(BA) Genesis 1:1-3

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31 July 2022 Navigate back to the Genesis index: index-genesis.

Genesis 1:1-3 is the first three verses, and maybe the first sentence, of Genesis. I read it something like this:

1 When God began to create the sky and the earth -- 2 the earth being waste and void, and darkness on the face of the deep, and a wind from God sweeping across the face of the waters -- 3 God said, Let there be light. And there was light.

The first word is bᵉrešit. Without going into all the Hebrew grammatical ins and outs, the interesting thing is that the first word is not barešit, "In the beginning," but bᵉrešit -- the “the” is missing. To write bᵉrešit is to write something like "In beginning of".

Or at least that's what it would mean, in the construct state, as a best guess, if you don't know what comes next. The construct state "ties" a noun grammatically to what follows it -- usually another noun -- and often in a way that can be approximated by the English word "of", or the suffix "-'s".

This works like so. The Hebrew word for woman is iššah. When we say a noun "is" something in Hebrew, we're talking about its "absolute" or "default" state. If you just wanted to say, "a woman", you would say, iššah. However, suppose you wanted to say "the wife of Noah" ("wife" and "woman" are one word in Hebrew). Then you would change iššah to its "construct" form, which happens to be ešet. So "Noah's wife" then is ešet noaḥ.

Now, if berešit is in the construct state, then "in the beginning of the year", would be bᵉrešit haššanah, where haššanah is "the year". However, in this case, the bᵉrešit of Genesis 1:1 comes right before bara ʾelohim ʾet haššamayim weʾet haʾareṣ, which by itself would mean, "God created the sky and the land".

When we "tie" the construct noun berešit to that clause, writing in English "In the beginning of -- God created the sky and the land" doesn't quite do the trick because it's not grammatical, but we might say, "When God began to create the sky and the land ..."

Based on my reading, my impression is that the construct state has the upper hand among mainstream scholars, while the absolute state tends to be most enthusiastically endorsed by religiously conservative Christian scholars. In rabbinic Judaism, the construct state has the advantage of Rashi's endorsement. Rashi, perhaps the most brilliant medieval exegete of the Hebrew Bible, had noticed that in the rest of the Bible rešit tends to be in the construct state.