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I had once heard that one of the remarkable thing about the creation account in Genesis, as compared to the other creation accounts of the cultures of the surrounding area is that God creates the universe out of nothing, or ‘ex nihilio’; whereas the other creation accounts usually had a god or gods forming the created universe out of some sort of pre-existing chaos.
A cursory reading of Genesis in KJV would seem to indicate ex nihilio:
King James Version: Genesis 1:1-2
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
However, reading Young’s Literal Translation, it seems that the original Hebrew account was written in the present tense, and the language would actually indicate the formation of the universe out of chaos, using phrases like ‘preparing the heavens and earth’ and ‘the earth hath existed waste and void’.
Young’s Literal Translation: Genesis 1:1-2
1 In the beginning of God’s preparing the heavens and the earth — 2 the earth hath existed waste and void, and darkness [is] on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God fluttering on the face of the waters,
My question is how would early Jewish reader/hearer have interpreted this passage? Would the concept creation ‘ex nihilo’ have stuck out to them, in contrast to the other cultures around them? Is the Young translation wording here just indicative of the difficulties with translating this text’s meaning?
Daniel
The verses tell of an already existing earth described as either a void or formless, out which God establishes the order of creation. While the material existence is already present when it God begins creating, the reader has no idea what might have occurred before God’s creation began. The real question is whether both the material universe and the Spiritual God are both co-eternal. Genesis simply does not say what happened before God was “preparing the heavens and the earth.” God may have brought unformed matter into existence before he began his creation in earnest. Or it may have existed along side God from the “start.”
Thus I argue that it is a mistake the claim God created the world “ex nihilo” if Scripture is the authority. I believe many gravitate to the ex nihilo position more for the philosophical tidiness that the view provides. One of the defining qualities that makes God, God, in the Judaeo-Christian concept, is that God is the creator. If there is something God did not create, then the question becomes who created it and what if that is the true creator-God? There is an attractive logic of the first cause philosophical proof for the existence of God. All motion is the result of some preceding motion. Thus one can trace the succession of cause and effect backwards to the universe’s first cause. The assumption is that there can only be one rather than (for the sake of argument) sixteen simultaneous first causes. But the backward succession logic only necessitates that a first cause exists, it does not necessitate that there only be one of them. Thus, this leaves open the possibility of a material first cause and kinetic first cause. This would be just as consistent with Scripture as holding God was the cause of both.
At the end of the day it is a mystery beyond the limits of knowledge that’s available to human beings, since there’s no record of what happened. And it’s a mystery God did not decide to resolve for us. In the beginning of OUR world, God and the chaotic waters of the deep are already there. What happened before that is not necessary for us to know.