Nicolas Wyatt Distinguishing Wood and Trees in the Waters: Creation in Biblical Thought I never could accept the first step of the Genesis story: “In the beginning the earth was with- out form and void”. That primary tabula rasa would have set a formidable problem in thermodynamics for the next billion years. Gregory Bateson. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E. P. Dutton, p. 5. 1 Introduction: Creation in Ancient Near Eastern Thought It is probably fair to say that in every cultural tradition, which implicitly contains a religious dimension, there is some kind of “belief ” that the gods, or one of the gods, or God, created the world. I have put the term “belief ” in inverted commas because I do not wish to give the impression that there were necessarily formal “doctrines” on the matter. In any event, they would be relatively esoteric doc- trines, reserved for a professional priesthood. Speculations, ritual practices, ex- planations of these, and any number of other scenarios may be imagined. The surviving written evidence from the ancient Near East gives us the first possibility of dealing seriously with such beliefs, since for the first time we have the evidence of language to go on, thus enabling us to engage however hesitantly with people’s actual thoughts, and to trace developments in their beliefs and practices; and this has left us with a considerable amount of material, offering a variety of narratives.¹ And it is on narratives that we rely. They tell a story (which I think is to be classified as myth²) and leave it to readers and hearers to understand as they will.³ The narratives fall into four main types, which we  See Brandon 1963; Westermann 1984, 18 – 47; Clifford 1994; Wyatt 2001a, 95 – 120; Batto 2013a, 7– 53.  For my assessment of the problem of myth, particularly as it relates to biblical thought and modern biblical studies, see Wyatt 2001b and 2008a.  The process of assessing authorial motives and appropriate reader responses grows ever more complicated. See now Lowery (2013). It is worth bearing in mind that neither authors nor readers in the ancient word were necessarily as sophisticated, or perhaps as devious, as modern aca- demics like to think! This is not to deny them considerable literary skill, and an imagination not necessarily trammelled in doctrinal straitjackets. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110606294-021