Before Creation There Was... Water?

The First Two Verses of the Bible are Pretty Watery

When modern people think of what was before the first day of creation as described in Genesis 1, we tend to think of “nothingness.” After all, we know about the Big Bang and modern science has pre-loaded us with concepts like a zero, a vacuum, and string theory and how matter comes from energy. Besides, isn’t it obvious? Before there was something, there was nothing. Right?

Not so fast. When ancient people thought about the uncreated state, they thought about a vast, chaotic ocean. Chaos, not nothingness.

And that is where the Bible begins.

The First Two Verses of the Bible are Pretty Watery

“1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was waste and wild, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

The Bible doesn’t begin with the Spirit of God hovering over a gently flowing stream (that is later) or a peaceful, calm sea (again, later). It begins with the Spirit of God hovering over a double image of water. Two words are used to describe this chaotic, pre-created sea: “the deep” (tehom) and “the waters” (mayim).

Mayim is just the plural form of the word for “water.” However, tehom will have a negative connotation almost every other time it appears in the Bible [see for yourself]. That is why it is sometimes translated in English as “the abyss.” The abyss is where the floodwaters come from in Genesis 7. It is where Job’s leviathan lives (Job 41). It is the place the Israelites fled through to escape the Egyptians (and then the place where the Egyptians were drowned when they tried to follow (Exodus 15). It is the waters of the grave that live beneath the earth (Psalm 71).

So the “primeval sea” is the uncreated state, the chaos that preceded God’s ordering of creation as described in Genesis 1. These are the waters of uncreation where no life can flourish, no meanings can take root, no order can take shape. It is the opposite of the good place God is about to bring about as the first chapter of Genesis unfolds.

What does the “Primeval Sea” Mean?

The sea was an image of chaos and death for the Hebrew people. They shaped the scriptures to reflect that symbolic meaning and were in turn shaped by them, deepening the association.

Remember, they didn’t have the heavy, iron-sided ocean-going vessels we have today. Their ships were small and vulnerable. They didn’t have satellite imagery and meteorology to tell them when storms were coming across the waters. They didn’t have the knowledge we have of all the many creatures of the sea. (Can you imagine what it might have been like to see a whale appear next to your tiny fishing dinghy back then? No wonder they believed in sea monsters.) On a practical level, the sea was not a place for humans; it was dangerous and often deadly.

However, the association between the sea and chaos, evil, and death was not only a practical reality; it was also a mythological one.

At this point, we need to take a quick digression into the creation stories of Israel’s ancient neighbors.

Genesis Is In Dialogue With Pagan Creation Stories

The creation stories of Israel’s enemies (Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and the Canaanites) form part of the cultural context of the ancient Hebrew imagination. 

For a modern analogy, you might think of the way that British stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood form part of the context of the cognitive framework of the West. If someone says, “He is a real Robin Hood,” the meaning doesn’t need to be explained. The speaker is creating new meanings by taking a common cultural understanding and applying it in a new context—and we understand that someone is figuratively robbing the rich and giving to the poor. The speaker doesn’t need to believe that Robin Hood actually existed.

Culture, language, and literature worked the same way in ancient times. 

Israel’s neighbors had their own ideas about how everything came to exist and the Bible is in dialogue with the alternate contemporary meta-stories.

When you compare Genesis with other ancient creation stories you find surprising similarities and differences. 

For instance, the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish, begins with two gods, Apsu (fresh water) and Tiamat (chaotic salt water). That’s it. They didn’t conceive of the uncreated state as being nothing. They thought of it as being landless water.

Similarly, in one of the Egyptian creation stories, the creator god is called Atum and he arises from the ocean and transforms himself into the land. The key thing to notice in our discussion is that, again, non-existence isn’t nothingness; it is the sea.

Now let’s go back to Genesis 1:1-2.

Situating the Hebrew creation story in an oceanic wasteland both evokes this primeval mythological ocean and subverts it.

Notice the differences between the pagan myths and Genesis.

• In the Egyptian story, Atum is not eternally-existent (unlike the God of the Bible), rather, he creates himself from the primordial sea, which pre-existed him. In Genesis, the uncreated state is also depicted as chaotic water, but God pre-existed it, created it, and rules it.

• Unlike the Babylonian creation story, creation doesn’t come about by two gods procreating (or the Greco-Roman one, for that matter). In Genesis, God simply speaks and new things are brought into being by his word alone. When God speaks and the tempest is stilled, the chaos is given meaning and order, and the waters are divided.

• Also, there is no struggle to create in Genesis. God is not a part of the sea and the sea is not part of him, but he hovers over it, ruling it. These waters “saw God and writhed” (Psalm 77:16). The Spirit is immanent, present, moving like a wind over the waters. There is a separation there, not an identification. God’s Spirit is poised like an indrawn breath waiting to exhale life and the words of creation.

If We Are Going to Hear What the Bible Is Saying, We Have to Learn to Read It Like Ancient People

This will be a recurrent theme in out Bible journey because it is a tricky idea to get our heads around. However, it is a habit we have to get into if we are going to learn to take the Bible on its own terms.

It is far too easy to read our modern paradigms into this ancient work, and far more difficult to let the Bible itself teach us how it should be read.

We need—to whatever degree possible—to take our modern lenses off of our eyes when we read the Bible and put on our ancient ones. Only when that happens can we begin to see details like the fact that the story of the Bible doesn’t begin with nothing, but with water. And only then can we ask the next important question: Why? What is God telling us here? Assuming this is exactly what God wanted his word in Scripture to say and exactly the way he wanted to say it, what is he saying?

First, we have to ask: “What did it mean for them?” (the text’s original audience). Then we can ask: “What does it mean for me?”

And that is when the adventure begins.

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Photo by Gleb Kozenko on Unsplash