In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth

Everything else stands on this sentence, so let's not start with a theory about it. Let's start with two questions you can check in your own Bible. What does the verb do? And what is it creating?

The verb: what does "create" do?

When the rest of the Bible says create (bara), what is it talking about? Here is Isaiah using the very same words as Genesis 1:1.

Isaiah says God will create new heavens and a new earth. Then he tells us what he means: God will create Jerusalem, and her people. Not a replacement sky, but a people made new. And it isn't a one-off. God says he "created" (bara) Jacob (Isaiah 43:1), a family already centuries old, so "created" can't mean "built from scratch" there. Malachi asks "hath not one God created (bara) us?" He is speaking to Israel, God's covenant people (Malachi 2:10).

The object: what are "the heavens and the earth"?

Now the second question. Isaiah answers this one too.

A throne and a footstool are furniture. On Isaiah's picture, heavens and earth are the two halves of one house: God's place and his people's place, together. That is also how Israel's temple worked. The inner room was heaven, the courts were earth, and it was one building where God and his people met.

Put the two questions together and Genesis 1:1 starts to read like a founding. God established a world that is a house, a covenant order where he would dwell with man. That's the claim this site examines, one word at a time, with the evidence in front of you.