J. D. Levenson on the translation of Genesis 1:1
Jon D. Levenson is Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard.
1.1: A tradition over two millennia old sees 1.1 as a complete sentence: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In the 11th century, the great Jewish commentator Rashi made a case that the verse functions as a temporal clause. This is, in fact, how some ancient Near Eastern creation stories begin—including the one that starts at 2.4b. Hence the translation, 'When God began to create heaven and earth.'
1.2: This clause describes things just before the process of creation began. To modern people, the opposite of the created order is "nothing," that is, a vacuum. To the ancients, the opposite of the created order was something much worse than "nothing." It was an active, malevolent force we can best term "chaos." In this verse, chaos is envisioned as a dark, undifferentiated mass of water. In 1.9, God creates the dry land (and the Seas, which can exist only when water is bounded by dry land). But in Genesis 1.1-2.3, water itself and darkness, too, are primordial (contrast Isa. 45.7). In the midrash, Bar Kappara upholds the troubling notion that the Torah shows that God created the world out of preexistent material. But other rabbis worry that acknowledging this would cause people to liken God to a king who had built his palace on a garbage dump, thus arrogantly impugning His majesty ('Gen. Rab.' 1.5). In the ancient Near East, however, to say that a deity had subdued chaos is to give him the highest praise.”
See also Wilfred Lambert on the translation of Genesis 1:1.
Some background
- Note that the diacritics for vowels and accents were added to Genesis much less than two millennia ago. When Genesis was written, and right through New Testament times, the vocalisation of the first word בראשית depended on tradition. The written text was ambiguous.
- The concept of Creatio ex nihilo ("Creation from nothing") came with the Greeks, 2347 years ago if we date from the death of Alexander. It is first found in the Bible in 2 Maccabees 7:28, “I beseech thee, my son, look upon the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, and consider that God made them of things that were not; and so was mankind made likewise.” (KJV) Before Hellenistic times the beginning of creation was understood as in Genesis 1:1-3, with water and darkness.
