This chapter will draw a picture of the origin and general nature of the universe as it is presented in Genesis 1:1–2:3. To a certain extent the picture was informed by statements about creation in other parts of the Hebrew scriptures, but these texts were utilized only to fill in blanks or ambiguities in our primary text. In general, it is the Genesis account of cosmogony and cosmology that served as a primary datum for what revelation teaches about creation, and not these other texts.

We will read Genesis in much the same way that the sources discussed in the first two parts of this book read it, viz., as a unified statement that makes a philosophical/theological claim. However, I will try, to the best of my ability, to set aside any of the interpretations of the text that I have inherited from two thousand years of close readings and interpretations by my predecessors in Jewish tradition and Western civilization. In other words, the text will be examined for what it says in itself. The summary presented below is the result of this effort.

The narrative of creation is divided into seven distinct units. Each is marked off as a “day.” In fact this is how the term “day” should be understood. In no way can it mean what we normally take the term to mean – viz., either a period of twenty-four hours or a single cycle alteration between light and dark on the planet earth, or a temporal measure of one cycle of the earth's rotation on its axis.