Below you will find, first of all, verses one to five of chapter one of the first book of the Bible in five languages. Read whichever ones you can! The sixth version is my English rendition of the Nawat version, of course.
Then come some notes I have written about this small fragment of text, verse by verse, focusing on issues that arise from the language, primarily of the original Hebrew, with reference where relevant to different translations including my own Nawat translation, where I comment on some of the specific matters I have had to think about. I hope this will make interesting reading even if you are not fluent in Biblical Hebrew and Nawat.
Finally, if you don't know Biblical Hebrew and this has made you wish you did, here is an additional goody: a custom-written Initiation to Biblical Hebrew: The First Day!
TARGUM ONKELOS
(Aramaic) |
MASORETIC TEXT
(Hebrew) |
בְּקַדְמִין בְּרָא יְיָ יָת שְׁמַיָּא וְיָת אַרְעָא
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וְאַרְעָא הֲוָת צָדְיָא וְרֵיקָנְיָא וַחֲשׁוֹכָא עַל אַפֵּי תְּהוֹמָא וְרוּחָא מִן קֳדָם יְיָ מְנַשְּׁבָא עַל אַפֵּי מַיָּא
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וַאֲמַר יְיָ יְהֵי נְהוֹרָא וַהֲוָה נְהוֹרָא
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וַחֲזָא יְיָ יָת נְהוֹרָא אֲרֵי טָב וְאַפְרֵישׁ יְיָ בֵּין נְהוֹרָא וּבֵין חֲשׁוֹכָא
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וּקְרָא יְיָ לִנְהוֹרָא יְמָמָא וְלַחֲשׁוֹכָא קְרָא לֵילְיָא וַהֲוָה רְמַשׁ וַהֲוָה צְפַר יוֹם חַד
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LXX
(Greek)
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KJV
(English)
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1:1 Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν.
1:2 ἡ δὲ γῆ ἦν ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, καὶ σκότος ἐπάνω τῆς ἀβύσσου, καὶ πνεῦμα θεοῦ ἐπεφέρετο ἐπάνω τοῦ ὕδατος.
1:3 καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός Γενηθήτω φῶς. καὶ ἐγένετο φῶς.
1:4 καὶ εἶδεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ φῶς ὅτι καλόν. καὶ διεχώρισεν ὁ θεὸς ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ φωτὸς καὶ ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ σκότους.
1:5 καὶ ἐκάλεσεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ φῶς ἡμέραν καὶ τὸ σκότος ἐκάλεσεν νύκτα. καὶ ἐγένετο ἑσπέρα καὶ ἐγένετο πρωί, ἡμέρα μία.
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1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
1:2 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 face of the waters.
1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
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NBTN
(Nawat) |
NBIE
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1 KWAK ne Teut pejki kinketza
ne ilwikak wan ne tal
2 ne tal inteuk muektalijtuk
takumi ijpak miktan
ejekat pal Teut papataka
pak iishkalyu ne at
3 kwakuni inak Teut ma nemi tawil
wan muchijki ne tawil
4 kiwelitak Teut ne tawil
kikupej Teut tawil tech takumi
5 ne tawil kinutzki Tunal
wan ne takumi kinutzki Tayua
tayuakik, tatwik, se tunal
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1 WHEN God began building
the sky and the land
2 the land was not yet arranged
darkness over depths
wind of God fluttering
on the face of the water
3 then said God there should be light
and there came to be light
4 God liked the light
God separated light and darkness
5 the light he called Day
and the darkness he called Night
night fell, morning dawned, one day
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LINKS TO OTHER VERSIONS AND FULL TEXTS:
Texts, translations and audio on the Mechon-Mamre website: Hebrew Masoretic text / Listen. Parallel texts: Hebrew-English, Hebrew-Targum (Aramaic)Koiné Greek "Septuagint" translation (on the Ellopos website)
Translations from the Bible Gateway website: Latin "Vulgate" translation. English King James / ESV / OJB translations. Spanish: RVC / LBLA.
English JPS translation.
Yehoyesh Yiddish translation.
Nawat draft translation
NOTES
1:1 b'reshit bara...
On the meaning of the H, see When God began building the sky and the land (the section "In the beginning... of what?"). The noun reshit 'beginning, starting point, first fruit' is derived from rosh 'head', also 'beginning'. It occurs three times in the book of G, at places which are tellingly strategic: (1) at the beginning of the introductory creation poem, (2) in a statement about the spread of Nimrod's empire in ancient Mesopotamia (10:10), and at the beginning of virtually the concluding passage of Genesis (49:3, qv) when Jacob gives out his blessings, starting with his eldest son Reuben whom he calls koxi w'reshit oni 'my might and the beginning of my strength' (KJV) or 'my strength and the first fruit of my vigour' (EAS). Thus the opening poem and grand finale of Genesis both start with the same word, reshit. In N 'begin', like many verbal notions, is rarely if ever nominalized (the beginning) despite the fact that I have neologized Pewalis as the title of the book. The idiomatic way to say 'in the beginning' is kwak pejki i.e. 'when [it] began' (or whatever tense and person is called for in the context).
The verb ברא (b-r-')
On the meaning of the H, see When God began building the sky and the land (the section "In the beginning... of what?"). The noun reshit 'beginning, starting point, first fruit' is derived from rosh 'head', also 'beginning'. It occurs three times in the book of G, at places which are tellingly strategic: (1) at the beginning of the introductory creation poem, (2) in a statement about the spread of Nimrod's empire in ancient Mesopotamia (10:10), and at the beginning of virtually the concluding passage of Genesis (49:3, qv) when Jacob gives out his blessings, starting with his eldest son Reuben whom he calls koxi w'reshit oni 'my might and the beginning of my strength' (KJV) or 'my strength and the first fruit of my vigour' (EAS). Thus the opening poem and grand finale of Genesis both start with the same word, reshit. In N 'begin', like many verbal notions, is rarely if ever nominalized (the beginning) despite the fact that I have neologized Pewalis as the title of the book. The idiomatic way to say 'in the beginning' is kwak pejki i.e. 'when [it] began' (or whatever tense and person is called for in the context).
The verb ברא (b-r-')
This verb, traditionally translated as create in Eng. (Onk. ברא, LXX ποιέω, Vulg. creo, Yeh. באַשאַפֿן) occurs six times in G. Five occurrences are in this passage, and the sixth (5:1) is in the introduction to a tol'dot passage which recounts the generations from Adam to Noah: ze séfer tol'dot adam b'yom bara elohim adam bid'mut elohim asa‛ oto 'this is the book of the generations of Adam / in the day God created Adam / similar to God [he] made [him]'. Thus ברא is used in a very specific way which contrasts both with the next passage (the "other" creation story) and with the general word for 'make' which is עשה (‛-s-h). Commentators have suggested that ברא denotes creation ex nihilo. In N, I use -ketza which means 'raise, build' because this verb occurs in Mas. in the sense of creating life; there is no N word that corresponds exactly to create per se, but remember that create is only the Eng. rendering of ברא.
elohim
This seems to be the generic H word for 'god' (and hence for 'God'). It is always plural in form like some other nouns (e.g. máyim 'water' and shamáyim 'sky') and usually singular in meaning and agreement (e.g. bara elohim, with a singular verb), but where a plural sense is required the same form is used (e.g. Laban's elohim 'gods, idols' which Rachel steals in Nearly caught: Laban's gods, 31:17-42). Thus agreement is the only guide to whether a singular or plural sense is intended, but it usually refers to the God of Israel and is understood as singular. The root of this noun is אלה ('-l-h) which is therefore distinct from the name el, which occurs as one of the names of God (either on its own or with an epithet, as el elyon, el shadday etc.) and may be treated as a proper name. Elohim is translated here as Onk. יְיָ (sic), LXX ὁ θεός, Vulg. deus, KJV God. In N, where there is no single universal term for 'god', I have used (ne) Teut (irregularly accented on the u, i.e. [tyut]), which is accepted by some and which is cognate to the CN teotl; this element is seen in a few traditional N derived forms such as teupan 'temple, (whence) church'. It is a moot point whether the most etymological spelling ought to be teut or tiut (the phonetic result being the same); the spelling chosen imitates the CN cognate.
shamáyim, máyim
These nouns are plural in form always and it is therefore quite inappropriate to translate them as plurals into languages in which the words for 'sky' and 'water' are normally singular. This unidiomatic practice (heavens, waters) and other such aberrations in English bible translation, together with the retention of some random archaisms (thou hast, yea, verily, even when we don't mean 'even'...), have led to the development of a strange kind of "Biblese" which of course sounds nothing like what Biblical Hebrew ever sounded to BH speakers and is therefore a spurious literary invention. The translators of the LXX knew better: they use singular ουρανος and υδωρ. The Vulg. and KJV go halfway, with caelum, heaven but aquae, waters. The Sp. RV has cielos and aguas both in the plural. In N, ilwikak 'sky, heaven' is always singular because in the plural it makes no sense; at 'water, sea etc.' is normally singular, though it can occasionally be plural (ajat 'waters') when this really seems called for (usually it isn't).
1:2
Regarding the parenthetical nature of this verse, see my discussion in the introductory post.
tóhu wavóhu
Nobody knows what this originally meant, so translating it invites creativity. The LXX, which has a good chance of reflecting a very old tradition, has ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, Onk. צָדְיָא וְרֵיקָנְיָא, Vulg. inanis et vacua, KJV without form, and void (the latter word must be an example of Biblese because I don't think we would ever describe a place as void in ordinary English). In any case, trying to say "without form and void" in Nawat would run into several problems, basically three: no word for "without", no word for "form" and no word for "void" (or rather "empty", which is what the Latin vacua, for example, means), or the RV vacía calqued straight from it. The N expression inteuk muektalijtuk means 'hadn't been sorted (put in order, organised, set up...) yet'.
‛al p'ney
Ultra-literally, this means 'on (‛al) the face of (p'ney)' and it is actually translated as upon the face of in KJV, twice in this verse since it occurs twice: upon the face of the deep and upon the face of the waters. The trouble with this as a translation is that ‛al p'ney in BH functions as a sort of compound preposition, and so is a standardized formula with a conventionalized meaning (it isn't actually about anyone's or anything's face). The reason why that's a problem is that, in non-Biblese English, upon the face of is not any kind of compound preposition, and it means on someone's or something's face. Thus there is a good argument for translating the whole of ‛al p'ney into Eng. as on (or upon, which means the same as on), and in N as pak or ijpak (which stand in roughly the same relationship to each other as on and upon in Eng.). There is a possible objection to this: in BH ‛al pney may not mean (literally) 'face', but it still resonates a certain way because it contains the word for face (panim), and Everett Fox would argue that its double use in this verse (w'xóshekh ‛al p'ney t'hom w'rúax elohim m'rexéfet ‛al p'ney hamáyim) conjures up something, which we will be missing, perhaps, if we omit the word face, with JPS for example: with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water. Two points: JPS may not say face but it says surface (which is one way to interpret the real sense of p'ney in such BH phrases) in the first occurence, and in both occurrences it employs the English preposition over which may carry something of the idea, perhaps. I have also compromised in N, since in the first occurrence of ‛al p'ney I have ijpak miktan 'over [the] deep' but in the second I have pak iishkalyu ne at 'on the face of the water', because intuitively I feel this is something that makes sense in Nawat, and making sense in the target language is one of the objectives of translating.
rúax
The primary meaning of rúax is 'wind, breeze' or as CHALOT puts it, 'air in motion'. It is translated as πνεῦμα in LXX, spiritus in the Vulg. and spirit in KJV. Now the Greek πνεῦμα, which comes from the verb πνέω 'to blow or breathe', primarily means 'a breathing', secondarily 'breeze, wind', and thence, through metaphorical extension, it may mean 'spirit' (IGEL). Similarly Latin spiritus, which comes from the verb spiro 'to breath', primarily means 'breathing, breath' and by extension may acquire the senses associated with the English word spirit (CTL). The English word spirit does not mean 'breathing' or 'breath', does not conjure up the idea of 'wind' or 'breeze', and is not associated with any English verb meaning 'blow' or 'breathe'; therefore it is not always a reliable translation for spiritus, pneuma or rúax, and the use of the English word spirit excludes from the reader's field of vision the primary senses which have to do with 'air in motion'. In N I have translated it as ejekat 'wind' which simply takes us back to the original idea of the Hebrew word. Notice the context too: the rúax (ejekat, air in motion) of elohim fluttering (see m'raxéfet below) over (the face of) the water. I would respectfully suggest that a breeze can flutter over the water more easily than a spirit can. Of course it may be a physical or a metaphorical wind (physically or metaphorically fluttering). And rúax elohim may mean a wind emerging from God or simply a poetic wind of God, i.e. God imagined as a wind, whether a physical or a metaphorical one. It is a complex and suggestive conceptual image evoked by a very few broad, deft brushstrokes, and it doesn't need to be analysed to death. Rendering rúax as spirit rather destroys the whole construction and with it the reader's or listener's freedom to construe.
m'raxéfet
The wind of God (rúax elohim) is depicted as m'raxéfet over the water. This is the participle (equivalent to -ing) of the Piel (intensive conjugation) of the verb רחף (r-x-p) which occurs just three times in the whole Hebrew Bible: once in Deuteronomy, once in Jeremiah and once here. רחף is glossed
by EK as 'move gently, hover, fly, flutter'. In the text, rúax elohim m'raxéfet ‛al pney hamáyim, what comes over is what could be called a sound-picture, a static though not still image, the water below with the "wind" of God m'raféxeting over it, perhaps for a single instant, or was it a billion years? For the N I have chosen the verb papataka. This is a certain kind of derived verb, one could very well say a binyan in fact, from the primary verb patani which means 'to fly'. Removing the n of the last syllable and the final vowel to leave the root PATA, we obtain the derived verb by reduplicating the first syllable and suffixing -ka, thus: pa-pata-ka. The semantic effect is rather close to that often produced in Biblical Hebrew by deriving a Hitpael: a repetitive intransitive activity, perhaps with a weakened version of the original verb's meaning, hence 'to flutter' rather than 'to fly', and without the latter's directionality: 'flutter about', perhaps.
1:3
God said... is the first main clause in Genesis, if we agree that what immediately follows b'reshit is a subordinate time clause and that verse 2 is a parenthetical clause which describes a scene and sets the stage before the action begins. The first thing that happens in the universe is that God speaks.
y'hi or
God's speech immediately results in an event, or in a change of state. Grammatically it is difficult to be sure which it is, because the verb היה (h-y-h) has two senses, which are actually more like two aspects (or Aktsionsarten). One is the meaning of a stative verb meaning 'to be' and the other is that of a dynamic verb meaning 'to come to be' or 'to become' or 'to happen'. Does the jussive y'hi or 'let there be light' mean 'let light exist' (stative) or 'let light appear' (dynamic)? And does the perfect indicative way'hi or 'and there was light' mean 'light existed' or 'light came into being'? And does it matter? Well, it might matter depending on the language you were translating into, or then again it might not. In any case the Hebrew text does not specify which of these it is (even if it were capable of distinguishing them, which is perhaps doubtful). Greek, as we might expect, is more nit-picking, and the translation in the LXX, γενηθήτω/ἐγένετο φῶς, implies a dynamic reading: let light come to be, light came to be (or even: let light happen, light happened). In Latin this gave fiat lux et facta est lux, whereas a stative reading might have produced sit lux et fuit lux. On the other hand, most of the English translations settle for Let there be light, and there was light. Other European translations show a split, so for example Que la lumière soit! Et la lumière fut! but Es werde Licht! und es ward Licht. In N, there is no actual copula (verb to be) as such, but two verbs may approximate the meaning in this context; the trouble is that they approach the target meaning from different directions, which force us to focus back on the two possible nuances inherent in the H to which I've just referred. (1) The verb nemi (past nemik or nenki), which historically meant 'to reside', now means 'to be (in a place or state) = Sp. estar' and 'to exist = Sp. haber', and its meaning is stative. (2) The verb muchiwa (past muchijki or muchiwki), which is the reflexive of -chiwa 'to make', still means literally 'to be made' etc., but it can also mean 'become, happen, come into existence', and its meaning is dynamic. There are thus two ways to say 'let there be' and 'there was' in Nawat: a choice must be made between a stative reading (ma nemi 'let X exist', nemik 'existed') or a dynamic one (ma muchiwa 'let X happen, come to be, become', muchijki 'happened etc.'). It isn't even necessary to have the same verb in both clauses: you could have ma muchiwa X, wan nemik X 'let X be made, and [then] X existed', and you could have ma nemi X, wan muchijki X 'let X exist, and X came to be', which is what I have chosen to put in the translation.
1:4 wayar... et haor ki Tov
wayar elohim et haor ki Tov 'and God saw the light that it was good' (literally) is a bit of a translator's conundrum; in most languages this makes no syntactic sense. Either you see the light, or you see that the light is good, you don't "see the light that it is good". But there are other such constructions here and there in H and so we may be sure that it is not a slip of the pen or anything of the sort. What it means is both of the above. God looked at the light and he saw that it was good (but he did all that in one sentence). The translator is faced with several options. It doesn't seem to me that the best solution is to write something that sounds like bad grammar in the target language, because in H it is not bad grammar, so that is reflecting something about the text that isn't true. In some translations such as JPS, God saw that the light was good. But wait a minute, what is the (idiomatic) meaning of seeing that something is good? Does it mean that God saw that the light he had made was a good light (as opposed, one supposes, to a bad light)? Why would he have decided to make a bad light anyway (unless he wanted to)? In fact, being God, he knew it was "a good light" before he looked at it, right? It is quite obvious, is it not, that what this really means to say is that God approved of the light he had made, he was pleased with it, he saw the light and, so to speak, said: Good! So, that's done. La vio bien. In N there is a verb that means 'to like' in the sense of seeing it and approving of what one sees, and using that verb (which incorporates the verb -ita 'to see'), the N translation says that God liked the light, in the particular sense of seeing it and approving of what he saw. (EAS translates: 'God was pleased with the light that he saw.')
1:5 way'hi ‛érev way'hi vóqer
Clearly, in this context the sense of היה (h-y-h) is dynamic: 'come to be, become, happen'. The meaning is that evening came and morning came, not that it "was" evening and it "was" morning. Coming almost immediately after another clause with way'hi: way'hi or 'and there was light', which depicts the creation of light (or at the very least, the emergence of light as something that now exists), one might be tempted to understand the present words to mean that evening and morning were thus also created, or emerged, but as the same wording is repeated five more times in this passage, that would lead us to assume that successive evenings and mornings were being created in the same way that light has just been created, whereas what the text actually was saying is probably something much more mundane and simpler (simpler, at least, given everyone's daily experience of such phenomena): namely that the day ended and night came (wah'hi ‛érev), and the night ended and the next day began (way'hi vóqer). And although the notions of day and night are connected with those of light and darkness, a distinction which in the narrative has only just come into being, given the infallible diurnal-nocturnal rhythm of the present universe as known to ancient peoples, day and night are also understood as basic units of time: in practice, to count the alternations of evenings and mornings, characterized by light and darkness, is to count the passage of days, the passage of time. So, the primary sense in context of way'hi ‛érev is not anything so grandiose as evening being created, it just means that the day came to a close and time advanced: dusk came, as did a new dawn, as has always been the case since the "universe" began, and such is the case for the ancient Israelites and likewise for present speakers of Nawat. Now N is a very verby language, i.e. it is a language with a great predilection for expressing anything that happens through verbal predicates. It is therefore more idiomatic in N not to say that it was evening (a noun) and it was morning (another noun) but rather, so to speak, that it dusked (tayuakik) and it dawned (tatwik or tanesik).
yom exad
That is, 'one day' and not 'the first day' (KJV), interpolated by the translators who must have reasoned that the following six days form a sequence and are referred to using ordinals (yom sheni 'a second day' etc.), so the original must be a mistake. But that is only if you read Genesis with foreknowledge of what comes next! Stop thinking so much, and listen: night fell, morning came, and that was one day. There is no first day if there is only one day.
shamáyim, máyim
These nouns are plural in form always and it is therefore quite inappropriate to translate them as plurals into languages in which the words for 'sky' and 'water' are normally singular. This unidiomatic practice (heavens, waters) and other such aberrations in English bible translation, together with the retention of some random archaisms (thou hast, yea, verily, even when we don't mean 'even'...), have led to the development of a strange kind of "Biblese" which of course sounds nothing like what Biblical Hebrew ever sounded to BH speakers and is therefore a spurious literary invention. The translators of the LXX knew better: they use singular ουρανος and υδωρ. The Vulg. and KJV go halfway, with caelum, heaven but aquae, waters. The Sp. RV has cielos and aguas both in the plural. In N, ilwikak 'sky, heaven' is always singular because in the plural it makes no sense; at 'water, sea etc.' is normally singular, though it can occasionally be plural (ajat 'waters') when this really seems called for (usually it isn't).
1:2
Regarding the parenthetical nature of this verse, see my discussion in the introductory post.
tóhu wavóhu
Nobody knows what this originally meant, so translating it invites creativity. The LXX, which has a good chance of reflecting a very old tradition, has ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, Onk. צָדְיָא וְרֵיקָנְיָא, Vulg. inanis et vacua, KJV without form, and void (the latter word must be an example of Biblese because I don't think we would ever describe a place as void in ordinary English). In any case, trying to say "without form and void" in Nawat would run into several problems, basically three: no word for "without", no word for "form" and no word for "void" (or rather "empty", which is what the Latin vacua, for example, means), or the RV vacía calqued straight from it. The N expression inteuk muektalijtuk means 'hadn't been sorted (put in order, organised, set up...) yet'.
‛al p'ney
Ultra-literally, this means 'on (‛al) the face of (p'ney)' and it is actually translated as upon the face of in KJV, twice in this verse since it occurs twice: upon the face of the deep and upon the face of the waters. The trouble with this as a translation is that ‛al p'ney in BH functions as a sort of compound preposition, and so is a standardized formula with a conventionalized meaning (it isn't actually about anyone's or anything's face). The reason why that's a problem is that, in non-Biblese English, upon the face of is not any kind of compound preposition, and it means on someone's or something's face. Thus there is a good argument for translating the whole of ‛al p'ney into Eng. as on (or upon, which means the same as on), and in N as pak or ijpak (which stand in roughly the same relationship to each other as on and upon in Eng.). There is a possible objection to this: in BH ‛al pney may not mean (literally) 'face', but it still resonates a certain way because it contains the word for face (panim), and Everett Fox would argue that its double use in this verse (w'xóshekh ‛al p'ney t'hom w'rúax elohim m'rexéfet ‛al p'ney hamáyim) conjures up something, which we will be missing, perhaps, if we omit the word face, with JPS for example: with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water. Two points: JPS may not say face but it says surface (which is one way to interpret the real sense of p'ney in such BH phrases) in the first occurence, and in both occurrences it employs the English preposition over which may carry something of the idea, perhaps. I have also compromised in N, since in the first occurrence of ‛al p'ney I have ijpak miktan 'over [the] deep' but in the second I have pak iishkalyu ne at 'on the face of the water', because intuitively I feel this is something that makes sense in Nawat, and making sense in the target language is one of the objectives of translating.
rúax
The primary meaning of rúax is 'wind, breeze' or as CHALOT puts it, 'air in motion'. It is translated as πνεῦμα in LXX, spiritus in the Vulg. and spirit in KJV. Now the Greek πνεῦμα, which comes from the verb πνέω 'to blow or breathe', primarily means 'a breathing', secondarily 'breeze, wind', and thence, through metaphorical extension, it may mean 'spirit' (IGEL). Similarly Latin spiritus, which comes from the verb spiro 'to breath', primarily means 'breathing, breath' and by extension may acquire the senses associated with the English word spirit (CTL). The English word spirit does not mean 'breathing' or 'breath', does not conjure up the idea of 'wind' or 'breeze', and is not associated with any English verb meaning 'blow' or 'breathe'; therefore it is not always a reliable translation for spiritus, pneuma or rúax, and the use of the English word spirit excludes from the reader's field of vision the primary senses which have to do with 'air in motion'. In N I have translated it as ejekat 'wind' which simply takes us back to the original idea of the Hebrew word. Notice the context too: the rúax (ejekat, air in motion) of elohim fluttering (see m'raxéfet below) over (the face of) the water. I would respectfully suggest that a breeze can flutter over the water more easily than a spirit can. Of course it may be a physical or a metaphorical wind (physically or metaphorically fluttering). And rúax elohim may mean a wind emerging from God or simply a poetic wind of God, i.e. God imagined as a wind, whether a physical or a metaphorical one. It is a complex and suggestive conceptual image evoked by a very few broad, deft brushstrokes, and it doesn't need to be analysed to death. Rendering rúax as spirit rather destroys the whole construction and with it the reader's or listener's freedom to construe.
m'raxéfet
The wind of God (rúax elohim) is depicted as m'raxéfet over the water. This is the participle (equivalent to -ing) of the Piel (intensive conjugation) of the verb רחף (r-x-p) which occurs just three times in the whole Hebrew Bible: once in Deuteronomy, once in Jeremiah and once here. רחף is glossed
by EK as 'move gently, hover, fly, flutter'. In the text, rúax elohim m'raxéfet ‛al pney hamáyim, what comes over is what could be called a sound-picture, a static though not still image, the water below with the "wind" of God m'raféxeting over it, perhaps for a single instant, or was it a billion years? For the N I have chosen the verb papataka. This is a certain kind of derived verb, one could very well say a binyan in fact, from the primary verb patani which means 'to fly'. Removing the n of the last syllable and the final vowel to leave the root PATA, we obtain the derived verb by reduplicating the first syllable and suffixing -ka, thus: pa-pata-ka. The semantic effect is rather close to that often produced in Biblical Hebrew by deriving a Hitpael: a repetitive intransitive activity, perhaps with a weakened version of the original verb's meaning, hence 'to flutter' rather than 'to fly', and without the latter's directionality: 'flutter about', perhaps.
1:3
God said... is the first main clause in Genesis, if we agree that what immediately follows b'reshit is a subordinate time clause and that verse 2 is a parenthetical clause which describes a scene and sets the stage before the action begins. The first thing that happens in the universe is that God speaks.
y'hi or
God's speech immediately results in an event, or in a change of state. Grammatically it is difficult to be sure which it is, because the verb היה (h-y-h) has two senses, which are actually more like two aspects (or Aktsionsarten). One is the meaning of a stative verb meaning 'to be' and the other is that of a dynamic verb meaning 'to come to be' or 'to become' or 'to happen'. Does the jussive y'hi or 'let there be light' mean 'let light exist' (stative) or 'let light appear' (dynamic)? And does the perfect indicative way'hi or 'and there was light' mean 'light existed' or 'light came into being'? And does it matter? Well, it might matter depending on the language you were translating into, or then again it might not. In any case the Hebrew text does not specify which of these it is (even if it were capable of distinguishing them, which is perhaps doubtful). Greek, as we might expect, is more nit-picking, and the translation in the LXX, γενηθήτω/ἐγένετο φῶς, implies a dynamic reading: let light come to be, light came to be (or even: let light happen, light happened). In Latin this gave fiat lux et facta est lux, whereas a stative reading might have produced sit lux et fuit lux. On the other hand, most of the English translations settle for Let there be light, and there was light. Other European translations show a split, so for example Que la lumière soit! Et la lumière fut! but Es werde Licht! und es ward Licht. In N, there is no actual copula (verb to be) as such, but two verbs may approximate the meaning in this context; the trouble is that they approach the target meaning from different directions, which force us to focus back on the two possible nuances inherent in the H to which I've just referred. (1) The verb nemi (past nemik or nenki), which historically meant 'to reside', now means 'to be (in a place or state) = Sp. estar' and 'to exist = Sp. haber', and its meaning is stative. (2) The verb muchiwa (past muchijki or muchiwki), which is the reflexive of -chiwa 'to make', still means literally 'to be made' etc., but it can also mean 'become, happen, come into existence', and its meaning is dynamic. There are thus two ways to say 'let there be' and 'there was' in Nawat: a choice must be made between a stative reading (ma nemi 'let X exist', nemik 'existed') or a dynamic one (ma muchiwa 'let X happen, come to be, become', muchijki 'happened etc.'). It isn't even necessary to have the same verb in both clauses: you could have ma muchiwa X, wan nemik X 'let X be made, and [then] X existed', and you could have ma nemi X, wan muchijki X 'let X exist, and X came to be', which is what I have chosen to put in the translation.
1:4 wayar... et haor ki Tov
wayar elohim et haor ki Tov 'and God saw the light that it was good' (literally) is a bit of a translator's conundrum; in most languages this makes no syntactic sense. Either you see the light, or you see that the light is good, you don't "see the light that it is good". But there are other such constructions here and there in H and so we may be sure that it is not a slip of the pen or anything of the sort. What it means is both of the above. God looked at the light and he saw that it was good (but he did all that in one sentence). The translator is faced with several options. It doesn't seem to me that the best solution is to write something that sounds like bad grammar in the target language, because in H it is not bad grammar, so that is reflecting something about the text that isn't true. In some translations such as JPS, God saw that the light was good. But wait a minute, what is the (idiomatic) meaning of seeing that something is good? Does it mean that God saw that the light he had made was a good light (as opposed, one supposes, to a bad light)? Why would he have decided to make a bad light anyway (unless he wanted to)? In fact, being God, he knew it was "a good light" before he looked at it, right? It is quite obvious, is it not, that what this really means to say is that God approved of the light he had made, he was pleased with it, he saw the light and, so to speak, said: Good! So, that's done. La vio bien. In N there is a verb that means 'to like' in the sense of seeing it and approving of what one sees, and using that verb (which incorporates the verb -ita 'to see'), the N translation says that God liked the light, in the particular sense of seeing it and approving of what he saw. (EAS translates: 'God was pleased with the light that he saw.')
1:5 way'hi ‛érev way'hi vóqer
Clearly, in this context the sense of היה (h-y-h) is dynamic: 'come to be, become, happen'. The meaning is that evening came and morning came, not that it "was" evening and it "was" morning. Coming almost immediately after another clause with way'hi: way'hi or 'and there was light', which depicts the creation of light (or at the very least, the emergence of light as something that now exists), one might be tempted to understand the present words to mean that evening and morning were thus also created, or emerged, but as the same wording is repeated five more times in this passage, that would lead us to assume that successive evenings and mornings were being created in the same way that light has just been created, whereas what the text actually was saying is probably something much more mundane and simpler (simpler, at least, given everyone's daily experience of such phenomena): namely that the day ended and night came (wah'hi ‛érev), and the night ended and the next day began (way'hi vóqer). And although the notions of day and night are connected with those of light and darkness, a distinction which in the narrative has only just come into being, given the infallible diurnal-nocturnal rhythm of the present universe as known to ancient peoples, day and night are also understood as basic units of time: in practice, to count the alternations of evenings and mornings, characterized by light and darkness, is to count the passage of days, the passage of time. So, the primary sense in context of way'hi ‛érev is not anything so grandiose as evening being created, it just means that the day came to a close and time advanced: dusk came, as did a new dawn, as has always been the case since the "universe" began, and such is the case for the ancient Israelites and likewise for present speakers of Nawat. Now N is a very verby language, i.e. it is a language with a great predilection for expressing anything that happens through verbal predicates. It is therefore more idiomatic in N not to say that it was evening (a noun) and it was morning (another noun) but rather, so to speak, that it dusked (tayuakik) and it dawned (tatwik or tanesik).
yom exad
That is, 'one day' and not 'the first day' (KJV), interpolated by the translators who must have reasoned that the following six days form a sequence and are referred to using ordinals (yom sheni 'a second day' etc.), so the original must be a mistake. But that is only if you read Genesis with foreknowledge of what comes next! Stop thinking so much, and listen: night fell, morning came, and that was one day. There is no first day if there is only one day.
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