The mountains rose, the valleys sank down to the place which thou didst appoint for them. Thou didst set a bound which they should not pass.
—Psalm 104
Contrary to popular belief, 1 Genesis, the first Book of Moses, does not tell a story of creation ex nihilo. That it is believed to be such a story is a tribute not so much to misinterpretation as to the power of a certain cosmologic, which dictates that nothing should or must precede the act of creation. But the celebrated opening lines of Genesis suggest otherwise:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.34
Not only does “the deep”—tehom, a term to which we shall have occasion to return—preexist creation, but it already has a “face.” The face itself is not superficial: it is the face “of the waters,” that is, of something quite elemental, and it is determinate enough to be moved over. In the beginning, then, was an elemental mass having sufficient density and shape to be counterposed to the movement of the spirit (or, alternately, the “wind”) of God. If the Deep is nothing, it is, like Chaos, the “nothing substantial,” a strangely substantial nothing!
It is true that the earth is said to be “without form and void.” Is this a reference to the absolute void that cosmological reasoning relentlessly posits? I think not. The void at stake here is the relative void of shapelessness—of something devoid of form. This becomes evident when the text adds, several lines later,
And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. (Gen. 1:9–10)
This passage makes it clear that the first allusion to “earth” is to an indeterminate entity that gains its full identity only when it has become separated from the oceans and other waters. When it has become “dry land,” it deserves the designation “Earth.” From a preformative state, it has come into its own; and at just this moment, God celebrates the fact of its formation as something determinate: He “saw that it was good.” It is notable that the latter clause is used for the first time at just this point in the text, that is to say, when the primordial act of distinguishing land from sea has occurred.
By this act, two places have been created, thereby illustrating a basic principle of cosmo-topo-logy: there is never merely one place anywhere, not even in the process of creation. It is as if cosmogony respected the general rule enunciated by Aristotle in another connection: “the minimum number, strictly speaking, is two.”35 To create in the first place is eo ipso to create two places. This principle is at work in the very first sentence of 1 Genesis (“God created the heavens and the earth”), and it recurs twice again even before the description of the separation of sea and land. First, God “separated the light from the darkness” (1:4), thereby creating two great domains that are not only temporal but spatial in character. Second, the creation of the “firmament,” that is, the vault of the sky, or Heaven, calls for separating “the waters from the waters” (1:6), those of the sea from those of the sky. Two aqueous realms signify two distinct places for water to be.
In the space of a few lines and following the bivalent logic of place-creation, then, we witness a surprisingly complicated beginning of the known world. In effect, Genesis maintains that a twice redoubled doubling of place occurs in the course of creation. For Heaven to become separate from the Earth, the creation of the firmament requires the prior dissociation of two regions of water; and the earth, to be truly Earth, in turn requires a distinction of land from sea. No simple matter this! In particular: no lack of place to begin with!
Thus there is no creation from a void or creation as a void. God is not creating from a preexisting abyss of nothingness. Things are already around when He begins to create—things in the guise of elemental masses, the watery Deep, darkness upon the face of that Deep, the predeterminate earth. Nor does God empty Himself in a kenotic move to constitute a void within His own being. In the germinal account of Genesis there is neither void without nor void within.
In place of the void are places, and all the more so if regions count as places, as surely they must. Already extant are domains of deepness and darkness. Indeed, at play here is the Spirit of God, which in “moving over the face of the waters” must ineluctably be moving among places. For there is no movement without place. As Aristotle says, “There cannot be change without place,”36 and movement is certainly a kind of change. God, in moving over the dark Deep, is already moving over a place as well as between places. He is moving, for example, between the beginning-place and the end-place of his own cosmogonic journey. These ur-places, though unnamed in the text, preexist the more particular places that are named.
In fact, we may distinguish three levels of place within the first chapter of Genesis: (1) the ur-places presupposed by the very activity of God Himself, as sources of His movements; (2) the elemental regions of darkness, the Deep, and the unformed Earth; and (3) the formed regions of Earth as dry land, the Seas as the waters that have been “gathered together into one place,” and the regimes of Day and Night. It is clear that the Old Testament account gives us a picture of creation as arising in an already given plenitude of places; and it describes as well a certain cosmic progression from one place to another—or, more exactly, from one kind of place to another. Creation, in short, is not only of place (and of things stationed in places) but cannot occur without place, including its own place-of-creation. The act of creating takes place in place.
This is not, of course, the whole story. As creation continues, yet other sorts of places emerge. These subsequent or consequent places are progressively more definite in character. They include the places of the sun and the moon, “the two great lights” that “rule over the day and over the night and separate . . . the light from the darkness” (1:14–18); of the birds that “fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens” (1:20); of sea monsters “with which the waters swarm” (1:21); of the “beasts of the earth” (1:25); of “every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth” (1:29); and of the human beings who are given dominion over all of these creatures and things” (1:26–28). When it is added in the second Book of Genesis that “a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground” (2:6) and that “God planted a garden in Eden, in the east” (2:8), we attain a still more definite degree of place-determination, one that now includes quite particular places (i.e., patches of ground) that have proper names and even cardinal directions.
In the progression just sketched, a pattern of cosmogenesis emerges which is common to many theories of creation: rather than from no-place to place simpliciter, the movement is from less determinate to more determinate places. It is only a step farther to call for measurable place as well—as happens, for example, in Job.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?37
The origin of “geometry”—literally, earth-measurement (geō-metria)—lies
