In the Beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)
The Torah opens with the story of creation: in six days God creates the universe and rests on the seventh. This is a central piece of Jewish life. We return to it yearly as part of the Torah reading cycle, and commemorate it each week on Shabbat, which recalls God’s rest after creation (Exodus 20:8-11). Yet, while being one of the Torah’s most foundational stories, Bereshit is also one of its most debated.
Modern scientific accounts of evolution and the universe’s origins through natural processes have led many to reject the Torah; others have sought creative — and sometimes questionable — ways of reconciling the Torah’s description of creation with modern science. This tension is not a new one, and our tradition has had a wide range of approaches to how to properly understand the creation narrative.
Many Jewish thinkers have argued that the story of creation does not have to be taken literally in every detail. In his “Guide for the Perplexed,” the 12th-century physician and philosopher Maimonides wrote that “the account given in Scripture of the Creation is not, as is generally believed, intended to be in all its parts literal.”
Even earlier, the 11th-century French commentator Rashi questioned whether reading Genesis as a literal description of creation is possible. The creation story describes God as “hovering on the face of the waters,” several verses before water was created on the second day. Similarly, light is said to have been created on day one, while the sun, the light’s source, wasn’t created until day four. “Therefore,” Rashi wrote, “you must admit that the text teaches nothing about the earlier or later sequence of the acts of Creation.”
These interpretations raise a broader question: What is the creation story trying to teach us?
In “Understanding Genesis,” Bible scholar Nahum Sarna approached that question through the lens of its Ancient Near Eastern context. “Biblical man, despite his undoubted intellectual and spiritual endowments, did not base his views of the universe and its laws on critical use of empirical data,” having not yet “discovered the principles and methods of disciplined inquiry, critical observation or analytical experimentation. Rather, his thinking was imaginative, and his expressions of thought were concrete, pictorial, emotional, and poetic.” The Torah, like its ancient Near Eastern contemporaries, utilized symbolism and metaphor, not to convey facts, but beliefs and values.
“The biblical creation narrative is a document of faith,” he wrote. “It is a quest for meaning and a statement of a religious position. It enunciates the fundamental postulates of the religion of Israel, the central ideas and concepts that animate the whole of biblical literature.”
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks offered a similar distinction: “Genesis is, in fact, philosophically written in a deliberately non-philosophical way…Philosophy is truth as a system. Genesis is truth as a story” (The Koren Shalem Humash, Introduction to Genesis).
If that’s the case, our task is to look beyond the mechanics of creation and ask what central ideas the creation story is conveying about God, humanity, and our place in the world.
God is above time and space
In the ancient world, the gods were themselves part of the cosmic order, subject to the competing whims and decisions of other gods and nature. The theological view of the pagan world was one that saw strife and conflict as fundamental to the natural order of the world.
“Implicit in the notion of a multiplicity of gods is a plurality of wills which, by human analogy, is bound, in turn, to engender strife,” Sarna wrote. These competing wills, he argued, made strife a defining feature of many polytheistic creation stories. Order emerged when one god overpowered the others and imposed his will.
However, this isn’t the case for the Biblical God and worldview. In Genesis, there are no mythological struggles between good and evil, between gods and nature, or between gods and people. There is no contest to determine who will rule the universe. God simply speaks, and creation follows.
The repeated phrase “and it was so” emphasizes this effortless authority. Nature does not resist God’s commands. God is the sole Creator, rather than one force among many within creation. In this understanding, God is not bound by the time and space that govern the world.
For Sarna, this view also carries moral implications. A God whose authority extends over all creation offers the people of Israel a source of confidence: neither the forces of nature nor the turmoil of history can overturn God’s purposes. God’s power over chaos becomes a basis for hope that righteousness will ultimately triumph over evil.
There is order to the universe
A central idea of the Genesis creation story is that the world was created by an intelligent being in an orderly and logical fashion. That idea isn’t presented through a literal retelling of the act of creation, but in the way the story is structured.
In “The Beginning of Wisdom,” author Leon Kass points to the progression of creation: from inanimate to animate, from creatures rooted in place to those that move. He also notes that the first six days of creation can be divided into two groups: the creation of the spaces that make up our world, and the creation of the things that populate those spaces.
“Day One brings light; Day Four, the heavenly lights (stars and planets). Day Two brings heaven, separating waters above from the waters below; Day Five, the living creatures — fish and fowl — that live in the waters below and that fly before the blue heaven…Day Three: first the earth or dry land; and second, the plants put forth by the earth. Day Six: first, the land animals; second, man.”
The seven-day framework reinforces this theme. In the ancient world, seven was a number laden with symbolic meaning used “to emphasize the basic idea of design, completion, and perfection,” wrote Sarna. The 22nd-century B.C.E. King Gudea of Lagash, in southern Mesopotamia, celebrated the completion of a temple with a seven-day feast. Other Mesopotamian and Ugaritic texts likewise describe six days of activities culminating in a final climactic event on the seventh. In Genesis, the seventh day marks the completion of creation through God’s rest.
Reflecting on the necessity of believing in a literal seven days of creation, Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook argued that the narrative’s emphasis on purpose mattered more than the precise duration of each day. In “For the Perplexed of the Generation,” he argued that the days could be understood as periods of 24 hours or as stages whose duration the Torah leaves unspecified. The essential point was that creation unfolded in an intentional order, directed toward divine wisdom, morality, and human development.
Read this way, the creation story invites us to see the world as purposeful and ordered — and to consider how our own lives can reflect that order.
Man is imbued with dignity
Genesis describes humankind as being created “In the Image of God” (Genesis 1:27). While the belief that all beings are created equal and deserving of rights and dignity is commonplace in the modern world, it was a groundbreaking theological statement at the time. In the ancient world, the only beings created in the image of gods were rulers and monarchs who were believed to be divine. The Torah upends that perspective and insists that it isn’t just monarchy that is divine — but everyone. “The dramatic claim of Genesis 1,” wrote Rabbi Shai Held in “Judaism is About Love,” “is that we are all kings and queens.”
In the Talmud, this sentiment originated from a single human being, Adam. If all humans come from the same source, no person can say to another, “My father is greater than your father.” (Sanhedrin 37a)
In contrast to other ancient Near Eastern creation stories where the creation of humankind “is almost incidental, fashioned as a kind of afterthought as a menial of the gods to provide them with nourishment and generally to satisfy their physical needs,” humankind is described in the Torah as a subject of care and concern for God.
God said, “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food. (Genesis 1:29)
“Man was entrusted with a good and harmonious world,” wrote Rabbi Moshe Shammah in “Recalling the Covenant,” “full of blessings of the one God, with the capability (and responsibility) to so maintain it or, in the eventuality, to repair it.”
Creativity is divine
Humankind is called to be godlike — For I command you this day, to love the ETERNAL your God, to walk in God’s ways (Deuteronomy 30:16) — but what exactly does that mean?
According to Rabbi Sacks, the creativity God used to create the world teaches us that to be creative is divine: “Just as God is creative, so you be creative.”
Similarly, Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm wrote that Genesis was a blueprint for how to be godlike — and to be godlike is to use our creativity to protect and improve human life. “To be like God, therefore, means that man has these three duties: to advance the welfare of the world by marshalling his creative abilities (yishuv ha-olam); to protect human life and improve the conditions of life (chessed); to establish the absolute moral good in society and civilization.”
In contrast to the complex and mythical tales of cosmological battles between different gods and forces of nature in ancient stories, the Torah is notably brief in its descriptions of the origins of the universe.
Rabbi Kook claimed, based on a midrash, that this brevity was intentional; it is impossible to convey the mechanisms that go into creating something from nothing, so the Torah left it out.
However, according to Kass, the purpose of this brevity was to emphasize that the creation story isn’t really important and to focus on what really matters in Judaism: life.
“Here, the big cosmological questions…are answered without even being asked, seemingly disposed of once and for all. With these matters apparently settled in the beginning, we readers can hereafter devote ourselves instead to more urgent human concerns: the character of human life and the question of how to live,” he writes.
In the end, the Torah isn’t a book of science. The Torah is a book of life whose “ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold on her: and happy are those who hold her fast.” (Mishlei 3:17-18)
