The opening section of the Bible which states God created heaven and earth is a mistranslation, according to a professor at Radboud University in Nijmegen.

God did not create heaven and earth but rather he separated them, says Ellen van Wolde in Thursday’s Trouw. Van Wolde, an expert on the Old Testament, defends her doctoral thesis on Friday.
She bases her conclusions on a new interpretation of the Hebrew version of Genesis, ‘placing it in the context of the rest of the Bible and creation stories from Mesopotamia’. Van Wolde concludes the Hebrew word ‘bara’ does not mean ‘create’ but ‘spacial separation’, the paper says.
The professor says this implies heaven and earth existed before they were separated, a direct contradiction of the accepted biblical intepretation.