A. Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” To this it has been objected that the verb ברא does not necessarily denote production without the use of preexisting materials (see Gen. 1:27 “God created man in his own image”; _cf._ 2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground”; also Ps. 51:10—“Create in me a clean heart”).
“In the first two chapters of Genesis ברא is used (1) of the creation of the universe (_1:1_); (2) of the creation of the great sea monsters (_1:21_); (3) of the creation of man (_1:27_). Everywhere else we read of God’s _making_, as from an already created substance, the firmament (_1:7_), the sun, moon and stars (_1:16_), the brute creation (_1:25_); or of his _forming_ the beasts of the field out of the ground (_2:19_); or, lastly, of his _building up_ into a woman the rib he had taken from man (_2:22_, margin)”—quoted from Bible Com., 1:31. Guyot, Creation, 30—“_Bara_ is thus reserved for marking the first introduction of each of the three great spheres of existence—the world of matter, the world of life, and the spiritual world represented by man.”
We grant, in reply, that the argument for absolute creation derived from the mere word ברא is not entirely conclusive. Other considerations in connection with the use of this word, however, seem to render this interpretation of Gen. 1:1 the most plausible. Some of these considerations we proceed to mention.
(_a_) While we acknowledge that the verb ברא “does not necessarily or invariably denote production without the use of preëxisting materials, we still maintain that it signifies the production of an effect for which no natural antecedent existed before, and which can be only the result of divine agency.” For this reason, in the Kal species it is used only of God, and is never accompanied by any accusative denoting material.
No accusative denoting material follows _bara_, in the passages indicated, for the reason that all thought of material was absent. See Dillmann, Genesis, 18; Oehler, Theol. O. T., 1:177. The quotation in the text above is from Green, Hebrew Chrestomathy, 67. But E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 88, remarks: “Whether the Scriptures teach the absolute origination of matter—its creation out of nothing—is an open question.... No decisive evidence is furnished by the Hebrew word _bara_.”