Numerical Patterning in Genesis 1

L. Michael Morales’ The Tabernacle Pre-Figured examines a cluster of related themes in the narrative texts of Genesis. The rites of Torah follow the cosmic pattern established in creation, in which one moves through the waters of death to the cosmic mountain in order to offer worship to God the Creator. 

Morales sees this “cosmic mountain ideology” at work in the intricate artistry of Genesis 1. The central concern of the creation account, he argues, is not simply the creation of man but the movement from the formless watery void to the teeming life of the ordered world. Life is literally at the center of the text: the central word of the pericope, with 234 words on either side, is the first appearance in the narrative (and thus in the Hebrew Bible) of chayah (‘living,’ 1.20), as the waters ‘swarm with swarms of living creatures.” this is all the more remarkable because life first appears in the water that once covered the earth and made it hostile to life. Now that water has been subdued and has become “the first realm of life – they have become the waters of life.” No wonder Genesis 1 uses the rare bara, “create,” at precisely this point (61).

He adds further details that highlight the central importance of life: “in receiving the first benediction of God, 1.22, highlighted the more so as it is noticeably absent from the creation of land-animals (1.24-25) . . . in its sharply unexpected occurrence within the waters once contributing to tohu wabohu, vv 20-1 . . . in the fifth day’s parallel to the climactic sixth day’s creation of life . . . so that both the waters and the earth yield chayah . . . in the sevenfold occurrence of chayah in the fifth and sixth paragraphs (61, fn 50).

He discovers additional patterning in the account of the Sabbath in Genesis 2: “beginning with a seven-word sentence, developed through seven paragraphs, and climaxing on the consecration of the Sabbath where the ‘seventh’ day is given threefold emphasis . . . . The seventh day . . . is also emphasized by means of complementary positive and negative statements.” This reinforces the fact that “the Sabbath, then, [is] the conclusion, culmination, and witness to God’s work of creation, as well as the telos of creation” (82).