From this point of view the first verse strikes the keynote of
the whole. In the beginning "Elohim<11> created the heaven and
the earth." Heaven and earth were not primitive existences from
which the gods proceeded, as the Gentiles taught; on the
contrary, the "Powers" preceded and created heaven and earth.
Whether by "creation" is meant "causing to be where nothing was
before" or "shaping of something which pre-existed," seems to me
to be an insoluble question.

As I have pointed out, the second verse has an interesting
parallel in Jeremiah iv. 23: "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it
was waste and void; and the heavens, and they had no light."
I conceive that there is no more allusion to chaos in the one
than in the other. The earth-disk lay in its watery envelope,
like the yolk of an egg in the glaire, and the spirit, or
breath, of Elohim stirred the mass. Light was created as a thing
by itself; and its antithesis "darkness" as another thing.
It was supposed to be the nature of these two to alternate, and
a pair of alternations constituted a "day" in the sense of an
unit of time.

The next step was, necessarily, the formation of that
"firmament," or dome over the earth-disk, which was supposed to
support the celestial waters; and in which sun, moon, and stars
were conceived to be set, as in a sort of orrery. The earth was
still surrounded and covered by the lower waters, but the upper
were separated from it by the "firmament," beneath which what we
call the air lay. A second alternation of darkness and light
marks the lapse of time.