In the beginning was the disturbance: God disrupted the pristine formlessness of the deep and created the heavens and the earth. Literally in a flash. With His utterance, the darkness was relegated to Night; the light He called Day. Waters were separated from waters by an expanse, and the expanse was called Heaven. Vegetation, and their seed, sprouted from the Earth and then, the Good Ecologist provisioned vegetation with light to distinguish day and night, to separate the seasons, and to mark the passage of time. God started on the largest imaginable scale, and then He attended to the ecological details. On the fifth day the earth pullulated with creatures: birds in the air and the great sea swarmed with life. On the sixth day God successfully propagated the terrestrial surface with creeping things, beasts, and livestock. And then He made man and in giving him dominion over the creatures, explained the ecological services that each could provide – for instance, the plants He told him make good eating. When He rested, His creation was stable. That which He created in a cataclysm persisted in the aftermath.
When He was adequately restored, He resumed His labor. His tasks were now ones of governance rather than creation. The largest entities of all were stably in place – the heavens and the earth, the stars in the firmament, the day separated from the night, the seasons, the seas and the land, the vegetation and the creeping beings, the livestock and mankind. The world that God created though it persisted was an imperfect one. His creature, Man, fell and God expelled Adan and Eve from his Garden. The children of the first man and women fought and Cain slew Abel. The descendents of Adam were numerous; the very old gave way to the young; but God saw the wickedness of man and was sorry that He made him. In surveying the earth God thought it corrupt and was determined to disrupt it by ending all flesh. He commanded Noah, a righteous man, to build an ark, and on that ark Noah brought his family: his wife, his sons, his sons’ wives, and seven pairs each of all clean animals, and a pair each of unclean animal, and seven pair of each species of bird. And then God unleashed his Disturbance in the form of a flood. The flood remained for 40 days and the water persisted for 150 days. All flesh upon the earth died – beast and man. The sacrifice that Noah made of some parts of the clean animals and the clean birds pleased him and God made a covenant with man and with the animals. He determined never again to destroy all flesh.
