Render, ‘In the beginning, when
God created the heavens and the earth—now the earth was waste and void, and
darkness was over the deep, and the spirit of God was brooding over the waters—then
God said: Let there be light.’ On this
reading, ‘Creation’ is not ‘out of nothing,’ but out of pre-existing chaos.
Vv. 1 and 3 tell us, when God determined on the creation of the ordered
universe, the first work was the formation of light as essential to life and
progress. The first half of 24 was probably prefixed originally to
v. 1. (J.R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the
Holy Bible [London: Macmillan and Co., 1909], 3-4, emphasis added)