In the beginning Elohim created heaven and the earth. (1:1)
Opinions are divided. The first verse appears to announce and summarize what follows (as asserted by Cassuto, for example), and as such, it contains all the details of the act of creation, in the sense that God (Elohim) created everything out of everything, both sides of the world, that of heaven and that of earth, which stand opposite to each other, like God and the image standing before him when he creates the Other.
And … Right after the introduction, our story begins: the plot. The conjunction “and” shows that something already happened in the past. There was something. Therefore, when God created the world, the world was already in some sort of state.And the earth was tohu vavohu, and darkness was upon the face of the abyss; and the spirit of Elohim hovered over the surface of the water. (1:2)
God was the sole factor, the only pre-conscious entity active against the inanimate: a world that was in tohu vavohu, darkness in the abyss, and water, which is an abyss. Everything was mingled with everything and with nothing, in confusion, with no differences. Nevertheless, let us emphasize: in a way the world was already in existence (and even if we accept Rashi’s opinion, which is contrary to that of Cassuto, that Verse 2 is the continuation of Verse 1, and that they both are an introduction, their meaning is: When God first came to create the world, the state of affairs was such and such … Even so it can be understood that Verse 2 describes the state of affairs before the creation).
It also could be that God still does not exist, in the full sense, but only in his spirit, which hovers over the surface of the water, and, just as water and dry land were not fully realized before God spoke, so, too, God was not created until the moment he began to act, when he spoke; speaking made him, when he became the speaker who said, Let there be light. Only then did speech distinguish him (from the rest of the world). Then, he was no longer just spirit but also speech. In the beginning, God was created by the very act of creation, meaning that he created himself along with the creation of objects, making a distinction between him and the created object exterior to him, but deriving from his creative essence.
In his conversations on the weekly Bible portion, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a man of faith,* declares that God’s essence does not derive from his being the creator of the world, but rather, from his very divinity, and that God could have existed without the world. This is an extension of his argument against pantheism, the idea that the world and God are the same. However, in our reading, I emphasize that God is not the world, and he creates it as an external Other; God becomes what he is and is materialized from the hovering spirit, turning into a divinely ruling essence as a consequence of creating what is Other than himself, to which he henceforth relates. This is the meaning of the Hebrew particle “et,” which marks the direct object of a verb: it shows the origin of God as a subject in relation to an object, the world. Thus, the first sentence describes relations between God and the world and presents God’s main characteristic: he is the creator of the world (and he needs the world).** No wonder Leibowitz speaks of Hegel with some distaste.***
* Below in our commentary on Genesis, we will explain the distinction between a person of faith, who places the concept of God above life, in contrast to the traditional person. Abraham is the key to the traditional outlook, not that of faith, which is to say that Abraham is not a knight of faith but a man acting with cunning in relation to God, perhaps as the young, anti-Jewish Hegel wrote in “The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate,” and we cunningly turn his words into praise for this Jewish attitude.** Here, the reader is entitled to object that this is an anthropomorphic presentation of God. We, in our innocence, read, for example, that God speaks, eats, smells sacrifices, comes down from heaven, walks about, creates man in his image, feels sorrow in his heart, weeps, not that a being who eats and speaks is necessarily a human being, or only a human being.*** That very Hegel about whom promising young French intellectuals like Sartre, Bataille, and Lacan heard in the 1930s in a course given in Paris by the Russian immigrant, Alexandre Kojève, who taught about Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave. For our purposes, Lacan’s attentive ear is relevant, for, following Hegel, as interpreted by Kojève, he formulated the doctrine of the dialectic between the ego (the slave) and its mirror image (the master). The deadly aggression between these two basic factors, the viewers and the viewed, of course destroys the joy of discovering the self in the mirror.
As for the antiquity of the world, it appears that in backward extending eternity, not only did God exist, but so also did the world, although chaotic in structure. Still, it did exist, and the divine creation merely set boundaries and organized the matter in that chaos. This moment of creation, as noted, is none other than the moment of the establishment of God as separate from chaos and as its organizer.
Tohu vavohu (chaos). God takes control of tohu vavohu and makes it into something else, a living reality. Light pierces the darkness and confusion and separates itself from darkness. Hence, darkness was not created. Darkness was there, and it remains a survivor from the confusion, and it is the remnant of creation.
The earth is tohu vavohu, and God struggles against it, making it into something unlike what it was, without the primordial tohu vavohu.*
* In the background, as it were, the ancient myths of the struggle against Tiamat resonate, the divine embodiment of the primal sea in the Mesopotamian epic, “Enuma Elish,” but we are halted by the finality of the text, which does not know or speak about Tiamat.
And the spirit [Heb., rua h ] of Elohim. Although Hermann Cohen stated that “God is spirit,” he is also a body, the body that descends into Adam’s world later on, and he is also speech by means of the body, the mouth. Rua h here means wind and not only spirit. It also carries the sense of spirit, his immateriality, which was his only essence in the beginning. He materialized in his own flesh by means of his primal speech, thereby creating himself beyond his own limitations as spirit. The continuation of materialization in flesh will be Adam (this is not necessarily an allusion to the future Gospel of John).
In this sense, the circularity of the snake that grasps its tail can serve as a metaphor for the consolidation of the world-God as a pair, as God creates the world from the nothingness of spirit, by giving it form. By forming and setting the boundaries of his various objects, he becomes a creative subject, created as God, who is not only spirit, not only a spiritual wandering in the expanses of the void. This void is not nothingness. Rather, the void is the vagueness of the world at its beginning and the vagueness of God before his creation, and only the piercing of light, the division of the world into objects, and the separation of God from the world creates substance, in no other sense than the placing of a boundary between clear being and vague nothingness.
Creation is not ex nihilo, but from confusion, from chaos. It is the differentiation of being from confusion, which is not nothingness but a distortion of being, and, retrospectively, it understands this. Language alone is what creates this substance and is capable of making it non-chaotic.
In the act of creation, which is to say, speech, God becomes aware that he is alone. He speaks to himself, within himself, or to the space before him, creating and then observing his handiwork; he is an artisan, and his craft is his alone, entirely. It is his Other, but an Other that is not included within him, in the image of himself. Only in that way can he see it, in relation to the image of his huge self.And Elohim said, Let there be light, and there was light. (1:3)
One might object and ask whether he was truly alone in the sense of being a solitary individual and in this sense of having no retinue, or was he, in fact, not distinct from the confusion, so that his hovering spirit was mingled with the mixture of water and land? In other words, before the creation, God might not have been a single isolated being but a flow, spirit, in a world that was not distinct from him. That primordial flow could also have been full of many essences, of liquidity mingled with the world, so that outwardly as well, he was not single and solitary. Only in the creation of the world, which was Other and distinct did his isolation from himself come into being, as well as his isolation from the world, which was Other.
Only by saying, Let there be light did he separate himself and become Other, isolated with respect to created things, meaning that at the moment of creation, for a fraction of a second (which was also the birth of time), when he spoke the words, light was not yet created, but it was no longer mingled with tohu vavohu, and that first moment of speaking, that fragment of a second, was the great moment of isolation, for only at the conclusion of the expression, “Let there be light … and there was light” was there light. Only then can one speak of God as isolated in the ordinary sense of the term. Let us reiterate: this was the first time in his history that God spoke, and this moment was the first moment of his isolation and also the moment when a world differentiated from him was born.
God presents the first differentiating creation to himself, the light, and he does not know in advance whether the result will be equal to the promise. As we shall see below, about Abraham, God is a voice of promise for the future, and this aspect already exists here with respect to God himself. He creates out of persuasion by his own promise to himself, a promise that is not made in full confidence, but one that enables the addressee of the promise to expect a better future.
In the following days as well, his imperfection spurs him to persist in creation, and every daily act of creation, of one object or another, brings God to praise it and say it was good, meaning: it was a big success. I am pleased with the work of my hands. Still, something urges him to keep on, despite the temporary achievement.
God will come to be nostalgic for the moment of creating a world that is Other, when he was by himself, for himself, and within himself, and creating. The words, Let there be light, make the Other burst forth, realize the thing that is Other, and embody the idea of light, which had been in his mind. First, there was the fantasy with which God indulged himself in the six days of creation, but afterward, it became increasingly clear that his words were not properly understood. By whom? Without an addressee for his complaint, God sees Adam as his only interlocutor, to move beyond the isolation of his supreme responsibility. The confusion of tongues (at the Tower of Babel) puts an end to the divine fantasy of genesis because in the beginning, the signifier “light” had just one signified, one meaning, and everything was clear and unequivocal.
The light was good—not only in the sense that the created thing was good (ethically good), but also in the sense of liberation from the primal, divine isolation toward a world in which the Other dwells (and this is good for God). This “good” also contains the implicit possibility of declaring of something that “it is bad,” as history will later make evident to God.And Elohim saw that the light was good; and Elohim separated the light from the darkness. And Elohim called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. (1:4–5)
The reader is entitled to ponder whether or not our remarks here have gnostic potential. In this context, let us state that we do not see that Genesis was written with ethical intent, even if our attitude may be termed nihilistic. Good and bad here do not have human, ethical meaning. These terms do not truly represent the good or bad actions of people—as, for example, between a person and his or her fellow being—but rather, a response to God’s desire for separation (good) and his distaste for the elimination of separation (bad). This is the basis upon which the acts between people are grasped as good or bad, even the murder of Abel, of which the primary fault was the sacrifice blood going back to the earth. We maintain that God’s concern for the injury to one’s fellow being veils his fears of intermingling and of the negation of his separate existence from the world.*
* Usually, human morality is signified as a most important aspect of religion—as the most ancient and strongest concern of the deity—from the first commentators on Scripture up to Levinas’ intentional display of innocence. The externalization of this aspect makes Scripture, in which God ostensibly speaks (as a representation of the divine voice, the true power of which lies in the reality of the text for the reader, more than any reality behind it), into a text sanctified by its readers. In fact, they want God truly to speak to them, for him not be immobilized only in his own desires. They project inherent sanctity upon the text, not dependent upon their own desire. Therefore, the appropriate step for the readers is to grasp Scripture, which sanctifies itself, as ostensibly ethical, whereas, not ostensibly, Scripture does sanctify itself from behind the veil, as beyond morality, as in love with itself, conceiving itself to be separate and superior to all other texts in the world, as sacred.
And Elohim separated. The craftsman only makes distinctions, differentiations within the world, like the blacksmith who takes raw iron and forges a knife or a shovel from it, and, while doing so, names them and distinguishes them from one another and from the other things in the world. Thus, God calls the light “day” and the darkness “night,” and later, he made, he separated, and he called are related to each other. Separation makes possible the good. It encompasses the satisfied statement, that it was good, whereas the pre-verbal confusion is bad, the impurity of non-separation (in Mary Douglas’ terms). Confusion is bad. Later, the words “man” and “woman,” as words, create them as such, and Adam himself is also a partner in the work of creation in that he gives the animals names and thus creates them and gives them life, makes them exist in words (the elephantine animal becomes an elephant). The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is none other than the tree of knowledge of the good, which has been separated out, and primal, chaotic badness. The moment they eat of knowledge, humans know shame, which is connected to the organs that differentiate and distinguish within the polymorphous-perverse body, between the organs that give pleasure and the other organs, and it marks them, sets them apart as forbidden to be seen. Language, only by its use, by its signifiers, will enable people to experience the primal chaotic, the contaminating badness. Language comes with God, as a tool, though a confusing one, which, while it separates, also creates a gap within God between the fantasy of the signified as meaning and the reality of the signifier, the gap of the joke.
God does not summon the objects in advance—that is to say, the plants, animals, stars, and the like—rather, he creates their actions, out of desire that this world will act. As we see from his words:
Let there be a firmament within the water, and let it separate water from water… . And Elohim said, Let the water under heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. Let the earth make grass grow, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit with their seed in it, each according to its kind, upon the earth. And it was so … Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years … And Elohim set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. (1:6, 11, 14, 17, 18)
And so on until the crown of the world:
Here, the action in the world is one of controlling and ruling! A representative of God has been created, endowed with authority, who will rule over that which the creator has just made, to restrain the earth, as though he did not trust its chaotic nature. Man, God’s active agent is made in the plural image implied by the grammatical form of Elohim, in our image, after our likeness, and this image is that of a foreman, controlling and dominating natural animals and nature itself.Then Elohim said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and the cattle, and all the earth, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. (1:26)
We take note that the God-of-language fears lest he merge back into the world which is Other. The tension of God’s envy of the earth appears to emerge here, with all his efforts to subdue the earth, first by means of the various creatures, which he blesses with be fruitful and multiply, and later by means of the rational creature, Adam, who is blessed with his own dominion over those intermediary creatures, the animals and fish, who ruled over the earth and mingled too much with it. Now human beings will rule over them as well, until they, too, mix with it. At that time, God will once again place himself as a factor external to the earth (and to mankind), and he will demand subjection to him alone, this time by means of his nation.
The first primordial material is apparently water, which entails the danger of liquidity. At first, the abyss was water, and water is tohu vavohu, and perhaps the abyss (tehom) is close to vohu....And Elohim said, Let there be a firmament within the water, and let it separate the water from the water. And Elohim made the firmament and separated the water from below the firmament from the water which is above the firmament. And it was so. And Elohim called the firmament heaven. And it was evening and it was morning, a second day. (1:6–8)