רַב הוּנָא בְּשֵׁם בַּר קַפָּרָא פָּתַח (תהלים לא, יט): תֵּאָלַמְנָה שִׂפְתֵי שָׁקֶר וגו', אִתְפַּרְכָן, אִתְחַרְשָׁן,
אִשְׁתַּתְּקָן. אִתְפַּרְכָן אִתְחַרְשָׁן, הֵיךְ מָה דְאַתְּ אָמַר (שמות ד, יא): אוֹ מִי יָשׂוּם אִלֵּם אוֹ חֵרֵשׁ אוֹ פִקֵּחַ אוֹ עִוֵּר הֲלֹא אָנֹכִי ה',
וְאוֹמֵר (בראשית לז, ז): וְהִנֵּה אֲנַחְנוּ מְאַלְּמִים אֲלֻמִּים
בְּתוֹךְ הַשָּׂדֶה וְהִנֵּה קָמָּה אֲלֻמָּתִי. אִשְׁתַּתְּקָן, כְּמַשְׁמָעוֹ (תהלים לא, יט): הַדֹּבְרוֹת עַל צַדִּיק, חַי הָעוֹלָמִים. (תהלים לא, יט): עָתָק, שֶׁהֶעְתִּיק
בִּבְרִיּוֹתָיו. (תהלים לא, יט): בְּגַאֲוָה, אֶתְמְהָה בִּשְׁבִיל
לְהִתְגָּאוֹת וְלוֹמַר אֲנִי דוֹרֵשׁ בְּמַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית. (תהלים לא, יט): וָבוּז, אֶתְמְהָה מְבַזֶּה עַל כְּבוֹדִי, דְּאָמַר רַבִּי יוֹסֵי בַּר
חֲנִינָא כָּל הַמִּתְכַּבֵּד בִּקְלוֹן חֲבֵרוֹ אֵין לוֹ חֵלֶק לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא,
בִּכְבוֹדוֹ שֶׁל מָקוֹם עַל אַחַת כַּמָּה וְכַמָּה, וּמַה כְּתִיב אַחֲרָיו (תהלים לא, כ): מָה רַב טוּבְךָ אֲשֶׁר צָפַנְתָּ לִירֵאֶיךָ, לִירֵאֶיךָ וְלֹא לַבּוֹזִים
אֶת מוֹרָאֲךָ [הרב] אַל יְהִי בְּמָה רַב טוּבְךָ, בְּנֹהַג שֶׁבָּעוֹלָם מֶלֶךְ
בָּשָׂר וָדָם בּוֹנֶה פָּלָטִין בִּמְקוֹם הַבִּיבִים, וּבִמְקוֹם הָאַשְׁפָּה,
וּבִמְקוֹם הַסָּרִיּוֹת, כָּל מִי שֶׁהוּא בָּא לוֹמַר פָּלָטִין זוֹ בְּנוּיָה
בִּמְקוֹם הַבִּיבִים וּבִמְקוֹם הָאַשְׁפָּה וּבִמְקוֹם הַסָּרִיּוֹת, אֵינוֹ
פּוֹגֵם. כָּךְ כָּל מִי שֶׁהוּא בָּא לוֹמַר הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה נִבְרָא מִתּוֹךְ
תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ, אֵינוֹ פּוֹגֵם, אֶתְמְהָה. רַב הוּנָא בְּשֵׁם בַּר קַפָּרָא
אָמַר, אִילוּלֵי שֶׁהַדָּבָר כָּתוּב אִי אֶפְשָׁר לְאָמְרוֹ, בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא
אֱלֹהִים, מִנַּיִן הֵן, וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ.
Rav Huna began in the name of bar
Kapara: “May they be silenced [te’alamna], those lying lips [that speak
harsh words against the righteous one with arrogance and contempt]” (Psalms
31:19) – may they be bound up, may they become mute, may they be silenced. May
they become mute – as it says: “Who gives a mouth to a person, or who renders
one mute [ilem] or deaf, or sighted or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?”
(Exodus 4:11). And [may they be bound up,] as it says: “Behold, we were binding
[me’alemim] sheaves in the field and behold, my sheaf arose” (Genesis
37:7). May they be silenced – that is its plain sense. “That speak…against the
Righteous One” (Psalms 31:19) – [this refers to] Him of eternal life. “Harsh
words [atak]” (Psalms 31:19) – matters that He concealed [shehe’etik]
from His creations. “With arrogance” (Psalms 31:19) – this is an expression of
bewilderment: [Do they do this] in order to boast arrogantly: I am expounding
the act of Creation? “And contempt” (Psalms 31:19) – this [too] is an
expression of bewilderment: Is it in order to show contempt for My honor? As
Rabbi Yosei bar Ḥanina said: Anyone who attains honor through the degradation
of another person has no portion in the World to Come; how much more so is this
so regarding the honor of the Omnipresent. What is written following this? “How
great is the goodness You have in store for those who fear You” (Psalms 31:20)
– for those who fear You, but not for those who demean the [awesome] fear of
You. They will not be included in: “How great is the goodness.”
The way of the world is that when a flesh-and-blood king builds his palace in
[a location that had been] a place of sewers, a place of refuse, and a
malodorous place, anyone who comes and says: ‘This palace was built in a place
of sewers, a place of refuse, and a malodorous place,’ is this not an insult?
So, too, anyone who comes and says: ‘This world was created from emptiness and
disorder,’ is this not an insult? This is a rhetorical question. Rav Huna said
in the name of bar Kapara: Were the matter not written explicitly it would not
have been possible to say it: “In the beginning, God created” (Genesis 1:1) –
from what? “The earth was emptiness and disorder” (Genesis 1:2). (Genesis Rabbah
[AKA Bereshit Rabbah] 1:5)
BeR
1:5
This is a petihah connecting Gen
1:1 with the petihah verse Ps 31:19, put in the mouth of Rav Huna in the name
of Bar Qappara. Bar Qappara is a Tanna of the fifth and last generation that
leads to the first generation of Amoraim (early third century). He was the
teacher, among others, of R. Oshaya who opens the very first sub-section of
BerR and founded an academy in the ‘South’, presumably in Lydda. Similar to the
first sub-section, the petihah begins with interpreting a difficult word in the
petihah verse, this time te’alamnah: ‘Let the lying lips be made dumb
(te’alamnah)’, translating it into Aramaic and making clear that it indeed means
‘be bound’, ‘be made dumb’, ‘be silenced’. The lying lips that must be
silenced, the petihah continues explaining the petihah verse Ps 31:19, are the
lips ‘that speak arrogantly against the righteous’. ‘The righteous’ is
understood as referring to God, and speaking arrogantly against him as
revealing things that God wants to be kept away (kept secret) from his
creatures. And finally, the continuation of the petihah verse ‘with pride and
contempt’ (Ps 31:19) is interpreted as proudly expounding the ‘work of
creation’ (ma’aseh bereshit) and contemptuously disgracing the honor of God.
The reference to the ‘work of
creation’ alludes, of course, to the well-known mishnah in Ḥagiga 2:1:
‘Forbidden sexual relations may not be expounded (en doreshin ba-‘arayot) by/to
three, nor the work of creation (ma’aseh bereshit) by/to two, nor the Merkabah
by/to an individual, unless he is wise [a scholar] and understands on his own’.
The ‘work of creation’—that is, the exegesis of Gen 1—belongs to the topics
that the Mishnah wants to be restricted, taking a middle position between
expounding forbidden sexual relations (least restricted) and expounding the
Merkabah (that is, Ezek 1: most restricted). From this it becomes clear that it
is the ‘work of creation’ that God wants to keep secret from his creatures:
whoever expounds Gen 1, disgraces God’s honor.
As in the first petihah, a
parable is added to explain what precisely this means—and to lead back from the
petihah verse Ps 31:19 to the Seder verse Gen 1:1: If a human king builds his
palace at a place of sewage, garbage, and rubbish—does not one of his subjects,
who passes by and publicly points to this unpleasant fact, disgrace the king?
Similarly, everyone who publicly points to the fact that ‘this world is created
from tohu and bohu and darkness—does he not disgrace [God]?’ The petihah climaxes
in another dictum by Rab Huna in the name of Bar Qappara which closes the
circle and explicitly refers to Gen 1:1f.:
If the matter were not
(explicitly) written [in Scripture], it would be impossible to state it: God
created heaven and earth (Gen 1:1)—from what? From: and the earth was tohu and
bohu etc. (Gen 1:2).
This is an exceptionally bold and
clear statement, presumably the earliest one in rabbinic Judaism that refers to
a doctrine of creation out of pre-existing matter (creatio ex hylis).
Obviously, Bar Qappara reads Gen 1:1–3 in the same way as, much later, Rashi
understood it (and the JPS English version translates it), namely: ‘(1) When
God began to create (reading bereshit bero elohim instead of bereshit bara
elohim) heaven and earth—(2) the earth being unformed (tohu) and void (bohu),
with darkness (hoshekh) over the surface of the deep (tehom) and a wind (ruah)
from Good sweeping over the water—(3) God said: Let there be light!’ According
to this translation, the first thing that God created was light, and what is
listed in the parenthesis was already there, as pre-existent matter, when God
started his creation with the light. The philosophical or theological context
of this statement is difficult to determine—whether, still untroubled by a
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, it ‘innocently’ propagates a creatio ex hylis,
or, on the contrary, whether it explicitly and aggressively argues against an
already existing doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—but what seems to be clear is
the fact that Bar Qappara draws his conclusion about God using pre-existing
matter for his creation from the Bible: I would rather prefer to not make this
point, he says, but unfortunately the biblical text compels me to make it.
Moreover, Bar Qappara evidently does not contest the idea of the creatio ex
hylis as such (it is unavoidable, he implies, if we read the Bible properly);
rather, he speaks against those who ma God’s ‘secret’ public by proudly and
spitefully advertising it and thereby putting God in a dubious and unfavorable
light. What the Bible says is certainly correct, but one should not speak
openly and publicly about this shameful case. Finally, despite Bar Qappara’s
attempt to connect the creatio ex hylis with the Bible, it is obvious that this
doctrine is well-grounded in Greek philosophy, following a literal reading of
the cosmology in Plato’s Timaios.
If we now look at the first two
sub-units of our parashah from the point of view of the editor, we observe a
stark contrast between the two. Whereas 1:1 emphasizes that the world was
created by means of the Torah, 1:5 claims that the world was created by means
of pre-existing matter. The first option is the essence of what the rabbis of
rabbinic Judaism have to offer; the second option is the essence of what pagan
philosophy suggests. To be sure, according to Bar Qappara even pagan philosophy
has its origin in the Hebrew Bible; but this (for the rabbis self-evident)
insight cannot conceal the fact that 1:5 presents the antidote to 1:1, or, to
put it differently, that the first two sub-sections produce an almost
unbearable tension between a rabbinic-theological and a pagan-philosophical
worldview. There can be no doubt that our editor favors 1:1, and one could
therefore more precisely speak of the two sub-sections as the thesis (1:1) and
the antithesis (1:5) of the parashah—the thesis and antithesis that define the
subject that the editor sets out to unfold in what follows. (Peter Schäfer, “Bereshit
Bara Elohim: Bershit Rabba, Parasha 1, Reconsidered,” in Empsychoi Logoi: Religious
Innovations in Antiquity—Studies in Honour of Pieter Willem van der Horst,
ed. Alberdina Houtman, Albert De Jong, and Magda Misset-Van De Weg [Ancient
Judaism and Early Christianity 73; Leiden: Brill, 2008], 269-72)
