On Genesis 1:1
While most translations agree that the translation of Genesis 1:1 should read, “In the beginning…” the (Jewish) JPS translation offers instead, “When God began to create…” And the NLT and some others offer a footnote with that possibility. What’s going on?
The answer dates back 1,000 years to Rashi. He notes that the usual word for “in the beginning” would be barishona. And he further notes that b’reishit is never used except preceding a noun to mean “at the beginning of.”
He therefore concludes that Genesis 1:1 does not say that creation took place “in the beginning,” but rather that it was “in the beginning of” creation that the first part of the story takes place. That is, the earth was in disarray when God began to create.
Rashi’s analysis gives us, “When God began to create,” or (as the translation in Artscroll’s Rashi edition has it) “In the beginning of God’s creating.”
Rashi’s analysis has at least two kinds of problems.
The first is a matter of detail. For his analysis to work, he needs the verb bara to be a participle, though it’s unclear how that’s possible. Secondly, he needs the “and” of “and the earth was…” to mean “when.” That one is possible, though unlikely.
The second kind of problem, though, is methodological.
Rashi is right that b’reishit is never used except before a noun, but there are only four other times the word is used, all of them in Jeremiah, and all of them before words having to do with “kingdom” or “reign.” This is hardly a large enough sample to deduce what b’reishit means. (The same reasoning would force bara to mean something about kingdoms.)
Rashi’s point is actually more generally about reishit. (The b- prefix means “in/when/at/etc.”) But here, too, he runs into problems, wrongly assuming that a word is the sum of its parts.
Furthermore, while Rashi is correct that barishona means “at first,” that doesn’t really have much bearing on what b’reishit means. Perhaps the two words are nearly synonymous, for example. Or maybe barishona means “at first” in the sense of “the first time around” while b’reishit means “at first” in the sense of “the first and only time around.” (I just met someone who introduces his wife as his “first wife.” She is his first, only, and last wife.)
All of which is to say that Rashi’s commentary here is interesting — and it explains the JPS translation — but I don’t think it helps figure out what the first words of the Bible originally meant.
God as Reward(er) and Protector in Genesis 15:1
From the About page comes this great question: Does Genesis 15:1 mean “your [Abram’s] reward will be very great” or “I [God] am your great reward”?
The NRSV translates it, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great,” while the KJV has a different understanding: “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.”
The issue is the final phrase in Hebrew, which (disregarding tense for a moment), according to the NRSV, means “your reward is good,” while the KJV thinks it means “your good reward.” Together with the first part of the sentence (“I am your shield”), the NRSV version ends up, “I am your shield and your reward is good,” while the KJV is also coherent: “I am your shield, your good reward.”
It turns out that the Hebrew is actually ambiguous.
To understand the text here we need a detour through a handful of related bits of Hebrew grammar. (And, really, what says “fun” more on a Friday morning in early September than a handful of Hebrew grammar?)
First, adjectives in Hebrew generally follow nouns, and there’s no word for “a” or “an.” So, for example, from the Hebrew words yeled (“boy”) and tov (“good”), we get yeled tov, “a good boy.”
Secondly, Hebrew does have a word “the” in the form of the prefix ha-. When it’s used, it gets put on both nouns and adjectives. So “the good boy” in Hebrew is ha-yeled ha-tov, literaly “the-boy the-good.” Furthermore, some phrases (technically called “definites”) behave like they have “the.” One such case is possessives. So “my good boy” in Hebrew is “my-boy the-good” (yaldi ha-tov).
Thirdly, Hebrew almost never uses “to be” in the present tense. So, for example, “I am your shield” in Hebrew is just “I your shield.” (The KJV — foolishly, in my opinion — sometimes uses italics in English to reflect the Hebrew grammar in these cases.)
The combination of the first and third bits create potential ambiguity. While yeled tov can mean “a good boy,” it can also mean “a boy is good.”
As a matter of practice, though, this kind of ambiguity is rare, because of the second bit. Hebrew differentiates between “the good boy” and “the boy is good” by using “the-boy the-good” (ha-yeled ha-tov, as we’ve seen) for the first one, and “the-boy good” (ha-yeled tov) for the second.
Similarly, “your good reward” is “your-reward the-good” in Hebrew (s’char’cha hatov), while “your reward is good” in Hebrew is “your-reward good” (s’char’cha tov). So you might expect that we’d be able to distinguish between “your great reward” and “your reward is great.”
Unfortunately, the word for “great” here is harbeh, and, together with m’od (“very”), it forms the invariant phrase harbeh m’od. Unlike most modifiers, that phrase never takes “the.” So “your reward is very great” in Hebrew is (as we see here in Genesis 1:15) “your-reward very great” (s’char’cha harbeh m’od) but “your very great reward” is the identical Hebrew, because, in this case, the expected “your-reward the-very-great” doesn’t exist.
This means that, as a matter of translating this sentence, the Hebrew is truly ambiguous. So we have to look elsewhere for clues.
One such clue might be the tenses. The first is present tense, and the second — if, as in the NRSV, it is its own clause — is also present tense. So the NRSV has to explain why the sentence doesn’t mean, “I am your shield; your reward is very great.” This seems to point in the direction of the KJV.
On the other hand, tenses are notoriously idiosyncratic, and anyone who’s looked at Hebrew knows that we commonly see one tense in Hebrew and a different one in English.
The commentator Rashi suggests that God is assuaging Abram on two fronts: he will not be punished, and he will be rewarded. So Rashi thinks the line means “don’t fear, Abram, I will be your shield [so you will not be punished] and you will be rewarded.” So Rashi would have sided with the NRSV.
I have some more thoughts, but nothing to convince me solidly one way or the other. (For those who are curious, here’s a list of where the phrase harbeh m’od appears: Genesis 15:1, Genesis 41:49, Deuteronomy 3:5, Joshua 13:1, Joshua 22:8, I Samuel 26:21, II Samuel 8:8, II Samuel 12:2, II Samuel 12:30, I Kings 5:9, I Kings 10:10, I Kings 10;11, II Kings 21:16, I Chronicles 20:2, II Chronicles 14;12, II Chronicles 32:27, Ezra 10:1, Nehemiah 2:2, and Jeremiah 40;12.)
So I’m opening up the question here. Based on context, which translation do you think makes more sense? And why?
Top Translation Traps: Mimicry
One of the most non-intuitive aspects of translation is that mimicry can lead the translator astray.
For example, it stands to reason that an adverb at the beginning of Hebrew sentence should be translated into English by an adverb at the beginning of a sentence; and, similarly, that an adverb at the end in Hebrew should be rendered as a final adverb in English.
But the reasoning is flawed. This is why the translation of the Hebrew word breishit (“in the beginning”), may not belong at the start of Genesis 1:1.
Modern Languages
As usual, we can look at modern languages to get a sense of the situation. This time, we’ll look at word order in modern Russian and modern Hebrew.
Spoken colloquial Russian allows considerable word-order variation. In fact, in the Russian equivalent of “Yesterday John saw Sarah” (v’chera Ivan videl Saru), all 24 logically possible word orders are grammatical. By contrast, the written language is more restrictive in Russian, generally requiring something close to what we allow in English.
Modern Hebrew also allows more word-order variation than English. But in Hebrew, it’s the written language that is more flexible than the spoken one. So in written Hebrew, again all 24 logically possible word orders are grammatical, but the spoken language is more restrictive.
The naive way to translate Russian into Hebrew is to preserve the word order. After all, the Russian word order is always grammatical in Hebrew (in this example). But mimicking the word order sometimes take colloquial Russian and turns it into formal Hebrew.
This demonstrates what can go wrong when translators mimic instead of translating.
Lessons
Rather than merely mimicking the original word-order, translators need to look at what the word order in Hebrew or Greek does, and then try to do the same thing in English. More generally, I think this lesson applies not just to word order but also to other aspects of grammar.
Applications
Perhaps the most mimicry-based translation is Dr. Everett Fox’s (and this is the problem I have with his work). To take an example that just came up in a discussion on BBB, we can look at part of his rendering of Genesis 22. In verse 2, he translates the Hebrew y’chidcha as “your only-one.” Presumably the hyphenated “only-one” is supposed to mimic the one-word Hebrew yachid. But in (partially) mimicking the number of words, Fox has taken ordinary Hebrew and turned it into bizarre English.
Fox’s “started-early” (verse 3) for the one Hebrew word hishkim makes the same mistake.
Dr. Robert Alter’s rendition of Psalm 104 — which he discusses in the introduction to his generally excellent The Book of Psalms — makes the same mistake. He gives us, “grandeur and glory You don,” which is barely English. He wants to preserve what he calls syntactic fronting. The problem is that the resulting English is bizarre in a way that the Hebrew never was.
A third example comes from Matthew 6:11. The common “give us this day our daily bread” mimics the Greek word order rather than translating it. It is well known that putting full phrases between the verb and its object in English is an odd word order. So “this day” doesn’t belong between “give us” and “our daily bread.” (Also “daily bread” might be wrong, but that’s for another time.)
I don’t know if this strange word order comes from the Greek (which reads: “our daily bread give us today”) or just from the KJV (which was written in a dialect that allowed for more word-order freedom). Either way, the right way to translate the Greek is to use English word order: “Give us our daily bread today” (again, if “daily bread” is right.)
First Things First: Stress, Focus, and Biblical Hebrew Word Order
The importance of word order in Biblical Hebrew recently came up regarding Genesis 1:1, and in particular how we know that that verse answers the question “when?”
Here’s some more information and some additional examples.
An English Diversion
In English, stressing different words changes the implications of a sentence.
For example:
Example 1.
- This is my friend.
- This is my friend.
- This is my friend.
Sentence 1.1 is neutral, and might be used simply to introduce someone.
But 1.2 has addition implications, and it doesn’t make sense as a neutral introduction. But it does make sense in more narrow contexts. For example, it could answer the question, “whose friend is this?” And it makes sense if, because of context, there is already a sense that this is someone else’s friend. In both scenarios — specifically answering a question and clarifying an unasked question — it’s convenient to say that 1.2 “answers the question: whose friend this is?”
Example 1.3 cannot be used to answer the question “whose friend is this?” (Try it: -“Whose friend is this?” -“This is my friend.”) But it can be used if it’s already clear that this person has a relationship to me, but the nature of that relationship is not yet established. And, again, this could be in response to a specific question (e.g, “and how do you know each other?”), an implication, or some other context that causes the speaker to highlight the nature of the relationship.
One particularly interesting consequence of this is that stressing a word sets up alternative scenarios in the mind of the hearer. When I say, “this is my friend,” an English speaker automatically considers other possibilities: this is my enemy; this is my lover; etc.
| Example 2. | |
| 1. | We have landed in LGA. (This is the safe statement.) |
| 2. | We have landed in LGA. (This is risky.) |
This is why “airplanese” stresses the words that are normally unstressed in English. For example, “we have landed in LaGuardia airport.” This phrasing only sets up one other possibility in the mind of English speakers who hear the sentence: “we have not landed in LaGuardia airport.” But the more usual sentence, “we have landed in LaGuardia airport” makes people consider other undesirable possibilities, like “we have crashed into LaGuardia airport.”
| Example 3. | |
| 1. | I killed Mary with a knife. (This is the safe answer.) |
| 2. | I killed Mary with a knife. (This is incriminating.) |
Similarly, a witness at a murder trial might be asked, “how did you kill Mary?” The safe answer is “I killed Mary with a knife.” The dangerous answer is, “I killed Mary with a knife,” because that response assumes other pairs of people and weapons to which “I killed” might apply. Just changing the sentential stress is tantamount to admitting to additional murders.
Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew uses the pre-verbal sentence-initial position much the way we use sentential stress in English. This is how we know that Genesis 1:1 answers the question “when?” not “what?” or “who?” — the first word is breishit, “in the beginning.” A spoken-English translation of Genesis 1:1 might be “God created heaven and Earth in the beginning.”
Further Examples
Another example comes from Genesis 3:16-17. The first words of Genesis 3:16 are el ha-isha amar, “to the-woman [God] said.” This deviation from normal word order, like Example 3, has the effect of focusing “the woman,” as if to say, “this is what God told the woman.” The Hebrew reader naturally wonders, “okay. And what did God tell the man?” Genesis 3:17 answers that question, using the word order ul’adam amar…, “and-to-Adam [God] said…” — that is, “and God told Adam…”
We see the same thing in Genesis 45:22. The verse has two parts. The first begins, “to all [of the brothers] [Joseph] gave….” and the second one, “to Benjamin [Joseph] gave…” The point is to contrast Benjamin with the other brothers.
Hosea 5:7 reads badonai bagadu ki vanim zarim yaldu, “God they-betrayed when/for children alien they-bore.” Again, the point is expressed in English with stress: “they betrayed God by fathering illegitimate children.” Hosea is emphasizing the connection between human action and the divine.
All of these nuances come to light when we take Hebrew word order into account.
Translating and Improving the Bible
Joel Berkowitz (in Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage) writes of the hubris of Yiddish theaters that promoted Yiddish productions of Shakespeare that were “translated and improved.”*
Though we mock it now, I often think I see the same thing in Bible translations, in two related ways:
1. “Translators” want to make the general flavor of the text into something it never was, frequently either overly formal (NKJV, for example) or overly informal (GNB / TEV).
2. “Translators” want to explain not just what the text says, but what it “means.” Sometimes this takes the flavor of theological interpretation. Other times it comes from a desire to make an opaque text simple.
The second issue came up recently in a comment by Peter Kirk, who correctly points out that expanding on bara in Genesis 1:1 to specify details of creation that are absent from the original text “go[es] beyond what is necessary for translation […] into theological speculation.”
One criticism of translating sarx as “sinful nature” is that is, too, is a “translation and an improvement” in that it fills in details on which the original text is silent. (Another criticism is that it’s not what the text meant. But my point here is that even if it is what the text meant, it might not be the right translation.)
Similarly, it seems to me that “translators” who take gender-specific texts and make them generic are “translating and improving.” For that matter, taking a generic text and making it gendered is a mistake, though I think this reverse pattern usually happens by error — because the translators don’t understand gender in the original language as well as they think they do — not by design.
A case in point is “ancestors.” Let’s assume I’m right that the Hebrew avot means “ancestors.” How, then, should we translate “to your avot, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Deut. 1:9)? Even though the ancestors listed are all male, and even if the biblical culture was such that only the men counted (I don’t think it was — but let’s assume), I still don’t think “ancestors” should be changed to “fathers.”
A more radical case makes the reasoning clearer. If patir refers to God, I think it should still be translated as either “father” or “parent,” not as “God.”
The reason I put scare quotes around “translators” so many times here is that in my opinion translation is incompatible with deciding a priori what the content or style of the translation should be. You can (try to) improve the text, or you can translate it, but you can’t do both.
(*) By the way, though the “translated and improved” slogan is widely cited, I’ve been unable to confirm it. If you have a photo of the original, I’ll be most grateful to see it.
On Gender
With Zondervan’s announcement that the (T)NIV will be updated, the debate about gender, language, and translation is sure to rage anew.
According to a report in USA Today (thanks to BBB for noticing), Douglas Moo, chair of the NIV Committee on Bible Translation, promises that the committee will, “review every single gender-related decision” they have made.
Gender is a hot topic.
For example, Dr. Jim West laments that “If a translation sets out to adjust the text simply for modern tastes and sensibilities, it isnt worth a pot. If it says ‘he’ translate ‘he’ and let the exegetes worry about whether or not its generic for ‘humankind or gender specific.”
Yet everyone agrees that Genesis 1:11 is about trees that bear fruit “with seed in it, according to their various kinds” (NIV), not “…with seed in him” (no one translates this way) or “…after his kind” (KJV). That’s because the Hebrew bo (“in him”) refers to any grammatically masculine noun. But in English, we use “his” only for nouns that are animate, preferring “its” for inanimate nouns. (English didn’t always work this way. That’s why we find “his” in the KJV.)
Once we agree that some originally gendered language has to be rendered non-gendered in English, we really do have to revisit every decision, hopefully in the light of sound linguistic theory, a topic I’ll turn to soon.
What’s This Leaping in Luke 1:41?
According to the NRSV translation of Luke 1:41, Elizabeth’s “child leaped in her womb.”
The Greek here for “womb” (koilia) means “belly” or “stomach.” It’s the same word used of the snake in Genesis, for instance, which is punished to walk on its belly. Because snakes don’t have wombs, contexts like this show us that the Greek word is more general than “womb.” But “womb” is still a reasonable translation. And certainly we know that the “child” was in the womb, not some other part of Elizabeth’s anatomy, even if the original text was less clear.
The “child” here (brefos) probably refers literally to what we might now call an infant. But, like the (well accepted) shift from “stomach” to “womb,” I think we should translate this as “fetus.” Even if I’m wrong, though, I don’t think this word has much to do with the status of a fetus, for reasons I’ve already pointed out — in particular, the general way in which words are disconnected from the time at which they apply. (This is why the “child” in a woman’s womb in Leviticus similarly doesn’t tell us about the status of a fetus.)
What about the leaping? What was this child or infant or fetus doing?
The Greek is skirtao, and here we find a surprise. That Greek verb is used elsewhere almost entirely in two (related?) contexts: figuratively, and of fetuses.
In Genesis 25:22, Rebekka’s twin children “struggled together within her.” That’s skirtao.
In Psalm 114 (verses 4 and 6), mountains “skip”; in Wisdom 17:19, animals whose running is invisible “leap”; in Malachi 3:20, those who revere God’s name shall “leap” like calves; in Jeremiah, plunderers “frisk about” like a cow; and in Luke 6:23, God’s chosen should rejoice and “leap for joy.” All of those are skirtao in Greek. (Joel 1:17 uses the verb, too, but in a translation that doesn’t accord perfectly with the original text.)
So it looks like “leap” is only one possible translation, and probably not even the best. Perhaps “moved in the way that fetuses do” would be better. Or maybe “leaped for joy” in the same metaphoric sense of the English phrase, which indicates joy but not necessarily actual leaping.
One thing is certain, though. If we go with the NRSV translation of “leap,” we must understand the language figuratively. While fetuses can shift, kick, and otherwise move, actual physical leaping is beyond their ability.
About
God Didn’t Say That (@GodDidntSayThat) is an online forum for discussing the Bible and its translations, mistranslations, interpretations, and misinterpretations.
Dr. Joel M. Hoffman is the chief translator for the ten-volume series My People’s Prayer Book, author of And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning, and editor of The Unabridged Bible. Writing under “J.M. Hoffman,” he is author of the thriller series The Warwick Files. He holds a PhD in theoretical linguistics and has taught at Brandeis University and HUC-JIR in New York City. He presents widely to churches, synagogues, and other groups. more…
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