The First Week

Before there was anything, there was God. He was not lonely, and He was not waiting. But on a certain evening, the evening before the very first Sunday, He began.

They came into being all at once, the way a room fills with light when a shutter is thrown open, and the first thing they did was look. There was nothing yet to look at except Him, and that was enough. They began to sing, and I do not think they knew they were going to until they already were. Some of them were made to keep the winds, and some the clouds, and some the snow and the hail and the frost on winter mornings that had never yet happened. Some were made for thunder. Some were made only to stand near Him. The things they were to keep did not exist yet: no branch for the snow to weigh down, no hillside for the rain to run down, no field for the wind to bend. But the keepers were ready before the kept, and all of them sang.

It did not come from anywhere. There was no sun, nor any star. The light simply was, all at once, the way a thought is suddenly there in your head. It lay across the water, and the water shone back, and the singers, who had been singing in the dark all this while, saw for the first time what they had been singing about. Their song went up so high that if there had been any mountains yet, the mountains would have rung.

God looked at the light, and it was good. He drew a line between the light and the dark, the way you might part a curtain, and He called the light Day and the darkness Night. And the light went slowly down, and the dark came softly up, and then the light came back again; and that was evening, and that was morning, and that was the first day of the world.

On the second day, God made a roof.

He spread it out over the waters like a smith beating out a sheet of bright metal, thin and wide and shining, and He lifted it up. Half the water He left beneath it. The other half He raised and held above the roof of the sky, stored away like rain in a great cistern. Between the two there was room, for the first time, for something to breathe.

God called the great roof Heaven. Remember the water above it. It stays up there for a long while in this story, but it is still there, and one day it will matter very much.

Evening came, and morning came: the second day.

On the third day, God spoke to the water under the sky.

"Gather together into one place, and let the dry ground appear."

And the water obeyed. Picture the whole shining face of the deep drawing back on itself, sliding away and away in long glittering sheets, piling up into the places made for it. And out of the water, streaming in the new light, the land came up: hilltops first, as they broke the surface, then the long backs of ridges, then wide brown plains glistening with wet, with the sea running off them in a thousand little rivers that would one day have names.

God called the dry ground Earth, and the gathered waters Seas. And it was good.

Then He spoke to the ground.

"Let the earth bring forth grass, and plants that bear seed, and trees that bear fruit of their own kind."

And the earth, which had been at the bottom of the sea an hour before, went green. It went green the way a cheek goes red: all at once, from the inside. Grass came up, and moss over the stones, and herbs and flowers, though there were no seasons yet for flowers to keep. And then the trees. They did not come up as seedlings. They came up tall, with trunks thick enough to lean against and branches already heavy with fruit, and in every fruit was seed, so that every kind of tree could go on being exactly itself forever.

Somewhere in the east, on that third day, God planted a garden, and took particular care over it. Every tree that was lovely to look at grew there, and every tree whose fruit was good to eat. And in the very middle of it He set two trees that were not like the others: the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

No one walked among them yet. The light rested on their leaves, and they waited.

Evening came, and morning came: the third day.

It was not until the fourth day that God made the sun.

Think of that. The grass was a whole day older than the sun that would warm it. The trees had stood in the light and grown their fruit before ever there was a sun in the sky to ripen it.

And He gave them work to do. They were not only to give light. They were to keep time. The sun would rise and set at its hour, the moon would grow and shrink at its pace, the stars would wheel round in their slow rings; and one day creatures who did not exist yet would look up at them and know when to sow their seed, and when to bring in the harvest, and when to gather together and give thanks.

Evening came, and morning came: the fourth day.

On the fifth day, God filled the sea and the sky.

God looked, and it was good. And then He did something He had not done before. He blessed them.

"Be fruitful," He said to the fish and the birds and the great things in the deep. "Multiply. Fill the seas, and fill the sky."

So the very first blessing ever spoken in the world was spoken over the fish. I have always liked that.

Evening came, and morning came: the fifth day.

On the sixth day, God spoke to the earth again, and the earth brought forth beasts.

And it was good.

And then there was a pause.

All that week, God had said, "Let there be." Now, for the first time, He was about to say something else. The singers, who had been singing without stopping since the evening before the first day, fell quiet. Every one of them. They knew, the way you know in a story when the important part is coming, that something was about to happen that had never happened before.

And God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing."

There was a place where water had been rising up out of the ground all morning and soaking it, and the earth there was soft and red, dark red, like the inside of a clay pot. This time God did not speak the thing into being. He knelt down. He gathered up that red earth in His hands, the way a potter takes up clay, and began to shape it: a head, shoulders, two arms, two hands with fingers on them, two feet to stand on. A face. He took His time over the face.

When He had finished, it lay there on the ground, a man, perfectly made and perfectly still. It was only earth. It did not breathe.

Then God bent down over it, closer than anyone has ever been to anyone, as close as a mother bending over a sleeping child, and breathed into its nostrils.

And the man breathed in.

His chest rose. His fingers moved in the wet red soil. His eyes opened, and the first thing they ever saw was the face of the One who had made him, very near, looking down at him with great delight.

He was made from the ground, and yet he was like God: not in size, or in power, but the way a son is like his father, or a face in still water is like the face that bends over it. He could think, and choose, and love, and answer when God spoke to him. His name was Adam. It was the word for a man, and it sounded like the word for the red ground he had been taken from, so that his name carried both halves of him at once: the earth he was made of, and the breath that made him live.

God brought Adam into the garden in the east.

"This garden is yours," God told him. "Work it, and keep it. You may eat from any tree in it, freely, as much as you like. All except one. You must not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will die."

Adam did not know what dying was. Nothing had ever died. But he understood that everything in the garden had been given to him except this one tree, and that the tree was God's, and he was content. It was a gift with a task inside it, and one small fence round the middle.

Then God brought him the animals.

They came to him across the grass and out of the trees and down out of the sky, one after another, and God stood each one before the man to see what he would call it. And Adam looked at each creature, and saw what it was, and gave it its name. Whatever he called it, that was its name, and it is the name it goes by still.

It took a long while. And they all talked to him as they came, for in those days every living creature spoke one language, and the man could speak to them and hear an answer.

And when the last of them had gone, Adam was still standing there by himself.

He had seen every creature in the world and given every one of them a name, and there was nobody in the whole of it who could look back at him the way he looked at them, and know him, and be known.

God had seen it before Adam did. "It is not good," He said, "for the man to be alone." All that week, everything God looked at had been good, and good, and very good, and this was the first time anything in the world had been not good. "I will make a helper for him," God said: "someone who will stand face to face with him."

So God made the man fall into a deep sleep, there in the grass, with the sun on him. And while he slept, God took one of his ribs, and closed up the place again with flesh. And out of the rib, the way a builder builds a house, God built a woman.

Then He woke the man, and brought her to him.

Adam looked at her, and something happened in his face that had never happened in the world before. He did not name her coolly, as he had named the animals, looking to see what she was. This time, his words came pouring out of him as a song:

"At last! This one is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh! She shall be called Woman, for she was taken out of Man!"

They stood there together in the garden, the man and the woman, naked, and neither of them was the least bit ashamed. There was nothing between them that needed hiding, and no one to hide it from.

God blessed them, as He had blessed the fish and the birds.

"Be fruitful," He said, "and multiply. Fill the earth, and look after it. It is yours to rule."

Then God looked at everything He had made. Not at this thing or that, but all of it together: the light and the dark, the roof of the sky with the waters above and below it, the hills and the seas, the grass and the great trees, the sun and the silver moon and the salt-spill of stars, the fish and the birds and the great things in the deep, the cattle and the creeping things, and the man and the woman standing among them in the light.

And it was very good.

You could not have found a blot on it anywhere. It was like a fair copy, written out by hand from beginning to end without a single mistake.

Evening came, and morning came: the sixth day.

And on the seventh day, God rested.

Not because He was tired. A voice that can say "Let there be light" does not grow tired. He rested the way a maker rests when the thing is finished and right and there is nothing to add and nothing to take away: He stepped back, and looked, and was glad.

And He blessed that day, and made it holy. Of all the things in the world, the first thing God ever made holy was not a place, or a person, or a stone. It was a day. A day for stopping, and looking at what had been made, and being glad, and knowing who had made it.