1In the beginning, when God created the heaven and the
earth—2the earth was desolate chaos, and darkness was over the face
of the ocean, and a wind of God was soaring over the face of the water—3God
said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Ronald Hendel, Genesis
1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AYB 1A; New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2024], 105)
. . . as Barr
(2013:180-81) has observed, words for remote time commonly lack the definite
article even when they are semantically definite (e.g., mērē’šît, “from the
beginning,” Isa 46:10). Hence bərēʾšît could be grammatically definite
without the definite article. But the absolute reading, “In the beginning, God
created heaven and earth,” taken as a punctual event, is contradicted by the
subsequent references to heaven and earth. The earth exists in 1:2, but it is a
desolate chaos. Heaven is created on the second day (1:6-7), rendering the
punctual reading of 1:1 unlikely. But the view of 1:1 as a punctual event has
its defenders, taking the creation to be an inchoate heaven and earth (Wenham
1987:12-13; Day 2013:7-8). It is also possible to regard the absolute reading
as a rubric or superscription for the whole account, rather than as a punctual
event (so Jenni 1989; Barr 2013:178-82; Gertz 2018: 36-37); similarly,
Westermann 1985: 97), but this sits awkwardly with the description of the earth
in 1:2 as tōhû wābōhû (“desolate chaos”) and lacks the analogies in
biblical prose narrative. Early translators and interpreters adopted various
exegetical strategies to resolve the difficulties of the meaning of the
absolute reading, which was usually taken to be the natural reading in
postbiblical Hebrew (see Anderson 1990; Kugel 1998: 44-47).
The construct
reading, in which bərēʾšît is the head of a temporal cause, makes good
sense in context, followed by the background clause in 1:2 and the first
punctual clause in 1:3. The introduction with a temporal cause is common in
other biblical and ancient Near Eastern creation myths, including Gen 2:4b, “On
the day that Yahweh God made earth and heaven,” and Enuma Elish, “When
the heavens above did not exist. / And the dearth beneath had not come into
being” (Lambert 2013:50-51). This construction in Hebrew suits the solemnity of
the occasion. For these and similar reasons, most modern treatments prefer this
reading (e.g., Ewald 1879: §332d; Joüon and Muraoka 1993: §129p3; Speiser 1964:
12-13; Bauks 1997: 81-86; Holmstedt 2008).
The postbiblical
“forgetting” of the Classical Hebrew construction eventually gave rise to the
idea of creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) (Kugel 1998: 60-63).
This idea (“seems to be first expressed
in 2 Macc 7:28: “God did not make them [heaven and earth] out of existing
things.” But the phrase “existing things” (ontōn) may refer to formed
matter in contrast to unformed primordial matter (Winston 2001: 60). (Ronald
Hendel, Genesis 1-11: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AYB
1A; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024], 108-9)
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