About TGB

The Genesis Blog is a series of essays exploring aspects of the book of Genesis (the first part of the Hebrew Bible, aka the Old Testament) and will eventually develop into a passage-by-passage commentary. I began this blog in November 2014. If you are a newcomer, for a fuller introduction to this project I recommend you begin by reading my introductory essay When God began building the sky and the land. There you will find further information about most of the points touched on in this brief intro.

The background to this blog is that while writing it I am engaged in translating Genesis from Hebrew into the Nawat language, and so in a sense the blog will track my personal research and reflections in the course of that process. The blog is in English and I will provide English renderings of any parts of the Nawat translation I refer to. The Genesis Blog addresses a fairly broad, non-specialist audience ranging from  "intelligent lay persons" to other translators, and from Bible enthusiasts to language lovers. Bearing this in mind, I will try to keep the topics interesting and varied, but also rigorous. 

The planned time frame for the translation project is as follows. I am currently working intensively on a draft version of the Nawat translation of Genesis which will be completed roughly by the end of December 2014 (that's right, this month!). That will be immediately followed by the beginning of the next phase, starting in January 2015, when I will begin further study and revision of the draft translation. What this means is that I have collected a fair bit of literature about Genesis which I want to read up on as well as possible to make sure my translation is informed by an awareness of what others more knowledgeable than I have said, thought and written on the subject. I will allow myself a few months to complete that process, after which I will be ready to submit to Ne Bibliaj Tik Nawat my completed translation. The exact timing will be affected by my availability since I will probably have to fit in other (non-Bible-related) translation work during this period and will scale up or down my dedication to this project accordingly.

In the meantime, I plan to continue developing The Genesis Blog at the same time as I continue work on the translation. At present I am posting general essays on different aspects of Genesis at a rate of one per week, on Fridays. The main page of the blog (to see which, click on the Blog tab at the top) always shows my most recent post, and all previous posts can be located through the Blog Archive which is located in the column on the right. I am also putting up occasional pages which are like "appendices" that can always be located through the "Other" tab (at the top of the blog).

Looking ahead, as my work progresses, I have further plans to start posting specific Genesis passages, in sequence, with the Nawat draft translation (tagged NBTN) and its ad hoc English rendering (labelled NBIE, for Ne Bibliaj In English) and my commentary. I will announce the details of this when the time is ripe. The eventual result will hopefully be both a full collection of my (draft) translations of all the passages and a commentary covering the whole book of Genesis from my translator's perspective. I would like this material to be of interest to the same kind of general readers alluded to above and also to Genesis enthusiasts and future translators of Genesis in other languages.

I want to emphasise that I have no intention or desire to make a theological or religious commentary, and that is something outside the purpose of this blog. Rather here our interest is in Genesis as a book, i.e. as literature. There is another place to interact informally about this project in the Facebook group Ne Bibliaj Tik Nawat which you are welcome to join. For further information about Nawat, please see my Nawat Resources website.

Alan R. King

Zarautz, December 2014