A Literary Translation of Genesis 1

The creation narrative in Genesis 1 begins with these words:

בראשית ברא אלהים

את השמים ואת הארץ

When God began to create

the sky and the land . . .

 The usual translation, ‘the heavens and the earth,’ obscures the concreteness of the terms in context. The point will be obvious, I think, by the end of this post. Anyone who loves Hebrew and the language of the Bible will enjoy the journey below the fold. 

On ‘day one,’ God calls ‘light’ into being, names it ‘day,’ and separates it from ‘darkness,’ which he names ‘night.’

ויאמר אלהים

יהי אור

ויהי אור

 

וירא אלהים את-האור כי-טוב

ויבדל אלהים

בין האור ובין החשך

 

ויקרא אלהים לאור יום

ולחשך קרא לילה

 

ויהי ערב

ויהי בקר

יום אחד

A literary translation that brings out the web of congruent parallelisms woven through the series of fiats in the larger narrative by concordant translation technique has something to commend it.

יהי אור

Let there be light.

יהי רקיע בתוך המים

ויהי מבדיל

בין מים למים

Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters,

and let it be a point of separation

between the waters.

יקוו המים מתחת השמים

אל-מקוה[1] אחד

ותראה היבשה

Let the waters under the sky be collected

into one collection point,

and let dry land appear.

תדשא הארץ דשא

Let the land turn green with green things.

יהי מארת ברקיע השמים

להבדיל בין היום ובין הלילה

Let there be points of light in the vault of the sky,

to separate the day from the night.

ישרצו המים

שרץ נפש חיה

 

ועוף יעופף על-הארץ

על-פני רקיע השמים

Let the waters swarm

with swarms of living beings,

 

and let fowl fly across the land,

across the face of the sky’s vault.

תוצא הארץ

נפש חיה למינה

 

בהמה ורמש

וחיתו ארץ למינה

Let the land bring forth

living beings of every kind,

 

cattle, crawling things,

and land beasts of every kind.

נעשה אדם

בצלמנו כדמותנו

 

וירדו בדגת הים

ובעוף השמיים

 

ובבהמה ובכל חית[2] הארץ

ובכל-הרמש הרמש על-הארץ

Let us make a human kind

in our image, after our likeness,

 

and let them hold sway over the fish of the sea,

over the fowl of the sky,

 

over the cattle, over all the land beasts,

and over the crawling things that crawl on the land.

 

The text continues:

ויברא אלהים

את-האדם בצלמו

 

בצלם אלהים

ברא אתו

 

זכר ונקבה

ברא אתם

And God created

the human kind in his image;

 

in the image of deity

he created it;

 

he created them

male and female.

ויברך אתם אלהים

ויאמר להם אלהים

 

פרו ורבו

ומלאו את-הארץ וכבשוה

 

ורדו בדגת הים

ובעוף השמים

ובכל חיה הרמשת על-הארץ

God blessed them,

and God said to them,

 

“Be fruitful and multiply,

fill the land and occupy it;

 

hold sway over the fish of the sea,

over the fowl of the sky,

and over every beast that crawls on the land.

 

To observe:

(1) The sequence of m prefixed nouns: מבדיל, מקוה, and מארת.

(2) The sequence of segholate nouns:  שרץ  ,דשא, and רמש .   

(3) The sequence of 'al prefixed arguments to verbs of motion:

על-הארץ

על-פני רקיע השמים

על-הארץ

(4) The sequence of double jussives:

יהי ->  ויהי

יקוו -> ותראה

ישרצו -> ו .יעופף 

נעשה -> וירדו 

(5) The sequence of double specifications, in which the article is first absent and then present:

  הארץ  <-     (v. 10)  ארץ 

 אדם -> האדם 

I've read a truckload of commentary on Genesis 1 over the years. I don’t remember any commentary pointing out these basic structural features of the composition. The translation I offer is not without peculiarities, but it has the advantage of preserving the noted structural features in the target language.

I consistently translate ארץ by ‘land.’ No other translation comes close to doing this. When it is done, the centrality of land to the narrative is evident. ‘Land’ is the habitat par excellence of God’s creatures, though not the only one.

A web of parallelisms forms the warp and woof of Genesis 1, including many parallelisms not highlighted in this post. Concordance in translation is a means of preserving the fine grain of the source text in a target language. In practice, of course, all kinds of compromises are necessary.

Genesis 1 is not poetry in the strict sense, but it makes use of a web of semantic and grammatical parallelisms just the same.

Were you able to read the un-vocalized Hebrew without faltering? If so, you know a fair bit of Hebrew. If not, more study is needed.

For an un-vocalized edition of the Tanakh – a great pedagogical tool – go here. To be sure, the added matres lectionis and punctuation are annoying from a scholar’s point of view.

This post in pdf fomat: here.

---

[1] מקום emended toמקוה . Cf. LXX.

[2] ובכל emended to ובכל חית.

Comments

[Nick Norelli]

I was able to read

בראשית ברא אלהים

את השמים ואת הארץ

and

ויאמר אלהים

יהי אור

ויהי אור

unvocalized. After that it all fell apart for me. But what's worse is that even though I can sound out the words, I don't know what all of them mean!

Pray for me and ask the Lord that I develop the love for Hebrew that you have so I can come back to this text with no problems... :^)

BTW, thank you for these types of post -- keep em' coming!

[Sue]

John,

This is delightful. And especially I like the use of "land." I remember when I first realized that Gen. 1 had erets in it and I felt as if I began to understood then the basic relationship between the land, the people and the book.

[Suzanne]

This is me. I have been posting comments sometimes as "Sue" - trying to experience what T.S. Eliot calles "escape from personality." ;-)

[J. K. Gayle]

John,
Very cool! I do need the more study you recommend, but can follow everything you wrote.

One minor qualification to what you said:

I consistently translate ארץ by ‘land.’ No other translation comes close to doing this. When it is done, the centrality of land to the narrative is evident. ‘Land’ is the habitat par excellence of God’s creatures, though not the only one.

Shouldn't that be "No other translation but mine and that of the LXX translators comes close to doing this"?

ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν

(and, after reading Sappho, I have to translate that into my English as:

"From the top, God made the sky and the ground."

The poet Sappho's Greek is much older with variant spelling but the Jewish men translating, well, "Genesis" may have read some, in the Alexandrian libraries, from the Hymn to Aphrodite:

ὤκεες στροῦθοι περὶ γᾶς μελαίνας
πύκνα δινεῦντες πτέῤ ἀπ᾽ ὠράνω

"quick sparrows over the black earth
whipping their wings down the sky"
-Anne Carson's English)

[JohnFH]

J.K., I stand corrected. I did a quick check against Rahlfs-Hanhart (the editio altera of Rahlfs now available) and you are right. I presume other ancient versions, the Targum, Syriac, and the Vulgate, also preserve concordance here.

[Martin Shields]

Perhaps in place of:
and let them hold sway over the fish of the sea
you might consider:
so they may hold sway over the fish of the sea.

I had though Sailhamer had a similar translation (at least with respect to "the sky and the land") in Genesis Unbound, but my memory may be faulty. I like "land" but "sky" is still difficult simply because our concept of sky is somewhat different to that found in the ancient world. It is, however, a better choice than the traditional "heavens" (in part because it causes people to sit up and take note).

[JohnFH]

Thanks, Martin, for your observations. I agree with you about their being a logical connection between being made in God's image and 'holding sway,' even if the connection is marked by simple parataxis in the Hebrew.

I would certainly want to make the logical connection clear, at least at the level of commentary.

Here is a quote you will like:

Translation is an abbreviated form of exegesis: exegesis that does not have the space to explain or justify itself.

-- Adele Berlin

[Karyn]

פרו ורבו
ומלאו את-הארץ וכבשוה

I was curious as to why you chose in this one instance to translate הארץ as "earth" instead of "land" as you did in every other instance.

[JohnFH]

Hi Karyn. Thanks for catching that. I'll fix that. I meant to translate 'land.' It's amazing how one reverts to the translation one grew up with unconsciously.

[ElShaddai Edwards]

You still choose "in his image" rather than "to be his image"? That really tied 1:27 and 1:28 together for me from a purpose and role perspective.

[JohnFH]

Hi, El Shaddai. 'To be his image' may be a helpful periphrastic rendering. But if you ask me, that rendering is opaque as well.

Thee sense of the passage is, at least in part, that humanity is created to be God's viceroy on earth. Is it possible to intimate this in translation without departing drastically from the wording of the original, which also implies much else? That is the question.