Wilfred Lambert on the translation of Genesis 1:1
Bro Wilfred Lambert was undoubtedly the best Christadelphian scholar of Semitic languages, including Hebrew, from the beginning of our community to the 20th Century. See here for links to his Festschrift and other academic honours. The following are his comments about the correct understanding of the first verse of Genesis.
In the Authorised Version the Bible begins, ‘In the beginning’ and, though this is probably a mistranslation, it is in itself appropriate. . . .
The traditional rendering of the first verse “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” was undisputed and universal until learned Jewish Rabbinic scholars in the Middle Ages pointed out an equally possible alternative:When God began to create the heavens and the earth – the earth was a vast waste, darkness covered the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water – God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.
The great scholar Rashi (full name: Rabbi Shelomo ben Yitshak, or Solomon son of Isaac) who lived 1040 – 1105 in the south of France, and who had great influence on both Jewish and Christian scholarship, proposed this translation, but tradition proved stronger so that to this day most versions follow the older rendering. One has to take this older rendering as a sort of summary statement, but a not too happy one, since the actual creation of heaven is recorded later, in vv. 7–8, while there is no account of the creation of earth unless in the first verse. So the traditional rendering is not stating what had already occurred at the time conceived, since earth is assumed to exist in the very next verse 2, but heaven is created only in vv. 7–8. As conventionally rendered the first verse fits the modern scientists’ ‘big bang’ theory, but it does not fit the rest of the narrative, which concludes, after the final creative acts, “thus the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed” which is a most appropriate ending to a narrative beginning “When God began to create.”
By the new rendering the account does not concern itself with the origin of matter, but starts from a point in time when two elements existed: earth and sea, but chaotically disposed, and God then begins his programme of work to yield a functional heavens and earth, with man on earth as the peak of his creation, created in the image of God.
We accept this new rendering and are convinced that many modern translations relegate it to the margin only to avoid upsetting devout believers who feel they can face the problems of geology and the theory of evolution armed with the traditional rendering which is simple, emphatic and easily memorised. Significantly the modern translation put out by the Jewish Publication Society of America, The Torah. The Five Books of Moses. A new translation (Philadelphia, 1962), had the courage to use the new translation in its text, putting the traditional one in the margin.
Full text of the study is here.
See also notes at Translation of Genesis 1:1, especially J. D. Levenson's note from the Jewish Study Bible re the translation of Genesis 1:1.
