19 August 2022 biblical-homepage
This is an old post I wrote in December 2016. I've revised it slightly in 2022.
Here’s how Genesis 1:1 reads in the King James Version:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Here’s how I read it:
When God began to create sky and land . . .
Here’s what the Hebrew text says:
brʾšyt brʾ ʾlhym ʾt hšmym wʾt hʾrṣ
Let’s work through this word by word, starting at the end.
hʾrṣ. Pronounced ha-arets, this is the Hebrew word for land as opposed to sky and earth. In a phrase like erets yisrael, “land of Israel,” it can refer to a particular land or country. It also can be used for earth, in the sense of the whole landmass that all the people of the world live on.
The prefix h- in Hebrew, usually pronounced ha-, is roughly the equivalent of the English word the, but with some differences in how it is used. There is a nifty introductory Hebrew grammar for beginning students by John Cook and Robert Holmstedt, which explains the basics of the article in its third lesson. You can find it here.
Note that when you add the prefix h- to a word, you will sometimes change its pronunciation. So the word erets, “land” becomes ha-arets “the land.” For many words, adding the article doubles the pronunciation of the first consonant: shamayim ‘sky’ becomes hash-shamayim ‘the sky’. This doubling is known as gemination.
The word ʾt, pronounced et, which appears twice in this verse, is (usually) a ‘ direct object marker.’ There is no direct object marker in English, so we leave this untranslated. The function of this word is to let the reader know that what follows is the direct object of the sentence. In Hebrew, this is often helpful for the reader. In English, we don’t need a direct object marker because our rules about word order show the reader what the object is. Every now and then you’ll find somebody who has some kind of mystical understanding of the word, but they are barking up the wrong tree. There is also another use of the word, which we’ll get to later, I hope. But in this verse it is simply the direct object marker.
The second time it appears in the sentence it has the prefix w- attached to it. The w- prefix is roughly the equivalent of and in English, although it is often used in places where an English writer wouldn’t use and.
hšmym. Prounounced hash-shamayim, this is what is called “heaven” in the King James Version. I think it would be better to translate it as sky, because heaven could mislead modern readers. The šmym is the sky, containing sun, moon, and stars, and it is also used for the place that God lives. However, in the Hebrew Bible, šmym is not used for the good place to go when you die. The place where (good and bad) people go when they die is šʾwl, ‘Sheol.’ Even the English word "sky" doesn't quite match the Hebrew šamayim, because the Hebrew Bible pictures the sky as a solid dome, holding back waters above from flooding down onto the earth.
The whole phrase, hšmym wʾt hʾrṣ, then is the sky and the land. Some interpreters--including S. R. Driver--would translate the whole phrase as universe. I’d leave them in, because as I read it, the beginning of this chapter is about how God began with the primordial ocean and then divided that ocean in two, sandwiching the sky and the land between them, creating a three-tiered universe: water below, land above it, and sky above it all. And then more water (a fourth tier, I guess), but that’s another story.
The word ʾlhym, pronounced elohim, is the word that is translated as ‘God.’ It always takes the ending -ym, which is usually on plural words, but elohim is usually singular. In some verses it is plural, but in this verse it is singular because it is the subject of a sentence that contains a singular verb.
The word brʾ, pronounced bara, is the verb ‘to create.’ If I remember correctly, it is always used of God’s creation. Some people go as far as to say that the verb refers specifically to creation ex nihilo, but I don’t think that claim is justifiable. There are also some who claim that the word does not refer so much to creating as it does to assigning function to something. I’m also suspicious of that claim, but I’m not an expert. I’m going to stick with create.
Now, leaving out the first word of the verse, we have brʾ ʾlhym ʾt hšmym wʾt hʾrṣ. If that was the whole verse, it would read, God created the sky and the land. Unfortunately, things aren’t quite that simple. They’re about to get trickier.
What makes this verse especially tricky is the word brʾšyt at the beginning. Complex theological and grammatical arguments have raged over this word. Let’s start where everyone agrees. This word is composed of the prefix b- which means in, or at, or when. It is attached to rʾšyt, pronounced reshit, which means 'beginning' or 'beginning of'.
The whole compound word is pronounced bᵉreshit, where the ᵉ symbol refers to the shva, a tiny little vowel-like mark that is usually either skipped over or read like a very short e vowel. This whole controversy wouldn’t exist if the word was pronounced bareshit, which would be b (in) plus a (a shortened form of ha-, the) plus reshit beginning.
If it were bareshit, the King James Version would have it right, and the verse would read something like In the beginning God created the sky and the land. But unfortunately, the the is missing in action.
One option is to say that the missing the is not consequential, and that the verse still means In the beginning God created, etc. A whole bunch of English translations of the Bible give the “In the beginning” interpretation of the verse. You can find a sampling here. This is the interpretation followed by the KJV and the Vulgate.
On the other hand, Robert Holmstedt (and I think most scholars are with him on this particular point) says that the in the beginning interpretation of bᵉreshit is incorrect.
In a nutshell, the interpretation and translation of the first complex word, בְּרֵאשִׁית, in the Masoretic text of the Leningrad Codex as an absolute temporal prepositional phrase, “in the beginning, …” is grammatically indefensible. Period. End of story.
Holmstedt and many others read the noun rešit as being in the construct state as opposed to the absolute state. If you read rešit as being in the construct state, then you’ll translate the first verse of Genesis something along the lines found in the NJPS: “When God began to create heaven and earth . . .”. Those who treat rešit as being in the construct state include not only modern scholars, but Rashi.
For more on this issue, see the discussion and the links found over at Holmstedt’s blog, here. Even if you accept the argument for the construct state, things continue to get more complicated, and honestly I’m in over my head on some of the linguistic details of the arguments about Genesis 1:1.