This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
31 July 2022 Navigate 'up' to the Genesis index: index-genesis.
Genesis 1's word create (Hebrew bara) has been the object of some discussion. In Biblical Hebrew, all the examples of the word show God as the subject of this verb -- only God bara-s things. Now, one option is that bara-ing is the sort of thing that only God can do. The other option is that a human or angel or something could also bara things, but that we just don't have any preserved examples of this happening in writing. I don't know.
There are a few attempts to assign a meaning to bara that is very different from the English "create," such as the idea that bara is more about "assigning roles" to things rather than making them. For a discussion of that, see here.
I think it's safe to say that the majority opinion among scholars is that the Hebrew word bara is a decently good match for the English word "create".
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