Before Genesis: Was Earth Restored Rather Than Created from Nothing?

Most people who take the Bible seriously—especially those who read it literally—assume that Genesis describes the creation of the entire universe ex nihilo, from absolute nothingness. I do not hold that view.

I see Genesis instead as describing the re-ordering or rebuilding of Earth (and possibly parts of our own planetary system) after a catastrophic event that is not directly described in the biblical text. In this reading, Genesis is not a cosmology of first origins, but a narrative of restoration.

This raises an obvious and difficult question:

If Genesis describes restoration, what happened before it?

Genesis Opens in the Aftermath of Ruin

Genesis 1:2 famously describes the Earth as tohu va-bohu—formless, desolate, submerged in water, and covered in darkness. These are not the conditions of a universe being created from nothing; they are the conditions of a world in ruin.

The text does not say that darkness or the waters were created at that moment. They already exist when the narrative begins. What follows is a process of separation, stabilization, and ordering.

Equally striking is the delayed appearance of the Sun, Moon, and stars, which are not mentioned until the so-called “fourth day.” In a strict creation-from-nothing model this is puzzling. In a restoration model, it is not. The lights may already have existed but were obscured, destabilized, or functionally absent due to atmospheric or cosmic conditions.

Two Major Transitions, Not One

A single catastrophe does not adequately explain the evidence. What fits better—both textually and physically—is a two-event model, separated by tens of thousands of years.

Event One: A Permanent Brightening (~130,000–100,000 years ago)

The first major transition appears to have occurred deep in the Late Pleistocene, roughly 100,000 years ago, overlapping the Eemian climate optimum.

This period was marked by unusually warm global temperatures and environmental conditions that did not persist. It also coincides with a severe Neanderthal population bottleneck or collapse. Importantly, Neanderthal populations never returned to their earlier levels, suggesting that the prior environmental regime did not return either.

In this framework, the Saturnian planetary system made a near approach to the Sun/Jupiter system and did not revert to its former configuration. Instead, it transitioned outward into a new, brighter, and more energetic regime. Illumination increased rather than decreased.

Neanderthals, adapted to an older and dimmer ecological niche, lost their competitive advantage under these new conditions. This explains both their collapse and their failure to recover.

In short, this first transition represents a permanent brightening of Earth, not a descent into darkness.

Additional Illumination and the “Central Fire”

Ancient philosophical and mythological traditions speak of a former sky that was brighter and more complex than today’s. The Pythagorean concept of a “Central Fire” is often dismissed as symbolic, but it maps plausibly onto a dominant Birkeland current or plasma structure within a different planetary configuration.

If Earth once received illumination not only from the Sun/Jupiter region but also from such a central electrical structure, the warmth and brightness of the Eemian are easily explained. The later disappearance of this additional light source would have been both climatically disruptive and culturally traumatic.

Event Two: Obscuration, Inundation, and Stabilization (Much Later)

A second major transition appears to have occurred far more recently, possibly between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago. Unlike the first, this event involved darkness rather than increased light.

This later transition likely included atmospheric opacity, large-scale hydrological disruption, and severe environmental stress. Crucially, this event should not be identified with the Noachian Flood described later in Genesis.

The flood of Noah occurs hundreds—and likely thousands—of years after the Genesis restoration narrative and is embedded within an already populated human history. Genesis itself does not require that all floods be the same flood.

Researchers such as Charles Ginenthal have argued that geological and historical evidence supports the existence of multiple global or near-global inundations across deep time. A pre-Genesis inundation associated with system-level reorganization can therefore be distinguished from the later Noachian Flood without contradiction.

What Genesis May Actually Be Describing

In this model, Genesis 1 does not describe the first appearance of light on Earth. Instead, it describes the final recovery from a period of darkness and disorder.

“Let there be light” marks the clearing of the skies and the re-establishment of a stable day–night cycle, not the ignition of the universe itself.

Put simply: Earth was bright before Genesis—and then it was not.

Why This Interpretation Matters

This reading resolves several longstanding problems:

• It explains why Neanderthals collapsed and never recovered
• It preserves the reality of the Eemian climate optimum
• It avoids forcing Genesis into Pleistocene chronology
• It allows for multiple world-ages rather than a single linear history
• It removes the burden of modern cosmology from an ancient theological text

Genesis, read this way, becomes a sober account of restoration after catastrophe—not a scientific treatise, and not a story of absolute beginnings.

What happened before Genesis may never be fully recoverable. But the text itself strongly suggests that something did.