For anyone that's interested, here is what I was talking about earlier regarding the role of evil in the interpretation of the first creation story.
I wrote this on another forum a while back. I used it to start a thread, so if it looks like it's initiating a thread, that's why.
Was Earth created ex nihilo?
Personally, I used to think that the Bible clearly states that it was. And well, most Christian Bibles do, in fact, state that. However, upon further research, I found that the traditional phrasing of the first creation story doesn't semantically align with the ancient Hebrew.
Here's the traditional phrasing. Most Christian Bibles do not differ from this.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
-KJV
Here's a more accurate translation:
When God began to create Heaven and Earth - the Earth being unformed and void with darkness over the surface of the deep, and a wind from God sweeping over the water - God said let there be light, and there was light.
-JPS
The difference, as you may have noticed, is the dependency of the clauses. The first verse is a dependent clause. The second verse is an appositive. The third verse is where we have our first independent clause. No, I'm not being a grammar Nazi and nitpicking the punctuation in the Bible. Linguistically, this creation story differs significantly from the story in the KJV. The most important thing to notice here is that the earth began as an unformed mass, which debunks the theory that God created Earth ex nihilo.
Moving on, verse two mentions five key elements that are present at the beginning of creation. Four out of those five are symbolic of chaos and evil: unformed, void, darkness, the deep, and water. The only item mentioned in verse two that is not symbolic of something bad is the "wind from God" (note that "spirit" and "wind" are the same word in Hebrew). The prehistoric people of ancient Israel who were reading the book of Genesis (and who were part and parcel of that ancient Near Eastern world) would have recognized the point very clearly: the preexistent matter in this story is symbolic of evil.
God's role is to bring order and goodness into this chaotic and evil world. Even the very next verse reads, "God saw that the light was good." Continuing verse four, we see that "He separated the light from the darkness." That is, he is separating the good from the evil. This is the point of the first creation story. It is not to literally
create everything. It is to give us an understanding of good and evil, which is what can really explain the creation story in Gen 2, which is focused on knowledge, which I'll get into later (supposing this discussion isn't for naught).