Change a Word, Change the Cosmos

“IN THE BEGINNING” IS NOT HOW THE BIBLE ACTUALLY OPENS in the Hebrew text that stands behind our oh so familiar English translation. The Hebrew reads “in a beginning” or “in beginning.” I noticed the discrepancy while learning biblical Hebrew, and when I asked the instructor about it, he dismissed it as nothing but a quirk in an ancient text.

Even so, it stuck with me. You see, it’s a minor grammatical difference that could have major philosophical implications. At issue are nothing less than our understandings of time and history.

The Hebrew text, with no definite article, is more in keeping with the cyclical views of the East than with the linear view of time and history so essential to our Western ideas of salvation and progress. Given the importance of what’s at stake, let’s take a very brief look at the grammar and history of the Hebrew text.

The Hebrew behind our translation is berashit (pronounced bay-rah-sheet). The b- is a prefix and the preposition (“in”); the vowel –e– indicates there is no definite article; and rashit is the participle (“beginning”). Now, ancient Hebrew was written without vowels (e.g., brsht), but the even more ancient oral tradition preserved the correct pronunciations of the words with their vowels.

If the oral tradition had preserved the pronunciation of the written brsht as barashit (bah-rah-sheet), we would have “in the beginning” in the text. The fact that the “more difficult reading” of the word was preserved, in spite of its problematic philosophical implications, tells us the oral tradition was strong enough to preserve a subtle detail of pronunciation (“e” not “a”) and a problematic detail of grammar (no “the”), for more than a millennium, until the Masoretic system for adding vowels to written Hebrew texts (as subscript dots and dashes) was introduced in about 600 CE — and the “difficult reading” has been preserved in writing ever since.

The ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (known as the Septuagint, represented with the Roman numeral LXX, and believed to have been carried out by 70 divinely inspired translators) preserves the same difficult reading. Like Hebrew, Greek has a definite article, but the “divinely inspired” LXX reading of Gen. 1:1 does not use it.

The ancient Latin translation of the Bible (carried out mostly by St. Jerome in the 4th cen. CE and the known as the Vulgate) isn’t helpful, because Latin does not use articles at all, neither definite nor indefinite. So, the Latin in principio could be either “in the beginning” or “in beginning” or “in a beginning.”

Things get a little more interesting, that is more ambiguous, when we take into consideration how “slippery” prepositions can be. Translating the Hebrew preposition b-, or the Greek en, or even the Latin in, is not always a simple matter of equating it with the English “in.” In fact, the entries for b- in the standard Hebrew-English lexicon of the Hebrew Bible cover more than three pages and include a relatively wide range of meanings, including “in” and “among” and “at” and “by” and “against” and “with” and even “through” (Brown-Driver-Briggs).

Because “in beginning” and “in a beginning” are rather awkward phrases in English, something like “as a beginning” or “for a beginning” might not be unreasonable as literal translations for berashit. Or, if you’re willing to go for more of a paraphrase, even “once upon a time” might be a possibility. This, then, could give us the opening “Once upon a time, when God created the heavens and the earth,…” which would tell us we’re reading a myth, a symbolic expression of truth, not a historical report.

Even so, we haven’t resolved the philosophical problem posed by the original Hebrew. Does the Bible open with a unique and not-to-be-repeated act of creation that eventually leads to a unique and not-to-be-repeated end of the world (and of time)? If so, it would support our linear understanding of time and history progressing from the beginning to the end. Or, should we read the opening of the original text as introducing a story of a creation, one of many possible creations in timeless cycles of beginning-existing-ending?

A Hindu or Buddhist would be most comfortable with the latter, the more literal reading. As Westerners, however, the idea of cyclical creation is all but inconceivable — even heretical. If we were to give up our linear understanding of time and history, would our commitment to progress become meaningless? Would our distinctions between the profane and the sacred, between this world and the world to come, between time and eternity collapse? Would we lose our individual identities as separate egos?

What do you think? How do the alternatives feel to you? As you begin to live these questions, and as we begin a new calendar cycle, I wish you all …

Happy New Year!