The first verse of Genesis, therefore, seems explicitly to assert the creation of the Universe; "the heaven," including the sidereal systems;[1], "and the earth," more especially specifying our own planet, as the subsequent scene of the operations of the six days about to be described: no information is given as to events which may have occurred upon this earth, unconnected with the history of man, between the creation of its component matter recorded in the first verse, and the era at which its history is resumed in the second verse; nor is any limit fixed to the time during which these intermediate events may have been going on: millions of millions of years may have occupied the indefinite interval, between the beginning in which God created the heaven and the earth, and the evening or commencement of the first day of the Mosaic narrative.[2]
- ↑ The Hebrew plural word, shamaim, Gen. i. 1, translated heaven, means etymologically, the higher regions, all that seems above the earth: as we say, God above, God on high, God in heaven; meaning thereby to express the presence of the Deity in space distinct from this earth—E. B. Pusey.
- ↑ I have much satisfaction in subjoining the following note by my friend, the Regius Professor of, Hebrew in Oxford, as it enables me to advance the very important sanction of Hebrew criticism, in support of the interpretations, by which we may reconcile the apparent difficulties arising from geological phenomena, with the literal interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis.—"Two opposite errors have, I think, been committed by critics, with regard to the meaning of the word bara, created; the one, by those who asserted that it must in itself signify "created out of nothing;" the other, by those who endeavoured by aid of etymology, to show that it must in itself signify "formation out of existing matter." In fact, neither is the case; nor am I aware of any language in which there is a word signifying necessarily "created out of nothing;" as of course, on the other hand, no word, when used of the agency of God would, in itself, imply the previous existence of matter. Thus the English word, create, by which bara is translated, expresses that the thing created received its existence from God, without in itself conveying whether God called that thing into existence out of nothing, or no; for our very addition of the words "out of nothing," shows that the word creation has not, in itself, that force: nor indeed, when we speak
