Suddenly There is God: The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture

By Veronica Mary Rolf and Rowan Williams

Suddenly There is God plunges us into the key stories of biblical characters who find themselves caught up in the divine-human drama. With unique insight, it relates these stories directly to the distinct stages of our own lives: being created, falling from grace, leaving the childhood ark, hearing God's call, gaining freedom, embracing covenant, praying the psalms, learning forgiveness, choosing love, and expecting resurrection. The scenes unfold before our eyes like a riveting play or film, as we discover with astonishment how closely the progression of Old and New Testament stories reflects our own spiritual journey.
Packed with historical content and written with dramatic intensity, Suddenly There is God suggests contemplative ways for us to nurture an ardent expectation of encountering God. By identifying with the biblical characters--their conflicts, difficult choices, and realizations--we recognize how divine presence continually breaks into our own life story. This book is a valuable resource for clergy, students, and spiritual seekers who long to experience the drama of sacred Scripture as deeply personal revelation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532674518

Veronica Mary Rolf

Veronica Mary Rolf is the author of Suddenly There is God: The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture (2019), An Explorer’s Guide to Julian of Norwich (2018), and Julian’s Gospel (2013), which have won numerous awards, including two Catholic Press Association Book Awards and the Nautilus Gold Medal for Religion. She records teachings on Christian mysticism and Scripture at www.lifelovelightpodcast.com, writes on spirituality at www.juliansvoice.com, and leads online contemplative retreats at www.veronicamaryrolf.com.

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Suddenly There Is God

The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture

Veronica Mary Rolf

Foreword by Rowan Williams

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Suddenly There Is God

The Story of Our Lives in Sacred Scripture

Copyright © 2019 Veronica Mary Rolf. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-7449-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-7450-1

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-7451-8

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Rolf, Veronica Mary, author.

Title: Suddenly there is God : the story of our lives in sacred Scripture / Veronica Mary Rolf.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019 | Series: if applicable | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-7449-5 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-7450-1 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-7451-8 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Theology. | Spirituality.

Classification: BS543 .R70 2019 (paperback) | BS543 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 11/01/19

In the Introduction and chapters 1 through 6, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

In chapters 7 through 10, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Figure of The Traditional Route of the Exodus: copyright © 2011 Ralph F. Wilson. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Figure of Mt. Sinai: www.iStock.com/boygovideo. Used by permission.

Figure of the empty tomb: www.iStock.com/Lokibaho. Used by permission.

Table of Contents

TITLE PAGE

FOREWORD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: OUT OF THE DEPTHS

CHAPTER 2: BROKEN TRUST

CHAPTER 3: FLOOD OF FEELINGS

CHAPTER 4: CALLED BY NAME

CHAPTER 5: STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM

CHAPTER 6: DARING TO COMMIT

CHAPTER 7: CRIES OF THE HEART

CHAPTER 8: WOUNDED AND HEALED

CHAPTER 9: COURAGE TO LOVE

CHAPTER 10: EXPECTING RESURRECTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For my husband, Frederick,

our daughter, Eva Natanya,

our son David and his wife, Leigh,

and our grandchildren, Adam and Matthew,

that they may continue to grow in love of sacred Scripture,

treasuring all these words and pondering them in their hearts.

Foreword

One of the most common mistakes we can make in approaching the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is to read them as first and foremost a source of third-person information. Of course they tell us what we need to know of God and God’s world; but they will only do that fully and effectively if we first allow ourselves to be taken in to something that is greater than the third-person register. We are first of all addressed and invited in. Scripture is proclaimed—a dramatic and rather old-fashioned word, but one that simply means that it is announced to people who have gathered to hear it because they have reason to think it has something to do with them. The stories it tells are not just stories about individuals remote in time and place but stories with which, as we might say, we resonate in sympathy because we recognize patterns and movements we are familiar with in our own stories; and we are then invited, as Scripture is interpreted and reflected on in the community, to make these stories our own, to enact them in our lives.

They are stories about what human lives look like when they are in touch with God. This doesn’t mean that they are stories of uniform goodness and holiness, because the impact of God on human life is sometimes so disturbing that it blows people off course or frightens them into running in the opposite direction. But Scripture keeps putting before us a central set of narratives dealing with those who have not run away and have survived this upheaval, those who have trusted themselves and God enough to stay with the events in which God is becoming known. Now it’s for us to discover how we shall encounter and survive; and the stories offer us the basic script or score around which we must think, and experiment, and improvise.

Veronica Mary Rolf has written a series of beautifully clear and direct meditations on how the biblical story traces our own developmental history and invites us to understand ourselves more deeply by reading ourselves into the text and the text into ourselves. She gives us the material for a dramatic reading, helping us again and again to hear the vigor, the tensions and energy of the actual conversational exchanges in the narrative, and also to see how we might find our place in the story. When Jesus told stories, he did so with an implicit or explicit invitation to the hearers to explore where they would be in the narrative, where they would be standing in relation to others and to God. And this is the guiding insight of this vivid, compassionate, and imaginative book, which urges us to discover all over again why the Bible is a book of life.

Rowan Williams

Cambridge, Epiphany 2019

Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the titans of twentieth and twenty-first century biblical scholarship who have so profoundly influenced my research over the years: Herman Gunkel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Buber, Sigmund Mowinckel, Martin Noth, Gerhard von Rad, Raymond Brown, Rudolf Schnackenburg, Nahum M. Sarna, Xavier Léon-Dufour, Lawrence Boadt, Daniel Harrington, Walter Brueggemann, Robert Alter, Sandra M. Schneiders, Francis J. Moloney, Pheme Perkins, and John H. Walton, to name a few. Their passionate dedication to historical and cultural context as well as their profound theological insights into sacred Scripture continue to challenge and inspire my own work.

On a more personal note, I want to thank Larry Bouchard, Professor of Theology, Ethics and Culture at the University of Virginia, for his perceptive comments on the manuscript and his deeply valued friendship. I am immensely grateful to George Guidall in New York City and Rica Bar-Sela in Jerusalem, both of whom contributed their nuanced understanding of the Hebrew language. I am also indebted to my editor at Cascade Books, Rodney Clapp, for guiding this manuscript through the publication process with the utmost courtesy, professionalism, and good humor. In addition, I want to express my gratitude for all the men and women who have attended my lectures and retreats over the years. Their faith seeking greater understanding has motivated me to write this book.

Finally, I am forever thankful for the enduring love and support of my beloved husband, Frederick Rolf, and our blessed children, David Joseph and Eva Natanya. They are my inspiration, my best personal editors, and my continual source of encouragement.

Introduction

Sacred Scripture is a love story, a dramatic love story, about God and humanity. It is the saga of God wooing and humanity wavering; God promising and humanity responding; God commanding and humanity disobeying; God being faithful and humanity mostly unfaithful; God forgiving and humanity repenting . . . only to begin the cycle all over again.

The Bible is not primarily a history of facts, but a history of faith. It is the epic narrative of human beings coming to believe in the radical unconditionality of God’s love. This narrative does not recount a divine revelation once offered, readily understood, totally accepted, and consistently practiced. That would have been much too simple—and woefully lacking in dramatic conflict. Rather, this majestic love story is about God’s relentless pursuit of humankind and humankind’s relentless struggle to respond. Because of humanity’s perennial contrariness, the struggle seems largely lost; but God, being God, never gives up on humanity. The Bible’s most persistent message is that no matter how many times and in how many tragic ways people fail to live up to the covenant, God will not fail the people. The Bible burns with expectant hope.

Is Scripture Relevant?

Still, for some, the questions may arise: Can we personally identify with this vast biblical literature that is such a rich combination of myth, legend, historical narrative, law, wisdom, psalms, prophecy, Gospels, letters, and apocalypse? Is Scripture still able to speak to our personal lives in the twenty-first century? Can Scripture become spiritually nourishing, transformative—and sacred—for us?

In answer, let us first consider that in our post-Enlightenment age, we often grope in the dark for a God beyond the limits of our human reason—the same human reason that has still failed to answer ultimate questions after more than 500 years of rigorous scientific inquiry. In our postmodern age, we sometimes feel left behind the times in the search for authentic revelation we can surely trust. Advances in technology, plus the overwhelming volume of information demanding to be absorbed each day, tend to leave us more confused than ever, adrift in the dust storm of our doubts. Is anyone out there? Is God absent or present? Aloof or involved? Is God still communicating with us in our temples and churches? In our hearts?

From time to time, we may intuit that the divine is waiting to burst in upon us, but then we become afraid that we might be misled. Either we feel unworthy to receive God’s revelation or we simply cannot believe that divine-human communication is still possible: at least not for us. We may consider it appropriate to ask theological questions about God, to learn about God, to pray to God. However, to expect that divine reality might reveal itself personally to us? That suddenly God might be here for us? That seems positively audacious. Yet that is precisely what sacred Scripture, God’s Word spoken through the medium of imperfect human words, encourages us to do. Indeed, commands us to do. Again and again, the Bible insists that divinity is not far away: The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth (Ps 145:18). We are told that God constantly breaks into our human reality in order to lead us, warn us, forgive us, heal us, renew us, inspire us, and most of all, love us.

Is God Still Speaking?

If we are willing to believe that God once intervened in biblical history to rescue the Israelites through mighty deeds, speaking to them through the patriarchs and prophets as well as through the medium of thunder and lightning, fire and cloud, wind and earthquake, as well as a gentle whisper (1 Kgs 19:12), would not this self-revelatory God still delight in speaking to us today in analogous ways? And if we believe that in the fullness of time the Son of God was born in the flesh and blood of a human being in order to teach, forgive, heal, die on a cross, and rise in glory that we might also be raised to eternal life, may we not rightfully assume that the Gospels tell the story of God’s ongoing love affair with us? Why have we embarked on a search for God but lost the hope of actually experiencing a world charged with the presence of God? Why do we not expect to hear God’s voice? Have we stopped listening?

Our mistake may be that we are so myopically focused on our personal needs and conflicts that we fail to take into account that God must necessarily communicate with us in every heartbeat, breath, thought, image, and action in order that we may continue to exist. The science of cosmology tells us about the birth of matter and antimatter, the stars, planets, moons, and galaxies that extend far beyond our own Milky Way, including the possibilities of multiple universes; indeed, the scenario becomes well-nigh inconceivable. These extrapolations of what might be out there in the vastness of space, light years beyond our ability to see or verify directly, fascinate us. And yet, if we are honest, the possibilities also terrify us. We feel lost in the stars.

Perhaps the universe we most need to explore is in here, within the space of our own minds and hearts. The only physical world we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch is revealed to us through the medium of our individual powers of awareness. Every one of us lives and breathes and eventually dies in a totally unique environment of perceptions and experiences. Through our consciousness, each one of us is conceptualizing and inhabiting our unique perspective on the universe every day. Certainly, each of our separate worlds interconnects intimately, constantly, and powerfully. That in itself is a mystery. And the fact that we are able to choose—to live, to love, to serve, to create, to hope (often against great odds and intolerable difficulties)—bears witness that our individual lives are evolving within a process of creative collaboration between some power utterly beyond us and what we ordinarily consider to be ourselves.

If we can accept that divine reality creates us and sustains our ability to be aware in every nanosecond, then does not the very fact that we continue to exist affirm that the source of our being loves us? And if the creative power is love, then does it not long for our complete fulfillment and happiness? May we not assume that in all things, divine life is for us and not against us? And does not the Creator desire the creature to trust that the divine will is always and everywhere at work, making all things well? Divine reality is bounteous goodness, unable to contain itself. God’s self-giving is revealed not only in the stories of creation and redemption, but in a volcano of love at every moment in time, making universe upon universe dance in space. May we not expect that this same divine reality is truly happening for us, if only we learn how to perceive its appearances, to listen for its voice?

These are questions of endless mystery and fascination. They are questions embedded in sacred Scripture. If we are able to enter into the stories of biblical characters, relating them directly to our own lives just as we do when experiencing a film or play, then we may more easily hear God’s voice speaking through them to us, here and now. The stories of the Bible are, in fact, our own stories, although we do not usually recognize or claim them as such. Even more rarely do we expect that God communicates with us personally through the drama and the individuals of the Bible. However, if we employ imaginative techniques to explore sacred Scripture, new facets of the divine mystery may appear to us. We may become more receptive to hearing God’s voice. And we may discover fresh insights into our own unanswered questions.

A Dramatic Approach

Therefore, we will use a dramatic method of interpretation to delve into biblical encounters between divinity and humanity. Just as an actor does extensive research to absorb the historical setting and culture of a play, then uses imagination and emotional identification in order to identify with a character’s conflicts and choices, so we will employ some of these same techniques to immerse ourselves in the drama of Scripture. We will investigate historical and cultural context, create the circumstances of time and place, examine complexities of character, explore relationships, and expose conflicts. Through this approach, we will collaborate in a grand experiment to get under the skin of the sacred texts so that we might experience them in a more personal way—imaginatively, emotionally, and spiritually—as if for the first time.

In the process, we will contemplate striking parallels between the biblical dramas and the distinct stages, conflicts, relationships, and realizations of our own lives, from birth to death and beyond. Then, as we identify with the mind-set of these men and women of the Bible who vacillated between belief and doubt, faithfulness and failure, longing and forgetting, just as we do, we may gain insight and courage from their example that will guide us on our own journey into God. We may also discover to our astonishment how closely their life situations reflect our own. Finally, we may be inspired to respond to the scenes with verbal or silent prayer.

In Genesis, we will encounter our own creation story and consider what it means to emerge into human existence out of the depths of nonexistence. With Adam and Eve, we will relive the shock and shame of our first fall and experience of broken trust in childhood. With Noah, we will recall the flood of conflicted feelings during our adolescent crisis and the wrench of escaping like a dove from the safety of our childhood ark. With Abraham, we will hear ourselves called by name and begin our journey to follow that call. With Moses and the Israelites, we will reflect on what has plagued us throughout our lives and re-experience our struggle for freedom as young adults. With the giving of the Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai, we will endeavor to embrace God in covenant as personally committed adults. In our daily life of prayer in the Psalms, we will cry out to God in joy, praise, lament, contrition, and thanksgiving. Like the men and women of the Gospels, we will experience our wounds healed and our sins forgiven by the Lord. As mature disciples, we will gain the courage to fall in love with Jesus and to embody our love in creative forms of self-giving. Then we may look forward with joy to our final re-creation in Christ.

To help us on our journey, we will revisit Old and New Testament stories in tandem, just as scriptural readings are selected to point up striking parallels between them during the Liturgy of the Word. By placing Hebrew and Christian texts in direct juxtaposition to one another, we will explore how the characters and their stories are similar and in what respects they differ. Through this discovery process, we may become more sensitive to the deep resonances running through all of sacred Scripture, resonances that form one vast continuum of divine revelation.

We will also consider contemplative practices through which we might grow more acutely aware of the ways in which the divine suddenly breaks in to our lives to challenge, guide, warn, and grace us. Thus we may become more responsive to the experience of divine illumination, so that God’s ongoing revelations do not get buried in our spiritual inbox. Once we open our minds and hearts to meditate reflectively on the meaning of the scriptural dramas as they pertain to the story of our lives, we may realize that divine revelations made long ago to biblical characters are being made in new and startling ways to us, right now. Then we may live, no matter the current circumstances, with a more impassioned faith, hope, and love.

Throughout our exploration, we will seek to reclaim an attitude of ardent expectation as a vibrant but often neglected aspect of our faith. Otherwise, we may forget why we worship, why we pray, why we serve others, and why we hold fast to an ancient canon of belief that, in our postmodern secular world, may seem utterly irrelevant. We will be on the lookout for assurances that God loves us so much that the Spirit greatly desires to speak to us—and actually does speak to us—personally and unmistakably in sacred Scripture as well as through the rich diversity of people, places, and events in our daily lives. Hopefully, we will become more aware that, just as it was for the biblical characters, every stage of our lives is filled with the astounding presence of God.

Come near me and listen to this:

"From the first announcement I have not spoken in secret;
at the time it happens, I am there." (Isa

48

:

16

)

1

OUT OF THE DEPTHS

Our Creation Story in Genesis

What does it mean to be created? To be birthed from nonbeing into existence? To not be and then, in an instant, to be , thus becoming capable of movement and growth, change and choice? Too often, we take life for granted, that it will always function for us. Yet does any one of us have control over our next heartbeat? Can we be certain of our next breath? In each and every moment of existence, we might ask: Where does our life come from? Is it by chance or design? What power initiates, sustains, and determines our length of days? Most importantly, why do we exist? For what purpose? These mysteries have long fascinated philosophers and theologians, poets and scientists. They are mysteries that must be plumbed again and again if we are to discover who we are and what our true destination might be, even to evaluate the meaning of our lives each day. Moreover, it is not merely a question of the origin and destiny of a single person or of a nation, but of an entire cosmos.

These are some of the questions that must have prompted the writer of Genesis 1 to attempt a description of the creation of the universe and everything in it. Let us venture with the ancient author back into empty nonbeing, to be present before anything appeared, so that we might experience the sheer wonder that there came to be anything at all. Let us imagine the first instant of time (if that is even conceivable), the dawn of light, the emergence of the cosmos, seas, land, animals, birds, fish, and the awakening of human awareness. This is what the creation poet sought to do: envision how everything in the known world came to exist, long before modern science could propose its own hypotheses. For our part, we will attend carefully to how and why the ancient Israelites believed the world was created, so that we may begin to fathom from our own perspectives how and why we ourselves might have been created. Moreover, we will engage the Genesis creation story as a poetic drama (as well as a profession of faith), so that we may better appreciate the creation story at the beginning of the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word . . . (John 1:1). Then we will link it directly to the story of our own personal coming-to-be in the womb of our mother. Indeed, the story of our lives actually commences with the creation of the entire cosmos. In a most wondrous way, we may discover that Genesis 1 is all about the miracle of our own creation.

The Bible begins at the very beginning with the story of creation, actually two stories of creation from separate sources. Scholars have identified the first version (Gen 1–2:4) as having probably been added on as an introduction to the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) by a priestly author during or after the Babylonian exile, c. 550–450 BCE. This would have been some four or five hundred years after the more ancient story of the creation of Adam and Eve in paradise (Gen 2:4–3:24) was set to writing. (It should be noted that the various books of the Hebrew canon were not arranged in the chronological order in which they were written.) We will encounter the second version of creation in chapter 2.

The Canticle of Creation

The first creation account is structured primarily as a poetic hymn. It may have been sung or recited at a covenant renewal ceremony or perhaps during the Israelite New Year’s festival in the autumn. This was a sacred time when the people gathered to celebrate nature’s fresh beginning, as on the first day of creation when everything was pristine, before evil and suffering entered the world. A priest or cantor might have chanted each verse of the hymn and a chorus of singers or cantors responded with the refrain: God saw all that he had made, and it was very good (Gen 1:31). The entire account is a dramatic depiction of the perfect world God called forth out of the abyss of chaos. It could be set to the music of the harp or psalter (a triangular stringed instrument akin to a zither), or danced to rhythmic drumbeats. The language is solemn, imagistic, evocative, deliberately repetitive to provide lyrical balance, and theologically astute, all at once.

The hymn of creation extols the harmony and interweaving functionality of everything in the cosmos as well as the Creator’s eternal peace and rest, symbolized by the evocation of the Sabbath on the seventh day. The style and images bear a strong resemblance to the ancient Babylonian account of creation, Enuma Elish, including its structure, with seven days of creation, as well as an act of self-praise by the deity, a familiar theme in Sumerian literature.¹ The deity derives glory not only from the material creation, but from the way the cosmos functions. Everything works. Nothing is out of order. And to the ancient Near Eastern peoples, cosmic functionality, signified by the Egyptian concept of Ma’at (truth, order, justice, law, morality, and harmony of all the elements), was of paramount importance.²

However, the greatest achievement of the canticle of creation is the theological clarity with which the poet borrowed elements of polytheistic creation myths, demythologized them, and then reshaped them into a vibrant monotheistic doctrine. In this account, God alone, not a congress of many gods, is the sole Creator of all that exists. God speaks with absolute authority, not after consultation with other deities. God needs no other gods to help in creating, naming, separating, and assigning functions to everything in the universe. Furthermore, God creates out of perfect goodness, not as the result of a primeval war between personified powers of good and evil. All that is created issues from eternal wisdom, the divine plan for perfect order, not through sorcery, magic, or trickery. Thus, all matter is good and has prescribed functions.

According to biblical theology, human beings are created in God’s own image and given the highest place of honor, with direct responsibility for the preservation of creation. They are also blessed, like the animals, with the power of procreation. They are not made to be mere slaves of the greedy gods of the ancient world, performing the hard labor of maintaining the earth, all the while keeping the temple idols clothed, fed, and pacified. In fact, human beings are so highly valued in this creation account that they are given the divine gift of the Sabbath, to join in the perfect rest of their Creator.³ With consummate skill, the canticle writer composed a song of adoration, praise, and gratitude to the one and only God of Israel, with a subtext of longing for the earth and its people to be made perfect once again, as they were originally created.

Out of Chaos

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Gen

1

:

1

–

2

)

In the beginning suggests that the concept of time had to be conceived before anything else, in order that there might be a beginning to time, while the transcendent deity exists before time and without time, eternally. The first phrase, translated from the Hebrew as in the beginning, usually implies a continuing period of time rather than a specific point in time. In this case, it refers to the beginning of the seven-day period of creation, not to a specific moment beforehand.⁴ It is also important to realize that in this translation of the original Hebrew, verse 1 is not merely an introductory temporal clause leading into verse 2, but an independent declarative sentence, establishing God’s supreme act as the foundation of all theological principles: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.⁵ Everything that is, was, or ever could be proceeds from the life of God.

The creation drama begins in chaos and emptiness. The formless and empty void (Hebrew, tohu vavohu) waits expectantly in complete darkness. Tohu and vohu were understood, in ancient Semitic terms, as disordered chaos, a problematic state of uncertainty and dysfunctionality that was usually juxtaposed in direct opposition to creation. All Near Eastern creation myths considered chaos or the desert, wilderness, void to be a true representation of the earth as it existed before creation. Thus the rhyming duo tohu and vohu (frequently used together in the Old Testament) might indicate that chaos preexisted divine creation or was created first, before anything else. However, the notion of a preexistent "created chaos" is itself illogical and therefore may be discounted. Alternately, tohu and vohu might suggest that God created everything from the material of this preexisting chaos, rather than out of nothing (Latin, creatio ex nihilo), as a more developed theological interpretation will later hold (2 Macc 7:28).⁶ But such a reading also presents a problem. Chaos only refers to the condition of the earth, not to both the heavens and the earth as in the Genesis text, which describes the creation of everything that is.

Moreover, the specific Hebrew verb used here for create is bara, which will be employed about fifty times in the Old Testament. God is the only subject or implied subject ever used with the verb bara. Thus bara always defines the incomparable and exclusive act of divine creativity, never that of human productivity.⁷ Such divine activity has no analogy: God alone creates the astonishing universe. And the action of bara never suggests any divine expenditure of effort, nor is it ever directly associated with any physical materials, as are required by human creativity.⁸ "It is correct to say that the verb bara, ‘create,’ contains the idea both of complete effortlessness and creatio ex nihilo, since it is never connected with any statement of the material.⁹ For the biblical author, God and God alone is the transcendent Creator, in total opposition to disordered chaos."

The contradictions we encounter throughout the text may be explained by the fact that the canticle writer borrowed metaphors from familiar cosmological myths, but completely distinguished Israel’s unique understanding of one transcendent Creator from the multiple deities active in these ancient myths. It is likely that the author could not conceive of a total nonbeing prior to creation (can anyone?) or of a universe emanating purely from the mind of God, who creates out of nothing. So he utilized the well-known keywords for disordered chaos (tohu and vohu) to serve as a striking counterpoint to the supreme acts of divine creation. Whatever the case, it is astounding that ancient Israel’s capacity to contemplate the origins of the universe could lead to the concept of bara as a uniquely divine creativity. This theology completely discounts mythical notions of the creator as a warrior deity who emerged from a primeval chaos or as just one of many procreator gods who formed the earth after a cosmic conflict.¹⁰

Wind and Light

It was commonly believed by Babylonians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Chinese that the world arose out of darkness. The two concepts—that in the beginning ‘the earth was a desert and void’ and that ‘darkness was upon the primordial sea’—were originally two distinct theories of the world’s beginning.¹¹ The narrator describes this vast deepness (whether dry or wet) as suddenly being moved by the life-giving wind of divine power: the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. The verb hovered (Hebrew, mirahefet) has also been translated as brooded or swept; more specifically it suggests vibrated, trembled, moved, or stirred.¹² Thus the primordial act of creation is described as a cosmic vibration, an oscillating motion that explodes into waves of energy over the dark abyss. But what about the abyss? The abyss is not to be understood as preexistent: "These primeval cosmic waters are the classic form that nonexistence takes in the functionally oriented ancient world."¹³

And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light (Gen 1:3). Here, the Word of God is understood as the personal expression of a Creator who communicates! God speaks and immediately everything comes into existence through the vibration of the divine Word: For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm (Ps 33:9). This divine speech is all-powerful and contains within itself limitless potentiality. God speaks and out of the great desolation of uncertainty (the