A Mountain Rose Out of the Water

Water in the Bible Part 4—Genesis 1:9-10

Aug 24, 2023

This is the fourth installment of our series examining the image of water in the Bible. Over the next months, we’ll be looking at these verses to follow the image of water as it flows from Genesis to Revelation. This time we’re looking down… toward the land that rose up out of the water.

In the last post in the water series, we looked at a curious moment in the narrative of creation in Genesis 1 when God created the “waters above” and the “waters below” by parting the primeval sea of chaos with a hard barrier above the sky called the raquia.

With the creation of the raquia, God was separating the waters vertically. The next thing he does is separate them horizontally, making a mountain rise up out of the sea.

Why Are We Talking About Mountains in a Post About Water?

The Bible is a tapestry of tightly woven threads. Part of reading the Bible is following the threads to see where they lead, where they double back on themselves and tie into what came before, where they converge en masse at key passages, where the former threads foreshadow and promise the latter, and the latter threads look back and relate to what came before.

All that is to say that biblical themes often intersect, as the theme of the sea of chaos and the mountain of God do here. That is why are we talking about mountains in a series about water—that is what comes out of the sea on the third day of creation when the waters part.

The Mountain that Rose from the Sea

On the first day of creation, God separated the light from the darkness, calling one day and the other night. On the second day, God separated the waters from the waters, creating the “water above” and the “water below.” On the third day, God parted the water again, naming the new areas the sea and the earth.

Here are the verses:

“Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. And God called the dry land “earth,” and the gathering of the waters He called “seas”; and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:9-10)

When I pictured this moment in the creation story as a kid, I imagined the water slowly draining away until the land was revealed as it might after a flood. I grew up in America’s Midwest, a region known for its (very flat) fields of corn, not its mountains. I was reading my own experience into the images of the Bible without knowing it (and still am in countless ways). It wasn’t until I studied the Psalms at greater depth that I realized I needed to change my image of the third day of creation.

Psalm 104 and the Sea Mountain

The vivid imagery of the Psalms can give us deeper insight into both the way the writers of the Bible pictured things and what they mean. To stick with the water metaphors, it is like taking a ride in a glass-bottomed boat. The lens of poetry lets you see straight down to the bottom of the biblical imagination—and, like a coastal reef, there are all sorts of surprising and wonderful things down there.

For instance, compare Psalm 104 to Genesis 1.

Psalm 104 is a reprisal of creation. First God makes light (v. 2), then the heavens (v. 2), next comes the raquia and the waters above (v. 3). When we first meet the land in the psalm it is covered in water “as with a garment” so that the water covers even the mountains (v. 6). Then, at God’s rebuke, the waters flee and the mountains rise.

Here is the third day of creation according to Psalm 104:

You set the earth on its foundations,
so that it should never be moved.
You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they fled;
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down
to the place that you appointed for them.

The psalmist, not a Midwesterner, didn’t have the flat, fertile plains of Missouri in mind here. This is more like the creation of the Hawaiian islands than the Mississippi overflowing its banks. Where there was once only sea, there is now a green and verdant mountain.

Imagine the View from the Windows of the Ark

When I imagined the third day of creation, I wasn’t wrong to picture the waters receding after a flood. I was just picturing the wrong flood. I should have been imagining what Noah might have seen from the windows of the ark after that flood.

The flood account in Genesis 6-9 is a reversal of creation. The chaotic waters that God parted in Genesis 1 returned to cover the land that God raised up out of the sea.

Remember that in the ancient mind, the pre-created state was not “nothing” but a chaotic ocean. So there is a sense in which the flood has taken things back to their uncreated state—with one notable exception. Instead of God’s spirit hovering over the waters, this time there is an ark floating on them, an ark filled with a righteous family and a whole bunch of animals. In other words, God has undone several of the days of creation but not the sixth day. Even though the land has been inundated, the creatures of the land remain.

After 40 days (there are those symbolic numbers again), the ark lodges against, of all things, the top of a mountain. A wind again passes over the face of the deep (compare Genesis 8:1 and Genesis 1:1). The “fountains of the deep” and the “windows of the sky” were closed (i.e. the waters are once again separated vertically as in Genesis 1:6). After a few weeks, the “tops of the mountains became visible.” (Genesis 8:5)

Now imagine what that might have looked like from the windows of the ark.

First, they saw an unbroken expanse of water. As time passed, they saw the very tips of the mountains break through the surface of the sea and continue to (apparently) rise as the water level fell. It would have looked like the mountains were sprouting up out of the water.

This is exactly how we should imagine the third day of Genesis 1. When God made the dry land, he made a mountain rise up out of the water. Just as the rest of the flood account was a rewind of Genesis 1, after the flood God was ready to press play again. As the rain stopped, the darkness ended and the light returned. The waters were once again separated vertically. Then, the mountains emerged as the waters were separated horizontally. Next, trees, people, and animals filled the land again.

Was Eden Really a Mountain?

But wait a minute. Does this mean that the Garden of Eden was a mountain?

Yes.

If you know the rest of the story of Genesis 1 and 2, you’ll know that God planted a garden in Eden on the land that he separated from the sea. In saying that land was in fact a mountain, I’m also saying that Eden was a mountain, which may not be the way you’ve always pictured it. So let’s take a minute to talk about where that idea comes from.

The strongest bit of supporting evidence that Eden was a mountain is the very thing we’ve been talking about—it was founded on the land that rose up out of the sea of chaos. We’ve seen how the psalmist pictured that moment and how the biblical imagination was further shaped by the reprise of the creation sequence after the flood.
A river flowed from Eden and split into other major rivers in the non-Eden regions of the earth. (Genesis 2:10-14) Gravity being what it is, this implies that Eden is topographically higher than the land around it.
The prophets also agree that Eden was a mountain. There is an interesting moment in Ezekiel in which the prophet is told to prophesy against the king of Tyre but it is clear as Ezekiel likens the king of Tyre to an “anointed cherub” who sinned and was cast down that the prophet is talking about more than just a mortal man. In the middle of his words, Ezekiel describes Eden with a double image that shows that he imagined Eden as both a garden and a mountain:

“You were in Eden, the garden of God… You were on the holy mountain of God;
You walked in the midst of the stones of fire…”. (Ezekiel 28: 13, 14)

The prophet Joel also speaks of Eden as a garden and as a mountain without indicating that he is talking about different things:

“Blow a trumpet in Zion; sound an alarm on my holy mountain!... Like blackness there is spread upon the mountains, a great and powerful people… The land is like the garden of Eden before them, but behind them a desolate wilderness…” (Joel 2:1-3)

The last piece of the puzzle is simply the concatenation of images that all meet at the same mountainous, garden-y spot.
- The temple, the place of meeting with God, is decked out in jungle/garden decoration because it is symbolically linked to Eden, the first place of meeting with God.
- The Eden-esque temple is literally on top of a mountain in Jerusalem.
- Jerusalem is “Mt. Zion” the mountain of God. Mt. Zion is both a physical place (Jerusalem) and is also linked to the symbolic “cosmic” mountain of God that is the high place from which God rules creation, i. e. the mountain that rose out of the sea in Genesis 1.

What Else Is Going On With Mountains in the Bible?

Alert… shameless plug dead ahead! My friend

Phillip Johnston

and I have another newsletter called Three Things. It is a monthly digest of (only) three resources from around the web with a bit of Phillip’s (very good) commentary. Each year, we offer courses on various topics like violence in the Bible, the Beatitudes, deconstruction, etc. Last year we did one on symbols in the Bible (which later grew into this Substack). In the last two sessions of that course, I explored what else happens with the image of mountains in the Bible.

If you want to continue to follow the theme of mountains in the Bible, start here: