‘First of all believe, that there is one God who created the universe and made the universe to be from having not been (ek tou me ontos eis to einai).’ Sometimes by way of Hermas and sometimes directly from Maccabees the reading is quoted by Irenaeus,5 Origen6 and so on. It seems to me, moreover, that this Jewish-early Christian exegetical tradition was right. Genesis 1:2 evokes pre-creation entirely with negatives, except for describing the presence of the ‘ruach of the Lord’. Most of the exegetes