Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Genesis · About this commentary
Days two and three: separating and filling
Genesis 1:6-13
6 God said, “Let there be an expanse in the middle of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” · WEB
Two more divisions make the world habitable, and the first living things are made to reproduce after their kind.
The second day divides the waters, putting an expanse between the waters below and the waters above, and names it sky. It is the only day of the six that does not close with the verdict that it was good, and the omission is worth noting without being pressed — the work of separating waters is completed on the third day, and the approval comes there, twice.
The description is given from the standpoint of someone on the ground looking up, which is how Scripture consistently speaks of the sky. That is not a scientific claim being made and failing; it is the ordinary language of observation, and the same book that says this describes the earth as hung on nothing Job 26:7.
The third day completes the forming. The waters are gathered to one place, the dry land appears, and both are named. At this point the world has shape — light and dark, sky and sea, land and water — and nothing yet lives in it.
Then the first living things, and the manner of the command changes. God does not say let there be; he says let the earth yield. The ground is made productive rather than simply stocked, and what it produces is described with a phrase that will recur through the chapter and matters more than its plainness suggests: herbs yielding seeds, and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind, with their seeds in it.
The phrase after their kind appears ten times in this chapter. What it describes is a built-in limit and a built-in mechanism at once. Each sort of living thing carries its own seed, and what comes from that seed is the same sort. Variation within a kind is not being denied — the seed is in it, and seed produces variety, which is why no two trees of one species are identical and why breeders have always been able to work. What is being asserted is that the variety runs inside a boundary, and that the boundary was set at the making rather than crossed over time.
That is a claim the chapter makes repeatedly and deliberately, and it is the reason this account cannot be read as a slow development of one kind of life into another. The text has plants before there is a sun to drive them, land creatures made in a day, and every category reproducing within itself from the start. A reader may accept the account or not; what the account says is not in doubt.
And the third day closes with the verdict withheld the day before, given twice.
settled What this mark means