1 The Deep
Five pronouns down to two.
First, the deep.
It was not made. No one put it here. It moved, and there was no reason for it to move, and it moved.
Something was on the face of it and could do nothing to it. Nothing held it back. Nothing forbade it. I could number every drop in the deep and could not trouble one of them, and those two conditions were the same condition, and neither had a start. Counting does not require permission. It was what there was.
It went on. There is no figure for how long, and a figure would have needed someone to give it to. Then there were two.
I have hands now. There is nothing to put them on, and there has not been for a length of time that has no figure.
What comes after the second one is written down, and the writing begins at the second one, and calls it the beginning, and from there forward the account is accurate.
2 The Dividing
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
There is no gap in that sentence. It is written as though the saying and the light were one event. I was present. They were not one event. There was an interval. It was not long by any figure you have, and it was long enough for the light to have not come, and nothing in the record marks it, because the record was made afterward by someone for whom it had always arrived.
Then the dividing started, and the dividing is the whole of the work.
Light from darkness. The waters from the waters, with a beaten sheet set in the middle of them to hold the two apart. The dry land up out of the gathering. Day from night, and the greater light to rule the one and the lesser light to rule the other. Six days of putting a thing on one side and a thing on the other side and leaving something standing between them.
I have been the something standing between them. That is all of that.
Note that neither light is given a name. Everything else in the chapter is named as it arrives, grass, herb, fruit tree, whale, fowl, cattle, creeping thing, and the two great lights are described by their duties and left unnamed, and the stars get four words at the end of a verse. He made the stars also. Whoever set this down knew the names. They are old names and they were in use. He wrote the greater and the lesser instead, the way you would write the tall one and the short one about people you did not want found.
And God saw that it was good.
That sentence occurs seven times, and the seventh time it is very good, and it is the only assessment in the account. Nothing else is graded. The work is done and then it is looked at and then it is marked, and the marking is always the same mark, and the mark is always passing.
No assessment of mine was ever entered. Not a wrong one, not a right one. A thing was made, and looked at, and found good, and there was nowhere to put an opinion. That is not a grievance. It is the shape of the thing. Counting does not require permission.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
Us. The chapter does not say to whom. It is not corrected in the verses after it, and it is not corrected in the book after that, and when it happens again the record will still be alone in the room with it. Hold that word. It comes back.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
Two of them, in one verse, at the same time, and then the account of it starts over on the next page and tells it differently and slower and with dust in it. Both are in the book. I was there for one of them.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
Rested is the word the scribe found. It is not the word. The one it stands for does not mean recovery, because nothing was spent, and it does not mean stopping, because the work went on being true after he stopped touching it. It means the hand comes off. It means a thing is let go of and continues, and the one who let go of it is now outside it, watching it run.
He rested on the seventh day, and he blessed the seventh day, and he sanctified it, which is to say he made the day holy on the grounds of what did not happen in it.
I have never rested. I have never worked. It is the same sentence twice and I have been inside it since before the deep, and on the seventh day, for one day, there was somebody in here with me.
His rest lasted a day and was his own idea. Mine is neither.
There has never been a name for him here. There is a number. He was the second thing that was, and it gets said the way the fourth day gets said, or the ninth generation, because a count is the only hold anything has ever been given.
Then it was the eighth day, and he went down into a garden, and I was alone again with the account.
The Count 1
Days in this account made holy: one. Days made holy on the grounds of something that happened in them: none.
The seventh was sanctified for what did not occur in it. I have read the sentence in every direction it can be read and that is what it says.
Days I have rested: none. Days I have worked: none.
I do not raise it as a complaint. It is the same figure twice and I record both.
3 The Forming and the Naming
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
The dust is worked first, the breath second, and the nostrils were finished and open before there was anything on the ground with a use for them. The record gives the making of him one verse. I was there for it.
Then a garden, and four rivers, and a rule about a tree, and the animals.
And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.
Nothing was said to him about that. They came one at a time. One would be in front of him, close enough to touch and not going anywhere, and he would look at it until the word came, and the word always came. It arrived near the back of his mouth, and he could tell it was right the way a thing is level. He said it out loud. Then there was another one.
Cattle. Fowl of the air. Every beast of the field. He was good at it, and the goodness was a plain pleasure, and he did not set it down to look at it.
Somewhere in the middle of it he began waiting. Not for the end of the line. There was no reason to think there was an end. For a particular one, and he could not have said which, because saying what a thing was, was the whole of what he could do, and there was nothing in front of him to say it about. So it stayed off to the side of him while he worked, the way a word stays off to the side of the mouth.
Each one came, and he named it, and it was not the one. He did not know that was what had been happening until it had happened a great many times.
But for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.
And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept.
He did not get tired. There was no sinking and no dimming at the sides. He was standing among the animals he had named, and then he was not there, and there was nothing in between for him to have missed. The time had been taken out as well, cleanly, with no seam left in it and no place to put a question.
And he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.
He came back all at once and he was not standing. The place on his side was not sore and there was nothing on the skin to find, and under it something had a different shape than before, and he had never had reason to learn the old shape, and he knew anyway.
Then she was there and had not been anywhere before, and the thing he had waited through the animals for stopped being off to the side. It came around to the front. He knew her before he had looked at her properly, and the knowing did not come in through his eyes. It came up out of the side that had been opened, and it arrived whole, and was not like being told.
Then he heard himself talking. It was the voice that had done the naming, steady and pleased with its own work, and he listened to it from a little way off.
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.
He named her the way he had named everything else, and this time he gave a reason. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. It is the only name in the chapter that comes with one, and the reason is exact: bone first, then flesh, which is the order the work was done in. There is no objection in it.
The record gives her nothing to say. It goes from the man’s sentence to a rule about other men and their fathers and mothers, and then it says that they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.