In his King Follett Discourse, Joseph Smith briefly discussed the first word of the Hebrew Bible, בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית (“in the beginning”), focusing, in part, on the preposition
I shall comment on the very first Hebrew word in the Bible; I will make a comment on the very first sentence of the history of creation in the Bible—Berosheit. I want to analyze the word. Baith—in, by, through, and everything else. Rosh—the head, Sheit—grammatical termination. When the inspired man wrote it, he did not put the baith there. An old Jew without any authority added the word; he thought it too bad to begin to talk about the head! It read first, “The head one of the Gods brought forth the Gods.” (Source)
It might seem odd for anyone to focus on something to rather minute, but interestingly, many Rabbis and other Jewish commentators focused on deconstructing בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית in such a manner. As Ephraim Urbach noted:
Anonymous homilies came to explain why the story of creation begins with the letter Bêt: ‘Why was (the world) created with a Bêt [that of בראשׁית Bê-rē’shît]? Because it is an expression of blessing (ברכה bĕrākhā, ‘blessing’, begins with a Bêt]. And why not with an ‘Ālef? Because it belongs to an expression of cursing [ארור ‘ārûr, ‘cursed’, begins with an ‘Ālef]. Another explanation is . . . in order not to give the sectarians an excuse to say: How can the world stand, seeing it was created by a locution of cursing’. A different homily explains that the shape of the letter Bêt implies that ‘He that is above created us . . . and He . . . the Lord is His name.’ The sectarians are Gnostics, who claimed that the created world was evil, for, according to Simon Magus, it was not the work of the Good Most High God but of the Demiurge, who was originally sent by the Good God to create the world, but he rebelled against him and proclaimed himself the supreme god. Marcion argued that the transcendental god of lovingkindness stand facing the god of judgment and righteousness, who is the god of the world and is evil, and hence the world is also evil. Clearly the second homily is likewise directed against such views, and stresses that the God of Israel, whose name is the Lord [the Tetragrammaton], is ‘He that is above’, and there is none superior to Him, and He is also the Creator of the world. The letters of the Torah, with which the world was created, were used by the Amoraim as symbols and intimations, in which they found support or the basic concepts, which were the heritage of generations, concerning the Creator and the created world, but they were forced to defend these ideas anew against the sectarians and deviationists. The testimony of the verse ‘And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good’ (Genesis i 31) is reiterated in the Prophets and mentioned again in the Hagiographa. Although Philo relies on Plato when he declares that the cause of Creation was the wish of God to vouchsafe of His goodness to the world and to make it more perfect, yet it is obvious that he could have based his words on the Holy Scriptures. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the Sages reiterated this thought in various forms. The verse ‘The Rock, His work is perfect’ (Deuteronomy xxxii 4) is expounded in the Sifre:
His Work is perfect in regard to all the inhabitants of the world, and there is not the slightest reason for questioning his works. There is not one of them who would speculate and say: If I had three eyes, or three hands, or three legs, or if I walked on my head, or if my face were turned backwards, how it would befit me!
The homily appears to be directed against people who did, in truth, question ‘the perfection of the work’ in the creation of the world. Indeed, in a parallel source, where the dictum is attributed to R. Simeon Y. Yoḥai, the polemical aim is underscored by ‘An analogy to a human king who built a palace, and people entered it and said: If the pillars were taller it would have been more beautiful; if the walls were higher, it would have been more beautiful; if the ceiling were loftier, it would have been more beautiful. (Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbis of Talmud [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, 1979], 201-2)
