Parashat Bereshit (Genesis 1:1–6:8)
The Start of a Relationship
Let’s start at the very beginning – because that’s such a good place to start. In fact, from a Jewish perspective, we are not starting at the beginning but have circled back around to it from the end of the Torah, the end of Deuteronomy.
But now we are reading about the creation of the world. This week’s parashah (the English word, to amuse you, is “lectionary,” I believe) actually goes through the beginning of Genesis 6, the introduction to the Flood story. The difference between the Jewish way of dividing up the Bible and the Christian chapter divisions is worth an essay on its own – which I will write some other time.
You may realize, as many people who’ve read these chapters carefully have, that the story of creation is told twice at the beginning of Genesis. The hinge between the stories is in the middle of Gen 2:4:
This is the story of
the heaven and the earth
when they were created,
on the day YHWH God made
earth and heaven.
It’s right where you see that comma that Version 1 of the creation story comes to an end and Version 2 of the story begins.
There are quite a lot of differences between the two stories. A traditional perspective on the differences is that Version 1 is essentially the headline news and Version 2 gives the detailed particulars. An idea I like somewhat better is that Version 1 gives a cosmic perspective on the story, while Version 2 brings the story down to earth.
Secular scholarship points to two different original authors of these two versions of creation, but that’s not my subject this week. Whether you accept or reject any particular secular or religious viewpoint, some quite interesting things are evident when you look at the two stories.
The one I want to look at this week is this. In Version 1 of the story, to use the contemporary phrase, it's all good. In Gen 1:3 God creates light, and in v. 4 God sees that the light is good. The Hebrew word is טוב (tov), a word that occurs seven times in Version 1. (Hint: That’s not a coincidence.) Here are the other things that God finds “good” in Genesis 1:
- V. 10: The water is collected into seas and the dry land appears. – טוב (tov)!
- V. 12: The earth brings forth vegetation. – טוב (tov)!
- V. 18: The sun, moon, and stars come into being. – טוב (tov)!
- V. 21: The sea creatures and the birds of the air are created. – טוב (tov)!
- V. 25: The land animals are created. – טוב (tov)!
And finally, of course – after humanity has come into being – God saw everything he had done, and it was טוב מאוד(tov me’od), very good. It’s nice to be able to grade your own work.
That’s the end of Genesis 1 but not quite of Version 1 of the creation story. As we saw earlier, that ends in the middle of Gen 2:4. (On my “Bible Guy” Substack, where I’m working through the creation story at a much slower pace, I’ll discuss this at greater length. I’ll link to it here once that’s posted.)
Now we begin to read Version 2, with the details of the story that Version 1 did not stop to enumerate, some things are switched around and the focus is quite different. God creates human beings much earlier in Version 2 than in Version 1 – or at least one human being. He is not called Adam at this point in the Hebrew text, but האדם (ha-adam), so called because he is made out of אדמה (adamah), earth. So he is “the earthling.”
In Genesis 1, the version of creation framed by the Christian chapter, humanity is the acme of creation. Even including the first few verses of Genesis 2 and thus completing all of Version 1 of the creation story, it’s clear that everything that was created in the material world led up to the creation of human beings. In Version 2, the fashioning of the first human comes much earlier.
Now the big surprise. At the end of Genesis 1 everything is “very good.” But when we get to Gen 2:18, in the remake, God looks at his work and says these memorable, even startling words: לא טוב (lo tov) – it is not good for the earthling to be by himself. Despite the pretty picture that was painted for us in Version 1, if we assume that these two versions are telling the same story we can see that there were actually some bumps in the road, some intermediate stages in creation that were not good.
God figures out that the way to solve the problem of the earthling’s being alone is to make an עזר כנגדו (ezer k’negdo), a “helpmeet,” to use the traditional English word. An English scholar once wrote a book asking, “What Does Eve Do to Help?” Whatever it is, the way to understand the phrase is not as a single word, but as two words, as the Hebrew and even the King James translation have it. What the earthling needs is a help that is “meet for him.”
What k’negdo really means is “corresponding to him” or “appropriate for him.” From what follows, we see what is really at stake. God forms all the other land creatures and the birds as well. Under the pretext of asking the earthling to name them, God introduces him to all of them. After all (see Gen 2:19), they too are made of adamah. Yet somehow none of them is an appropriate partner for him.
The standard English translations all say that no partner “was found” for him, and that is a perfectly good translation of the Hebrew. But what it literally says is “he did not find.” In Biblical Hebrew this is one of the ways to write a passive expression, using an active verb with no subject, just the verb with an implicit “he” built in. It was done, we’re not interested in who did (or didn’t) do it.
But of course at this particular juncture there are only two beings around who could do this job of “finding”: the earthling himself, not the subject of this sentence because he's the one “for whom” no matching partner was found. So it would seem that it was God who did not find an appropriate partner for the earthling after creating all these animals.
Did God not understand that a dog or a lion or an eagle would not be an appropriate mate for the earthling? Did God not yet have sexual reproduction figured out at this point, until he stopped and thought about it for a minute? Obviously not; and remember that we are never told that appropriates mates are found for the other animals and birds – not to mention the fish.
Whatever the explanation is, this whole episode is recorded as briefly as possible in Gen 1:27, as recounted in Version 1:
God created the earthling in his image;
in the image of God he created him.
[insert our story here]
Male and female he created them.
People who argue against taking the creation story literally like to say, “The Bible was not written to be a science book.” But one of the striking differences between the two versions of the creation story is that Version 1 is very, veryscientific. It’s taxonomic. In that story, everything is good because everything is orderly. Things make scientific sense, at least from an ancient Near Eastern perspective. There is a hierarchy of creatures, from the less complicated to the more complicated, and they fit the different realms of the planet: air, sea, and earth.
Version 2, as I read it, says that God understood the science but God did not understand relationship. Physics as we know it today says essentially the same thing about creation that Genesis does, from the big picture point of view: It was a singularity, occurring at a single point in space and at a single moment of time.
That’s a one-man job, not something that a committee of gods could do. The essence of the oneness of God, as the medieval philosophers explained it, is that God is perfect, complete, and, therefore, one. If you are this kind of being, the thing you are guaranteed not to understand is what it is like to have a relationship with anything else – let alone with anyone else.
Before you create the world, there simply is nothing else. Afterward, whatever exists is something qualitatively different from you. But the story of the Torah is about a God who is looking for a relationship. And that’s a problem, because relationships are something that the God of our story has a lot of trouble with. It's very hard for him to understand what it means to be in relationship with another being.
The God of Genesis grows to understand this only over a long and protracted period. The next nine chapters of Genesis, and beyond, will tell more of that story.