God the Creator

In the long, tortuous history through which the Jewish nation came to know the Lord, monotheism (belief in one God) finally became absolutely fundamental. And once the Jews had realized that there is one God and one God alone, a very important consequence of this belief became apparent to them: the one God, the ruler of all things, is also the creator of all things. The relationship of these ideas is strikingly illustrated in a passage from Isaiah, written during the Babylonian Exile:

For thus says the Lord,
who created the heavens
(he is God!),
who formed the earth and made it
(he established it;
he did not create it a chaos,
he formed it to be inhabited!):
"I am the LORD, and there is no other."

( Isa. 45: 18)

This note recurs again and again in the later chapters of Isaiah. These chapters, together with Gen., chs. 1; 2 (which in their present form also come from the Exilic period), are our main sources for the Biblical understanding of God as creator.