Reading Your First Verse

This is the first verse of the Bible as the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) gives it: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים (bereshit bara elohim, in the beginning God created), then אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ (et hashshamayim ve'et ha'arets, the heavens and the earth). Seven words and twenty-eight letters. You can now read every letter and every vowel in it. Open it in Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible beside this lesson, and take the words one at a time, from right to left, sounding out each as Lesson 4 taught you before you look at the transliteration.

בְּרֵאשִׁית: bet with its hardening dot, because it starts the word, and a sounded shewa: be. Resh with tsere: re. Aleph with no vowel of its own, silent: it is a letter left over from the root, quietly carrying nothing. Shin, dot on the right, with hireq and yod: shi. Tav, closing the syllable: t. Be-re-shit, bereshit, in the beginning. It is two pieces: the little word בְּ (be, in) joined to the front of רֵאשִׁית (reshit, beginning, first part, first fruits), a feminine singular noun built on רֹאשׁ (rosh, head). Notice that there is no article. When the article stands after be, in, the two merge and the vowel becomes a: you saw that in בַּמִּקְרָא (bammiqra, in the reading) in Nehemiah 8:8. Here the vowel is a shewa, be-, so there is no article. English says in the beginning; the Hebrew says simply in beginning. That one vowel is where the debate in section 4 begins.

בָּרָא: bet with its dot, qamets: ba. Resh, qamets, and a silent aleph at the end: ra. Ba-ra, bara, he created. The tools parse it as Qal perfect, third person masculine singular, of the root ברא. The Qal is the basic stem of the Hebrew verb, and the perfect is a form that commonly reports a completed action; Module 4 explains both. Third person masculine singular means he. Hebrew does not need a separate word for he, because the form of the verb already tells you who acted. So far, then: in the beginning he created. Then the subject comes, after its verb, as it usually does in Hebrew narrative.

אֱלֹהִים: aleph with hateph segol: e. Lamed with holem: lo. He with hireq and yod: hi. Final mem: m. E-lo-him, elohim, God. The tools tag it as a masculine plural noun, which section 3 discusses. Under it in your tool you may see the atnach, the small upside-down V, which marks the main division of the verse. The Masoretes divided Genesis 1:1 into two halves: in the beginning God created, and then what he created.

אֵת: aleph with tsere, then tav: et. This little word has no English translation. It marks the definite direct object of the verb, the thing that was created, and it is one of the commonest words in the Old Testament. When it is joined to the next word by a maqqef it is usually written אֶת־ with a segol; here it stands alone and has tsere. הַשָּׁמַיִם: he with patach, the article ha, the; then shin with a doubling dot, because the article doubles the next letter; qamets, mem with patach, yod with hireq, final mem: hash-sha-ma-yim, hashshamayim, the heavens. The word is plural in form, and has no singular in the Bible. The KJV's 'the heaven' is a fair rendering of a word that names one great sky as well as many heavens. וְאֵת: vav with shewa, and; then et again: ve'et. הָאָרֶץ: the article, with qamets this time because aleph cannot be doubled, then aleph with qamets, resh with segol, final tsade: ha-'a-rets, ha'arets, the earth. You have read the first verse of the Bible.

The verb בָּרָא (bara) is special in one clear way. In the Qal, the stem used here, the Old Testament uses it only with God as its subject. People make, form, build and do, with other verbs; only God creates in this sense. The Niphal, the passive, 'were created', also has God as the implied creator, as in Genesis 2:4. The objects of bara are worth listing: the heavens and the earth (1:1), the great sea creatures (1:21), humanity, male and female (1:27), a clean heart, 'Create in me a clean heart, O God' (Psalm 51:10, Psalm 51:12 in the Hebrew numbering), and 'new heavens and a new earth' (Isaiah 65:17). Each is something only God can bring about.

Notice what the verb does not say by itself. It is often said in sermons that bara means to create out of nothing. The word does not carry that meaning on its own. In Genesis 1:27 God bara humanity, and Genesis 2:7 says the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. The clean heart of Psalm 51 is made in a man who already exists. Bara says that God is the one acting and that the result is new; it does not tell you what, if anything, he worked on. That is a good example of the rule you met in Lesson 1: a word means what it is used to mean in its contexts, and the context decides.

That does not weaken the Christian doctrine of creation from nothing, which the church has confessed from the early centuries. The doctrine rests on the whole of scripture's witness. 'By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible' (Hebrews 11:3). 'Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made' (John 1:3). God 'calls into being what does not yet exist' (Romans 4:17). 'You created all things; by Your will they exist and were created' (Revelation 4:11). Whether Genesis 1:1 itself states creation from nothing depends on how its grammar is read, which is the question of section 4. On any reading, the Bible as a whole teaches it.

One more point of honest method. Some writers count the seven words and twenty-eight letters of Genesis 1:1 and build theories of hidden numerical codes on them. The counts are real; you made them yourself. But no writer in the Bible ever teaches us to read scripture by counting its letters, and such schemes can find patterns in any text long enough. Seven is a meaningful number in Genesis 1, which is structured around seven days, and readers may note that the first verse has seven words. To go further and build doctrine on letter counts is to read something into the text rather than out of it.

The word אֱלֹהִים (elohim) is plural in form; the ending -im is the ordinary masculine plural, as in עָרִים (arim, cities) or שָׂרִים (sarim, rulers) in Psalm 119:161. When it means the gods of the nations, it is treated as a plural, as in אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים (elohim acherim, other gods) in Exodus 20:3. When it means the God of Israel, it almost always takes singular verbs and singular adjectives, as here: bara, he created, not they created. Why?

Most Hebrew grammarians explain it as a plural of majesty or of fullness, sometimes called an intensive or abstract plural: a plural form used to express greatness, the sum of all that deity is, rather than number. They point to other Hebrew nouns that are plural in form with a singular meaning, such as the word for life, חַיִּים (chayyim), in Genesis 2:7, and the plural forms sometimes used of a single master or owner. Gesenius's Hebrew Grammar, the standard reference grammar since the nineteenth century, classes it this way, and on this view the plural tells us nothing about the number of persons in God, only about his greatness.

Many Christian interpreters, from the early church onward, have also read the plural form, together with God's words 'Let Us make man in Our image' in Genesis 1:26, as an early hint of the plurality within the one God that the New Testament reveals as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Those who hold this view today generally do not claim that the grammar of elohim proves the Trinity; they argue that the God who speaks in the plural in 1:26 and whose Spirit hovers over the waters in 1:2 is, read in the light of John 1:1-3, the God whose fullness the plural form fittingly expresses. Others answer that the same plural is used of single pagan gods, such as Chemosh in Judges 11:24, so the form alone cannot carry that weight. Defenders of the Christian reading reply that their case rests less on the noun than on the 'Us' of Genesis 1:26, 3:22 and 11:7, which, they argue, a plural of majesty in a noun does not by itself explain. Module 3 returns to this debate with the evidence on both sides. What is settled, and agreed by both sides, is the point the singular verb makes: Genesis 1:1 speaks of one God who creates.

Now the question that has divided careful Hebrew readers for nine centuries and more. How does Genesis 1:1 relate to the verses after it? Three answers have serious defenders. All of them are held by people who believe that God created everything that exists. They differ on what this verse says and on where the sentence ends.

The first view reads Genesis 1:1 as a complete sentence describing God's first act: in the beginning, at the start of everything, God created the heavens and the earth. Verse 2 then describes the earth as it was after that first act, formless and empty, and verse 3 begins the work of shaping it. This is how the Septuagint read the verse, Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς (en archē epoiēsen ho theos, in the beginning God made), and how the Latin Vulgate and the ancient Aramaic translations read it; it is the reading of the KJV, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth' (KJV), and of the BSB. Its defenders give strong grammatical reasons. A time phrase without the article can stand on its own in Hebrew, as מֵרֵאשִׁית (mereshit, from the beginning) does in Isaiah 46:10, 'I declare the end from the beginning'. The Masoretic accents put a dividing accent on bereshit, which is how they usually mark a word that stands on its own, not one bound to the next. And the verb is the ordinary perfect, bara, he created, which reads naturally as a main verb. On this view the verse teaches an absolute beginning, and John 1:1, 'In the beginning was the Word,' deliberately echoes it.

The second view also reads Genesis 1:1 as a complete sentence, but as a heading or summary of the whole account, like a title over a chapter. Its defenders observe that 'the heavens and the earth' is a Hebrew way of saying the whole ordered world, two opposites naming everything between them, and that the ordered world is exactly what is not yet there in verse 2 and is finished only in 2:1, 'Thus the heavens and the earth were completed.' So verse 1 announces what the chapter will describe, verse 2 sets the scene, and the account of how God made the ordered world begins in verse 3; 2:1 closes the frame that 1:1 opened. Bruce Waltke argued for this reading in a series of articles in 1975. Its defenders add that it respects the absence of the article and the frame of the passage, and that it leaves the doctrine of creation from nothing to the many texts that teach it directly.

The third view reads Genesis 1:1 as the opening of a longer sentence: when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth being formless and void, God said, 'Let there be light.' Rashi, the great Jewish commentator of the eleventh century, argued for this reading, and some modern translations take it, among them the Jewish Publication Society's Tanakh (1985), which opens with a when-clause about God beginning to create, and the NRSV (1989), which turns the first words into a when-clause inside the opening sentence. Its defenders also give strong reasons. The other places where bereshit appears, all in Jeremiah (26:1, 27:1, 28:1, 49:34), are bound to the following words: 'at the beginning of the reign of'. Hebrew can bind such a noun directly to a following verb, as Hosea 1:2 does, 'When the LORD first spoke through Hosea', literally the beginning of the LORD spoke. The second creation account opens the same way, with a 'when' clause, 'in the day that the LORD God made them' (Genesis 2:4), followed by a description of the earth before God acted (2:5) and then the main action (2:7). And the missing article is exactly what a bound noun would show. Its defenders say this reading does not teach that matter existed apart from God; it says that Genesis 1 begins its story with the world in its unformed state and does not stop to describe where that state came from, which other texts address.

Notice what each view can explain easily and what it has to work at. The first explains the ancient versions and the accents easily, and has to account for the missing article. The second explains the frame of 1:1 and 2:1 easily, and has to explain why a heading would begin with in the beginning. The third explains the missing article and the parallel with Genesis 2:4-7 easily, and has to account for the ancient versions, the accents and the finite verb, which its defenders sometimes read as if it were the infinitive used in Genesis 2:4. All three agree that the verse speaks of the one God as the maker of the world, that the world is not divine, and that everything in it depends on him. When you preach Genesis 1:1, you can say all of that with confidence, and you can tell your church honestly that faithful readers of the Hebrew take the grammar of the verse in more than one way.

You have now read a verse the way you will read every verse in this track. Here is the method, in seven steps. First, read the verse in your own Bible and in one other translation, and write down any difference. Second, open the interlinear and count the Hebrew words, noting where one Hebrew word stands for several English ones and where a Hebrew word has no English word at all. Third, sound out each Hebrew word aloud, syllable by syllable, before you look at the transliteration, and then check yourself.

Fourth, for each word, write down the dictionary form the tool gives, called the lemma, and its gloss. Fifth, write down what the tool says about the form: for a noun, its gender and number, and whether it has the article or is bound to the next word; for a verb, its stem, its form, its person, gender and number, and its root. Do not worry yet about understanding every term; Modules 2 to 4 will explain them, and copying them carefully is how you will learn them. Sixth, look at the small words joined to the front of the big ones, the in, the and, the and, the to; they are often where the meaning turns. Seventh, ask what question the verse raises that a translation has had to answer, and look at your Bible's footnotes and at two or three other versions to see how they answered it.

Use the method humbly. A tool's parsing and a tool's tag are the work of editors, and they are usually right; but the tag on bereshit in Genesis 1:1 is a decision on a debated question, and you should learn to notice when a tool has made a decision for you. When the tools disagree with each other, or when the translations do, you have found something worth slowing down for. When they all agree, believe them, and spend your time on what the passage says.

Turn to a fresh page of your notebook and head it Genesis 1:1. Rule five columns across the page, starting from the right as Hebrew does if you like, and head them: Hebrew, sound, lemma and gloss, kind of word, parsing. Using Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible on your phone, fill in one row for each of the seven words, in order. Where a word repeats, as et does, fill in its row again. Under the table, write the verse in Hebrew in your own hand, mark the atnach with a small v, and draw a box around each little word joined to the front of a bigger one.

Then make the same five-column sheet for the first verse of your own passage, on the page after your My passage page, following all seven steps of the method in section 5. This is the first full word-by-word sheet of the passage you will study at the end of the track. If your verse is long, do as many words as you can in three sessions this week, and finish next week. Do not skip the small words. Then record yourself reading the verse aloud in Hebrew, as you did last week, and compare the new recording with your first one.

This is also the week to settle your passage. Read it through again in your Bible and in the interlinear, and ask whether it is the passage you want to live with for the rest of this track. If it is, write under its reference on the My passage page: Chosen, with the date. If it is not, choose another now and begin its first verse sheet. From Module 2 onward every lesson's practical step will use it.

Finally, go back to the sentences you wrote for the last inquiry question, about what Genesis 1:1 means to you and your church. Rewrite them in three or four sentences, using what you now know. Say what the Hebrew of the verse shows, say honestly that faithful readers take its first clause in more than one way, and say what all of them agree on. Write it as you would say it to your congregation. Then open the Claims to test page at the back of your notebook, where in Lesson 1 you wrote a claim you had once heard about 'the Hebrew'. You cannot check every claim yet. But look at it again: you can now read the letters it was talking about.