Wyatt, The Darkness of Genesis 2

The Darkness of Genesis I 2Author(s): Nicolas WyattSource: Vetus Testamentum, Vol. 43, Fasc. 4 (Oct., 1993), pp. 543-554Published by: BRILLStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1518500 .

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Vetus Testamentum XLIII, 4 (1993), © E. J. Brill, Leiden

THE DARKNESS OF GENESIS I 2

by

NICOLAS WYATT Edinburgh

It is commonly observed that in cosmogonic accounts, darkness precedes light, and is in opposition to it: it represents the chaos which precedes the cosmos. There is a half-truth in this. It is certainly the way in which mythology may express a creation story in its choice of surface language. But to stop at this point, concluding that this is what the myth is about, is perhaps to miss the deeper levels of meaning that are available merely by asking simple ques- tions of the precise vocabulary used, its affective ranges, the order in which words occur in a text (or oral narrative), and even the simple question, are we dealing with prose or poetry?

The account of creation in Gen. i 1-ii 4a begins with perhaps the most discussed verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. The only aspect of it which need detain us is the precise nuance of the term 'eres. Its Ugaritic counterpart, ars, is notoriously difficult to pin down, which is perhaps understandable, given the mythological nature of much of the literature. At times it simply means (1) the ground on which we stand. At others it refers (2) more specifically to what lies underneath the ground, that is, the realm of darkness and death, the abode of the dead. And sometimes it is (3) ambiguous, carrying the overtones of both senses. Context alone guides us in the right direction when trying to interpret it.

A good example of the second use in Ugaritic is the formulayrd (b)ars, occurring for instance in KTU 1. 4 (CTA 4) viii 7-9 and 1. 5 (CTA 5) v 15-16. The former passage reads:

wrd bt bptt ars tspr byrdm ars and go down into the "house of the couch"' of the earth, be numbered among those who go down into the earth.

1 For this interpretation of bt hptt (= Hebrew bet hopsit) see N. J. Tromp, Primitive Conceptions of Death and the Nether World in the Old Testament (Rome, 1969), pp. 157-9. He makes a good case for hopsz in Ps. lxxxviii 6 (EVV. 5) meaning "my couch". Cf. M. J. Dahood, Psalms II (Garden City, 19732) pp. 301, 303-4.



NICOLAS WYATT

The key phrase used here, yrd ars, corresponds to the Hebrew yrd sPwlh (Gen. xxxvii 35) or yrd bwr (Ps. lxxxviii 5 [EVV. 4]). 'eres clearly has the same sense of "netherworld" in such passages as Isa. xiv 12; 1 Sam. xxviii 13; Pss lxxi 20, cxliii 6;2 Job iv 23 and xv 29 (Dahood, Psalms III, p. 305). More relevant to our present context is the threefold division occurring in Ps. lxxxix 12 (EVV. 1 1):

Ik 'mym 'p-lk 'rs tbl wml'h 'th ysdtm The heavens are yours, and the netherworld is yours, the world and its fulness: you established them.

The term tebel occurring in the third line of this tetracolon represents the habitable and culture-orientated world lying between the heavens above and the netherworld below, and separating them. This is in effect a figure for the world-constructional role of culture, keeping apart as two separate parts those features of reality which, allowed to come together again (as for example in the flood story), would involve a reversion to chaos. The same threefold division may be discerned in 1 Sam. ii 8, where the opposition between the bicola in a (the dust//the ash-heap) and b (enthroning//a seat of honour) is that between the condition of the netherworld and that of the land of the living, and anticipates the opposition within c:

ky lyhwh msqy'rs wyst Clyhm tbl For to Yahweh belong the pillars of the netherworld, and he has set over them the habitable world.

Dahood suggests (Psalms II, p. 232) that we have the same division in Ps. lxxvii 19 (EVV. 18):

qwl rcmk bglgl h yrw brqym tbl rgzh wtrcs h rs The voice of your thunder is in the vault of heaven; lightnings illumine the habitable world; the netherworld shudders and quakes.

2 On the last passage, see M. J. Dahood, Psalms III (Garden City, 1970) p. 324.

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This is part of a description of Yahweh's fight with the sea, and of relevance to our present discussion is the fact that the entire universe, on Dahood's approach, in all its three levels, responds to the divine manifestation of power. That is, even the netherworld is subject to Yahweh's influence. It may be argued, however, that his interpretation of glgl as "vault of heaven" is less than certain.

I think it likely that >eres in Gen. i 1 may be an example of the ambiguous use of the term, allowing for the 'eres as the environment of the creatures who later appear and belong to neither the sky nor the sea, while at the same time inviting the sense "netherworld" in the implicit opposition of the merismus hassamayim we... ha dres. The obvious sense of the word in its use in v. 2, where it is qualified as thw wbhw, "chaotic and empty", confirms the line I have taken. Indeed, whether or not we follow the interpretation of v. 1 as a subordinate clause, there is a sense in which the 'eres of v. 2 at least logically, if not temporally, precedes that of v. 1. For it is not yet defined by opposition to the samayim, but is instead characterized precisely by the quality of chaos. Like >eres in v. 1, however, it remains ambiguous, and may therefore be translated as "earth" (as distinct from "[habitable] world"-exclusively the upper dimension-or "netherworld"-exclusively the lower dimension). It may be considered to contain undifferentiated within it the later oppositional senses (1 and 2) of the word.

Apart from my discussion and the conclusions reached so far, there is another important reason for understanding 'eres in v. 2 to be ambiguous. This is that the verse is poetry.3 This can be seen by grouping the text according to its cola:

(w)h'rs hyth thw wbhw whsk CI-pny thwm wrwh >Ihym mrhpt cl-pny hmym (Now) the earth was chaotic and empty, and darkness (was) over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was brooding over the surface of the waters.

At first glance it appears to be a tricolon, but the second and third cola are structurally distinct, and may alternatively be analysed for the sake of argument as a classic bicolon with synonymous

3 See J. S. Kselman, "The recovery of poetic fragments form the pentateuchal priestly source", JBL 97 (1978), p. 163. As will be seen, I disagree with his association of parallel terms ('rsllthwmllmym).

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NICOLAS WYATT

parallelism, linked to a preceding monocolon by the w of whsk, which demands an antecedent. This also seems a satisfactory analysis of the prosody, though in fact the structure of the whole verse is more subtle than this suggests, as we shall see.

The structure of the bicolon, to follow this line of reasoning, is ab, acb, an unexpressed copula being implied in the first colon (or even the hiatus due to the lack of a verb anticipating a double-duty use of mrhpt in the second). Recognition of the structure is important for purposes of interpretation, since it brings to the fore a hitherto unrecognized feature of the verse-the significance of hsk-as well as resolving a problem in the interpretation of a second item of vocabulary rwh'lhym. The two b items in the bicolon, thwm and mym, both refer to the primordial condition of the waters which after the cosmogony is complete will continue to exist above the fir- mament and below the netherworld, ready to irrupt and bring destruction to the cosmos in any breakdown of the system, but at the same time ready to be harnessed by proper cultic proceedure for the nourishing of the world. At the same time they are evocative symbols of the netherworld, as Tromp has shown ([n. 1] pp. 59-69). Death always contained in ancient Semitic religious thought a greater or lesser fear that it constituted total annihilation. Such a fear surely lies beneath the choice of vocabulary of a literary composition that reached its final form in the heart of the exilic experience.

But if the two b terms belong together, the same is true of the a pair. The darkness therefore must correspond in some way to the spirit of God. It is arguable that the two terms form a contrasting pair:

and darkness (was) over the face of the deep, but the spirit of God was brooding over the surface of the waters.

But I suggest that, while this is generally assumed to be the case, it is a false assumption. It is, of course, possible to take the latter expression, rwh 'Ihym, in the neutral sense proposed by some recent commentators and accepted in the NEB (i.e. the New English Bible; contrast the Revised English Bible-REB) translation, that is, "a mighty wind", but it seems unlikely that the writer of Gen. i would allow such a diminution of one of his key terms by its use as a mere superlative. We may perhaps take it as "the wind of God", but the deity who is in total control of the cosmogonic process is surely pres-

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ent, even perhaps in the notionally neutral form of his "wind", from the beginning.4 V. 2 is the beginning grammatically (I reject the view that v. 1 is a main clause) and therefore logically, and its heavy stress on hdadres by its initial position, preceding its verb, draws attention to its pregnant, ambiguous nature. Now, if rwh lhym denotes some divine quality, it follows that hsk, unless con- trastive as commonly assumed, must also denote a similar quality.5 We have been misled by our habit of reading Gen. i 2 as prose into supposing that darkness is no more than the primordial entity later split into two constituent parts, darkness and light (v. 4). It is indeed that, but does not simply have negative connotations, having rather a richness of content of which commentators have apparently been unaware.

An assertion based on no more than the discussion above may be felt to be unconvincing. But an excellent corroboration is to be found in Ps. xviii 12 (EVV. 11), appearing also with some variation in 2 Sam. xxii 12. The Psalm verse reads as follows:

yst hsk strw sbybwtyw sktw hskt-mym 'by stqym

I suspect that there are glosses to both cola here (though the matter is not vital to our discussion), so that an original form, underlying both the Psalm version and that of 2 Samuel, would have read:

ySt hsk strw sktw hskt-mym He made darkness his hiding place, his shelter the darkness of the waters.

This passage paradoxically makes darkness the locus of the invisibility, and therefore perhaps of the spiritual essence, of the deity. Furthermore, it links darkness explicitly with the waters, and, I suspect, with the primordial waters in mind, as the extra- terrestrial location of God. Indeed, the chiastic structure of the bicolon cleverly envelops the dwelling (str, skh) in the darkness and the darkness of the waters, a graphic verbal presentation of the secrecy of the divine abode. In a context of primordality, we may

4 On the expression see P. J. Smith, "A semotactical approach to the meaing of the term ruiah 'elohim in Genesis 1:2", JNSL 8 (1980), pp. 99-104.

5 The formal association of the two terms is argued by I. Blythin, "A note on Genesis i 2", VT 12 (1962), p. 121.

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see here a thought-process similar to that of the ancient Her- mopolitan cosmogony of Egypt, in which Kuk and Kauket feature as a male and female pair of primordial deities, representing darkness, and Amun and Amaunet appear as the deities of invisibility.6

Another biblical usage occurs in two passages describing darkness as an important element in a theophany. These are Deut. iv 11 and v 23. The first reads awkwardly, since the final three words hang rather limply in apposition as attributes of heaven:

whhr b'r b's Cd-lb hsmym hsk Cnn wcrpl and the mountain was burning with fire to the midst of heaven, (amid? with?) darkness, cloud and deep gloom.

The second passage is more graphic:

wyhy ksmctm t-qwl mtwk hhsk And when you heard the voice from the midst of the darkness...

In this context, darkness seems precisely the appropriate medium for the divine voice. It is a figure for invisibility. And it is out of the primordial darkness that the voice of God is uttered in Gen. i, initiating the creative process, the manifestation of his glory. It is out of the darkness of v. 2 that God's voice comes, uttering the first word in v. 3: "Let there be light!", whose climactic nature is due precisely to its surprising implication that the light proceeds from the darkness.

Deut. iv 11 has combined the darkness idiom of v 23, which

belongs to the same formulaic context as Gen. i 2, with the alternative idiom of the storm-cloud as the veil for the divine glory. This is not inappropriate, if we recall, following Day's analysis, that Gen. i is an extensively reworked version of the fight with the sea.7

I have suggested that the putative bicolon we have discussed in

6 See K. Sethe, Amun und die acht Urgotter von Hermopolis (Berlin, 1929), passim, and for Kuk, Kauket, pp. 65, 76; H. Bonnet, Reallexikon der igyptischen Religions- geschichte (Berlin, 1952), 5; S. G. F. Brandon, Creation Legends of the Ancient Near East (London, 1963), pp. 54-5, and 148 (cross-reference to Gen. i 2). See also R. Kilian, "Gen. i 2 und die Urgotter von Hermopolis", VT 16 (1966), pp. 420-38.

7 J. Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 49-53. I disagree with Day's assessment that Gen. i has demythologized the event, reduc- ing it, in his words, to "simply a job of work". See my comments in "Killing and cosmogony in Canaanite and biblical thought", UF 17 (1985), p. 376. His whole approach is questioned by D. T. Tsumura, The earth and the waters in Genesis 1 and 2 (Sheffield, 1989), pp. 62-5.

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Gen. i 2 follows a monocolon, the two units forming the present body of the verse. The first colon, omitting the initial w which was perhaps added to link the verse to the preceding one, would have read:

h'rs hyth thw wbhw The earth was chaotic and empty

Let us note the structure. I characterized the following bicolon in prosodic terms as ab, acb (above). But while the preceding monocolon may be construed as an independent unit, having a dif- ferent structure, with copula8 but no prepositional phrase, it never- theless has a peculiarly intimate relationship with the first stich of the bicolon. These two lines can also be isolated and taken together:

The earth was chaotic and empty and darkness was over the face of the deep.

The absence of the copula in the second line now makes sense on the ground that hyth in the first performs double duty, and the obvious analysis of the lines is as abc, ac: h rsllhsk, and thw wbhw/lthwm. 9 In view of the impossibility of separating the second and third lines of the verse, we may conclude that it is after all a tricolon. Prosodically, we have abc, ac, adc through the three lines of the verse. In the first stich, the effective equating of a and c binds not only these two terms together, but also the a and c terms of the following stichs. There is thus an overall chiastic structure with further reinforcements throughout (such as the assonance of the gut- turals; there are no less than seven hs and three hs), which serves to emphasize the central theme, of the darkness over the face of the deep. The omission of the copula in the second stich also enhances the chiasmus, and the possibility noted above that the hiatus in the central stich also anticipates the mrhpt of the third gives it a peculiar prominence, as though the "grammatical void" were itself a religious symbol.

It may be argued that, while all that has been discussed so far is reasonable, it is absurd to imply that the formula thw wbhw can

8 For the nuance of the verb hyth see W. R. Lane, "The initiation of creation", VT 13 (1963), pp. 70-1. 9 The two terms thw and thwm are unrelated etymologically (see Tsumura, pp. 17-18, 51-2), though their assonance is of course of value here in interlocking their complementary resonances.

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NICOLAS WYATT

seriously be taken as tantamount to a designation of the deity, or of the aura of his presence. But this seems to be an implication of what I have said. Within the context of the verse, I may make two points. First, we have to proceed on any exegetical path with regard to what the text says, and not what subsequent generations have made of it; and certainly we cannot allow a later theology to determine what an exilic or earlier writer may or may not have said or meant. Secondly, the logical structure of the verse indicates that a process is being identified within the verse. This process involves the initial stages in the self-manifestation of the deity. It is, in some- what unusual form, an account of a theophany. It describes three stages in it: first, there is the seemingly improbable condition of primordial chaos in which it is to occur. Second, there is the inchoate medium of revelation: the darkness. And third, there is the spirit of God intuited rather than seen traversing waters as yet unordered.

The term thw occurs some twenty times in the Hebrew Bible, on three occasions in conjunction with bhw. These three passages are instructive, and perhaps significantly, they probably all belong to the same general historical period, that of the exile. They are the following: Gen. i 2; Jer. iv 23; and Isa. xxxiv 11. Job xxvi 7 is also of interest, and these further three passages may be cited in turn:

Jer. iv 2310 ryty 't-h'rs whnh thw wbhw w l hsmym w'yn 'wrm

I looked at the netherworld and lo, chaos and emptiness! And to the heavens, and they had no light.

Isa. xxxiv 11 wnth Clyh qw-thw w 'bny-bhw

And over it he stretches the measuring-line of chaos and the plumbline of emptiness.

Job xxvi 7 nth spwn Cl thw tlh rs Cl-blymh

He stretches Sapon over chaos and hangs the netherworld over nothingness.

10 See M. Fishbane, "Jeremiah iv 23-26 and Job iii 3-13: a recovered use of the creation pattern", VT 21 (1971), pp. 151-67.

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The Jeremiah and Isaiah passages both occur in contexts of judgement oracles, and might therefore be argued to have no useful connection with our present discussion. But the point of each of them is that the prophet has a vision of destruction in which there is a reversion to the primordial situation. It is particularly interesting to note that Jeremiah uses the notions of chaos and darkness ("no light") in parallel. But the Isaianic passage is even more interesting, and shares a significant feature with the bicolon in Job. This is the use of the verb nth, the precise meaning of which is to stretch out the fabric of a tent, or to pitch it. This, as N.C. Habel has eloquently shown," is a figure for cosmogony, in which the archaic image of a tent-shrine is used to describe the canopy of heaven. The whole earth (sc. universe) is the divine shrine. And while in context the plumbline image of the passage may evoke Amos, it is of course a constructional, architectural metaphor, appropriate as much to a cosmogonic as to a forensic context. The bicolon from Job is the most interesting to us, since as well as being strictly cosmogonic, it incorporates the ancient Canaanite figure of the cosmic mountain, abode of the whole pantheon (and not just to be associated with the storm-god: see the designation of KTU 1.47 [CTA 29]: il spn = "the gods of Sapan"). The point in the bicolon is that the deity dwells everywhere: he is as much at home in the netherworld, which he controls as cosmic overlord, as on Mount Sapon. At the same time, Sapon and the netherworld are significantly located in relation to thw wbhw, even though for bhw Job employs the synonymous expression blymh. A further point to this passage, which requires more detailed analysis, is that M. C. Astour's suggestion that spn and Greek Tucpcov are related'2 suggests that at least in mythological contexts the former was personified and implicitly identified as Yam, since the Greek myth of Zeus and Typhon (Hesiod 820-68, etc.) is a variant of the Baal-Yam conflict.13 Astour's suggestion has interesting implications for Ps.

1 "He who stretches out the heavens", CBQ 34 (1972), pp. 417-30. 12 Hellernosemitica (Leiden, 19672), pp. 216-17. The older form of Typhon,

Tucpqostu, might be tentatively explained as from *sapuy, "stretched out" (cf. Hebrew sdpa) on C. H. Gordon's argument ("Vergil and the Near East", Ugaritica 6 [1969], p. 288), that Greek names in -eus are derived from pre-Greek Near Eastern names. Astour, p. 175, argues that the ending is related to West Semitic passive participles.

13 J. Fontenrose, Python (Berkeley, 1959, 1980 reprint), pp. 129-38.

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lxxxix 13 (EVV. 12), where the MT reads sapon weyamin, but the LXX reads xca OoaX&aaa or xal xT/v Oa&0aa0v, suggesting that the second word be corrected to yam(m)im (see BHS app.), and explained as an appositional equivalent to sdpon ("Typhon"//Yam) rather than the MT's contrasting complement (north//south). It also has a bearing on Job xxvi 7, which may be construed as indicating that Yahweh uses (the corpses of) Yam (= sdpon) and Mot (= 'eres) as the raw materials of his cosmogonic activity.

We have encountered a wide range of associated motifs-thw wbhw, blymh, thwm, mym, 'rs and hsk-which are figures for the same thing, the invisibility of God with particular reference to the primordial context of cosmogony. If we return briefly to the bicolon in Ps. xviii 12, there is a further term which may have considerable importance in our overall understanding of this language. This refers to Yahweh's hiding place and his shelter (strllskh). Now while the former of these terms is relatively neutral, merely referring to the hiddenness of the deity, the latter is replete with cultic overtones. It is possible that it should be viewed neutrally, in conjunction with str; but given the cultic Sitz im Leben of the psalm, in which a cry for help results in a theophany, so that the choice of vocabulary is determined by the cultic milieu, it seems more credi- ble to see in skh the technical term for a booth used in the seasonal festival, the chief function of which was the sexual rituals of cosmic fertility. While this must remain conjectural, I propose that we lift this entire cultic ambiance, and recognize its presence, implied rather than explicit, to be sure, in the cosmogonic language of the darkness from which the divine voice calls in Gen. i 2. That is to say, whatever theological nuances are to the fore in the creative language of Gen. i, with its systematic use of such verbs as br', bdl

(hiphil), Csh, 'mr, qr' and nth, there lies behind the altogether less cerebral discourse of v. 2 the older mythological overtones of the primordial hieros gamos, which initiated all things. That this is by no means alien to the thought of the biblical writers is clear from the content of Ps. xix, which in verses 2-7 (EVV. 1-6) narrates the sacred marriage of El and the sun. While there is a constant pressure among scholars to see such allusions in the biblical text, and in particular when their pre-biblical origin is (sometimes reluc- tantly) acknowledged, as thoroughly demythologized in their pres-

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ent context, this is surely to diminish, not to enhance, the material in question. It is in the pervasive nature of myth that its literary use is one further twist in the mythological plot.14

There remains one final issue: the matter of the origin of the snatch of poetry I have detected in Gen. i 2. Its poetic nature is hardly in dispute, since its whole structure is entirely in accordance with the rules of Hebrew poetry. Nor is the isolated presence in Genesis of a short poetic passage cause for surprise.15 For instance, the Jerusalem Bible and the REB print Gen. i 27 as poetry within a prose context, and treat ii 23, iii 14-15 (disagreeing about where the poetry begins), 16, 17b-19 in similar fashion. The REB in addition reads iv 6-7 as poetry, and is joined by theJB in its similar treatment of iv 23-4. The same sporadic incidence of poetry, often unrecognized by older editors, is found widely in modern versions. The same belated recognition may be seen with reference to the layout of the text in BH3 and BHS, which acknowledge most of the above. Examples of such poetic passages will no doubt continue to be discovered. Gen. i lOa is a further case, for instance, having the structure abcdllcad. The question is whether the present instance is a quotation from a larger composition, such as a poem about creation, or is the result of a poeticizing tendency by the writer of Gen. i. It is impossible to determine this. Gen. i certainly exhibits a distinctive prose style, with its constant, refrain-like repetition of many phrases, as though it served a liturgical purpose. Its use of alternative verbs for creation (br', Csh, hbdyl) could be argued to be evidence of multiple authorship-not a view I would espouse-in which parts of a poem had as legitimate a place as the prose elements. Even if its unitary nature be accepted, an author might spontaneously cite excerpts of a poem (vv. 2, lOa, 27 are obvious,

14 Cf. C. Levi-Strauss, "The structural study of mith", Structural Anthropology i (Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 206-31: he insists on taking into account all versions of a myth as the basis for analysis. This would ultimately take into account, for instance, J. Anouilh's treatment of the Oedipus myth in Antigone.

15 See C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11 (Minneapolis and London, 1984), pp. 90-1 (E. tr. of Genesis 1: Genesis 1-11 [Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1974], pp. 126-7): "Gen 1 contains a fusion of poetry and prose that is unique in the Old Testament"; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Waco, 1987), p. 10: "It is indeed a great hymn... elevated prose, not pure poetry..." See also Kselman, JBL 97, pp. 161-73.

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and a case might be made for others'6) to which his prose account was parallel. Alternatively, his "poetic prose" may be seen to have tipped over from time to time into the classic structure of verse.

16 Thus Kselman argues, in addition to i 10, 27, for i 5, 16 and 20, as well as for verses in later chapters,JBL 97, pp. 164-5; and B. Porten and U. Rappoport, "Poetic structure in Genesis ix 7", VT 21 (1971), pp. 368-9, make the case for i 22.



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Wyatt, The Darkness of Genesis 2