Where we are
After the mountain, Moses comes down and starts writing — and the first thing the Lord gives him to write is the Creation. So Moses 2 is the restored Genesis 1. If you read it next to the Bible's version, the bones are the same: seven days, the same sequence, the same refrains. But three things have changed, and each one matters.
First, the voice. Genesis says "God created… and God said." Moses 2 puts it in the first person: I, God, created… I, God, said. You're no longer hearing a report about God. You're hearing God narrate his own work.
Second — and this is the big one — the agent is named. Genesis 1:1 just says God created the heavens and the earth. Moses 2:1 says, by mine Only Begotten I created. The thing John and Paul will spend the New Testament insisting on — that everything was made through Christ — is sitting right there in verse 1, at the foundation.
Third, there are little seams that look ahead. "As many as obeyed my voice" (v. 1) is a strange phrase to find in a creation account — until you get to Moses 4 and meet the ones who didn't obey. The council of heaven is hiding in the grammar of Genesis.
The chapter walks the seven days. Days one through three make separations — light from dark, waters from waters, sea from land. Days four through six fill those spaces — the lights, the fish and birds, the animals and us. And then it pauses, mid-breath, because the seventh day, the rest, opens Moses 3.
(A quick note carried over from Moses 1: when I bring in the old books — Jubilees, 2 Enoch, the Wisdom literature — I mean them as illuminating witnesses, not as scripture, read the way D&C 91 tells us to read the Apocrypha: by the Spirit, keeping what is true. Canon is Moses, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants. The rest are old neighbors who remember the same story.)
Day One — light, and the agent of it all (verses 1–5)
Behold, I reveal unto you concerning this heaven, and this earth; write the words which I speak. I am the Beginning and the End, the Almighty God; by mine Only Begotten I created these things; yea, in the beginning I created the heaven, and the earth upon which thou standest. — Moses 2:1
Look at how much got added to "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." God names himself "the Beginning and the End" — that's Revelation 22:13, set at the front of Genesis, a thousand years before John writes it. He says he created "by mine Only Begotten." And he ties it back to Moses 1 — "the earth upon which thou standest," the one earth narrowed down out of the many Moses had just been shown.
Here's the claim underneath all of it, and it's a large one: Genesis was always about Christ. The agent didn't get added in the New Testament; he got edited out of the Hebrew text somewhere along the way, and the Restoration puts him back. The Only Begotten was the agent of creation long before he was the agent of redemption. John says it flatly — "all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made" (Jn. 1:3). Paul says it — "by him were all things created" (Col. 1:16). Moses 2 just says it first.
And the earth was without form, and void; and I caused darkness to come up upon the face of the deep; and my Spirit moved upon the face of the water. — Moses 2:2
"Without form, and void" — in Hebrew that's tohu va-vohu, a rhyming pair for primordial chaos. And that tells you what kind of creation this is. The Lord isn't conjuring substance out of nothing here; he's bringing order out of chaos, shape out of formlessness. That's the register the whole Restoration works in.
But it's the next phrase I'd slow down on. "My Spirit moved upon the face of the water." The verb is rachaph — to brood, to hover, the way a mother bird settles over the nest. It's the same word Moses uses later for an eagle "fluttering over her young" (Deut. 32:11). So the Spirit's posture at the very start of things isn't a general marching out to conquer the dark. It's a mother bird, brooding, warming something toward life. And it's the same Spirit that comes down "like a dove" over Jesus at his baptism (Mk. 1:10) — the same brooding presence at the birth of the world and at the birth of the new covenant. Creation begins with tenderness.
Then: I, God, said: Let there be light; and there was light… and this I did by the word of my power. Creation is by word. The Word of verse 1 and the words of verse 3 work together — the Only Begotten is the agent, and speech is the instrument. "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made" (Ps. 33:6). And that little restored phrase, "the word of my power," is the same power that binds Satan in Moses 4 and the same power that redeems in the Atonement. One power, running from creation to providence to the cross.
Days Two and Three — separating, then planting (verses 6–13)
Day two divides the waters with a "firmament." The Hebrew there, raqia, literally means a thin sheet of beaten metal — the ancients pictured the sky as a hammered dome. And I think it's worth noticing that the Restoration doesn't update that picture. It keeps the ancient cosmology, because the point was never astronomy. The point is that God made the separations that make a world livable. The Lord speaks to people "after the manner of their language" (D&C 1:24) — he met Moses in Moses' sky.
And notice the pattern building: light from darkness, waters from waters, and on day three the dry land gathered out of the sea. Creation proceeds by separation. That same Hebrew grammar of dividing — havdalah — is the grammar of holy from common, clean from unclean, Sabbath from weekday. The God who separates the waters is the God who will teach a people to separate the holy from the ordinary. It's one habit of mind, running from the cosmos down into the covenant.
Then the vegetation, "whose seed should be in itself." The Lord builds self-renewal into the world — he doesn't have to re-create each spring's grass; the system carries its own future inside it. "After his kind." There's a quiet law in that, the same one Paul reaches for: whatever a man sows, that he reaps (Gal. 6:7). The moral universe runs on the same seed-logic as the garden.
Day Four — the lights, demoted on purpose (verses 14–19)
Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven… and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years. — Moses 2:14
Here's something easy to miss because of what isn't said. Day four makes the sun and moon — and the text refuses to name them. They're just "the greater light" and "the lesser light" (v. 16). That's deliberate, and in its world it was almost provocative. Egypt worshipped the sun as Ra and the moon as Khonsu; Babylon had Shamash and Sin; Canaan had Shapash and Yarikh. Every neighbor of Israel bowed to those lights as gods. And Genesis won't even say their names. It demotes them to fixtures — lamps God hung up to keep the calendar. The most worshipped objects in the ancient sky get reduced to a clock.
Days Five and Six — the living things, and us (verses 20–31)
Day five fills the sea and sky, and notice the verb bara, "create," comes back here — it hasn't appeared since verse 1. The plants merely "grew"; the earth brought them forth. But animal life, the creatures that carry nephesh — breath, soul — those are bara'd, directly created. There's a line being drawn between things that grow and things that breathe. And even the "great whales," the taninim — the same word used for Leviathan the chaos-monster (Isa. 27:1) — even those are simply made by God. No rival, no sea-dragon God had to defeat. Israel's neighbors told the story of creation as a war between gods; Genesis tells it as a God who simply speaks, and the monsters turn out to be his creatures too.
Then day six arrives at us:
And I, God, said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… And I, God, created man in mine own image, in the image of mine Only Begotten created I him; male and female created I them. — Moses 2:26–27
"Let us." People have argued over that plural for two thousand years — royal we? Trinity? And Moses 2 quietly answers it back in verse 1: God created "by mine Only Begotten… and even as many as obeyed my voice." The "us" is the council — the Father, the Son, and the obedient hosts of heaven. We're made in the image of a council, not a solitary deity. And then verse 27 sharpens the image to a point: man is made "in the image of mine Only Begotten." The image of God is the image of Christ. So when you want to know what you were made to look like — what a fully human being is — you look at him. "Christ, who is the image of God" (2 Cor. 4:4). We're meant to be "conformed to the image of his Son" (Rom. 8:29).
And the first words God speaks to them are a blessing, not a rule: "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth." The first commandment is a gift of life-giving. (That old word "replenish" — re-plenish, fill again — has always sat a little oddly in the text, and it reads naturally against Moses 1's worlds without number: a much longer, richer history of the earth than a flat reading allows. The verse doesn't require that. But it leaves the door open.)
Then the day closes with God looking at all of it and calling it tov me'od — "very good," the same emphatic "exceedingly" we met on the mountain in Moses 1:1. This is the foundation of how the Restoration reads everything that comes after: creation starts good. Bodies are good. The earth is good. The Fall, in the very next chapters, will complicate that — but it never cancels it. "Every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused" (1 Tim. 4:4). When you get to Moses 4 and the Garden goes wrong, keep verse 31 in your pocket. Whatever the Fall does, it doesn't make the world stop being God's good work.
The old books beside Genesis 1
The agent-of-creation that Moses 2 restores wasn't a brand-new idea in the ancient world — and being honest about that is the whole game here. The Jewish Wisdom tradition had long pictured a divine agent at God's side in the making of the world. Which cuts two ways, and I want to be straight about both.
Here's the honest shape of it. The bare idea of a divine agent in creation was partly available to Joseph — it's in the Apocrypha that sat in many family Bibles. What's harder to account for is the cluster of restored details that match books he could not have read: the angels made and counted at creation (Jubilees), the first-person "I made this from the unseen" voice (2 Enoch), the council folded into the grammar. And what's genuinely his own, found nowhere else, is the boldest move of all — taking the agent the Wisdom writers only personified and naming him outright, in Genesis itself: by mine Only Begotten I created. No other Bible on earth says that in the first verse.
How the chapter changes the reader
Moses 2 hands you a cosmology to live inside, and it's worth saying out loud what it does to ordinary life.
If creation is by the Only Begotten, then you don't live in a neutral universe. The world is Christ's handiwork from the ground up — which makes the natural world sacramental rather than scenery. And if the image of God is the image of Christ, then every person you meet is carrying his statue around. That reframes how you treat people more than almost any doctrine I know: to dishonor a human being is to deface the King's image. And if the whole thing was pronounced "very good," then the work isn't to escape the earth or despise the body but to help recover the goodness they started with — which is why caring for creation, honoring the body, keeping marriage holy, even enjoying beauty, are all just verse 31 worked out in practice.
The chapter that restored the prologue and the foundation is the one you come back to every Sunday, whether you notice it or not. "That we may always remember him… that we may have his Spirit to be with us" — the sacrament prayer reaches for the same brooding Spirit that hovered over the first waters. The Christ who made the world is the Christ who remakes you. Same word. Same power.