As I mentioned in a previous post, John Walton’s 2003 discussion of Genesis 1 has gotten a lot of biblicablogger attention recently. I assume that this presentation’s online availability accounts for its (as opposed to Walton’s commentary, for example) role as stimulus. I also mentioned John Hobbins’s reaction, though I didn’t interact extensively with Hobbins (I’m using his last name to distinguish John Hobbins from John Walton) in my previous post.

Both Walton and Hobbins give some (but, Walton cautions, not exclusive!) attention to the word ברא, and I’d like to follow their lead in doing so here. ברא lies behind the English word “create” in Genesis 1:1 and several other passages, hence the interest in it.

In his presentation, Walton repeats the common observation that ברא is “[n]ever used in context[s] where materials are mentioned.” From this observation, many interpreters have drawn the conclusion that ברא specifically implies creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”). Walton criticizes this view for resting on a presupposition that ברא means making a thing. Hobbins agrees with Walton that ברא does not denote creation out of nothing, but disagrees with Walton’s limiting of ברא to the defintion “to establish a function, to assign a role.”

For my own part, I am not quite convinced that the assertion that ברא is “[n]ever used in context[s] where materials are mentioned” is entirely correct. Such “absolute” claims sometimes stumble over attempts to define exactly what constitutes the “context” and exactly what constitutes “materials.” The most obviously disputable case is Genesis 1 itself, where it is eminently reasonable to regard the waters of the תהום as the “raw materials” from which everything else is fashioned; those waters are taken as a given in Genesis 1, and creation proceeds for a time by a process of dividing and differentiating that cosmic ocean. You can’t really say “never” while such a big case remains debatable. But other cases are debatable as well. Consider Numbers 16:30:

‏וְאִם־בְּרִיאָה יִבְרָא יְהוָה וּפָצְתָה הָאֲדָמָה אֶת־פִּיהָ וּבָלְעָה אֹתָם

But if Adonai creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up …

In this text, God ברא-s an event, but one could argue that the earth provides a “raw material” for the creation of that event (the event couldn’t happen without the presence of the earth). Similarly, God נרא-s an event (even if its nature is not quite clear to us) in Jeremiah 31:22:

‏כִּי־בָרָא יְהוָה חֲדָשָׁה בָּאָרֶץ נְקֵבָה תְּסוֹבֵב גָּבֶר

For Adonai has created something new in the land: a woman surrounds [?] a man.

Again, the object of ברא is an event rather than a material object, but this event presupposes the existence of certain actors who could be considered “raw materials” (not that I want to objectify people, but you get my point). Similarly, on some occasions, ברא seems to indicate the transformation of something from one thing into another:

‏הֵן אָנֹכִי בָּרָאתִי חָרָשׁ

נֹפֵחַ בְּאֵשׁ פֶּחָם

וּמוֹצִיא כְלִי לְמַעֲשֵׂהוּ
וְאָנֹכִי בָּרָאתִי מַשְׁחִית לְחַבֵּל

See, I created the smith,
who blows on the coals of fire
and produces a weapon for its task,
and I created the destroyer to destroy.
(Isaiah 54:16)

‏כִּי־אִם־שִׂישׂוּ וְגִילוּ עֲדֵי־עַד
אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי בוֹרֵא
כִּי הִנְנִי בוֹרֵא אֶת־יְרוּשָׁלִַם גִּילָה
וְעַמָּהּ מָשׂוֹשׂ

But be glad and rejoice forever
for what I am creating,
since I am creating Jerusalem to be a joy
and its people to be a delight.
(Isaiah 65:18)

These latter two examples provide some support for Walton’s explanation of ברא, because they involve taking something that’s already there—a person or group—and transforming it into something else, e.g., from an unskilled worker into a smith or a depression-inducing Jerusalem into a joy-inducing Jerusalem. But these “transformative” uses of ברא also belie the whole “no materials” bit, because materials of a sort do seem to be implied: the person who was not a smith is the raw material from which God makes a smith, and the old Jerusalem is the raw material from which God makes the new Jerusalem—unless we wish to believe that [Deutero- and Trito-]Isaiah believed that God made blacksmiths and cities pop into existence ex nihilo.

No, ברא does not denote creation ex nihilo. The two Johns and I agree on this point.

But Walton goes further than this (or at least seems to), and argues that ברא has nothing to do with creating things at all—or at least that is how both Hobbins and I understood his presentation. In support of his thesis that ברא means “to establish a function, to assign a role,” Walton cites certain objects that ברא takes in the Tanakh:

- People groups (Ps 102:19; Ezek 21:35)
- Jerusalem (Isa 65:18)
- Phenomena (wind, fire, cloud, destruction, calamity, darkness)
- Abstractions (righteousness, purity, praise)
- People male and female (5:2)

Of these objects, Walton says, “I mean, look at all those categories. These are all functional things, the way things work, they way they are ordered, the way they fit into the cosmic operation.” Yet it seems to me that Walton’s categories don’t firmly support his conclusion. Some instances of ברא fit in very well with Walton’s suggestion; see Isa 54:16; 65:18 above. Yet other instances don’t fit so well. Consider Walton’s category of “phenomena” in relation to one possible example for that category, Exodus 34:10:

‏נֶגֶד כָּל־עַמְּךָ אֶעֱשֶׂה נִפְלָאֹת אֲשֶׁר לֹא־נִבְרְאוּ בְכָל־הָאָרֶץ וּבְכָל־הַגּוֹיִם

Before all your people I will do wonders that have not been created in all the earth or in any nation.

Now besides putting a chink in the armor of the old claim that ברא only takes God as a subject (as Hobbins noted, the ברא N[iphal] never takes God as a subject, and here the author even flirts with the idea that someone other than God could, just maybe, “create” a “wonder”), this example seems to prevent us from accepting Walton’s definition of ברא for all cases. For Walton’s definition to work everywhere, the following translation would have to make sense:

Before all your people I will do wonders that have never been assigned a role in all the earth or in any nation.

I don’t know about you, but I get a chuckle out of imagining homeless “wonders” tripping around the ancient Near East looking for work, “existing” in some sense, but functionless until ברא-ed.

Don’t just take my subjective impression for proof, though. To my mind, the strongest argument against limiting ברא to Walton’s definition lies in poetry, in the terms which biblical poets set in parallel with ברא. Consider the following cases, and note the parallelism:

‏כֹּל הַנִּקְרָא בִשְׁמִי …
וְלִכְבוֹדִי בְּרָאתִיו
יְצַרְתִּיו אַף־עֲשִׂיתִיו

… all who are called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.
(Isaiah 43:7)

‏יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ …
עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא רָע

… the one forming light and creating darkness,
the one making weal and creating woe …
(Isaiah 45:7)

“Created” (ברא) stands in synonymous parallelism with “formed” (יצר) and “made” (עשה) in other passages, too. Given these data, I cannot possibly agree that ברא means “to assign a function” to the exclusion of meaning “to create, form, make.”

In any event, focusing on the semantics of ברא tightens the focus a bit too narrowly. In the vocabulary of Genesis 1, God “created” (ברא) the heavens and the earth (v. 1), the tanninim (v. 21), and humankind (v. 27), but God “made” the sky-dome (v. 7), the celestial “lights” (v. 16), and the (non-human) animals (v. 25). I wrote “but” in the preceding sentence, but I really think this is a distinction without a difference. Consider the creation of humanity in Genesis 1:

‏וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ וְיִרְדּוּ בִדְגַת הַיָּם וּבְעוֹף הַשָּׁמַיִם וּבַבְּהֵמָה וּבְכָל־הָאָרֶץ וּבְכָל־הָרֶמֶשׂ הָרֹמֵשׂ עַל־הָאָרֶץ׃
‎‏וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם׃

And God said, “Let us make [עשה] humankind in our image, according to our likeness …” So God created [ברא] humankind …

In my opinion, we must conclude that the author of Genesis 1 used ברא and עשה as synonyms. If so, then the whole “assignment of function” argument cannot stand or fall with ברא alone, but also with עשה. This weakens Walton’s point even further, if he really wants to eliminate “making things” from the semantic range of ברא. It just won’t work.

(Please note that I am aware of Walton’s response to John Hobbins on Hobbins’s blog, and I will comment on that response in due course. At this stage of analysis, I think that Walton overplays his hand, but I very much appreciate his efforts to understand Genesis 1 in an ancient Near Eastern context and with an ancient Near Eastern mindset.)