Genesis 1:1


Genesis 1:1 is the first verse of the first chapter in the Book of Genesis in the Bible and the opening of the Genesis creation narrative.

Hebrew text

In the Masoretic Text the verse is as follows:
It consists of 7 words:
  1. Bereshit : "In beginning ". The definite article is missing, but implied.
  2. bara : " created/creating". The word is in the masculine singular form, so that "he" is implied; a peculiarity of this verb is that it used only of God.
  3. Elohim : the generic word for God, whether the God of Israel or the gods of other nations; it is used throughout Genesis 1, and contrasts with the phrase YHWH Elohim, "God YHWH", introduced in Genesis 2.
  4. et : a particle used in front of the direct object of a verb, in this case "the heavens and the earth", indicating that this is what is being "created".
  5. Hashamayim ve'et ha'aretz : "the heavens and the earth"; this is a merism, a figure of speech indicating the two stand not for "heaven" and "earth" individually but "everything". the entire cosmos.
  6. ha is the definite article, equivalent to the English word "the".
  7. ve is equivalent to English "and".

    Translation

Genesis 1:1 can be translated into English in at least three ways:
  1. As a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning.
  2. As a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating.
  3. Taking all of Genesis 1:2 as background information.

    Analysis

Genesis 1:1 is widely taken as the authority for the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing, but most biblical scholars agree that on strictly linguistic and exegetical grounds this is not the preferred option and is not found directly in Genesis nor in the entire Hebrew Bible. The Priestly authors of Genesis 1, writing around 500–400 BCE, had been concerned not with the origins of matter, but with the fixing of destinies. This was still the situation in the early 2nd century CE, although early Christian scholars were beginning to see a tension between the idea of world-formation and the omnipotence of God, but by the beginning of the 3rd century this tension was resolved, world-formation was overcome, and creation ex nihilo had become a fundamental tenet of Christian theology.

Citations