Some of my readers have expressed concern that the first paragraph of the first article on Genesis uses ideas in Hebrew grammar that are obscure to those who have not yet studied the Holy Tongue. I hope the explanation below will make that paragraph a little more accessible.

In the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1, the word "the" is not present before the word "beginning." Rather, the grammatical construction is one that we would associate with the preposition "of." Ancient biblical Hebrew had no real equivalent word to our preposition "of." If someone wanted to say "the house of the king" they simply linked "house" and "king" together in pronunciation, taking the accent off the term "house" and running the pronunciation to "king." This annexing of the word to the next one caused the vowels of the first word to change. The first word is called a "construct" form, the second word is often called the nomens rectum or the "genitive."

The second word in the phrase, the one to which the first one was tied (i.e. the nomens rectum, had the same basic meaning that is captured in the "Genitive Case" known from Greek, Latin, and even German (though with different nuances). This expresses often the possessor (king's house), a quality (a house fit for a king), or other features that we express in English with "of." But the Hebrew construction is a bit more far-reaching than that. In Hebrew and the other semitic languages like Arabic or Akkadian, a noun can be "in construct" with a whole clause or sentence. So in Exod. 4:13 Moses says to Yahweh, (woodenly) "Send by hand-of-you will send." The word "hand" is in construct, but the word that "owns" it is a verb "you will send." "Send by the hand-of-you-will-send" means "by the hand of whom(ever) you will send." Here the word "hand" is "in construct" with the verb "you will send." The result grammatically is a dependent clause.

So in Genesis 1:1, "beginning" is in construct with "created" producing the (woodenly rendered) "In-beginning-of-created God the heavens and the earth." Just as in my Exodus 4:13 example above, this construction results in a dependent, or subordinate, clause. The clause "God created the heavens and the earth" basically modifies "beginning" leading to the more idiomatically accurate "when God began to createÉ"

The clauses in Gen 1:2 display a distinctive pattern of word order that most grammars identify as "circumstantial" clauses. That is, they supply information about the circumstances that existed at the time identified by the preceding sentence. So Gen 1:1-2 reads "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, (here are the circumstances that then existed:) the earth was formless and void, darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters."

Finally, in verse 3 the "main thread" of the narrative begins, using yet another distinctive grammatical feature related to the Hebrew verb. So v. 3 might start "(that is when) God said, "Let there be light."

I hope that helps to clarify the grammatical issues for my readers who have not yet studied Hebrew.

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