Where to begin?
I suppose the first thing to note is that there are two Hebrew languages, and they are very different. There is the ancient Hebrew of the Bible, and then there is the Hebrew language spoken today in Israel. This is a modern language, and an artificial one, the brain-child of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (a Russian-born, Sorbonne-trained Jew who worked in the early 1900s).
Modern Hebrew is built on the lexical bones of ancient Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew words were shipped over into modern Hebrew. Likewise, the Babylonian "Aramaic" letters that the Jews adopted during their Babylonian exile to replace the most ancient Hebrew pictographic letters (called "Ivrit") were shipped over into modern Hebrew. But the grammatical structure of the verbs - the muscles that move the language - is completely different in modern Hebrew, and is based on Indo-European verb structure.
The importance of this difference cannot be overstated, because the verb system of Indo-European languages - INCLUDING modern Hebrew, which inserts Western language forms and structure into the shell of Hebrew letters and words - is completely different from the verb structure of Ancient Hebrew.
The difference is profound. Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin, English, German, Russian and, at its verbal root, Modern Hebrew, are based on the time stream. There is past, present and future. And then there are compound structures for the pluperfect - the "past-of-the-past" (example, I had worked for seven hours before I went to the store. I went is past tense, but before that, in the past, I had worked. The pluperfect is the past of the past), and for the future perfect (ex.: "One I have graduated from medical school, I will have had 21 years of formal education").
Our Western languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Russian - and the other Indo-European languages - Hindi, Persian Farsi - and the verb apparatus of Modern Hebrew, are all rooted in the timestream. Verbs all reference time - what happened in the past, what is happening now, what will, or might, happen in the future.
It is so natural to the way our very thoughts are constructed that it is difficult to imagine any other possible system of language.
When we hear, for example, that spoken Chinese doesn't have verb tenses, we are bewildered for a moment. "Then how do they know whether something is past, present or future?" It is reassuring to discover that Chinese simply adds helper words that make the timestream clear. "I go today." "I go yesterday." "I go tomorrow." Ok. It sounds kind of cave-mannish, but it gets the job done.
Modern Hebrew isn't Indo-European, but its creator was a European whose native languages, Russian and Yiddish, both are Indo- European. And he studied in Paris in another Indo-European language. To revive long (long, long) dead Hebrew, he used verbs in the only way any of us knows how" with time-stream-referenced verbs.
Arabic, first cousin of Hebrew, is not Indo-European either, but it, too, uses time-stream verbs. All modern languages do.
But ancient Hebrew, the language in which Genesis and the rest of the Torah are written (the Torah is the Pentateuch, the first "five books" of the Bible) has a completely different verb system, one in which there is only two verb tenses: perfect (completed action) and imperfect (uncompleted action).
Now, on initially encountering that fact, the immediate thing that the mind does is say "Ok, so the ancient Hebrews must have accounted for the timestream like the Chinese, but using helper words." And this is where it gets really very hard - mind bendingly hard. No, they did not. Ancient Hebrew, the language of the Bible, has no reference to the time stream. There is no sense of the timestream. There are concrete facts and actions, and they are either completed or not.
In English, we can say "I am walking to the store" or we can say "I will be walking to the store tomorrow." We immediately see that the first sentence means right now, at present, but the second means that something has happened yet but will happen in the future.
One can say the same thing in modern Hebrew.
But in ancient Hebrew, both sentences would have the same verb, because the action is not completed.
On the other hand, I walked to the store, or I had walked to the store are both completed actions. In Hebrew these are the same verbs.
I am not a teacher. My examples are poor. The importance of this difference in the verbs cannot be overstated.
Let me give you an example from Scripture.
We traditionally read (I paraphrase here): 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ... and on the first day. God said "Let there be light", and there was light.
So in English, we read a past tense verb: created. Then we read an imperative (Let there be light), and then another past tense of the verb to be.
But in Hebrew, there is no past, present or future tense, only the perfect (completed action) and the imperfect (incomplete action). How do we even render that in English?
With the perfect tense, we can represent it by the English simple past, e.g.: "I walked".
But with the imperfect tense things become difficult, because it doesn't simply mean futurity.
Sure, "I will walk", future tense in English, would be the imperfect tense in Hebrew.
But so would "I am walking", or "I walk everyday", or "I was walking" (because the action is not complete), or "I might walk", or "When I walk...".
See the problem? A bunch of things that are at different times in the timestream, past, present and future in English or French or modern Hebrew, are all the Hebrew imperfect tense.
This might seem to be an abstract, even abstruse linguistic point - a "who cares?", but the problem is that the Hebrew Bible, and Genesis, is written ENTIRELY in just those two tenses: perfect and imperfect. Which means that if we're translating the imperfect tense into English, there are a RANGE of possibilities, and none of them is exactly right.
Let's go back to our example: 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. ... and on the first day. God said "Let there be light", and there was light.'
Truth is, the Hebrew doesn't say this at all. It doesn't say "In the beginning", the word we translate as "God" is actually the Hebrew word "Powers" (or "Mighty Ones"), It doesn't say "Heavens", only skies (there is no Ancient Hebrew word for heaven. There is only the skies). Nor does it say "earth" (there is no Ancient Hebrew word for "earth" - the planet; there is only "the land"). The word "created" is not in the text. Rather, the Hebrew word "fattened" - like fattening a cow, or "filled" as in filling things up is there, and it is in the perfect tense, referring to a completed action.
"Let there be light" is an imperfective: "He will exist light!", but that next expression "and there was light" is an IMPERFECT verb in Hebrew.
In English, we could say "light will exist", or we could say "light began to exist". The key is that God did NOT "create light" on Day One. He BEGAN to create light. He didn't actually COMPLETE the creation (the "fattening" or "filling up" or "making substantial", of anything from Day One through Day 6. The text for Day 7 says that God completed his work on that day, in English. But in Hebrew, once again, the imperfect tense is used: God WILL complete his work, God BEGAN to complete his work.
So, "light" was being "fattened" from Day 1 into Day 7, and the same thing is true of the rest of creation. Those verbs are all imperfects. And then, even on day 7, he "will complete" or "began to complete" his work. In English we so very much want to write all of these verbs as past tense, and sequential: Day 1 - God did this, Day 2, God did this, Day 7, he was done and he rested.
The Hebrew says only that he began those things, and on Day seven, he began to rest. None of the verbs are in the past, completed tense. They are all in the imperfect tense, which means that none of the actions were in fact completed in the time described. They were open, and creation and resting all continued forward after that.
In fact, those verbs are NEVER closed out in the Hebrew text. The English verb tenses give 7 days of Creation. The Hebrew gives seven days of beginning to fill up the sky and the land, and no completion of the "creation".
The English speaking mind has difficulty enough with the Hebrew, but the English speaking theological mind REBELS at all of these open verbs, because English-speaking theology has always imposed closure on all of those verbs. Which simply means that the entirety of theology based on the closed verb tense is wrong, and always has been wrong, on this point, because the actual revealed word of God was exclusively in ancient Hebrew, and GOD used open, imperfect verbs throughout the entirety of Genesis one, except for the first verb in the first line.
Another example of the imperfect tense - what God says to Moses on Sinai: "Ehyeh asher Ehyeh". This is translated traditionally as "I am that I am" or "I am what I am" (God is Popeye?). The verb is in the IMPERFECT tense.
So it can be "I am" (in a continuing sense) or "I will be" or "I was existing, and am existing, and will be existing". It takes all of these words because the Hebrew imperfect tense is an uncompleted action.
And "asher" is a general purpose Hebrew relative pronoun. In English it is sometimes rendered, "who", "that", "which" and "where". The problem is not that it means one of those things when it is used. The problem is that English subdivides a concept (who, what, where) that is simply one concept in Hebrew.
So, what does God say? Not just "I am that I am", but "I am what I will be", or "I will be what I began to be", or "I will be what I am", and many other variants. Is that the same thing?
In Hebrew, yes it is.
In English, no it isn't. And that's a problem for English speakers. God spoke and inspired a text written in ancient Hebrew, and he used imperfect verbs in that sentence, so the action is not closed.
It doesn't matter if ten million Greek, Latin and English speaking theologians have built two thousand years of theology on verbs in the past tense. God spoke Ancient Hebrew to Moses, and he used the imperfect tense, so anything that is translated into a completed verb is wrong, because that is not what God said.
Translators make choices, and people who think like Western legalists then read the Scriptures, in English, as though they were statutes written by God. Perhaps they are, but if they are going to be treated that way, each word in Hebrew has to be translated into English with a variety of meanings, and the understanding that the Hebrew embaces all of those meanings. And imperfect verbs must be rendered with a future sense.
That's a long preliminary.
The key takeaway is that Ancient Hebrew verbs are not based on the time principle, but on the completeness or incompletion of action. It's a difficult way to think, and when you do start to think that way, it isn't pleasant, because it starts to change some "settled" Biblical understandings rather radically. But if you want to understand what God actually SAID, you MUST do that. Otherwise you're reading a story in which things happened in a certain fixed way, but the Scriptures say differently.
Example: when humans began to be made substantial, light also was still being filled up.
To understand what Genesis says, you have to accept that the verbs are open and incomplete - the imperfect tense. Everything you have ever read has the verbs in the perfect tense, the actions completed. And everything you have ever read is wrong. The verbs are imperfect in Hebrew, and the Hebrew is the only real Scripture. God spoke and wrote in Ancient Hebrew. English is merely a translation, not the actual Scripture, and a translation is but an echo.
We are going to start at the beginning of Genesis 1 and go through letter by letter, word be word, and unfold something amazing...IF you have the patience to bear with me and my writing style. I'm not a minister, or a teacher, and I really tend to pound in the points like tent stakes. Imperfect verbs are not firm things, but the fact that the verbs ARE imperfect IS a firm thing, and an important thing to grasp and fully accept if one is to have any hope of understanding what God actually SAID.
Here endeth the first epistle. LOL
Let me start in with the language itself. The Hebrew isn't really open ended at all. There are two specific verb tenses, and one of those tenses is the perfect tense, which is absolutely a completed action. The other form is the imperfect tense, which is, likewise, absolutely an imperfect action.
So, if we assume that God inspired the writers of Scripture in general, and if we assume that for Genesis 1 particularly, where there was no man present to see what happened, God dictated the words (there being no other way for men to know what happened, no traditional memories, because nobody was there to see the beginning but God and the angels), then God specifically, purposely and intentionally dictated that all of those verbs except the first be in the imperfect tense, and not the perfect tense. And the Hebrews able to read it (a bare handful in the early generations) saw those imperfect tenses and understood what God was saying. They, after all, walked through the sea, saw the plagues of Egypt, heard God's voice on the mountain, and their children ate manna every day except the seventh - they all saw God and God's miracles directly every single solitary day. So there was no quibbling from THEM about what God meant. He meant exactly what he said, exactly how he said it.
Now, they may not have wanted to DO what he said. Eve and Adam were no different - they KNEW the rule, but simply decided to break it because they wanted to. But Eve faithfully RECOUNTED the rule to the serpent. She knew what she was doing. Likewise, the written Torah was handed down as scrolls. There are scribal errors in things that got handed down, of course, but verb tense is not a scribal error.
Genesis 1 had to be dictated, even written, by God, because no man had any memory of the events. God wrote that account, either directly with his own hand (God wrote on the stone tablets before Moses on the mountaintop), or by dictation. Either way, the nature of Genesis, speaking of the origin of things predating man, was divine in DIRECT origin, because it had to be. Once we get into the realms of man, men could write things, or maintain oral histories and then write them later, and later scribes amend and emend - and as long as the key points that God wanted to convey in those texts were preserved, the variations did not matter.
With Genesis, however, there is no "crutch" of human tradition. Nobody was present to witness any of that. And we have the myths of creation from around the world. None of the other myths reads anything like Genesis. The Code of Hammurabi somewhat resembles some of the provisions of the Torah, but the Gilgamesh Epic, the Mesopotamian creation myth, reads like any other pagan demi-god hero creation epic. Put differently, there is family memory and traditions, going back to the Ark, in all cultures, because everybody on earth is descended from at least half of the people who were on the Ark, so four grandparents were there to tell later generations what happened. After Babel, people spread out, but they didn't FORGET what they had learned. And remember: Noah lived for something like 350 years AFTER the Flood, and his sons were also very long lived.
Human living memory today generally goes back to grandparents or sometimes great-grandparents. The oldest person I was ever conscious of knowing was born in 1873. My oldest relative when I was a child was born in 1886. They remembered their grandparents, who had been born in the early 1800s, so the span of "living memory" (the memories of living people who had spoken with living people) to which I was exposed, circa 1970, was about 170 years.
But 350 years after the Flood Noah was still around able to tell his great-great-great-great-great grandchildren what had happened, not just during the Flood, but also for 600 years before that. His sons remembered the 100 years before the Flood also. Noah was born only a few years after Adam died, so Adam was within living memory of Noah.
One of the reasons that there was no written history from before the Flood or immediately after it is that people did not need it. Noah's grandfather Methuselah knew Adam and all of the rest of the descendants of Adam (or COULD have known them, because they were all alive at the same time), and Noah knew Methuselah for 600 years of his life. So, what need to write down histories when living people are there who can tell you what happened?
After the Flood, the lifespans of named people start to pull in towards the modern day norms, and the range of living memory closes in to only a couple of generations - THEN written history becomes more important (and, rather unsurprisingly, systems of writing to record things develop in the Middle East, in Egypt, in China and in India at just about the same time.
There are some things in common to all of the written creation myths of early civilizations, namely, a Flood. This is unsurprising. There were 8 people on the Ark. They are the grandparents of all. While they lived, they told generations of the flood. They passed, and the tales grew taller and stranger, but the basic story was conveyed to all people. It comes as no surprise to me that the ancient Chinese character for "ship" or "vessel" is a picture of a house with eight human figures inside of it. How many people were on the ark?
But what Genesis 1 tells has very few common elements with any of the creation myth. There is no superhero demigod at the center, defeating monsters to tame the chaotic sea. There is simply the supreme God of all, acting with power to fill up the land and the seas and the skies.
And THAT story could NOT have come down through collective memory, unless God told Adam and Eve, or Noah, or Abraham, or Jacob, and there is no evidence whatever that he did.
Instead, this extremely complex Hebrew text, the most complex piece of writing on earth (as you will see), an impossible amalgamation of letters, words, sentences and images, came out of nowhere as the very first section of the first piece of known Hebrew literature. The Greeks, of course, had a long tradition of plays and poetry before the New Testament. The Romans had their poets and historians. The English had already had Shakespeare,Marlowe and Chaucer as their literary heritage when the scholars assembled to translate the Bible for King James.
But the Hebrews were a polyglot of slaves out of Egypt, semi-nomadic, without a literature. And they never developed another literature. The Koine Greek New Testament stands alongside of Homer and Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, as monuments of Greek literature.
My point is that there were already deep literary traditions of settled great civilizations that already existed before the New Testament was produced in Greek, and then converted into Latin, or in the English, French and German civilizations that made the modern Bible translations.
The Hebrews were a no-people before God pulled them out of Egypt - ignorant slaves for the most part, led by an Egyptian-educated Hebrew who had been a shepherd for years. The Hebrews didn't exist before the Exodus, and they never produced any great literary works other than the Psalms of David and the Song of Songs. The rest of the Old Testimony is flat history, all referring back to the Torah.
But the Torah is incredibly dense and sophisticated, and Genesis 1, in particular, is impossibly sophisticated. Once one sees the sound-word-phrase-sentence structure and content, one realizes that Genesis 1 had to have been directly written by, or dictated by, God. It is filled entirely with the knowledge of things that no man ever saw, what is related is completely unlike any of the other nations' creation myths, and it fits together in a fractal pattern that is not human in its complexity.
When we look at Genesis 1 in its ancient Hebrew fullness, we are looking at something, perhaps the only piece of literature on earth, that was actually written by God.
The rest of the text was certainly inspired by God, but except for the "God said" parts, the direct quotes of God's words, the authors' own human voices are clear.
And accordingly, no other text is as sophisticated in its underling structures, in the way the sounds, letters, letter sequences, words, phrases and meanings fit together.
One of the best proofs of the existence of God that there is in a deep analysis of Genesis 1, because the very features of it, and its age, and its uniformity in manuscript over history, is a true miracle in and of itself. You won't have to take my word for it - you will see for yourself. That is the whole point of this long thread (to which I have added one non-contentious person).
But one of the things that all of that means is that where God used imperfect verbs, it was not an accident. God fully intended to convey the incompleteness of the actions described, their ongoing nature.
This MAY NOT be true of the Hebrew later in the Scripture, which clearly shows the mind and style of the men who wrote it, but Genesis 1 in particular, treating as it does with things visible only to God, comes directly from God and in its fractal complexity shows us a corner of God's mind. Where IT had imperfects, so consistently throughout, that must be accepted as the direct written words of God.
Which means that any translator, any interpreter, any priest, any scholar, or any group, who changes the imperfect to the perfect in order to make the story easier, changes Scripture and errs.
God wrote Genesis 1:1 in the imperfect tense. And that means that the creation described there occurs over the entire length of the description. The Days merely describe the sequence in which God began an activity - and even the word "Day" (yom) doesn't simply mean "day". For God DEFINES "day" in Genesis 1 as "light", but "light", the English word, is not the only thing implicit in the Hebrew word we translate as "light", for the word is "OR", the root of "order". ("Seder" is the standard Hebrew word often translated as "order" but that form of "order" is of the sense of sequence, lined up in rows - the Passover "seder" is the sequenced order of the Passover meal; "or" is the root of the Hebrew word meaning the ordering of things in space.
Scientifically, the law of entropy tells us that disorder - chaos - increases, and that the only thing that can bring order out of chaos is the application of energy.
There is no ancient Hebrew word for energy. There is a modern Hebrew word: energia, but of course this is just modern Hebrew supplying a word from western languages where there is no word in ancient Hebrew.
There is only the word "or" - light, and the root of arakh - ordering in space. Light, of course, IS energy, and energy is the thing that brings order out of chaos. The fundamental link between light and order, is the link between energy as the force that overcomes chaos. And look at where this appears - in a revelation of God bringing the world out of the dark abyssal sea. Or = light = day = energy = order which penetrates the darkness, darkness = lack of light = lack of energy = chaos ("tohu vavohu"). The modern physics is here, expressed in the language of bedouins 4000 year ago.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. (I told you I'm not a teacher or a minister, and I do tend to wander a bit.) The bottom line is this: God revealed, probably dictated, and perhaps even wrote the words of Genesis 1 in ancient Hebrew, and he used imperfect verbs throughout. Any interpretation that reverses God's will and turns those verbs into completed fact is wrong on its face. It is wrestling with God.
One must accept God's revelation on his own terms. The 7 days of creation are not a start-stop sequence of creation, day by day. They are a series of starting points for a creative process that continued to unfold. Light began to be made substantial on the first day, the beginnings of the plants began to be made substantial on the third day, on the seventh day it continued, and continues still.
This should not be a point of contention for anybody - it is what God SAID, quite literally: those verbs are imperfect, the action is not completed. He created man and woman, and he still does - each of us is separately breathed out. God is not a watchmaker who stepped away from a static creation. He brought forth creation and he continues to do so. That's what those verbs tell you.
If this were on the thread boards, there would be well-meaning Christians now screaming that this is perverting the word of God, because they read English translations as though they were Scripture (they are not - only the Hebrew is Scripture, the English translations are interpretative representations of Scripture in English - and the English translators have generally done a bad job of conveying the imperfect Hebrew verb, in part because the theology is 1500 years older than the translations.
What about Jewish translators and interpreters? Well, they divided Israel, rejected God as King, had two Kingdoms and two Temples destroyed, and completely missed Christ when he came, so no, there is no noticeable wisdom in Jewish sages or interpreters. In fact, one finds a marked tendency among many of them to do just exactly like the Christians and interpret everything to fit their traditions. After all, no JEWS have spoken Biblical Hebrew for 1500 years either.
Modern Hebrew is a timestream language with a verb system DERIVED FROM French, English, German, Latin and Greek. The imperfect verb is as confusing for modern Jews as it is for everybody else who thinks in terms of the timestream, as opposed to completion and incompletion of action.
Now, a poster on a thread raised a nasty point but a good one - this sounds like taking somebody into a dark corner. It isn't, but can you imagine the firestorm if I posted something this long on the major threads?
I am uninterested in having a fight over these things. I see much, and I want to teach it. But I will only do so in peace. The contentious can remain outside and feast on their traditions.
Final thought: God keeping his word means he will keep his promises. He made no promise to anybody in Genesis 1. So ULTIMATELY Genesis 1 just answers our curiosity and provides a framework for understanding where we came from and what comes next. That's useful, but it isn't vital.
Let me start in with the language itself. The Hebrew isn't really open ended at all. There are two specific verb tenses, and one of those tenses is the perfect tense, which is absolutely a completed action. The other form is the imperfect tense, which is, likewise, absolutely an imperfect action.
So, if we assume that God inspired the writers of Scripture in general, and if we assume that for Genesis 1 particularly, where there was no man present to see what happened, God dictated the words (there being no other way for men to know what happened, no traditional memories, because nobody was there to see the beginning but God and the angels), then God specifically, purposely and intentionally dictated that all of those verbs except the first be in the imperfect tense, and not the perfect tense. And the Hebrews able to read it (a bare handful in the early generations) saw those imperfect tenses and understood what God was saying. They, after all, walked through the sea, saw the plagues of Egypt, heard God's voice on the mountain, and their children ate manna every day except the seventh - they all saw God and God's miracles directly every single solitary day. So there was no quibbling from THEM about what God meant. He meant exactly what he said, exactly how he said it.
Now, they may not have wanted to DO what he said. Eve and Adam were no different - they KNEW the rule, but simply decided to break it because they wanted to. But Eve faithfully RECOUNTED the rule to the serpent. She knew what she was doing. Likewise, the written Torah was handed down as scrolls. There are scribal errors in things that got handed down, of course, but verb tense is not a scribal error.
Genesis 1 had to be dictated, even written, by God, because no man had any memory of the events. God wrote that account, either directly with his own hand (God wrote on the stone tablets before Moses on the mountaintop), or by dictation. Either way, the nature of Genesis, speaking of the origin of things predating man, was divine in DIRECT origin, because it had to be. Once we get into the realms of man, men could write things, or maintain oral histories and then write them later, and later scribes amend and emend - and as long as the key points that God wanted to convey in those texts were preserved, the variations did not matter.
With Genesis, however, there is no "crutch" of human tradition. Nobody was present to witness any of that. And we have the myths of creation from around the world. None of the other myths reads anything like Genesis. The Code of Hammurabi somewhat resembles some of the provisions of the Torah, but the Gilgamesh Epic, the Mesopotamian creation myth, reads like any other pagan demi-god hero creation epic. Put differently, there is family memory and traditions, going back to the Ark, in all cultures, because everybody on earth is descended from at least half of the people who were on the Ark, so four grandparents were there to tell later generations what happened. After Babel, people spread out, but they didn't FORGET what they had learned. And remember: Noah lived for something like 350 years AFTER the Flood, and his sons were also very long lived.
Human living memory today generally goes back to grandparents or sometimes great-grandparents. The oldest person I was ever conscious of knowing was born in 1873. My oldest relative when I was a child was born in 1886. They remembered their grandparents, who had been born in the early 1800s, so the span of "living memory" (the memories of living people who had spoken with living people) to which I was exposed, circa 1970, was about 170 years.
But 350 years after the Flood Noah was still around able to tell his great-great-great-great-great grandchildren what had happened, not just during the Flood, but also for 600 years before that. His sons remembered the 100 years before the Flood also. Noah was born only a few years after Adam died, so Adam was within living memory of Noah.
One of the reasons that there was no written history from before the Flood or immediately after it is that people did not need it. Noah's grandfather Methuselah knew Adam and all of the rest of the descendants of Adam (or COULD have known them, because they were all alive at the same time), and Noah knew Methuselah for 600 years of his life. So, what need to write down histories when living people are there who can tell you what happened?
After the Flood, the lifespans of named people start to pull in towards the modern day norms, and the range of living memory closes in to only a couple of generations - THEN written history becomes more important (and, rather unsurprisingly, systems of writing to record things develop in the Middle East, in Egypt, in China and in India at just about the same time.
There are some things in common to all of the written creation myths of early civilizations, namely, a Flood. This is unsurprising. There were 8 people on the Ark. They are the grandparents of all. While they lived, they told generations of the flood. They passed, and the tales grew taller and stranger, but the basic story was conveyed to all people. It comes as no surprise to me that the ancient Chinese character for "ship" or "vessel" is a picture of a house with eight human figures inside of it. How many people were on the ark?
But what Genesis 1 tells has very few common elements with any of the creation myth. There is no superhero demigod at the center, defeating monsters to tame the chaotic sea. There is simply the supreme God of all, acting with power to fill up the land and the seas and the skies.
And THAT story could NOT have come down through collective memory, unless God told Adam and Eve, or Noah, or Abraham, or Jacob, and there is no evidence whatever that he did.
Instead, this extremely complex Hebrew text, the most complex piece of writing on earth (as you will see), an impossible amalgamation of letters, words, sentences and images, came out of nowhere as the very first section of the first piece of known Hebrew literature. The Greeks, of course, had a long tradition of plays and poetry before the New Testament. The Romans had their poets and historians. The English had already had Shakespeare,Marlowe and Chaucer as their literary heritage when the scholars assembled to translate the Bible for King James.
But the Hebrews were a polyglot of slaves out of Egypt, semi-nomadic, without a literature. And they never developed another literature. The Koine Greek New Testament stands alongside of Homer and Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, as monuments of Greek literature.
My point is that there were already deep literary traditions of settled great civilizations that already existed before the New Testament was produced in Greek, and then converted into Latin, or in the English, French and German civilizations that made the modern Bible translations.
The Hebrews were a no-people before God pulled them out of Egypt - ignorant slaves for the most part, led by an Egyptian-educated Hebrew who had been a shepherd for years. The Hebrews didn't exist before the Exodus, and they never produced any great literary works other than the Psalms of David and the Song of Songs. The rest of the Old Testimony is flat history, all referring back to the Torah.
But the Torah is incredibly dense and sophisticated, and Genesis 1, in particular, is impossibly sophisticated. Once one sees the sound-word-phrase-sentence structure and content, one realizes that Genesis 1 had to have been directly written by, or dictated by, God. It is filled entirely with the knowledge of things that no man ever saw, what is related is completely unlike any of the other nations' creation myths, and it fits together in a fractal pattern that is not human in its complexity.
When we look at Genesis 1 in its ancient Hebrew fullness, we are looking at something, perhaps the only piece of literature on earth, that was actually written by God.
The rest of the text was certainly inspired by God, but except for the "God said" parts, the direct quotes of God's words, the authors' own human voices are clear.
And accordingly, no other text is as sophisticated in its underling structures, in the way the sounds, letters, letter sequences, words, phrases and meanings fit together.
One of the best proofs of the existence of God that there is in a deep analysis of Genesis 1, because the very features of it, and its age, and its uniformity in manuscript over history, is a true miracle in and of itself. You won't have to take my word for it - you will see for yourself. That is the whole point of this long thread (to which I have added one non-contentious person).
But one of the things that all of that means is that where God used imperfect verbs, it was not an accident. God fully intended to convey the incompleteness of the actions described, their ongoing nature.
This MAY NOT be true of the Hebrew later in the Scripture, which clearly shows the mind and style of the men who wrote it, but Genesis 1 in particular, treating as it does with things visible only to God, comes directly from God and in its fractal complexity shows us a corner of God's mind. Where IT had imperfects, so consistently throughout, that must be accepted as the direct written words of God.
Which means that any translator, any interpreter, any priest, any scholar, or any group, who changes the imperfect to the perfect in order to make the story easier, changes Scripture and errs.
God wrote Genesis 1:1 in the imperfect tense. And that means that the creation described there occurs over the entire length of the description. The Days merely describe the sequence in which God began an activity - and even the word "Day" (yom) doesn't simply mean "day". For God DEFINES "day" in Genesis 1 as "light", but "light", the English word, is not the only thing implicit in the Hebrew word we translate as "light", for the word is "OR", the root of "order". ("Seder" is the standard Hebrew word often translated as "order" but that form of "order" is of the sense of sequence, lined up in rows - the Passover "seder" is the sequenced order of the Passover meal; "or" is the root of the Hebrew word meaning the ordering of things in space.
Scientifically, the law of entropy tells us that disorder - chaos - increases, and that the only thing that can bring order out of chaos is the application of energy.
There is no ancient Hebrew word for energy. There is a modern Hebrew word: energia, but of course this is just modern Hebrew supplying a word from western languages where there is no word in ancient Hebrew.
There is only the word "or" - light, and the root of arakh - ordering in space. Light, of course, IS energy, and energy is the thing that brings order out of chaos. The fundamental link between light and order, is the link between energy as the force that overcomes chaos. And look at where this appears - in a revelation of God bringing the world out of the dark abyssal sea. Or = light = day = energy = order which penetrates the darkness, darkness = lack of light = lack of energy = chaos ("tohu vavohu"). The modern physics is here, expressed in the language of bedouins 4000 year ago.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. (I told you I'm not a teacher or a minister, and I do tend to wander a bit.) The bottom line is this: God revealed, probably dictated, and perhaps even wrote the words of Genesis 1 in ancient Hebrew, and he used imperfect verbs throughout. Any interpretation that reverses God's will and turns those verbs into completed fact is wrong on its face. It is wrestling with God.
One must accept God's revelation on his own terms. The 7 days of creation are not a start-stop sequence of creation, day by day. They are a series of starting points for a creative process that continued to unfold. Light began to be made substantial on the first day, the beginnings of the plants began to be made substantial on the third day, on the seventh day it continued, and continues still.
This should not be a point of contention for anybody - it is what God SAID, quite literally: those verbs are imperfect, the action is not completed. He created man and woman, and he still does - each of us is separately breathed out. God is not a watchmaker who stepped away from a static creation. He brought forth creation and he continues to do so. That's what those verbs tell you.
If this were on the thread boards, there would be well-meaning Christians now screaming that this is perverting the word of God, because they read English translations as though they were Scripture (they are not - only the Hebrew is Scripture, the English translations are interpretative representations of Scripture in English - and the English translators have generally done a bad job of conveying the imperfect Hebrew verb, in part because the theology is 1500 years older than the translations.
What about Jewish translators and interpreters? Well, they divided Israel, rejected God as King, had two Kingdoms and two Temples destroyed, and completely missed Christ when he came, so no, there is no noticeable wisdom in Jewish sages or interpreters. In fact, one finds a marked tendency among many of them to do just exactly like the Christians and interpret everything to fit their traditions. After all, no JEWS have spoken Biblical Hebrew for 1500 years either.
Modern Hebrew is a timestream language with a verb system DERIVED FROM French, English, German, Latin and Greek. The imperfect verb is as confusing for modern Jews as it is for everybody else who thinks in terms of the timestream, as opposed to completion and incompletion of action.
Now, a poster on a thread raised a nasty point but a good one - this sounds like taking somebody into a dark corner. It isn't, but can you imagine the firestorm if I posted something this long on the major threads?
I am uninterested in having a fight over these things. I see much, and I want to teach it. But I will only do so in peace. The contentious can remain outside and feast on their traditions.
Final thought: God keeping his word means he will keep his promises. He made no promise to anybody in Genesis 1. So ULTIMATELY Genesis 1 just answers our curiosity and provides a framework for understanding where we came from and what comes next. That's useful, but it isn't vital.
Let me start in with the language itself. The Hebrew isn't really open ended at all. There are two specific verb tenses, and one of those tenses is the perfect tense, which is absolutely a completed action. The other form is the imperfect tense, which is, likewise, absolutely an imperfect action.
So, if we assume that God inspired the writers of Scripture in general, and if we assume that for Genesis 1 particularly, where there was no man present to see what happened, God dictated the words (there being no other way for men to know what happened, no traditional memories, because nobody was there to see the beginning but God and the angels), then God specifically, purposely and intentionally dictated that all of those verbs except the first be in the imperfect tense, and not the perfect tense. And the Hebrews able to read it (a bare handful in the early generations) saw those imperfect tenses and understood what God was saying. They, after all, walked through the sea, saw the plagues of Egypt, heard God's voice on the mountain, and their children ate manna every day except the seventh - they all saw God and God's miracles directly every single solitary day. So there was no quibbling from THEM about what God meant. He meant exactly what he said, exactly how he said it.
Now, they may not have wanted to DO what he said. Eve and Adam were no different - they KNEW the rule, but simply decided to break it because they wanted to. But Eve faithfully RECOUNTED the rule to the serpent. She knew what she was doing. Likewise, the written Torah was handed down as scrolls. There are scribal errors in things that got handed down, of course, but verb tense is not a scribal error.
Genesis 1 had to be dictated, even written, by God, because no man had any memory of the events. God wrote that account, either directly with his own hand (God wrote on the stone tablets before Moses on the mountaintop), or by dictation. Either way, the nature of Genesis, speaking of the origin of things predating man, was divine in DIRECT origin, because it had to be. Once we get into the realms of man, men could write things, or maintain oral histories and then write them later, and later scribes amend and emend - and as long as the key points that God wanted to convey in those texts were preserved, the variations did not matter.
With Genesis, however, there is no "crutch" of human tradition. Nobody was present to witness any of that. And we have the myths of creation from around the world. None of the other myths reads anything like Genesis. The Code of Hammurabi somewhat resembles some of the provisions of the Torah, but the Gilgamesh Epic, the Mesopotamian creation myth, reads like any other pagan demi-god hero creation epic. Put differently, there is family memory and traditions, going back to the Ark, in all cultures, because everybody on earth is descended from at least half of the people who were on the Ark, so four grandparents were there to tell later generations what happened. After Babel, people spread out, but they didn't FORGET what they had learned. And remember: Noah lived for something like 350 years AFTER the Flood, and his sons were also very long lived.
Human living memory today generally goes back to grandparents or sometimes great-grandparents. The oldest person I was ever conscious of knowing was born in 1873. My oldest relative when I was a child was born in 1886. They remembered their grandparents, who had been born in the early 1800s, so the span of "living memory" (the memories of living people who had spoken with living people) to which I was exposed, circa 1970, was about 170 years.
But 350 years after the Flood Noah was still around able to tell his great-great-great-great-great grandchildren what had happened, not just during the Flood, but also for 600 years before that. His sons remembered the 100 years before the Flood also. Noah was born only a few years after Adam died, so Adam was within living memory of Noah.
One of the reasons that there was no written history from before the Flood or immediately after it is that people did not need it. Noah's grandfather Methuselah knew Adam and all of the rest of the descendants of Adam (or COULD have known them, because they were all alive at the same time), and Noah knew Methuselah for 600 years of his life. So, what need to write down histories when living people are there who can tell you what happened?
After the Flood, the lifespans of named people start to pull in towards the modern day norms, and the range of living memory closes in to only a couple of generations - THEN written history becomes more important (and, rather unsurprisingly, systems of writing to record things develop in the Middle East, in Egypt, in China and in India at just about the same time.
There are some things in common to all of the written creation myths of early civilizations, namely, a Flood. This is unsurprising. There were 8 people on the Ark. They are the grandparents of all. While they lived, they told generations of the flood. They passed, and the tales grew taller and stranger, but the basic story was conveyed to all people. It comes as no surprise to me that the ancient Chinese character for "ship" or "vessel" is a picture of a house with eight human figures inside of it. How many people were on the ark?
But what Genesis 1 tells has very few common elements with any of the creation myth. There is no superhero demigod at the center, defeating monsters to tame the chaotic sea. There is simply the supreme God of all, acting with power to fill up the land and the seas and the skies.
And THAT story could NOT have come down through collective memory, unless God told Adam and Eve, or Noah, or Abraham, or Jacob, and there is no evidence whatever that he did.
Instead, this extremely complex Hebrew text, the most complex piece of writing on earth (as you will see), an impossible amalgamation of letters, words, sentences and images, came out of nowhere as the very first section of the first piece of known Hebrew literature. The Greeks, of course, had a long tradition of plays and poetry before the New Testament. The Romans had their poets and historians. The English had already had Shakespeare,Marlowe and Chaucer as their literary heritage when the scholars assembled to translate the Bible for King James.
But the Hebrews were a polyglot of slaves out of Egypt, semi-nomadic, without a literature. And they never developed another literature. The Koine Greek New Testament stands alongside of Homer and Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, as monuments of Greek literature.
My point is that there were already deep literary traditions of settled great civilizations that already existed before the New Testament was produced in Greek, and then converted into Latin, or in the English, French and German civilizations that made the modern Bible translations.
The Hebrews were a no-people before God pulled them out of Egypt - ignorant slaves for the most part, led by an Egyptian-educated Hebrew who had been a shepherd for years. The Hebrews didn't exist before the Exodus, and they never produced any great literary works other than the Psalms of David and the Song of Songs. The rest of the Old Testimony is flat history, all referring back to the Torah.
But the Torah is incredibly dense and sophisticated, and Genesis 1, in particular, is impossibly sophisticated. Once one sees the sound-word-phrase-sentence structure and content, one realizes that Genesis 1 had to have been directly written by, or dictated by, God. It is filled entirely with the knowledge of things that no man ever saw, what is related is completely unlike any of the other nations' creation myths, and it fits together in a fractal pattern that is not human in its complexity.
When we look at Genesis 1 in its ancient Hebrew fullness, we are looking at something, perhaps the only piece of literature on earth, that was actually written by God.
The rest of the text was certainly inspired by God, but except for the "God said" parts, the direct quotes of God's words, the authors' own human voices are clear.
And accordingly, no other text is as sophisticated in its underling structures, in the way the sounds, letters, letter sequences, words, phrases and meanings fit together.
One of the best proofs of the existence of God that there is in a deep analysis of Genesis 1, because the very features of it, and its age, and its uniformity in manuscript over history, is a true miracle in and of itself. You won't have to take my word for it - you will see for yourself. That is the whole point of this long thread (to which I have added one non-contentious person).
But one of the things that all of that means is that where God used imperfect verbs, it was not an accident. God fully intended to convey the incompleteness of the actions described, their ongoing nature.
This MAY NOT be true of the Hebrew later in the Scripture, which clearly shows the mind and style of the men who wrote it, but Genesis 1 in particular, treating as it does with things visible only to God, comes directly from God and in its fractal complexity shows us a corner of God's mind. Where IT had imperfects, so consistently throughout, that must be accepted as the direct written words of God.
Which means that any translator, any interpreter, any priest, any scholar, or any group, who changes the imperfect to the perfect in order to make the story easier, changes Scripture and errs.
God wrote Genesis 1:1 in the imperfect tense. And that means that the creation described there occurs over the entire length of the description. The Days merely describe the sequence in which God began an activity - and even the word "Day" (yom) doesn't simply mean "day". For God DEFINES "day" in Genesis 1 as "light", but "light", the English word, is not the only thing implicit in the Hebrew word we translate as "light", for the word is "OR", the root of "order". ("Seder" is the standard Hebrew word often translated as "order" but that form of "order" is of the sense of sequence, lined up in rows - the Passover "seder" is the sequenced order of the Passover meal; "or" is the root of the Hebrew word meaning the ordering of things in space.
Scientifically, the law of entropy tells us that disorder - chaos - increases, and that the only thing that can bring order out of chaos is the application of energy.
There is no ancient Hebrew word for energy. There is a modern Hebrew word: energia, but of course this is just modern Hebrew supplying a word from western languages where there is no word in ancient Hebrew.
There is only the word "or" - light, and the root of arakh - ordering in space. Light, of course, IS energy, and energy is the thing that brings order out of chaos. The fundamental link between light and order, is the link between energy as the force that overcomes chaos. And look at where this appears - in a revelation of God bringing the world out of the dark abyssal sea. Or = light = day = energy = order which penetrates the darkness, darkness = lack of light = lack of energy = chaos ("tohu vavohu"). The modern physics is here, expressed in the language of bedouins 4000 year ago.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. (I told you I'm not a teacher or a minister, and I do tend to wander a bit.) The bottom line is this: God revealed, probably dictated, and perhaps even wrote the words of Genesis 1 in ancient Hebrew, and he used imperfect verbs throughout. Any interpretation that reverses God's will and turns those verbs into completed fact is wrong on its face. It is wrestling with God.
One must accept God's revelation on his own terms. The 7 days of creation are not a start-stop sequence of creation, day by day. They are a series of starting points for a creative process that continued to unfold. Light began to be made substantial on the first day, the beginnings of the plants began to be made substantial on the third day, on the seventh day it continued, and continues still.
This should not be a point of contention for anybody - it is what God SAID, quite literally: those verbs are imperfect, the action is not completed. He created man and woman, and he still does - each of us is separately breathed out. God is not a watchmaker who stepped away from a static creation. He brought forth creation and he continues to do so. That's what those verbs tell you.
If this were on the thread boards, there would be well-meaning Christians now screaming that this is perverting the word of God, because they read English translations as though they were Scripture (they are not - only the Hebrew is Scripture, the English translations are interpretative representations of Scripture in English - and the English translators have generally done a bad job of conveying the imperfect Hebrew verb, in part because the theology is 1500 years older than the translations.
What about Jewish translators and interpreters? Well, they divided Israel, rejected God as King, had two Kingdoms and two Temples destroyed, and completely missed Christ when he came, so no, there is no noticeable wisdom in Jewish sages or interpreters. In fact, one finds a marked tendency among many of them to do just exactly like the Christians and interpret everything to fit their traditions. After all, no JEWS have spoken Biblical Hebrew for 1500 years either.
Modern Hebrew is a timestream language with a verb system DERIVED FROM French, English, German, Latin and Greek. The imperfect verb is as confusing for modern Jews as it is for everybody else who thinks in terms of the timestream, as opposed to completion and incompletion of action.
Now, a poster on a thread raised a nasty point but a good one - this sounds like taking somebody into a dark corner. It isn't, but can you imagine the firestorm if I posted something this long on the major threads?
I am uninterested in having a fight over these things. I see much, and I want to teach it. But I will only do so in peace. The contentious can remain outside and feast on their traditions.
Final thought: God keeping his word means he will keep his promises. He made no promise to anybody in Genesis 1. So ULTIMATELY Genesis 1 just answers our curiosity and provides a framework for understanding where we came from and what comes next. That's useful, but it isn't vital.
count me in I'm very interested in the roots of the Hebrew tongue.Thread to expand on original text of Genesis. This is not a debate thread; it is simply for those wanting to understand more about the depth behind the original language in Genesis. It is led by Vicomte, who has studied this subject for many years. Feel free to ask questions, but please refrain from debate, as this is a thread for education purposes.
The world is full of people eager to tell you what the Scripture MEANS. All I will do is tell you what Genesis 1 actually SAYS.
As to what exact authority Scripture has, or even what IS Scripture (is Enoch Scripture? Are the books of the Maccabees? Is anything in the Old Testament after Deuteronomy?) different people answer those questions differently, and all that is for them to debate.
All that I will be doing here is taking Genesis 1 as it appears in the Leningrad Codex form of the Massoretic text, stripping it back to the paleo-Hebrew letters (which means removing all of the vowel pointing, which was added by the Massoretes and was not part of the original text), and then going through it with you letter by letter, word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, thought by thought.
There will be some comparisons made to some of the standard English translations If there is a particular English translation you prefer then let me know, because I will use that. This saves time. Otherwise, I may say "The text says this, but the KJV says...", and you'll think "That's interesting, but the KJV is an old translation that has some flaws in it. The NIV, on the other hand..." To save time and energy, if you tell me the English translation you prefer, I will use that as a baseline.
Two things that will help you:
(1) Google "Ancient Hebrew Alphabet" or "Paleo-Hebrew Alphabet", and you'll find under "Images" all sorts of charts showing the current "Hebrew" letters (which are really Babylonian Aramaic letters) and the ancient Hebrew pictographs (sometimes called "Ivrit").
(2) The Mechanical Translation of Genesis is particularly useful - not for the theology of its creators, but because it literally chops out each word, with its part of speech, and makes no attempt at English syntax. I think you can get it online in PDF form.
The key to a mechanical translation (which the Concordant Translation circa 1906 also is, but without the grammatical markings, and made to be readable) is that every time a word appears in the text, it is always translated exactly the same way. This removes the translator's bias for everything except the initial selection of the word. It's the only way to actually SEE the Hebrew in English.
Unfortunately, ALL translators have theological bias, so in that selection of THE word for a given Hebrew word, their bias comes to play. But with a reliable mechanical translation, the bias can always be se seen, as one can easily compare to the English.
For your reference, for my own personal use, I only use the Mechanical Translation for the Hebrew Torah.
I use the Concordant Translation to see the words of the New Testament translated concordantly.
I believe that the most accurate translation of the New Testament for MEANING is the Eastern Orthodox Bible (the EOB), for three specific reasons:
(1) It is translated by Greek-speaking Greeks. Ancient Koine Greek is not the same as modern Greek, but it is closer to modern Greek than, say, Latin is to Italian. Modern Greek flowed in unbroken, and unconquered and unreplaced population, from ancient Greek.
Hebrew, of course died. Modern Hebrew is an artificial language intentionally constructed in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries to revive the language. It has a thoroughly modern grammatical apparatus patterned after French, English, Yiddish and German. It uses Babylonian letters and ancient Hebrew words, but has vast numbers of new loanwords, because there are only about 9000 words of ancient Hebrew available to us, and many are not particularly useful.
Greece was invaded, but the Greeks remained, still speaking Greek, and the New Testament is written in an old form of Greek. Jews today speak Hebrew, and read and write it as a living language, because it was intentionally revived. But the Greeks never stopped speaking Greek, and were never separated from their homeland. They've also had the same religion - which today is called Greek Orthodoxy - since their conversion to Christianity by Paul and the other missionaries of the apostolic era. The continuity of both the language of the New Testament and the people in their geographic area means, quite simply, that Greek Christian scholars have a deeper and more natural understanding of Greek and its idioms than any non-Greek speaker can ever attain.
Consider: we do not speak Shakespearean English, but we do speak English nevertheless, and while Shakespeare's vocabulary is odd and some old forms are difficult, we can nevertheless read it. To really understand many of the nuances we have to consult scholars. But would it ever really be possible for, say, a Russian who had studied English as a foreign language, and who studied Shakespeare, to EVER has as deep and intuitive understanding of what Shakespeare's idiom meant than, say, the dons of the English department at Oxford university?
No. Native speakers have an innate advantage over everybody else when it comes to their own native language, and highly educated native speakers will always be supreme in the field when it comes to interpreting their own language to others.
With Hebrew it doesn't work, just as it doesn't work for ancient Egyptian, because while there are still Jews, and while many Jews speak modern Hebrew, nobody was a native speaker of ancient Hebrew for about 1500 years before the revival of the language, and the language that was revived only appears to be the same as the language of the Old Testament because of the form of letters and reuse of words. Also, we have to remember the fundamental theological error of the Jews. Even though certain features of the Hebrew language of the Old Testament clearly indicate or suggest something, Hebrew theology frequently will intervene and say "No, the word could not POSSIBLY mean THAT, because THAT would be blasphemous", according to Jewish religion. The notion, for example, that God has a Son is absolute blasphemy to Jews. Any pluralism in the Hebrew Scriptures, then, is suppressed by Jewish theologians, explained away. You will not even know that it's THERE if you rely upon them.
With the Greeks, though, it's different. Paul and Silas and Luke and Mark and others of the Apostolic era brought the Good News to them, and they converted. The names of the cities to which Paul's letters are addressed are almost all Greek, except for the Romans and Galatians (and they spoke Greek). Philippi, Colossia, Thessalonika, Corinth - all were Greek, and all still ARE Greek. Ephesus was Greek, but it's gone now. The Greeks converted in the first century, and Greece was not the source of the various heresies. The most important heresy of all, the Arian, began in Egypt. It was a council at a Greek city in Asia Minor, Nicaea, that formulated the Creed to put down the Arian Heresy.
The New Testament is entirely written in the Greek they spoke. And while other areas such as Antioch were also Christian early, when the Eastern Mediterranean (including Greece) was all overrun by the Muslims, Christianity was replaced by Islam for 90%+ of the population of Antioch, of Egypt and all around. In Greece, Islam never got anywhere. The Greeks remained stubbornly Christian. Indeed, this is one of the key REASONS for the very ancient and unchanging structure of Greek Orthodox rites. In the West, Catholicism was the dominant religion in a continent ruled by Christians, so the Catholic rites and doctrines were able to grow and adjust with new circumstances and advances. But in Greece, the conquerors were Muslim, and Christianity was not free to grow. Instead, it held fast, under Muslim occupation, for four hundred years. The Greek Christians preserved everything from the old times because they could not innovate.
And what that means, simply put, is that nobody on earth can properly read the Greek New Testament - the actual manuscripts of the Bible - in a Christian context that still uses all of the original symbology - as well as well-educated native Greek scholars.
And that is one reason why the Eastern Orthodox Bible New Testament - the EOB - is the best translation of the New Testament.
A second reason has to do with the manuscripts that the Greeks use to make their translation. The Greeks do not use a translation. THEIR Bible IS an ancient manuscript - called the "Patriarchal Text".
The KJV was translated from a single Greek text that came out of the Greek Church. The "textus receptus" as it is called in the West, is a version of the Patriarchal Text. Every manuscript is a little bit different from every other one, and the one that went West has its own little idiosyncracies. Still, it reflects the same textual family tradition as the Patriarchal text. And the people who preserved these texts, continuously, were the ones in the best position to know which ones came from the best originals.
There is also the matter of the Holy Spirit having come into the Greek Church with the apostles, and having never left, even through conquest.
These things are self-evidently obvious. I can think of no valid argument to use any translation of the New Testament in preference to the translation made BY Greek Greeks using the best manuscripts, in the Churches grown by Paul, that survived 400 years of Islamic occupation. So, when having discussions, I use the EOB, and I consider it to be the final authority among conflicting English translations of the New Testament.
And since the New Testament contains all of the law of God that we need to know, it is by far the most important document to know and understand. The Hebrew (or Greek, or Latin, or Aramaic) Old Testament contain a lot of explanatory background information to put what Jesus says in context, but they contain no law for Christians that Christ doesn't repeat (and modify).
So, all this work on the Hebrew is interesting because of what God reveals about Creation, not because knowledge of it is necessary to pass final judgment. If we want to focus on the NECESSARY, then we should be reading the New Testament, and specifically focusing on the words of Christ therein, because he is the one way.
All of that is said to explain what I use overall, in parallel to what you said.
For our purposes with Genesis 1, we will look at the Greek LXX in comparison, and the Latin Vulgate, and some English translations - notably the NKJV. But our root will be the consonants of the Massoretic text, and the underlying grammar revealed by mechanical translation of the Hebrew.
No. You don't need to get a copy of the Hebrew Bible. You don't read Hebrew letters. The Mechanical Translation has the Hebrew of the Leningrad Codex printed right there, and you can always just Google the lines in Hebrew.
And anyway, we're going to have to strip away the vowel pointing (ancient Hebrew had no vowel points, some of the consonants that are silent today were the vowels, and other vowels were simply understood - what SOUND they made, we don't know, and can't) to get to the underlying consonant. Original written Hebrew - the Dead Sea Scroll stuff and older - is just consonants. You can read Hebrew just fine without the vowel points. If you pick up a copy of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz and scan it, you will realize that the entire paper is just consonants. They don't bother to print the vowels, b/c u cn rd Hbrw (& Nglsh) w/t vwls.
(WHY no vowels? Because before 1453 (invention of the printing press) every single written thing, every book, had to be written out by hand, and every copy had to likewise be written out by hand. And half of the letters of any written passage are vowels.)
Now consider:
(WHY n vwls? Bcs bfr 1453 (vntn f th prntng prss) vry sngl wrttn thng, vry bk, hd t b wrttn t by hnd, nd vry cpy hd t lkws b wrttn t by hnd. nd hlf f th lttrs f ny wrttn pssg r vwls.)
It's half as much writing, and you can still understand it or figure it out, especially if you've heard it before. (nd y cn stll ndrstnd t r fgr t t, spclly f y'v hrd t bfr).
When words were carved on rocks, shorthand was used. Old tombstones didn't have Requiescat In Pacem painstakingly carved into them by hand - 17 letters - when R I P would do.
A book like the Bible has 2000 pages in English. Without vowels, it's still about 1000 pages. It takes about an hour to copy down, by hand, a page of scripture. Now take away the pen and use a goose quill or a similar instrument, that you have to sharpen by hand using a knife. And keep having to stop every letter or two to dip more ink. That hour turns into three.
A man working steadily at copying a manuscript for which accuracy mattered could copy perhaps 2 pages per day. Rush, perhaps four - with all sorts of errors and cross outs. (Remember, no two manuscripts are ever identical. The process of copying, by hand, means that each and every one of the 10,000 or so ancient manuscripts of scripture we has is different in some respect from every other one. This means that the ideas that either (a) God transmitted his word down to us with letter perfection, or (b) God NEEDS his message to be transmitted letter perfectly, are both absurd. If either of those things were true, then we have no Scripture at all, unless we simply arbitrarily select the oldest manuscript that we have for any given piece of text and assert that the idiosyncracies of the copyist in THAT manuscript are, in fact, inspired by God. Of course that would mean that Scripture changed a few times every day, as we find this older fragment and that older fragment.
Truth is, God conveyed what he wanted to convey at a level that could be conveyed through handwritten manuscripts that are all a little bit different, and it all moves in a general direction. Punctilious precision in every word is not what is on offer in the Scripture.
Now, some DO assert that Scripture is just exactly that: letter perfect and flawless. Such folks are ignorant of reality. (Not stupid, just ignorant.) They do not realize that there are no two ancient manuscripts that are identical. Scripture isn't letter perfect, and cannot be made so. If God required letter perfection to convey his message, then he failed. If he failed, he's not God.
Since God is God, and scripture is imperfectly conveyed manuscript to manuscript, with no two ever being identical, therefore we know for certain that letter-perfection of Scripture is a false doctrine, and really very silly.
God didn't protect the letter perfection of the conveyance of Scripture, so apparently that degree of precision is not required to understand what God meant to convey to us by Scripture (or else he would have had to have preserved Scripture with letter perfection between copies - and he didn't).
And yet, we're going to be reading Genesis 1 with letter precision. Why? It isn't necessary for salvation, for life after death. That's true. We're going to read it with precision anyway, knowing full well that somewhere in it a letter or two or five or whatever has been garbled by time, because in it we will find an unbelievable complexity and beauty, and as we do, we are inspired. Though marred by sin, we are still made in God's image. Though marred by random accident, the Scripture of Genesis 1 still shows us the grand panorama of creation as God made it, just as a sntence missng some vowls or consnants still conveys its full original meaning.
My point about the amount of time it took to copy a page was this: working assiduously but with care to try to get it right, at the rate of 2 pages per day it took 500 days - two years - for a scribe to copy the Bible (recalling that no work was done on Sundays or other major feast days). And that is all that a man could do - a full-time, sitting job, copying scripture, for two years of his life.
Literacy rates in the Roman Empire probably hovered in the 33% range. In the Middle Ages, it was more like 5%. Literacy was scarce, and it came at a premium in the work force. So, to be absolutely clear, to copy the Bible one single time, so that somebody had a copy of it, required the full time employment of a man who either in the top third, or the top 5%, of the population, for two years. Scribal work was full time employment of necessity. There was no other way to obtain a Bible.
Working this out in contemporary terms, the median pay in America is about $50,000, in a society with 100% literacy. In ancient Roman society, the fact of literacy put a man in the top third. The top 33rd percentile of income in the USA is about $75,000. So, in modern terms, the cost to make one Bible in the Roman Empire was the equivalent of about $150,000 today: full time employment for a man for two years.
Paper is cheap, and it was not invented until the Middle Ages. The two things available to Romans was papyrus, from Egypt (at the modern day equivalent cost of about $1 a page - meaning that the raw materials for a papyrus Bible was about $500, if writing was done front and back). The other writing material available - and the only one available in the middle ages - was parchment or vellum: stretched, dried animal skins, at a cost of about $5 a page in modern terms. Written front an back, the parchment of a 1000 page Bible would cost about $2500.
There were no other things to write upon, and there was no other way to get a Bible other than through copying it. Which means that the cheapest Bible available in the ancient Roman world, in modern terms, would cost $150,500 to make of papyrus...which breaks down and rots. Parchment Bibles last - and one of those would have cost $152,500 in labor and materials...that is, if you could find somebody with two years of his life to spare to copy it, and you could find a complete set of Scriptures. People did not simply lend out objects worth (in our terms) $150,000+.
And of course, price of scarce things goes up with illegality. A Christian Bible in the Roman Empire for the first three hundred years after Christ was the equivalent of 50 kilos of heroin today, in Malaysia where they impose the death sentence for drug trafficking.
Remember, Christianity was treason, punishable by torture and death throughout the Roman Empire, for 300 years. There were no monasteries of people able to devote themselves full time to copying Christian Scriptures, because to copy Christian Scriptures was a crime punishable by crucifixion or by being fed to lions. Christianity was treason.
Remember, two, that Christianity was mostly composed of the lower class, slaves and working class people. Paul made his living as a tentmaker. Several of the apostles were fishermen. Many were former prostitutes. This was not a religion of the rich, or of the literate.
Before Christianity was legalized in the 320s, there were no Christian Bibles. The oldest complete Bibles date from the mid-300s, precisely because it was only after Christianity became legal, and then became the religion of the emperors that monasteries and scriptoria could be set up where the Scriptures were copied. The two oldest complete Bibles: the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, date from this period.
Before the legalization of Christianity, there are only fragments of this book or that letter. There are Jewish Scriptures, from libraries, but Christian Scriptures are fragmentary, mostly on papyrus, and nowhere did they exist in Bible form.
Before legalization, Christianity spread by word of mouth. It was an oral tradition. Paul wrote some letters, and some individuals wrote the Gospels, etc., but just a single letter was a very valuable thing - think of the cost of materials. We are fortunate to be able to read, and to have available to us whole books of Scripture, the entirety of it, that were unavailable to even the Apostles.
As we study the Scriptures, we have to remember that nobody before about 350 AD was able to do that at all - there were no Bibles, only different pieces, carefully hidden if they were Christian.
And then, we have to remember that Bibles cost two years of professional wages until 1453, when the printing press was invented. Something like Protestantism, where people interpreted the Scriptures individually, was impossible for anybody but the super rich before the invention of paper and the printing press...and by then, Christianity was almost a millennium and a half old.
And now we have to remember that what we can do today, immediately point-cite Scriptures and cull the Scriptures with a few keystrokes, was impossible until about the year 2000, with the emergence of the broad Internet.
So, what we are doing here, going letter by letter through Genesis 1, cross referencing different sources in an instant, will get a much more precise view of what is actually IN the Scriptures than it was ever POSSIBLE to get during the first 2000 years of Christianity...which is precisely why you have never seen it before.
It took Christianity 1000 years to invent chapter and verse numbers. It took until the 1800s for Mr. Strong to count out each word and make a Concordance out of the a Bible, and that took him his entire lifetime.
We can learn things from these exercises. But one thing we must not do is fall into bibliolatry - to note that because we CAN glean deep knowledge about God from these symbols and words and structures he used, when seen altogether across the Bible, that does not mean that that is the way God INTENDED for us to obtain Christian or Jewish faith. What we are doing here was physically impossible for anybody to do before the year 2000. It would have taken a lifetime.
Also, the next piece of this, the letter "A" (Aleph/Alef/El) is daunting to write about, because the discussion of it is also the introduction to the pictographs/hieroglyphs...and all of their derivatives (the Greek, Latin and Cyrillic alphabets and, partly, the Egyptian hieroglyphs also, as well as right-to-left versus left-to-right writing, why vowels don't matter much in any language (and why they REALLY don't matter much at all in the Hebrew...also how ancient Hebrew actually HAD vowels, that are still hidden in plain sight in modern Hebrew).
And then there's the theological fact that the first letter of the ancient Hebrew alphabet is the name "God" - "El" - only later called "Aleph" - how the pictograph is the head of a bull, and how that fact worked on the Hebrew mind (and the mind of the others who used the ancient Canaanitic script) to cause them to make their idols to look like oxen (the Golden Calf, for example...why a calf? Why the brazen oxen before the Temple? Because "El" is an ox head...and it means "mighty" or "power"...and it's the first name by which God is known...the letter "A").
There's an exhausting series of relationships that all have to be untangled, because it is in the knotted-up nature of signs, symbols, words and aspects that the real depth of the revelation in Genesis 1, through language at all levels, is delivered.
The human mind recoils at such complexity, and seeks to simplify, and over the course of history it has been the tendency of the human mind to OVER simplify, to make things simpler than they are, that leads to idolatry, which each form of idolatry bearing the scars that show where the idolatry was cut off from the branch of the living tree of truth that used to feed and nourish it.
We'll end up learning what an "Ace" really is, in English.
It exhausts me thinking about even starting in on all of that.
The good news is that the Letter A clears off a great deal of freight, so I'll be glad to be done with it.
Our launch point will be the letter we call "A", which the Greeks called "Alpha" - first letter of the Alphabet.
The Greeks got the letter from the Phonecians, a Canaanitic people from whom the letters seem to originate. Phonecians were ocean traders, so it is not surprising that their pictographic alphabet spread to Minoan Greece (also sea traders), and down Egypt way, and over the Babylon, and became the underlying alphabetic script of most of the world (by way of European colonizers, who themselves got it by way of Roman colonization of Europe, who got it from Greek colonization of southern Italy, who got it from Phonecian traders, who seem to have made it up for trade record purposes).
Aleph...EL...is a topic as big as the universe. Given that it's the name of God, and given what I wrote about about Genesis 1 having had to have been dictated by God, given the details about creation no man could have seen (assuming, of course, that Genesis 1 is true), It's the letter of the alphabet...the Aleph-Beit...that carries the whole weight of the universe. Wherever it appears in Genesis 1 it is the opposite of trivial.
(The other two letters that carry particular divine significance is the letter H - Hey - which is literally a puff of breath. Breath and wind and spirit are the same word in ancient Hebrew, and this is of immense importance, because the H inserted into a word signifies the insertion of a puff of breath in pronunciation, and the infusion of the Holy Breath (which we like to call the "Holy Spirit" - same thing). Two examples: Sarai becomes SaraH, and Abram becomes AbraHam, in both case at the time that God chooses to breath the Holy Breath into them, raising them up from what they were before. H is crucial, because of course God is a spirit, and breath IS spirit.
The other letter is Yod, which is an arm and a pointing hand. This is both a pointer, indicating the direction of things, and also appears (when speaking of God, as God's mighty outstretched arm upon things.
But everything originates with God...with El...with Aleph...the "Alpha" of the "Alpha and Omega"...so we have to start there and do our deepest dive into that letter, which requires a dive into the substance of God himself in his first and most persistent presentation in Scripture.
It's wonderful stuff, stuff that makes you stand up and shout "HEY!" in surprise...and in so doing, explode forth with the breath...that is spirit. Look at the pictograph of Hey. It's a man standing with his arms up, as if in surprise and astonishment. Hey! And that's the actual name of the letter. The most ancient Hebrew is strangely very tied to humans and their gestures, and in those cases where a human figure is presented, there is a spiritual significance. We should not be surprised, for are we not made in the image of God? Would not, then, pictographs that depict us also be depicting aspects of the divine image as well?
What is more divine than spirit? Hey! Hey! HEY!
YHWH...The mighty arm, the spirit, linked to, the spirit.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves!
And before I delve into El - the Alpha of Alpha-Omega - I need some herring and a nap.
Alright, here goes.
If you ever study Hebrew formally in a class, the first thing you will probably do is learn the letters. You will be told that the written letters are consonants, and that the vowels are indicated by "nikkud" - dots dashes and similar marks placed above or below the consonants to tell you what vowel should be pronounced next.
You will find the consonants pretty easy, because even though Hebrew letters look very exotic, they are based on the same ancient Phonecian/Canaanite pictographic system that English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin and Greek derive from.
You may get the impression that the Hebrew letters you are taught are much older forms of the Greek or Roman alphabet, but that is not really true. You probably won't be taught that the "Hebrew" alphabet you're learning isn't Hebrew at all, or Jewish.
The "Hebrew" letters are in fact Babylonian. The Babylonian alphabet also developed originally from the Phonecian/Canaanitic pictographs, but it's letters are much more stylized and elegant than the original pictographs. When the Jews were carted off in captivity to Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, those that were literate wrote in the "Ivrit" script, which was the ancient pictographs, modified by time. But the Jews that came back seventy years - two generations - later, had learned to read and write in Babylon, and used the Babylonian script.
There was a transition period in reconstituted Israel in which both script forms were used, but the educated classes of the returning exiles strongly preferred the Babylonian letters, which they considered to be more refined and artistic than the pictures of the Canaanitic script. Also, the Israelites who had remained in the land and mixed with the other immigrants still used the old Hebrew script (Ivrit). The Samaritans in particular - the great rivals of the Jews - used the Ivrit letters, and still do. The Samaritan Pentateuch is very ancient, and it is written in the old Hebrew pictographs, not the post-exilic Babylonian letters.
So, what we today call Hebrew letters are only Hebrew by adoption. The very ancient coins and seals of the Israelite kings and kings of Judah are written in the Ivrit script, not the modern Hebrew.
There are names for these two scripts, and discussions of them in the Talmud. The original "old Hebrew" letters are Ktav Ivri (literally "written in Ivri [letters]"), while the "new" Hebrew letters, the Babylonian script (which came from Ashur, which is Assyria) is called "Ktav Ashuri" (literally "written in Assyrian [letters]). The Talmud goes on to prefer the Ktav Ashuri, in no small part, no doubt, because the Samaritans used Ktav Ivri.
Only scholars remember this today, but it is important for our study because "Hebrew" (Assyrian) letters are very stylized and beautiful, but their service as pictographs was sacrificed to artistry. The Hebrew letters, which are the original letters in which the Torah was first written, are literally pictures, and those pictures coming in succession convey a story which relates to each word they compose.
When you read an English, or Modern Hebrew, sentence, you see words composed of letters, but the letters are particles, like atoms that form words. There is no meaning intrinsic to each letter.
But in the pictographic Ivri, each letter is ITSELF a word, so a Hebrew word in Ivrit is a series of pictures which ITSELF might be read as a sentence. And in the case of Genesis 1, the pictographs DO, quite startlingly, tell their own story, which runs in parallel to the story that the words convey.
What is more, the pictographs are themselves phonetic - each word naming the letter begins with the sound that the letters convey. And interestingly, the words themselves that are the names of the letters are what is drawn in the pictograph. That's WHY it is called a pictograph.
Example: Bet, the second letter. "Bet" (or Beyt, or Beth - these are the same word, pronounced differently) is the name of the letter, and it starts with the sound "b".
In English, we'd say "Bee". The Hebrews say "Bet" (or "Beyt", or "Beth"). But, unlike English where "Bee" doesn't mean anything in that context, in Hebrew, "Bet" is the word "House" (originally "tent"). The ancient Ivrit pictograph that is called "Bet" is the picture of the floor plan of a Bedouin Tent.
I already mentioned that "Hey", the letter "H", is a pictograph of a man standing with his hands up and legs flexed - a man jumping and shouting "Hey!"
Of course the modern Hebrew Ashuri letters show none of this. They are stylized letters that have been denatured of their original pictographic meaning
The fourth letter of the Hebrew aleph-bet is "dalet". It is the letter "D". The WORD "dalet" in Hebrew means "door". And the pictograph "dalet" is the picture of the triangular door cover of a bedouin tent with its cross rod.
The letter "g" in Hebrew is called "gimel". Originally it was called "gam". You can guess what the pictograph is: a bent leg. (We call actresses' and dancers' legs their "gams" thanks to the Yiddish influence in the New York entertainment industry of old.)
And so it goes.
If you look at the chart Redleghunter posted, you will see two letters that are called "silent". These consonants, Aleph and Ayin (the chart erroneously calls Ayin "Ghah", in the old Hebrew, but Ghah is at the bottom of the chart), in modern Hebrew, have no sound. Rather, they carry the sound of the vowel points placed on them.
In ancient Hebrew, there was no vowel pointing, and these WERE vowels. Vav - originally pronounced "waw" was also a vowel of sorts (W is a vowel, even in English in words like Bryn Mwr). Today, a dot on Vav makes it an "O".
The vowel pointing came out of the Massoretes, and essentially preserves the way that Galilean Jews of 1000 AD pronounced the scriptures. Because it's hard and traditional, and people have a fetish for things that are hard and traditional, learning the vowel pointing...and how in modern Hebrew it all folds down into a few sounds...is one of the hardest things to learn about the Biblical language.
But of course those nikkud were all added circa 1000 AD. The Dead Sea scrolls have no vowel points, and the original Scriptures had only consonants.
Since we're interested in what God revealed, not a Jewish history lesson, we will ignore the vowel points - they didn't exist in the original text - and focus on the text as originally written in the original script.
Right now, we're looking at that original script, and discovering that it had vowels after all. Aleph and Ayin were vowels.
Ayin, you can see from the original picture, was an eye. The modern character reflects just the corner of the eye, as though done up in makeup. The word "ayin" MEANS eye - and is related phonetically to our own word "eye". That big round eye over time turned into our letter "O".
Aleph turned into our letter "A". In Hebrew the vowel points on it are respectively "ah" and "eh". The Peshitta (first and second century Christian translation into Aramaic) has Hebrew characters that give the value of "Ah" to the letter. The Hebrew "elohiym", which we translate as "God" was translated into Aramaic as the word "Alah". "Allah" in Christian Aramaic is the same word as "Elohiym". It's "God".
But that's just telling us the sound. The vowels are not really important - Hebrew calls the letter "Aleph", but frequently assigns the value "eh" to it. "El", "Al" - the vowel sound changes, but the concept remains the same.
The original name of this letter was "El", and El, of course, is the masculine singular name of "God" in Hebrew. (Eloah - "allah" - is the feminine singular; elohiym - the plural - is the way the word is usually written in Scripture). The first constituent letter of the word "el" is the LETTER "el".
"El" consists of two elements, phonetically. The "eh" which is aleph (originally "el"), and the "l" sound. The letter is called "lamed", originally "lam". A "lam" in Hebrew is a shepherd's crook, so that is what the pictograph of the letter is: a curved shepherd's crook.
"El" - Aleph - itself is the head of an ox. Now, the word "el" itself has a meaning. It means "mighty" or "strong". The strongest living thing the Hebrews normally saw was their oxen. And the bull was the strong leader of the oxen. So, the letter "A" - Aleph - El - was the horned head of a bull. It MEANS "mighty one", "strong leader", or "power". In English the traditional word for the leader was "lord". ("Lord" was not originally a religious word but a term from which we derive "leader".)
So, look at that word, the first name given for God: El. Aleph-Lam. A-L. The ox head and the shepherd's crook. The mighty leader and the shepherd's staff of leadership.
What does the pictographic word show? A-L. Leader and staff...the Lord is my Shepherd.
The name "EL", the first name by which we meet God in the Scripture - in every word that has an Aleph in it, is composed of two pictographic letters which, read as a pictographic sentence reads: the lord is my shepherd.
The NAME of God, is "The Lord is my Shepherd".
See how these pictographs work?
Now then, El - the letter Aleph, is embedded within many words including the first word of the Bible. The first time a word comes along that we TRANSLATE as "God" in English, we have the word we write as "elohiym" in Hebrew. It's a plural word. When speaking of the pagan gods or earthly powers, or forces of natural law, we would say "powers". When speaking of the Hebrew God, the Jews say "God", and so do we, when we see this plural word.
But if we look at the pictograph of "elohiym", we have ALHYM
AL - El - the Lord is my shepher.
H - the breath, the spirit (same word)
Y - yod - the strong arm of God
M - the letter mayim - which itself means "water", and which is formed of the root word "mem", which is chaos. It's pictograph is parallel waves of the water.
So, what does the name "Elohiym" MEAN? It's a pictographic sentence:
The lord is my shepherd whose spirit and strong arm is upon the waters of chaos"...which of course is precisely what the WORDS of Genesis 1:1 go on to say.
Right after that first appearance of the word "God" - elohiym - there is a short little Hebrew word that is never translated into English. It is said to be a grammatical device that shows that the word that follows is the direct object of the verb.
The way that Hebrew indicated this pictographically was to take the first and last letter of the Hebrew Alphabet and put them together. In English, this would be AZ. In Greek, it would be Alpha-Omega. In Hebrew, it is "Aleph-Tav".
If we were to translate A-T into Greek, we could have a beginning of Genesis that read like this: "In the beginning God, Alpha-Omega, ..." Interesting that at the END of Scripture God returned to the theme of himself as Alpha and Omega, beginning and end.
In Hebrew, it's not Omega, it is Tav. Aleph-Tav, from El to Tav.
So, in the same sort of way, we might read "In the beginning, the Lord my shepherd whose spirit and mighty arm are upon the waters of chaos, from El to Tav...
But there is one more interesting thing about this Hebrew Tav that should not go unnoticed. Tav doesn't "mean" anything. It's a mark. And the ancient pictograph of Tav is... a cross.
In the beginning the Lord, my shepherd who spirit and arm are upon the waters of chaos, from El to the Cross...
Right about now, on the threads, people who are experts in all of these things would be screaming, paging through lexicons that do not say these things (nobody reads the pictographs). How absurd! They would say. Cultish. Freaky.
Still, that is what the letters of Genesis 1:1 begin to spell out, within those words. Is it a fluke? No. It just keeps on going and going.
But as for me, tonight I will stop.
You tell me if you want me to go on. I'm not going to defend this to anybody. It's what the pictures say.
There are four Hebrew letters whose value is of particular importance in reading Genesis 1.
Let's pause there and note that the particular approach we are taking, going into not just the translation of Genesis 1, but the translation of each word by its letters, is probably not of much use later in the Bible. The psalms of David may well have been written by David, and the maskils of Asaph by Asaph. The Song of Songs is ascribed to Solomon and could very well have been written by him. Nobody really knows, and it doesn't really matter who the author was. What is clear in reading them is that author was human. Words are words, and in human writing they convey human thought and emotion. We don't notice the letters we use when we make words, and if you can imagine composing words so that every letter of every word itself reflected something about the word above it, and every word was a sentence of letters that retold the story - human language isn't that flexible, our minds are not that penetrating. Solomon was allegedly the wisest man who ever lived, for part of his life anyway - he started well (we should remember that his reign ended badly, with thousands of concubines, children all over the place who eventually killed one another, a broke treasury and a kingdom on the verge of rebellion and permanent division - not really very wise at all in the end, was he?) - but if we pick up the Song of Songs, or Proverbs, or Wisdom, all ascribed to Solomon, we would probably not find the letters of the words spelling out sentences that corresponded to the overlying message.
I haven't actually tried this to know for sure. It would be more didactically satisfying to be able to whip out examples to prove it, but there is nowhere I can turn for that and it takes time to do it. Rather than suddenly put a gap in what we are doing here, I will leave an asterisk by this and go back to do it, to give you the proof of the point once we've finished this.
As I wrote earlier, Genesis 1 is different, because it had to have been directly revealed by God. And the elaborate complexity of the way it is written - how TERSE it is, on the surface, but how each word, read as a sentence of pictures, echoes and deepens the meaning, and how each letter, even, further reveals information. It opens up like a fractal.
People cannot write that way, and Genesis is the first part of the very oldest part of Scripture, delivered to people who were escaped slaves living in tents and eating manna. It is the first piece of literature in the Hebrew language, and nothing Shakespeare wrote matches it in its fractal complexity.
That is how you know that it was revealed by God in a word-for-word manner: it reflects a level of complexity that exceeds human ken.
I say all of this as preface, because Genesis 1, being the first piece of Scripture, recounting the history of things before man came to be, had to have come from God (or angels). Sometimes later in Scripture we will find conflicts with what was said elsewhere. For example, one of the Psalms says that God never does anything evil, but God himself, out of his own mouth, told Isaiah that He sends both good and evil. This is a conflict. It is resolvable by noting that Psalms are human prayers TO God, asking for things, supplicating him, and sometimes men express their hopes and fears in ways that hope to ward off. Consider the traditional prayer Christians pray, the Lord's Prayer. Consider one of the lines we have made it say "...and lead us not into temptation". Lead us not into temptation? If we didn't beg God not to lead us into temptation, he might?
Well, Pharaoh DID change his mind after the first few plagues. It was God who kept on hardening his heart so that he could smite Egypt further. Human beings have conditional free will. We HAVE it, but God CAN override it. Scripture says that he did with Pharaoh. Pharaoh was ready to let the Israelites go; it was God who kept hardening Pharaoh's heart again so that he would not. Then he punished Egypt more. In the end, Pharaoh and his whole army charged into the hole in the sea through which the Israelites had fled. Would Pharaoh have done that at all had God not hardened his heart? Did not God "lead Pharaoh into temptation"? Yeah, he did.
God also let Satan kill Job's children and destroy everything he had, and cover him in boils, and all of this was to tempt Job to denounce God.
And God sent the Flood, and plagues, and other calamities, and sends death upon all men. So yes, God DOES send evil upon men. He does it throughout the Bible. So when we read that one line of a prayer, a hymn written to be sung with a harp (for that is what the word "psalm" actually means), that says that God does not send evil, we understand that we are reading the hopeful prayer of a man, and not reality. The man is asking God not to send evil, but no human writer has the authority to direct God to do - or not do - anything. God is God.
With Genesis 1 we will find no conflicts within Scripture. The conflicts we will find will be with our secular science that has developed outside of Scripture. But the truth is that, when we read Genesis 1 carefully in its astonishing detail, we will find that SOME of those conflicts don't really exist. What we will discover in Genesis is that there is no disconnect between God's spirit and the physical world. Rather, we discover that God's presence is shockingly concrete, in ways that we probably won't like when we first see it. We are accustomed to a philosophy of mind/body and material/spirit duality which comes right out of Western philosophy, but which is not what God reveals.
In Genesis 1 we will also find a small dictionary. For it is in this text that God, like a good lawyer, defines the key terms that he will be using throughout the Scriptures.
He defines day, night, sky, land and sea. He defines the word we translate as "soul" concretely. He uses the word "functional" (concretely: "that works"), which we like to translate as "good" (as opposed to "evil", which is really "dysfunctional" (as in "that doesn't work"), but which doesn't appear until Genesis 2). He describes the kinds of moving things - animals - using his own classification system. We translate "birds of the air", "fishes of the sea", etc. But God actually said "flyers", "swarmers", "swimmers" etc. A bat and a butterfly are not "birds", by our usage, but they are "flyers". But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's get back to the task at hand: going through Genesis 1, in order.
To do this properly, there are four particular letters that we need to learn. Two of these letters refer directly to God. One refers to the arm and hand of anybody, including God. And one is a matter of housekeeping, that shows how Hebrew differs from English and makes one properly cautious about English translation.
We've spoken briefly already about El/Aleph, the first letter, which means "power" or "mighty", and which is the first name revealed of God. El, drawn as the head of an ox.
We've also spoken briefly about Hey, the letter H, a picture of a man arms raised in surprise or jubilation. This letter is an exhaled breath to speak, and the Hebrew word breath is the same word as light wind, which is the same word we variously translate as breath, wind or spirit, as it suits us. But in God there is a unity of these things. God's breath IS the spirit, and is also the wind. He breathes life into Adam. And Jesus breathes the Holy Breath - the Holy Spirit - into the Apostles gathered in the Upper Room. At Pentecost they heard a mighty wind. And in Genesis 1, the breath/wind/spirit of God hovers over the dark waters. When God infuses Abram and Sarai with his blessing, he breathes an H into their name, and that H - that infusion of breath/spirit changes them.
God is a spirit, and the spirit is breath, which is wind.
When he breathes life into us, we live. When he removes the breath, we die and fall back to dust.
Western philosophy sees a mind/body duality, and the Western theology that derived from the philosophy sees a body/spirit or spirit/matter duality. But what is breath? Is breath material? In scripture, it is spirit. Uncomfortable, isn't it. God and the material world intersect in the breath. And of course the breath is the most vital of all interactions our bodies have with the world. We can live without clothes. We can live two or three months without food. We can live a week without water. But we're dead in four minutes without breath.
Spirit IS breath. Literally, the word "spirit", in Latin and Greek the word translated as spirit is the word breath. In Hebrew, they are also the same word.
Now, somebody very much in love with his or her Western traditions will obstinately claim that these are two different things. To which I will reply: not in Scripture they are not. Mind/body duality is Greco-Roman philosophy. It is not what Scripture says.
In Scripture, breath and spirit are the same thing. God is MUCH CLOSER to the ancient Hebrew than to us. We actually RESIST the idea that breath is spirit. It renders God...material. And we - based on theology we made up out of Greek and Roman and Western philosophy, harshly separate the physical and the divine, just as we separate material science from theology.
We have free will and can do that. We just need to realize that when we do it, we are running out on what Scripture actually says.
We translate that Adam walked with God "in the breezy part of the day". Of course, God is a spirit, and the word spirit is the word wind. Wind/breath/spirit - one word. Three meanings in English. ONE meaning in Hebrew.
THAT is the mental leap you have to make. To read what God wrote, in Hebrew, you have to read what he wrote literally, to see what it means. And when you do, you will discover, as the early Hebrews knew, that God is MUCH CLOSER than we realize.
Our philosophy and theology have moved him farther and farther away. We don't want wind and breath and spirit to be the same thing. They ARE, but we reject that with every fiber of our beings, because THAT makes God PHYSICALLY PRESENT ALL THE TIME. Which, of course, He IS, and that is the point. Your breath, every breath, is God sustaining you. To kill you, God stops your breath, and just like that, the effects of the last breath - the oxygen carried in your system - are used up, and then you're dead.
So, why was the blood the life? What does the blood carry? The blood is the means by which the spirit - which is the breath of air - is carried to the body. Eat the blood, you are eating the spirit that is dissolved into the blood.
No! No! NO! the Greek screams within us. God is NOT physically manifest like that! NO! This is...heresy! Blasphemy!
But God was not Greek. He revealed himself in Hebrew, and when he came to earth as a man, he spoke to Hebrews in Hebraic language. We get it in translation, which is fine. But if we actually want to UNDERSTAND, we have to realize that Western philosophy is completely useless for understanding God. He didn't reveal himself to the West. He revealed himself to the Hebrews. We learned about him from them. We don't like him as he reveals himself - too CLOSE - God's spirit is our BREATH? The wind blowing on your face is the breath of God? NO!
YES.
That is why the letter "H" is important. When H appears in a word, God is imparting a breath into it. And the breath of God IS the Holy Spirit. There is the Father, the Son and the Holy Breath.
Notice how the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, unwittingly, divided over the matter of this Holy Breath. They tangled it all up in Greek philosophy. Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son, or just the Father? Does it matter? It mattered enough to divide Christendom and keep it divided. Truth is, probably nobody in the debate then or now realized that the fundamental question here is really whether or not Jesus, the Son, has breath of his own - is he an originator of breath/spirit, or is the spirit that proceeds out of him itself from the Father.
When he was alive, the answer to that was obvious. Notice how he died: he cried out: Father, into your hands I commend my breath. (Pneuma - spirit - is the word "breath" in Greek). And then what did he do? He expired. Ex-spired. The breath left him (spiritus in Latin is also breath).
At Pentecost the Holy Breath came roaring over them all, a mighty wind indeed.
Words are spoken sounds produced by breath. It is not so terribly surprising, then, to see God called "the Word".
And yet, it is very surprising indeed. So surprising, when we see it, and when we realize that to appreciate the closeness of God we need only take a breath, that we might exclaim Hey! Just like the guy jumping for joy in the pictogram for the letter H.
Yod is the arm and hand...of a man, or of God. In Genesis, we will see the mighty arm of God whose hand is upon the waters.
Reminds me of the Navy Hymn: "Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave, who bids the mighty ocean deep its own appointed limits keep - O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea."
Some of this is old ground, a groove we already cut. He're we've cut it deeper.
I want to go on now about Vav, or Waw, and about B, V, punctuation and "and" (but not "but"). But this is going long so I will cut it short until next time.
Review:
A - Aleph, Alpha, the first letter, was originally "El", which is the masculine singular of the name by which God was first known to many. "El" as a word means "mighty one" or "power". It need not refer specifically to THE mighty one - God - though it is the word "God". One of the reasons modern Hebrew imported the Greek word "energia" for power and energy is because the native Hebrew word for power is "el"...and that is a name of God. By importing a word, the modern Hebrew has obscured the fact that the first name of God is POWER or MIGHT. It is a descriptor of God, but also of anything that has power.
The strongest animal on the middle eastern farm was the ox. El - Aleph - as a pictograph is the head of an ox...which is why, when the Israelites insisted on trying to depict their God with an idol, they made a golden calf.
H - Hey. It is a pictograph of a man shouting Hey! H is an imparted puff of breath. Breath, spirit and wind are one word.
Yod - an arm and a hand in the pictograph.
Vav, or Waw...next time.
If there is a next time. If your Greek philosophy gets the better of you, you might decide you've had enough. Breath is spirit, and spirit is breath? How ABSURD?
It's what the scripture actually says.
And now, on to Waw, or Vav as it is called today.
Today, it's a silent letter, like Aleph (which USED TO BE "ah" or "el", but today is silent and takes vowel points - for reasons I suppose we can discuss in a minute), or Ayin (which became "O" in our world, because of its shape - it used to be an eye. You see that eye in Egyptian hieroglyphs? That's Ayin. Egyptian hieroglyphs also derived from the ancient Phoenecian-Canaanitic script).
Point of order - why were the Phoenecians first with a pictographic script that had dual-purpose as sound-carrying letters? Probably because they were the first sea traders.
The Egyptians and Mesopotamians were settled empires, settled on fertile rivers. The Mesopotamians were the first to develop a writing of sorts, but it was cuneiform marks on clay. Its purpose was agricultural record-keeping, not novel-writing. But the Phoenicians sit on that rather barren coast of northern Canaan, in what is today Lebanon. The rest of the Canaanites were busy herding sheep and goats with some oxen, and eventually scratching out a living in subsistence farming from rain-watered uplands that have no river. The Jordan River valley is fertile, which is why Jericho was there and is the oldest known place of continuous settled agriculture in the world. The plain further south was also very fertile...around Sodom and Gomorrah. It isn't anymore, since God overturned it all and the Sodium (salt) and bitumen dried it all out.
The Phoenicians sit on drier uplands: no rivers, forests, which make grazing difficult but which make shipbuilding easier, and they have the natural inlet of Tyre, which is a phenomenal natural port. So they fished, and built boats and traded up and down the coast. And soon, they were able to make a living carrying things between empires. Traders need a way to record transactions, and that is why the script probably came to be. It was based on pictures of simple things, and phonetically-based, which made it transferrable. It spread to the rest of Canaan overland, and the sea-based trade focus of Phoenicia made it a very different place from the rest of Canaan (and therefore NOT part of the lands that God would eventually allot to the Israelites). The first settled Greeks were the Minoans, of Crete. To GET TO Crete they had to ride boats. Greece is a series of islands. The Greeks were not traders, at first, they were fishermen, and the Aegean with all of those islands and alternating shallows and deeps is a fisherman's paradise in a way that the stark Levantine coast is not. The Phoenician traders sailed in and met the Greeks, and traded with them, not the reverse. That's why the Greeks ended up with the Phoenician script. There is no native Greek alphabet. It's CALLED the alphabet because of Aleph-Bet, the first two letters of the Phoenician/Canaanitic alphabet.
But the Greeks didn't have much to write about until the 5th Century BC, when Homer's oral epics began to be written, by altogether different Greeks (the Minoans faded from the scene 700 years before, probably as the result of a volcanic explosion, of Thera, and a tsunami that devastated the Aegean coast...which of course is precisely where the settlements of fishing people would be).
This gap in time explains the odd fact that the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean is the boundary line between left-right writing, and right-left writing. All of Europe uses left-to-right writing, in three alphabets (Greek, Latin and Cyrillic). The latter two were derived from the Greek, and the Greek came from the Phoenicians. And yet Hebrew, and ancient Coptic (Egyptian), and Aramaean (the Mesopotamian writing systems of Assyria and Babylon) are all written right-to-left.
Why?
Probably because of writing materials.
Writing materials are important. Remember how expensive and hard it was to get just the materials to write with, and then find somebody who could read and write willing to invest two years of his life, minimum, to copy out the Bible (that is, assuming that all of the various scrolls and books of the Bible could be assembled in one place). It wasn't done until after Christianity was legal and state sponsored by the Roman Empire. Only then could the resources be gathered and professional scribes be devoted to openly and safely copying out whole Bibles. The Bible didn't exist as a single book before the mid-300s AD, and this was because of COST, as well as danger.
Now go way back, further into time, to 1500 BC, or 1000 BC. We have nothing in parchment from that time, not even from Egyptian tombs. The Egytians had papyrus plants growing in their Nile, but they weren't turning it into papyrus "paper" until much later. Likewise, parchment is not found then either. Bills of sale and the like were scratched into clay, and anything important was carved into stone. So, that was what writing was for: carving into stone, or pressing into clay for temporary use.
Now, consider the process of carving words into stone. You take a chisel in one hand, and a hammer or mallet into the other. Do it by imagination right now. Most human beings are right-hand dominant because the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the left brain is the language processor. Language is of primordial use to human beings from youth, and so there is a general tendency for the left side of the human brain to be more heavily stimulated from within the womb onward, and for the left brain, through use, to become dominant, thereby causing the overwhelming majority of people to be right-handed.
Notice your imaginary hammer and chisel. You hold the chisel in your left hand, and with your right hand you wield the hammer. This was true of all societies that learned to write in the age of stone-carving, because of the natural right handedness of people.
Now consider carving the different letters in a word with hammer and chisel. Look what happens if you go left to right. Your hand holding the chisel covers the letter you've just carved. If you go right-to-left, you can see the letters and pictures you've just carved, and can easily carve the next one in line. If people were naturally left-handed, they would pick up the hammer and chisel with the other hand and naturally go the other way.
But now fast forward 1000 years, to Greece. The Greeks have advanced to the point that they are able to write using the Phoenician characters, and have reached the level of development that they actually have something to write about. They have other tools that are available now - parchment and ink.
Look what happens if you try to write right-to-left using ink and parchment. You hold the pen in your right hand, dip it in the ink, and then drag your hand as you write THROUGH the ink you've just written, smearing everything into a mess. But if you drag your right hand rightward, you don't drag your hand through the letters you've just written, and - just as with hammer and chisel - you can SEE what you just wrote so you can keep the letters in line. The TOOLS of writing determined the direction of the original written languages. When the Middle East and Egypt learned writing, they were writing on stone. When the Greeks got around to adopting it, they were writing with ink and parchment. Everybody West of Greece learned the modern writing system from the Greeks (yes, the Irish had some sort of writing system, but it was blotted out completely by the ease of the Latin alphabet). So, the West writes left to right, because they became literate in the age of ink, but the Middle East writes right to left because they developed writing in the age of stone. The mechanical medium of writing determined its direction.
Of course, people have a natural bent for mysticism, and also for thinking every aspect of their own culture is absolutely superior, so the sages over the years have noted the difference between Hebrew right-left writing, and Western left-right. The Talmud is full of imprecations against things that are taken with the left hand or from the left. (This taboo of the left hand is quasi-universal to older cultures, for an old and obvious reason: before the age of toilet people, people had to use something, and the non-dominant hand was, and still is, the "something", so there is more than superstition involved in left-hand aversion among peoples of old. It was alarming to see somebody reach into the common food pot with his left hand in an era with neither Charmin nor running water. Had anybody really thought about it, left handers shake hands with their non-dominant hand...but I am REALLY digressing this time, so back to the side path!) You will find superstition attached to writing directions. You'll find superstition attached to everything. Understanding the mechanical reason WHY writing developed among men in the directions it did, and WHY right-handed-ism is biologically preferred by the human allows that sort of superstition to be greeted with a grin and then ignored.
That was a long point of order.
We still didn't get to Vav/Waw. Next time I shall cut right to the chase. I promise.
Vav/Waw.
Finally.
It's a small letter, a sort of up and down stroke. Today, it is a letter that is given a dot to make the sound "O", or undotted, a "v'" sound which is said to mean "and".
Anciently, it was a a letter that may have had a "U" or "W" sound. Some speculate that "David" was originally pronounced "Dawid". It's impossible to know what anything sounded like 3000 years ago. There are no tape recordings.
Original Hebrew had no vowel points (it did have vowels, but how they sounded is unknown). The Massoretes of circa 1000 AD, who are the source of the current text used by Jewish and Christian scholars alike (the Massoretic Text) loaded their text with vowel pointing to demonstrate how it should have sounded...in their opinion of course.
But consider: the Massoretes were writing in Galilee. Even at the time of Christ, BEFORE the Romans destroyed Israel in two wars and scattered the people and moved in new ones, BEFORE the Muslim conquest of the 700s with all that came in train of that, in Biblical times the Galilean Jews had a pronounced accent. It was by his Galilean accent that people immediately recognized Peter to be with Jesus' party when Peter was trying to conceal his origins in the courtyard while the Sanhedrin tried Jesus.
If in circa 33 AD the Galileans already had a distinct accent, we cannot expect that 1000 years and three calamitous foreign invasions brought the pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew - a dead language by 1000 - closer to whatever it sounded like 2800 years before that.
Now, there are those (mostly Hasidic Jews) who will tell you that the vowel pointing itself was indicated by God, divinely inspired. And there are those who will tell you that the original English translation of 1611, the so-called "Authorized" or "King James" version, is a new revelation of the Scriptures into English. Indeed, some have taken that thought to it's logical conclusion and assert that one can tell the "correct" ancient manuscript by looking at that which is closest to the English, because God inspired the English. To be charitable, this doesn't seem likely. The KJV translators themselves left notes acknowledging the inevitable errors in their work. THEY did not think they were inspired by God to make a perfect translation - something they did not believe could be done - but to make a good translation that already existed, better.
We don't know what the Massoretes thought they were doing, because we only have a few of their Bible manuscripts. We can speculate all we like, and until 1949 it was debated as to whether the vowel points were part of the ancient Hebrew manuscripts.
Then the caves at Qumran gave up their thousands of pages of Hebrew scripture and other writing, some of it in Old Hebrew Ktav Ivri letters, most of it in Ktav Asshuri letters. None of it pointed. So no, Hebrew at the time of Christ and before did not have vowel points. THAT we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls and from places like the Geniza of Alexandria. (Hebrew tradition is that anything with the name of God YHWH written in it must not be destroyed. So when manuscripts became, or become, unusable, devout Jews do not dispose of them, but place them in a "scripture graveyard", a tomb of sorts, called a "genizah". One will comb the ancient genizahs in vain for vowel-pointed Hebrew. It was an innovation of the Massoretes, which preserves THEIR pronunciation. How did MOSES sound when he spoke or wrote the words of the Torah? Who knows? He was raised and educated in the court of an Egyptian princess. He probably had a thick Egyptian accent.
By the way, have you ever wondered what the Jews think that Isaiah's prophesied "light from Galilee" is? Obviously they don't think it was Jesus. Many Jewish scholars have opined that it was the work of the Massoretes, whose work in Tiberias of the Galilee preserved the Jewish Scriptures. That, they think, is the light that came from Galilee. Go figure.
All of that to say that whether the letter in David's name was a Waw, and his name pronounced "Dawid", or a Vav, and his name pronounced "David" as we do today, is unknown and unknowable. And it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter but it is interesting, because there is a pair of vowel and consonant shifts concerning U and V, and also B and V, that occur in many languages.
There is an expression in Spanish that asks "Bay de baca o bay de burro?" That's how it is pronounced. If you saw it written it would be "V de vaca o b de burro?" Is it the "V" of "vaca" (cow) or the "B" of "burro" (donkey).
In English this seems silly - v is vee and b is bee. But in Castilian Spanish and throughout the Vasque country (pronounced Basque), B and V are both pronounced as a "B". So, is it "B" of vaca, or "B" of burro is a legitimate question.
In Russian also, an off feature is that the letter written as "B" in Cyrillic is pronounced "V". The capital city, "Moskva", is "Mockba" ("c" is pronounced "s", and "b" is pronounced "v"). The port of the Crimea is "Cebactopol", pronounced "Sevastopol".
B and V are both bilabial fricatives. They are formed by closing the airstream with the lips. They are the same letter. The difference is that the B is formed by closing the lips together. The V is formed by pressing the upper teeth against the lower lips (and the Spanish "V de vaca" is classically formed by doing both teeth and lips at the same time, while "B de burro" has no teeth in it. This was classical. One in fifty Spaniards know that, and one in a hundred Latinos. And in places like Argentina, where the people mostly came from Italy, they pronounce the V's like V and the B's like B. Galileans all!
Modern Hebrew came out of people from Europe, mostly Eastern Europe, where B's turn into V (e.g. Sebastopol). Unsuprisingly, the modern Hebrew "V" is actually formed by TWO consonants: the B (Bet) with a dot inside it becomes "Vet", and also the Waw becomes Vav. So, there are two V's in Modern Hebrew...and there may have been none in ancient Hebrew at all. Beit or Bet was just that: Bet/Beyt/Beth - the picture of the floor plan of a tent, and Waw or Vav.
Just because TODAY Hebrew skews to "V" does not mean that it was pronounced that way back them. It doesn't matter for meaning, but it DOES matter when one reads transliterated Hebrew. When Hebrew is written into English, some writers use Bs, some use Vs for Bet, most use "v'" and "ve" for Vav/Waw. And the vowels are pronounced differently depending on the culture (Ashkenazim sound like Germans, Separdim sound like Arabs). Which is RIGHT? Well, which is right, New York English, Tennessee English, Texas English, Jamaican English, London English, Scots English, Irish English, Australian English, etc.? They're all right. There is no correct pronunciation in English. Or in Hebrew. But when Hebrew is written out in Roman letters, the difference in pronunciation can cause the English letters written to GREATLY differ.
Which is why, if one is going to read the pictographs of Genesis, one has to look at the Hebrew consonants in Hebrew - because if one looks at the English, a B could be a V, or vice versa, and a v could be a B or a Waw/Vav. Only by looking at the Hebrew can one know.
Back to Waw/Vav itself. It's a simple letter. Used to be a vowel in very ancient Hebrew. The pictograph is of a tent peg, a "waw" or "vav". So, this letter serves two functions: it conveys a sound, but more importantly, it serves as a conjunction, linking the text that precedes it to the text that follows. Bedouin tents have loops of overlapping cloth at their ends (there is an example of his this works detailed in Exodus in he description of the construction design of the tabernacle). The peg that fits through them and is driven into the ground to hold the tent upright is a waw/vav - a tent peg.
It's generic use as a conjunction means "and" - it links one thing to the next, like a tent peg.
We should talk about ancient Hebrew capitals and small letters. There are none, just one shape and size. Which means that one reads the word "elohiym" - "powers", it may be referring to earthly powers. It may be referring to judges. It may be referring to foreign gods, or it may be referring to God. The only way to know is by context, because there is no capitalization of "God" in Hebrew. We see a big distinction between "god" and "God". In Hebrew, this distinction is impossible. There is only one form of letter. There is no such thing as capitalization to help the reader.
Likewise, ancient Hebrew has no punctuation, and no visible paragraphs as such. When you read Genesis, you see that it begins, and then sentence after sentence begins with "And". What this means is that there was a Waw/Vav at the beginning of the word, which links the ideas that follow to the ones before. We cannot stand a page long run-on, but the Hebrew preserves the unity of the idea, that the next thing is linked to the previous thing, by "Ve" or "V'" (W') - a Waw/Vav.
Did this serve as a sort of paragraph marker, that all of the sentences that are linked with "Vav" are to be comprehended as a continuous thought? Sure.
However there is one translation of Vav/Waw that is an abuse of the letter. It's a tent peg, something that links two things together. It is NOT a disjunctive.
Let me ask you: can you think of a single instance in English - even one - where you can substitute "but" in a sentence for "and" without changing the meaning? You can't. "And" is a conjuction, but "But" is a disjunctive conjunction, something that tells you that the text breaks and that the next thought is NOT in continuation from what came before.
Vav/Waw is a tent peg, it shows linkage. All of those "ands" in the text are Vavs. Hebrew has words for the disjunctive. It has "buts" and "howevers", "howbeits" and "althoughs". But when VAV/WAW is translated as a "but", the translator has erred just as surely as if somebody substituted "but" for "and" in an English sentence.
This happens very rarely in Scripture translation, which is why it is interesting when it does. If you look at the Hebrew for the various "buts", "howevers" and "althoughs", you will see different Hebrew words. Those words are almost never "Vav", but in Genesis there is one case where the "Vav" has been translated into English wrongly as a "but", and that has an effect on theology, so we need to understand what Vav is, and understand that it is a linking peg, and never a "but". "But" is an incorrect translation of Vav.
The first time it happens doesn't really make a difference. It just makes the sentence sound more friendly. It occurs in the description before the flood. God decides to destroy all life. And the the text reads "But Noah found favor with God." That "but" there is not in the text. The text reads "And" - Waw. We can see why the translator into English really wanted a "but" there. The Hebrew "and" here is linking Noah with what came before - it is a new sentence, part of the story. The English wants a disjunctive, to make the point that Noah WON'T be drowned. Leaving the "and" there would just make the writing look flat, like a run-on sentence. But of course that's what the Hebrew Bible is - a set of giant run-on sentences, with Waw/Vav linking the ideas.
The translator's temptation to insert "But" there for a Vav/Waw for the first time in the Scripture translation is forgivable, because it doesn't make any theological difference.
The very next time it happens, though, is important theologically, because it mars Scripture and reverses its sense. It happens in Abraham's discussion of his sons, Ishmael and Isaac, with God. In the Scripture, God says that Ishmael will be a great nation, and that God's covenant is (also) with Isaac (the second born).
The translators took that AND and turned it into a BUT. "Ishmael will be a great nation, BUT my covenant is with Isaac." The reader, seeing this, thinks that there is no covenant with Ishmael, but that is untrue. Twice God promised Hagar that Ishmael would live and would be the father of great nations. God promised Abraham that too, when the effects of his polygamy had led to such poisonous relationships between Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael that Sarah was demanding that they be pushed out of the camp (abandoned in the desert - essentially a death sentence). Abraham was greatly troubled by this, and there is no indication that he would actually do it, but for the fact that an angel appeared to him and told him to go ahead and do it, and not to worry about Ishmael, for God would make of him a great nation.
Inserting that "BUT" in there implies that God rejected Ishmael and favored Isaac. But that is not what the Scripture says. The Scripture says "AND", not "but". Why do the translators put the "but" in there? In part Jewish tradition and theology, and in part Christian theology also, that Isaac is the chosen one, and Ishmael is rejected.
This is a lie. God made covenants with Hagar regarding Ishmael, and he also made them with Abraham regarding Ishmael. That was why Abraham was willing to send his son and Hagar out into the desert with just bread and a skin of water: God promised him that He would provide (and he did). Isaac, as the second son, would not have gotten the same portion as Ishmael. But instead, Ishmael was given a great portion, many kings, AND Isaac was also given a portion. This is not a Cain/Abel or Jacob/Esau situation. It is TWO brothers, both of a blessed man, both heirs to promises of God. Some of the promises overlapped. Because of tension within Abraham's family, due to polygamy, God allowed the brothers to be parted, BOTH heirs to covenantal promises.
When the simple word "And", which is Scripture, is stripped out and the word "But" is put in there instead, Scripture changes, the meaning changes, and the stories that are spun from it change. I have read many sermons and speeches framing it as Isaac, son of the covenant, versus Ishmael, son of perdition.
This is ignorant. God made two covenants specifically regarding Ishmael, and he only did this because the boy and his mother were twice put at peril of their lives in the desert due to the problems of polygamy and the anger of the number one wife, Sarai/Sarah. He didn't make any specifically regarding Isaac - Isaac, as Ishmael before him was an heir to the promise of Abraham.
That promise was that Abraham's circumcised heirs would live in that land and be as numerous as the stars if one could count them. Ishmael was circumcised, as was Isaac. Ishmael was Abraham's son. Ishmael shared in the promise. That word is an AND, not a "But". Vav/Waw is AND, it is not "but".
Inserting "but" in there dramatically changes Scripture. But when you look at the Hebrew, you see that it is and, not but. And once you know that, you re-read it, and realize that there is no condemnation of Ishmael in that text.
We're not looking at that part of Genesis, but the point is an important one. We must read Scripture exactly as it is written. We must NOT change it around to suit what we think is right, or what we understand.
It says what it says, and when it says "Waw/Vav", that is a tent peg of linkage that means AND. Not "But". Not ever. "And" and "but" do opposite things. When God wants to say "but", he says it. He does not say "but" with "and". When Scripture is translated to make him do so, it is because foolish men are allowing their traditions and politics to override Scripture.
Fortunately the Scripture survives in Hebrew, so we can see these errors and fix them.
So, now we're on the cusp of being able to start reading Genesis 1.
So far we have learned five letters:
El/Aleph - the picture of an ox head - El means "Power" or "Might", and the picture signifies "Mighty One" or "leader". The deity is the mightiest one, so "El" - Power - is the first attribution of God, and the first name by which God is known. We will transcribe Aleph into screen characters as the letter A.
"A" as in "Ace". Did you know that "Ace" is the old English and old Norse singular for "god". The plural was "Aesir". "God" is an old English/Old Norse word, it's the word "good", but the pagan Norse did not call the old gods (Odin, Thor, Freya, Loki, etc.) "gods", they called them Aesir. "God" singular was first applied to the Christian god and to Jesus. The difference, in the eyes of the North, between their aesir and the Christian aesir (the Christian missionaries would have preferred "ace", thinking of the Trinity as being three in one, but the Norse, standing outside of that belief, would have seen a plural, aesir, until they converted) is that the Christian aesir were mild and not bloody. No human sacrifice for the Christians - they ate bread and wine and called it body and blood. When the Norse converted, it simply wouldn't do to call the Trinity another Ace, because the Christian Ace was DIFFERENT from the other aces (aesir). The qualititative difference was that the Christian Ace was the the GOOD one. So they didn't call the Trinity, or Jesus, or the Father, "Ace", they simply called it/him/them "The GOOD", which was the word "god" in Old Norse. So, from the beginning of Christianity in the Germanic North, the Mighty One - El Elyon - and he who is - YHWH - has not been called by his attribute of POWER, like among the Hebrews, and the Greeks and Romans, but by his GOODNESS.
The instinct among men is to identify with power. El, power, is the first attribute noted of the Hebrew Ace, the first name by which he was known, instinctively.
The Greeks called their aesir "theos". We translate this as "gods", but a better translation would be "aesir", because theos refers to MIGHT and authority, not goodness.
The Latin "deus", whence we get the word "deity", is simply the Greek word "theos" pronounced with a heavy tongue. Think of how Midwesterners pronounce the word "mitten". They don't say "Mitt-ten". They say "Mid-dn" The written "t" is really pronounced as a "d" "Deus" is "Theos" pronounced like a Midwesterner - same word, referring to might and authority. Authority impresses men.
And "ace" and "aesir"? It's authority, might, power.
If we remember that all of these cultures words for the deity is "power" and that our only English with "god" is the odd man out, we realize that we are dealing with ATTRIBUTES of the deity - authority, might...and goodness.
So, in ENGLISH it is actually true when we say "There is only one God", even if the various pantheons were TRUE. Because while Loki and Ares had MIGHT (if they really existed), they were not GOOD. The distinctive thing about the Christian Ace that made him DIFFERENT is that he is GOOD.
I will be using the word "Ace" or "Aesir", or more often, simply Power, and not the word "God", when I write El, because God is the word "good", and that is not what the Hebrew is talking about. Indeed, it is a dramatic point that Jesus makes later in Scripture, speaking of the Father's uniqueness, when he asks "Why do you call me good? There is none good but the Ace." Now, we would translate "There is none good but God", but this is a tautology. Jesus uses the word "theos", which is to say "El" or "Elohiym" in Hebrew, or the word "Ace" in older English. Our English use has blotted out the differentiation between "goodness" and "power" by using the word "God", but we cannot follow this English pattern if we want to understand Hebrew, because the goodness of the deity, the UNIQUE goodness of the deity, was not revealed until Jesus...and we're reading Genesis.
A - El - is a very fraught letter!
The second letter we've learned is Bet, "B". It means "house" or "tent" (a tent WAS the original form of house), and it is used as a prefix to mean "in" or "within". The pictograph shows from above the inside floor plan of a bedouin tent, with its two parts, the inner sanctum, where the women lived, and then the longer hall twisting towards the front door, where the men lived.
We learned Gimel, the letter "G". Gimel is the word camel, but the older name of this letter was ""gam", which is "leg", and the picture is of a leg.
We learned Dalet, originally "Dal", which is the word "door", and see that the pictograph is the triangular cloth that hun in a bedouin tent door.
A-B-G-D
Aleph-Bet-Gimel-Dalet
Alpha-Beta-Gamma-Delta.
These are the first four letters, words and pictographs of the Hebrew aleph-beit AND the Greek. Thanks to pronunciation, the Latin "C" became a "k" sound instead of the original "g". The Latins got their alphabet from the Greeks, but modified it to the sounds of Latin. The Greeks got theirs from the Phoenicians, who were Canaanites from whom the Hebrews also got it.
We also learned the letter Hey - H - the picture of a man standing with his arms up shouting Hey! Hallelujah! H is a puff of breath, and we learned that the Hebrew word breath is the same as the word for light wind and spirit: ruach. Or rather, ruach means all of those things, but they're not different things in the Hebrew mind. The wind is the breath of El on your face, same thing as the breath you breathe out. These are not DIFFERENT things, they are the same thing, from the same ultimate source. It's a little hard to see that perspective, but it's not THAT hard, and if you resist it, you cannot understand Genesis, so don't resist it.
We learned Yod - "Y" - which means "arm", and which is the picture of an extended arm and hand.
We learned Tav - "T" - last letter of the alphabet, and we learned that it doesn't mean anything. Rather, it IS a mark, consisting of a cross in this form: "t", but without the little serif tail that the computer puts on it. Just a straight up and down cross.
And we spent a whole page on Waw/Vav - which with a dot on it today is "O", and without a dot is "V", today, but which was originally the vowel "u". Its pictograph is a tent peg, and it signifies that the thing before and the thing next are linked together.
It means "and". But it doesn't mean "but" and theological error arises when it is translated as "but". A tent peg links. A tent wall divides. Waw is a tent peg.
I personally prefer to pronounce "Vav", because Waw (or Uau, as in Luau) is harder to pronounce, but I use "Waw" as the Hebrew, because I associate it with the only organized sound that SETI ever hears from 40 years listening to space: the undulating "Waw-Waw-waw-waw" of open frequency energy. If there is actually a voice of God ringing through the universe, it's audible to us as Waw-waw-waw-waw, and given that Waw/Vav is a tent peg linking things, and God is the common creator of all things, I'll take my cue from the sky and call the letter "Waw"...because it makes me feel clever to do so. Who knows what the original pronunciation was (and what difference does it make).
So, so far we have learned A,B,G,D,H,Y,T and U.
We're almost ready to take on the first word of Scripture: Bereshit. Or B'reshyt. Or various other pronunciations. We have to learn "Sh" and "R" before we start.
It is strange to think that the whole Bible starts with a word that, read direct in English, would come out as "Bear [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]". Actually, it's funny. To me. Others give me stern looks.
(This is why I really should not be a history teacher...or a Sunday school teacher for that matter.)
So, to return to Hebrew, we're going to start with just the first word of Genesis 1:1.
It is rendered "bereshiyt", or "bereshit", or "b'reishiyt", or "b'reshit", or other variants when transcriped into English - demonstrating the point that vowels don't matter.
There were no apostrophes or other punctuation in the ancient Hebrew - just the pictographs.
So, the word was BRAShYT. 6 letters.
We've already learned B, A, Y and T - Bet, El, Yod and Tav - Tent, God/Power, Arm and Cross.
We have two letters left to learn.
The first is R. "R" is "resh". It's a picture of a head, and the word "resh" or "reish" means "head". The pictograph signals head, top, summit.
The second is Sh. Sh is a letter, making the sound sh in English. Today, this same letter in Hebrew can be "s", depending where the dot is, but there is another Hebrew letter "samech", which is a pure "s". The difference between "sh" and "s" has always been problematic for some people, with different tribes even in Israel pronouncing it differently. In the book of Judges, when the Gileadites and Ephraimites fight, Jephthah uses this difference as a mean to snare the retreating Ephraimites at the river forces, demanding they pronounce the word "shibboleth". In Gilead, they pronounced this "sh", shibboleth - the Sh sound. In Ephraim, they pronounced it with the pure "s" - sibboleth. Sibboleth got you killed.
To confuse matters to the modern learner of Hebrew, the pure sounded letter "s", samech, competes with the letter Sh - because Sh - the letter "sin" or "shin", is ALSO pronounced "s" as well as "sh".
Ugh. Fortunately, pronunciation of the Hebrew isn't key to understanding it, but the getting the letters right IS, if we're going to read the pictographs.
The letter in "Breshiyt" is Shin/Sin, not Samech.
Shin/Sin is a pictograph of two front teeth side by side. It signifies dividing things, cutting them in two.
Today's Hebrew "Sin/Shin" still looks like that, sort of, except that instead of being two wide square teeth, today's letter (and some imagination) looks like point rat teeth.
So, there we have it. All of the pictographs of the first word of Scripture: B-R-A-Sh-Y-T. BRAShYT.
"Bereshit".
What is the surface meaning of that word?
Open up your Bible and read "In the beginning...". Open up another Bible "When God began to..." WHOA! Look at several different translations, you will see the first sentence translated differently time and again. Is one "formal equivalence" and the other "dynamic equivalence"? No. The problem is the "bereshiyt" isn't really a word that is used at all, so we have a barely-attested word that is the first thing in Scripture.
For our next, you are invited to go pull a bunch of Genesis 1's out of various Bibles and put them down in a list. Look how different they are.
That tells you something.
Which one is right? Almost all of them are somewhat right. They're close. But none of them captures the essence. The problem lies in the verbs (as we discussed before). It also lies in prepositions ("in" versus "at"). And finally, most of all it lies in the different concepts of the word "head".
So do that little exercise for me. God pull the open sentences, Genesis 1:1, from five different bibles and lay them out in column.
That will be our starting point next time.
By this exercise, I was hoping that you'd both Google it and get the experience of going onto an online site that has dozens, or a hundred, of different translations all at your fingertips. Maybe you both already know that's out there, but I didn't until more recently.
And then I was hoping you would be surprised by seeing for yourself just how DIFFERENT the translations are of that first line.
I was going to use that as a teachable moment, to make the point that the translation of some Hebrew words is HARD, because they are poorly attested (only appearing once or twice in all of Scripture), and because sometimes they are the word that SETS the context of what follows. You can't read for context when the word that provides the context is the thing you're trying to interpret.
I would then stack up the translations that had the same "traditional" language ("In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.", and show how that tradition came, in English, from Tyndale. And then I'd how Tyndale got that from the Latin Vulgate in which he was educated in the Bible. I'd show how the Latin Vulgate and Greek Septuaging resemble each other, but how both the Latin and the Greek use an open and vague word that we (sometimes) translate as "beginning".
Then I'd show other influential translations. I would note, for example, that the Jewish standard Jewish Publication Society translation of the Torah does NOT begin with "In the beginning..." at all, but rather, with "When God began to...".
And I would show you other translations that do the same thing.
Next, I would raise the question of "dynamic equivalent" translation versus "formal equivalent" translation, but then I would torpedo the concept as a mental crutch and point out that the differences in translation in this care neither dynamic nor formal equivalence. The PROBLEM is that the first word in Genesis is not really translatable. It's not really a word, as such.
Probably the BEST formal AND dynamically equivalent translation would be to take the first word "BRAShYT", and set it apart at the top of the first page and translate it as "CAPITULO", or "PREFACE", and then start translating the text with the second word "BRA", which repeats the first half of the first word.
There has been a lot of discussion of these things over the years, and one will find that one cannot come to a proper decision, because there's no real basis of authority on which to do it. Some of the translations provide THREE alternatives for reading the first line.
Now, this is a temptation for some Christians whose intent may be good but whose reasoning skills are deficient. I've read the assertion that "God intended to Bible to be read by all" (he did? It never says that in the Bible. In fact, the Bible never refers to the Bible as a whole as such at all, only to certain writings within it), and that "therefore" (a leap of logic - really a leap of faith, but with the faith invested in the wrong things), God made sure that we have accurate translations."
The folks who take that approach usually say they know the "accurate" translation, and usually say that it is the KJV. And then when pressed turn the KJV translation into THE revelation of God on earth, against with all other things are to be compared. And that belief is outright idolatry. It is following human reasoning into a ditch. Jesus spoke in parables. The notion that God made everything clear and proper, for the modern reader to digest and comprehend in his own language, is made up. When God spoke, he was frequently unclear, and he revealed Genesis in a language which he then caused to die by wiping out its country, Temple and culture.
So no, the KJV is, in fact, NOT a particularly accurate or sure translation of Scripture. It's good, but it is not revealed. The Scripture is in Hebrew. There is no Scripture, not one word of it, in English. All English "scripture" is nothing but a translation, and a translation is but an echo. In every case. The Scriptures were revealed in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Maybe one or two letters were revealed in Latin. That is a fact. There is theology that says that God intended for man to encounter God primarily through the Scriptures in their native language.
If that is true, it is a revelation that is not contained within Scripture - you cannot read Scripture to come to that precise conclusion, because it isn't in there.
The translators have done what they can, and done good work, and the truth is that the first sentence of Genesis cannot be certainly translated into English, BECAUSE some of the words - particularly the first word - are not regular Hebrew conversational word, and because of that issue with the imperfect and perfect verb tenses we discussed before, and also because the exact translation of a Hebrew word can vary in English, depending on the translator. (Example: God created the LAND, not "the earth". The word "planet" doesn't exist in Hebrew. Everything in the sky is something we translate as "star" or "meteor" or "comet" or "planet"...but really it's a "shining thing".)
And there's one more thing: the opening of Genesis 1 may not be a series of words at all, but a series of sentences. Each "word", as we translate it, is a sentence of pictographs.
Example: the very first word, BRAShYT, reads pictographically:
In head or tent, El divided-in-two pointing to the cross.
So, the pictographs of the first "word" of Scripture speak of God dividing into two, "in head" , or "in tent", or "in house".
The Bible actually begins, in that "CAPITULO", before time, with the begetting of the Son by the Father - "El" ("Power") becomes "Elohiym" (Powers), the first spelled out word by which we meet God, as the third "word" (or pictographic sentence) of Scripture.
That's where I was going. It was going to take several of these mini-essays, as we explored the differences in the translations, and speculated, and talked about translation.
But I sense that the interest is passing from this thread, so I thought I would just give a synopsis of the First Word, and show the fractal, and the revelation, that lies within it.
In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth --YLT
(WYC) In the beginning God made of nought heaven and earth. (In the beginning God made out of nothing the heavens and the earth.)
(OJB) In the beginning Elohim created hashomayim (the heavens, Himel) and haaretz (the earth).
(NRSA) In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
(GNTA) In the beginning, when God created the universe,
Sorry, had a false alarm labor scare, and haven't had my phone on me for a bit.
These were the five I found that varied the most from "In the beginning", or "When God began".
I didn't really look at the translations like the Message, because I have a hard time thinking they really cared about original language. They seem to just get the gist and put it in familiar terms.
Excellent. Ok, redleg, you've got to add three more, different ones, then I'll toss in a few. Then we'll look at Greek LXX (En arche...) and Latin Vulgate (In principio creavit Deus terram et caelum...), as they were both translated from the Hebrew texts available circa 250 BC and 380 AD.
Then we'll look at the Hebrew of the Massoretic Text (1000 AD), transcribed into English with vowels.
We'll look at how modern Jews think it should be translated.
We'll look at the text mechanically translated.
And through all of this, well come to a set of options for meaning. The meaning is in this cloud.
THEN we'll look at the pictographic sentences, and see what THEY say, and from that we will come away with an astonishingly expanded viewpoint of this text, and the mind that inspired it.
Here is the closest you can get in English:
CAPITULO: Powers Alpha-Omega filled the land and the skies
The land was higgledy-piggledy, darkness upon faces deep sea, and Powers' wind/spirit much-fluttering upon faces the waters.
But even the capitalization and punctuation doesn't belong there.
The actually words: BRAShYT BRA ALHYM AT HShMYM VAT HARTs
(NASB) Literal translation:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
(YLT) Literal translation:
In the beginning of God's preparing the heavens and the earth
(OJB) Orthodox Jewish Bible
In the beginning Elohim created hashomayim (the heavens, Himel) and haaretz (the earth).
Let's start with the oldest text.
The absolute oldest manuscripts of parts of the Bible we have are parts of lines of psalms on fragments of seals or clay from several hundred years BC. But the very earliest text of any part of Genesis we have are from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unfortunately, there are only two very fragmentary portions of Genesis in the Dead Sea Scrolls, containing just a few lines. There is one single papyrus fragment, called 4Q7, which contains a portion of the first few lines of Genesis.
The BRAShYT is smudged and torn through, and BRA is missing (there's a piece gone from the document. The first fully visible word is ALHYM (Elohym), followed by AT HShMYM VAT HARTs.
This fragment dates from somewhere between 100 BC and 70 AD, when the site was abandoned. It is written in a plain, simple form of the Aramaic (Asshuri) lettering. Of course there is no vowel pointing.
But with these fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, one could piece together only a few incomplete sentences of Genesis. The oldest complete Hebrew text of Genesis dates from 1000 years later, 1008-1009, and is called the Leningrad Codex.
So, when we use the Hebrew without any vowel pointing, we are following the example of all of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but we have to use the actual Hebrew text from 1000 years later, because the Dead Sea Scrolls are truly just bits and fragments. Put altogether, one can get only parts of a couple of lines of Genesis 1. The oldest complete Hebrew text dates from only about 1000 years ago. It is fully of vowel pointing, which we will ignore, because the vowel pointing did not exist until about 900 AD, and the ancient Hebrew text, as we have said before, DID have letters that were treated as vowels. The vowel pointing was the Massoretes way of getting their precise vocalization into the text. While that's nice, it's not Scripture. Scripture is the Hebrew letters without vowel pointing.
With the Greek, we can go back about 800 years further. In Berlin there is a fragmentary papyrus version of Genesis in Greek that contains much of the text. This dates from sometime in the 200s AD. But the oldest complete manuscript of Genesis in any language is in Greek. It is the Codex Alexandrinus, and dates from sometime between 400 and 440 AD. The older Codex Vaticanus, from the 350s AD is missing Genesis, and the Codex Sinaticus, from the 370s, is missing major parts of Genesis.
So, you see, when tradition tells you that Moses wrote the Torah (the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Bible) circa 1500 BC, that may very well be true, but the law as he wrote it on two stone tablets was much shorter than the 200+ pages of the Torah. Likewise, when we hear that circa 150 BC the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek by 72 Jewish scribes, making the famous Septuagint (LXX) translation that seems to be the basis of the quotations used by the First Century Christians, that may also be true, but we don't actually HAVE any of that material. What we have for the Hebrew is a copy from 2500 years after Moses of what was handed down by tradition. What we have in the Greek is not the LXX but Greek translation manuscripts from 400-500 years later.
Nobody disputes that Julius Caesar wrote the Commentaries on the Gallic War, but we don't have ANY fragments of Roman "paper" from the 1st Century BC or AD. The oldest copy of Caesar's writings is from Amsterdam in the 800s AD, 900 years after the man's death.
Truth is, until about a half century after the invention of the printing press, most people were illiterate, most learning was word of mouth, and manuscripts were made and preserved for reference, to teach people the basics. The sort of detailed flipping back and forth exegesis we do today, with point cites and the like, was simply beyond the capacity of civilization before the modern age. The way that WE use books in our religion is NOT the way that the ancient Jews or the Apostolic Christians did. The lack of manuscripts before the legalization of Christianity demonstrates the truth that tradition tells us: For the first 300 years, Christianity spread by word of mouth and tradition, with only a handful of writings here and there. With legalization, an oral tradition BECAME a written tradition.
This was doubly true of the Jews.
I have read many efforts to retroject a literate society back upon the ancient Jews. This is absurd. The lack of ancient manuscripts is not due to the fact they have all decayed away. It is due to the fact that not very much written material EXISTED before the Imperial Age.
What was written has been preserved reasonably well - the Dead Sea Scrolls fragments of the manuscripts we have are quite similar to the texts that underlie the Bible. But they're not exactly the same. No two manuscripts are ever exactly the same.
All of this reality is how we know that God did not intend for us to be fighting over the letters, but gaining knowledge in the spirit by hearing these stories read.
I've gone long, and it seems that I haven't even begun on the actual language.
Yeah. I was trying to copy and paste from my phone. And it wasn't working. Sorry!I found this very interesting and would be interested in more. But posts 3-5 were repeats.
