The Torah begins with the words “Be-reishit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-aretz,” but the meaning of the phrase is not clear. The problem hinges on the first word. The most popular translation of “be-reishit” is “In the beginning,” and thus the phrase would read, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” This is how many early sages translated and understood the phrase.
Rashi suggests an alternative translation. Picking up on the construct state of the word be-reishit, which should mean “in the beginning of,” he reads the phrase as an opening to the next sentence in the Torah, with the verb “bara” functioning as a present participle: “In the beginning of God’s creating of the heavens and the earth, the earth was unformed and chaotic…”
Following the midrashic tradition, where creative translations abound, the Targum Yerushalmi (c. sixth-century Palestine) connects the word “reishit” (“beginning”) with its root, “rosh,” meaning “head” or “mind.” Understanding the Hebrew preposition “be-” to be instrumental instead of temporal, Targum Yerushalmi offers a radically different translation: “With wisdom, God created the heavens and the earth.” God uses the words of wisdom — meaning the wisdom of Torah — to create the world. The idea of God creating the world through words has an important place in kabbalistic thought as well. Moreover, the perception of Torah as the basis for creation intersects with the kabbalistic idea of God’s presence as part of the fabric of creation.
These three different translations of the phrase correspond to three different conceptions of the world and its creation.
Rashi’s image of God using the “tohu ve-vohu,” the unformed and chaotic primordial matter, fits in well with other ancient Near Eastern conceptions. If God and the material from which God creates existed together from primordial times, then God is part of the universe in some essential way. Various ancient myths depict this graphically. For example, in the Akkadian creation myth, Enuma Elish, the two great primordial gods, Apsu (fresh water) and Tiamat (salt water), create the world by mixing their waters. The Egyptian creator god, Atum, spills his seed on the ground and forms the Nile. Egyptian texts describe creation as order (ma’at) holding back the chaos (isfet), which constantly threatens to overwhelm it. God’s use of primordial matter formed the basis of Plato’s concept of the universe.
The traditional understanding of the verse sees God as creating the world out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo. This God is not part of the world at all, but separate from it. Pharaoh Akhenaten describes his God, Aten, as a being beyond comprehension, but upon whom the world relies for its sustenance. We find a related concept in Aristotle’s notion of God’s relationship to the world. For Aristotle, the world was never created, but exists as a consequence of God’s will, almost like the relationship of a shadow to a body.
Creation through words, as described in Targum Yerushalmi, was the method of Ptah, the god of Memphis, who “conceived in his heart everything that exists and by his utterance created them all.” Similarly, according to the Gnostics, God created the world using “the word,” “logos.” Amun (Hidden One, another Egyptian deity) permeates the world he created, just as God does in the kabbalistic tradition.
The three translations also connect with three different images of God.
The God who creates with primordial material is a God who lives in this world. It is an anthropomorphic and anthropopathic God. It is a God who walks in the garden with Adam and Eve, speaks with Moses face-to-face, and cries for his children when they suffer in this world.
The God who creates the world ex nihilo, making use of nothing but divine will, is a distant and powerful God. It is the God of science, the God of philosophy. This God is omniscient, omnipotent, devoid of any emotions and impossible to describe or comprehend. This is the God of Akhenaten, Aristotle, and Maimonides.
The God who makes use of words and wisdom permeates the universe with divine emanations (sefirot). When we improve the world, we touch God’s presence. We see this God in the face of every human being, in the pulsation of life on earth, and in the shining galaxies countless miles away. This nonpersonified and more Eastern conception of God stands behind the teaching of the mystical tradition that we all have a piece of God in us (helek e-loha mi-ma’al).
Each of us connects to God in different ways. At various points in our lives, one or more of these images of God will speak to us. It is the genius of Torah, as encountered through the profound tradition of Torah study, that allows us to find each of these images — and countless more — in the same religion, in the same book, and even in the same verse.
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