Before the World: Eight Creation Passages from Eight Traditions

The Babylonian creation epic begins by saying the heavens and the earth had no name yet, and the passage treats naming as the act that makes a thing exist. Apsu and Tiamat are already there, which makes this a beginning among powers rather than out of nothing.

The Nasadiya Sukta opens by saying that then there was neither non-existent nor existent, and asks what covered it and where. Four verses later it doubts whether even the highest god knows how the world began, so the hymn is as much about the limit of knowing as about creation.

Another Vedic answer, set beside the first: in the beginning rose Hiranyagarbha, the golden germ, the only lord of all created beings. Every verse ends with the question of which god to adore, and the verse that names Prajapati is generally held to be a later addition, so the hymn first asked a question it did not answer.

In the American Standard Version the earth is waste and void and darkness is on the face of the deep before the first command is spoken. The opening of Genesis begins with God creating the heavens and the earth, and the deep and the Spirit of God are already part of the scene.

Hesiod gives the Greek order in a single line: first Chaos came to be, and next wide-bosomed Earth, the sure foundation of the deathless ones on Olympus. The line numbers follow the Greek text, so the English does not divide evenly at these verses.

The cosmogony of the book in a few words: the Tao produced One, One produced Two, Two produced Three, and Three produced all things. Legge reads the Obscurity and the Brightness as yin and yang, and he says in his own note that what One, Two and Three stand for is not known to him.

A seeress speaks to Odin and describes the age when Ymir lived, with no sea, no cool waves, no sand, no earth and no heaven above. All that stands there is a yawning gap, Ginnungagap, and grass nowhere, which is a beginning defined by what is missing.

The first sentence of the Kojiki lists the deities born in the Plain of High Heaven when heaven and earth began, starting with the Deity Master-of-the-August-Centre-of-Heaven. The first three are born alone and hide themselves at once, and that is all the text says of them.