God creates light, sky, land, seas, vegetation, sun, moon, stars, sea creatures, birds and land animals across six days, then rests on the seventh. The account establishes God as sole creator of an ordered world and frames everything that follows in Scripture.
Further context
3 min readSix days of making, and then a day of rest. Light came first, then a division between the waters above and the waters below, then dry land and the plants growing out of it, then the sun, moon and stars, then fish and birds, then land animals and finally human beings. On the seventh day the work stopped (shabat), and that is where the Jewish Sabbath takes its name. The weekly day of rest commanded at Sinai is tied directly back to this week.
The order is not a list of items but a structure. Days one to three make three empty spaces: light and darkness, the sky and the sea, the dry land. Days four to six fill them in the same sequence. Sun and moon govern light and darkness, birds and fish occupy sky and sea, animals and people occupy the land. Anyone hearing it in the ancient world would have caught the symmetry at once.
The God described here stands out most sharply beside the creation stories told by Israel's neighbours. The Babylonian poem Enuma Elish, copied onto tablets in the seventh century BC and composed a good deal earlier, has the world assembled out of the body of the goddess Tiamat after a war among the gods, and humanity made from the blood of a defeated rebel so that the gods could stop working. Here there is no war, no dismembered deity and no reluctant workforce. The sun and the moon, worshipped from Egypt to Mesopotamia, are not even given their ordinary Hebrew names; they are the greater light and the lesser light, and they appear among the things that were made. Human beings are described as made in God's image, a phrase used across the ancient Near East of a king, and applied here to everyone.
How long ago any of this happened cannot be established. The figure most often repeated, 4004 BC, was calculated by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and published in 1650. He added the ages preserved in two genealogies and worked backwards from datable Near Eastern kings. Two problems weaken the arithmetic badly. Hebrew genealogies demonstrably leave people out when a list is being shaped for symmetry, and one of them runs from Joram straight to Uzziah, passing over three kings who reigned between them. The lifespans themselves also differ between manuscript traditions, and the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures used across the ancient Mediterranean places roughly 1,400 more years between Adam and Abraham than the Hebrew does. Any total therefore depends on which manuscripts are counted, and on an assumption of completeness that this kind of list does not support.
The six days have been read in several ways for a very long time. Some take them as a literal week. Some take each day as an extended period. Others read the whole week as an ordered statement about who made the world and why, set out in a framework its first hearers would recognise, and making no claim about duration at all. Nothing external bears on the question, which is why nobody has settled it.
What is beyond dispute is how much weight the rest of the Bible puts on these six days. John's Gospel opens with "In the beginning was the Word", repeating the first three words in Greek and identifying the one through whom the world was made with Jesus. Paul writes of all things, visible and invisible, created through Christ. Both are reading this week of work centuries afterwards and building a claim about a man on it.