It literally means “in [the] beginning,” and it is built right on the Hebrew word for “head” (rōʾsh), the head or starting point of a thing. So the very first word sets us down at the head of all things, the moment when time itself begins.

This is a special word. In this form it is only ever used of God in the whole Old Testament, never of a person. You and I make things out of stuff that is already there, but bārāʾ is the making of something brand new, out of nothing at all, by the bare word of God. “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3).

Here is a quiet wonder. The word is plural in its form (that is what the -îm ending does in Hebrew), yet the verb right beside it, bārāʾ, is singular. One God, acting as one. It is not by itself a proof of the Trinity, but it is a seed, and it starts to open up when God says “Let us make man” in verse 26.

A tiny word your English Bible cannot really show. It is just a little pointer that says “here comes the thing being acted on,” marking “the heavens” as the very thing God created. Even the small words here are doing honest work.

“The heavens,” and when it is paired with “the earth” it becomes a lovely Hebrew way of saying “the whole universe, everything there is,” by naming the two far ends and sweeping in all that lies between. Time, space, and matter all step onto the stage in this first verse.

A plain little word, “was.” Some have tried to read it as “became,” to fit a long gap of time between verse 1 and verse 2. But it is simply the everyday verb “to be,” and the most natural reading is just that the freshly made earth was still unshaped, waiting on the six days to come.

A rhyming pair of words, almost sing-song when you say them out loud, meaning “empty and unshaped.” This is not a ruined world but an unfinished one, the blank canvas before the painting. In the first three days God gives it shape, and in the next three He fills it up.

One rich little word that can mean wind, breath, or Spirit, all at once. Joined to ʾĕlōhîm it reads “the Spirit of God.” A few translations soften it to “a mighty wind,” but the fuller and better reading is the Spirit of God Himself, already at work on the very first page.

Such a tender word. It is the same one used of an eagle fluttering over her nest, watching over her young (Deuteronomy 32:11). Being a participle, it pictures something ongoing: the Spirit of God gently hovering over the dark waters, not idle but caring, getting ready to bring life out of the deep.

Here it comes, the first recorded speech in all the universe. God creates by speaking. There is no effort, no struggle, no raw material worked over with the hands; He simply says, and it is so. This little verb will drum through the whole chapter like a heartbeat: “And God said… and God said…” Ten times He speaks, and ten times the world leaps to obey.

In the Hebrew it is just two words, short and sudden as the flash it describes: yəhî ʾōr. And what a thing that light should be the very first thing God calls for. Notice too that this light comes on day one, but the sun is not made until day four, so this light does not depend on the sun. God Himself is its source.

The first time God calls something “good.” The word means more than “not bad”; it means beautiful, fitting, pleasing, exactly as it ought to be. This word will sound seven times across the chapter, building and building until the great “very good” at the end (v. 31). Creation came from the hand of God whole and lovely, and later, when the Preacher says God “hath made every thing beautiful in his time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11), he is looking back to this very goodness.

To divide, to separate, to set apart. So much of creation is God making distinctions: light from dark, day from night, waters from waters. He is a God of order, not confusion, for “God is not the author of confusion” (1 Corinthians 14:33). And this same word is later used of Israel being separated unto the Lord (Leviticus 20:26); separating light from dark is the first of many such holy partings.

God names what He makes, and in the Bible to name a thing is to have authority over it. He calls the light “Day” and the darkness “Night.” The Maker is also the Lord of what He made; even time itself answers to His naming. Later He will let Adam name the animals (2:19), handing man a share of this royal work of naming and ruling.

“And there was evening, and there was morning, day one.” By the Hebrew reckoning the day begins at evening, which is why to this day the Sabbath starts at sundown (Leviticus 23:32). God’s people move from dark to light, which is the very shape of redemption, called “out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9). This refrain will close each of the six days like the tolling of a bell.

The word comes from a root meaning to beat or hammer something out thin, the way a metalworker spreads a sheet of gold (see the same root in Exodus 39:3, where gold is beaten into thin plates). So the picture is of an expanse stretched wide overhead, the open vault of the sky. Job speaks of God spreading out the heavens like a molten mirror (Job 37:18); it is the breathing-space of the world, the great dome under which everything will live.

The expanse is set right “in the midst” of the waters, dividing water below from water above. Once again the theme of separating (v. 4) runs on. God is bringing His world from a watery, formless deep into ordered, livable space, one gracious division at a time.

A different verb from bārāʾ (“create”). This one, ʿāśāh, means to make or fashion, and it can be used of people too. Genesis moves easily between “create” and “make,” and both are God’s work here. He not only speaks the world into being, He shapes and arranges it with care.

“And it was so.” A quiet phrase that carries enormous weight. Whatever God says is not a wish or an attempt; it stands firm and settled the moment it leaves His mouth. “For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast” (Psalm 33:9). His word does not return empty (Isaiah 55:11). What He commands, is.

God names the expanse “Heaven,” the same word we met in verse 1. Here is a gentle thing worth noticing: the second day is the only one of the six where God does not say “it was good.” Many good expositors have thought this is because the work of dividing the waters was not finished until the third day, when the seas were gathered and the dry land appeared. God does not call a thing good until it is complete, and He is patient with unfinished work, in His creation and in us, “being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it” (Philippians 1:6).

The second day closes with the sky in place. Notice the steady march of the account: God works, God names, God numbers the day, and moves on. There is nothing frantic here. Creation unfolds with the calm, ordered majesty of a King who is never in a hurry and never in doubt.

The waters are gathered into one place at God’s command. Interestingly, this same root can carry the sense of “waiting” or “hoping,” a gathering of expectation. Here the seas draw back like a curtain so the land can step onto the stage.

The dry ground appears, the same word later used when Israel crosses the Red Sea on “dry land” (Exodus 14:29) and the Jordan on “dry ground” (Joshua 3:17). The God who parts the waters here will part them again to save His people. What He does in creation, He echoes in redemption; the Maker and the Redeemer are the same LORD.

God names the dry land “Earth” and the gathered waters “Seas.” And here, for the first time, He looks on the finished work of a full day and calls it “good.” The dividing that began on day two is now complete, and God pronounces His blessing upon it.

The gathered waters He calls “Seas.” The nations round about feared the sea as a wild, god-haunted chaos, but here it is simply named and set in its place by its Maker. The sea has bounds it cannot cross, for God “shut up the sea with doors” and said, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further” (Job 38:8, 11).

God calls the earth to grow green, to put out grass and herb and fruit tree. Notice He invites the earth to “bring forth,” giving the ground a share in the work. And every plant carries “seed in itself,” life folded up inside, ready to make more life. From the very first, God builds His world to keep on giving.

Here is one of the great refrains of the chapter, sounding for the first time and ringing out ten times in all: “after his kind.” Each living thing brings forth its own sort, the apple tree making apple trees, never oaks. There is wide room for variety inside a kind, but the kinds themselves are God’s, and they hold. Paul draws on this very order when he writes that “all flesh is not the same flesh” (1 Corinthians 15:39), each with its own body as God has appointed.

And the earth did exactly as it was told. Verse 11 was the command; verse 12 is the obedience, word for word. God speaks and the world answers back in perfect step. When He calls for grass and herb and fruit tree “after his kind,” that is precisely what rises out of the ground, no more and no less.

The little word “seed” is worth pausing on, for it will become one of the great words of the Bible. The seed hidden in the fruit is God’s way of carrying life forward. That same word will soon be lifted to a mighty promise, “the seed of the woman” who shall bruise the serpent’s head (3:15), and at last to Christ Himself, the promised Seed (Galatians 3:16).

The word yōm is the plain Hebrew word for “day.” When it stands with a number and with “evening and morning,” as it does here, it everywhere else in the Old Testament means an ordinary day. The fourth commandment rests its whole weight on this plain reading: “for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth” (Exodus 20:11). The third day closes with the earth clothed in green, and the first half of creation’s work is done: the world has now been given its shape.

The light of day one is now given its bearers, the “lamps” of the sky. The word is not the ordinary word for light but for a light-holder, a lamp. And notice how careful Moses is, writing into a world that worshipped sun and moon: he will not even name them here, but calls them simply “lights,” hung in the sky to serve, not to be served.

Not merely “seasons” like spring and fall, but “appointed times.” This is the very word later used for Israel’s sacred feasts, the “feasts of the LORD” (Leviticus 23:2). So from the fourth day, the sun and moon are set to mark not only planting and harvest but the holy calendar, the appointed meetings between God and His people. The clock of the heavens keeps sacred time, for “he appointed the moon for seasons” (Psalm 104:19).

The lamps are given one great task: to shine upon the earth. They are servants, appointed to give light for the benefit of the world below. The heavens are not there to be admired as gods but to pour their light down upon the little green earth God has just clothed and is about to fill.

The lights are set in the very expanse God stretched out on the second day. So each day’s work builds on the last: the sky was spread out then, and now it is furnished with its shining lamps. The heavens declare His glory (Psalm 19:1), and here we watch Him hang them.

Here is a quiet thunderbolt against idolatry. The nations all around worshipped the sun and the moon as mighty gods, yet Moses will not even speak their names. He calls them only “the greater light” and “the lesser light,” two lamps God hung and lit. And the stars, which whole empires feared and worshipped, get four small words tossed in at the end: “he made the stars also.” Later Israel is warned not to bow to sun, moon, or stars (Deuteronomy 4:19), for they are creatures, not gods.

The lights are given “rule” over day and night, but it is a borrowed, appointed rule, a governorship under the true King. They do not rule by their own power; they hold their office at God’s pleasure. Even the sun is a servant that keeps the watch its Master set for it.

The verb is literally “gave” or “set”: God placed the lights in the sky, like a hand setting lamps upon a shelf. They did not put themselves there or rise by chance. Each one was positioned by God, on purpose, for the good of the earth below. He “telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 147:4), and not one is out of place.

Once again that word for separating, the same one from verse 4. On day one God Himself divided light from darkness; now the lights He has made carry on that same work of separation. What God begins, He appoints His creatures to continue. And again He looks and calls it good, the fourth “good” of the chapter, His delight in His work never wearing thin (Psalm 104:31).

The fourth day closes. With it the second set of three days begins, the days of filling. The first three days gave the world its form (light, sky and sea, land); now the next three fill those realms (lights for the sky, creatures for sea and air, then land animals and man). Form, then fullness. There is a beautiful order in it, for “let all things be done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40) is the very character of the God who made them.

What a word: to swarm, to teem, to bring forth in swarming abundance. The waters are not to hold a few fish but to boil over with life. God is no miser; He loves fullness, overflow, teeming plenty. The seas are to swarm and the skies to fill with wings, all at a single word. “So is this great and wide sea… wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts” (Psalm 104:25).

Literally “living soul.” With sea creatures and birds we meet, for the first time, conscious animate life, creatures that breathe and move and feel. This is a higher thing than plants, and Scripture marks it. The plants were simply “brought forth”; but breathing life is something new under the sun. This same phrase, nepeš ḥayyāh, will be used of man in 2:7, though man alone receives it by God’s own inbreathing.

Here the great creating word bārāʾ returns, for the first time since verse 1. The plants were “brought forth” by the earth, but conscious, breathing life is a new and higher thing, and Scripture reaches back for the special word reserved for God’s creative act. Animate life does not simply grow up from below; it takes a fresh act of creation from above. Life belongs to God, “for in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

The “great whales,” or more literally the great sea creatures. The surrounding nations told fearful myths of chaos-dragons in the deep, monsters that even the gods dreaded. Genesis calmly notes that God simply made them, like everything else. The dreadful sea-beasts of the pagan imagination are just more of God’s good handiwork.

Here is the first blessing in the whole Bible. God does not merely make life; He blesses it, He speaks well over it, He bids it flourish and grow. The very root is tied to kneeling, the posture of blessing and being blessed. The God of Scripture is a giving God, delighting to see the seas swarm and the skies grow loud with wings, the God who “giveth to all life, and breath, and all things” (Acts 17:25).

“Be fruitful and multiply.” It is a command wrapped in a gift. God gives the creatures the power to make more of their own kind, to fill the world with life upon life. This same blessing will be spoken over man in a few verses, and it echoes on through the whole story of Scripture.

The fifth day ends, and the seas and skies are now alive and full. The refrain of “evening and morning” keeps its faithful beat, closing each day in turn. Two realms are filled; one remains. Tomorrow God will fill the dry land, and crown the whole work with the making of man. Even here the psalmist’s wonder fits: “O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all” (Psalm 104:24).

The land animals now come, and they are sorted into three homely groups: bəhēmāh (the tame livestock that live alongside man), the creeping things, and the wild beasts of the field. Once more, each is made “after his kind.” The house is nearly furnished now, and ready for the one who will keep it. “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10).

The “creeping things,” the small low creatures that move along the ground. God’s care and craftsmanship reach even to the least and lowliest of them. Not one is beneath His notice, for the same Lord who flung the stars into the sky also fashioned the beetle in the grass, and pronounced them all good.

The bell rings yet again, three times over in this one verse: beast after its kind, cattle after their kind, creeping thing after its kind. God made the categories, and He made them to hold. And having filled the land with living things, He looks upon it all and calls it good, the sixth “good” of the chapter, the last before the crown of creation is set in place. “The earth is full of thy riches” (Psalm 104:24).

Until now it has been “Let there be.” Now the tone changes: “Let us make man.” God pauses, as it were, to take counsel within Himself. Man is not flung off carelessly with the rest but purposed, deliberated, willed. And there is the plural again, the same we glimpsed in verse 1, now stepping fully into the open. The seed planted at the beginning has put out its shoot.

Here is the ground of all human worth. Man is not merely a cleverer animal; he alone is stamped with the image of God, able to reason and choose, to love, to create, to know God and be known by Him. Every human being carries this stamp, king and beggar alike. To despise a person is to despise the image of God he bears.

With the image comes a charge: dominion. Man is made to rule the earth, not to ruin it but to govern it as God governs, as a steward who will one day give account to the true King. It is a kingly word, but a kingship held under God, on His behalf, and for the good of what is ruled.

The great word bārāʾ thunders out three times in this single verse: created… created… created. Moses would have us slow down and wonder. And the verse falls into three balanced lines, the first true Hebrew poetry in the Bible, as though creation itself broke into song at the making of man.

“Male and female created he them.” Both the man and the woman bear the divine image, fully, equally, together. Whatever differences of role Scripture will later unfold, here at the foundation is a perfect equality of worth and dignity. The woman is no afterthought and no lesser creature. Here, on the first page, is the great charter of the worth of woman. Our Lord Himself reaches back to this verse to settle the matter of marriage: “he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4).

The word is simply “fill.” (The old word “replenish” once meant just that, “to fill,” not “fill again.”) God hands His image-bearers a fresh and empty world and bids them fill it with life and with homes and with the works of their hands. The filling of the earth God began, He now delights to carry on through us.

This is part of what the old writers called the creation mandate. God gives man not only life but work, to subdue the earth, to bring it under wise and ordered rule. Marriage, family, labor, and culture are all rooted right here, before sin ever entered. Work is not a curse from the fall; it is part of the original “good.” Even in Eden, before there was any thorn, God “put him into the garden… to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15).

“Behold!” A little word that lifts a pointing finger and says, “Look at this, pay attention.” God is about to make a gift, and He wants it noticed. He has given man the whole green earth for food, every seed-bearing plant and fruit tree spread out like a table set for a feast. “He giveth to all life, and breath, and all things” (Acts 17:25), and He loves for His giving to be seen.

The word simply means “food” or “something to eat.” Notice that in the original creation, both man and beast are given plants for food. God provides for every creature He has made. He is not only the Maker but the Feeder, spreading a table in the world He built. (Only later, after the flood, is meat expressly given for food, in 9:3.)

Literally, everything in which there is a “living soul,” every breathing creature. God’s care reaches down to the least of them. Not one beast of the field or bird of the air is forgotten at the table He spreads. The Maker of the vast heavens also feeds the smallest sparrow, a tenderness Jesus Himself points to: “not one of them is forgotten before God” (Luke 12:6). “These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season” (Psalm 104:27).

Six times God has said “good.” Now, looking on the whole finished work together, He says ṭōb məʾōd, “very good,” exceedingly good. Fix this in your heart, for it matters greatly: the world came very good from the hand of God. Whatever ruin and sorrow the next chapter brings, none of it belongs to the original design. Evil is the intruder, the latecomer, the vandal in a house that was built beautiful. And that is our hope too, for “every creature of God is good” (1 Timothy 4:4), and what He made very good He has promised one day to make new.

Notice a small change: it is not just “a sixth day” but “the sixth day,” with the article, as if the days have been building toward this one. The work of creation is finished. The house is built, furnished, and filled; its keeper is made; and God pronounces His blessing over all of it. Tomorrow He rests.