Bara (בָּרָא) Hebrew Meaning — The Biblical Word for 'Create' Explained

Q: What is the difference between bara and asah?

Bārā' (בָּרָא) is reserved for divine creative activity and often emphasizes something genuinely new or unprecedented. 'Āśâ (עָשָׂה) is the general Hebrew word for 'make' or 'do' — it is used thousands of times in the Hebrew Bible by both God and human beings. Genesis 1 uses both verbs, sometimes in close proximity, but reserves bārā' for moments of special creative significance: the cosmos (1:1), sea creatures (1:21), and humanity (1:27).

Q: Does bara mean creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo)?

Scholars disagree. Copan and Craig argue that bārā' in Genesis 1:1 does assert creation from nothing. Walton contends the word functions primarily to describe the assignment of roles and purposes. The evidence suggests that bārā' can carry both material and functional dimensions depending on context — the word is richer than any single English gloss can capture.

Q: What is the difference between bara and yatsar?

Bārā' (בָּרָא, 'to create') is reserved exclusively for God and often emphasizes newness or divine sovereignty. Yāṣar (יָצַר, 'to form, to fashion') evokes a potter shaping clay — it emphasizes craftsmanship and intentional design. Both God and humans can yāṣar. In Genesis, God bārā' the heavens and the earth (1:1) and humanity (1:27), but he yāṣar Adam from the dust of the ground (2:7), emphasizing the intimate, hands-on nature of that act.

The second word of the Hebrew Bible is בָּרָא (bārā’, Strong’s H1254). English Bibles translate it “created.” Genesis 1:1 reads, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Most English readers encounter that word and assume it means something like “to bring into material existence from nothing.” And that may be part of what it means. But the original Hebrew is more nuanced—and more interesting—than a single English gloss can capture.

Understanding bārā’ matters because it shapes how we read the entire creation account. It affects debates about the age of the earth, the relationship between science and faith, and the very purpose of Genesis 1. I explored many of these themes in my review of The Lost World of Genesis One, and this post builds on that foundation by examining the word itself.

The Word Itself

The Hebrew root ב-ר-א (b-r-ʾ) appears in the Qal stem (the basic active verbal form in Hebrew) in Genesis 1:1 as a perfect-tense verb—indicating completed action. In all its verbal forms across the Hebrew Bible, the root appears approximately 54 times in 46 verses. In its Qal stem—the basic active form—the verb occurs roughly 38 times.¹

It is worth noting that the consonants ב-ר-א correspond to three distinct roots in biblical Hebrew, treated as separate lexical entries in standard lexicons like BDB and HALOT:

בָּרָא I—“to create” (the subject of this article; Strong’s H1254)
בָּרָא II—“to be fat, to feed” (as in 1 Samuel 2:29; Strong’s H1254a)
בָּרָא III—“to cut down, to clear” (as in Joshua 17:15, 18; Strong’s H1254b)

Readers doing independent word studies should be aware of these distinctions to avoid conflating the roots.

What makes bārā’ remarkable is not its frequency but its exclusivity. In every instance where the verb appears in the Qal stem, the subject is God.² Human beings never bārā’. They ‘āśâ (עָשָׂה, “make”), they yāṣar (יָצַר, “form”), they bānâ (בָּנָה, “build”)—but they do not bārā’. The verb is reserved exclusively for divine activity.

This tells us something important before we even examine the word’s range of meaning: whatever bārā’ signifies, it describes something only God does. It carries a theological weight that no other Hebrew creation verb shares.

A Survey of Key Occurrences

The best way to understand a Hebrew word is to see how it is actually used across Scripture. Here is a walk through several of the most important occurrences of bārā’, organized to show its breadth.

Genesis 1:1—“In the beginning, God created (בָּרָא) the heavens and the earth.”

This is the Bible’s opening statement about the cosmos. The context is grand and sweeping—the totality of heaven and earth. Whether this refers to material origination, the assignment of function, or both, it clearly marks the supreme act of divine initiative.

Genesis 1:21—“So God created (וַיִּבְרָא) the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves.”

Here bārā’ appears in the account of Day Five. The sea creatures are singled out for this verb, even though much of the surrounding narrative uses ‘āśâ (“made”). This selective use suggests the author saw something distinctive about these creatures—perhaps their novelty, their strangeness, or their role in the ordered world God was establishing.

Genesis 1:27—“So God created (וַיִּבְרָא) man in his own image, in the image of God he created (בָּרָא) him; male and female he created (בָּרָא) them.”

The verb appears three times in a single verse—an emphatic, poetic repetition that underscores the singular significance of humanity’s creation. Whatever bārā’ means, the author wants us to know it applies to human beings in a special way.

Genesis 2:3—“So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creating (בְּרֹא).”

This summary statement uses bārā’ to describe the whole of God’s creative work. It wraps the entire seven-day account in the language of divine creation.

Isaiah 43:7—“Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created (בְּרָאתִיו) for my glory, whom I formed and made.”

Here bārā’ is parallel to “formed” (yāṣar) and “made” (‘āśâ), but the emphasis falls on purpose: God created his people for his glory. The context is not about material origination at all—it is about identity and calling.

Isaiah 45:7—“I form light and create (וּבוֹרֵא) darkness, I make well-being and create (וּבוֹרֵא) calamity.”

This is one of the most striking uses of bārā’ in Scripture. God “creates” darkness and calamity. The point is clearly not that darkness is a material substance God manufactures. Rather, God sovereignly ordains and brings about even adverse realities. The verb here functions to assert God’s authority over all things.

Isaiah 65:17—“For behold, I create (בּוֹרֵא) new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered.”

A future-oriented use of bārā’—God will create something radically new. The language echoes Genesis 1:1 deliberately, suggesting a re-creation or renewal of cosmic scope.

Psalm 51:10—“Create (בְּרָא) in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

David’s prayer uses bārā’ for an interior, spiritual transformation. No one would argue that David is asking God to manufacture a physical organ. He is asking for something only God can do: bring about a genuinely new moral and spiritual reality within him.⁶

Amos 4:13—“For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates (וּבֹרֵא) the wind, and declares to man what is his thought…”

Here bārā’ applies to the wind—an invisible, immaterial force. The emphasis is on God’s sovereign power over all aspects of creation, material and immaterial alike.

What Patterns Emerge?

Looking across these occurrences, several things become clear. First, bārā’ is always an act of God—never of human beings. Second, it does not always describe material creation. Darkness, calamity, a clean heart, and wind are not physical objects brought into existence from raw materials. Third, the word frequently emphasizes newness, divine sovereignty, and purpose. The thread running through every use is that God is doing something that only God can do—something decisive, authoritative, and often unprecedented.

Walton’s Functional-Origins Argument

John Walton, in The Lost World of Genesis One, argues that bārā’ in Genesis 1 functions primarily in a “functional-origins” sense.³ That is, when Genesis 1 says God “created” the heavens and the earth, it is describing God’s act of assigning roles, functions, and purposes to the cosmos—not necessarily the act of producing physical matter.

Walton points out that in the ancient Near Eastern world, something was considered to “exist” not when it had material substance but when it had a name, a function, and a place in the ordered world. Creation, in that cultural context, was the act of ordering, naming, and assigning purpose. To “create” was to move something from non-functional chaos into an ordered, purposeful system.

On this reading, the seven days of Genesis 1 describe God inaugurating the cosmos as a functioning temple—assigning roles to light and darkness (time), sky and sea (weather), land and vegetation (food), and so on. The climax is Day Seven, when God “rests”—not because he is tired, but because he takes up residence in the cosmic temple he has ordered.

This interpretation, Walton argues, is not a modern accommodation to science. It is a recovery of how the original audience would have understood the text. Ancient Israelites, embedded in a culture where creation meant functional ordering, would have heard Genesis 1 as an account of God establishing the world’s purpose—not a step-by-step material manufacturing process.

It is worth noting that Walton’s argument is a specific scholarly proposal, not the consensus of all Old Testament scholarship. It has gained significant traction, but it remains debated.

Other Scholarly Perspectives

Not all scholars agree that bārā’ should be understood primarily—or exclusively—in functional terms.

Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, in Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (2004), argue that bārā’ does carry a material-creation sense in key contexts—especially Genesis 1:1.⁴ They contend that the opening verse of the Bible asserts creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing—and that the unique use of bārā’ with only God as subject supports this reading. If the verb merely meant “to assign function,” they argue, there would be less reason to restrict it to divine activity.

Copan and Craig acknowledge that bārā’ has a range of meaning and does not always denote material creation. But they maintain that in its most foundational uses—particularly Genesis 1:1—the word does assert that God brought the cosmos into existence, not merely that he organized pre-existing material.

It is worth noting that Creation out of Nothing was published in 2004, five years before Walton’s Lost World of Genesis One (2009), and thus does not directly engage his functional-origins thesis. Craig has since engaged Walton’s position in subsequent work, including In Quest of the Historical Adam (Eerdmans, 2021).

Several additional scholars have made important contributions to the scholarly discussion. C. John Collins, in his commentary Genesis 1–4 (P&R Publishing, 2006), argues for a mediating position: that בָּרָא encompasses both material and functional dimensions and that the evidence does not compel a choice between them. David Toshio Tsumura, in Creation and Destruction (Eisenbrauns, 2005), provides detailed linguistic analysis challenging both purely functional and purely mythological readings, arguing that the Hebrew text resists reduction to a single interpretive grid. G.K. Beale, in The Temple and the Church’s Mission (IVP Academic, 2004), recovers the cosmic temple theology of Genesis 1 without committing to Walton’s exclusively functional conclusions about בָּרָא. For a more technical treatment of the lexical question than the popular-level Lost World provides, Walton’s own scholarly monograph Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Eisenbrauns, 2011) supplies the full philological and ANE evidence base.⁵

The truth is that the semantic range of bārā’ likely includes both material and functional dimensions. Hebrew words, like English words, can carry multiple senses depending on context. The evidence surveyed above suggests that bārā’ sometimes describes material origination, sometimes describes functional ordering, and often describes both simultaneously. Insisting that the word must mean only one thing in every context risks flattening the richness of the biblical text—a principle recognized across Christian traditions, including the Catholic emphasis on the multiple senses of Scripture.⁷

Understanding bārā’ is easier when we see it alongside the other Hebrew verbs used for creation:

Hebrew	Transliteration	Gloss	Who uses it?	Example	Nuance
בָּרָא	bārā‘	“to create”	God alone	Genesis 1:1, 1:27; Psalm 51:10	Exclusively divine; marks an act as something only God can do—often emphasizing newness, sovereignty, or purpose
עָשָׂה	’āśâ	”to make, to do”	God and humans	Genesis 1:7; thousands of general uses	Broadest Hebrew verb for making; carries no special theological restriction
יָצַר	yāṣar	”to form, to fashion”	God and humans	Genesis 2:7 (man from dust); Genesis 2:19 (animals)	Evokes a potter shaping clay; emphasizes craftsmanship and careful design
בָּנָה	bānâ	”to build”	God and humans	Genesis 2:22 (woman “built” from rib); Psalm 127:1	Architectural metaphor; emphasizes intentional construction and establishment

The distinctiveness of bārā’ stands out in this company. While ‘āśâ is broad and yāṣar is artisanal, bārā’ is exclusively divine. It marks an act as belonging to a category of creative power that no human possesses. When the biblical authors reached for a word to describe what God alone does in bringing about something genuinely new, they chose bārā’.

Why It Matters for Reading Genesis

The meaning of bārā’ is not an academic curiosity. It sits at the heart of how we read Genesis 1—and how Genesis 1 shapes our understanding of God, creation, and our place in it.

If bārā’ is primarily functional, then Genesis 1 is an account of God establishing the world’s purpose. The “creation” of light on Day One is not about photons coming into existence but about God establishing the function of time—the rhythm of day and night. On this reading, Genesis 1 says nothing about the age of the earth or the mechanism of biological life, because those are not the questions it addresses.

If bārā’ is primarily material, then Genesis 1 asserts that God brought physical reality into existence. The cosmos is not self-existent or eternal; it owes its very being to a transcendent Creator. This reading underscores God’s absolute sovereignty over all matter and energy.

If bārā’ encompasses both—and the evidence suggests it often does—then Genesis 1 is making a claim that is simultaneously cosmological and theological. God both brought the world into being and gave it purpose. The material and the functional are not in competition; they are two dimensions of a single divine act.

Recognizing this breadth does not resolve every debate about Genesis 1. But it does caution us against forcing the text into a single interpretive box. The Hebrew word at the center of the creation account is richer than any one English translation can capture. It invites us to hold together the grandeur of material creation and the intimacy of divine purpose—to see in the opening words of Scripture a God who not only makes things exist but makes them matter.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is bara only used for God in the Hebrew Bible?

Yes — in the Qal stem (the basic active form), the subject of bārā’ is always God, without exception. Human beings make (‘āśâ), form (yāṣar), and build (bānâ), but they never bārā’. This exclusivity is one of the word’s most distinctive features and is widely attested in standard Hebrew lexicons.

What is the difference between bara and asah?

Bārā’ (בָּרָא) is reserved for divine creative activity and often emphasizes something genuinely new or unprecedented. ‘Āśâ (עָשָׂה) is the general Hebrew word for “make” or “do” — it is used thousands of times in the Hebrew Bible by both God and human beings. Genesis 1 uses both verbs, sometimes in close proximity, but reserves bārā’ for moments of special creative significance (the cosmos, sea creatures, humanity).

Does bara mean creation from nothing (creatio ex nihilo)?

Scholars disagree. Copan and Craig argue that bārā’ in Genesis 1:1 does assert creation from nothing. Walton contends the word functions primarily to describe the assignment of roles and purposes. The evidence surveyed above suggests that bārā’ can carry both material and functional dimensions depending on context — the word is richer than any single English gloss can capture.

How many times does bara appear in the Old Testament?

The root בָּרָא appears approximately 54 times in 46 verses across all verbal stems in the Hebrew Bible. In the Qal stem—the basic active form where God is always the subject—it occurs roughly 38 times. Within Genesis 1 alone, the verb appears at three pivotal moments: the creation of the cosmos (1:1), sea creatures (1:21), and humanity (1:27).

What is the difference between bara and yatsar?

Bārā’ (בָּרָא, “to create”) is reserved exclusively for God and often emphasizes newness or divine sovereignty. Yāṣar (יָצַר, “to form, to fashion”) evokes a potter shaping clay—it emphasizes craftsmanship and intentional design. Both God and humans can yāṣar. In Genesis, God bārā’ the heavens and the earth (1:1) and humanity (1:27), but he yāṣar Adam from the dust of the ground (2:7), emphasizing the intimate, hands-on nature of that act.

Notes

1. Based on Strong's H1254, the root בָּרָא appears 54 times in 46 verses across all verbal stems in the Hebrew Bible (WLC text). Qal occurrences account for approximately 38 of those instances; the remainder appear in Niphal, Piel, and Hiphil forms. See Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), s.v. "בָּרָא." For a digital concordance entry, see Strong's H1254 on BibleHub.
2. This observation is widely noted in Hebrew lexicons and grammars. See, e.g., Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 2 vols., study ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2001), s.v. "ברא." The five-volume critical edition appeared 1994–2000; the 2001 two-volume study edition is the standard format in most seminary libraries. See also Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987), 14.
3. John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 38–44. Available from IVP Academic.
4. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, Creation out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), especially chapters 1–4.
5. C. John Collins, Genesis 1–4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006); David Toshio Tsumura, Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005); G.K. Beale, The Temple and the Church's Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2004); John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011).
6. In the Hebrew Bible's own versification, where the superscription counts as verses 1–2, this verse appears as Psalm 51:12. English Bibles follow a different versification that yields v. 10.
7. See Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§ 115–119 (the four senses of Scripture) and §§ 296–298 (creatio ex nihilo). For a pastoral treatment of Genesis 1 in the Catholic tradition, see Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995; German original 1986).