(d) The fact that ברא may have had an original signification of “cutting,” “forming,” and that it retains this meaning in the Piel conjugation, need not prejudice the conclusion thus reached, since terms expressive of the most spiritual processes are derived from sensuous roots. If ברא does not signify absolute creation, no word exists in the Hebrew language that can express this idea.
(e) But this idea of production without the use of preëxisting materials unquestionably existed among the Hebrews. The later Scriptures show that it had become natural to the Hebrew mind. The possession of this idea by the Hebrews, while it is either not found at all or is very dimly and ambiguously expressed in the sacred books of the heathen, can be best explained by supposing that it was derived from this early revelation in Genesis.
E. H. Johnson, Outline of Syst. Theol., 94—“Rom. 4:17 tells us that the faith of Abraham, to whom God had promised a son, grasped the fact that God calls into existence ‘the things that are not.’ This may be accepted as Paul's interpretation of the first verse of the Bible.” It is possible that the heathen had occasional glimpses of this truth, though with no such clearness as that with which it was held in Israel. Perhaps we may say that through the perversions of later nature-worship something of the original revelation of absolute creation shines, as the first writing of a palimpsest appears faintly through the subsequent script with which it has been overlaid. If the doctrine of absolute creation is found at all among the heathen, it is greatly blurred and obscured. No one of the heathen books teaches it as do the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews. Yet it seems as if this “One accent of the Holy Ghost The heedless world has never lost.”
Bib. Com., 1:31—“Perhaps no other ancient language, however refined and philosophical, could have so dearly distinguished the different acts of the Maker of all things [as the Hebrew did With its four different words], and that because all heathen philosophy esteemed matter to be eternal and uncreated.” Prof. E. D. Burton: “Brahmanism, and the original religion of which Zoroastrianism was a reformation, were Eastern and Western divisions of a primitive Aryan, and probably monotheistic, religion. The Vedas, which represented the Brahmanism, leave it a question whence the world came, whether from God by emanation, or by the shaping of material eternally existent. Later Brahmanism is pantheistic, and Buddhism, the Reformation of Brahmanism, is atheistic.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:471, and Mosheim's references in Cudworth's Intellectual System, 3:140.
We are inclined still to hold that the doctrine of absolute creation was known to no other ancient nation besides the Hebrews. Recent investigations, however, render this somewhat more doubtful than it once seemed to be. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 142, 143, finds creation among the early Babylonians. In his Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397, he says: “The elements of Hebrew cosmology are all Babylonian; even the creative word itself was a Babylonian conception; but the spirit which inspires the cosmology is the antithesis to that which inspired the cosmology of Babylonia. Between the polytheism of Babylonia and the monotheism of Israel a gulf is fixed which cannot be spanned. So soon as we have a clear monotheism, absolute creation is a corollary. As the monotheistic idea is corrupted, creation gives place to pantheistic transformation.”
It is now claimed by others that Zoroastrianism, the Vedas, and the religion of the ancient Egyptians had the idea of absolute creation. On creation in the Zoroastrian system, see our treatment of Dualism, page 382. Vedic hymn in Rig Veda, 10:9, quoted by J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:205—“Originally this universe was soul [pg 377]only; nothing else whatsoever existed, active or inactive. He thought: ‘I will create worlds’; thus he created these various worlds: earth, light, mortal being, and the waters.” Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 216-222, speaks of a papyrus on the staircase of the British Museum, which reads: “The great God, the Lord of heaven and earth, who made all things which are ... the almighty God, self-existent, who made heaven and earth; ... the heaven was yet uncreated, uncreated was the earth; thou hast put together the earth; ... who made all things, but was not made.”
But the Egyptian religion in its later development, as well as Brahmanism, was pantheistic, and it is possible that all the expressions we have quoted are to be interpreted, not as indicating a belief in creation out of nothing, but as asserting emanation, or the taking on by deity of new forms and modes of existence. On creation in heathen systems, see Pierret, Mythologie, and answer to it by Maspero; Hymn to Amen-Rha, in “Records of the Past”; G. C. Müller, Literature of Greece, 87, 88; George Smith, Chaldean Genesis, chapters 1, 3, 5 and 6; Dillmann, Com. on Genesis, 6th edition, Introd., 5-10; LeNormant, Hist. Ancienne de l'Orient, 1:17-26; 5:238; Otto Zöckler, art.: Schöpfung, in Herzog and Plitt, Encyclop.; S. B. Gould, Origin and Devel. of Relig. Beliefs, 281-292.
B. Hebrews 11:3—“By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear” = the world was not made out of sensible and preëxisting material, but by the direct fiat of omnipotence (see Alford, and Lünemann, Meyer's Com. in loco).
Compare 2 Maccabees 7:28—ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων ἐποίησεν αὐτὰ ὁ Θεός. This the Vulgate translated by “quia ex nihilo fecit illa Deus,” and from the Vulgate the phrase “creation out of nothing” is derived. Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, points out that Wisdom 11:17 has ἐξ ἀμόρφου ὕλης, interprets by this the ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων in 2 Maccabees, and denies that this last refers to creation out of nothing. But we must remember that the later Apocryphal writings were composed under the influence of the Platonic philosophy; that the passage in Wisdom may be a rationalistic interpretation of that in Maccabees; and that even if it were independent, we are not to assume a harmony of view in the Apocrypha. 2 Maccabees 7:28 must stand by itself as a testimony to Jewish belief in creation without use of preëxisting material,—belief which can be traced to no other source than the Old Testament Scriptures. Compare Ex. 34:10—“I will do marvels such as have not been wrought [marg. “created”] in all the earth”; Num. 16:30—“if Jehovah make a new thing” [marg. “create a creation”]; Is. 4:5—“Jehovah will create ... a cloud and smoke”; 41:20—“the Holy One of Israel hath created it”; 45:7, 8—“I form the light, and create darkness”; 57:19—“I create the fruit of the lips”; 65:17—“I create new heavens and a new earth”; Jer. 31:22—“Jehovah hath created a new thing.”
Rom. 4:17—“God, who giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were”; 1 Cor. 1:28—“things that are not” [did God choose] “that he might bring to naught the things that are”; 2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness”—created light without preëxisting material,—for darkness is no material; Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and he is before all things”; so also Ps. 33:9—“he spake, and it was done”; 148:5—“he commanded, and they were created.” See Philo, Creation of the World, chap. 1-7, and Life of Moses, book 3, chap. 36—“He produced the most perfect work, the Cosmos, out of non-existence (τοῦ μὴ ὄντος) into being (εἰς τὸ εἶναι).” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theol., 94—“We have no reason to believe that the Hebrew mind had the idea of creation out of invisible materials. But creation out of visible materials is in Hebrews 11:3 expressly denied. This text is therefore equivalent to an assertion that the universe was made without the use of anypreëxisting materials.”