(BA) Genesis 1:2, ruah elohim meraheft

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

And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2, Revised Version)

First, as a grammatical point, the word translated moved is a participle, so I think it would be a little better to read the spirit of God moving. But there's additional issues here.

The word here translated as spirit is ruah, which can refer to more than just something like the English word "spirit." In some translations, such as the KJV, the word Spirit is capitalized. At least for English readers, this capitalization could be misleading. The "Spirit of God," to readers acquainted with the New Testament, could be read as "the Holy Spirit, the second person of the Trinity." But the concept of the Trinity does not appear in the Hebrew Bible -- it begins to be developed only later, in the New Testament, and even there does not appear in the fully fleshed out Athanasian style that underlies the basis of most Christian Trinitarianism from then on. It's not that Genesis 1:2 is incompatible with the doctrine of the Trinity. It's just that it isn't mentioned here. So, if we must translate the term as "spirit," let it be lowercase.

But the Hebrew ruah does not only refer to an idea like "spirit," but also to the less metaphysical idea of simple "wind." So ruah elohim could be read not only as "spirit of God" but just as easily as "wind of God" or "breath of God." That is, the story could open with a wind moving across the waters. It has even been suggested, though I don't think that this has been widely adopted by scholars, that elohim could be read here roughly as equivalent to the English "mighty," thus, not a "wind of God" but a "mighty wind."

The verb "move" here is a pretty rare Hebrew term, merahefet, from the Hebrew verbal stem rḥp, which appears in the piel only here and in Deuteronomy 32:11 (Revised Version):

As an eagle that stirreth up her nest, That rḥp over her young, He spread abroad his wings, he took them, He bare them on his pinions:

So here the verb is something an eagle would do over its young. Does that refer to fluttering its wings as it lands on the nest, brooding over the eggs, or something else? And how does thing relate to something that the ruah elohim would do over the surface of the water? Is it the spirit of God brooding over the universe like an egg, not yet alive but brimming with potential? Is the wind from God sweeping across the waters as an eagle would sweep through the air?

I'm not entirely certain.