Genesis 1:1-2
Beginning at the beginning. Translation and notes on the mysterious opening verses of Genesis.
The first words of Genesis are the most difficult to translate:
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָֽרֶץ׃
(Note: Substack does not currently allow for right alignment, so for the foreseeable future the Hebrew has to be left aligned.)
The difficulties are twofold. First, what is the purpose and meaning of the first verse in the context of the chapter? God does not begin with creating the heavens and the earth. He begins on the first day with speaking light into being and does not create the heavens and the earth until the second and third days, respectively. The second difficulty is the relationship between בְּרֵאשִׁית and בָּרָא.
Rashi describes the grammatical issues with the first two words thus. At first glance, the vowelization of בָּרָא, as it’s given in the Masoretic text, seems wrong. It is not grammatical. If, like the translators of the King James Bible and their followers, we understand the first word, בְּרֵאשִׁית, to mean “In the beginning,” then what follows should be “of such and such”. But instead we find a perfect verb, בָּרָא. Put them together, and we end up with the ungrammatical phrase “In the beginning of God created”. Nearly every English translation elides the strangeness and just says, “In the beginning God created.”
Here are alternatives:
Robert Alter and JPS (2016): When God began to create heaven and earth Everett Fox: At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth Eugene Peterson: First this: God created the Heavens and Earth
Alter, JPS (2006), and Fox translate the opening verses as an adverbial clause: When God began to create heaven and earth… God said, “Let there be light”.
It was important for me to maintain some of the sound of the first word, בְּרֵאשִׁית (b’resheit). My first stab at this was In a start, which matched the syllables and final consonant sound, but In a start has a range of meaning (to start suddenly, to be startled) inappropriate to the phrase. And while it kept the final consonant sound, it lacked the more important first consonant, bet. Bet is the second letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and it’s an interesting question, posed in the old rabbinic commentaries, why the first letter of the first word of the first verse is not aleph, the first letter.
And so I chose to translate בְּרֵאשִׁית simply as Beginning, on its own line. The incongruence between בְּרֵאשִׁית and בָּרָא is not a mistake. It’s a sign that בְּרֵאשִׁית stands apart. Rashi is right to say that the opening verses are not an account of the order of creation (that comes next). They serve as a preface. I was almost tempted to translate בְּרֵאשִׁית as Heading:, which would both announce the role of the opening verses (without pretending they are an adverbial clause) and express the root (רֹאשׁ) of בְּרֵאשִׁית, which means head.
And so my translation of the opening verse:
Beginning God made Heavens and Earth
Heavens and Earth are definite nouns in the Hebrew, הַשָּׁמַיִם הָאָֽרֶץ. The definite article in Hebrew is a prefix, not a separate word (this is also true of the conjunction and), and these two definite nouns give occasion for the fascinating particle אֵת, which has no translatable meaning but denotes a definite direct object. I can make Heavens and Earth definite in English without the by capitalizing them and thus avoid extra words.
My translation continues:
Earth was wild and woolly Darkness on the deep His breath over the water
I have Michael Carasik to thank for “wild and woolly” as a translation for the mysterious and aurally evocative Hebrew phrase תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ (tohu v’vohu). Equally mysterious is תְהוֹם, the deep.1 (Perhaps the only writer in English to approach the meaning of תְהוֹם is Herman Melville.) As with the first verse, the second does not give an order of creation. They conclude the preface to Genesis and give a small glimpse at the unspeakable, primal strangeness of world without world.
If this approach to translating the Bible is interesting to you, please:
Next week I will translate more verses from the opening chapter of Genesis, as well as a post or two about patristic readings of Genesis 1:1-2 and how the verses appear in the Septuagint and Vulgate.
See: Psalm 42:7. Cf. Seth Benardete: “The sea has both a surface and a depth. It thus lends itself to be the paradigm for the human soul, which, as the Chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone says, when stirred brings to the surface the blackness within. The soul retains the very nature of historical time, in whose sediment are stored the experiences of an original terror.” “Depth is an illusion of surface.”