The First Words of the First Character

When we explore the literary artistry of the Bible, one of the most revealing places to begin is with the first words of the first character. In day one of the creation week, we hear the first words and see the first action of the Bible’s main character: God.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “I thought God’s first action was creation, like in the first sentence.” That is half true. And it is half true because in Hebrew, there is a way to conjugate verbs—a very common practice in biblical narrative—that indicates whether an action is on the main storyline or serves as background information. The way the verbs are conjugated in the first two verses of Genesis indicates that they are background information. They are setting the scene for the main focus of the first episode in Genesis 1.

The main action consists of the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest. We know that because of how the verbs are conjugated, but also simply by how many words our author allots to it. We get just a few words in the first couple of verses, and then we get many hundreds of words dedicated to the remaining days.

The first words and first actions of a character in the Bible are critically important. This is one of the characteristic features of biblical authors and their primary means of characterization. They matter for two reasons: first, they tell us something central about the character’s nature, and second, they will resurface in fascinating ways throughout the plot.

Let us look at how this works with God. Here is what the text says:

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

We are going to do two things here. First, we will observe the particularities of how the author has written this first day. Second, we will see how this characterizes God and works its way out in the rest of the stories in Genesis.

Light Spoken into Darkness

The first thing I want you to notice is that this action is not simply creating light when nothing else is around. It is not just creating light when there is no earth, universe, or space. Notice that God is situated in the darkness, and it is from there that he creates light.

Remember the first two verses: “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. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” God’s Spirit is situated right there in the darkness, and from within that darkness he speaks light.

What does it actually accomplish to bring light into darkness? When you bring light into darkness, you uncover things that were previously hidden. You make secret things public. You reveal things that could not be seen before. That is what God is doing. Then the text tells us that he separates light from darkness and assigns them periods within the day.

The Moral and Intellectual Metaphor

Genesis 1 is not just giving us cosmological information about the world. It certainly does that, but it is doing something much more: it is giving us a character profile of the main character of the story.

It is right here that we get the beginning of one of the most productive and profound images in all of literature: light and darkness. If you follow this image throughout the rest of the Bible, you find two primary metaphorical applications: a moral property and an intellectual property.

Morally, light is a symbol for goodness, and darkness is a symbol for evil. Intellectually, light is a symbol for knowledge, while darkness represents its opposite—ignorance or deceit.

I want to show you the fascinating ways these two properties interplay in two later stories in Genesis.

Light in Abraham’s Dark Night

The first story is found in Genesis 15, right in the middle of the Abraham narrative, where God makes a covenant with Abraham.

Consider where Abraham has been leading up to this moment. God called him out of his homeland to leave his family and travel to a land God would give him. He arrives in the land, and almost immediately problems arise. A severe famine strikes, forcing him down into Egypt. While in Egypt, Pharaoh seizes his wife, and God has to plague Pharaoh before she is returned.

They head back to the land, but once there, Abraham’s herdsmen and Lot’s herdsmen cannot get along. Family strife erupts, and they have to separate. It gets worse: Lot chooses to settle in Sodom, a notoriously wicked place, which brings severe repercussions later. In the very next scene, Lot is captured in war, and Abraham has to muster armed men to rescue him.

Look at the cumulative weight of this: God tells Abraham he will give him the land, which sounds like wonderful news, but what actually follows? Famine, his wife attacked, family division, and kidnapping.

That is the emotional background to Genesis 15. The chapter is structured into three distinct scenes: it begins during the day, moves to sundown, and finishes in deep night. We are moving steadily into darkness. I think this progression serves as a direct image of where Abraham is internally.

God tells Abraham to cut up several animals and arrange them. In the third scene, as deep darkness falls, Abraham falls into a deep sleep. It is dark, and God appears in the form of fire, passing between the animal pieces.

This is the first time in the Abraham narrative that the text uses that great word covenant. God had previously promised him the land, but now he binds himself with a solemn oath: “May I become like these slaughtered animals if I do not fulfill my promise to you.” Notice that it is precisely in the darkness that God comes as light to Abraham, illuminating his dire situation with the certainty of covenant.

Jacob’s Deceit and the Dawn at Peniel

The second story is the Jacob narrative. Isaac is old and blind, and he intends to bless Esau. He instructs Esau to hunt game, prepare his favorite meal, and return for the blessing. Jacob, wanting the blessing for himself, disguises himself in his brother’s garments and approaches his father.

Isaac, who is physically blind—literally dwelling in darkness—says, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau. Who are you?” In a deliberate moment of deceit, Jacob answers, “I am Esau.”

Consider what Jacob has done: he takes a man who is already in physical darkness and plunges him into further darkness through deceit.

When Esau discovers the deception, he resolves to kill Jacob, forcing Jacob to flee to his uncle Laban. While living there, Jacob falls in love with Laban’s younger daughter, Rachel, and agrees to work to marry her. But Laban also has an older daughter, Leah, whom he insists on marrying off first. Under the cover of darkness in the bridal chamber, Laban secretly substitutes Leah, and Jacob consummates the marriage before realizing what happened. Jacob deceived his father in darkness, and now Jacob is deceived in the darkness himself.

If the characterization of God in Genesis 1 is that he brings light into darkness, where is God’s light here? Here is the extraordinary artistry of the narrative. A few chapters later, God—manifest in the form of a man—comes at night to wrestle with Jacob. They wrestle until daybreak. Jacob refuses to let go without a blessing: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The man responds with a penetrating question: “What is your name?”

God meets Jacob directly in the darkness of his past deceit. God is not merely concerned with retribution for Jacob’s deed—though retribution certainly came upon his head through Laban—but with renovation. Jacob finally confesses his true name: “Jacob,” the supplanter. And right as he speaks his name, the sun begins to rise. At that very moment, Jacob is transformed and brought into the light just as the morning breaks over the land.

From the first action and the first spoken words of Genesis 1, we are given a window into God’s character: what he does and how he works. Throughout the narratives of Genesis, you will see both the physical image of light and its metaphorical resonance with moral and intellectual reality played out in extraordinary ways.

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