Notes 1: Creation (1:1 - 2:4a)

SYNOPSIS: God creates heaven and earth in six days and rests on the seventh.

• Text of the passage

Source: W.H. Bennett (ed.), Genesis, Caxton, London,
[1904?] in the Century Bible: A Modern Commentary
series

The first passage in Genesis is a creation myth which, through its first word, b'reshit 'in the beginning', gave the whole book its traditional Hebrew name. Besides naming the book as a whole, בראשית is also used as the name of the first parasha (weekly reading, section) of the twelve that make up the book. The section Bereshit, which goes from Gen. 1:1 to 6:8, is where the book starts, where the world starts, and where we will now start reading Genesis!

A great many ancient and pre-literate cultures, all around the world, have such creation myths. The writers of Genesis also, it seems, had one, for here it is; furthermore, they formed part of a milieu dominated by the literary traditions of larger cultures than their own which were far, far more ancient, and the Hebrew myth does not start from scratch, ignoring those traditions. In consequence, there are resonances to be found between the scriptural account and certain aspects of more ancient middle-eastern texts. However, that is not to say that the Genesis myth was "copied" from another account; in point of fact, it wasn't, since once we have finished being suitably impressed, excited and intrigued by the points of contact, we can calm down and read the different accounts in detail, whereupon it becomes very evident, despite those overlaps, how distinct the Genesis account is from the others. Some scholars have presented the idea that what the authors of Genesis did was take a well-known theme such as the (then) standard middle-eastern creation story and give it a different twist, indeed to some extent stand it on its head, and that to the original readers (unlike us) what would have stood out most of all in this way was not the similarities (which might have been taken for granted, as familiar background) but the special features in the Genesis version. 

What special features? I will quote Bennett, the editor of the Century Bible edition of Genesis, with commentary, which is now more than a century old (the reference is given under the illustration; p. 69-70):

The one important difference is that the Babylonian account revels in myths concerning the doings of multitudinous gods, demons, and monsters, while Genesis gives us an almost scientific [footnote: According to the knowledge of the times.] account of creation by one God; the mythical features have been carefully removed, and can only be traced in a few phrases.

For a taste of what this revelling in myths of doings of multitudinous gods consists of, and just how foreign it all is to anything we read in Genesis, let's turn to a more recent commentator, Zeitlin, in whose book Ancient Judaism we can read, first, a brief synopsis of a creation account from Sumerian mythology (p. 3):

The Sumerian cosmogonic and creation myths trace the origin of the universe to the primeval sea. This was the first form of being. The primeval sea begot heaven and earth, gods conceived in human form and united in a cosmic mountain. Heaven (An) the male and earth (Ki) the female then begot the air god (Enlil) who separated heaven from earth and carried off his mother Ki. Following this, man was created and civilization established.

Later, the Babylonians and Assyrians (who unlike the Sumerians spoke a Semitic language, Akkadian, and are often lumped together as "Akkadians") reworked ideas derived from the Sumerian myths into a version of their own, which Zeitlin synthesizes thus (p. 4):

In Akkad, too, it is the primordial oceans, Tiamat and Apsu, that exist at the very beginning, long before heaven and earth are created. Then several generations of gods are born, including Ea, the god of wisdom. Apsu and Tiamat are so distressed by the continued clamour of the deities that Apsu decides to destroy them. Ea, however, succeeds in preventing this by killing Apsu with the aid of a magical incantation. Ea's wife then gives birth to Marduk, a great god who soon demonstrates his courage. He kills Tiamat who with the assistance of renegade gods and vicious monsters, had been bent on avenging the death of her husband. Splitting Tiamat in two, Marduk then proceeds to create heaven and earth from her huge corpse. Following this, Marduk with the co-operation of his father Ea creates mankind from the blood of the rebel god Kingu, who had led Tiamat's hostile host.

Speiser (p. 8 and ff.) insists, and I agree, that the question of most interest in the present context is not whether the statement of how creation happened is true or false, but rather what it means, and specifically: what it meant to the writer and the audience and how the account came to take the form it took. The Babylonian creation epic, now called the Enūma Eliš, which is usually considered the "standard" Mesopotamian version, not only agrees with Genesis in many of the points that it describes (such as the creation of light, the firmament, etc. etc.) but most tellingly it places them in the same order, suggesting a common origin. This, Speiser says, is hardly likely to be just a coincidence. Furthermore, he points out that today nobody seriously doubts this: "The relationship is duly recognized by all informed students, no matter how orthodox their personal beliefs may be."

Quoting from Heidel's The Babylonian Genesis, Speiser tabulates the overall sequence of steps in creation given in the Enūma Eliš as follows:

• Divine spirit and cosmic matter are coexistent and coeternal
• Primeval chaos; Ti'amat (= t'hom?) enveloped in darkness
• Light emanating from the gods
• The creation of the firmament
• The creation of dry land
• The creation of luminaries
• The creation of man
• The gods rest and celebrate

Now, what does it "mean" that the Genesis account of creation came from Mesopotamia and from a culture much more substantial and older than its own? All it means, says Speiser, is that the biblical tradition on this matter aligned itself with the basic tenets of "Babylonian science", which is a fairly natural thing to have happened since, in the context of the time, that "science" was, to quote Speiser, "highly advanced, respected, and influential". Besides, the patriarchs themselves came from Mesopotamia and it is not surprising if they had "picked up" such notions there, just as we know that they had absorbed other cultural elements. But once we accept that, we can focus on the divergences between the Mesopotamian and biblical accounts of creation (EAS p. 11):

While we have before us incontestable similarities in detail, the difference in over-all approach is no less prominent. The Babylonian creation story features a succession of various rival deities. The biblical version, on the other hand, is dominated by the monotheistic concept in the absolute sense of the term. Thus the two are both genetically related and yet poles apart. In common with other portions of the Primeval History, the biblical account of creation displays at one and the same time a recognition of pertinent Babylonian sources as well as a critical position toward them.

Now a word about form. The first three-and-a-half verses of ch. 2, with which this passage concludes, are the way in which the account of the creation of the heaven and the earth is "wrapped up". Taking the passage as a discourse unit, we find elements in this part which seem to answer to elements of the introductory part of the account, which we might consider to be constituted by the first two verses. Those verses talk about the situation that existed (tóhu wavóhu, rúax elohim m'raxéfet) prior to God's beginning to create heaven and earth (b'reshit bara elohim et...); now we are told about the situation following God's finishing his creation. So, way'khúllu hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz w'khol tz'va'am - when everything had been completed (and note the verbatim repetition of the phrase 'heaven and earth') - way'khal elohim bayyom hassh'vi‛i m'lakhto asher 'asa wayyishbot - God ended his work and rested. The symmetry is fairly obvious. There remains just one thing for God to do now, and apparently it isn't seen as part of his "work" because we have already been told that he rested, but...: way'várekh elohim et yom hassh'vi‛i way'qaddesh oto 'and God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it.' And lastly, a "verbal punctuation mark" to formally close the passage: élle tol'dot hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz b'hibbar'am 'this is the story of the heaven and the earth when they were created', or in other words, 'that's how the heaven and the earth were created'.


1:1  b'reshit...
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).

b-r-'

This verb, traditionally translated as create in Eng. (Onk. b-r-', LXX poieô, Vulg. creo, Yeh. bashafn) 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 bidmut 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 b-r-' 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 ‛-s-h. 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 b-r-'. This rare verb occurs at the beginning of the passage (it is the second word, coming after b'reshit), and it occurs at the very end of it, in the form b'hibbar'am 'upon their being created', in the closing sentence (2:4, JPS): 'Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created.' Thus,  the verb b-r-' 'create' forms an inclusio, or bracketing structure for the present passage.

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 ho theos, 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'. 

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 ouranos and hudôr. 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).

et hasshamáyim w'et ha'áretz
It has been suggested (e.g. EH, 4) that the phrase 'the heaven and the earth' is a way of saying 'everything' or 'the universe'. This makes a lot of sense in Hebrew, because naming two opposites is quite a common way to convey the idea of all (in rhetoric, the technical name for this device is merism). Similarly, dá‛at Tov wara‛ 'knowledge of good and evil' (ch. 2) may really have been understood to mean something akin to 'knowing all things' (notice that it is stated that this is one thing that would make humans similar to "gods"), and when all the inhabitants of Sodom (or at least all the men) crowd around Lot's house (ch. 19), they are described as minnahar w'‛ad zaqen literally 'from boy to old man'. In effect, the entire world was thought of as consisting of two main parts, heaven and earth, so both together made up everything. If the phrase really is used in this somewhat metaphorical manner here, 'heaven and earth' might not be a very transparent translation if, when translated, it sounds like it means specifically those "two things". The trouble is that the phrase, as formulated, is still suggestive and has particular connotations that are dependent on the use of those words, so that omitting them in favour of a "more idiomatic translation" might in this case lose, for the reader, more than it gains. The translator, while striving for a natural, idiomatic translation, needs to be wary of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

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 aoratos kai akataskeuastos, Onk. tzadya w'reqanya, 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'. We should also note that while this is a coordinate expression in form (tóhu and bohu), that doesn't mean it really expresses two attributes of the earth. This is simply an instance of the rhetorical figure known as hendiadys, a term which comes from the Greek phrase hen dia dus(in) meaning 'one through two', and refers to the use of a conjoined phrase to express a single idea, as in good and ready. When you are good and ready doesn't mean 'when you are good, and when you are ready'! Sometimes, as with tóhu wavóhu, the individual words don't all mean anything on their own, it is the combination of words as a whole that has meaning, as in English compounds like helter-skelter or topsy-turvy. Therefore, there is really no reason whatsoever to feel obliged to translate the phrase tóhu wavóhu as if you were finding a word for tóhu and another one for bóhu and join them with and, as all the standard translations do: tzadya w'reqanya (Aramaic), aoratos kai kataskeuastos, inanis et vacua, without form and void... EAS has 'a formless waste'.

‛al p'ne
Ultra-literally, this means 'on (‛al) the face of (p'ne)' 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'ne 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'ne 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 pne 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'ne t'hom w'rúax elohim m'rexéfet ‛al p'ne 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'ne 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'ne 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.

t'hom
(See the introductory comment.)

rúax
The primary meaning of rúax is 'wind, breeze' or as CHALOT puts it, 'air in motion'. It is translated as pneuma in LXX, spiritus in the Vulg. and spirit in KJV. Now the Greek pneuma, which comes from the verb pneô '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 r-x-p which occurs just three times in the whole Hebrew Bible: once in Deuteronomy, once in Jeremiah and once here. r-x-p is glossed
by EK as 'move gently, hover, fly, flutter'. In the text, rúax elohim m'raxéfet ‛al pne hamáyim, what comes across 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. Interestingly, CB points out that this verb, rare in BH, occurs in Aramaic and is sometimes used of a bird hatching an egg. The egg idea is perhaps suggestive. Others say it evokes the idea of an eagle protecting its young. My Nawat choice, papataka, can mean 'flap one's wings' (aletear in Spanish), which might fit either image at a pinch. EF translated 'hovering', and says in a note that it also can mean 'flitting'.


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, genêthêtô/egeneto phôs, 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 ha'or ki Tov
wayar elohim et ha'or 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.

1:4 ben... uven... 
The BH preposition ben 'between' is very commonly repeated before both noun phrases, with u- (the allomorph of w'- used before labial consonants) before the second ben whereby it becomes uven: ben ha'or uven haxóshekh 'between the light and (between) the darkness', cf. also 1:7 ben hammáyim asher mittáxat haraqía' uven hammáyim asher me‛al haraqía‛ 'between the water that [was] under the firmament and (between) the water that was above the firmament', etc. etc. Another use is seen in 1:6, ben... l'..., where we have ben máyim lamáyim 'between water and water'.
 
1:6 raqía‛
Trad. Eng. 'firmament', which comes from Latin firmamentum translating Gk. stereôma, which is derived from stereoô 'to make firm or solid'. But the Hebrew raqía‛ comes from a verb (r-q-‛) meaning 'to stamp, hammer out, beat out (into plates)'. It is said that the intended image is that of a dome. I think the central notion to raqía' is really that of a wide, flat, thin object. EAS translates 'expanse'; EF uses 'dome'.

1:9 yabbasha
The meaning of yabbasha is '(dry) land' as opposed to water.

1:10 miqwe hammáyim
Literally 'the gathering of the water(s)': KJV and the gathering of the waters he called seas, LXX ta sustêmata tôn hudatôn, Vulg. congregationesque aquarum. This is just another way of saying 'the gathered water(s)', which is much easier in Nawat. So also EAS.

1:11 tad'she ha'áretz déshe 
The meaning of déshe is '(fresh, green) grass', and in the context of this construction the cognate verb d-sh-' means 'sprout up'. The "redundant" joining of both cognates in a single phrase and with a single meaning is a standard device in BH which draws the listener's attention to the image thus represented; it is all but untranslatable, although EF tries: let the earth sprout forth with sprouting-growth. So also, in the same verse, mazría‛ zéra‛, for which EF has (plants that) seed forth seeds.
 
l’mino etc. 
This phrase and the others containing *min 'kind, sort, class' (always possessed in BH!) in the passage give me a double challenge for translation. First of all, there is no Nawat word meaning min. Apart from that, what do these expressions actually mean anyway (pardon the acoustic pun)? In l'-min-o lit. 'to its kind', the l' means 'in accordance with', thus 'according to its kind', but what is that? Just another way of saying 'all kinds of...'? In the following verse the variant form of the possessive suffix is used, so l'minéhu, with the same meaning, and this is repeated until it becomes a sort of refrain; it seems to cover in one word the complete idea that many specimens of each kind (species) emerged. In 1:11 and 1:12 I have translated l'mino as ken yejemet 'like them', and l'minéhu in the subsequent verses I have translated sejse ken sejse 'each like each'. (The word min is prob. derived from a verb m-y-n or m-w-n 'split, furrow' whence 'classify' (EK).)

1:14 
The explicit wording of this paragraph makes it sound rather like a didactic text, spelling out just what the sun, moon and stars are (as if one could possibly not know). One wonders whether the subtext of such attention might have been a deliberate presentation of the "lights in the sky" as just that and nothing more, luminous bodies with periodicity of movement, but certainly not divine beings or the abodes of gods! They make the difference between day and night, their changes mark the seasons, they provide us with light - and that's that. So others, e.g. EH: "[the details of the description] serve to emphasize that the sun, moon, and stars are not divinities, as they were universally thought to be in other creation narratives."

l’otot ul’mo‛adim
Lit. 'for signs and for seasons', which is a hendiadys meaning 'as signs for the seasons' (so EAS). The Nawat says 'for the knowing of holidays'. The real meaning of mo‛ed is 'appointed time', i.e. a holiday, but the holidays served to mark the time of year (season).

ul'yamim w'shanim
'And for days and years', for which Onk. has ul'mimne b'hon yomin ush'nin 'with which to count days and years', which clarifies the meaning.

1:16 w'et hakkokhavim
'And the stars.' The addition of the stars sounds like an afterthought, and the lack of any function attributed to them contrasts markedly with the treatment of the sun and the moon. Apparently the authors had little time for astrology!

1:20 yishr'tzu hammáyim shéretz 
Cf. note on tad'she ha'áretz déshe in 1:11, and so also, of course, w'‛of y'‛ofef. The idea expressed by sh-r-tz is 'swarm, teem', and not 'move' (or 'crawl' or 'creep') as suggested by KJV moving things and other translations, no doubt wrongly suggested by the LXX which has herpeta, whence Vulg. producant aquae reptile animae viventis and so on.


néfesh xayya
The word néfesh means 'breath, soul, mind, person, human being, will, desire, self'. The phrase néfesh xayya 'living néfesh, living breath, living soul...' may refer as here to all animate life forms, i.e. living being(s), as a metonymy, but per se it really means 'the breath of life' itself, i.e. the life force, as in 1:30: ul'khol xayyat ha'áretz... asher bo néfesh xayya 'and for all the animals... in which the breath of life is [found].' The metonymous sense seems to have been widespread; it will also be seen in 2:7, where we have: way'hi ha'adam l'néfesh xayya 'and the adam became a living soul, i.e. came to life, became a living being.'

‛of
Although ‛of on its own means 'bird, fowl', in the present context (‛of y'‛ofef) it is taken to refer to all flying things (not just birds). Maybe this is why in 1:21 the specification ‛of kanaf 'winged bird(s)' is made. The overall sense of the present words is suggested by the structure of the clauses: yishr'tzu hammáyim shéretz néfesh xayya / w'‛of y'‛ofef ‛al ha'áretz '[God said] the water should swarm with swarming life / that flying things should fly on land'. The three parallel contrasts are thus: (1) swarming life : flying things, (2) swarm : fly, (3) water : land. Thus ‛of stands for things that fly, as shéretz is things that swarm.

1:21 hattanninim hagg’dolim
The great water-serpents? Sea-monsters? "Both the Hebrew word for these creatures (tannin) and the 'Leviathan' appear in Canaanite myths from the ancient city of Ugarit, as the name of the dragon god from earliest times who assisted Yam (god of the sea) in a battle against Baal (Canaanite god of fertility)... By stating that they were part of God's creation, the narrative deprives them of divinity" (EH).


roméset
Unlike sh-r-tz (note above), I do take r-m-s to mean 'creep, crawl, move', and so translate kol néfesh haxayya haroméset as 'all moving life'. By rendering 1:20 with the moving creature that hath life (= shéretz) and 1:21 with every living creature that moveth (= haroméset), the KJV conflates two terms that Genesis seems to be trying to keep apart. The nominal correlate, rémes, which occurs in 1:24, should not be translated as 'reptiles'.
 
1:22 p'ru ur'vu
The first blessings in Genesis commence with this formula: 'be fruitful and multiply', as it is usually rendered into English. The formula consists of verbal derivatives of two nominal words, p'ri 'fruit' and rav 'great, many', in the second person plural imperative, joined by the conjunction w'- (here u- because the first consonant following it has schwa).

1:24 b'hema, xay'to éretz
In a narrow sense, b'hema means 'cattle', in a broad sense as clearly here, the whole range of domesticated animals. It is pretty obvious that xay'to éretz, lit. 'life of the earth/land' (elsewhere xayat hassade 'life of the field') refers, in contrast, to non-domesticated (i.e. wild) animals. As a curiosity (since we are not assuming this mythical text to have a modern scientific basis!), we might note the obvious ahistoricity of a view according to which wild animals were created wild and domesticated ones were already created domesticated, but the narrative doesn't go so far as to say that, in any case: what it says is that God created the animals that we know as domesticated and also other animals; he created all life single-handed (and yes, even sea-monsters).

1:25 adama
In 1:24 we had plain rémes 'living, moving thing' (concerning which see the note on roméset in 1:21), and now we have kol rémes ha'adama 'all things that move on the ground'. In the context of the present verse, it would seem that this can't just mean animals because this seems to be a list and most animals, as usually understood, would be covered by the preceding items: [wayyá‛as elohim (and God made)] et xayyat ha'áretz (the wild beasts)... w'et habb'hema (and the domesticated animals)... w'et kol rémes ha'adama (and all the ???)... I think this probably means, quite literally, all the things that move on the ground, which are not normally counted either as livestock or as wild animals: the little critters and the creepy-crawlies, especially since otherwise there is no mention of insects and the like. This suggests a meaning for adama 'ground'? that is not quite the same as éretz 'land' (and soon we shall have to deal with yet another near-synonym, sade 'field'). EK glosses adama as 'ground; soil, earth, land', and suggests a possible etymological relationship with adom 'red' hinging on the meaning 'red arable ground'. See also the note below on adam.

1:26 na‛ase adam b'tzalménu kid'muténu
'Let us make adam in our image, after our likeness' or perhaps 'similar to ourselves'; the phrase in our likeness (etc.) is hardly natural, spontaneous English, its literary use today no doubt having been based on the biblical usage, not vice-versa. It is a calque on the Hebrew, as are, I think, the Greek and Latin translations kat' eikona hêmeteran kai kath' homoiôsin, ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. In any case, the two nouns, here glossed 'image' and 'likeness', are clearly synonyms, not expressions of two distinct ideas, and a translation using two different corresponding nouns is not essential (especially in a language where two cannot be found). But the chief reason why this phrase has given commentators more than a few headaches is not any of that: there are more serious problems. One is how we are to understand or visualize the likeness between God and humans, and since we think we know what the latter look like, the question it really raises is: Is this what God looks like? Or need we not be so literal in our interpretation? Another is the n- of na‛ase and the -nu of b'tzalménu and kid'muténu: 'let us make a man in our image, after our likeness'; who does God have in mind when he says us and our? Some think they see here an echo of a more ancient polytheistic view of things; others are eager to deny it, so what is it then? I don't want to get into the fray, but here are some of the suggestions that have been made, apart from the idea that it refers to an unnamed pantheon: (1) it refers to the Christian holy trinity; (2) it refers to the manifold attributes of God; (3) it is the "royal we"; (4) God is addressing his heavenly court (as described in Isaiah ch. 6), in other words he is talking to the angels. As translators, when all is said and done, it is clearly not for us personally to resolve these issues or to pick one answer over others, so what we have to do is quite simple: reflect what the original says, and let our readers worry, if they want to, about any uncertainties about the interpretation of the text. The Nawat says, in effect: Let us make Man similar to ourselves, and that's that.

adam
This is a troublesome word, too. It is not the usual word for 'man', which is ish, so does it mean 'man' at all? We might wish to conjecture that adam is non-gender-specific, hence 'human', whereas ish is gender-specific 'man', but neither part of that theory really holds up when we scrutinize the way the words are used (ish is not always gender-specific, any more than adam is necessarily gender-neutral). (If, however, anyone doubts whether or not in the present context this adam is sex-specific, 1:27 seems to answer the question.) It is often used, furthermore, as a proper noun, i.e. as the name of the first human that God created. In the present verse, the sentence is in grammatical terms perfectly ambiguous: it could just as easily signify 'Let's make Adam...' or 'Let's make a (hu)man...' As regards this word's origin, it is suggested that it comes from adama 'ground' (see note on 1:25), because the first human was created out of the earth (EK).

1:27 zakhar un'qeva bara otam
'Male and female he created them.' So there we have it. Clearly it is not the same story as that of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, though.

1:29 hinne natátti lakhem
It is often impossible to translate the word hinne which lends emphasis; lo is weird Biblese; behold is nearly as bad, and besides, it actually just means 'look!', and it is a bit too strongly marked to serve every time the Hebrew puts in a hinne. Sometimes, as here, here! might work in colloquial English, but that is not the right register for this. As for natátti, this is in the perfect tense (as it is usually called in Hebrew grammars) but that doesn't mean it is always to be translated into other languages as a past or a perfect. In this case, rather than I have given you..., the meaning is pretty much I give you (as JPS), or even I hereby give you.

1:31 Tov m'od
Whereas in the preceding paragraphs God considered all his creations 'good' (Tov), in this single case he views his work as Tov m'od 'very good, extremely good'. Probably this responds to the fact that the work of creation is now complete, as we will find out in the next verse.

2:1

Entry for the word shabbat in
Ernest Klein's etymological
Hebrew dictionary

w'khol tz'va'am
The only sense that can be made of this phrase, trad. 'and all their host' (or '...array'), is that heaven and earth and all their things were now complete. It is very vague; we might as well say, colloquially, the heaven and the earth and everything. I don't believe there is call for a nit-picking inquiry into what kind of a "host" is meant!

2:3 way'qaddesh oto
'And sanctified it' or 'and made it holy', but what do these really mean? It seems that the root meaning of the verb q-d-sh is 'separate, set apart'. Perhaps we might think of it as making something special. God made the seventh day a special day. The bad news for the translator is, the language that lacks a word for 'holy' may also lack one that means 'special'!

ki vo shavat
'Because in it he rested,' and so we understand that God celebrated his shabbat 'Sabbath.' Notice that the word shabbat does not occur in this text, and yet everyone who hears it knows that this is what we are talking about. And clearly nobody misses the similarity, and possible etymological relationship, between it and shavat 'ceased' or 'rested'. This, then, is a word game albeit a subtly presented one, in which the connection is not stated and the target word (the name being explained) is not mentioned, only assumed. It may be that the exact wording of the paragraph was manipulated so as to make the word shavat occur in that form practically at the end, although it is anticipated in 2:2 by the form wayyishbot which means the same. But now that we are on the subject of name games, I doubt anyone misses the other pun involved here, namely the thrice repeated word (hash)sh'vi‛i '(the) seventh', from the root sh-b-‛ 'seven', the first two consonants of which are also the first two consonants of the word shabbat. Both the name and the concept of sabbath may have Mesopotamian roots and have been reflected in Babylonian culture, or perhaps the borrowing was in the opposite direction (EK).

bara la‛asot
The last words of this sentence pose a linguistic difficulty: they don't seem to make sense. We expect it to end with something like ki vo shavat mikkol m'lakhto asher ‛asa elohim 'for on it God rested from all the work that he had done'. Instead of ‛asa elohim 'God had done', however, we find bara elohim la‛asot which literally is 'God created to do'. Frankly this is enigmatic. What I have written in Nawat, ka tik yaja sewik itekiw pal kichiwa muchi tay kiketzki, means approximately for on it his work ended of making everything he created. Sometimes the best we can do is all we can do.

2:4a b'hibbar'am
On the inclusio formed by the root b-r-' (meaning 'create'), which is the second word in the passage (the first is b'reshit 'in the beginining') and the last word of the narrative here, see my note above on 1:1.