Genesis 1 — the creation account

The structure

Genesis 1:1–2:3 (the unit ends partway into chapter 2 in the Hebrew text; the chapter divisions added in the medieval period place 2:1–3 with chapter 2 in some editions) follows a deliberate six-plus-one structure:

The first three days establish realms; the second three days populate them. Day 4 corresponds to Day 1 (lights for day and night), Day 5 to Day 2 (creatures for sea and sky), Day 6 to Day 3 (creatures for the land). The structure is symmetrical and deliberate.

Each day except the seventh follows a recurring formula: “And God said… and it was so… and God saw that it was good… and there was evening, and there was morning — the nth day.”

The opening verses

Genesis 1:1–3 in the BSB:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

In the KJV:

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. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Three Hebrew points worth knowing

B’reshit (בְּרֵאשִׁית, “In the beginning”)

The opening word of the Bible. The grammar is debated. There are two principal readings:

• Independent statement: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” On this reading, verse 1 is a complete declaration; verse 2 then describes the state of what was created.
• Dependent clause: “When God began to create the heavens and the earth — the earth being formless and void… — God said: ‘Let there be light.’” On this reading, verse 1 is a temporal subordinate clause leading into verse 3 as the main clause; verse 2 is a parenthetical description of pre-creation conditions.

Both readings are within the Hebrew grammar. The KJV, BSB, NIV, ESV, and most major English translations follow the independent-statement reading. The NRSV (1989) footnoted the dependent-clause alternative; the JPS Tanakh (1985) renders the dependent-clause reading in its main text (“When God began to create heaven and earth — the earth being unformed and void…”). The interpretive consequences are significant: the independent reading suggests creation ex nihilo (out of nothing); the dependent reading suggests creation out of pre-existing chaos.

Bara (בָּרָא, “create”)

The Hebrew verb in Genesis 1:1, 1:21, and 1:27, and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. HALOT s.v. bara glosses it as “to create, to bring something new into being.” A distinctive feature of bara in the Hebrew Bible is that its subject is always God — no human is ever the subject of this verb. The verb thus marks the action as specifically divine.

A different verb — יָצַר (yatsar, “to form, shape”) — appears in the second creation account at Genesis 2:7 (“the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground”). Yatsar is the verb a potter uses for shaping clay. Two different verbs are used for two different framings of the creative act.

A third verb — עָשָׂה (asah, “to do, make”) — appears throughout Genesis 1 alongside bara, often in contexts that suggest organising or arranging rather than creating ex nihilo. The three verbs together (bara, yatsar, asah) form the principal vocabulary of divine making in the Hebrew Bible.

Yom (יוֹם, “day”)

The single Hebrew word at the centre of the modern science-and-Scripture debates. Yom in biblical Hebrew has a range that includes:

• A 24-hour solar day (Exodus 20:11)
• The daylight portion of a 24-hour day, as opposed to night (Genesis 1:5)
• An undefined period of time, especially in the construct phrase “the day of” (e.g., “the day of the LORD”)
• A specific era or epoch (Joel 2:1–2)

HALOT s.v. yom documents this range. Whether the yom in Genesis 1 is to be read as a 24-hour period (the “young earth” reading), as an undefined era (the “day-age” reading), as a literary-liturgical structure not tied to physical chronology (the “framework” reading), or in some other way is the subject of an enormous interpretive literature. The Hebrew word itself permits multiple readings; the choice depends on hermeneutical commitments that the text does not adjudicate.

”In our image”

Genesis 1:26 — “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness’” — uses a first-person plural. The Hebrew verbs na’aseh (we will make), tsalmenu (our image), and demutenu (our likeness) are all plural forms.

Several readings of this plural have been proposed in the interpretive tradition:

• Plural of majesty — a Hebrew idiom in which a singular subject uses plural forms to indicate dignity. Elohim (God) is itself grammatically plural in form; some commentators read na’aseh as consistent with this pattern.
• Plural of deliberation — internal divine discourse, similar to “let me think this over.”
• Reference to the divine council — God speaking to a heavenly assembly (cf. 1 Kings 22:19, Job 1:6, Psalm 82). This is the reading favoured by much modern scholarly literature; the divine-council motif appears across the ancient Near East and is well-attested in the Hebrew Bible.
• Trinitarian reading — a reading that emerges in patristic Christian commentary, identifying the plural with the persons of the Trinity. This reading is not present in the Hebrew Bible itself or in pre-Christian Jewish interpretation.

A second creation account

Genesis 2:4–25 contains a second creation narrative, with a different order of events, a different name for God (YHWH-Elohim instead of Elohim alone), and different vocabulary. The relationship between the two accounts is the subject of substantial scholarly literature. See our Commonly Confused entry on the two creation accounts for documentation of the differences.

What this entry does not do

We do not adjudicate between the major interpretive frameworks for reading Genesis 1 — young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, theistic evolution, the framework hypothesis, the cosmic-temple reading, etc. The Hebrew text permits multiple readings within the lexical range of its key vocabulary. The choice between them is hermeneutical, not strictly linguistic.