The Art of Tension: Genesis 1:2

Every story has tension, and we are going to see how our author introduces it in the very second sentence of the Bible.

You may be thinking to yourself, “I thought the tension came in with Adam and Eve eating from the tree in the garden.” That is true; that is the major tension of the story. But there is also a minor tension, and that comes right here in the second verse of Genesis 1. In the first verse, our narrator introduces the main character, God, and his first action: creating the heavens and the earth. Then, in the second verse, our narrator immediately focuses our attention on the second half of that pairing, heaven and earth. He focuses our attention squarely on the earth.

This is what he says:

And the earth was without form and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.

Notice that he does not say, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the heavens…” and then proceed to tell us all about the heavens. We are not focused up there. We are focused in on the earth and the action that happens there. Why? Because that is going to be the main location of the story. This is where the action is going to happen, both in Genesis and in the rest of the grand narrative. We get to poke our heads into heaven sometimes, but only rarely. We are earthbound people.

Three Problems on the Earth

Now, the author tells us three points of tension—three incompletenesses, if you will. I am not sure what the best description is, but there are three things about the earth that need to change: it is formless, meaning the landscape does not yet have good architecture for living beings; it is empty; and it is dark.

When we are looking at something very familiar to us, we have to have tools by which we can enter into it anew, so that we can see the thing with fresh eyes. Often, if we know a passage very well, we think we know what is going on, when really we are just sliding over all the particularities that are actually there. One of the tools you can use is asking: What didn’t the author say? Or, to put it another way, What could the author have said, but didn’t?

Let us try this out on our text. Our author could have said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth did not yet have water.” But he did not say that. He could have, because at some point in the process of creation it did not have water. But no, we want to stop after the water and pick up the story from there. Or our author could have said, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but the earth did not yet revolve around the sun.” No, he did not say that either.

As you can see, he stops and slows down the narrative at the exact point where we have these three specific problems to deal with: formlessness, emptiness, and darkness.

So then the great question is: Why these three problems? The author has chosen them because, in the six days of creation, these are the very problems that our main character will solve. These are the problems that he will fix.

The Operatic Overture

That is a partial answer, but the fuller answer is this: Genesis 1 is like an operatic overture. In an opera, you have an overture that gathers all the main musical themes in the whole work. You get a preview, a taste, getting you ready for all of these great songs.

Shakespeare uses this exact technique as well. For instance, in Romeo and Juliet, the first time Romeo and Juliet meet in act 2, Shakespeare positions Romeo on the ground and Juliet up on the balcony. They are separated by space: Juliet is above, and Romeo is below. Romeo starts out with those famous words: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.” And as they go on, in a perfect emblem of love, they compose a sonnet together with their dialogue, line by line.

Then the nurse calls Juliet from inside the house to come back in. She does this right when Juliet is talking about the boundlessness and infinite nature of her love. In a masterful piece of art, what Shakespeare is doing is encapsulating the whole play in this single scene. The entire drama is about the inability of this perfect love to be realized because of this family and their names, demanding things of these two lovers. This barrier is shown emblematically by the nurse calling Juliet back into the house, interrupting this infinite love at their very first meeting. As their beginning is, so will their end be. They want so badly to cross that space to be together, but the demands of the family will not allow them.

Genesis 1 works the same way. You have the whole story of the Bible, and of Genesis, encapsulated in this one chapter.

Poised in the Darkness

So where does this leave us? Let us briefly look at the three points of tension and where our author sets us up before the creation week begins:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.

Those first two points of tension are an exquisite Hebrew word pairing. It sounds like this: the earth was tohu va-vohu. They are exquisite because both in their sound and in their structure, they denote what they actually mean. That is to say, they are trying to communicate formlessness, and they sound almost the same. Their form is unable to distinguish them from one another, which is precisely the state of the earth. It is formless, it is empty, and it is dark.

“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” The Spirit of God, or the wind of God, or the breath of God—do not choose between them; he intends all of them. The Spirit of God is poised. Poised to do what? He is poised in the darkness to fix these problems across the creation week.

And that is where the narrative leaves us, waiting for the work to begin.

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