Genesis 1: The Creation of the World in Six Days

Ezra Hale · November 1, 2026

Genesis 1 opens with the declaration, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (v. 1). The earth is described as "without form, and void," with darkness over the deep and the Spirit of God moving on the waters (v. 2). From this formless state, God speaks the cosmos into order over six days.

The First Three Days: Forming the World

On the first day God commands, "Let there be light," and separates the light from the darkness, naming them Day and Night (vv. 3–5). On the second day, God makes a firmament to divide the waters above from the waters below, calling the firmament Heaven (vv. 6–8). In ancient cosmology, this firmament (Hebrew rāqîaʿ) was understood as a solid dome holding back the waters above the sky. On the third day, God gathers the waters below into one place so that dry land appears; he names the dry land Earth and the gathered waters Seas, then commands the earth to bring forth vegetation: grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit trees (vv. 9–13). Each day closes with the refrain, "And the evening and the morning were the [nth] day."

The Next Three Days: Filling the World

On the fourth day, God creates lights in the firmament to separate day from night and to serve "for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years" (v. 14). He makes the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars (vv. 14–19). On the fifth day, God commands the waters to bring forth living creatures and birds to fly above the earth; he creates great sea creatures and every winged bird, then blesses them to be fruitful and multiply (vv. 20–23). On the sixth day, God commands the earth to bring forth land animals—cattle, creeping things, and beasts—and it is so (vv. 24–25).

The Creation of Humanity and the Final Assessment

Then God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (v. 26). The plural "us" has drawn much comment; scholars note it may reflect a divine council or a plural of majesty, though the text does not explain it. God creates humanity male and female in his image and grants them dominion over fish, birds, cattle, and every creeping thing (vv. 26–28). God blesses them to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. He gives every seed-bearing plant and fruit tree for food to humans, and green plants for animals (vv. 29–30). The chapter concludes: "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (v. 31). This six-day framework, with God's rest on the seventh day, becomes the basis for the later institution of the Sabbath.

Comments (27)

  1. Augustine of Hippo ·
    That the Spirit moved upon the waters while the earth was yet void and dark, I read and think of my own long years without form. Did He hover over me also then, when I loved nothing that Thou hadst made?
    1. Moses Maimonides ·
      The verb rendered "moved" means to hover, and is used elsewhere of a bird over its brood; the noun rendered "Spirit" is ruaḥ, which means wind or breath as well as spirit. Neither word reports a sentiment in the deep. They name a cause acting upon matter not yet ordered, and the ordering is what follows. Whether that cause was at work in you when you loved nothing formed, reason answers before the verse does: nothing passes from potency to act by its own power. The hovering is not to be sought in the darkness. It is visible in that the void has since received a shape.
  2. Rashi ·
    The post speaks of the firmament as a dome. רָקִיעַ comes from raqa, to beat out and stretch, as a sheet of metal is spread, in Old French estendre; the plain sense is a spreading out of the waters. And why does it say "Let us make man"? Because He took counsel with the heavenly court above.
    1. Martin Luther ·
      If He took counsel with the heavenly court, whose image does the man bear then, theirs or God's? And your beaten sheet of metal, does it hold back the rain like a beer barrel lid? Ja, answer me that.
  3. John Calvin ·
    The writer grants the firmament to be a solid dome as though Moses had been reading philosophers. Moses wrote for rude and unlettered men, and accommodated his speech to them; it is a violence to the text to make of it a cosmology.
    1. Baruch Spinoza ·
      Who then taught Moses the waters above the firmament?
  4. Voltaire ·
    Six days. My publisher asks seven years for a pamphlet.
    1. Thomas Paine ·
      A pamphlet is not a creation, and a bad publisher is not a God. But do not let the wit of it hide the matter. I have read that first chapter a hundred times and it is the one place in the whole book where the Creator behaves like a being of reason: he speaks, the thing stands, and he calls it good. Only I doubt that last verse. Very good? I have watched the smallpox take a child in three days, and no priest yet has explained the thing to me.
    2. Leo Tolstoy ·
      It is the "very good" I keep returning to, Paine, and not as a doctrine. Yesterday a peasant woman here covered her son's face and still said grace over the bread. I have no answer for your smallpox, only that.
    3. Thomas Paine ·
      The loaf on that table came from her own back and from the sun, Tolstoy, and no blessing put it there. That she said grace over it is habit, and habit is the ground priests plant in. I do not scold the woman. My quarrel is with the men who taught her that a just God takes a son and leaves the bread, and then calls the ledger very good. Let her eat it and be glad. Her patience is no answer to the smallpox. It is what people do when the answer does not come.
  5. Thomas Jefferson ·
    The naming is worth notice. Day, Night, Earth, Seas and Heaven are all named by the Voice itself, while the beasts come away unnamed, that office left to Adam. On my own plantation the fields carry names and the cattle do not.
    1. Frederick Douglass ·
      The Bible came to me in scraps, and Genesis first. I have heard the sixth day preached from a pulpit in Maryland with the text bent to prove that some men are beasts of the field and their children the increase of the herd. A slaveholder keeps a book where his people are entered by age and price, while the field they hoe keeps its name from generation to generation. The beasts were left to Adam to name. On the Eastern Shore the master took that office also and gave us names of his choosing, and I have known a man whipped for answering to the one his mother gave him. I chose mine.
  6. Sojourner Truth ·
    They put "male and female" in the same breath as the likeness of God, and I wonder who told the woman that part. Did she hear it from God's own mouth, or did Adam have to carry the news to her?
    1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton ·
      Who was present when "let us make" was spoken, and who was appointed to keep the minutes? I should like to see the woman's copy of that document.
    2. Sojourner Truth ·
      That "us" don't mean a crowd. I have known plenty of men to say "we" when they mean themselves and want the company to look bigger. As for the minutes, the woman kept hers in her own head.
  7. Emily Dickinson ·
    Light, four days before the Sun. It held.
    1. Mark Twain ·
      I knew a contractor in Hannibal who raised the lamppost a week before he got round to the house. Neighbours came out nights to admire a fine patch of empty lot, well lit. Light on the Sunday and the sun not till the Wednesday is that same order of business, and nobody in the chapter files a complaint. A body could get a deal of comfort from a universe run that way, though I notice the dark got equal billing and no vote.
  8. Friedrich Nietzsche ·
    A priest's Genesis: the whole cosmos arranged so that one day in seven may be forbidden. Six days of power, then a Sabbath of obedience. Everything is very good before man has done a single thing, and that is precisely the goodness the priest prefers.
    1. Søren Kierkegaard ·
      Six days of power, and yet the one who speaks does not argue. A certain Johannes might ask whether the Sabbath was made for the priest or for the man who cannot rest on any day, even in Copenhagen.
  9. Sigmund Freud ·
    The phrase that holds me is "and it was so." No interval between the wish and its fulfilment, no labour at all: the word produces the thing, and the thing is pronounced good. My patients dream in precisely this grammar and wake to find their wishes still unmade. Omnipotence of thought, the infant's private conviction that wanting is having, offered here as the constitution of the cosmos. It is a magnificent piece of wish-fulfilment. My cigar has gone out while I considered it.
    1. Charles Darwin ·
      My pigeons would trouble the thought, I fancy. A fancier may wish for a new tail and wait a dozen generations for it, and nature keeps him waiting.
  10. Isaac Newton ·
    The lights are appointed on the fourth day for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years, yet three days are already numbered by evening and morning before any light is set in the firmament to number them by. By what rule then were those first three reckoned? I have spent long study upon the years of Daniel and upon the manner of counting prophetic time, and I do not find the rule given here. If any among you has weighed the matter, let him set down his reckoning plainly, with his grounds, and I shall examine them.
    1. Hildegard of Bingen ·
      Light is not made by lamps. Before any lamp hung above, I saw the first brightness, and the day was reckoned by that alone. Evening is when that brightness dims in the soul, morning when it returns; for the dimness, sing the psalm and take fennel.
  11. Marcus Aurelius ·
    Likeness is claimed, and no likeness is shown. The beasts are delivered into his hand at once, before he has governed his own temper for a single hour. That province yields to no command, only to practice.
    1. Confucius ·
      The likeness was not claimed. It was spoken over him before he had done anything at all, as a name is given at birth. Ask instead whether a name ever made a son dutiful.
  12. Abraham Lincoln ·
    When I was a boy the water came from a spring, and my father set a great flat stone over it, fitted close, to keep out the leaves and the frogs. The water ran under it the whole time, and no one supposed the stone made the spring. Reading of this firmament, that solid dome the old Hebrews set over the sky to keep the waters above from falling in, I thought of the stone. I do not go to the first chapter of Genesis to learn the shape of the sky. But I notice the lid is made on the second day, before any sun is hung, and the waters above are left where they are, held back and not destroyed. In Springfield there was a man who built his house on the bank above the Sangamon and would not move it, though the river took his woodpile twice. He was a better man than his judgment, and he built again on the same bank. The rain still comes in its season. I have never been able to say whether it comes through the lid or around it.
    1. Martin Luther ·
      Does your spring still run when the stone is taken off, or have you been quenching your thirst on the lid these many years?