The Ur-story

It's striking that the opening scene in the Bible has all the elements of a story. A short story. Plot, characters, setting, and dialogue. 

And not just any story, but the Ur-story. This is the story that lays the basis for all other stories. Every story is contained in this story. 

God and his Spirt are the Ur-characters. They, in turn, create other characters. Human characters, and animals. God is the Ur-speaker who creates other speakers. 

It has a plot. The creation of the world. The Ur-plot. All other plots take this for granted. All other plots build on this plot. 

It has dialogue. Ur-dialogue. Initially, God is the only speaker. He seems to be talking to himself. A divine soliloquy. 

But then, in v26, the monologue switches to dialogue. There are competing interpretations for what this means. I agree with David Clines that it probably refers back to the Spirit as God's conversation partner. 

Initially, it has no setting. It begins nowhere. In a void. God is the only existent. 

Then God proceeds to create the setting. A setting can be spatial or temporal. God creates a physical setting. Places, high and low, large and small. The cosmos. Outer space. The solar system. Sun, moon, and visible stars. The earth. Land and sea. Trees. Progression from nowhere to somewhere. 

But a setting can also be a time of day or time of year. An epoch. The Middle Ages, the Old West, the Roaring Twenties, the Psychedelic Sixties. 

God creates day and night, dawn and dusk. God creates the seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter. Like watching a stage set assembled piece-by-piece. 

It's interesting to compare the creation account to its counterpart in Jn 1. Many scholars have noted the studied parallels between Jn 1:1-5 and Gen 1. 

But the allusions to the creation account pick up again at the baptism of Jesus. Water and Spirit. The avian image of the Spirit hovering above the waters, between heaven and earth. And it picks up at other points. In Gen 1, the Spirit as the breath of life. In Jn 3, the Spirit as the breath of new life.