Hey, so: How does the book of Genesis begin?

If you ask a bunch of random people off the street, you’ll probably get a lot of “In the beginning...”s. And that’s how the most famous English translation renders Genesis 1:1: In the beginning, G-d created the heaven and the earth.

Open up a translation informed by modern scholarship, tho, and you’ll likely find something more like “When G-d began to create the heaven and the earth,...”. At first blush, this might just seem like a question of style. “In the beginning...”, “When G-d began...”, potayto, potahto. But many scholars are adamant that the second is more correct than the first, and I’ve occasionally heard a rabbi on the bimah reference the supposed increased accuracy of it without really delving into the arguments in favor of it. For this first parashah, I’d like to go thru some of those arguments and why people think the difference matters.

So far, I’ve just been talking about translation. What does the Hebrew say?

Bəreishit begins בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹקִים | Bəreishit bara Eloqim. That first word is where the trouble is, so let’s bracket it for now. בָּרָא | bara is a nice, ordinary third-person singular perfect-tense verb: he created. אֱלֹקִים | Eloqim is, of course, one of the Hebrew words for G-d [a]. So the clause as a whole seems to say “Bəreishit G-d created...[b]” Which means all of this is hinging on how we understand that first word.

[a] In fact, it’s a word with any number of grammatical curiosities of its own, but we’re going to have enough to say about the first word here without worrying about the third, so we’ll have to leave that be for now.
[b] Hebrew word order is more flexible than English, and it’s not uncommon for a verb (created) to precede its subject (G-d).

Bəreishit breaks down into three parts: The first letter is a preposition that generally encompasses meanings like in, with, and at [c]. The second part is the root, ראשׁ | R’Sh, which originally refers to the “head” of something, but then expands in meaning to refer to any kind of first or initial thing [d]. Finally, there’s the ending -it, which is just a marker added to the root to make it a noun, the same way in English we might add -ness to do the same thing. Putting it together, we have a preposition, bə, attached to a noun meaning “beginning/start”, reishit.

[c] Hence the book of BəMidbar or “In the wilderness” and Psalm 150’s exhortation to praise G-d bətof umaḥol, “with drum and dance”.
[d] Hence Rosh haShanah, the head of the year.

But there’s a catch: Hebrew nouns have a few different forms. The one that’s most like an English noun is the absolute form, the form that gets used when the noun is just sitting there on its own being a noun. So Torah in a sentence like “G-d gave the Torah to Mosheh” is a noun in the absolute state. It’s the form you look up in the dictionary. But a Hebrew noun can also be in what’s called the construct state, which is a form used to construct larger noun phrases. It indicates that the noun in question should be linked to the noun that follows it: In the sentence “G-d gave Mosheh a Torah of life”, we’d have to put Torah into the construct state in Hebrew — Torat ḥayim, not Torah.

And the word bəreishit is, unambiguously, in the construct state [e]. Not “In the beginning,”, but “In the beginning of...”.

[e] The absolute would be בָּרֵאשִׁית | bareishit.

Hang on, tho, you might object, didn’t I just say that the construct state links two nouns together? And isn’t bara a verb? Can you even do that?

Well, it turns out that you can. It’s not particularly common, and in later layers of Hebrew, it would likely be viewed as a solecism, but in Biblical Hebrew, you can get away with it. You can find another example in Hoshéi’a 1:2: תְּחִלַּת דִּבֶּר יי בְּהוֹשֵֽׁעַ | Təḥilat diber haSheim bəHoshéi’a — idiomatically “When haSheim started speaking with Hoshéi’a” but more literally “The start of G-d spoke with Hoshéi’a:”. It’s a perfectly legitimate way of starting this sort of temporal clause; “when X started to Y” can be rendered in Biblical Hebrew as “at the start of X did Y”, even if it feels weird to render literally in English.

So grammar is no obstacle. But this whole argument so far rests on the vowels, and anyone who knows the full history of this text can tell you that the written vowels are a very late addition. And if you just look at the older, more reliable consonants, there isn’t any difference between the absolute and construct forms of בראשית | BR’ShT. Are we dependent on something as tenuous as vowels for this?

It turns out we’re not. If we broaden our examination very slightly to the first clause of the next verse, we find וְהָאָֽרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹֽהוּ וָבֹֽהוּ | vəha’áretz hayətah tóhu vavóhu | “and the earth was shapeless nothing”. If this were a separate thought, we would expect the verb to come first: not וְהָאָֽרֶץ הָיְתָה | vəha’áretz hayətah but וַתְּהִי הָאָֽרֶץ | vatəhi ha’áretz [f]. (You can find examples of this sort of “separate thought = verb first” construction in basically every verse that follows: “And said G-d, ‘Let there be light’ . . . And saw G-d the light that it was good . . . And called G-d the light day” --- it’s an extremely common construction.) The force of this noun-first construction is to subordinate or parenthesize the second verse: “When G-d began to create the heaven and the earth (and the earth was shapeless nothing)...”

[f] Why not וְהָיְתָה הָאָֽרֶץ | vəhayətah ha’áretz? Because Biblical Hebrew typically uses a different form of the verb when it falls at the start of a clause than when it falls in the middle of one. For much more on this, look up the ו-consequent form in any grammar of the language.

This, in turn, positions the third verse (which has the verb first!) as the completion of the temporal clause in the first verse: “[1] When G-d began to create the heaven and the earth [2] (and the earth was shapeless nothing . . . ), [3]G-d said, ‘Let there be light.’, and there was light.”

Bəreishit 1:1 is not the only place we find this sort of multi-verse temporal-parenthetical construction in the Bible. In fact, it’s not even the only place we find it at the start of a creation story in Bəreishit. The second account of creation [g] uses this exact same construction: The second half of Bəreishit 2:4 kicks us off with בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת יי אֱלֹקִים אֶֽרֶץ וְשָׁמָֽיִם | Bəyom asot haSheim Eloqim éretz vəshamáyim | “On the day of haSheim G-d’s making of [h] earth and heaven...”; this is followed by a bunch of subordinated clauses in verses 5 and 6 that all, critically, have the noun first in the clause before the verb (“and every shrub . . . and every herb . . . and humans were not . . . and a flow came up...”); finally in verse 7 we get the main clause (“and haSheim G-d fashioned...”) with the verb coming before the noun. The overall effect is the same: “[2:4b] When G-d made earth and heaven [5] (and a whole bunch of stuff wasn’t around yet [6] even tho a couple things were), [7] G-d fashioned a human”

[g] If you haven’t before encountered the idea that the Hebrew Bible contains many duplicated passages that seem to tell the same story multiple times from different perspectives in a way that suggests the Torah we have is a composite document pulled together in various stages from various different sources, set aside some time to look into the Documentary Hypothesis and prepare to catch up on about 150 years of ongoing academic debate.
[h] ie “When haSheim G-d made”

Reliable sources [i] tell me that the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish [j], opens with this exact same construction. Most contemporary scholars concur that the first creation account in Bəreishit is modeled on this Babylonian account, either as a general cultural reference or as a polemical re-writing of a polytheistic creation story into a firmly, unambiguously monotheistic one.

[i] To pull a random reference off my shelf, see EA Speiser, Genesis, The Anchor Bible Vol 1. New York: Doubleday (1964), the complete text of which can be found online at the Internet Archive.
[j] Or Enūma Eliš, or probably other transliterations depending on who you ask. I assume if I knew Akkadian, I would immediately develop strong opinions about the best way to transliterate it for a general audience, but I don’t so I haven’t.

I have not read Enuma Elish and am not in a position to independently evaluate this claim. But, in a circuitous way, this brings us to an important question: Why does anyone care about this?

And to answer that, we need to take a brief detour thru another question: What’s the relationship of monotheism to polytheism anyway?

Not having thought much about it, my assumption the first time I encountered this question was that the monotheism of the ancient Israelites had grown organically out of the polytheism around them [k]. You start out believing in a bunch of g-ds, then you gravitate towards one (perhaps the specific patron g-d of your city or something) and start elevating that g-d as more important than the other g-ds, then finally you say that those other g-ds are so much less important that they’re actually not true g-ds at all. I’m not sure whether someone taught me this at some point or whether it’s something I just invented out of whole cloth myself. It feels like it could be either. Perhaps you yourself assume the process unfolded along similar lines.

[k] Historically, it turns out, a lot of other people have advanced this view, and because many of them have been monotheists themselves, they’ve advanced it as specifically a progression or purification, casting polytheism as inherently inferior to monotheism as a religious framework. I want to be very clear both that I don’t think there’s anything inherently better about monotheism and that I don’t think you need to believe in the superiority of monotheism to believe that the change from polytheism to monotheism was gradual — just as you don’t need to believe that uninflected languages are better than inflected ones to believe that English lost most of its grammatical inflections thru a gradual, protracted historical process (that is arguably still unfolding).

If so, you’re not alone. Prior to the middle of the 20th century, this was, in fact, the dominant scholarly view of how Israelite monotheism had developed from its polytheistic cultural environment. This view is famously challenged by Yehezkel Kaufmann in his History of the Religion of Israel, first published in 1960.

Kaufmann argued that there are sharp divides between polytheism and monotheism such that you can’t really get from one to the other without a pronounced break, a radical paradigm shift. One of the divides Kaufmann discusses is the nature of the universe itself. In Ancient Near Eastern polytheistic creation myths, Kaufmann says, the world — including not just the physical earth but living things and even the g-ds themselves — emerges from some sort of primordial ur-substance that precedes the creation of the universe proper. In Israelite monotheism, on the other hand, it is G-d Who is antecedent to the world; G-d doesn’t emerge from some pre-existing cosmic goop, but instead simply is at the beginning of all things and creates the universe out of nothing from there.

I haven’t actually read Kaufmann’s work. As far as I can tell, an unabridged translation of it into English has never been published. My knowledge of it comes largely from professor Christine Hayes’s excellent lecture series on the Hebrew Bible accessible thru the Open Yale Courses website [l]. Nevertheless, I think even this kind of high-level overview can help illuminate why the translation of bəreishit can get so fraught.

[l] https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145 — she discusses Kaufmann most extensively in lecture 2

Because if you believe that the pre-creation existence of some primordial substrate implies a polytheistic outlook that is fundamentally at odds with monotheism, then understanding Bəreishit 1:1–3 as describing an unbounded creation — When G-d started to make the world, there was already a bunch of chaotic primordial stuff — is likely to strike you as somewhere between dunderheaded and blasphemous. And so you’re likely to argue strenuously against that understanding.

All academics bring their beliefs and biases to their scholarship, of course. But it is my experience that the beliefs that Biblical scholars bring to their work are of a different sort than, say, Shakespeare scholars’ beliefs about the precise order in which he wrote his plays. Biblical scholars tend to have beliefs that are, well, religious. This doesn’t always hinder their scholarship — many of them do excellent work and are cautious and responsible with the evidence, fitting their theories to the facts, however inconvenient. But that’s hard, and they’re human, and sometimes they fail. Sometimes their prior beliefs are so strong that they lead them to bend the facts to fit the theories. Sometimes this is deliberate mendacity, but more frequently it’s the kind of motivated confirmation bias we all fall prey to when we want something to be true and have only patchy, sparse, ambiguous evidence to guide us.

At times, this is pretty obvious. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion, for example, that in his psalm commentaries, Mitchell Dahood is seriously distorting the textual evidence because he’s retrojecting his Jesuit beliefs onto pre-Christian texts out of a desire to uncover a hidden Christian thread buried in them all along.

But sometimes it’s harder. As I said, I don’t know Akkadian, so I can’t read the opening of Enuma Elish in the original to evaluate the grammatical parallels with Bəreishit directly. I have to take others’ word for it. Enuma Elish is at least a well-known and much commented-on text; frequently, however, Biblical scholars will cite one-off Hurrian marriage contracts or unpublished Cuneiform fragments or other obscure texts in dead languages that it’s all but impossible to follow up on if you yourself aren’t a tenured professor of Ancient Near Eastern languages and literatures.

This isn’t to say that those citations must necessarily be wrong, merely that they often leave me with a degree of unease, especially when I’m encountering a scholar whose work I don’t know for the first time. How reliable are they? Are they careful with evidence, or do they let belief lead them and find what they want to find regardless of whether it’s actually there?

The Bible is a complicated text that was created thru a complicated process, and every time I read it, I come away with new questions. So often, worry I can’t trust the answers I find. Is this person reading “Bəreishit bara...” as “In the beginning...” instead of “When G-d began...” because of an honest assessment of the evidence, or is there another agenda in the background pulling them off track? And then, in turn, am I dismissing good scholarship because I find it theologically irritating, and using suspicion of bias as an excuse to disengage?

I don’t have easy answers here. I’m not sure there even are answers in the tidy, final sense here. But I think these are questions worth sitting with. I think it’s always worth it to trace thru these sorts of textual arguments, to pin down each step of the logic and try to suss out what you can verify yourself and what goes beyond the realms where you have knowledge. There’s too much in the world for any one person to know everything; we are all, constantly, relying on others to know and report accurately things beyond our ken. But even experts can err, can convince themselves that the castles their wishful thinking builds in the air are founded on firm bedrock. I think Biblical scholarship is always going to be a messy field precisely because the Bible means so much to so many. I just wish that didn’t leave me so frequently so uncertain about the field’s conclusions.

At this point, I feel pretty comfortable agreeing that the opening of Bəreishit is best translated “When G-d began to create…”. That may cause difficulties for certain theories of Israelite religion, but those theories must, ultimately, contend with the evidence as it is, not as they wish it were. I don’t have any particular belief in how monotheism came about anymore, but I also don’t know that I need to. For now, it’s enough to read and think and study and ponder the questions raised by that pesky first word of Torah. Maybe then one day I’ll be able to get to the questions raised by the second!