Announcer: Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Fr. Stephen De Young teaches verse by verse on the podcast The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies and is an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Fr. Stephen De Young: We'll go ahead and get started, and when we get started in just a moment, we'll be starting in Genesis 1:1, so that'll be relatively easy to find.

So I'm not going to do a long review of the introduction that we did last time.

So I will just say that by the time people are hearing this recording at least, the introduction will already be there for people to go back and listen to.

I'm going to add a couple of things real quick that I realized I didn't mention in the introduction, the main one being: I didn't talk about the names of the books in the Torah, or the Pentateuch, because the names we know them by are the Greek names for the books.

So Genesis, Yenisis, is basically beginning; it's the coming into being, the beginning. "Generation" comes from the same...

And then Exodus literally means the way or the road out in Greek.

Leviticus, Levitikos or Lewitikos, that means the Levite thing, literally; the Levitical book is the thing in this case.

Numbers is kind of obvious.

That's not actually the Greek name. That's the English translation of the Greek name through Latin.

And then Deuteronomy is defteros-nomos, which is literally like the second law, or the second Torah,

because most of the stuff that's in Deuteronomy is stuff that was already in the previous four books.

So, for example, in Deuteronomy 5, we get the Ten Commandments again that were originally in Exodus 20.

So those are the names we know them by.

The Hebrew names—this is going to be a good segue here in Genesis— The Hebrew names for the books are the first word, just whatever the first word is.

So the Hebrew name of Genesis is Bereshit, which is what we translate "in the beginning," which is a little bit interpretive.

So, technically, Bereshit means more like at the head, because beresh is head in Hebrew.

The b is a preposition that can mean in, at, or with—which makes Hebrew really fun, the fact that the prepositions can mean, like, a whole bunch of different things!

Yes, ma'am.

Q1: A couple of weeks ago I was looking into a video, and a person said that it means "home." Is there a connection that way? I thought that was strange.

Fr. Stephen: I don't know where they're getting that. Yeah, because it literally means head, but "head" can mean, for example, the head of a river, the source of the river: it's where the river begins.

Q1: I could see "source."

Fr. Stephen: The other place where we know that word from is Rosh Hashanah, Rosh Hashanah, which literally means the head of the year, and that's New Year's; that's the first day, so you could say the beginning of the year.

But, yeah, so that's the name of Genesis, and, likewise—and we'll mention this again as we eventually get to the other books in the Torah or the Pentateuch—what the first word is.

But it's not— They did not make an attempt to sort of characterize what the book was about, or...

I mean, Exodus, for example, is very clearly saying: Well, this is what the book is about.

Whereas, just the first word is just: This is the first word. And that's how it's known.

So, that covered, we'll now get into the first word, unless there are any questions or comments or accusations of heresy leveled at me that anybody wants to make.

We'll start in Genesis 1:1. So Genesis 1:1 is:

"In the beginning, God made heaven and earth."

That's how it is in the Orthodox Study Bible, at least.

So, that seems simple and straightforward, but there's sort of more to this.

So, the Hebrew of that is: Bereshit bara Elohim ha-shamayim v' ha'aretz, which is that bereshit word, which we'll come back to, that we translate "in the beginning," that first word.

Bara is the word for create. So we'll come back to that, too.

Elohim is God.

Ha-shamayim is the word for the heavens. Mayim, which you can hear in there, is the word for waters, and we'll see when we get to the second day of creation how those are connected here.

Aretz is the earth, the ground.

So we'll start with that first word.

So we, because we translate it "in the beginning," we're used to thinking of this as being a reference to time, sort of, this is the first thing that happened,

but neither bereshit, nor the Greek translation of that, which is en arche, en being "in," arche being literally "first" or "primary"—

it's a really direct translation of head, like an archon, what occupies the first place, and it really means more like "in the first place" or "to begin" in terms of what's being communicated to us.

And this is important because this first sentence, this first verse, is kind of a summary statement.

So it's not that God created the heavens and the earth and then this other stuff that we're about to read about happens after that;

it's: this is a statement of what's about to be narrated.

So in the first place, or to begin, God created the heavens and the earth.

And now we're going to hear a description of that; now that's going to be described to us in a particular way.

The Greek translation of en arche is also important because that's the same way that St. John's Gospel begins: en arche, In the beginning was the Word.

So St. John uses Genesis a lot all the way through his Gospel, but even right there at the beginning, he's trying to line up what he's doing with what Genesis is doing.

And in the same way, we call those first 18 verses of St. John's Gospel his prologue, where he's making this summary statement, and then he goes and describes the life of Christ.

So then, the other thing I said we were going to come back to was what's translated here as "made," which is probably better translated "created," because in both Hebrew and Greek, the word for "create" and the word for "make" are different words.

So in Hebrew, bara is to create; asah is to do or to make.

In Greek, ktizo is to create, poieo is to do or to make.

And those are two different words.

And the idea of creating means what it originally meant in English, that you're making something that didn't exist before, that something is coming to be that before that wasn't.

Whereas making does not imply that. The verb to do or to make, you might be doing something you've done a thousand times before.

You might be making your 853rd chair. You're just making something—out of other things, using raw materials and that kind of thing.

Now, that is not to say— Here's where the accusations of heresy come in. [Laughter]

So, the Orthodox Church teaches, and the Scriptures teach, that God created everything from nothing.

Fancy Latin way: creation ex nihilo.

But Genesis 1, as we're about to see, does not describe— This particular passage does not describe God creating from nothing in the way that we typically think about that as modern people.

There are places later in the Old Testament that do that, and so that's true, but this place comes at it from a different perspective.

The story of God creating the world is actually told several times in the Old Testament, in different ways.

They all agree God created the world, but they're making different points.

Just like we have four gospels, they aren't all identical, but they're all describing the same Christ, who actually lived and did these things—but to make different points and from different perspectives.

But so the idea here is that God is making the world in that— or creating the world in that there wasn't a world before this.

So that's important, because, for most ancient people, time was basically seen as cyclical, and so you could have an endless number of worlds before this one.

In fact, pretty much everybody believed that there had been at least one before this one.

It usually ended with a flood, pretty much across the board, but some places you find where there's lots and lots.

But this is: there is no world, there are no heavens, there is no earth, and God creates them.

This also says something about God,

because the gods of ancient peoples, there's pretty much universally found, outside of Israel, some version of the succession myth—

that's what scholars call it—

that at some point in the past, there were different gods who ruled over the world, and then there was some kind of insurrection or revolution.

Usually, it's some son of those older gods goes and defeats and/or kills and/or maims their father and takes over.

And those stories— Sometimes you get multiple levels of succession.

So probably the one that most of us are most familiar with is Greek mythology.

Greek mythology: you've got Ouranos, the heavens, and Gaia, the earth, and then they have children who are the Titans, and Chronos maims his father, Ouranos, and takes over.

And then Zeus, who's Chronos' son, leads his siblings to go and defeat the Titans, and they take over. There's like two cycles.

In Babylon, there were several.

And so, God sort of addresses this directly. For example, in Isaiah, he says, "Yahweh, the God of Israel says, I am God. Before me, there was no other, and after me, there will be no other."

He's God all the way—but that's already embedded here, at the beginning, because there is no world before God makes one,

which means there can't have been any gods before him; there can't have been any anything before him.

That's already put in place here.

And this also means that, even though God is going to come to identify himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Israel, the God of these particular people, he's not just the God of some place or some thing.

He's not the god of war, he's not a storm god, he's not— because none of those things exist until he creates them.

So he's not associated with any of those things. He makes all of them. They don't pre-exist him or co-exist with him.

So there's a lot in that first verse!

So, verse 2:

"The earth was invisible and unfinished, and darkness was over the deep. The spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water."

So I'm going to do a little more Hebrew on the first part of this verse just because it's fun to say.

The Hebrew is that the earth was tohu v'bohu, which is just fun and rhymes: tohu v'bohu,

and that's what's being translated here as "invisible and unfinished."

But in the old King James, they translate it as "without form and void,"

and tohu kind of means that; it means like formless or chaotic, disordered.

And bohu is the void part, meaning empty.

So this is where we get into how this is a little different than how we think about nothing.

So when I say the word "nothing" to you—I'm guessing here, but I imagine the image, if you try to imagine nothing, would probably be like a black space or just a white space, but that's not actually nothing; that's an empty space, and an empty space is sort of something.

We can't imagine nothing.

Any time we try to imagine nothing or picture it, that picture is something. [Laughter]

So nothing is something we can't conceive.

But ancient people didn't even try to make that move, of trying to imagine nothingness.

For ancient people, being wasn't opposed to nothingness—apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre—but being was opposed to chaos.

To exist meant to be not just to exist in general, but to be something in particular.

Everything that exists is something in particular. You don't have something that just exists but isn't anything.

Q1: Are you coming around to saying that matter is eternal?

Fr. Stephen: No. [Laughter] No, because what we think of matter is not what they thought of.

So when we think of matter, we just think of the smallest particles of stuff that we can imagine. You know? Matter is just stuff, physical stuff that you can touch.

But even that photons— There's some little bundles of energy.

And what they meant when they said matter, like when Aristotle talks about prime matter, is, again, chaos.

Prime matter isn't anything, but it has the potential to become anything.

Q2: Like stem cells.

Fr. Stephen: Well, except those are stem cells. [Laughter] And this nothing. This is also a thing we can't imagine.

But the difference is, the core difference, is that we're not talking about a void.

Q2: So is it kind of like the scientific relationship between matter and energy? Like, energy—

Fr. Stephen: Not really.

Q2: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: Both energy and matter are something. [Laughter]

This is sort of— And, again, it's something we can't really imagine, but it's sort of—

There is all of this potentiality there that's unactualized, so it isn't anything.

And what might help a little with this, because we're being given imagery—the imagery that then gets used in the rest of the verse—

It says the spirit of God was hovering over the face of of the water.

So water, again, in the Old Testament water—we've talked about this several times—water represents chaos. This is another image for chaos.

But the word that's translated "hover" here in the Hebrew—

And St. Basil actually points this out.

He didn't know Hebrew, but he points to the Syriac word that was used here, which is—Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic—is a word that's used to describe a bird, a mother bird, brooding over its eggs.

So that egg imagery is another way of getting at this idea of potential.

Q2: So it's something more like possibility? Because it's not manifest or something, it's just…?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Right. And so what God's going to now do as we go forward in the rest of this chapter is he's going to take that—the eggs are going to hatch, as it were, and this is going to be put in order and established.

So that's why I say this particular passage is not aimed at creation ex nihilo the way we usually think about it.

There are other passages in the Old Testament that directly teach that, but this passage is aimed at describing God as taking these things out of the realm of potential and bringing them into the realm of being, of existence.

Q1: Is there room for anticipation on God's part?

Fr. Stephen: Well, that's the brooding. That's the Spirit there, yeah.

So this isn't just hovering as in, like… but actively right brooding,

and that imagery then gets picked up at Christ's baptism, when the Holy Spirit descends like a dove.

This is where that bird imagery— Christ is in the water.

And in the hymns—it's a few weeks away still, but in the hymns it keeps connecting Christ to Adam and redeeming Adam in the waters.

And that's through this imagery.

So the tohu v'bohu here, the "without form and void," these are presented as these two problems that God's going to solve.

The first one of those problems, the tohu, is formless. It's chaos. It needs to be put in order, brought out of chaos into existence.

And to exist means to be in an order, not just the thing itself is in a certain order and is what it is, but there's an order between things.

There's this whole system of relationships, correct relationships between things.

And that system of relationships is what's going to be called justice later on in the Old Testament. Justice and then peace, or that state of everything being in the right place again.

But there's also going to be injustice, as we're going to see, where things get out of order, where that order gets broken.

But so when God creates, he's going to be taking out of that chaos and putting things into order, internal and with each other in the creation.

That's problem one.

Problem two, the bohu, is that it's empty, empty specifically of life, because chaos and life are opposed to each other.

This is one of the reasons why the ocean is and the sea is an image of chaos and death, because humans can't live there. In fact, they drown. So it's threatening, right?

So those are the two things, being empty of life and being chaotic and disordered.

Those are the two problems with creation that God is going to resolve through creation as it goes forward.

And as you mentioned, there's this sense of anticipation already with the spirit of God there.

Verse three:

"Then God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.

God saw the light. It was good.

And God divided the light from the darkness.

God called the light day; the darkness, he called night.

And there was evening and morning, one day."

In the Hebrew, it's actually the opposite; it's "day one." That's at the end.

So God says, "Let there be light"; light comes to be, and then he separates light and darkness.

So this is step one of that ordering, of dealing with that first problem of putting things in order.

Q1: But apparently light is not yet the sun, because the sun is going to be made later.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But we have light and darkness separated, separated out from each other, and so this

is the first part of ordering

Q3: So when light was created, it was created and still somehow mixed with darkness and needed to be separated?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes.

Q2: Or there were two aspects of the same act.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, because God doesn't create darkness. Remember, darkness was over the face of the deep, which is the abyss in Greek.

So God isn't described here as creating the darkness; he creates the light.

St. John's going to play with this in his prologue. Remember, the light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not— right?

So in the icon of the first day of creation, the light that is being created has all of these angelic faces and wings in it.

So the way that a lot of Fathers interpret this—and I say a lot of Fathers, because there is some disagreement on this, but a lot of Fathers interpret this as actually the creation of the angels, of the angelic beings.

And then they connect the separation of the light from the darkness as referring to angels fallen and unfallen.

That's not all of the Fathers. A lot of other Fathers connect it to the fourth day, and we'll talk about that more when we get there, which is the sun and the moon and the stars.

And there are even a couple who connect it to the second day, for different reasons.

But so the light here that we're talking about, because we're not talking about the sun and moon, this is heavenly light.

So you either get: this is sort of the light of the glory of God himself shining in creation and driving out darkness, or if this is light in the sense of the angelic beings who sort of have reflected or refracted—

Q1: As long as it's not abolished!

Fr. Stephen: —light of the glory of God.

Right, it still exists, or, I mean, darkness is sort of the absence of light, but yeah, yeah.

Q2: Is this similar to the light that was talked about in Revelation, that came from the New Jerusalem?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, this is what the Fathers called the uncreated light of God, if we're talking about God's light.

If that's, what's in view here, then this is the light of the glory of God himself, and the difference is now that's shining into creation, that God is manifesting himself into creation, so that that is beginning to drive out darkness on that reading.

So verse six:

"Then God said, 'Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water, and let it divide the water from the water.' And it was so.

Thus God made the firmament, and God divided the water under the firmament from the water above the firmament.

So God called the firmament heaven, and God saw that it was good.

And there was evening and morning, the second day."

So even though the Greek word is pretty different than the Hebrew word here, they went with "firmament" in the Orthodox Study Bible, just because the King James version sort of established that word as the word to use here.

Q1: I've never seen that word used in any other place!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! It's kind of a punt. It's a little bit of a translation punt.

So the Hebrew word here is raqia, which means sort of like a barrier or a partition would be how we understand it.

And the visual image here is that this raqia, this firmament, is sort of like a dome, and so there's water up above the dome and there's water below the dome, so this is creating the sky. This is the heavens is in the sky—and then the sea are being separated.

Q2: Specifically the sky, or, like, the sky is the separation with the water?

Fr. Stephen: The sky is the separation.

The sky is the separation, and there's water above there. That's why it's blue.

Q4: Is it safe to say that that water is chaos?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because they're going to say that's where storms come from.

So they're going to say you have storms up there, and you have storms in the sea.

And then sort of in their cosmological understanding, God's throne, the angels and everything, are up above that. They're up above that.

Q4: And that's where we get the idea of "third heaven" that we see later?

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. And there are various ways— When you when you get to Second Temple Judaism, there are all these different ways of categorizing the heavens and descriptions.

There's sometimes seven, sometimes three, sometimes nine or ten.

But those are all sort of up above this is the idea.

And sometime early next year when we get to the flood, we'll see that part of the way the flood is depicted is that the raqia, this firmament, kind of opens up to let the water dump back down, and that's part of what causes the flood.

But we'll talk about that more then.

So I'll go ahead and say it here to cover sort of the last two things.

So we have this idea by putting things in order, God has also sort of created these spaces in the sense that we now have day and night. We now have the sky and the sea.

So things are being put in order, but they're still empty. There are now spaces, but they're empty spaces.

But also, so—as much as I hate going over this, the question does arise: How literally are we expected to take this?

And we're not expected to believe the earth is flat. We're not expected to believe there's a literal dome of the sky, and that satellites are a trick and that man never went to the moon. [Laughter] We're not expected.

As we talked about briefly last time, God is not trying to sort of download some kind of future physics into Moses' brain.

What we're reading here, according to the tradition of the Church, is the vision that Moses received on Mount Sinai, the vision of the creation of the world.

And so, just like when we were reading Revelation and we were reading St. John's vision, and it was a mistake to say, like, "Oh, giant locusts that spit fire: those must be Apache attack helicopters, right?" it's a mistake to try to literalize this into: I am a biblical flat earther, and the earth is flat and supported by pillars and all that.

Yeah. So that's not what it's trying to convey. It's not trying to convey that kind of scientific information.

This is a vision that Moses is receiving in order to communicate certain theological truths to him and truths about the world.

Yes, ma'am.

Q1: This may not be the right to ask or develop this thought, but—

Fr. Stephen: Oh, go ahead. [Laughter]

Q1: The time—is time part of this now?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, see, that's an interesting question, too, because that's the next piece of this: is how literally to take the time.

Q1: Well, I'm thinking about how one day equals—

Fr. Stephen: Right, right. Time in general.

So, yeah. This is an interesting question!

I mean, the day question is implied by that, right?

So because this is a vision that the prophet Moses is receiving, we wouldn't want to take the time so literally as to think that Moses sat there for 24 hours watching the things that we're told happened on the first day. So that would be pushing it too far.

Now when we get to the fourth day and we see the sun and moon and stars are created, one of their purposes, we're told in the text, is going to be to measure times and seasons,

which, again, if we try to take this super literally, causes an issue because you're going: Well, wait a minute. We just had three days. A day is a measure of time, right?

But we couldn't measure time until the fourth day, and so you can tie yourself up in a knot with that.

So I don't want— I don't know how far to go down this rabbit-hole.

Q1: I never thought of this, but the Jewish calendar begins on this day one, or some time in the seven days? See they have this as 5,000-something right now?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, on the Jewish calendar, the rabbinic Jewish calendar. Yeah, so they count this. They have this.

Matthew Henry did the same thing, our Puritan friend, Matthew Henry. If you read his commentary on Genesis, he gives dates!

He's like, this is April 24, you know, 4,062 BC, like he's got it nailed right down.

So I think that's again, an over-literalization.

I mean, when I'm saying, I don't know how far to go down this rabbit-hole, what I mean is, since there are—

I mean, Moses has seen this vision, but when this is actually happening, long before Moses, there aren't any humans there to experience time.

Q1: Well, that is hard to—

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. So then what do we even mean? because God doesn't experience time the way we do.

Q1: And is time a consequence of the fall?

Fr. Stephen: No! No, but time, the way we talk about it, the thing that you and I mean when we say time, is a product of our human consciousness, meaning God doesn't experience time the way we do.

That's reiterated to us in the Bible repeatedly, right? A thousand years are like a day; a day is like a thousand… to try to communicate again, that's not literal, but that— the idea that God doesn't experience time the way we do, which we would expect.

And angels: if we say the angels are created on the first day, there's no reason to think they experience time the way we do.

So if by "time" you mean a succession of events, well, yeah? Things happen and then other things happen.

But what we usually call time is really our experience of time.

So, and I don't know how far we want to go down this philosophical rabbit hole, but there's a concept— There's a concept called deep time, which is hypothetical time that passed when there were no observers, like there's no people, there's no one observing anything.

Q4: Like the [Inaudible] in the book.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah! And that's hype— But like we talk about deep space, like beyond what we can observe— It's there, but we can't say anything about it really, because—

Q4: But it all sounds like the possibility that we were talking about earlier, like the possibility's there, but it hasn't been formed yet, so it's like the possibility for time is there,

like day and night: the possibility for light is there, and then we get the sun and we get the moon. It's almost like it's refined or something.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, put in order.

Q4: So just because it's not ordered, doesn't mean that the possibility doesn't exist.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, but a lot of times when we talk about—a lot of times [Laughter]—most often when we talk about time, we're talking about an order of— It's precisely an order.

So if you don't have that order yet, can you talk about time?

Yeah. So I won't go any further down that rabbit-hole and explode people's brains.

But the idea is that that's enough that we don't want to try to force things and do a very super mega literal mode.

Yes, ma'am.

Q1: I know you've seen practically everything. Has anyone else here ever seen the old '30s movie, The Green Pastures?

Fr. Stephen: I have. [Laughter]

Q1: Yeah, I knew you would. If anybody else hasn't, it's wonderful. It's based on a book that tells Bible stories in Negro dialect, but now again, it gets called a racist movie, but yeah.

It starts with this wonderful scene that there's a fish fry in heaven, and the little black angel comes and says, "Lord, the batter needs some more firmament."

And the Lord says, "That'd be a whole lot of firmament." And they end up with so much that the world is created, so that's what they do.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And this is also— I mean, there's a whole question, too.

Time doesn't come into existence because of the fall, but there is an open question—and this is in the Fathers—as to whether time was experienced differently before the expulsion from paradise.

And that's an important question because that gets into— in the age, in the world to come, will we experience time differently?

We kind of assume, because we don't know anything else, that time then will be like time now—and I'm using "then" and "now"!

But that there'll be just sort of this succession of moments, but it's eternal life, so it'll just go on forever, you know?

Q1: Is there a physical, physics truth that the younger you are, you experience time less steeply, as you get older?

Fr. Stephen: Well, I think that my theory is that that's based on the percentage of your life.

Like, when you're five, a year is 20% of your life. When you're 50, a year is 2% of your life, and so it seems, you know, quicker.

Q1: At my age, you've got weeks. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So, right. But so, yeah. And so that is a germane question in terms of time being experienced.

But the important thing, I think, is that time is not this absolute thing that's out there in the world. Time is part of our experience of the world, the way we measure and experience time.

Q2: Just like we don't see atoms, we don't experience them. We think they're there.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Q1: But that's our theory that if you're going to outer space and come back, you'd be so much older or younger.

Fr. Stephen: Depending on how fast you travel, yeah. But, yeah. And so, like, I know—

There's an everyday example: My dogs experience time very differently than me.

Like, I can go out to get the newspaper and come back in, or, like, Trish and I can go and be gone most of the day and come back, and they react exactly the same way.

And I'm convinced that they don't really understand: Was this an hour? Was this five hours? Was this five minutes?

It's just: They're gone! They're back! [Laughter]

Yeah. They're gone, I'm sad; they're back, I'm happy! [Laughter]

Q3: Can you also kind of give an explanation of visions of saints, saints having visions of saints who are not— who are much younger than when they died?

But some of them are elderly when they died, and why are some people in the afterlife varying one way or the other. I'm curious, just trying to open our understanding of time, how it really is.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we're filtering our perceptions through our understanding.

But, yeah, one place that comes up in the Fathers—and we'll get to that when we get into Genesis 3—is that a lot of the Fathers don't have a big time-lapse between the creation of humanity and the expulsion from paradise, like it's almost immediate.

And that would be the same idea for the Fathers who understand that the angels are created and some of them fall on the first day, that that's because angels wouldn't experience time the way we do.

So it's kind of immediate from their perspective.

Announcer: Listen next time as Fr. Stephen De Young continues his study of the Scriptures on The Whole Counsel of God.

Fr. Stephen's email address is wholecounsel at ancientfaith.com. That's wholecounsel at ancientfaith.com.