Genesis 1 vs. Rashi

Those of you who are interested enough to watch my videos (or read this blog) know that Genesis 1:1 reads: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." in Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃ What you might not know is that Jewish translations treat this verse differently. Artscroll translates the first three verses as "In the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth – when the earth was astonishingly empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep, and the divine presence hovered upon the surface of the waters – God said, "Let there be light, and there was light."

Artscroll translates this passage so that the first two verses describe the situation and nothing happens until verse three. Artscroll's justification is that "in the beginning God created" would indicate that the Torah is giving the sequence of Creation – that God created the heaven, the earth, darkness, water, light, and so on. However, Rashi and Ibn Ezra maintain that this verse cannot be chronological.

Rashi argues that we cannot translate רֵאשִׁית as a beginning simpliciter, since it always means "beginning of." He cites Genesis 10:10 "beginning of his kingdom" Jeremiah 26:1 "beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim" and Deuteronomy 18:4 "first of your grain." Hence, the Hebrew word בָּרָא which is a verb, has to become a gerund in order for the verse to make sense. He justifies this with Hosea 1:2 "When the LORD first spoke to Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea..." which uses תְּחִלַּ֥ת as a sort of "in the beginning of" and the verb דִּבֶּר as a gerund as well.

Rashi admits that "In the beginning God created" is not a forced interpretation of the Hebrew. He just rejects it because he believes that such an interpretation would suggest that God created the earth before he created the water. And to Rashi, this is unacceptable. Hagigah 12a of the Talmud says that the water preceded the earth because the heavens were created from fire and water.

I think you can see already, Rashi is letting rabbinic tradition mess with his interpretation of this verse. This is one problem with the rabbis. They know the verses in their original Hebrew, and what the Hebrew means, but they sometimes derive their interpretations independently of what the words are actually saying.

Like some of the modern scholars, Rashi denies the prima facie reading and places verse 1 as a subordinate clause modifying verse 2. Claus Westermann, one of the leading Old Testament scholars of the 20th century, who specialized in Genesis, disagreed with Rashi. Westermann notes that there is no evidence that בְּרֵאשִׁית cannot be used in the absolute sense as רֵאשִׁית is used to denote an absolute beginning in Isaiah 46:10. So it can mean "in the beginning" or "in the beginning of" depending on the context. While Hosea 1:2 does use the same structure as a subordinate clause, this verse is atypical. The normal construct for circumstantial ideas is the infinite construct, as is used in Genesis 5:1. Hence, Hosea is the exception, not the rule. Also, our oldest textual witnesses of Genesis 1:1: the Masoretic punctuation, the oldest translations, and the New Testament all took 1:1 as designating an absolute beginning.

As Franz Delitzsch pointed out, not only does "the heavens and the earth" serve as an idiom to mean "the whole universe" as the ancient Hebrew language has no word for universe, but the grammatical relation of verse 1 to verse 2 entails that 1 cannot be a mere heading, because the vav connects the two verses, indicating a relation of connection between God's primary and subsequent acts of creation. Computer analysis has also shown what scholars like Delitzsch noted—that whenever there is a vav plus a non-predicate plus a predicate, then the preceding clause furnishes either background or circumstantial information. Whenever this construction precedes a main verb, as it does in verse 2, then it is always background information that is given.

Finally, the real nail in the coffin the fact that the next verse וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהֹום וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃ begins with a vav, which always means "and" and is used extensively in Genesis to signal the beginning of a new sentence. As Artscroll notes, Rashi's interpretation forces the interpreter to translate the vav as "when" even though it is not translated as such anywhere else. If translating רֵאשִׁית as "the beginning" simpliciter is problematic, then translating וְהָאָרֶץ as "when the earth" is a thousand times more problematic. When the text is allowed to speak for itself, it testifies strongly against Rashi's rabbinic eisegesis and in favor of the standard translation: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth."