King James Version · Before the nations
Genesis 1
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created the and the earth. And the earth was without form and void; and was upon the of the deep. And of moved upon the of the waters. And said, Let there be : and there was . And saw , that it was good: and divided from . And called Day, and he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8And called the firmament . And the evening and the morning were the second day. And said, Let the waters under the be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and saw that it was good. And said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding , and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose was in itself, after his kind: and saw that it was good. 13And the evening and the morning were the third day. And said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 15And let them be for lights in the firmament of the to give upon the earth: and it was so. And made two great lights; the greater to rule the day, and the lesser to rule the night: he made the stars also. And set them in the firmament of the to give upon the earth, And to the day and over the night, and to divide from : and saw that it was good. 19And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of . And created great whales, and every that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and saw that it was good. And them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And said, Let the earth bring forth the after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And made of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and saw that it was good. And said, Let us make man in our , after our : and let them over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So created man , in the created he him; male and female created he them. And them, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and it: and over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing , which is upon the of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding ; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
Christians read this chapter differently
- How should Christians read Genesis 1? · Genesis 1:1-2:3
Every view at its strongest, with who holds it and what it has to answer for.
The world at this moment · Before the nations, 2600 BC to 2100 BC ›
The opening chapters, from creation to Babel, told on a scale that covers the whole earth before the story narrows to one family.
- The neighbours' own stories
- Mesopotamia told its own versions of these events. Atrahasis and the eleventh tablet of Gilgamesh tell of a flood, a survivor, an ark, and birds sent out to find land. Enuma Elish tells of a world made from a defeated sea. The resemblances are close enough that scholars have argued about them for a century and a half, and the differences are where the argument gets interesting: Genesis has no quarrel among gods, no accidental humanity, and a flood sent for moral reasons rather than because people were noisy.
- Babel and the ziggurat
- A tower with its top in the heavens, built of brick and bitumen on a plain in Shinar, describes a Mesopotamian ziggurat exactly. Dozens were built, the best known at Ur and Babylon, of mud brick because southern Mesopotamia has no stone. The detail about brick instead of stone is the kind of thing someone writes who has actually seen one.
- The wider world
- If these chapters are placed anywhere in ordinary chronology, the surrounding centuries are the age of the Egyptian pyramids, the Sumerian city-states, the Indus Valley cities, and the first phase of Stonehenge. Writing was a few centuries old and existed in two places on earth.
All of Genesis