Archives for May 2024

vayiytzer (Adonai) elohim et-haadam aphar min-ha’adamah

“And the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground.”

The action of forming, the Hebrew verb yatzar, is related to purpose.  In later Jewish tradition, human beings were understood to incline towards a yetzer ra, an ‘evil purpose’, or towards towards the yetzer tov, the ‘good purpose’.  Our deeds are judged not only by the objective fact of the deed, but by the intention of the one carrying it out.  In some manner, we imprint our deeds with the mark of our intention.

God’s forming of humanity from the dust, then, is not merely about ‘form’ and ‘matter’, but means imparting to dust a new purpose, to be the material aspect of this new creature, the human person.

Today, of course, there is a great temptation to judge actions only by purpose.  “I meant well” does not excuse the performance of an action that is inherently bad.  Nonetheless, the Christian tradition, and especially, I think, the monastic tradition, insists that we take time to inspect our purposes for acting.  Otherwise, we may very slowly be drawn away even from right action.

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’”

When God creates the inanimate objects, He simply speaks a command and matter responds to His wishes.  God speaks ‘impersonally’.  When He speaks to man ‘in the image of God’, He says ‘to them,’ addressing fellow subjects, spiritual beings with the gift of understanding.  The fruitfulness of human existence is not completely ‘natural’ in the sense of impersonal forces obeying laws inscribed in their very essence.  Human beings have the choice of listening, obeying and cooperating with God’s blessing and creativity, or of disregarding the commandment.  From the moment of creation, human beings have been given autonomy, the freedom of taking responsibility for their own responses or failure to respond to God’s offer of friendship.

Vayyibəra’ elohim et-hadam bətsalmo.

“And God created man/adam in His image.”  This is only the second use of the specific verb bara, ‘to create’.  So far, after creating matter, it would seem, God has been making use of matter to make new creatures.  By a process of separation, He formed light and darkness, and by the process of ‘bringing forth’, the plants and animals sprang up.  But when it comes to creating man, God must both ‘make’ (1: 26, Hebrew na’aseh) man, but also ‘create’ Him in His image.  This indicates that man is a two-fold creature, matter and spirit.  Chapter 2 communicates the same truth in the two-fold process of forming man’s body from the earth, but breathing in, from God’s own breath, a spiritual nature besides.

Way·yō·mer ’ĕ·lō·hîm, taḏ·šê hā·’ā·reṣ de·še, ‘ê·śeḇ maz·rî·a‘ ze·ra‘, ‘êṣ pə·rî ‘ō·śeh pə·rî lə·mî·nōw, ’ă·šer zar·‘ōw-ḇōw.

“And God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind.’”  That God created plants ‘according to kind’ seems to militate against a strictly nominalist reading of creation.  Genus and species are ordained by God, not imposed on reality by minds.  We name them, yes, but the names allow us to abstract from the actual plants to the idea of the plant.  This allows us access to God’s providential arrangement of His creation.  Strict nominalists maintain that there are no ‘kinds’ of things.  This is contrary to the Biblical worldview.

Vayyar’ elohim et-ha’or ki-tov vayyabddel elohim bein ha’or ubein hakhoshek.

“And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.”  Separation is an important concept in the Biblical view of the cosmos.  Distinction is for the sake of the whole, as light and darkness are both good in their created relationship to one another.  Separated but bound by their distinction, they create order, cosmos; mixed, they create confusion and chaos, at best dull grey.  We should be attentive to this reality throughout the Bible:  Israel is separated from the nations, but this is for the sake of the nations themselves.  Similarly within the Church, religious and clerics are separated from the laity, but not in judgment on the laity or because the laity are unimportant, but precisely because both are needed to recognize the beauty of the other.

Lord, help me to imitate You by separating my thoughts, dividing them between light and darkness.  May the Light Who enlightens every man rule over the day and over the night, and separate light and darkness upon the earth, that is, in my human nature.

Bəre’shit bara elohim et hashamayim.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens.”  God is not said to have created ‘heavens’ but ‘the heavens,’ meaning the very heavens that we know, that we see today.  God did not create generic heavens from a pre-existing template, as we might infer if the author had written, “In the beginning, God created heavens.”  God was not bound to the “realization” of an idea independent of Himself.  The ideal and real are the same in God, because in creating the real, God created the ideal in the same action.