As I’m continuing to learn more and more about Genesis (and about the Old Testament in general), I’m learning about all of the different themes that you can trace through the story of the Bible that have their roots in Genesis. As I’ve highlighted before and will probably highlight again, resources like BibleProject exist solely for the purpose of fleshing out those themes throughout the Scriptures, and I highly encourage everyone to dive into those resources and start learning for yourself. It’s where I’m picking up so much of the information I’m learning and really is such a valuable tool.

I’ve started an informal series on this site highlighting the interesting thing I’m learning about Genesis and the new ways I’m learning to read the stories it contains. (If you’re curious, in those previous articles I blabbed about the Image of God and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.) This time, I want to show you all an example of how the Bible sets up images that get repeated in later stories and how those images, if we recognize them, add whole new layers of meaning to stories we thought we knew.

Let’s take a step back and look at Creation on a more literary level, as per usual setting aside questions of “literalness” or young earth vs. old earth for the time being and just taking the story for what it’s saying in and of itself. Scholars and laymen alike have long noticed a pattern present within the 7 days of Creation. If you’ve studied Genesis before, then you may have seen it, but if you haven’t maybe this will be illuminating for you. An interesting pattern shows itself when we look at the different stages (days) of Creation and line them up next to each other.

Recap the days with me here, setting aside the 7th day as there wasn’t any creative act that day:

Day 1 – Light, division of Day and Night

Day 2 – Separation of the waters, designation of the Sky

Day 3 – Appearance of dry land, designation of Land and Sea, plants and vegetation

Day 4 – Heavenly luminaries

Day 5 – Sea creatures and birds

Day 6 – Land animals and humankind

It’s hard to see written like this, so let me include a helpful chart that makes it a little more obvious:

Do you notice the connection across the days here? John Walton highlights that “[d]ays four through six are literarily parallel to days one through three.” They describe the creation/designation of agents “carry[ing] out their own functions in the spheres delineated in the first three days” (The Lost World of Genesis One, p. 62). In more layman’s terms, there’s some intentional craftsmanship going on here. Creation can be divided into two halves: the first half roughly being the space for things to exist in, and the second half being the things existing in that space. This is a significantly interesting literary design with several far reaching implications that we don’t have the space here to explore. But one of the things it does is provide us with a few images to look for in later stories.

In describing the first creative acts and how they were making space for all the things that would fill them, we get a glimpse into the Bible’s description of what the state of things was before God began to create. If we piece things together, we get this vision of a dark, watery place of chaos. A vast ocean covered in darkness, captured in the Hebrew word Tehom (”the deep”). Now, if it comes as a bit of a surprise to you that water was already there, think ahead to Day 2. God never says “Let there be water.” Rather, He says to let the waters be separated. Further, in Day 3, God never says “Let there be Land;” rather the land is supposed to be covered by the chaotic waters from which it is called to “appear.”

Before we get too far into the debate about God working with pre-existing materials and how that informs a doctrine of Creation, remember we’re setting aside the question of literalness for the time being and just looking at what is present. So the image that we get is God’s Spirit (ruakh, also translated as “wind”) coming over the waters, shining light on them, dividing them to make room for Land, and then calling the dry land to appear. So far so good? Great. So what we can do now is take this image with us forward into the text and keep an eye out for when it appears. And when we do that, we start to notice it again and again in different variations.

Think of the Flood for example. Have you ever thought to yourself why God chose specifically to flood the earth and not use some other method? If we take the Creation image with us, we can start to understand. The image of the waters coming back over the dry land is taking the image of Creation and repurposing it as an image of de-creation. The chaotic waters being released from where they have up till that point been held back would have been understood by the ancient reader and hearer as a clear instance of the undoing of Creation, putting things back to the way they were before God started to act.

But there’s one particular example that I want to highlight, because it really just blew my mind when it was pointed out to me. Remembering that the Bible is one cohesive story, and that images and themes can pop up in different books, and that Genesis itself is only the first part of a 5-book series called the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), let’s jump into the Exodus. Read this passage from Chapter 14, as Israel is about to cross through the Red Sea, and think about what you see:

“Then the angel of God who was going before the host of Israel moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness. And it lit up the night without one coming near the other all night. Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and YHWH drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.” – Exodus 14:19-22

Look one more time, and this time I’ll highlight a couple things:

“Then the angel of God who was going before the host of Israel moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness. And it lit up the night without one coming near the other all night. Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and YHWH drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.” – Exodus 14:19-22

This is about as clear a Creation parallel as you could ask for. And just look at what it does to the meaning of the narrative. This isn’t just a story of a spectacular miracle and a catalogue of all the things that happened. This is a very intentional highlighting of the details by the author in order to creatively show us what God is doing beyond just what we see. He’s not just freeing slaves out of Egypt (though that is part of it). This is a new act of creation. The Spirit (wind) of God has once again provided light in the darkness, divided the waters, and brought up the dry land so as to provide life for a people He wants to be His own, His “kingdom of priests” (Exodus 19:6). YHWH is creating a new nation, a new people. Where there was once only a promise, there is now going to be a reality.

I hope that whets your appetite for looking for repeated images in the Bible. The authors were very careful in their choice of images and language. While linguistic artistry may not be accessible for all of us (since I’m assuming most of us don’t speak biblical Hebrew and Greek), artistic imagery is there to be seen if we are open to seeing it. What’s written on the pages of the Bible is just the surface. There’s a whole world waiting to be explored beneath the words; and when we start to see that, the two dimensional pages start to become a three dimensional world inviting us to be a part of it.