"When you look at the Hebrew bereshit, the first two words in Genesis, most translations say "in the beginning", but actually it means "in the beginning/start of". So if you literally translate the first verse in the Bible from Hebrew, it reads "In the beginning/start of God create the heavens and the earth," Now the Hebrew word for create is bara. You can't tell if it's past, present, or future. English versions always put it in the past tense, but a lot of Hebrew scholars think it is in the present. So therefore it would read, "in the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth"
http://judaism.stackexchange.com/questi ... n-bereshit
(This is an interesting quote on this link, yet no sources to back it are provided. One can do some digging to see if they find any sources to back it up.)
I believe that the Jewish scholar Rashi believed that everything was created in an instance in Gen 1, and that from that God created with what had already been created.
"Rashi did not take the Genesis creation passage to be trying to assert either a time-scale or even an order for creation: The text does not intend to point the order of the [acts] of creation... the text does not by any means teach which things were created first and which later [it only] wants to teach us what was the condition of things at the time when heaven and earth were created, namely, that the earth was without form and a confused mass.
It is interesting to see Rashi argue this point from the Hebrew language used. As one following the Rabbinic tradition and steeped in Hebrew semantics he must be considered an expert on such matters: The text does not intend to point out the order of the acts of Creation – to state that these (heaven and earth) were created first; for if it intended to point this out, it should have written wnw {ym$h t) )rb hnw$)rb “At first God created etc.”... Should you, however, insist that it does actually intend to point out that these (heaven and earth) were created first, and that the meaning is, “At the beginning of everything He created these, admitting therefore that the word ty$)rb is in its construct state and explaining the omission of a word signifying “everything” by saying
that you have texts which are elliptical, omitting a word... you should be astonished at yourself, because as a matter of fact the waters were created before
heaven and earth , for lo, it is written, (v. 2) The Spirit of God hovering on the face of the waters,” and Scripture had not yet disclosed when the creation of waters took place – consequently you must learn from this that the creation of the waters preceded that of the earth.
http://www.scienceandchristianbelief.or ... arston.pdf