Creation out of Hovering

How does a new thing begin? By what means does order emerge from the void? To read the beginning of the book of Genesis, it seems a matter of divine will, God’s decision to speak and say, “let light be.” But perhaps there is something else too, if we look closely enough. Or perhaps we will end up looking too closely, and miss the forest of the plain sense for the variety of the textual trees. That is fine; then this exercise will be something closer to creation than discovery.  But my point in what follows is, in part, precisely that: that creation comes through discovery.

“The earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept upon the waters.” (Genesis 1:2 [NRSV with minor modification, here and elsewhere]) The earth, the darkness, the watery deep: These all have their place in the creation story that follows. But what is the nature or role of the “wind” or “spirit” (רוח), and why is it attributed to God? Some medieval commentators (Rashbam, Ibn Ezra, Radaq) suggest that the wind is the means by which the waters are gathered on the third day to expose dry land, just as God will later employ a strong east wind to split the sea during the exodus from Egypt (Ex 14:21). On this approach, the attribution of the wind to God indicates the wind’s power, or the fact that it serves God’s purpose. The Bible’s silence about a role for wind on the third day of creation is a challenge for this line of interpretation.

Rashi, drawing on the rabbis, instead sees a reference to God’s throne, hovering over the waters by dint of a breath from God, “like a dove hovering over its nest.” The notion that the wind or spirit of God is bird-like finds support from the story of Noah. The flood returns the world to chaos, and afterward comes, as it were, a new creation. How does this new creation begin? Noah famously sends out a raven, then a dove, and readers often suppose that the two birds serve the same function, to determine whether the floodwaters have receded. But, as scholars have noted, the Bible in fact ascribes this function only to the sending of the dove (Gen 8:7). In the case of the raven, “it went to and fro until the waters were dried up from the earth.”  That is to say, the back-and-forth movement of the raven is itself, evidently, what turns the tide, and enables order to reemerge after the flood. The reference to the drying up of the waters in Gen 8:7 (and even more to the point, in Gen 8:1) does support the approach that sees the wind in Gen 1:2 as a drying agent, but in the main, when we read Gen 1:2 and Gen 8:7 together, we emerge, following Rashi, with a bird-like spirit in Gen 1:2, whose subtle movement somehow sets creation as a whole (and not just the confining of the waters on the third day) in motion.

How does this happen? We find elsewhere an association of birds with the void or wilderness. According to Moses’ song at the end of his life, God supported Israel “in a desert land, in a howling wilderness waste” (Deut 32:8). The song offers an ornithological simile (Deut 32:9): “as an eagle stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions.” Here then, as in Genesis 1, a hovering bird is linked to the waste, the chaos, the wilderness. Again, the psalmist (Ps 55:6-7), in distress, expresses the wish, “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest. Truly, I would flee far away, I would lodge in the wilderness.”

I want to suggest that the hovering bird, or the bird moving to and fro, participates in two similar but distinct images. The first image is simply of the bird in its natural habitat, the air, which is no place at all, a trackless wilderness. At this point it is helpful to reflect on the creation of the birds in Genesis 1 and 2. According to Genesis 1, God, on day five, has the sea produce the birds, alongside the fish (Gen 1:20). In Genesis 2, by contrast, God forms the birds, along with the land animals, from the earth (Gen 2:19).  (The rabbis solve the contradiction thus, in Bavli Hullin 27b: The birds’ origin lies in the alluvial mud, where the sea meets the earth.)  Likewise, the birds created in Gen 1:20 are said to fly both “over the earth” and “upon the firmament of the heavens,” while the spirit of Gen 1:2 hovers “upon the waters.” These inconsistencies point us to the fact birds’ natural place, the air, is a no-place.  The bird in flight—the bird when it realizes its essence as a bird—is a creature of the void, a creature in suspense.  We think of Job 26:7: “He hangs the earth upon nothing.” This, then, is the first image: the bird in flight, suspended upon nothing. At the same time, the suspended bird, the hovering bird, is also—and this is the second image—a bird over its nest.  In addition to Moses’ song, we might think of Isa 31:5: “Like birds hovering overhead, so the Lord of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare and rescue it.”  (Note, however, that here, unlike Gen 1:2 and Deut 32:9, the verbal root in Hebrew is not רחף but עוף.)

We thus arrive at the magic of the hovering spirit of God in Gen 1:2. We see in it two superimposed images: the bird suspended over nothingness, and the bird hovering over its nest. In the overlap of these images, the nothingness becomes a nest, becomes generative. The chaos begins to order itself. Creation emerges, then, through the discovery that the void and the nest coincide in relation to the hovering bird.