The
very first word of the Hebrew Bible, bereshit, usually translated as “in
the beginning,” has no strict parallel there. For this reason alone it has been
a source of linguistic or grammatical puzzles, apart from other puzzles as
well. From the viewpoint of grammar, bereshit is an anomaly. Only by
making trained comparisons with some very rare and not entirely identical
expressions can one justify its translation, on the basis of grammar alone, as “in
the beginning.” By rules of Hebrew grammar, bereshit should be followed
by a noun, or at least an infinitive, and convey thereby the meaning of the
beginning of something or of an action. But the next word, bara (created),
is in the third personal case of the simple past tense. Yet it was the rabbis’
unanimous conviction, unbroken until the twelfth century, that bereshit should
be translated as “in the beginning,” a sort of an adverb standing majestically alone.
Up to that time the conviction was also unanimous that the Masoretes could be
trusted when in the sixth century that vocalized the entire Hebrew Scriptures
and specified the pronunciation of the four consonants brsht as bereshit.
On
the basis of grammar lone, Claude Tresmontant would be justified, for instance,
in rendering bereshit as “in a certain beginning” (C. Tresmontant, Etude
de métaphysique biblique [Paris: Gabalda, 1955], p. 72). More convincingly
could grammar be invoked for taking bereshit for the object of a
possessive case, or “in the beginning of God’s creating the heaven and the
earth, the earth was without form and void . . . .” This would be equivalent to
a simple temporal subclause, “when God made the heaven and the earth . . . “ But
then it would be impossible not to sense that there had already been something
on hand when God started his work of creation.
In
other words, on the basis of grammar alone, Genesis 1:1 would suggest that God was
a mere fashioner of things already existing rather than their Creator. Such a
suggestion was emphatically resisted throughout orthodox. Christian tradition from
its very start. Less inform and formal was the resistance of Jewish
interpreters. In fact, . . .when in early medieval times some Jewish
interpreters of Genesis 1 took the view that God had merely fashioned the
world, they did so for reasons other than grammatical. Being possessed with a
particular notion about the mutual ordering of the elements, they adopted a
quasi-scientific perspective which invited concordism. Disputes about what to
do with bereshit have been connected from the start with concordism,
this chief pitfall of all interpretations of Genesis 1 through the ages. (Stanley
L. Jaki, Genesis 1 Through the Ages [2d ed.; Edinburgh: Real View Books,
1998], 2-3, emphasis in bold added)