rit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light!' And there was light..." implies that God began by creating a desolate waste, then creating light, then shaping the waste, and so forth. All this as a function of one verb16. As another departure, examination of creation stories by Summering and Babylonians show that they begin with subordinate clauses such as "when" or "On the day of."17 Genesis clearly diverges from this: "In the beginning" clearly sets apart the text from any other, making it the actual start of all time and space as we know it. It also puts the Hebrew god outside of time and space. There would be no point in arguing that the Old Testament was influenced by the contemporary cultures of its writers; the facts clearly point to innumerable external sources of inspiration. But while we can acknowledge these similarities, we must also acknowledge that the writers of the Book of Genesis are making a radical departure from the norm: they have created a monotheistic religion, and their god is all-powerful, beyond the scope of human comprehension. Typically, gods are represented as something akin to humans on a grander scale; the Hebrew god is simply not measured or scaled; He is an unknown quantity, set apart from the bounds of human knowledge. These similarities serve a function as a contrast to the differences between these religions. It would seem that the writers acknowledged these other religions, and addressed each one by creating a god that surpasses all others. The god that creates himself is one of many; the Hebrew god stands alone in his might. The god that created the world defeated another god, and formed the earth from the corpse; in Genesis, God speaks and his words transform into actions. God exists before the matter He shapes to His will. The writers have then, in fact, minimized the actions of all other gods in comparison to one all-powerful deity such as this. By drawing comparisons...
