§5

The World as God's Creation

1. In the beginning God created

The Hebrew Bible often speaks of the creation, and of God as creator. The basic scheme of Israel's history as found in the Pentateuch begins with the creation, or more precisely with God's act of creation. Some of the great sketches of history that are found later in the Hebrew Bible also begin with this (Ps 136; Neh 9 [-+334, 399]). But elsewhere too, throughout all parts of the Hebrew Bible in fact, we find an al• most innumerable quantity of references and allusions to the creation as the fundamental event that provided the point of departure for the history of the world and humanity. The first word of the Bible is b'res/f, "in the beginning" (Gen 1.1). Before that there was nothing-other than God himself Psalm 90 puts it like this: "Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (v. 2). According to Deut 4.32 the ultimate point in time to which one can think back is "the day when God created humans on the earth." And according to Prov 8.22-31 it was the beginning (resIt) of God's activity that he created wisdom before everything else. When the Hebrew Bible considers the question of the beginning of the world and the history of humankind, only one answer is given: God was there before the beginning of everything, and everything had its beginnings in him. To the question how this beginning occurred, the Hebrew Bible gives various answers. In Gen 1.2 we read that before the beginning of the divine act of creation, the earth was in a chaotic state of toha wiibohU and was covered by the "primeval waters," the {hOrn (cf Ps 104.6) [-+332]. In ancient thought, "beginning" does not necessarily mean that there was "nothing" beforehand. The notion of a "creatio ex nihilo" was first expressed in the Hellenistic period (2 Macc 7.28). In Gen 1 the concern is not with the contrast between Nothing and the Created but §5 The World as God's Creation 419 with the Chaos-Cosmos polarity (von Rad 1972, 31). Traditions from Israel's ancient near eastern world resonate here. The (hOrn (hereafter "Tehom") has been connected with the Chaos-monster Tiamat, killed in the Babylonian myth by the god Marduk, who then fonns the Cosmos out of her body (Enuma elish, tablet 4, AOT 116ff). Against this background Gen 1.2 was understood as a pale variant of a "Chaos struggle myth," in which the creator-god defeats the personified power of Chaos in battle and then creates the world (Gunkel 1895). The ancient near eastern traditions are however more varied and nu• anced (c£ Stolz 1970), and the conflict between God and the chaotic flood is primarily the expression of his superiority over other powers that threaten his creation (Podella 1993). In addition, the overcoming of the powers that are inimical to creation is not a once-and-for-all, self-contained occurrence, but the threat persists pennanently, and God has to prove his power time and again (Levenson 1988). The "weapon" that God uses in Gen 1 is the word. This comes even more clearly to expression in Ps 104, where with his voice of thunder God forces the Tehom, who is here equated with the waters (as in Gen 1.2), to retreat and thus to expose the dry land. Here the element of battle is much more marked than in Gen 1. At the same time it becomes clearer that these anti-creation powers have not disap• peared: God sets them a boundary which they may not cross (v. 9, c£ Jer 5.22). In Gen 1 too, God sets limits on the water, in two regards. On the one hand by means of the vault of the "firmament" God "separates" (hibdtQ between the water, what is above it, and what re• mains below it (vv. 6f). On the other hand he assigns particular areas to what is under the water, so that the "dry land" is given its space (vv. 9f). In the "flood" we then see, however, that the destructive power of the waters of chaos is still operative; for with the creator's permis• sion the "great Tehom" bursts up from below, and the water collected above cascades down through the "openings" (Gen 7.11), and thus together they devastate the creation until God grants a respite and the upper and lower openings are closed once again (8.2). In Ps 104.9 we read that they are not allowed to transgress the boundaries set for them; but in the great flood the creator permitted it this one time. The psalm does not speak of God's covenant with Noah; but the psalmist knows that God will not allow the Tehom to flood the earth again. The author of the book ofJ ob is aware of this too. In the great divine speech in Job 38 [--+352], as in Ps 104 there is talk of the boundary that