Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 1:1a
In the beginning, or when God began. The first word is shaped like half a phrase.
Genesis 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
In the beginning. Beginning of what? English lets you leave that open. Hebrew usually does not, because a word like that normally has to be attached to something, the way the top of needs a stair.
Because the first three words of the Bible can be read as a complete sentence or as the opening half of a longer one, and the difference decides whether verse 1 describes the first act of creation or sets the scene for it.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
The King James, ESV, NIV and NASB read In the beginning. The JPS reads When God began to create. The NRSV footnotes it and the NET discusses it at length.
בְּרֵאשִׁית bereshit · H7225
Bereshit is the noun reshit, beginning, with a prefixed preposition and no definite article. In Hebrew that shape usually signals a construct, a noun leaning on the next word, which would give when God began to create rather than in the beginning. The vowel pointing that makes it absolute was added by scribes over a thousand years later.
English prepositions do not lean. In the beginning is grammatically complete the moment you write it, so the question never arises for an English reader.
Hebrew nouns that lean on the next word are the commonest structural feature English cannot show. When a translation footnote offers you a whole different sentence shape rather than a different word, this is usually why.
Absolute gives a first act of creation and a universe with a start. Construct gives a scene-setting clause with the real main verb in verse 3. The consonants permit both, the ancient versions mostly took it as absolute, and the grammar leans construct. This is a live argument, not a settled one.
- reshit in construct: Jeremiah 26:1; Hosea 9:10; Proverbs 8:22
- Septuagint and Vulgate both read the absolute
- Rashi takes the construct reading, which puts a medieval Jewish commentator on the same side as modern grammarians
