Translation of Gen. 1:1...scholars know better.

David Paul said:

So, my question to the forum is...do you know of anything, in Logos or not, that addresses this topic beyond the level of bare ivory tower pontification?

Worded in this manner, no. However if you are genuinely interested in what the academicians say, these are the discussions I usually go back to:

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1. When God begun to create This rendering of the Hebrew looks to verse 3 for the completion of the sentence. It takes verse 2 to be parenthetical, describing the state of things at the time when God first spoke. Support for understanding the text in this way comes from 2:4 and 5:1, both of which refer to Creation and begin with “When.” The Mesopotamian creation epic known as Enuma Elish also commences the same way. In fact, enuma means “when.” Apparently, this was a conventional opening style for cosmological narratives. As to the peculiar syntax of the Hebrew sentence—a noun in the construct state (be-reʾshit) with a finite verb (baraʾ)—analogies may be found in Leviticus 14:46, Isaiah 29:1, and Hosea 1:2. This seems to be the way Rashi understood the text.
The traditional English translation reads: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” This rendering construes the verse as an independent sentence complete in itself, a solemn declaration that serves as an epitomizing caption to the entire narrative. It takes the initial word be-reʾshit2 to mean “at the beginning of time” and thus makes a momentous assertion about the nature of God: that He is wholly outside of time, just as He is outside of space, both of which He proceeds to create. In other words, for the first time in the religious history of the Near East, God is conceived as being entirely free of temporal and spatial dimensions.
In favor of the traditional English translation are the arguments that be-reʾshit does not have to be in the construct state and that the analogies of 2:4 and 5:1, as well as of Enuma Elish, are inexact. In each instance, the word translated “when” is literally “in the day,” which is not the case in this verse.

God Unlike the pagan cosmologies, Genesis exhibits no interest in the question of God’s origins. His existence prior to the world is taken as axiomatic and does not even require assertion, let alone proof. There is no definition of God or any mystical speculation about His nature. God’s nature finds expression not in philosophical abstractions but through His acts and through the demands He makes on human beings.
The term for God used here and throughout the present account of Creation is ʾelohim. This is not a personal name but the general Hebrew word for deity. It can even refer to pagan gods. Although plural in form, only rarely is it not constructed with a singular verb or adjective.3 The plural form may signify majesty or serve to intensify the basic idea. The preference for the use of ʾelohim in this chapter, rather than the sacred divine name YHVH, may well be conditioned by theological considerations; the term ʾelohim, connoting universalism and abstraction, is most appropriate for the transcendent God of Creation.

create The Hebrew stem b-r-ʾ4 is used in the Bible exclusively of divine creativity. It signifies that the product is absolutely novel and unexampled, depends solely on God for its coming into existence, and is beyond the human capacity to reproduce. The verb always refers to the completed product, never to the material of which it is made. As Ibn Ezra observed, baraʾ does not of itself denote the creation of something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). This doctrine seems to have been first articulated in the late Second Temple work, 2 Maccabees: “Look up to heaven and earth and see all that is therein, and know that God made them out of things that did not exist” (7:28). However, the Genesis narrative does contain intimations of such a concept. Precisely because of the indispensable importance of preexisting matter in the pagan cosmologies, the very absence of such mention here is highly significant. This conclusion is reinforced by the idea of creation by divine fiat without reference to any inert matter being present. Also, the repeated biblical emphasis upon God as the exclusive Creator would seem to rule out the possibility of preexistent matter. Finally, if baraʾ is used only of God’s creation, it must be essentially distinct from human creation. The ultimate distinction would be creatio ex nihilo, which has no human parallel and is thus utterly beyond all human comprehension.

heaven and earth The definite article in the Hebrew specifies the observable universe. The use here of a merism, the combination of opposites, expresses the totality of cosmic phenomena,5 for which there is no single word in biblical Hebrew. The subsequent usage of each term separately refers to the sky and the dry land in the more restricted and concrete sense. We are not told how the cosmos came into being, but other texts point to a tradition of its creation by means of divine fiat. Thus, Psalm 33:6 and 9 declare: “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, / by the breath of His mouth, all their host … / For He spoke, and it was; / He commanded, and it endured.” The postbiblical 2 Esdras 6:38 has the same notion: “I said, O Lord, You have indeed spoken from the beginning of creation; on the first day You said: ‘Let heaven and earth be made,’ and Your word accomplished the work.”

2. Following the general comprehensive statement comes a detailed description of the primordial state of the world.

unformed and void Hebrew tohu va-vohu. This compound phrase appears again in the Bible in Jeremiah’s prophetic vision of the return of the primal chaos (Jer. 4:23–27), thus leaving no doubt that the phrase designates the initial chaotic state of the earth.6 That God should create disorganized matter, only to reduce it to order, presents no more of a problem than does His taking six days to complete creation instead of instantaneously producing a perfected universe. The quintessential point of the narrative is the idea of ordering that is the result of divine intent. It is a fundamental biblical teaching that the original, divinely ordained order in the physical world has its counterpart in the divinely ordained universal moral order to which the human race is subject.

darkness Throughout the Bible darkness is often a symbol of evil, misfortune, death, and oblivion.7 Here it seems to be not just the absence of light but a distinct entity, the origin of which is left unclear. Isaiah 45:7, however, explicitly ascribes its existence to divine creation.

the deep Hebrew tehom, the cosmic abyssal water that enveloped the earth. The text says nothing about how or when this watery mass came into existence. Proverbs 8:22–24 makes it one of God’s creations. In many unrelated mythologies water is the primal element, a notion that most likely arose from its amorphous nature. To the ancients, this characteristic seemed to represent appropriately the state of affairs before chaos was reduced to order and things achieved stable form.
It is instructive that tehom is treated as a Hebrew proper name; like all such names, it never appears with the definite article. Although not feminine in grammatical form, it is frequently employed with a feminine verb or adjective.8 At times it is personified. In Genesis 49:25 and Deuteronomy 33:13 it “couches below,” and in Habakkuk 3:10, “Loud roars the deep” in panic at the wrathful approach of God. Lastly, tehom appears in Isaiah 51:10 in a mythic context. All these facts suggest that tehom may once have been the name of a mythical being much like the Mesopotamian Tiamat, the female dragonesque personification of the primordial salt-water ocean, representing the aggressive forces of primitive chaos that contended against the god of creativity. Here in Genesis, tehom is thoroughly demythologized.

a wind from God Hebrew ruaḥ means “wind, breath, spirit.” “Wind” is the most popular rendering of the word in ancient and medieval Jewish sources.9 As a physical phenomenon, wind conforms to the general picture of primal chaos evoked by this verse, except that, unlike darkness and water, it is not mentioned again in the Creation story. One possible explanation may be that wind reappears as the agent by means of which the water is separated—that is, blown back—as in Genesis 8:1 at the conclusion of the Flood and in Exodus 14:21 at the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. Wind often functions as a divine agent in the Bible. Another interpretation takes ruaḥ in the sense of God’s creative, life-giving, sustaining energy. Still a third possibility lies in its use as a term heralding the arrival of God, expressing His immanence, or symbolizing His presence. The last two explanations connect the phrase with the following verse, thus alerting us to an imminent, dramatic development: God is about to transform the inert, disorganized matter, to affect it by His presence, to animate it with His spirit.

sweeping The Hebrew stem r-ḥ-f appears otherwise in Deuteronomy 32:11, where it describes an eagle hovering over its young, a meaning it also possesses in Ugaritic;10 but in Jeremiah 23:9 it refers to bones trembling or shaking. The basic idea of the stem is vibration, movement. Hitherto all is static, lifeless, immobile. Motion, which is the essential element in change, originates with God’s dynamic presence.

water This is either the cosmic ocean believed by the ancients to surround the earth or the same water referred to in verses 6, 7, 9, and 10, namely, the water covering the solid mass of earth. It is doubtful that the two were really differentiated in the Hebrew mind.

Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, The JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 5–7.

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It remains to discuss, in passing, the structure of the introductory verses of this section, since their syntax determines the meaning, and the precise meaning of this passage happens to be of far-reaching significance. The problem could not be fully elucidated in the NOTES, which is why it is being considered here.
The first word of Genesis, and hence the first word in the Hebrew Bible as a unit, is vocalized as berẹ̄ʾšīt. Grammatically, this is evidently in the construct state, that is, the first of two connected forms which jointly yield a possessive compound. Thus the sense of this particular initial term is, or should be, “At the beginning of …,” or “When,” and not “In/At the beginning”; the absolute form with adverbial connotation would be bārẹ̄ʾšīt. As the text is now vocalized, therefore, the Hebrew Bible starts out with a dependent clause.
The second word in Hebrew, and hence the end-form of the indicated possessive compound, appears as bārāʾ, literally “he created.” The normal way of saying “at the beginning of creation (by God)” would be berẹ̄šīt berōʾ (ʾelōhīm), with the infinitive in the second position; and this is indeed the precise construction (though not the wording) of the corresponding phrase in 2:4b. Nevertheless, Hebrew usage permits a finite verb in this position; cf. Hos 1:2. It is worth noting that the majority of medieval Hebrew commentators and grammarians, not to mention many moderns, could see no objection to viewing Gen 1:1 as a dependent clause.
Nevertheless, vocalization alone should not be the decisive factor in this instance. For it could be (and has been) argued that the vocalized text is relatively late and should not therefore be unduly binding. A more valid argument, however, is furnished by the syntax of the entire first paragraph. A closer examination reveals that vs. 2 is a parenthetic clause: “the earth being then a formless waste …,” with the main clause coming in vs. 3. The structure of the whole sentence is thus schematically as follows: “(1) When … (2)—at which time …—(3) then …” Significantly enough, the analogous account (by J) in 2:4b–7 shows the identical construction, with vss. 5–6 constituting a circumstantial description. Perhaps more important still, the related, and probably normative, arrangement at the beginning of Enūma eliš exhibits exactly the same kind of structure: dependent temporal clause (lines 1–2); parenthetic clauses (3–8); main clause (9). Thus grammar, context, and parallels point uniformly in one and the same direction.
There is more to this question, of course, than mere linguistic niceties. If the first sentence states that “In the beginning God created heaven and earth,” what ensued was chaos (vs. 2) which needed immediate attention. In other words, the Creator would be charged with an inadequate initial performance, unless one takes the whole of vs. 1 as a general title, contrary to established biblical practice. To be sure, the present interpretation precludes the view that the creation accounts in Genesis say nothing about coexistent matter. The question, however, is not the ultimate truth about cosmogony, but only the exact meaning of the Genesis passages which deal with the subject. On this score, at least, the biblical writers repeat the Babylonian formulation, perhaps without full awareness of the theological and philosophical implications. At all events, the text should be allowed to speak for itself.

E. A. Speiser, Genesis: Introduction, Translation, and Notes, vol. 1, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 11–13.

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While the first sentence of the Bible is relatively straightforward in Hebrew, it possesses a subtle ambiguity that makes it difficult to translate. It can be rendered in the classical fashion, with an implicit relative clause, or, with the inclusion of v. 3, as one sentence. Witness the following examples.

The King James Version and Its Descendants

Classical
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. (KJV, 1611)

Classical
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. (RSV, 1952)

Implicit relative clause
1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. (NRSV, 1991)

The Vulgate and Its Descendants

Classical
1 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.
2 Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi, et Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. (VG, 1592)

Classical
1 Au commencement, Dieu créa le ciel et la terre. 2 Or la terre était vague et vide, les ténèbres couvraient l’abîme, l’esprit de Dieu plânait sur les eaux. (Bible de Jérusalem, 1956)

Classical
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water. (Jerusalem Bible, 1966)

Implicit relative clause
1 In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. (New American Bible, 1970, 1990)

Genesis 1:1–3 as one sentence
1 Lorsque Dieu commença la création du ciel et de la terre, 2 la terre était déserte et vide, et la ténèbre à la surface de l’abîme; le souffle de Dieu plânait à la surface des eaux, 3 et Dieu dit: «Que la lumière soit!» Et la lumière fut. (Traduction Oecuménique de la Bible, 1979)

Translations in the Jewish Tradition

Classical
1 In the beginning God created / the heavens and the earth.
2 As for the earth, it was without form or life, / and darkness was upon the face of the Deep;
but the Spirit of God / was hovering over the face of the waters.18

Classical
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 —Now the earth had been wild and waste
darkness over the face of Ocean
breath of God over the face of the waters—19

Genesis 1:1–3 as one sentence
1 When God began to create heaven and earth—2 the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water—(New Jewish Publication Society Version, 1985)

Scholarly translations

Classical
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 The earth was still a desert waste, and darkness lay upon the primeval deep and God’s wind was moving to and fro over the surface of the waters.20

Implicit relative clause
1 When God set about to create the heaven and earth—2 the world being then a formless waste, with darkness over the seas and only an awesome wind sweeping over the water—21

Why such variety? The first two words of the Bible, bĕrēʾšît bārāʾ, present the translator with a conundrum. bĕrēʾšît (see, for example, Jer 26:1) means the beginning of something, e.g., the harvest, and not “first” in some absolute sense. Such an expression does exist in the Hebrew Bible, (bāriʾšōnâ; for example, Gen 13:4) but it is not used here. The implication seems to be that what is being described is the first of a series of creative acts rather than some absolute beginning of things and that God may have created other things before those described here. Some suggest that the creation of the Law or of the angels might be hinted at here. Many feel that the text says that God created the universe out of pre-existing chaotic matter, not out of nothing and that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is a theological assertion not necessarily founded in this biblical text.
What does God do? God creates. The word “create” here is bārāʾ.22 bārāʾ means to expend no energy, to make something without any effort, without any work involved. In the entire Bible only God is the subject of the verb, so it seems to capture some part of God’s own character. Therefore, when God makes he does it completely freely and effortlessly. God is an uncreated, genderless, powerful God creating without any energy at all.
The author does not use the personal name for Israel’s God, YHWH; he simply uses a generic term, “God” (ʾĕlōhîm). Seemingly, he wants to avoid any sort of narrow identification between this story and Israelites’ national concerns.
What exactly does he do? He creates the heavens and the earth. This is a merismus, a figure of speech that describes a totality by naming polar opposites. “Heavens and earth” means all of creation. God creates everything in the face of what sort of opposition—what does God confront? “Empty void” (tōhû wābōhû) conveys the sense of a sterile nothingness.23 “Darkness on the face of the abyss” (ḥōšek ʿal-pĕnê tĕhôm) conveys a similar idea of a world where God is not present.24
The author draws a picture of a world that features none of the distinctions that are important to us and necessary for being, just an empty pit of water and darkness and wind. There was no life, no up, no down, neither space nor time, a desert in which there are no paths. Lacking a vocabulary to express nothingness, he sets a scene where he gives us a picture that negates everything positive instead. Into the nothingness come a first positive hint of life, rûaḥ ʾĕlōhîm. Depending on context rûaḥ can mean wind, breath, soul, spirit; and ʾĕlōhîm can mean divine, of God, or simply indicate a superlative construction. Translations, then, can range from “the spirit of God” to “a mighty wind.” The translator’s choice has as much to do with theological preconceptions about what is going on as with the words involved. Having introduced the character of a single God who acts effortlessly to confront a cosmos of chaotic, meaningless nothing, I suggest that we have in these first two verses a picture of creation of everything out of nothing. And so the stage is set for the story’s development.

David W. Cotter, Genesis, ed. Jerome T. Walsh, Chris Franke, and David W. Cotter, Berit Olam Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2003), 12–16.

But I suspect you are aware of these.

David Paul said:

Don't you feel small and uneducated?

No, I find the support for the various potential translations to be an interesting debate - one that encourages one to read the text closely rather than assuming it means what you currently believe it to mean.

David Paul, I'm out of this thread so I'm not tempted to violate guidelines.