The Most Radical Sentence Ever Written

In our latest faculty blog, Old Testament Lecturer Dr Eric Ortlund explores Genesis 1:1 and why the Bible’s opening line was far more revolutionary to its original readers than we realise

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

The Bible’s first verse is surely familiar to us all, and although it has a stately simplicity to it, I doubt many of us find it shocking or startling. I suspect, however, that ancient Israelites would have reacted in exactly this way to the opening line of the Bible, and that our familiarity with it has dulled us to one of the most astounding sentences ever written.

The world behind the text

I say this because of the Bible’s polytheistic context. I repeatedly tell my students at Oak Hill that keeping in mind certain aspects of life in the ancient world will remarkably improve your Bible reading. For example, the cultures of the ancient Middle East were warlike and aggressive, celebrating violence and the slaughter of their foes. For most of Israel’s history, our spiritual ancestors were surrounded by stronger powers who were quite happy to invade and enslave them. 

Whatever modern Westerners might think about this, the Old Testament’s praise and veneration of the Davidic king, and especially his prowess on the battlefield, comes into full relief when we keep this in mind: how glad normal Israelites would have been to have a king to protect them! 

The tragically high infant mortality rates in biblical times, or Israel being a mostly agricultural society, are two other examples. (And don’t forget that the Roman Empire had never heard of ideas like religious freedom or celebrating diversity. Imagine being told to love your enemies and turn the other cheek when you could be jailed—or worse—for your for your faith.)

But most importantly, we must never forget that the Bible was written in a culture that did not believe the divine nature was one: both in the sense that there are multiple personalities who are gods, and also in that they could be in conflict with each other. There are many stories from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia of gods fighting and killing each other—and also eating and drinking together, sometimes marrying and having children, and so on. In the Bible’s cultural context, the gods were basically bigger projections of human beings. They existed on a higher level of reality, but were part of the fabric of creation, and not absolutely transcendent.

Now, take a moment to imagine how utterly different everything in the world would appear if you believed that there were many gods out there, some of them good and worth praying to, some of them sinister and needing to be defeated—but none of them absolute and omnipotent. If your child gets sick or your crop fails, what sinister force might be at work? And was there any assurance that your patron god would hear your prayers—or be strong enough to save you if he or she did? By analogy, imagine how utterly different your whole religious life might be if, instead of being taught about the Father and the Son, you had been told to pray to the Mother through her Daughter—or the Parent and Child. Every moment of your life as a Christian would feel different.

The Revolutionary Reality of One Transcendent God

Now imagine learning that God is one. There is only one God, and there is no conflict or shadow side within him. Not only that, but he exists entirely independently of creation, as the grammar of Gen. 1:1-2 suggests. It bears mentioning, of course, that all of the creation stories from the ancient Middle East (and there are many) begin with their equivalent of Gen. 1:2—the darkness and water before creation, with the gods being formed within that larger context.

(And would it surprise any of you that, in my twenty-first year of teaching the Old Testament, I am more convinced than ever that it is a revelation from God, not merely one more human religious document? Israel lived in the midst of some of the greatest civilisations history has ever seen—but it is only the OT that tells us that “the Lord is one.” Where did Israel get that idea from? Certainly not from the Canaanites! If it were only a human idea, someone across the 3000 years of ancient Middle Eastern history would have thought that up.)

Realism in a World of Darkness

The Bible is realistic about created reality, of course. The darkness and water in Gen. 1:2 (remember that the sea is often a symbol for spiritual chaos in the OT) are not obliterated, but organised and contained, and given a role in God’s world. We learn from later stages in the biblical story that God sometimes allows these forces to transgress their created boundaries in terrifying ways, such as the flood in Gen. 6-9 or the plague of darkness which Egypt suffered (Exod. 10). 

Even worse, a talking serpent successfully convinces God’s first creations to rebel (Gen. 3). Although a serpent crusher is coming, Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden (Gen. 3:24). I can never read that verse without being moved. (By the way, don’t worry about sceptics who say the serpent in Gen. 3 shows how primitive and stupid ancient Israelites were, believing stories about talking animals. Ancient Israelites knew snakes don’t normally talk the same way we do, and there are plenty of stories from the ancient world of demonic forces being portrayed as serpentine in form.)

But even with the presence of darkness and raging waters and sinister, serpentine forces, the Bible’s vision of created reality, even before the redemption of all things, is breathtaking. It puts us in a position to be utterly realistic about the world and utterly joyful at the same time. We can look on darkness and evil as “illegal aliens” in creation—temporary invaders who, for all the damage they might do, will one day be disarmed and banished. An utterly supreme Being has put together reality exactly according to his infinite goodness—and we get to live here! Together with other creation texts like Ps. 104 and Job 38, all the world is lit up with a kind of joy and safety which requires a spiritual imagination to appreciate fully. 

But it is all founded on Gen. 1:1. Without the Bible’s first verse, the entire edifice crumbles. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This is one of the most surprising sentences any human has ever written. May our familiarity with it never dull our appreciation.