When God began to create the sky and the earth — now the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face the abyss, and the spirit of God hovering upon the face of the waters — God said, Let there be light. And there was light.
The first three verses of Genesis might be a particularly good place to illustrate the philosophy of translation that animates this project. The goal, in part, is to produce a translation of the Hebrew Bible which is in reasonably modern English, and which hews closely to the best of modern scholarship. If this were the whole goal, I should give up now — there are already fine translation that accomplish this goal, produced by much better-qualified people. I don’t pretend to have any special insight into the Bible that can’t already be found in the mainstream literature.
But if I do have an excuse for taking on a project like this, it is that this translation will be in the public domain. And within the realm of translations in the public domain, I do think I can make a fair contribution. To my knowledge, all translations in reasonably current (post-thee and thou) English are sectarian in nature.
The field is wide open.
Ideally, on every question of substance, I would most prefer to take the top dozen experts on the question, poll them, and adopt the majority position. However, anyone producing a translation of the Hebrew Bible is going to have tens of thousands of decisions to make in the process, and it is simply impossible to carry out such a procedure.
So, for now, my plan is to carefully compare the texts of the ASV and WEB, verse by verse, with the Hebrew text, and try to come up with something that approximates the text as understood by most qualified scholars. I will not do this perfectly. Except on certain matters of style, which I hope to discuss further at a later date, my plan is generally to follow the ASV and WEB where they agree. Where they disagree, I will try to make the best call I can, and where they both seem deficient I will try to improve upon them.
Ideally, I would like to note every place where I disagree with either translation, and lay out the reasoning in detail, but this will not be possible. I hope to get as close to this ideal as practical. For the first few chapters of Genesis, I plan to be especially thorough in documenting my decisions, even at a trivial level, so that the reader can work out my general approach and decide whether this translation is of interest to them.
The first three verses of Genesis, as found in the American Standard Version, read as follows:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
The World English Bible reads like so:
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep and God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.
3 God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
I have gone in a somewhat different direction.
When God began to create the sky and the earth — now the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the abyss, and a wind from God sweeping across the face of the waters — God said, Let there be light, and there was light.
Some explanation is in order. First, the whole structure has changed, from a series of sentences to one long sentence covering stretching across the first three verses. For a defense of this overall way of reading Genesis 1:1-3, I would recommend Baasten (2007) and Holmstedt (2008). And though I do lean toward the position they and many others hold on this question, that is not the main reason I’ve adopted it. The main reason is that, as far as I can tell, this seems to be the dominant view in scholarship over at least the past four decades, perhaps more.
“Heaven”, in the modern imagination, is often a place of infinite bliss, an eternal dwelling-place, the better of two possible destinations to which the deceased must go. The problem with translating the Hebrew shamayim as “heaven” is that no such concept was known to the authors of Genesis.
For this reason, I cannot follow the NEB or NJPS in reading “heaven” here. Some translations, such as the NJPS, NABRE, and NRSV, read “heavens” in Genesis 1:1. This is better. If we talk about “the heavens” in English, we think more of the sky than of the afterlife. I cannot recall hearing of anyone who went to heavens after death. But I suspect still that this may be motivated more by a pull toward the traditional reading of Genesis 1:1 than by any clear notion of what the shamayim was to the first readers of Genesis.
Verses 5 through 8 spell out just what the shamayim was and what it was for. God made a dome-like structure over the earth, which — strange as this may sound to modern ears — made human life possible by separating the waters above it from the waters beneath it. Unfortunately, English does not have a perfect equivalent for shamayim, but we have to translate it somehow, and it seems to me that the shamayim is more “sky” than “heaven”. The “sky”, at least, is the wide blue well-known part of the universe above our heads, just as the shamayim was for the Israelites.
We come next to the expression tohu wabohu, which the ASV renders “waste and void”. A review of the contexts in which tohu appears shows that it carries a set of meanings such as desert, destruction, futility, and nothingness, while about bohu we can say little more than that it is a synonym of tohu. And so the ASV’s “waste and void” strikes me as a very good translation. The WEB’s “formless and empty” seems a step backward. An honorable mention must go to the REB’s “a vast waste”, which somewhat like the Hebrew preserves the repetition of two similar words.
Where the ASV has upon, the WEB has on, and at first glance one can see the logic in what the WEB has done. If the goal is to make the translation sound as recent as possible, then yes, “on” is better than “upon”. However, we should not exaggerate how uncommon “upon” is in today’s English. Google’s Ngram viewer indicates that in recently printed books, the word “upon” appears about three hundred times as often as the word “gullible”, and no one imagines that “gullible” is passing out of existence.
Even so, should the translator of the Hebrew Bible automatically choose the most current word available? Part of this depends on the nature of the Hebrew Bible itself. When it reached its original audiences, was it written in the most current words possible, or did it at times sound dated? I would suggest to you that it did at points sound dated, as compared to spoken Hebrew. This is especially true in passages of poetry, and is likely true in a passage like Genesis 1, which, while prose, approaches poetry at points. So I think there is no simple, automatic way to choose between “upon” and “on”, and in matters of style there is much that is subjective here. I lean toward “upon” in this case. It is a trivial thing, I suppose, but there it is.
Next we come to the Hebrew pᵉne, which is a word which can refer to the outside part or exterior layer of a thing that might be visible to a viewer, or to the part of a human being which includes the eyes, nose, and mouth. Luckily, English has a word which can cover both these meanings. That word is “face”. Sure, in this context “surface” is also equivalent, but where possible I would like to use an English word whose range of meanings covers an area similar to that of the Hebrew word which it represents. Here I agree with the NRSV and NEB in reading “face”, as opposed to the NJPS and REB, which read “surface”.
A particularly interesting term is tehom, which the KJV and many subsequent translations read as “the deep”. It refers to the primeval ocean, and in later passages either to the oceans or to a great reserve of water beneath the earth. NEB and NABRE read “abyss”, which might have some of the right connotations, but an “abyss” does not necessarily contain the idea of water, which is absolutely vital to sense of tehom.
The ruaḥ ʾelohim, we are now told, was doing something over the face of the waters. The ASV’s capitalized “Spirit of God” suggests Trinitarian theology, which is alien to the Hebrew Bible, while the WEB’s “God’s Spirit” seems to me a more awkward way of implying the same thing. However, the term ruaḥ can mean “wind”, as in Genesis 8:1, where the world is re-created after the destruction of a flood — “and ʾelohim caused a ruaḥ to pass over the earth …” As in Genesis 1, the dry land will soon appear, and humans will be given the task of governing it. As for ʾelohim, the term usually refers to God, but some scholars hold that it might be an expression of intensity. Thus, those who read ruaḥ as “wind” may read either “wind from God” (NRSV, NJPS) or “a mighty wind” (NEB, NABRE).
And just what is the ruaḥ doing? The Hebrew mᵉraḥefet, here a piʿel verb, used only here and in Deuteronomy 32:11. The contextual evidence does not give enough evidence to say definitively exactly what meanings the verb might express. Perhaps, some think, the spirit of God is “hovering” over the water, or the wind of God is “sweeping” across it. Whether one reads the word ruaḥ as “spirit” or “wind” will influence how one interprets mᵉraḥefet.
Finally, there is the matter of quotation marks. The WEB adds quotation marks throughout, while the ASV leaves them out. I will be swimming against the grain of modern style here, but I think the best approach is to leave them out, for several reasons. First, and perhaps most trivially, the Hebrew text itself does not have them. This is not sufficient reason in itself — the Hebrew text also lacks commas, periods, and capitalization, but I use all of those freely.
More importantly, there is something about the use of quotation marks which can tend to import modern ideas about quotation into an ancient context. For one thing, quotation in a modern context tends toward the exact — one expects that, if something is found within quotation marks, the quoter has access to the exact words of the quotee and is reporting them verbatim. To this we might add that in casual speech, English tends to default to indirect quotation when the exact wording is not available. For example, if we do not remember in what words someone said they were going to buy groceries, we might say, “Mark said that he was going to buy groceries”. We would be less likely to say, “Mark said, ‘I will go buy groceries’”, unless we are indicating that this is more or less exactly what he said.
Hebrew, on the other hand, defaults to grammatically direct quotation even in cases where the wording cannot be exact.
Consider, perhaps, Ruth 4:1 —
Then Boaz went up to the gate and sat there, and there passed by the close relative of whom Boaz had spoken. And he said, Come sit down here, such and such. And he came and sat down.
Or 2 Kings 6:8
And the king of Aram was at war with Israel, and he took counsel with his officials, saying, At such and such a place will be my camp.
We are surely not to imagine that either Boaz or the king of Aram would have said, literally, “such and such” in either instance. Doesn’t this work better without quotation marks? I think it does.
Another reason in favor of omitting quotation marks is that it places the reader in a similar position to the reader of the Hebrew text — in both Hebrew and English, when quotation marks are not used, it is usually obvious where direct speech begins, but the end of direct speech must be figured out by context clues. By not using closing quotes, this translation will try to avoid dogmatically making decisions for the reader about where a quote ends.
Another reason to omit quotation marks is that in some cases the Bible quotes for long chunks of text, and it nests quotations in a way that makes marking quotes awkward. This becomes especially acute in some prophetic texts, where the point of view flits back and forth rather unpredictably between the deity and his prophet.
None of these reasons weigh particularly heavily on Genesis 1:3. But whatever policy I adopt, I will need to carry out consistenty, and so I will leave quotation marks out of it.
And so this long-winded explanation of the translation choices in Genesis 1:1-3 comes to an end. I hope it helps explain how this project will be carried out.
When God began to create the sky and the earth — now the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the abyss, and a wind from God sweeping across the face of the waters — God said, Let there be light, and there was light.