03-20-2019, 08:01 AM
(03-19-2019, 07:31 PM)nili Wrote: The difference is betweenand
- In the beginning, God created ...
- In the beginning of God's creation of ...
In my opinion, the former suggests creation ex nihilo while the latter does not, and I find it interesting that this latter rendering seems to be the one preferred by what might be termed "Jewish sources" across a broad spectrum, from Reform (JPS/Plaut Commentary) and Conservative (JPS/Etz Hayim) to Orthodox (Chabad, Stone).
Because of the presence of the אֵת particle, I don't think that we should go with "creation of." This is expressed in Hebrew as בְּרִיאַת הָעוֹלָם. Avraham Ahuvya's translation of the Bible (תָּנָ״ךְ רָם),* which is a translation from classical Hebrew to modern Hebrew, the author phrases the first verse in this way:
בִּתְחִלַּת הַבְּרִיאָה, כְּשֶׁבָּרָא אֱלוֹהִים אֶת הָעוֹלָם...
He renders the second phrase, which is also temporal (since it is following כְּשֶׁ־ "when"), as something dependent. He renders it as: "In the beginning of the creation, when God created the world...." He then follows it with a comma. The main verb still appears in verse 3 with אָמַר אֱלוֹהִים, and verse 2 has commas that make it continue into verse 3.
That's exactly how I would understand it.
Biblical Hebrew is a bit more limited regarding the passive sense of verbs in certain syntactic constraints. So, "the beginning of the creation of the world by God" is a little difficult. Only in rabbinic Hebrew (from the period of the Second Temple) do we see the emergence of a word "by" (עַל־יְדֵי "on the hands of") for agents with passive verbs!
In modern Hebrew, we can express בְּרִיאַת הָעוֹלָם עַל־יְדֵי אֱלוֹהִים "the creation of the word by God." Biblical Hebrew would force us to use an infinitive construct with God as the "subjective genitive" (to steal a grammatical category from Greek) and אֵת to mark the direct object of the verbal form. Taking בְּרֹא as the pointing of the first verb is certainly representing Hebrew syntax at its best.
* אהוביה, אברהם. (2010). תנ״ך רם: תורה. הרצלייה, ישראל: רם – הוצאה לאור בע״ם.
Ahuvia, Avraham. (2010). Ram Tanach: Torah. Herzliya, Israel: Ram – Publishing House, LTD.
** By the way, the font we use on the forum for Hebrew (and Greek) is called SBL BibLit. For transliteration of Hebrew, we use Gentium Plus. You can stylize your Hebrew with
[he] and [/he] surrounding your Hebrew text (like [he]שלום[/he], which yields שלום). Transliteration can be surrounded with [tr] tags in the same way. Greek can be surrounded with the tag [gr].