The opening narrative of the Hebrew Bible, in which God brings the world into being by speech across six days, separating light from darkness, waters from waters, and sea from dry land before filling each domain in turn, making humanity in the divine image on the sixth day and resting on the seventh. Genesis places a second and differently ordered account directly after the first, in which a man is formed from the dust of the ground before the plants and the animals rather than after them, and the relation between the two has occupied Jewish and Christian commentators since antiquity. The Qur'an describes the same six-day making of the heavens and the earth but has no seventh-day rest, and Islamic commentary reads the creative act throughout as the divine command to be.
Facts
Text
Source TextGenesis 1:1 to 2:3, with the second account at Genesis 2:4 to 2:25 1 Source TextQur'an 7:54, 10:3, 11:7, 25:59 and 50:38 2 History
Historical NoteGenesis creates light and separates day from night on the first day, three days before the sun, moon and stars are made on the fourth, an ordering ancient and modern commentators alike have long singled out as needing explanation within the text's own internal logic. 1 Historical NoteThe account's seventh day rest is the scriptural basis for the Sabbath in Judaism and, by inheritance and adaptation, for the Christian practice of a weekly day of rest, one of the narrative's most widely observed afterlives outside strictly doctrinal contexts. 1 Meaning
Central MotifCreation by divine speech across an ordered sequence of days 1 Sources
Primary SourceThe account survives in the Masoretic Hebrew Torah and, in a form differing in wording and order at points, in the Samaritan Pentateuch, two textual traditions that diverged from a shared textual ancestor before the end of the Second Temple period. 1 Disputed
Scholarly NoteThe two Genesis accounts are harmonised as summary and close focus in traditional exegesis and treated as distinct sources in critical scholarship 3 Two standing camps rather than an absence of positions: traditional harmonising exegesis in all three traditions against the source-critical reading standard in academic biblical studies since the eighteenth century. Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteThe Hebrew text of the sixth day has God create humankind, male and female, in a single verse using plural language, let us make man in our image, a grammatical plural that later Jewish and Christian commentators have read variously as a royal plural, an address to a heavenly council, or, in later Christian tradition, an anticipation of the Trinity. 1 Controversy
Point in DisputeWhether the six days of Genesis 1 are meant as literal days, as long ages, or as a literary framework is read differently across Jewish and Christian interpretive tradition, ancient and modern, with young earth, day age and literary framework readings each finding their own defenders. 1 Learn More
The Ordering of the Six Days
Genesis opens with the earth formless and empty, darkness over the face of the deep, and the spirit or wind of God moving over the waters. God speaks, light comes into being and is divided from the darkness, and that is the first day. On the second a vault is set in the midst of the waters to divide the waters below from the waters above. On the third the lower waters are gathered so that dry land appears, and the land puts forth vegetation of its own accord. The first three days are acts of separation and the next three are acts of filling: on the fourth the sun, moon and stars are set in the vault to rule day and night and to mark the festivals and the years; on the fifth the waters swarm with living creatures and birds fly across the face of the vault; and on the sixth the land brings forth animals, after which God makes humanity, male and female, in the divine image, blesses them, and gives them charge of the rest.
Every act is announced with the same formula, that God said and it was so, and almost every one closes with the judgment that it was good. On the seventh day the work is complete, God ceases from it, and the day itself is blessed and set apart, which is the reason the text offers for the Sabbath rather than any argument drawn from nature or from agriculture. Readers from antiquity onward have noticed that the account is built as a structure rather than a chronicle, with the domains made in the first three days occupied by their rulers in the second three, and a substantial line of modern scholarship reads the whole as a temple-building pattern in which the world is made as a dwelling and the seventh day is its dedication.
The Second Account and the Qur'anic Telling
Genesis begins again a few verses later from a dry earth with no plants and no rain, and tells of a single man formed from the dust of the ground and animated by breath, placed in a planted garden, given the animals to name, and only afterward given a woman, built from his own side because none of the animals answered to him. The order of making is reversed against the six-day account and the divine name changes. Traditional Jewish and Christian exegesis generally read the second passage as a close focus on the sixth day of the first, while most academic study since the eighteenth century has treated the two as material from distinct sources joined by a later editor, a reading that is standard in critical scholarship and is not accepted by many traditional readers in any of the three traditions.
The Qur'an does not narrate creation once at length but returns to it repeatedly, stating that God made the heavens and the earth in six days and then established himself upon the Throne. There is no seventh-day rest, and one verse states explicitly that no weariness touched God, a point Islamic commentators make against the biblical Sabbath account. The recurring formula is that when God decrees a thing, he says to it be, and it is. Christian reading identifies that same creative speech with the Word of the opening of the Gospel of John, through whom all things were made, which is why the Genesis account is the first reading of the Easter vigil and why the creeds open by confessing one God, maker of heaven and earth.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Adam, Figures Made on the sixth day in the first account and formed from dust in the second
The creator throughout, in all three traditions
Belongs to Tradition
Originated In
Sources
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