A. Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” To this it has been objected that the verb ברא does not necessarily denote production without the use of preexisting materials (see Gen. 1:27 “God created man in his own image”; cf. 2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground”; also Ps. 51:10—“Create in me a clean heart”).
“In the first two chapters of Genesis ברא is used (1) of the creation of the universe (1:1); (2) of the creation of the great sea monsters (1:21); (3) of the creation of man (1:27). Everywhere else we read of God's making, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of his forming the beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of his building upinto a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“Bara is thus reserved for marking the first introduction of each of the three great spheres of existence—the world of matter, the world of life, and the spiritual world represented by man.”
We grant, in reply, that the argument for absolute creation derived from the mere word ברא is not entirely conclusive. Other considerations in connection with the use of this word, however, seem to render this interpretation [pg 375] of Gen. 1:1 the most plausible. Some of these considerations we proceed to mention.
(a) While we acknowledge that the verb ברא “does not necessarily or invariably denote production without the use of preëxisting materials, we still maintain that it signifies the production of an effect for which no natural antecedent existed before, and which can be only the result of divine agency.” For this reason, in the Kal species it is used only of God, and is never accompanied by any accusative denoting material.
No accusative denoting material follows bara, in the passages indicated, for the reason that all thought of material was absent. See Dillmann, Genesis, 18; Oehler, Theol. O. T., 1:177. The quotation in the text above is from Green, Hebrew Chrestomathy, 67. But E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 88, remarks: “Whether the Scriptures teach the absolute origination of matter—its creation out of nothing—is an open question.... No decisive evidence is furnished by the Hebrew word bara.”
A moderate and scholarly statement of the facts is furnished by Professor W. J. Beecher, in S. S. Times, Dec. 23, 1893:807—“To create is to originate divinely.... Creation, in the sense in which the Bible uses the word, does not exclude the use of materials previously existing; for man was taken from the ground (Gen. 2:7), and woman was builded from the rib of a man (2:22). Ordinarily God brings things into existence through the operation of second causes. But it is possible, in our thinking, to withdraw attention from the second causes, and to think of anything as originating simply from God, apart from second causes. To think of a thing thus is to think of it as created. The Bible speaks of Israel as created, of the promised prosperity of Jerusalem as created, of the Ammonite people and the king of Tyre as created, of persons of any date in history as created (Is. 43:1-15; 65:18; Ez. 21:30; 28:13, 15; Ps. 102:18; Eccl. 12:1; Mal. 2:10). Miracles and the ultimate beginnings of second causes are necessarily thought of as creative acts; all other originating of things may be thought of, according to the purpose we have in mind, either as creation or as effected by second causes.”
(b) In the account of the creation, ברא seems to be distinguished from עשה, “to make” either with or without the use of already existing material (ברא לעשות, “created in making” or “made by creation,” in 2:3; and ויעש, of the firmament, in 1:7), and from יצר, “to form” out of such material. (See ויברא, of man regarded as a spiritual being, in 1:27; but ויצר, of man regarded as a physical being, in 2:7.)
See Conant, Genesis, 1; Bible Com., 1:37—“ ‘created to make’ (in Gen. 2:3) = created out of nothing, in order that he might make out of it all the works recorded in the six days.” Over against these texts, however, we must set others in which there appears no accurate distinguishing of these words from one another. Bara is used in Gen. 1:1, asah in Gen. 2:4, of the creation of the heaven and earth. Of earth, both yatzar and asah are used in Is. 45:18. In regard to man, in Gen. 1:27 we find bara; in Gen. 1:26 and 9:6, asah; and in Gen. 2:7, yatzar. In Is. 43:7, all three are found in the same verse: “whom I have bara for my glory, I have yatzar, yea, I have asah him.” In Is. 45:12, “asah the earth, and bara man upon it”; but in Gen. 1:1 we read: “God bara the earth,” and in 9:6 “asah man.” Is. 44:2—“the Lord that asah thee (i. e., man) and yatzar thee”; but in Gen. 1:27, God “bara man.” Gen. 5:2—“male and female bara he them.” Gen. 2:22—“the rib asah he a woman”; Gen. 2:7—“he yatzar man”; i. e., bara male and female, yet asah the woman and yatzar the man. Asah is not always used for transform: Is. 41:20—“fir-tree, pine, box-tree” in nature—bara; Ps. 51:10—“bara in me a clean heart”; Is. 65:18—God “bara Jerusalem into a rejoicing.”
(c) The context shows that the meaning here is a making without the use of preëxisting materials. Since the earth in its rude, unformed, chaotic condition is still called “the earth” in verse 2, the word ברא in verse 1 cannot refer to any shaping or fashioning of the elements, but must signify the calling of them into being.
Oehler, Theology of O.T., 1:177—“By the absolute berashith, ‘in the beginning,’ the divine creation is fixed as an absolute beginning, not as a working on something that already existed.” Verse 2 cannot be the beginning of a history, for it begins with “and.”Delitzsch says of the expression “the earth was without form and void”: “From this it is evident that the void and formless state of the earth was not uncreated or without a beginning. ... It is evident that ‘the heaven and earth’ as God created them in the beginning were not the well-ordered universe, but the world in its elementary form.”