Rishon Rishon

Translating in the beginning

Amritas posts:

I think John Ray and David Boxenhorn (who's updated his post on the opening line of Genesis) would be interested in what reader Ian M. Slater had to say about "Br'shyt".

I can't speak for John, but Amritas is certainly right about me! Here's an exerpt:

The Septuagint seems to have read the unvocalized Hebrew text as ba-reshith, "in the beginning," and ignored any problem with the construction with the following verb. And so most Christian translations, up to the present, and, following them, the 1917 Jewish Publication Society version. The New Revised Standard Version is an interesting exception.

Rashi, as noted in the link, explained that the Masoretic (official traditional) vocalization as be-reshith avoided the problem of the verb, and interpreted it as indicating only "at the time when..." This has its own problems, but, coincidentally or not, corresponds rather nicely to the opening of Mesopotamian creation narratives, like Enuma Elish (When above) and Enuma Anu Enlil (When Anu (and) Enlil [created the stars and planets]). This understanding is used, in one or another variation, in a number of recent Jewish translations. (When in doubt, a conjunction of Rashi's authority and Assyriological precedents is a good defense against attacks from almost any direction! )

The New Jewish Publication Society version (originally 1960) has "When God began to create." Everett Fox (1983, 1995) has "At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth." The New Revised Standard Version (1989) offers "In the beginning, when God created," with "When God began to create" and "In the beginning God created" as alternatives in fine print.

The Targum (Jewish Aramaic translation) actually seems to have dodged the grammatical issue entirely, offering bkdm (sorry, I don't remember the vocalization), "in the past." (Or, I think, by etymology, "in the east," but any geographical reference is excluded by context!) This could be translated, rather roughly, "A long time ago, God created...."

Here's the Targum of Genesis 1:1 - b'reshit is translated b'qadmin (בְּקַדְמִין). I might add Ian is referring to Targum Onqelos (תרגום אונקלוס) - the word 'targum' means simply 'translation'. Targum Onqelos is an ancient translation of the Bible into Aramaic, circa 1-300 CE. At one time it was read in the synagogue alongside the original Hebrew. In most communities the practice died out when the Hebrew became more readily understandable than the Aramaic, but Yemenite Jews preserve this tradition: the ba`al qore' (בעל קורא) - 'master of the reading' - reads a line from the Tora (תורה) - the first five books of the Bible, then a child reads the translation in the Targum.

Another thing: I've been doing a fair amount of translation since I started this blog, and I want to point out that this is not a typical translation problem. In this case, it really is unclear how the text should be read. More typically, it is perfectly clear how a text should be read, but it is impossible to translate it precisely, concisely, and fluently, into the target language. As a result, you are forced to choose between the possibilities. On this blog, I have also given myself another goal: to translate in a way that will help readers understand the original Hebrew - I therefore also want to maintain as much as possible the original structure of the text, so readers can figure out which word goes with which (are there any readers who do that?). Also, I don't want to spend more than a few seconds on each line. Put these goals together and you get compromises everywhere - not to mention mistakes (I almost always find mistakes in my transcriptions when I go back and read them, since I don't have a spell checker to help me out). I apologize for my sloppy translations and transcriptions!

So, what is going on here? Clearly there is something strange about the text: Either you accept b'reshit as 'In the beginning' without a following noun, or accept bara' as a noun, neither of which have any corroborating evidence. A big part of the problem is the limitation of the historical record: the fact that we have no evidence of a certain usage does not mean that it didn't occur, only that it wasn't recorded. So it is certainly possible that one of these exceptional usages did occur. If I had to bet, I would go with Rashi - not just because of his credentials, but because it conforms better to my instincts. I suspect that part of the problem is that the opening of the Bible was as famous in ancient times as it is now, and therefore preserves either archaic features, or features of a different dialect, that are not preserved in most of the Bible. There are clear instances of this occurring in other places, for example in the cohanic blessing.