The Verb That Made the World, and the Making That Reflects the Maker
Good Protocols, SPC · Paul Tan · revised September 2026
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Genesis 1:3
I. The Jussive
The first recorded words of God are a verb in a mood most English readers never learn the name of. Yehi ‘or. The Hebrew is in the jussive, the mood of willed becoming, a grammatical form whose whole job is to speak something toward existence, and the conventional translation, let there be, catches it about as well as English can. Before there is any thing at all, there is a verb, and the verb is not a description but a summons. The world does not begin with matter awaiting arrangement. It begins with speech in motion, and light happens.
John Sailhamer spent his career insisting that we read Genesis as it was actually composed, a deliberate narrative whose meaning lives in its arrangement, and read that way the first chapter is a composition built on a repeated act of speaking. And God said, again and again, the phrase structuring the week like a drumbeat, and the ancient rabbis, counting, taught that with ten utterances the world was created. Each scene closes with its evening-and-morning refrain, episode after episode, which is to say the oldest text in our formation carries its meaning the way all deep formation carries meaning, in composed scenes, with the speaking at the center. The Pentateuch as narrative begins as narrative’s purest case, a story in which saying is making.
II. A Language Rooted in Verbs
It matters that this story was first told in Hebrew, because Biblical Hebrew is a language whose center of gravity is the verb. Nearly every word in the language grows from a root of three consonants, and the root is characteristically verbal, an action or a happening from which the nouns bud like fruit from a branch. Tradition has loved to read the nouns as budding from verbs, the king from reigning, the bread from the older doing of hands, and whatever the philologists finally settle about direction, one word settles the matter by itself: the language’s word for word, davar, means both word and thing, as though Hebrew never forgot the first chapter of its own scriptures, where things are spoken before they are anything else. A speaker of such a language moves through a world of doings that have condensed, for the moment, into names.
Hebrew is not alone in this. Robin Wall Kimmerer has written of her own people’s language, Potawatomi, as one mostly made of verbs, where a bay alive is not a thing but a happening, and I cite her published observation with gratitude and leave her language’s stories to the people who carry them. One caution belongs with any observation like this, and it belongs here too: no language imprisons thought, and the claim is only the modest, evidenced one, that a language trains its speakers’ habitual attention. Hebrew trains attention toward the happening under the thing. When I was taught to read the scriptures in their own tongue, I was being trained, without anyone saying so, in the attention this work depends on, the eye that watches for the doing beneath the noun.
III. The Name That Refuses to Be a Noun
Then comes the mountain, and the strangest exchange in the whole library of the world. Moses, standing before a bush that burns without burning up, an ongoing verb if ever there was one, asks for a name to carry back to the enslaved, a noun, a handle, something portable. And the answer he receives is a verb, first person, in motion. Ehyeh asher ehyeh. I AM WHO I AM, or closer to the grammar’s own openness, I will be who I will be. And the text itself ties the covenant name, YHWH, to that same verb of being, hayah, so that the name Israel will carry through its whole history is not a label but a happening, being itself, underway, refusing to hold still long enough to become an object.
Moses asked for a noun and was given a verb, and much of what this practice believes about persons follows from that refusal. The living God will not be rendered as a thing, and as the next sections show, the scriptures are precise about what happens when worshippers insist on things anyway.
IV. The Word That Became
The fourth gospel opens by gathering Genesis into a single sweep. In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and all things were made through him, and nothing that was made was made without him. It is possible to read Logos as a Greek philosopher would, the rational principle, the idea of ideas, a magnificent noun. John does not let the reading survive his own paragraph. The Logos he announces does the least noun-like thing conceivable: the Word became flesh, egeneto, the great verb of becoming, and dwelt among us, and the verb John chooses for dwelt means pitched a tent, tabernacled, moved into the neighborhood, in Eugene Peterson’s phrase, with stakes and canvas. The Word through whom the let-there-be was spoken enters the world the way a verb enters a sentence, to act, to suffer the tenses, to be conjugated through birth and hunger and touch and death and the strangest tense of all, risen. Creation and incarnation are the same signature twice. Whatever God is, God is not standing still, and the Word is not an idea to be held but a happening to be met.
V. The Idols Are Nouns
The scriptures also show us the alternative, and their satire of it is grammatical. Psalm 115 describes the idols of the nations with a merciless inventory of arrested verbs: they have mouths that do not speak, eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear, hands that do not handle, feet that do not walk. An idol is pure nounhood, a being with all its verbs removed, matter shaped like life with the happening taken out. And the inventory ends with the line that Greg Beale built a whole biblical theology on: those who make them become like them, and so do all who trust in them. We become what we worship. Worship the verb, the living I-will-be, and you are kept in motion, still becoming, still spoken. Worship a noun and you noun yourself, the mouth slowly forgetting speech, the hands forgetting their handling, the life freezing into its own image.
Sailhamer loved to tell a Hollywood story that belongs exactly here, and it is worth telling as the parable it is, whichever way the casting actually went. Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston as Moses, the story goes, because DeMille recognized Michelangelo’s Moses in the actor’s face, and so a marble image four centuries old chose the face through which generations would picture the man of the mountain. The image mediated until it replaced. That is Daniel Boorstin’s whole warning about the manufactured image compressed into a single piece of casting, and it is also, this practice must say plainly, a working definition of what a file does to a child. The file has honest work to do; the trouble begins when it is asked to stand in for the child. The assessment’s rendering, the case history’s freeze-frame, the scores arranged into a profile, all of it is a Michelangelo problem, an image standing in for a living person until the institutions are relating to the statue. The habit of reducing a person to what can be measured about them is, in the light of Psalm 115, the idolatry of persons, the worship of the rendered noun over the living verb. The discipline this work keeps, reading the person above the record, is an ancient commandment wearing modern clothes: read the person’s own composition, and refuse the statue.
VI. The Makers Made in the Maker’s Image
The first thing the scriptures reveal about God is not an attribute but an activity: in the beginning, God created. Making is the opening disclosure. So when the same composition says, a few verses later, that humankind is made in the image of that God, the first available meaning of the image is the one Dorothy Sayers spent The Mind of the Maker drawing out: at the point in the story where the image is conferred, the only thing we have been shown about God is that God makes, and so the clearest trace of the image in us is the act of making itself. Tolkien said it as a poet, that we make still by the law in which we’re made, and called the human vocation subcreation, the making of makers under the Maker. Makoto Fujimura carries it into the studio, grinding minerals into pigment and laying them down in layer upon layer until the surface holds light, and from the studio into the culture: making as a way of knowing God, culture care as tending the soil where making can happen, the kintsugi bowl as broken making made beautiful and load-bearing again.
And the workbench voices give it their plain confession. James Krenov, who said it was working well that he loved, locates the joy exactly where this essay locates the image, in the verb, in the working, with the finished cabinet standing afterward as the noun that testifies to the making. George Nakashima gave the felled tree a second life in the table, the verb continued past the felling, which is a maker’s resurrection doctrine if the phrase can be forgiven. Even Genesis’s second chapter keeps the grammar: God plants a garden, forms the creature from the dust, breathes into its nostrils, and then places the human in the garden with two verbs for a job description, to serve it and to keep it, avad and shamar, the gardener’s verbs. Whatever the first chapter’s dominion means, the second chapter is plain about the job. The image-bearer is not licensed to dominate a world of objects. The image-bearer is a gardener set among fellow creatures to serve and keep, and the parent tending a child, the host tending a table, and the carpenter reading a board are all inside that job description, making because made by a Maker.
VII. The Naming
There is one more scene. In Genesis 2, God brings the animals to the first human to see what he would call them, and whatever the man calls each living creature, that is its name. Read carelessly, this is a scene of domination, labels stamped on inventory. Read as composed, it is a scene of attention: the Maker watching the image-bearer watch the creatures, the naming an act of relation, each name an answer to what the creature shows itself to be. The text says God brought them to see what he would call them, which is to say the naming was not dictated and not arbitrary. It was earned by looking. Before any fall, and right beside the garden given to be served and kept, the first human work the text shows is learning the names of the living by watching how they live.
A practice whose daily work is learning the names of young people by watching how they actually live, before any file has its say, is entitled to notice that the oldest text it holds describes that exact work as among the first things a human being was asked to do.
VIII. Formation as Continuing Speech
The essay ends in the rooms where this work happens. If the world begins with let there be, and the name of God is a verb, and the idols are the nouns we freeze each other into, then formation is best understood as continuing speech, the let-there-be still being said over persons who are still becoming. A child is not a finished noun awaiting classification. A child is still growing, still becoming, still being spoken into who they are, and the adults around that child are always in one of two grammatical postures, speaking futures open with something like the jussive, or reading the statue the file has already carved. Blessing is a grammar before it is a sentiment. When a parent speaks a future over a child, when a coach names what a kid is becoming before the kid can see it, when someone writes down the verbs the deficit file has no column for, the ancient mood is being used for its original purpose.
Martin Buber stands quietly under this whole essay, and he should be named before it closes. You cannot be in relation with an It, he taught, only with a Thou, and the sociologist Hartmut Rosa draws on that hinge for his account of resonance, which means the social theory this practice runs on and the theology this essay confesses are holding the same door open from two sides. The noun-world is the It-world, the world of files and statues and idols and cases. The verb-world is the Thou-world, where the living meet the living and both keep becoming. Every practice in this work, the shared table, the circle, the record that belongs to the person, the edge left unsquared, is finally a way of staying in the second world on behalf of people whom the systems around them press into the first. This whole practice began with one claim, that every person carries a sound. This essay only adds the grammar: the sound is a verb, it was spoken before the person could speak, and the work is to keep it sounding, until the child cast as a statue hears the older grammar and starts to move.
Good Protocols, SPC · Let There Be · thinking alongside John Sailhamer on Genesis as composition, Greg Beale on becoming what we worship, Dorothy Sayers and J. R. R. Tolkien on the maker’s image, Makoto Fujimura on making and culture care, James Krenov and George Nakashima at the bench, and Martin Buber and Hartmut Rosa on the door held open from two sides · Hebrew and Greek claims are made at the level of the text itself: the jussive of Genesis 1, the name tied to the verb of being in Exodus 3, davar as word and thing, egeneto and the tent-pitching verb of John 1:14 · revised September 2026