Random Notes on Genesis 1

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In the Masoretic Text of Genesis, the letter bet at the beginning of the first word, brʾšyt, is written extra large. You can read more about the phenomenon of large and small letters here. To my knowledge, nobody has come up with a convincing explanation of why some letters are written small and some large, but I would imagine in this case being the first letter of the entire Bible has something to do with it.

According to my Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, instead of a shva beneath the b in brʾšyt, the Samaritan tradition reads an a vowel. Now, I don’t know exactly how vowels work in the Samaritan reading tradition, which is followed only by the 700-some Samaritans left in the world. But based on what I know about the Masoretic vowels, it would seem that this pronunciation, if adopted, would undermine the explanation I gave of Genesis 1:1 here.

The biblical scholar Robert Holmstedt agrees:

If one wants to ignore the Masoretic vocalization and read the word with an articular vowel with the preposition, i.e., *בָּרֵאשִׁית, “in THE beginning,” as the Samaritan Pentateuch appears to do, fine. But one must not only recognize that such a choice is a departure from the Masoretic text, but also fails to explain the Greek Ἐν ἀρχῇ, which also lack the definite article.

Source of that quote here.

For whatever it's worth, Sofi Sarah Tsedaka, a born-Samaritan, now-Jewish singer/actress/politician, released a CD called Barashet, named after the Samaritan pronunciation of what most people would read as Bereshit. So says her Wikipedia page. Not every day you see a contested vowel-point in the Hebrew Bible showing up in pop culture.

Despite occasional suggestions to the contrary, in this verse the word "God" is clearly being used in a singular sense -- the verb that goes with it is singular.

Between verse 1 and verse 2, some interpreters (outside the mainstream of biblical studies) have suggested that an enormous gap in time exists, during which there was an earlier creation, a fall into sin, the destruction of the world's inhabitants, and the flooding of the earth with water. There is nothing to indicate that the author of Genesis had ever even imagined such a strange scenario.

2 the earth being waste and void ...

(1:2) "waste". Hebrew tohu, a word with various meanings, generally with negative connotations. This has engendered debate over whether Genesis describes the earliest state of the world as "bad" and whether this earliest state is as God created it, as in creation ex nihilo, or whether creation ex nihilo would even make sense to the author of Genesis.

(1:2) "void". Hebrew bohu, a word less common than tohu. Its meaning is unclear except that it must be similar in meaning to tohu.

(1:2) "waste and void". Hebrew tohu wa-bohu. The capture the sound, Robert Alter reads "welter and waste". See Mosaic Magazine for an excerpt.

.. with darkness upon the face of the deep,

(1:2) deep. Or, abyss. Hebrew tehom, a term for water with interesting mythological connotations, associated with chaos. "In the Babylonian cosmogony also, as reported by Berossus ... all things began in darkness and water. [Tehom] recalls at once the Babylonian [Tiamat]" (Driver, Genesis). In the Babylonian story, Marduk kills Tiamat and uses her dead body to create heaven and earth (see Wikipedia, "Tiamat"). Genesis likewise starts with tehom and from it God creates heaven and earth. But God does not wage war against or kill tehom; he merely restrains it by the power of his speech: a point in favor of reading Genesis 1 as a de-mythologizing text.

... and the spirit of God...

(1:2) "spirit". Here lower-case to avoid the implication that the Hebrew text is speaking of the Second Person of the Trinity. Trinitarianism is alien to Genesis.

(1:2) "spirit of God". Or "a wind from God". I have even seen, "a mighty wind", taking elohim (usually "God") as an adjective of intensity. Robert Alter reads, "God's breath".

... moving ...

(1:2) "moving". The Hebrew term is rare, and probably more specific than just "moving". The only other occurrence of this verbal root is in Deuteronomy 32:11, where it describes an action performed by an eagle or vulture over its young. Thus Driver reads it as "brooding".

upon the face of the water,

(1:2) "water". Note that while the sky and land will be created shortly, the water is here prior to the story recording any of God's creative acts.

In the fourth and fifth verse of Genesis, God creates light and establishes the day-night cycle, which then becomes the first day. Interestingly, it is not until the fourth day that the heavenly bodies, including sun and moon, are created.

In the sixth verse of Genesis, God commands the existence of a rqyʿ, read as ra-KI-a, which he calls Sky. I have heard it said that the etymology of the word implies something solid and specifically hammered-out, but it is unnecessary to rely on such a flimsy support as etymology for this point. The point that the raqia is solid is made implicitly in the text of Genesis 1 itself. God commands that the raqia should serve to divide “water from water” (verse 6). Specifically, verse 7 says that the raqia divided the water below it from the waters above the raqia.

It would be easy for an English-speaking reader to skip right over this point, because it doesn’t correspond to anything in our modern conception of the cosmos. But in the cosmology of Genesis 1, the universe has water below and waters above. The waters below are kept down below the earth, and the waters above the sky are held back by the sky. This system falls apart in Genesis 6-9, when God sends a punishing flood which arrives via breaking up fountains from below and water pouring down from openings in the sky.

Verses nine and ten also say something that strikes my ears as odd:

Then God said, Let the waters under the sky be gathered into a single place, and let the dry ground appear.  And God called the dry ground Land, and the collection of water he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

There is a strange jump from singular to plural here. God brings all the water into “a single place” (maqom eḥad) but then gives the water a plural name, ‘Seas’ (yamim). So is all the water in one place or are there several seas?

I have read the following explanation somewhere, but I can’t remember the exact source. The idea is that the implicit picture is of the earth as a land mass roughly disk-shaped, with the water surrounding it on all sides. To the west, an Israelite would find the Mediterranean Sea, to the north the Black Sea, to the south the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez, to the east the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf. All these would be imagined as inlets, or individual seas, of a single ocean surrounding the world. I don’t know enough about biblical cosmology to endorse that view, but maybe that’s the idea.

Genesis 1:11 is awkward, and discussed by John Hobbins here.

Verse 11 contains three key words, applied to things created: dšʾ (deshe), ʿśb (esev), and ʿṣ (ets). According to the KJV, these are three different things: “grass,” “herb,” and “tree(s).” According to Gesenius (Lexicon) the first two are stages of the same thing: deshe is newly sprouted plants, while eseb is the more mature plant when it is in the seed-bearing stage of its life. The NJPS reads deshe as a general term for “vegetation,” and then takes eseb and ets to be two subcategories of deshe: seed-bearing plants and trees, respectively.

Perhaps eseb refers collectively specifically to the seed-bearing edible plants. Here’s two reasons why. First, Genesis 1:11 does not refer to trees in general, but specifically to fruit trees, useful for food. Second, because Genesis 1:29 specifically designates every seed-bearing eseb as food for human beings, along with the fruit trees.

Notice that these forms of vegetation are created on the third day. The sun is created on the next day. This is no biggie unless you’re a believer who takes the individual days to be millions of years long. Then you have vegetation existing for million years before the sun.

Verse 14 gives four purposes for the creation of the heavenly bodies. They are to be lʾtt wlmwʿdym wlymym wšnym. The KJV translates this as including four different purposes: “let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”

If you take them word by word, ‘signs,’ ʾtt  might refer to omens appearing in the sky. It would be natural to take mwʿdym as referring not to ‘seasons’ in the sense of ‘four seasons in the year,’ but to various fixed points on the calender such as religious festivals, which are called by the same word in 2 Chronicles 8:13, for example. And of course the passage of days and years are marked by heavenly bodies.

Rather than listing the four, the NJPS reads “they shall serve as signs for the set times—the days and the years.”

Verse 16 mentions, though not by name, the sun and the moon, calling them simply “the big light” and “the little light”. It would have to be intentional, as there are words for the two in biblical Hebrew: šmš  (shemesh) and yrḥ (yareaḥ). The only explanation I know of for this curious omission is that the Genesis 1 story was written with the deliberate intention of depersonalizing elements of the cosmos other than God. In neighboring creation myths, various deities and monsters struggle and the earth is a result of their struggles. In Genesis, there is no hint of a struggle in creation: God simply speaks things into being. So we can read the curious wording of this verse as a deliberate step in the production of monotheism.

On the other hand, I think I see a hint of anthropomorphism in verse 18, where the sun and moon are depicting as “governing” day and night.

Verse 20 sees the creation of ʿwp. The KJV has fowl, but the meaning of the word is broader than just birds. Leviticus 11:20 indicates that the word includes flying insects.

After Genesis 1:1, verse 21 marks the first appearance of the verb brʾ. God ‘makes’ (ʿśh) the various inanimate objects and plants of the first four days, but here on the fifth day God ‘creates’ (bara) and blesses sea and air creatures, just as he will create and bless land-dwelling life on the sixth.

Verse 21 also introduces the great tnnym (tanninim), which the KJV calls “whales.” This rendering is a mistake, despite the fact that Lamentations 4:3 would seem to suggest a mammalian creature. The word is used both for land-dwelling serpents and for mythological sea-monsters. The context in this case suggests it is sea-going creatures that are intended. Leviathan, specifically, is an example of a tannin.

Verse 21 also introduces an interesting verb, rmś. Genesis 1:21 includes the creation of living sea-creatures that rmś, and there are also a noun rmś which names some creatures living on land in verse 24. The KJV goes two different ways, translating the verb as “that moveth” in 21 and the noun as “creeping thing” in 24. From a previous survey of the uses of the verb, I’m inclined to agree with the opinion that it refers to the movements of small animals that dart or scurry on land or in the water. The translation “moveth” is not specific enough, while “creeping” might have been good English usage in the seventeenth century, but it has not aged well. Today, the idea of sneakiness or creepiness clings to the word, which I don’t think fits with the intentions of the writer here at all. Note: Genesis 9:3 uses the noun rmś to refer to land-dwelling animals in general.

Verse 24 introduces the living creatures of the land, naming three categories: bhmh (domestic animals), rmś (scurrying critters), and the wild animals (presumably larger than the scurrying critters). These last are interesting, because they are referred to in two different ways.

In 24, the wild animals are called ḥytw ʾrṣ, ḥayto ʾerets, which is unusual. In 25, they are called by the more common designation ḥayat haʾarets. What is unexpected here is not the alternation between erets and haarets, which is a minor thing, but the -o on the end of ḥyt.

BHK suggests that ḥytw is simply an error and should be shortened to ḥyt. On the other hand, Dillmann gives the following explanation:

[ḥytw ʾrṣ]—from the oldest period of the language, in which the noun in the construct state ended in [u] or [o], and the article was as yet little in use. This mode of speech is here chosen as the more solemn, because God speaks. In ver. 25, where the narrator speaks, we have [ḥyt hʾrṣ]

So on Dillmann’s hypothesis, the narrator was making God sound old-fashioned, and therefore solemn. You can find a link out the commentary by Dillmann here.

In verse 26, notice that God says, “Let us make humankind” rather than “I will make humankind.” The standard Jewish explanation has been that God is speaking to his heavenly court, that is, to the angels. I have no objection to this theory. Though perhaps, if the writer of Genesis 1 had written in more detail, he may have called these characters “sons of God” as in Genesis 6, rather than angels (as in Genesis 19, 28, and 32). But who knows?

In verse 26, when the author lists the various creatures mankind will rule over, notice that he says “fish of the sea.” Earlier in the chapter, we read of God creating various sea-creatures, but fish are not mentioned by name. Also, the earlier part of the chapter mentions the creation of sea-monsters (tanninim) but verse 26 does not mention humans ruling over them. Could this be intentional? I don’t know, but I do know that Job 41 describes a pretty frightening sea monster that apparently is not ruled over by man. Maybe this is just coincidence.

In verse 29, apparently a vegetarian diet is prescribed. In Genesis 9:3, after the Deluge, meat will be added to the diet. It appears that verse 30 assigns the vegetarian diet to the animals as well. Genesis 1:30 describes an ideal past without carnivory; Isaiah 11:6 describes an ideal future without carnivory.

Verse 31 ends with the phrase “the sixth day,” while the previous days are describes as “a fifth day,” “a fourth day,” etc. Could the addition of the article mark the specialness of the sixth day? I’d like to think so.