3 October 2026

The seven days of creation is a literary mechanism which enables the story-teller to unfold his beautiful tale with great harm and simplicity. He does so  with the imaginative use of several literary formula. Consider these two.

The creative acts begin with the formula, ‘And God said …’ and end with the refrain, ‘And it was so.’ God speaks and something happens. And God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light.

In fact the Hebrew word which is translated ‘create’ is ‘bara’. Unlike any of the other words which are translated as ‘made’, the subject of this particular verb is always God.

In the narrative, we are never told what God used to create the heavens and the earth. This has given rise to the doctrine ‘creatio ex nihilo’ – a creation out of nothing.

At the end of each creative act, the story-teller says, ‘And God saw that it was good.’ This is true for the first five days of creation. On the sixth, he observes, ‘God saw everything that he had made and indeed, it was very good.’

God saw that it was good – the light, the dry land, the plants, the living creatures, human beings. They were good in the sense of being lovely. And that’s appropriate too because they were brought to birth out of God’s love.