Unveiling Genesis 1:1: How Origin Stories Shape Us
What if the story you were taught about how the world began is still shaping what you believe about yourself, the world, and your place in it?
Think about a story you’ve told yourself for years. Maybe somewhere along the way you decided you had to get things right to be loved. You might even be able to remember where you learned that. And when you go back and look at it now, with everything you know about yourself and the people who raised you, you might hear a different story than the one you’ve been telling.
I wonder what happens when we give a story we inherited together that same kind of attention.
[Embed the Episode 18 podcast player here.]
What did we hear “in the beginning”?
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” I’ve heard those words for as long as I can remember. I thought I knew what they meant. Then I started spending time with the Hebrew, and I kept finding things I wanted to stop and look at.
Genesis 1:1 has seven Hebrew words and twenty-eight letters. I spent a whole episode on that one verse, and there were moments when I thought, how are we still on the first word?
The first word is Bereshit, the word we usually hear as “in the beginning.” In Jewish mystical tradition, there’s also a way of hearing it as “with wisdom.” Say those two openings out loud and see what each makes you listen for. I found myself wondering why I’d spent so much time thinking about when creation happened and so little time wondering about the Wisdom present as it happened.
The numbers I wanted to draw for you
In the episode, I use gematria, a practice that assigns numerical values to Hebrew letters. Add up the letters of Genesis 1:1 using the method I share in the episode, and you get 2,701. That’s also what you get when you multiply 73 by 37. In Hebrew, 73 is the value of chokhmah, “wisdom,” and 37 is the value of ha-lev, “the heart.”
Here’s the part I wanted you to be able to see. Arrange 2,701 dots in rows of one, two, three, and so on, and you’ll end up with a triangle with 73 dots along each side. The middle dot on each side is the 37th. Connect those three dots and you get a smaller triangle inside the first one.
Image 1: The 2,701-dot triangle. Connecting the 37th dot on each side forms an inverted triangle, with three outer triangles of 666 dots each.
Image 2: Connect alternating centers of the six outer circles and two triangles appear. Together they form the Star of David around a shared center.
You can check the arithmetic yourself. What I keep coming back to is the image. We’ve been talking about Wisdom since the first word, and here, in the numbers, I find myself thinking about the heart.
The story we’re still living
One day I stopped to save a little ant. It felt obvious to me that its life mattered. And then I found myself wondering why I could see something sacred in that tiny life so easily, while I’ve spent so much of my own life questioning where I belong.
I’m still sitting with that question. If you listen to the episode, I’d invite you to notice what you were taught to hear in those opening words. What did that reading teach you about God, about yourself, or about the earth under your feet? And what might you hear in the story now?
Mentioned in this episode:
- How the stories we inherit about where we came from shape what we believe about ourselves and where we belong.
- What Jamie Tartt’s backstory in Ted Lasso can teach us about hearing a familiar story differently.
- Why a Jewish mystical reading hears the first word of Genesis, Bereshit, as “with wisdom.”
- What two little Hebrew letters, aleph and tav, made me wonder about the sacredness of everything, even the little ant I stopped to save.
- How the Hebrew letters of Genesis 1:1 add up to 2,701, and why drawing that number as a triangle brought me back to wisdom and the heart.
🌙 Learn more, explore additional resources, and join the Know Thy Soul community at:
🎙️New episodes every Tuesday.
Prefer to read?
The full episode transcript is below.
Why Origin Stories Matter
Hi Friends,
Welcome to Know Thy Soul, where we explore the stories, symbols, and truths that help us bring our world back into balance.
Today we’re going back to the very first verse of Genesis to ask what the story we inherited about the beginning of the world has taught us about ourselves, and what might change if we heard it differently.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” It’s probably one of the most recognizable lines in the entire Bible. And I think part of the reason those words have stayed with us is that we care deeply about where we came from.
I would argue that origin stories are the most important stories we tell. They help us understand our place in the world and why we’re here. A creation story can tell you what a people believes about God, about what it means to be human, and about how we’re meant to live with one another and with the world around us. And as that story gets passed down, it helps shape what the next generation believes, too.
Now, you guys know I love a good Ted Lasso reference, so let’s bring this down to the scale of one person. When we first meet Jamie Tartt, he’s pretty hard to like. He’s got an ego bigger than the stadium he plays in. He makes fun of Nate, he wants every play to go through him, and he and Roy Kent, who also has a giant ego, can barely get through a conversation without going at each other.
At one point, Jamie tells his teammates that his dad started showing up to his games once he got good. He’d brag to his friends when Jamie scored and call him soft when he didn’t dominate. So Jamie decided he was going to get so tough his dad could never call him soft again. And that’s our first little glimpse of how Jamie became the guy we’ve been watching.
Then in season two, Richmond plays Manchester City, Jamie’s old team, at Wembley. After Richmond loses, Jamie’s dad walks into their locker room wearing Jamie’s old Man City jersey. Just picture that for a second. He’s wearing his son’s name on his back, and he’s been cheering for the team his son is playing against.
He starts mocking Jamie in front of everybody, and Jamie eventually punches him. Coach Beard gets his dad out of the room, and then Roy, of all people, walks over and hugs him. And Jamie just breaks down in his arms.
And suddenly, we see Jamie Tartt differently. Why? Because we know his origin story. We know why he put that armor on in the first place. And for just a moment, he lets it fall, and we can see how much he’s been hurting underneath it.
All of us can be held captive by our origin stories. And if we want to grow and become the people God created us to be, I think we have to be willing to question those stories. That goes for the ones we tell about ourselves and the ones we’ve inherited about who we are as human beings.
In my 1-1 work with people, we go back to a moment like that and ask, “What did you come to believe about yourself back then?” Maybe your dad only praised you when you won. So as a kid, you put two and two together and thought, “I guess I have to win to matter.” And you might spend years living by that without ever asking where it came from.
Then you go back to it as an adult, and you can say, “Of course I wanted him to be proud of me. I was a kid.” And maybe you can see something now that was hard to see then. You mattered just as much on the days you lost. You mattered before you ever stepped onto the field.
There’s a word I love for this. Re-authoring. Your dad still only praised you when you won, and it still hurt when you lost and wanted to hear he was proud of you. But you can look back now and see how you came to believe you had to win to matter. And you can ask yourself, do I still want to live by a conclusion I came to as a kid?
Marie-Louise von Franz calls creation myths “the deepest and most important of all myths.” She tells us that creation stories deal with the most basic questions of existence. They ask how the world came to be and what it means that we’re here at all. She points out that in some traditions, young people were taught the creation story as part of their initiation. It was one of the most important things a community could pass on. Von Franz even noticed that images from creation stories can show up in dreams just before a person sees themselves or their life in a new way.
And that’s why I want us to come back to Genesis with fresh eyes to see and ears to hear. This is one of the stories that helped lay the foundation for Western culture. The way we’ve heard it has shaped what many of us believe about God, about each other, about men and women, about our relationship to nature, and about where we belong in the world.
And if we want something in our culture to change, I think we have to go back to that foundation and ask some questions. What does the story actually say? What did we learn to hear in it? And what might we hear now if we gave ourselves a chance to listen again?
I’ve spent the last two years asking those questions, and I’m excited to share what I’ve found. So let’s start where the story starts. In the beginning.
If this is your first episode, we’ve already begun exploring Genesis in the last 2 episodes. And for today, we are going to focus on one single verse in Genesis chapter 1:1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Now, you might be wondering, how could I possibly spend an entire episode on one verse? And you’re right. I could probably spend a whole season on it.
Bereshit and the First Letter
The first verse of Genesis is just seven words in Hebrew. Twenty-eight letters. I do not speak Hebrew so please excuse my pronunciations. It goes like this. Bereshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve’et ha-aretz. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
It begs the questions: is this the first thing that happens in the story? Or is it more like an overture, giving us something to listen for in everything that follows? I think the answer is both.
In English, we hear three words, “in the beginning,” and in Hebrew, those three words are one. Bereshit. There’s no explicit “the” in the Hebrew, so some scholars suggest we hear it as “in a beginning.”
The first letter of Bereshit is the letter bet, and it’s traditionally written larger than the letters around it. If you look at it, it’s closed on three sides and open on the left. And because Hebrew is read from right to left, that opening faces right into the rest of the story.
There’s an old Jewish teaching that picks up on that shape. The way I picture it, there’s a wall behind us and an opening in front of us. We can look into the story and see what unfolds from here. Whatever came before is on the other side of that wall.
And that’s why I like hearing it as “in a beginning.” This is where the story opens for us.
This first letter, the bet, is actually the second letter of the alphabet. So we’re already seeing the idea of the 2 coming from the one! And it makes me think about how each of us began. One fertilized egg divides into two cells, then four, then eight. From the one comes the two.
And that’s an idea we’ll come back to throughout this story. The one in the two and the two in the one.
And if I zoom out and look at the Bible as a whole, I see people wrestling with some version of that question over and over again. How do we find our way back to the oneness of God that underlies all of life? And I love that I can already hear the first hint of that question in a single letter.
What If Creation Began with Wisdom?
This first word, Bereshit, is also built on a feminine noun. Did you hear that? The first word of the bible is feminine! I remember finding that out and thinking, wait, the feminine is already here? We’re one word in!
And it gets better. In Jewish mystical tradition, there’s a way to read Bereshit as “with wisdom.” So listen to the verse that way for a second. “With wisdom, God created the heavens and the earth.”
Now, if you go to Proverbs, chapter eight, verses 22-31, Wisdom actually speaks and it’s a woman. She says she was there before the mountains and the hills, before God had even made the earth. Do you see that? Before God made the earth, exactly what is going to happen in the second part of this verse. And when she talks about the beginning, she uses that same word, reshit. By the end of the passage, she’s right there beside God, taking delight in the world and the people in it.
And there’s another place where we hear a voice like hers. It’s an ancient text called Three Forms of First Thought, and the one speaking calls herself First Thought. The text also calls her Mother. She says she was there before everything came into being, and then she says something I had to go back and read again. “I move in every creature.”
I mean, think about those two images for a second. In Proverbs, Wisdom says she was there before the mountains, and she’s beside God, taking delight in the world as it comes into being. And here’s the Mother in Three Forms of First Thought saying, “I move in every creature.”
And this is where my mind goes to the Greek creation story. Gaia, Mother Earth, gives birth to the sky and the sea. There it is again, the heavens and the earth. Only here, the earth is the mother and the sky is born from her. I mean, how often do we hear “the heavens and the earth” and picture them in that kind of relationship?
And in one Hindu tradition, the Goddess is called the World Mother. She creates the universe, sustains it, and eventually brings it to an end. So when I go back to Genesis and hear, “With wisdom, God created the heavens and the earth,” I have to ask, who got to tell us what this story meant? Because I think the people who handed down the version I grew up with made choices about what to emphasize. And somewhere along the way, the feminine got left out of the telling.
So I looked up “wisdom” in Merriam-Webster, and you guys, one of the definitions is “the teachings of the ancient wise men.” And I thought, wait a minute. We just heard Wisdom herself say she was there before the mountains. And when we talk about whose wisdom got handed down, the men are the ones who get named?
Remember that rigged Monopoly game we talked about last week? I keep thinking about who got to sit at the table and decide what counted in this story and even define what wisdom means. Because there’s a question I’d love to ask the people who taught me this story. How did we spend so much time talking about what Eve did in the garden and so little time talking about what Wisdom was doing before there even was a garden?
And I have to include myself in that question. Because for years, when somebody told me what a story meant or what God expected of me, I went along with it. Even when something in me was telling me to pay attention.
Like Perceval, I spent most of my life following the rules. When I was told that Eve was responsible for the fall of humanity, everything inside me screamed. And I did what I’d learned to do when I felt that way. I ignored it.
Years later, my third child was getting ready for his First Communion, and I was sitting in those parent meetings. I could feel that same thing happening inside me. The more I heard people use shame and guilt to get us to do what they wanted, the harder it was to sit there and go along with it. And finally I asked myself, why am I here? What do I hope my kids will get from this? Is this really what I want them growing up with?
I struggled with that decision for a few months, because I had to go back and re-story something I’d believed for most of my life. What did it mean to connect with God? What made me a good person? And what did going to church actually mean to me? When I finally let myself answer honestly, it was a hard no. And I stopped going to church.
When I say I gained wisdom from that experience, I mean that the next time I heard that voice inside me, I was willing to listen. And when I listened, I felt closer to God than I ever had in my entire life. Which, honestly, was the last thing I expected to happen when I stopped going to church.
And that got me thinking about the people we read about in the Bible. Moses hears God at a burning bush. Abraham is told to leave home without knowing where he’s going. And Sarah is standing at the entrance to her tent when she hears she’s going to have a child, and she laughs. Which, honestly, I get. I laughed when Wisdom first told me to start this podcast a few years ago. Me? A podcast? But I kept showing up and listening, and I followed her down a whole lot of rabbit holes. And, well, here we are.
I can look back now and see that she was leading me exactly where I was meant to be, even if I couldn’t see it at the time. Wisdom saw something in me I couldn’t yet see in myself. And luckily for me, by then I’d gotten pretty good at showing up even when I wasn’t sure I could do the thing I was showing up for. I think that’s how I started to believe that one day I could.
We don’t seem to have trouble believing that God could speak directly to people in the bible, because that is the origin story we were told. So why do we have such a hard time imagining that God, specifically wisdom, could speak to us? And there’s a line in James, chapter one, verse five, that I love. It says that if any of us needs wisdom, we can ask God, who gives generously to all. I keep coming back to that word, “all.” Not a few prophets, not a few special people. All. Because I spent a lot of my life assuming somebody else had to tell me what God wanted from me. And here’s James saying, you can ask God yourself.
I still have to sort out what I’m hearing. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s just what I want to be true. But when I finally got quiet enough to ask myself what I actually believed, I felt closer to God.
And it makes me wonder how many of us have heard that quiet voice and brushed her off because we figured she couldn’t possibly be speaking to us. And how many of us, if we’re honest, have gone a little further than that? We’ve chopped off her hands. We’ve locked her in a tower. And then we wonder why we can’t hear her.
How We Learn to Hear Wisdom
So when I say wisdom, here’s what I mean. Wisdom is what we learn through experience that changes how we show up the next time. And I want to spend a little time here because I think wisdom is one of the most important ideas in this story, and we’re going to come back to it.
Think about a baby learning to walk. They’ve watched us do it a thousand times, and then one day they pull themselves up, take a step or two, and land right back on their butt. And what do they do? They get up and try again.
If we could hear what they were thinking, Look Who’s Talking style, I imagine it’d be something like, “Okay, last time I leaned too far forward. Let’s see what happens if I keep my weight right here.” They’re learning where their center of gravity is by feeling what happens when they move away from it. That’s the wisdom of walking. Or, as Maya Angelou put it, “When you know better, you do better.”
Finding our balance in our inner lives can be a little trickier. Remember that rigged Monopoly game we talked about? Think about how many of us learned that being good at love meant trying harder, being more understanding, or giving a little more. I was pretty good at playing by those rules.
Do you want to know why the Handless Maiden resonates so much with me? I’ve lived it. I’ve worn silver hands in all kinds of relationships. I know what it’s like to feel like someone’s left the castle while I’m still there, wondering what else I can do to reach them.
And now that I’ve grown my hands back, I can spot silver hands almost immediately. It makes me think of something else the incredibly wise Maya Angelou said. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
I’d heard that a thousand times. It took living through it to understand what believing someone might ask of me. Sometimes it means walking away, and sometimes it means letting go of the idea that if I just try a little harder, I’ll finally get through to them. I know what it feels like to be at peace on my own, and I’m unwilling to give that up for the temporary thrill of a pair of silver hands.
And that’s why I love hearing “with wisdom” in the opening of Genesis. It’s like that first word is already giving us a hint about what the stories that follow will ask of us. What do we do with what we’ve learned?
Also, can I just point out that we’re still on the first word?
Bara and the Act of Creation
The Zohar, a Jewish mystical text, takes the six letters of Bereshit and splits them right down the middle. The first three spell bara, which means “created,” and the last three spell shit, which means “six” in Aramaic. So tucked inside “in the beginning” is this little phrase, “created six.” And how many letters did it take to get there? Six.
Now, think about the physical world for a second. You can go north, south, east, or west. You can also go up or down. That’s six directions. And then, of course, the story goes on to give us six days of creation.
I love that we’re one word in and already getting a little glimpse of what’s coming. The way I read it, this first chapter is about how the physical world takes shape out of the spiritual one.
And now we finally get to the second word. And what is it? Bara. There’s “created” again, this time standing all by itself. And in Hebrew, the verb is in the masculine form. So we’ve gone from a feminine noun in Bereshit to a masculine verb in bara. I want you to hold on to that for a second.
And there’s something interesting about that word. When the Hebrew Bible uses bara to mean “create,” God is the one doing the creating. When people make something, you’ll hear other words, like asah, which means “to make” or “to do.”
The Zohar sees two sides to creation here, one hidden and one out in the open. And the way I picture it, the first is like a blueprint. You can have a whole house taking shape on paper long before there’s anything you can walk into. And then one day you can stand in the kitchen. Same house, in a very different form.
And here’s where I see the masculine come in. It separates things so they can take on a shape of their own. We’re about to see God separate light from darkness. I love that we started with two tucked into that very first letter, and now we get to see what happens when things actually become two.
Elohim and the Hidden Source
Now listen to what comes next. Bereshit bara Elohim. In English, we say “God created,” but in Hebrew, “created” comes first. That’s perfectly normal in Hebrew. But the Zohar takes that word order and does something fascinating.
Remember how we read Bereshit as “with Wisdom”? Well, listen to what happens if we keep going that way. “With Wisdom, the Hidden One created Elohim.” Wait a minute. Elohim is the name we just translated as “God.” And here the Zohar is saying that the God we can name is already something emerging from a mystery we can’t name. And what’s there as that happens? Wisdom.
Now, here’s something I love about Elohim. It has a plural ending, but bara, the verb right before it, is singular. So we hear the form of many paired with a verb that speaks of one. Remember how we talked about the two coming out of the One? Here we are again.
You can hear that same idea in the first letters of the verse. Listen to the first four words. Bereshit bara Elohim et. The Zohar points out that the first two begin with bet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the next two begin with aleph, the first.
Then the Zohar tells a story about those two letters. God chooses bet to begin creation and tells aleph that it will still be the letter that expresses God’s oneness. So the story opens with two, and before we’ve even gotten to the heavens and the earth, the One is already there.
And there’s one more little detail I can’t resist. In gematria, where Hebrew letters have numerical values, Elohim adds up to eighty-six. And so does ha-teva, the Hebrew word for nature. I love that connection because look at what Elohim goes on to do in this chapter. Elohim separates light from darkness, gives us day and night, and separates the waters above from the waters below. We get to watch a world take shape as things begin to have places and rhythms of their own.
Now, Elohim is the first name we hear for God in this story. In chapter two, verse four, a second name appears right alongside it. We’ll spend more time with both names when we get there, because I want you to hear what’s happening in the story when that new name shows up.
Et and the Sacred in Everything
Okay, now we get to a little word made up of just two Hebrew letters. It’s et, and if you’re following along in English, you might be thinking, where? It’s there twice in the Hebrew, once right before “the heavens” and again right before “the earth.” And it’ll show up many more times as we go through the story. But its untranslated in English.
In Hebrew, et helps you tell what’s being created. English gets that across through word order, so most translations leave it out. Which means we’ve been hearing this verse our whole lives without ever hearing those two little letters. And the Zohar has a lot to say about them.
Et is made up of two letters, aleph and tav. Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and tav is the last. Think about what we mean when we say “from A to Z.” We mean everything in between, too. That’s how the Zohar hears those two letters with the whole alphabet in them.
And if that sounds familiar, listen to Revelation 22:13. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the way aleph and tav are the first and last in Hebrew. You name the two ends, and suddenly you’re talking about everything in between.
So if God is present in everything, doesn’t that include us? I mean all of us. Every gender, every religion, every nation, and yes, even the people who vote differently than you. From the smallest atom to the farthest galaxy, where exactly would we draw a line and say, “Okay, God stops here”? The answer is, you don’t.
So listen to the verse with that little word left in. “In the beginning, Elohim created et the heavens and et the earth.” and it’s there twice. From aleph to tav, the heavens are held within that wholeness, and so is the earth. Everything we can see and everything we can’t. From the One comes the two, and the One is still there in both.
And this is where I went down another rabbit hole. Modern physicists are exploring whether we might live in a holographic universe. And it makes me wonder whether this ancient story might be pointing toward something modern physics is still trying to understand. As Paul Levy writes, “Similar to a hologram—where every part contains an image of the whole—in each part of the quantum system the whole is encoded.”
Let’s pan back a couple of episodes to the story of the ant I stopped to save. I told you then that I believe all of life is sacred. And here we are, still in the very first verse of the Bible, and I’m already hearing that same idea in those two little letters.
I hear et as a reminder that the sacred is present in everything that comes into being, and we will see et many more times in this story. It’s there in the heavens, it’s there in the earth, and yes, it’s there in that little ant.
And that makes me think of the reverence for the natural world that runs through many Indigenous traditions. If you see a river or a mountain as sacred, that changes how you treat it. And if you see yourself as part of the same sacred world, that changes how you understand your place in it, too.
Look at what happens in this story. The Spirit hovers over the waters, the earth brings forth life, and the seas fill up with creatures. And what does God keep saying about all of it? It’s good. And all of that happens before we even show up.
So how did so many of us in the West come to see the earth as something separate from us, something we could use up? I mean, look at our own origin story. The earth is already alive, and God is already calling it good before we even show up. And when we do show up, we’re part of that same creation.
And that brings me back to the ant. Why is it sometimes easier for me to see the sacred in that little ant than it is to see it in myself? I grew up saying things like “pray for us sinners,” and somewhere along the way, I took that to mean there was something wrong with me just for being human. And when you’ve learned something that deeply, after a while it feels like something you just *know*.
And what’s the name of the tree we’re about to meet in the garden? The Tree of the KNOWLEDGE of Good and Evil. I want you to hang on to that word, because when we get to what people call the Fall, I want to ask what Adam and Eve suddenly think they know about themselves.
A little spoiler. I think what changes is how they see themselves. And I wonder if that has something to do with how we learned to see ourselves as separate from the very earth we came from. But we’ll get there in a couple of chapters. We’re still in verse one, you guys.
What If Heaven Is Already Here?
Okay, let’s come back to the two things et points to in this verse. The heavens and the earth. When you think about the creation story, how much time do you remember anyone spending on the heavens? Because in every version I remember hearing, we talked about how God made the earth and everything on it. And yet, which one comes first in the verse? The heavens.
So let’s start there, too. When I say “heaven,” what’s the first thing you picture? And where did that picture come from? Did somebody tell you that’s what heaven was, or do you remember ever looking into it for yourself? I want you to hold on to whatever came to mind as we go back and look at the Hebrew.
Here we are, five words into the Hebrew, and the heavens are already part of the story. We haven’t met a single human being yet. Nobody’s died, and we won’t even hear about death until we get to the tree in the garden.
So if you pictured heaven as somewhere we go when we die, here’s what I want to ask. What are the heavens doing here already?
There’s an old Jewish play on the word shamayim that I love. You can hear sham, meaning “there,” and mayim, meaning “water.” There’s water there. And sure enough, in the very next verse, God’s spirit is hovering over those same waters.
So what does any of this have to do with what happens when we die? I’d say everything and nothing at the same time. Because when I read this, I start to see heaven as the unseen side of the world I’m already living in.
So will I go there when I die? Well, yes and no. “Going there” makes it sound like I’m somewhere else right now. But if I’m already living in both the physical and the spiritual realms, maybe when I die, I stay where part of me has been all along. I just won’t be living in both anymore.
And once I started thinking about heaven this way, I started noticing how other traditions picture what’s there before the world takes shape. In one ancient Egyptian creation story, there are primordial waters called Nun, and the creator emerges from them. So there’s that image again. Before there’s a world we can recognize, there’s water.
And then there’s the Tao Te Ching, which says the Tao gives birth to One, and One gives birth to Two. And of course I hear that and go, wait, didn’t we just see something like that in Genesis? Remember how the Zohar reads those first three words? With Wisdom, the Hidden One brings forth Elohim, who brings for the heavens and the earth. So wisdom gives birth to the one, Elohim, who gives birth to the two, the heavens and the earth.
So what and where do we think heaven is?
In Luke, chapter seventeen, people ask Jesus when the kingdom of God is coming. And he says it’s “among you,” or “within you,” depending on the translation. I love that they ask him when, and he basically says, dude, look around. It’s already here.
And then there’s the Gospel of Thomas. In saying three, he says that if people tell you the kingdom is up in the sky, the birds will get there first. And if they tell you it’s in the sea, the fish will beat you to it, and then he says, “The kingdom is within you and outside of you.”
And later, in saying 113, the disciples ask when the kingdom will come. And Jesus tells them it’s already spread out over the earth, but people don’t see it. And I love that he says *the earth*. The very place we’re standing. What if we’ve been looking right at it and just haven’t known what we were looking at?
There are two little stories in Matthew, chapter thirteen, that help me picture this. In the first, Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman mixes into flour. And she mixes it in until it works its way through the whole batch. I love that we’ve gone from looking up at the sky to watching a woman make bread. You can’t see the yeast working, but you can see the dough rise.
And a few verses later, Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like treasure buried in a field. Someone finds it, and he’s so happy that he sells everything he owns to buy that field. Now think about that for a second. It’s the same field it was five minutes ago. The treasure was already there. What changed was his knowledge, what he could see in the ground he was standing on.
And that brings me right back to Genesis. The heavens and the earth are right there together in the very first line. And I wonder how much I’ve missed right here on earth because I was taught to look up when I thought about heaven. What if it’s been here the whole time?
What Does Genesis Mean by Earth?
And now, finally, let’s talk about the earth. Et ha-aretz. When I hear the word “earth,” I picture this beautiful blue-green planet we happen to inhabit. But here, I hear it as the whole physical realm. The stars, the galaxies, the ground under our feet, and even the bodies we’re living in. Everything that takes physical form.
And that’s what I think we’re about to watch unfold in this first chapter. We’re hearing the story of the physical world coming into being, told from the perspective of someone standing right here on Earth. Which makes sense to me. If you were going to tell the story of how the world came to be, wouldn’t you start with the world as you see it from where you stand?
So now we can look at it and say as in the beginning, god created the spiritual and the physical or the physical and the non physical.
The Numbers Behind Heaven and Earth
Now, you might think we’re done with this verse. I mean, we finally made it to the earth. But there’s a mathematical architecture underlying the entire story, and I think this first verse might be one of the most beautiful and complex in all of Torah. Which is saying something, considering it’s seven words long.
And it makes me think of what we just said about heaven being woven through the physical world. The numbers are woven through the very words we’ve been reading all along, but you can’t see them unless you go looking for them. You must develop the eyes to see in order to find them.
In Hebrew, every letter has a numerical value. And there’s a practice called gematria where you add up the values of the letters in a word or a phrase and see what story those numbers might tell. There are a few different ways to do that, but for today, we’ll keep it simple. We’ll take the value of each letter and add them up.
We’ve already seen one example. Elohim and ha-teva, the Hebrew word for nature, both add up to 86. In gematria, that gives us a reason to put those words next to each other and ask what we might hear in them together. And wait till you see what happens when we do that with the heavens and the earth.
Et ha-shamayim, “the heavens,” adds up to 796. And if we set aside the little “and” that joins the two phrases, et ha-aretz, “the earth,” adds up to 697. Listen to those digits. 7–9–6. 6–9–7. They’re mirror images of each other.
It makes me think of “as above, so below,” and of a line we’ve said so many times in prayer. “On earth as it is in heaven.”
It also makes me picture the Star of David. If you are unfamiliar, imagine 2 interlocking triangles, one pointing up and one pointing down. Together they make a 6-pointed star. At first, I saw the triangle pointing up as earth and the one pointing down as heaven, which is a valid way to see it, and remember symbols hold many meanings and all can be true. But the longer I sat with that image, the more I started to see something else.
Think about how we experience life here on earth. We know up in relation to down, left in relation to right, daylight in relation to darkness. But if you draw a straight line and put an L at one end and an R at the other, you’ll notice something curious. There’s a point right in the middle that is neither left nor right. That’s what I mean by nondual. At the center, you can see that both sides belong to one line and neither can exist without the other
And once you start looking for that relationship, you see it all over the physical world. Take a magnet. If you cut it in half, you get 2 smaller magnets, each with a north pole and a south pole. Or take a coin. You can flip it from heads to tails all day long, and whichever side you’re looking at, you’re still holding the same coin.
That’s where I picture heaven. Right at the center, where the 2 meet. And when I zoom back out to the Star of David, I see both triangles as the duality we experience here on earth. I see heaven in the way they come together as one shape.
And when I look at those two triangles together, I think about how every duality exists in relationship. Up only makes sense in relation to down. If I say something’s on the left, you could ask, “The left of what?” Left cannot exist without right. And I know what it means for the sky to grow light because I’ve seen it dark.
That’s what I see in those two triangles. I can trace each one with my finger, but it’s the way they fit together that makes the star. And I wonder if that’s part of what God is calling good as creation unfolds. The way all these different things belong together.
2,701 and the Wisdom of the Heart 37:00
Now, before we end today, let’s zoom out and look at the gematria of the whole verse. One of the things I love about the stories we’ve explored is that a symbol can speak to you differently depending on where you are in your life. You can come back to the same story years later and wonder how on earth you missed something that now seems so obvious.
But numbers give us something else to work with. We can read the same pattern in different ways, and we can all add up the letters and get the same number. What fascinates me is how often those numbers echo something we’ve already seen in the story. We just saw it with the heavens and the earth. Now let’s see what happens when we put the whole verse together.
Genesis 1:1 has seven Hebrew words and twenty-eight Hebrew letters. If you add up the numerical values of all those letters, you get 2,701. And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Okay, Jenn, what am I supposed to do with 2,701?” Fair question.
If you’re able to grab a pen and a piece of paper, it might help to jot down the numbers or sketch along with me. If you’re driving or you’re out walking, just keep listening. I’ll put the drawings in the blog post for this episode so you can look at them later. Just go to KnowThySoul.com, click Blog, and look for this episode 18.
Yosef Sebag, who’s written about the numbers in this verse, says 2,701 “can be regarded as the ultimate and peerless masterpiece of mathematical wisdom and perfection.” Which is quite a thing to say about 7 words written thousands of years before anyone could plug them into a computer and start looking for patterns.
I’ve only scratched the surface of what people have found in these 7 words. Let me show you a little bit of what caught my attention.
Remember, there are 28 letters in this verse. 28 is what’s called a triangular number. Imagine arranging 28 dots in rows. You put 1 dot at the top, 2 underneath it, then 3, and you keep going till you get 7 rows. Your total triangle has 28 dots in it. But 28 is also what mathematicians call a perfect number. That means if you take all the smaller whole numbers that divide evenly into it and add them together, you get the number itself. So 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28.
And you know what the first perfect number is? 6. It divides evenly by 1, 2, and 3, and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. And how many letters did we count in Bereshit? 6. So the very first word has 6 letters, and the very first verse has 28. The first 2 perfect numbers.
But let’s go a little deeper. If you break 2,701 down into its prime factors, you get 73 × 37. And there’s that mirror again. 7–3. 3–7. We just saw the numbers for heaven and earth reverse each other, and now the two numbers that multiply to give us the whole verse do it, too.
So what do those numbers give us in Hebrew? 73 is the gematria of chokhmah, which means, are you ready? “wisdom.” And 37 is the gematria of ha-lev, “the heart.” I love that we spent so much time with Wisdom at the beginning of this episode, and now here she is again, mathematically paired with the wisdom of heart.
And remember that exact center in the middle of the left and right line? The place that is neither left nor right, its non-dual? Well, what if we brought that image back into our own bodies? When I picture that center in myself, I think of my heart. And in the 7-chakra system, the heart chakra is right in the middle, with 3 chakras below it and 3 chakras above it.
And I wonder if that’s where Wisdom has been asking me to listen all along. You’ve heard me talk about how I’ve learned to listen to the wisdom of my heart. And here I am, adding up the letters in the first verse of Genesis, and somehow the numbers bring me right back there.
And there’s one more little thing about the heart I can’t resist. The Torah begins with bet and ends with lamed. Take that last letter and bring it back around to the first, and you spell lev, “heart.” So when you finish the Torah and go back to the beginning, there’s a heart right where the end and the beginning meet.
And before we leave 37 and 73, there’s one more mirror I want you to see. If you count the prime numbers in order, 37 is the 12th, and 73 is the 21st. So even their places in the list of prime numbers are mirror images. 12 and 21.
If I haven’t lost you in all the numbers, we can keep going. Take 2,701 and read the digits backward. You get 1,072. Now add them together gives you 3,773. And look what’s sitting right there in the answer. 37 and 73, side by side.
We multiplied 37 and 73 to get 2,701. Then we added 2,701 to its own reflection, and there they are again, right next to each other. The heart and Wisdom. Sebag notes: “No other known decimal number has this perfection.”
2,701 is also a triangular number. Remember, you put 1 dot at the top, 2 underneath it, then 3, and you keep going until you get to the row with 73 dots, you’ve used every single dot, and they make one big triangle that totals 2,701 dots.
This dotted triangle has 73 dots along each side. Now imagine counting to the middle dot of each side. Which dot do you land on? The 37th. So there’s 73 and 37 again, and this time you can actually see one sitting at the center of the other.
Now connect those 3 middle dots. You get a smaller triangle pointing the other way, with 37 dots on each side and so that middle triangle has 703 dots altogether. And once you’ve drawn that triangle, you’ve got 3 little triangles left over, one at each corner. How many dots are in each one? Take 703 away from 2,701 and divide what’s left by 3. You get 666 dots in each corner.
The Three Corners of 666
And here’s where my mind goes with that. Remember the six directions we talked about? North, south, east, west, up, and down. So when I see 666 in each of those three corners, I think about what happens when the physical world gets all my attention. I can get so caught up in what I can see, measure, and control that I forget there’s a spiritual dimension to the life I’m already living.
And that’s what I love about this triangle. My eye goes straight to those three corners, but the center has been there the whole time.
Let me give you an example. You know that debate about how the world began? Was it the Big Bang, or did God create the world in six days and rest on the seventh? Let’s stand at that center point we’ve been talking about for a minute and see what we can hear from both sides.
The Big Bang gives us a way to understand how the universe expanded from an early, hot, dense state. And Genesis gives me a way to think about what it means to live in that universe. I mean, even that oversized bet at the beginning of Bereshit makes me think of the Big Bang. There’s something about that big letter opening the whole story that makes me smile.
Science can tell us that force equals mass times acceleration, and it can trace the history of the universe a long way back. And I still find myself asking, where did the laws that make any of this possible come from? It’s like looking at a computer program and wondering who wrote it. If I keep asking what caused this, and then what caused that, I eventually find myself wondering whether there’s a first cause that was itself uncaused. I can sit with that question and still be fascinated by what science has figured out.
And isn’t even science similar to that oversized Bet at the beginning of this story, we can tell the story from that point forward, but we know nothing scientifically about what came before that point.
Think about how we began. A sperm fertilizes an egg, and one cell becomes 2, then 4, then 8. We can explain how that happens and still look at a newborn and think, how on earth did we get you?
And it makes me think about that image we’ll get in Genesis of God breathing life into the human. I can follow what’s happening with those cells and still wonder what it means for God to breathe life into us. I mean, the more I know about what had to happen for that baby to be here, the more miraculous it seems to me.
And that’s what I see in those three corners of the triangle. When I come across 666 later in the Bible, I think about what happens to me when the physical world becomes the whole story. I start measuring my life by how much I’ve earned, what title I can put after my name, or whether somebody chooses me. And every time I get the thing I thought would finally be enough, I find something else to chase.
And that’s exactly how Perceval lives for so much of his story. He gets so good at being a knight, but when he’s sitting right there with the wounded inner Fisher King, he can’t bring himself to ask, “What ails you?” And now that we’ve talked about the center of the triangle and the wisdom of the heart, go back and listen to those Perceval episodes. I think you’ll hear a different story this time.
There are a lot more patterns in that triangle of 2,701 dots. If you’d like to go deeper, send me a message. If enough of you are interested, I’ll host a live workshop on Zoom so I can draw this out and we can actually look at the numbers and the 2,701 dot triangle together.
The Seventh Dot and the Heart
But for now, let’s zoom all the way in to the center of that big triangle. There’s one dot in the middle, with six dots right around it. Remember the six directions we talked about? North, south, east, west, up, and down.
Now picture yourself looking out in all six directions. Where’s the seventh dot, the center? Right where you are. And when I picture that meeting place in myself, I think of the heart. So many wisdom traditions point us there, to the heart as the place where our inner and outer worlds meet.
And let’s go one layer deeper. The brain has two hemispheres, a left and a right. And think about how differently we experience our minds depending on what we’re doing. There’s the part of me that can get so absorbed in solving a problem that I lose track of time. Then I sit down to meditate, or I fall asleep and dream, and my mind feels like a very different place.
Put your hand on your chest for a second. What do you feel? One heartbeat. When you were still an embryo, your heart was already beating while your brain was just beginning to take shape. I hear an echo there of the image we’ve been following all along, the two emerging from the One.
Now keep that heartbeat in mind and come back to the center dot. There are six dots around it. Connect every other dot and you get a triangle. Connect the three you skipped and you get another triangle pointing the other way. And there it is again, the Star of David.
We first pictured that star when we were talking about the heavens and the earth. And here it is again, tucked right into the heart of those seven words. Which, okay, you guys, was a lot for seven words.
Before we go, put your hand back on your chest for a second. Feel that heartbeat. We’re going to spend a lot of time in this story talking about the breath of life and what it means to listen to your heart. We’ve spent this whole episode with one verse about the beginning of everything, and here you are, breathing, with your hand on your heart, part of the very world that story is telling.
Creation is still happening. It’s happening right now, every day, in you, in me, in that little ant, and in every corner of the cosmos.
Creation begins in wisdom, and wisdom begins in the heart. So if you let yourself feel that for a moment, how might you re-story what you believe about your place in the universe?
Until next time, my friends,
may you know thy soul.
It already knows the way.
Recent Comments