Genesis 1 vs. Rashi

To view a transcript or to comment, please visit my blog here: http://messianicdrew.blogspot.com/2011/04/genesis-1-vs-rashi.html

Those of you who are interested enough to watch my videos (or read this blog) know that Genesis 1:1 reads: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." in Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃ What you might not know is that Jewish translations treat this verse differently. Artscroll translates the first three verses as "In the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth -- when the earth was astonishingly empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep, and the divine presence hovered upon the surface of the waters -- God said, "Let there be light, and there was light."

Artscroll translates this passage so that the first two verses describe the situation and nothing happens until verse three. Artscroll's justification is that "in the beginning God created" would indicate that the Torah is giving the sequence of Creation -- that God created the heaven, the earth, darkness, water, light, and so on. However, Rashi and Ibn Ezra maintain that this verse cannot be chronological.

Rashi argues that we cannot translate רֵאשִׁית as a beginning simpliciter, since it always means "beginning of." He cites Genesis 10:10 "beginning of his kingdom" Jeremiah 26:1 "beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim" and Deuteronomy 18:4 "first of your grain." Hence, the Hebrew word בָּרָא which is a verb, has to become a gerund in order for the verse to make sense. He justifies this with Hosea 1:2 "When the LORD first spoke to Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea..." which uses תְּחִלַּ֥ת as a sort of "in the beginning of" and the verb דִּבֶּר as a gerund as well.

Rashi admits that "In the beginning God created" is not a forced interpretation of the Hebrew. He just rejects it because he believes that such an interpretation would suggest that God created the earth before he created the water. And to Rashi, this is unacceptable. Hagigah 12a of the Talmud says that the water preceded the earth because the heavens were created from fire and water.

I think you can see already, Rashi is letting rabbinic tradition mess with his interpretation of this verse. This is one problem with the rabbis. They know the verses in their original Hebrew, and what the Hebrew means, but they sometimes derive their interpretations independently of what the words are actually saying.

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