the beginning, God created heaven and earth.”8 A similar understanding of 1:1 as an independent statement has helped support Christian understandings of God having created the universe ex nihilo (“out of nothing”).9
Now, even scholars advocating a translation of Gen 1:1 as an independent clause generally reject an understanding of it as an assertion of God’s creation of the universe from nothing.10 Comparable ancient Near Eastern creation accounts, most famously the above-discussed Mesopotamian Enuma Elish epic, start their account of creation with what things were like before creation:11
when on high no name was given to heaven,
nor below was the netherworld called by name …
Then were the gods formed within the(se two). (I:1–2, 9)
The creation account that follows Gen 1 in the Bible and likely predated it, Gen 2:5–3:24, likewise begins with a description of the uncreated prologue to God’s creation:
no shrub of the field was yet on the earth, and no vegetation of the field was yet sprouting up because God Yhwh12 had not [yet] caused it to rain on the earth and there was no human to work the ground…. Then God Yhwh formed the human (Gen 2:5, 7)
Genesis 1 similarly begins with a statement of what creation was like before God created. This begins properly in Gen 1:2—“the earth was an uninhabitable mass, darkness was on the surface of the primeval ocean, and the breath of God swirled over the surface of the waters.” Only after this description of pre-creation earth, ocean, and wind does the Genesis creation account truly get underway in Gen 1:3: “God said, ‘let there be light.’” In this sense Gen 1 agrees with other accounts in seeing cosmic elements that preceded God’s creative work.
The main issue to be considered now is whether Gen 1:1 was meant specifically to provide the setting for the following clause in Gen 1:2 (and possibly also 1:3) at the outset of God’s creation of the cosmos (the “hypotactic” understanding of 1:1) or whether it was meant to serve as a summary superscription indicating the overall theme of the entire following narrative (the “paratactic” understanding of 1:1). The former, hypotactic, understanding of Gen 1:1 as a temporal introduction to 1:2(–3) yields the translation “when God created [heaven and earth],” while the latter, paratactic, understanding of 1:1 as an independent clause yields the rendering “in the beginning God created [heaven and earth].”
Though much work has been done on the syntax of the verse, it appears that the text, particularly the Hebrew consonantal text, admits either interpretation. Nevertheless, the paratactic understanding of Gen 1:1 is undermined by the problem that “beginning” in בְּרֵאשִׁית is not vocalized in the Masoretic Text with the definite article (that would be בָּרֵאשִׁית). Instead, the vowels of בְּרֵאשִׁית imply a translation “in a beginning God created….”13 This datum is particularly striking, given the above-mentioned fact that the Masoretes, who added this vocalization to the Hebrew text, appear to have followed the paratactic understanding of the verse. To be sure, some have noted a similar lack of definite article in expressions meant as definite, including expressions of beginning (e.g., Isa 46:10; Prov 8:23), but all of the relevant examples come from poetry, where the definiteness of nouns is often unmarked.
Conversely, it should be noted that the hypotactic understanding of Gen 1:1—“in the beginning of when God created heaven and earth…”—presupposes, if one follows the Masoretic vocalization of the text, that Gen 1:1 contains a relatively rare grammatical phenomenon: the noun ראשית in construct with and modified by an unmarked relative clause “[when] God created heaven and earth.”14 Not only is this phenomenon uncommon (at least in terms of the present vocalization of the overall Hebrew Bible), but the examples of such phrases with unmarked relative clauses generally modify a limited range of words (יד [hand], יום [day] and ימי [days], כל [all], עת [time], and מקום [place]) and are most often found in poetry.15 Genesis 1, though seen as having poetic elements, is prose.
The verses that follow Gen 1:1 also provide data relevant to its translation. If Gen 1:1 were an independent clause labeling the following narrative, it would be the only instance in the Priestly narrative where a superscription is followed syndetically by a clause (Gen 1:2) beginning with “and” והארץ היתה (“and the earth was…”).16 Indeed, most Hebrew literary compositions do not begin with such a conjunction.17 Genesis 1:2 also presents somewhat of a problem for those who translate Gen 1:1–3 as one unit, with the three clauses of Gen 1:2 taken as a parenthesis before the main clause of 1:3. Though such an extended sentence (Gen 1:1–3) is theoretically possible in Hebrew and has some parallel in the prologue to the Enuma Elish epic, it is relatively unprecedented in length (within the Hebrew Bible) and contrasts substantially with the otherwise quite standardized beginnings of the other acts of creation through word found in Gen 1 (1:6, 9, 14, 19, 24).18
The (hypotactic) translation adopted above understands Gen 1:1 as providing the temporal setting for the description of pre-creation elements in Gen 1:2.19 The lack of temporal specificity in Gen 1:1 thus is not a problem, since the Priestly writing would not be concerned with establishing exact chronology for elements preceding God’s creation. Instead, the focus here is on how things stood at the outset, before “God created heaven and earth.” In this respect, the introduction to Gen 1 in Gen 1:1–2 parallels the function of the introduction to the following creation account (Gen 2:4b–3:24) in Gen 2:4b–5, with its temporal introduction in Gen 1:1 echoing that in Gen 2:4b. Where Gen 2:4b introduces the ground (אדמה)-focused account in Gen 2–3 with “when God Yhwh created earth and heaven” (ביום עשות יהוה אלהים ארץ ושמים), Gen 1:1 introduces the broader cosmology in Gen 1 with “at the beginning of when God created the heavens and the earth (בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ).20 This is one of the closer parallels of the P and non-P histories.
Diachronic Prologue
Genesis 1:1–2:3 as Priestly and Its Relations to Gen 2:4b–3:24
Genesis 1:1–2:3 has long been recognized as a key part of a broader Priestly Source extending at least into the Tabernacle Narrative at the conclusion of Exodus. The chapter as a whole is saturated by vocabulary and phrases that are otherwise mostly attested in Priestly contexts, e.g., ברא (“create”; Gen 1:1, 21, 27; 2:3); בדל (hiphil, “separate, divide”; Gen 1:4, 6, 14, 18), חית הארץ (“[wild] animals of the earth”; 1:24, 25, 30), מין (“kind”; Gen 1:11, 12, 21, 24, 25), רמש/רֶמֶשׁ (“crawl/creeping thing” Gen 1:21, 24–26, 28, 30), שרץ (“swarm”; Gen 1:20, 21) and לאכלה (“for food”; Gen 1:29, 30).21 More importantly, as we will see in the following commentary, the chapter introduces key themes that are unfolded in subsequent Priestly texts about the flood, Israel’s ancestors, and the story of Moses.
This Priestly creation account in Gen 1:1–2:3 (Gen 1) in turn is literarily distinct from the following non-Priestly Eden story in Gen 2:4b–3:24 (Gen 2–3) along with the P-like superscription in Gen 2:4a that bridges the two texts. These latter texts will be discussed in the commentary on Gen 2:4–3:24. For now it is just important to consider the potential relationship between Gen 1 and Gen 2–3. Whereas older scholarship tended to see these two creation narratives as either originally parallel or Gen 1 as dependent in some way on Gen 2–3, a number of recent studies have suggested instead that Gen 2–3 was composed from the outset as a post-Priestly expansion of the Gen 1 creation account.
This commentary likewise sees these two texts as related, but with Gen 1 later than and dependent
