Verbal Creation: From Linguistic Feature to Literary Motif in Genesis 1-11

The book of Genesis opens with the creation of the world by means of speech. “God said: ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen 1,3). Scholars have considered this creation through speech a prototypical speech act. However, the recurrence of this motif in later chapters of the book is often overlooked. This article argues that the “speech as a means of creation” paradigm functions as a literary motif in subsequent stories of the Primeval History. The discussion will revolve around the initial appearance of the paradigm, its later manifestations, and the relationship between them, focusing in particular on the formal realization of the linguistic category of the speech act as a literary motif.