Days 1-3 of creation show God dividing and stretching out the world so that the things in Days 4-6 can be built. Can live. Can have their being.
God prepares.
The foundation goes down first. That’s why we must study Genesis 1. EVERYTHING builds on it.
I don’t have a particular theological point for this, other than it happens to be my favorite color, and it makes me think of life.
And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground –everything that has the breath of life in it– I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
Genesis 1:30 (NIV)
Authority to rule the animals, but not to rule or have dominion over other humans.
Ruling over one another is not the image.
Light/Darkness: Good/Evil.
Water below/above: ???
Land/Water: Humanity; God’s work of removing wickedness & chaos from us.
I’m wrestling with the firmament: a vault God put in the water to shove half the sea into the sky. This is what the Hebrews understood. Why?
The ancient people believed that earth had a dome over it, where an uncrossable sky-sea existed, beyond which was God’s realm. The flood waters involved the dome opening and allowing water to fall.
That’s the mythology.
But what is the symbolism? And why is it not “good?”
The dividing of the sea into the “waters below” and “waters above” is on day 2 of the creation story, and it’s the only day where God does not say that He “saw that it was good.”
Is it not good? Is it bad? Does it point to the grief of the Flood story? I don’t know.
It’s filled with sea monsters, dragons, serpents, and wriggling swarming things.
It’s a place of terror.
So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1:23
This isn’t just assumptions about history. The word “great sea creatures” is the Hebrew word that describes “dragons, sea monsters, serpents.”
Heaven (masculine word); earth (feminine word). Separate, but perhaps made of the same thing.
It echoes.
“Splitting to create order” is the prevalent theme: heaven/earth, light/dark, waters-above/waters-below, water/dry-land.
I think “in the beginning, God split heaven and earth” can be a reasonable additional view of the text.
The Hebrew word used to describe “livestock” comes from a root word that means mute.
As in, “These are the ones that do not speak.”
As opposed to the “wild animals” or the “creatures that crawl.” Or to a particular serpent.
The “creature that crawl” is a word used for “reptiles.” And “wild animals” is literally “creatures that have life in them.”
This is really wild stuff.
These three distinct titles are given and repeated multiple times in the chapter.
This is probably important.
I think most commentaries point out the history of the Hebrew people. “Livestock” are their own domesticated and known animals, where as the “wild” ones with “life in them” (because they were free) were seen as something different.
Creeping things are always just “icky.”
In Gen 2, Adam will be tasked with naming the “living ones of the field,” and the picture isn’t him naming ALL the animals, but the wild ones and birds that lived nearby.
Perhaps the livestock are already known and named?
And nobody names the creeping icky things. Strange.