Do you contend with me? And do you set yourself against me? And do you wrestle against my athletes? But where were you when I was fashioning the earth? Who were you then? Already, he says, you had fallen. For indeed at the beginning of the creation of the world there was darkness, he says, upon the abyss. This darkness was not a created darkness, but a darkness that by deliberate choice had begun to be, through the privation of light.