1. IN THE NAME OF THE LORD, THE HISTORY OF CREATION AS GIVEN BY MOSES
GENESIS CHAPTER I
According to the versions of Schmidius and Castellio.
Verses [are in parentheses after the quote]
1. 1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
(1) Namely, in the beginning of time, when as yet there was no time.
And the earth was waste and void, (2) or, according to the interpretation of Castellio, was inert and unformed; that is, was an unordered mass, called by the Ancients, Chaos. 1
And darkness was upon the faces of the abyss, or, as Castellio renders it, the deep was overspread with darkness.
The universe without atmospheres is not a universe but a void, an abyss, and a deep, where is mere darkness. For it is the atmospheres, and especially the ethereal atmospheres, that transmit the solar rays, that is, light; wherefore, without these atmospheres there is a vacuity, a void, or, nothing natural; and hence mere darkness.
And the spirit of God moved upon the faces of the waters, or, according to Castellio, moved to and fro over the waters.
By the Divine Spirit is meant the ether, as may be evident from numerous passages in the Sacred Scripture. 2
When these ethers had been produced, and were incumbent upon the earth, that is, upon its waters which they moved to and fro, or whose surface they reduced to a level by their pressure,
God said, Let there be light; and there was light, (3) or, as Castellio has it, and light existed.
By this is signified that although the sun existed as the first creation of all, yet it was without light, because without atmospheres, which are the supports and vehicles of its rays; but as soon as atmospheres surrounded the earth, which was at first purely aqueous, that is, was fluid consisting of the elements of inert nature, then it began to be illumined, or to be suffused with light.
And when God saw the light that it was good, God distinguished between the light and the darkness, or, He divided the light from, the darkness. (4)
This was done when the aqueous globe--now become a terraqueous globe, or an earth with its ether, or, now encompassed by the ethereal vortex--began to rotate on its axis; for then, as is well known, darkness and light succeeded each other. Wherefore, by this division of light from darkness, is signified that an axillary motion was impressed on the earth. (Concerning the days of creation, see The Word Explained 1445.)
And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (5) Before darkness came into existence by means of the circumvolution of the globe, no light could be predicated of the latter; and before night, no day. For nothing is known and distinguished except from its opposites or contraries. For this reason day is said to come into existence only after darkness or night has first been induced, together with the distinctions of light and shade. It commences, therefore, from the darkness of the deep, and then from light.
But by Day here, and in the following verses of this chapter, is not meant one ordinary day, but the whole space of that time, or that whole time of creation during which the sun--the globe of the future earth--and also the ethereal atmospheres, came into existence. For in the Sacred Scriptures whole periods of time are frequently called a day, as will be seen even more clearly from what follows.
V:
1. In this introductory treatise the paragraphs have been numbered by the translator; in the main work [The Word Explained] they are numbered by the author.
2. The author marks this word "(a)," as though referring to a footnote; but no such note is found in the manuscript. See The Worship and Love of God 9, note.
The Worship and Love of God 38 note, where some of these passages are cited. See n. 15 below.
