In the Beginning...

[Dean Anderson]

I notice that most Bibles (e.g. the KJV) have Genesis 1:1 as:

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

However, Young's Literal Translation has:

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth

and the NAB has:

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth

Now I can see the difference in meaning between these different translations. The more common one seems to imply that the initial creation was pretty instant, then the rest of the chapter is talking about things that happened after creation - whereas the two differing ones both imply that the whole chapter is describing the creation process itself.

It's a small difference, but could have large theological ramifications.

However, this is ASC&H, so we're not here to talk about theology - but about the text.

So I have a couple of questions for those more au-fait with Hebrew and Greek than I...

Which of these English translations is the most accurate, and what is the difference between them when it comes to translating the Hebrew?

Does the Masoretic Text agree with the LXX?

Is this text included in any of the DSS material? If so, does that have any differences?

[lpetrich]

I've also seen it translated as

In the beginning of God's creating the heaven and the earth...

or

When God was beginning to create the heaven and the earth...

which would flow nicely into the text that follows,

... the earth was formless and empty.

"Formless and empty" would then describe the state that the Earth had before God started his creative work.

[spin]

The majority Jewish approach to Gen 1:1 has always been "the beginning of what?" to which they answer "the beginning of creating the earth and the heaven".

There is a grammatical relationship between nouns in Hebrew called the "construct", and that relationship is translated with an "of", eg the "wind of god" in Gen 1:2, RWH )LHYM. It would be called a "genitive" relationship in other languages.

A clause can act as the second part of a construct state. In Gen 31:10 for example we have,

at the time when the cattle conceived
B(T YXM C)N
literally: at the time B(T of conceive YXM the cattle C)N

The verb YXM has a construct relationship with time (T. Similarly, the verb BR) ("create") has the same relationship with BR)$YT ("beginning"). This relationship ties the whole following clause structure to the beginning and we have "at the beginning of god's creating of the earth and the heavens", but it doesn't stop there because it subsumes all the second verse as well, so that we come to the first act of creation in Gen 1:3, "And god said, "let there be light". (The formal framework of the passage has god creating over six days, each day starting the same as every other, "and god said".)

It's very hard to conceive of god creating the earth and the heavens as a chaotic mess that he then has to physically create through divine fiat. This would be the implication of the KJV translation (a translation that has led to wild speculation such as the "gap theory"), ie god created the heaven and the earth, but obviously didn't exist until god made the earth appear out of the watery chaos, nor did the heavens exist until god hemmed it in with the raising of the waters as a solid barrier (the "firmament").

The Greek also has difficulties in dealing with the grammar, but this time about the form of the verb (epoihsen -- "created") and its significance. The verb is in the aorist and may be a "punctiliar" aorist, which gives an overview of the action as though it were all bundled into one point of time, when the action would have taken a long period. This is one way of looking at the problem and it would make Gen 1:1 a heading describing what was to come in the passage. The verb may also simply be taken descriptively on its own merit and reflect the KJV translation.

4QGen(b) which contains Gen 1 reflects the Masoretic text.


spin

[Dean Anderson]

Thanks, Spin. That's just what I was looking for.