In his recent essay on Gen 1:1-3, John A. Cook (professor of OT and director of Hebrew Language Instruction, Ashbury Theological Seminary) defends the following translation:
First event is
subordinate to the third, and the second is parenthetical: When God created
. . .
(the earth was . . . ), then God Said.
“When God began to create
heaven and earth—2 the earth being unformed and void, when darkness over the
surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—3 God said, ‘Let
there be light’; and there was light.” (NPJS) (John A. Cook, “Back to the
Beginning: Verbal Syntax and Semantics in Genesis 1:1-3,” in Adam Miglio, Caryn
A. Reeder, Joshua T. Walton, and Kenneth C. Way, eds., For Us, But Not To
Us: Essays on Creation, Covenant, and Context in Honor of John H. Walton
[Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick Publications, 2020], 22-36, here, p. 23)
In defence of Gen 1:1 being a subordinate
clause, Cook wrote:
Temporal subordination
is a common strategy used to override the default successive readings of
bounded events, as illustrated by the examples in 15).
15.
a. Evan painted
the house, and he said, “It’s big.”
b. Even said, “It’s
big,” and he painted the house.
c. While Evan
painted the house, he said, “It’s big.”
d. Even said “It’s
big,” while he painted the house.
In (15a) the events
are bounded and temporally successive. If we reverse them, as in (15b), the
sense is altered. Y contrast, constructed with a temporal subordinate clause,
the order of the subordinate and main clauses can be reversed without any
change in meaning, as shown in (15c-d).
This subordinate strategy
is unnecessary to effect temporal overlay if one of the predicates is unbounded,
as illustrated by the example in (11a) above. A subordinate strategy is thus
unnecessary to create temporal overlay between the event of verse 1 and the
stative and progressive predicates in verse 2. By contrast, this is the only
way to effect temporal overlay between created in verse 1 and said in
verse 3. In both cases, however, the subordinating strategy clearly denotes
verse 1 as background to its foregrounded main clause, whether in verse 2 or in
verse 3. Although the event in verse 3 is already clearly marked as
foregrounded by the past narrative conjugation, the stative and progressive
situations of verse 2 lend themselves to a background reading insofar as boundedness
and temporal succession are closely correlated with narrative foreground.
Nevertheless, it is possible to find a rationale for subordinating verse 1 to
verse 2 on the assumption that verse 2 is foregrounded despite the
stative/progressive semantics of the predicates, to highlight the state of the
earth at the beginning of God’s creative activity.
In contrast to this
foregrounded status given to verse 2 by [the NRSV], [the NJPS translation]
relegates it to the backgrounded parenthetical material. As Holmstedt notes,
parenthesis consists of “non-at-issue” or background material and it interrupts
the syntax—here, interrupting the sequence of subordinate (verse 1) and its
main clause (verse 3) (Holmstedt, “Syntax of Gen 1.1-3.” “Holmstedt, “Parenthesis”).
As in the case of the
above comparison between the first two interpretive options, there is a stark
contrast between the second two options in terms of comparable constructions in
the Hebrew Bible. On the one hand, examples of episodes beginning with a
temporal clause subordinate to a following subject-verb perfect clause are not
forthcoming. On the other hand, temporal clauses subordinate to past narrative
verbs, as illustrated in (16), are ubiquitous (See also Gen 6:1; 20;13; 27:1;
30:25; etc. The initial ויהי is immaterial to the case, as evident from examples like Gen 22:4 that
lack it, indicating that the prepositional phrase is subordinate to the
following past narrative verb).
16. Gen 24:52
וַיְהִי כַּאֲשֶׁר שָׁמַע עֶבֶד אַבְרָהָם אֶת־דִּבְרֵיהֶם
וַיִּשְׁתַּחוּ אַרְצָה לַיהוָה׃
When the servant of
Abraham heard their words, he bowed to the ground to Yhwh.
More importantly, an
example paralleling Gen 1:1-3 even more closely can be found in Josh 23:1, given
in (17).
17. Josh 23:1-2
וַיְהִי מִיָּמִים רַבִּים אַחֲרֵי אֲשֶׁר־הֵנִיחַ יְהוָה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל מִכָּל־אֹיְבֵיהֶם מִסָּבִיב וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ זָקֵן בָּא בַּיָּמִים׃ וַיִּקְרָא יְהוֹשֻׁעַ לְכָל־יִשְׂרָאֵל לִזְקֵנָיו וּלְרָאשָׁיו וּלְשֹׁפְטָיו וּלְשֹׁטְרָיו וַיֹּאמֶר אֲלֵהֶם אֲנִי זָקַנְתִּי בָּאתִי בַּיָּמִים׃
After many days,
after Yhwh gave rest to Israel from all their enemies all around, (Joshua
was/had become old; he [had] advanced in years) Joshua summoned all Israel . .
.
As in Gen 1:1-3, in
the example from Joshua in (17), it must be decided whether the initial subordinate
expression is subordinate to the subject-verb perfect clause or the following
past narrative clause (The initial ויהי is immaterial to the case, as evident from examples
uke Gen 15:1 that lack it. As in Gen 15:1, so here, the prepositional phrase is
syntactically subordinate to the following verb, not the initial ויהי, which serves as a
discourse pragmatic marker [see Cook, Time and the Biblical Hebrew Verb,
309-12]. Instances of prepositional phrases without an initial ויהי proceeding past narrative
verbs [e.g., Gen 22:4] confirm this analysis insofar as they demonstrate that
the past narrative is not exclusively clause initial, but may be preceded by
adjunct modifiers). The stative expression וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ זָקֵן, just as וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה, can be interpreted in a number of ways
that are contextually determined. In both cases, an inchoative sense that
effects temporal succession seems an odd fit: Joshua did not become old only after
Yhwh gave rest to Israel. A past-perfect rendering, as the perfect verb in [Gen
31:31-33] receives, is possible here in Josh 23:1, indicating that by the time
Yhwh has given rest to Israel, Joshua had already become old. A similar sense
is possible for Gen 1:2, suggesting that when God began to create, the earth
was already, and had for some undetermined time prior, in the state of affairs
expressed by verse 2. (Ibid., 32-34, emphasis in bold added)
Further in defence of Gen 1 not
teaching creation ex nihilo, following Walton, Cook noted:
. . . if ברא does not refer to
bringing into material existence, analogous with (11b), but refers to something
else, analogous with (11a), such as God organized the heavens and the earth,
then the situations of verse 2 will be understood to overlap with the
events on either side of it. Thus, the matter of the traditional interpretation
really turns on the lexical-semantic understanding of ברא. Traditionally ברא has been understood
to refer to material creation, a view defended especially by those desiring to
preserve an idea of creatio ex nihilo in this verse. Walton has cogently
argued that the term does not refer to material creation, but refers, instead,
to bringing something into functional existence (Walton, Genesis One,
proposition 3; Genesis 1, 127-33). (Ibid., 31)
Blake T. Ostler, Out of Nothing: A History of Creation ex Nihilo in Early Christian Thought
Daniel O. McClellan, James Patrick Holding refuted on Creation Ex Nihilo