Creation - Reflections on Genesis 1:1-2:4a, Trinity Sunday, Year A
by John C. Holbert on Wednesday, April 1, 2026
We begin the 26-week-long season of Pentecost appropriately with the Bible’s very first chapter, the second account, at least second in terms of time of composition, of the creation of the world. Creation’s author here is Elohim, an unusual noun form, masculine plural of the basic West Semitic word for God, El. In the familiar nomenclature of the historical-critical study of the Bible, inaugurated some 150 years ago by the German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, this chapter was written by an unknown figure named “P,” due to his preference for using this particular name for the deity, Elohim, and his special interests in things priestly (hence P). In contrast, Gen.2:4b-25, according to similar scholarship, was composed by someone named “J,” for Yahwist (German “J” is pronounced as a “Y”), an author who was writing some centuries prior to Gen.1. Whether these scholarly speculations retain their validity, or are at least somewhat plausible, are the subject of vociferous debate. I, for one very minor scholar, have serious doubts about the value of the J,E,D,P rubric, however long they have reigned in the minds of many.
Nevertheless, it is still fully appropriate to begin the story of the Bible with Gen.1. There can hardly be a Bible story at all without a tale of the creation of all things. And that creation was affected by God, named Elohim in Gen.1 and YHWH Elohim in Gen.2. However, in both accounts the authors have no doubt that the God of Israel, whatever the divine name may be, was the creator of heaven and earth. Oceans of ink, vast reams of paper, countless racks of vellum, and now numerous gigabytes of computer activity have attempted to unpack and dissect the rich meanings enshrined in these ancient words. I sit before these words in awe, imagining, however feebly, the enormous impacts they have had on readers for the near three millennia they have existed. I have precious little to add to that enormous store of wisdom. But in the face of all that scholarly struggle, what has long intrigued me is the very first word of the entire text.
That word is “b’reshit,” usually translated “In the beginning,” but more recently read as “In beginning,” or “When God began to create.” The former translation was made famous by KJV in the early 17th century and was followed in the 20th century by RSV and NRSV among many others. The reason for the latter translation, proposed above, is the fact that early written Hebrew possessed few if any vowels. It was not until many centuries later, when the sounds of Hebrew, along with the ways it may have been verbally understood, necessitated the creation of a system of vowels, promulgated by a group known as the Massoretes (6th/7th century CE?) to ensure that a common way of hearing and saying the language could be maintained. That first word, “b’reshit,” is actually two words in Hebrew, “b’,” the pronoun “in” (or sometimes “with,” “by,” among other possibilities), and reshit, a noun derived from the word “head,” hence “first” or “beginning.” The KJV reading “in the beginning” is surely a possible one. From that translation, the theologians of the Middle Ages derived the famous doctrine that God had created the world “from nothing,” i.e. ex nihilo, in Latin. That became a fixed belief that God was all-powerful and could bring everything from nothing.
However, when the Massoretes added vowels to the Hebrew text, they punctuated the first word in a rather different way. It could more obviously mean “in beginning,” that is “when God started to create.” That reading would make vs.3 of the text a subordinate clause to the first two verses. Hence, it could read: “When God began to create the skies and the earth, the earth being tohu wavohu (chaos?), with darkness covering the surface of tehom (the cosmic sea), and the wind of Elohim howling over the surface of the seas, Elohim then said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’” What that translation implies is that God did not in fact create the world out of nothing, but instead used already existing matter (chaos, water) to shape the world as we now see it. Rather than create from nothing, God in this way of understanding the matter imposes a design on a chaotic formlessness. Perhaps one ought not to claim that one or the other ways of imagining God’s creation is more powerful or more astonishing than the other, but the two readings obviously offer a rather different portrait of the beginning of all things.
It might also be said that designing from preexistent material is more in line with older versions of divine creation found in other non-biblical accounts, such as is found in the famous Babylonian Enuma Elish story, words that mean “when in the heights” and begin the tale of the birth and ways of the gods. Also, in Ps.104:5-9 the picture of God’s creation, “setting the earth on its foundations” bears a certain resemblance to the fashioning and shaping image of the second way of reading that first word.
As we celebrate Trinity Sunday, however we hear that first Genesis word, the account of creation by God in Gen.1 sets the context of all later deliberations about the nature of God, whether God be seen as “one” or “alone” (Deut.6:4), or in later speculation as “three in one,” or Trinity, God is first creator and sustainer of all. Genesis 1-2 makes that fact a theological certainty, a reality that underlies all later thought and reflection about who God is.