz comes before the verb, haitah (הָיְתתָה), which is in the perfect form. This syntax is used in Biblical Hebrew to indicate the past perfect, so the correct translation is “And the earth had been …” (Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2001, p. 6) 
3. God does not create the sun until the fourth day. However, on the fourth day God says that the purpose of the sun, moon, and stars is: “to separate the day from the night”(Genesis 1:14).
4. Pseudo-Philo, Book of Biblical Antiquities, translated by Howard Jacobson, Outside the Bible, Jewish Publication Society, 2013, p. 601.
5. Radak (Rabbi David Kimchi, 1160-1235), translated in www.sefaria.org.
6. Israel Knohl, The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 2003, p. 12.
7. See my post Psalm 73: When Good Things Happen.
8. Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Hirsch Chumash: Sefer Bereshis, English translation by Daniel Haberman, Feldheim Publishers, Jerusalem, 2002, p. 1.
9. Ibid, p. 2.

This week we roll the Torah scroll back to the beginning, and read:

Bereishit, God created the heavens and the earth — and the earth had been tohu vavohu, and darkness over the face of tehom, and a ruach of Elohim was hovering over the face of the waters — then God said: “Light, be!” and light was. (Genesis/Bereishit 1:1-3)

Beginning

bereishit (בְּרֵאשִׁית) = in a beginning, at first, when first. (The prepositional prefix be- (בְּ) =in, at, among, through, by, when. Reishit (רֵאשִׁית) = (noun) a beginning, a first step, a starting point; (adjective) first-rate, choicest, best.)

Two possible accurate translations of Genesis 1:1 are “In a beginning, God created” or “When God first created”.

Although the old King James translation of the first word as “In the beginning” is no longer popular, it is also a reasonable possibility. Normally a prefix meaning “in the” would be ba (בַּ), not be- (בְּ). But reishit is an unusual word, in that it does not take a definite article even in contexts where the English translation would be “the beginning” or “the first step”. In 50 of the 51 times that reishit appears in the Hebrew Bible, there is no prefix indicating a definite article (“the”).¹ And the word bereishit appears four times in the book of Jeremiah in the phrase “at the beginning of the reign of”.²

Therefore, the translation “In the beginning, God created” is also accurate—and it has a different implication. “In the beginning” indicates that there was only one beginning. “In a beginning” indicates that this creation story describes only one beginning, and there might have been—or will be—others.³

What does God create in this verse of the bible?

… the  shamayim and the eretz … (Genesis 1:1)

shamayim (שָׁמַיִם) = heavens, skies.

eretz (אֶרֶץ) = land, earth.

Shamayim, always plural, refers to the visible dome above the horizon containing the sun, moon, stars, and clouds. Birds fly in the shamayim. The heavens are not called the abode of God until Deuteronomy 26:15.⁴

Eretz can refer to a specific land (such as “Eretz Israel”), or to all the land in the world. Eretz can also mean “Earth”—our world—but not dirt, which is adamah. In Genesis 1:1-2 God has not yet created land, so eretz can only mean Earth or the world.⁵

Yet what God creates on the first “day” is not the heavens and the earth, but light:

Then God said: “Light, be!” and light was. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and called the darkness night. And it was evening and it was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:3-5)

What does God create first: the heavens and the earth, or light? 20^th-century translator Everett Fox explained that “the shamayim and the eretz” is “probably a merism—an inclusive idiom meaning ‘everything’ or ‘everywhere’—such as Hamlet’s ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …’”

So Genesis 1:1 actually means one of the following:

1. In the beginning, God created the world—
2. In a beginning, God created the world—
3. When God first created the world—

Translation 1 implies that God created only one world, and this is it. There was a single moment when creation began; the moment when God created light.

Translations 2 and 3 leave the possibility open that our world is one of many that God has or will create. Other worlds may exist in a different time and/or space.

“There was a God before He created the world, who was perhaps involved in other things prior to choosing to turn His Divine attention to our homeland. … Genesis 1:1 is the biblical account of the commencement of our narrative journey, but not necessarily God’s.” (Dennis Shulman,)⁶

Translation 3 also opens the possibility that God’s creation of the world did not stop on the seventh “day”, but is ongoing.

“The Lord created the world in a state of beginning. The universe is always in an uncompleted state, in the form of its beginning. It is not like a vessel at which the master works to finish it; it requires continuous labor and renewal by creative forces. Should these cease for only a second, the universe would return to primeval chaos.” (Simcha Bunim Bonhardt)⁷

Tohu

You might have noticed that so far I have not referred to Genesis 1:2. This parenthetical but important verse is inserted between “When God first created the world” and “God said: Light, be! And light was.”

— and the eretz [Earth] had been tohu vavohu, and darkness over the face of tehom, and a ruach of Elohim was hovering over the face of the waters — (Genesis 1:2)

tohu (תֺהוּ)= emptiness, unreality; worthlessness, worthless people or things; chaos, shapelessness, undifferentiation.

vavohu (וָבֺהוּ) = “and the vohu”. The word vohu appears only three times in the bible,⁸ always as part of tohu vavohu. Therefore vavohu is probably an intensifier for tohu, and is often translated with an alliterative synonym, as in “void and vacant”, “chaos and confusion”, “a worthless waste”, “a hodge-podge”, or “a mish-mash”. Tohu vavohu could also mean “an insubstantial unreality”.

The word tohu appears in the Hebrew 20 times. Eleven of these occurrences use the word either as a synonym for “nothing”, or as a descriptor of an empty, depopulated desert.⁹ In six other places, tohu is a synonym for either “worthlessness” or “worthless people or things”.¹⁰ This leaves two occurrences of the word tohu that are harder to translate. One is the tohu vavohu in Genesis 1:2; the other is in second Isaiah.

The creator of the heavens, he is God,
          who formed the earth and made it.
          He established it.
He did not create tohu;
          For dwelling he shaped it. (Isaiah 45:18)

In other words, God created the world as an orderly place to live in; God did not create undifferentiated chaos.

One opinion in the commentary is that tohu is indeterminate matter that has the potential to become something definite.

“The first raw material was something entirely new. It is described as tohu to indicate that at that point it was merely something which had potential, the potential not yet having been converted to something actual.” (Sforno)¹¹

It seems that when God began to create the world in the book of Genesis, tohu already existed. That means God did not create the world ex nihilo, out of nothing, as many Jewish and Christian commentators have claimed from the first century C.E. onward. God had tohu, at least, as a raw material—though God may have previously created tohu vavohu, darkness, and tehom.

On the other hand, some commentators claim that these words describe what the universe was like before God created anything.

“At the beginning of creation, God encounters primordial material (Genesis 1:2) … The universe in its pristine state betrayed a disorganization and utter lack of order which God found intolerable and on which He felt compelled to impose order. … His dissatisfaction with the chaotic state of existence leads to the reordering, classifying, and distinguishing described in the primordial week of creation.”¹²

“This description raises two questions potentially troubling to monotheism. First, if God did not create the primeval entity, who did? And second, doesn’t the claim that there are elements of the universe that predated Creation diminish God’s omnipotence and sovereignty? … I believe that scripture would like us to understand that these materials were always there, coexistent with God.”¹³

Darkness and water

Tohu vavohu is not the only thing that already exists when God begins to create.

— and the earth was tohu vavohu, and darkness was over the face of tehom,and a ruach of God was hovering over the face of the waters— (Genesis 1:2)

tehom (תְהוֹם) = a place of deep water, i.e. a sea bed or an underground spring. The word is often translated as “deeps” or “abyss”.¹⁴

ruach (רוּחַ) = wind; spirit; mood or disposition. (Ruach is also one of several words that mean “breath”.)

In Genesis 1:2, either a divine wind is preparing to expose the land that lies underneath the water (as the east wind exposes the land under the Reed Sea in Exodus); or God’s spirit (or metaphorical breath) is hovering over the water while God decides what to do.

Are darkness and deep waters part of tohu vavohu? Or are they separate materials that were also present before God began to create the world? Classic commentators considered the original tohu as both dark and watery.

“Darkness and silence were before the world was made, and silence spoke and the darkness became visible.” (Pseudo-Philo)¹⁵

“This tohu vavohu is alternately referred to by the Torah as “water” … at this point God wanted to imbue this tohu vavohu with some quality, [some] useful meaning, hence God’s spirit moved above it in order to inspire such a change. When something assumes definitive, solid dimensions, it has become qualitatively superior to water, which slips through one’s fingers, cannot be held in one’s hand. This mass which has thickened out of a primordial murky liquid something is—the earth.” (Radak)¹⁶

Speech and separation

Yet the text in Genesis does not say that God turned tohu, darkness, or water into the items God creates over the course of six “days”.

When God first created the heavens and the earth—and the Earth was tohu vavohu, and darkness was over the face of deep water, and a ruach of God was hovering over the face of the waters—then God said: “Light, be!” and light was. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light “day” and called the darkness “night”, and it was evening and it was morning: one day. (Genesis 1:1-5)

Tohu, darkness, and deep waters existed before God created light. But God creates light by speaking. And simply commanding light to exist makes it so—ex nihilo.

So on the first “day” of creation, the world includes both the darkness that pre-existed the beginning of creation, and the light that God creates ex nihilo. God separates light from the existing darkness—a separation in time, distinguishing day from night.

On the second day God speaks again, and creates a dome or vault that separates the waters into two areas, one below the dome and one above it. This is the first separation in space.

And God called the dome shamayim [heavens, skies]; and it was evening and it was morning, a second day.  (Genesis 1: 8)

When God speaks on the third day, the waters below the skies collect into one place and dry land appears.

And God called the dry land eretz [earth], and called the gathering of the waters: seas. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:10)

Thus God’s first creations in Genesis are light, sky, and land—as well as time and space.

Apparently God is dissatisfied with what already exists (tohu, darkness, and tehom), so God creates light using speech alone, then makes separations and sets boundaries in both time and space to change the pre-existing raw materials into the sky, the land, and the seas.

Today someone writing about the creation of the world might start with the mysterious Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when a single point of something suddenly existed. Billions of years later, a floating cloud of interstellar gas (mostly hydrogen) and dust (microscopic particles made of other elements) collapsed into a solar nebula – a spinning, swirling disk of raw material. Gravity made this nebulous tohu vavohu—excuse me, gas and dust—coalesce in the center to form our sun—and light was. Clumps of gas and dust farther out in the solar nebula compressed into planets. One of them was our Earth. Both creation stories are amazing.

1. The exception is the word lareishit (לָרֵאשִׁית) = “for the first [fruits]” (Nehemiah 12:44).
2. Jeremiah 26:1, 27:1, 28:1, and 49:34.
3. See my post Bereishit: A First-Rate Beginning.
4. The etymology of shamayim is uncertain. It may be related to an Akkadian word shamu, meaning “lofty”. If there was once an equivalent Hebrew root word shamah, the plural would be shamayim, i.e. “lofty places”. On the other hand, shamayim may be the Hebrew noun mayim (מַיִם), which means “waters”, with a prefix sh- (שְׁ) meaning “that is”. God makes the shamayim in Genesis 1:6-8 by separating the waters above from the waters below.
5. According to modern scholars, Genesis 1:1-2:4 was written in the 6^th century B.C.E. The first recorded proposal that our world is a sphere was made in the 5^th century B.C.E. by Pythagorean astronomers. So the author(s) of Genesis chapter 1 would not imagine Earth as a sphere. They might use eretz to refer to our world, but not to a planet Earth.
6. Dennis Shulman, The Genius of Genesis, iUniverse Inc., 2003, p. 25.
7. Simcha Bunim Bonhardt, 1765-1827, translated in www.sefaria.org.
8. Genesis 1:2, Isaiah 24:10, 34:11; Jeremiah 4:23.
9. Deuteronomy 32:10; Isaiah 29:21, 40:17, 40:23, 41:29; Jeremiah 4:23; Psalm 107:40, Job 6:18, 12:24, 26:7.
10. 1 Sam 12:21 (twice); Isaiah 44:9, 45:19, 49:4, 59:4.
11. Ovadiah Sforno, 16^th century, translation in www.sefaria.org.
12. James A. Diamond, “Creating Order from Tohu and Bohu”, www.thetorah.com.
13. Israel Knohl, The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 2003, p. 12.
14. The word tehom occurs 35 times in the Hebrew Bible. The only time tehom contains fire instead of water is in Amos 7:4.
15. Pseudo-Philo, circa 70-150 C.E., translation in www.sefaria.org.
16. Radak (an acronym for Rabbi David Kimchi, 1160–1235), translation in www.sefaria.org.

Question: How many gods does it take to create humankind?

The whole universe is created in six days at the beginning of the first book and first Torah portion of the bible, both called Bereishit (“In a beginning”). God announces what will exist, and then it does. Here is the first act of creation:

Vayomer Elohim: “Let light be! And light was.” (Genesis/Bereishit 1:3)

vayomer elohim (ובַיֺּאמֶר אֱלוֹהִים) = And God said. (vayomer (וַיֺּאמֶר) = and he said + elohim (אֱלוֹהִים) = God; multiple gods.

Grammatically, elohim is the plural of eloha, אֱלוֹהַּ = a god.¹ But the plural elohim is also used to refer to the God, the one with the four-letter personal name abbreviated Y-H-V-H.²

We know that only one God speaks light into being, because vayomer is singular—“he said”, not “they said”.  (In the Torah the God is referred to by the default gender: male.) Hebrew has no capital letters, but I capitalize elohim in this essay when it is clear that the word means “God” rather than “gods”.

The words Vayomer Elohim precede each new creation in the first story of Genesis.³ On the sixth day, God makes land animals of various kinds, and finally human beings. But the grammar of the sentence in which God initiates the creation of humans is peculiar.

Vayomer Elohim: “Let us make humankind in our image, like our likeness. And they shall rule over the fish of the sea and over the flyers of the skies and over the big animals and over all the earth and over all the crawlers that crawl on the earth.” (Genesis 1:26)

The speaker is God in the singular. But what God says is “Let us make humankind in our image, like our likeness.”⁴

Us? Neither the kings nor the God speak with the royal “we” in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, God uses the first person plural only four times in that entire canon:

• In Genesis 1:26 on the sixth day of creation (above).
• In Isaiah 6:8 in a vision calling the first Isaiah to become a prophet.
• In Genesis 3:22 regarding the Garden of Eden.
• In Genesis 11:7 regarding the Tower of Babel.

Can we figure out whom God is addressing in Genesis 1:26 by examining the other three times God says “we”?

Angels?

Serafim were standing in attendance from above; each had six wings … And I heard the voice of my lord saying: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said: “Here I am. Send me.” (Isaiah 6:2, 6:8)

In “Whom shall I send?” God speaks in the first person singular. But in “And who will go for us?” God is probably including the serafim, six-winged fiery creatures who surround God in Isaiah’s vision. God addresses them because in this case God is looking for a human prophet, rather than an angel, to pass on God’s words to the people.

No serafim appear in the book of Genesis. However, medieval commentators proposed that God is addressing a different kind of angel in Genesis 1:26: a malakh. (Malakh, מַלְאַךְ = messenger, emissary. Plural malakhim, מַלְאָכִים.)⁵

A malakh sent by a human being is simply a man who delivers a message to another human. A malakh sent by God also delivers a message, but the human recipient perceives a voice, a fire, or something that at first looks like a man (without wings) but then vanishes dramatically.⁶ Every “angel” mentioned in Genesis through 2 Kings is called a malakh.

By the fifth century C.E., Talmudic rabbis considered malakhim not just mouthpieces, but half-human creatures with independent thoughts and feelings. Bereishit Rabbah 8 claims that God created the “ministering angels” (malakhei hashareit, מַלְאֲכֵי הַשָּׁרֵת) before creating the universe. According to this text, angels and humans are similar in how they stand, speak, understand, and see; but only humans are also animals that eat, drink, bear children, excrete, and die.

11th-century rabbi Shlomoh Yitzchaki, known as Rashi, built on this idea when he explained Genesis 1:26. He wrote that the malakhim were created in God’s image before God created the universe. When God wanted to create another kind of being in God’s image, God included the malakhim in the decision as a tactful way to prevent them from feeling envious. Perhaps these angles might be jealous of humankind’s animal functions. Alternatively, angels might envy humans because right after God creates them, God tells them to rule over the earth and all its animals.⁷

This fanciful characterization of malakhim is entirely absent from the Hebrew Bible, where a malakh is not an independent person with feelings, but only a mouthpiece God that uses and discards, like a marionette. Sometimes in the Torah a malakh speaks to a human, and then with no transition the next sentence is from God in the first person singular.⁸

A malakh in the Torah has no will of its own and cannot create something. When God says “Let us make humankind in our image, like our likeness,” God is addressing fellow creators—creators who can collectively make a new kind of animal. Thus in the context of the book of Genesis, God is not addressing any angels.

Moral immortals?

Does that mean God is addressing other gods in Genesis 1:26?

The second time in the book of Genesis that God uses the first person plural occurs after the two humans in the Garden of Eden eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God says:

“Humankind is becoming like one of us, knowing good and evil!  And now, lest it stretch out its hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever—!” And Y-H-V-H Elohim sent it away from the Garden of Eden … (Genesis 3:22-23)

Here, “us” includes fellow beings who are aware of good and evil. These beings must also be immortal, or they would not be alarmed by the idea of humans living forever. The only other information about them in this week’s Torah portion comes from the snake in the Garden of Eden, who tells Eve:

“Because Elohim knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like elohim, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5)

The second elohim in this sentence could refer to either the one God, or to gods in general. Most English translations use a plural such as “divine beings” for the second Elohim. It makes sense, and not just because God says “one of us” later in the story. After all, what is a moral immortal? Not an angel; before the later prophets, biblical angels appear to be amoral and transient manifestations.

But the bible does contain other passages assuming the existence of multiple gods. Lesser gods appear in Genesis 6:2-4 at the of this week’s Torah portion (where the “sons of the elohim”impregnate the “daughters of humankind”). There are also references to a court of gods who acknowledge the God of Israel as their king in Exodus 15:11, Job 1:6-2:7, and Psalms 29, 82, and 97.

Alienators?

The remaining sentence in the Hebrew Bible in which God speaks in the first person plural appears in the Tower of Babel story in next week’s Torah portion, Noach:

Vayomer Y-H-V-H: “Hey, one people and one language for all of them, and this is how they have begun to act! So now nothing that they plan to do will be impossible! Come, let us go down there and let us make their language fail, so that a man cannot understand the language of his neighbor.” (Genesis 11:6-7)

Here God’s “us” includes fellow beings who can separate collaborators and turn them into strangers, aliens who cannot even understand each other. These beings cannot be malakhim, who only repeat God’s words. Nor can they be human beings, since all the humans on earth are building the Tower of Babel together. Therefore the obfuscators can only be subsidiary gods, gods that have power to move people to different locations and change their ways of thinking. (I will discuss this further in next week’s blog post, Noach: Alienation.)

Why do lesser gods make several fleeting appearances in the book of Genesis, which otherwise posits a single god powerful enough to create the heavens and the earth? Genesis 1:26, 3:22, and 11:7 might be remnants of other ancient stories—polytheistic tales about  a chief creator god with lesser gods to assist him. This could also explain the perfunctory story in Genesis 6:2-4 about how the “sons of elohim” took human wives who bore them children who became legendary heroes. The scribes who wrote down the book of Genesis may have been inspired, but they were only human. There are many rough spots in the Torah where different oral traditions were combined without being edited for consistency.⁹

Question: How many gods does it take to create a universe, invent humankind, set up the Garden of Eden, and turn human language into babble?

Answer: Only one, but that God makes the other gods that are hanging around feel included and empowered.

Apparently God is considerate of other gods, at least in the book of Genesis.

1. The first place in the Torah where the word elohim definitely refers to plural gods is Genesis 3:5 in the Garden of Eden story.
2. See my post Lekh-Lekha: New Names for God. God is referred to as elohim throughout Genesis chapter 1. The first use of God’s personal name, Y-H-V-H, occurs in Genesis 2:4.
3. Genesis 1:3, 1:6, 1:9, 1:11, 1:14, 1:20, 1:24, 1:26.
4. “Let us make” is na-aseh, נַֽעֲשֶׂ֥ה. The prefix נ indicates a first person plural verb. “In our image” is betzalmeinu, בְּצַלמֵנוּ, and “like our likeness” is kidmuteinu, כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ. In both nouns, the suffix einu (ֵנוּ  ) indicates the first person plural possessive, i.e. “our”.   
5. The Septuagint (3^rd century B.C.E.), the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, routinely translates the word malakh as “angelos”, whether the malakh in question is human or supernatural. Many English translations call a malakh from a human a messenger, but a malakh from God an “angel”.
6. See my post Vayeira: Stopped by an Angel.
7. Genesis 1:28.
8. E.g. Genesis 22:11-2 and 22:15-18.
9. Most modern scholars agree that the first creation story in Genesis, the one about the six days of creation and seventh day of rest, was written by a Levite who was deported to Babylon in the 6^th century B.C.E. and was influenced by Babylonian theology. The Garden of Eden and Tower of Babel stories are attributed to a different author, whose century is still a matter of debate; but scholars agree that this author or redactor drew from more than one oral tradition.

What happened to my book about moral psychology in Genesis?  I finished it—then realized that examining why most of the characters in Genesis do the wrong thing is not enough.  I needed an ongoing argument about why humans find it so hard to take the high road out of Eden.

Now I am doing more research and rewriting my book.  Meanwhile, here is an essay from my first version.  The Torah portion this week is Bereishit (“In a beginning”), and tells about the beginning of everything, including good and evil.

§

Humans Dominate the Earth

And God made beasts of the land according to their type, and cattle by their type, and all creeping things of the earth by their type; and God saw that it was tov. (Genesis 1:25)

tov (טוֹב) = good; functional, attractive, beneficial, or virtuous.

In the first creation story, God sees that seven creations are tov: light (day 1); the separation of dry land from waters (day 3); plants (day 3); sun, moon, and stars (day 4); swimming and flying animals (day 5); land animals excluding humans (day 6); and the whole world (day 6).¹  In all seven of these divine observations, tov means functional, attractive, or beneficial for some divine plan, but not virtuous.  Stars and fish are not moral agents.

All the land animals, including humankind, are made on the same day, but God only considers the other animals tov.  When God makes humans, God blesses them, but does not see that they are tov.

And God created humankind in [God’s] image; in the image of God [God]created it; male and female [God] created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth vekhivshuha; urdu over the fish of the sea and over the flyers of the skies and over every beast that crawls on the earth.” (Genesis 1:27-28)

vekhivshuha (וְכִבְשֻׁהָ) = and subjugate her, make her subservient, rape her, bring her under control. (An imperative form of the verb kavash, כָּבַשׁ.)

urdu (וּרְדוּ) = and subdue, dominate, rule over. (An imperative form of the verb radah, רָדָה.)

Humankind is the only creation that gets a blessing and a directive from God.

Why does God tell humans to subjugate and rule over a perfectly good world? What if they ruin the earth and its animals?

If God had created an imperfect world and given humankind the job of improving it, humans might have organized an uncivilized wilderness into parklands and gardens. The Garden of Eden might have served as a model, as well as being the source of humankind’s awareness of the categories of good and evil. But God does not create an imperfect world; God sees that the entire creation is already “very good”.

*

What if God expected humans to be good stewards of the earth? Since humans have the free will to choose between good and evil actions, and since we have the intelligence to learn and extrapolate from experience, we could have multiplied only until we filled the earth without overtaxing its resources. And we could have husbanded the earth rather than raped it.

Instead, our widespread adherence to a red meat diet led to overgrazing, which caused desertification (that’s why the Sahara is so big) and deforestation (e.g. to create more pastureland in 20^th century South America). Our demand for lumber at unsustainable rates has led to millennia of clear-cutting, which changes biomes and causes more deforestation. (The bible praises the cedars of Lebanon, which used to be a vast forest and now consist of isolated urban trees and endangered wooded enclaves high in the mountains.) During the last century humans have also poisoned the air, soil, and water, and released greenhouse gases that are causing permanent climate change. Worldwide, humans have had neither the right intuitions nor the wisdom to be good stewards of the earth.

* 

What if God, who gives humankind free will in the Garden of Eden, does not know whether humans will be good stewards or not?  What if God’s instruction to subjugate and dominate the earth and its animals is a temporary authorization, conditional upon good behavior?

Some classic commentators have proposed that at first humans were afraid of other animals and needed to be encouraged to control them by using their superior intelligence.² The project of bringing wilderness under cultivation must also have seemed daunting.

But by the time humankind achieved the power to alter the earth’s ecology, the divine instruction to the first humans was no longer useful.

Bereishit Rabbah, a 5th-century C.E. collection of commentary, presents one rabbi’s opinion that people with merit will dominate the animals, but people without merit will descend to the state of being dominated by animals—perhaps by the beastly side of their own natures.³

This interpretation is based on an ambiguous word in God’s initial remark about letting humankind rule over the earth and all the animals:

And God said: “Let us make humankind in our image, like our likeness, veyirdu the fish of the sea and over the flyers of the skies and over the big animals and over all the earth and over all the crawlers that crawl on the earth.” (Genesis/Bereishit 1:26)

veyirdu (וְיִרְדּוּ) = and they shall subdue, dominate, rule over. (An imperfect form of the verb radah, רָדָה)

The word veyirdu is another form of the verb radah only when it is spelled with the Masoretic vowel pointings added to the Torah in the 6^th to 10^th century C.E.. But there were no vowel pointings in the Torah scrolls the Masoretes annotated.⁴  Therefore commentators are free to interpret a biblical passage as if one of the words originally had different vowels. Bereishit Rabbah is perhaps the earliest, but not the only, commentary that spells the word v-y-r-d-u as veyeirdu.⁵

veyeirdu (וְיֵרְדוּ) = and they shall go down, descend; and they might descend. (An imperfect form of the verb yarad, יָרַד).⁶

According to this interpretation, God still tells humankind to subjugate and dominate the earth and its animals, but only after predicting that humans might descend to the level of unthinking animals themselves.

*

In the 21^st century it looks as if our beastly natures have won. Too many of us have acted in ways that control the earth without thinking about the consequences. Yet human intelligence could also be used for restoring the earth, or at least minimizing its degradation. What we and all the other animals and plants on earth need now is for every human leader, in governments and industries, to choose ethical actions over selfish short-term benefits.

Humans already rule over the earth, for good or bad. Our rule has already caused global climate change, with some areas flooding and others burning up.  Our only hope now is to stop choosing what seems good, tov, because it is functional, attractive, or beneficial to only a few individuals, and start choosing what is virtuous because it reduces the harm to all humans and all living creatures on earth.

—

1. Genesis 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25, and 1:31.
2. e.g. Nachalas Yaakov in Siftei Chakhamim, a 17^th-century collection of commentary; Haamek Davar, a 19^th-century commentary by Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin.
3. Bereishit Rabbah 8:12.
4. At services today Jews still read out loud from parchment Torah scrolls on which scribes have copied the letters without vowel pointings or other diacritical marks indicating pronunciation (nikkudim).
5. e.g. Rashi (11^th-century Rabbi Shlomoh Yitzchaki), and Jacob ben Asher (13^th-century rabbi) in Kitzur Baal Haturim, Nachalas Yaakov (ibid.).
6. Biblical Hebrew has no past, present, or future tense. Veyeirdu is in the imperfect aspect, which means that its action has not been completed. Often the context indicates that an imperfect verb in Biblical Hebrew should be translated as a future tense verb in English, but in this case the imperfect verb yeirdu could be translated equally well as “they will descend”, “they shall descend”, “they could descend”, or “they might descend”.

And God formed the human out of the dust of the earth, and blew into its nostrils the breath of life, and the human became an animated animal.  (Genesis/Bereishit 2:7)

Sorry, Michelangelo.  In the book of Genesis, God breathes life into the first human’s nose.  God does not animate Adam with a fingertip, the way Michelangelo painted it on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

I’d like to say I saw this painting on our first full day in Italy.  But we are in Florence, not Rome, and we had to go grocery shopping.  So today all we saw the house where Michelangelo lived as an adolescent, along with two of his earliest relief sculptures.

His “Battle of the Centaurs”, completed in 1492 when he was 17, proved that he had already mastered the realistic depiction of the human form (in a period when artists were just beginning to revive the approach of ancient Greek sculptors).  But his own spark of genius had not yet emerged.

Next week we plan to see some of Michelangelo’s greatest sculptures, from “David” to “Captives”.  How amazing that he could create such things out of giant blocks of marble!  How amazing that we are here, and can see them!

What a crazy universe we humans inherited.  We have inspiration, we have beauty, we have life.  We also have despair, and evil deeds, and death.  Can we embrace the good things without hiding from the bad?

Click on this link to read my 2015 post about how humans and God hide from each other: Bereishit: In Hiding.