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 1:1b
Created. A verb with only one possible subject in the whole Hebrew Bible.
Genesis 1:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine an English verb that only ever takes one subject. Nobody else in the language is allowed to do it. You would learn a lot about what the writers thought of that subject just from the grammar, before anyone made an argument.
Because this verb is reserved. It never takes a human subject anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, and knowing that is worth more than any argument about what it does or does not say concerning raw material.
Every version reads created. No dispute about the rendering, and a long dispute about what the verb implies.
בָּרָא bara · H1254
Bara occurs around fifty times and God is the subject every single time. Humans never bara anything. The word says nothing on its own about whether material already existed; that argument runs through other verses and through later theology, not through this verb.
English create is used of anyone. A novelist creates a character, a chef creates a dish. The exclusivity is invisible in translation because English has no reserved verb.
Before deciding what a word means, check who is allowed to do it. Subject restriction is one of the strongest signals a language gives about a word's weight.
Nothing is disputed in translation. What is disputed is whether bara implies creation from nothing, and the honest answer is that the verb alone does not settle it.
- bara with God as subject throughout: Genesis 1:21, 27; 2:3; Isaiah 40:26; 45:7
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One, argues bara concerns function rather than material (the dissent)
- No occurrence of bara with a human subject exists in the Hebrew Bible
