A Beginning: בראשית

For the first installation of Targum Torah, I want to explore what is perhaps one of the more famous phrases in Western Civilization from the Bible: “In the beginning.” I also want to start here because the very first word of the Bible shows the complexity of the text as a whole. We see that Rashi and the commentators on the opening of the Bible observe the text’s complexity and implore us to explore it.

For background, the Hebrew Bible originally only had consonants, and the vowels were retained through oral recitation, which in the Common Era was written down and preserved by a group known as the Masoretes, more than a thousand years after the period of King David, and well after the revelation of the Torah at Sinai. This is important, since the first vowel we have from the Masoretes in בראשית is a shewa, giving a literal translation of ״In a beginning”, leaving a state of indefiniteness. We can turn to our two ancient Jewish sources for insight, the Septuagint and Targum Onkelos, to see how these texts, which pre-date the period when Masoretes, understood the text.

How do you read the text?

In the Septuagint we read “ΕΝ ἀρχῇ,” which is also indefinite missing the definite article. In targum Onkelos, we read בְּקַדְמִין and for those familiar with Aramaic, we would expect an aleph (א) and the end of קַדְמִין. At the time of Targum Onkelos, the א at the end retained a meaning of “the”, whereas later Aramaic (such as we see in the Talmud, and also in Syriac in the 5th and 6th century CE) had “fossilized” the א at the end, leaving it up to interpretation if the text is definite or not.

For these reasons, and others related to comparative Ancient Near Eastern textual studies, there are many translators today who read the opening of the Bible as “When G-d began to create”, treating this as a dependent clause. The Torah (the first 5 books of the Hebrew Bible, which include Writings/כתובים and Prophets/נביאים) contains more the 300,000 individual written consonants, if there can be such a wide interpretation of the text with just the first letter (accounting for less than 0.00034% of the Torah). The sea of possibility amid all of the Torah when it comes to interpretation should be a moment of reflection and a call to approach the text with curiosity. There is always more to learn and certainly more than any lifetime can accomplish.

This blog post is also on YouTube