God said, ‘Let there be a vault in the waters to divide the waters in two’. And so it was. God made the vault, and it divided the waters above the vault from the waters under the vault. God called the vault “heaven”. 1:6-8
All in a day’s work, I guess. Day two, in fact. Two of seven. Which brings us to our second act of dividing ie waters above the earth from waters below. The first was separating light from dark.
We noted that division / separation is not rooted in a sense of superiority but rather order. It’s about carving out sacred spaces – sanctuaries. Once defined by borders, these places can be made safe and fertile, become oases, flowing with milk and honey - somewhere to raise kids in security and even comfort. Here God’s chosen people can worship without fear and live out their happy days far from the corrupting idolatry and falsehoods of the outside world. This is the vision: keep shape, name and identity and thereby preserve destiny. Live free from enemies, from subjugation, from ravaging want, and from that encircling chaos.
We also noted that darkness is a sacred reality in the Bible but, for the sake of storytelling, is portrayed in opposition to light; originating with the darkness over the deep. On the other hand, water is normally a positive reality in the Bible – from the beautiful Psalm of Isaiah: with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation (12:3), to the living water of Jesus Himself, offered to the midday lady of Samaria (Jn 4:5ff). But this is the sweet, fresh water of deep, cool springs and babbling brooks.
However, Creation One is referring to a different water: the grimy primordial brine directly associated with the forces of chaos. Its character is far darker and requires dividing and managing in order to mitigate its power. This is the sort that gleefully wrecks caravels out there in the lonely mid-Med; it’s the shifting tides and suck pools of seductive polytheisms; the hypnotic crash of waves unleashing wild libido and orgiastic oblivion; syncretism’s fearsome flood where religious distinctions become so much beach-blown froth and foam.
For the writers of Creation One, this watery chaos symbolises the source of fear itself - the preternatural grounding of rational and irrational dread. It is the equivalent of Creation Two’s serpent. How many times do we hear the words fear not / do not be afraid in the Bible? It’s a rhetorical question - I looked it up. 365 apparently. There’s a lot of fear flying round. Justified fear of the unknown but also of the known. Is it any wonder? Even the good guys can be scary!
We all know how chaos can overtake any one of us; how things fall apart. Murphy’s Law, the delightful FUBAR, C-19, pestilence, famine, destructive nature, global conflict, ennui, depression, relationship breakdown and so on. Fear can be crippling and hollowing, and modern doom-scrolling an addling addiction. Kurtz’s last words in Heart of Darkness are: The horror! The horror! Joseph Conrad is recorded as having had a vision of the nature of the universe as something akin to this, aligned to Tennyson’s sentiment about bloodthirsty nature. Humanity…
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
The writers of Creation One very cleverly leave the phantom menace faceless. This unsettling elemental feel contrasts with and complements the very visual serpent of Creation Two. In other words, evil can be experienced as both impersonal and personal. Conrad saw aright: this dark-hearted chaos is voiding and horrifying. He sensed a world without God’s protecting and shaping love.
Menace is the frame for every story but so too the vault. All epics are built on overcoming fear in order to face the chaos. The vault represents the necessity of dividing to conquer since we can’t take on universal evil. Our only chance is to face it down in smaller segments. But we need the help of One with total power over it and to whom it poses no threat. That is why God is portrayed as simply boxing it up and putting it to use - saltwater into rainwater, the sea a home for the fishies.
God alone has the measure of the chaos, circumscribes the sum of all fears. His benevolence sets the boundaries which hold back the worst and stop us sinking into those unnoticed quicksands. The question hidden within all the dividing is: will we trust His judgement about those boundary lines?
Photo: Nikolaos Alexis, Unsplash