Perhaps I should wait to hear additional information and argumentation—but I can’t seem to help myself. Claude Mariottini transmitted to the Bible-curious blogosphere today a report from a Dutch web site that Ellen van Wolde—whom I have long considered a very fine scholar of the Hebrew Bible—plans to present an argument tomorrow to the effect that Genesis 1:1 should not read something like “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” but “In the beginning, God separated the heavens and the earth.”

My initial, gut reaction was, “She’s off her rocker.” After a few minutes’ consideration, I thought, “Okay, I can sort of see where one might get that.” Then I went back to “off her rocker.”

Van Wolde’s proposed translation (as reported—please apply this important disclaimer throughout this post) of the Hebrew verb ברא (bara’) as “to separate” rather than “to create” in Genesis 1:1 bothers me less—a little bit less—than the ridiculous spin that Van Wolde, her publicist, the spokesperson for the Radboud University in Nijmegen (where Van Wolde will present her research tomorrow), and/or the Dutch media seem to have put on the proposal.

Professor Van Wolde, an Old Testament scholar and member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, said the standard interpretation of the opening sentence of the bible is no longer acceptable: “The traditional image of God the Creator is untenable. God did not create.”

…

Professor Van Wolde said she understood her findings, which are soon to be published in a leading scientific magazine, will be devastating to traditional believers.

The hype boggles the mind, and can serve no useful function other than to stir up controversy. (For the moment, I’m going to avoid getting exercised over a technical study of Hebrew lexicography being published in a “leading scientific magazine” by assuming that “scientific magazine” is a poor English rendering of the Dutch equivalent of “scholarly journal.”) Despite the hype, translating ברא as “separate” rather than “create” in Genesis 1:1 makes very little difference to the overall story. “Traditional believers” have always been able to handle the idea of the divine creative activity in Genesis 1 as a sequence of separations. First, God separates the light from the darkness. Then God separates the “waters above the sky” from the “waters below the sky” by means of the “sky” (שמים, shamayim, translated “heavens” in 1:1). Then God separates the dry land (ארץ, eretz, translated “earth” in 1:1) from the “waters below the sky.” From this perspective—which has never troubled “traditional believers”—Van Wolde’s proposed “retranslation” is not much more than tweaking one verb in Genesis 1:1 to more closely resemble the verbs in the subsequent verses. “Traditional believers” have always accepted “create” in Genesis 1:1 as an “umbrella” term that includes acts of separation. To a “literalist,” translating Genesis 1:1 as “In the beginning, God separated the heavens/sky from the earth/land” shouldn’t look like anything more than a compressed version of Genesis 1:6–10. That hardly seems like a dramatic shakeup to me. Indeed, to this extent, the rewrite seems rather trivial.

But does Van Wolde’s proposal stand on solid exegetical and lexical ground? I should not speak too dogmatically until I see Van Wolde’s actual argument, but my gut says “No.” Regular readers of Higgaion will realize that my hunch has nothing to do with a desire to preserve a “traditional” interpretation of Genesis 1. (I keep putting “traditional” in quotation marks because I suspect the press release uses “traditional believer” as a code word for “creationist,” and creationism as we know it is a modern phenomenon, not a “traditional” stance—Steve Wiggins has all the details in “Creationism’s White Box.”) I just don’t think that Van Wolde’s reported contention—that “the Hebrew verb bara does not mean to create but to spatially separate”—holds water.

As I mentioned above, if we apply this proposal only to Genesis 1:1, the result is almost trivial. However, if the author of Genesis 1:1 wanted to say that God “separated the heavens from the earth,” I have no idea why that author wrote ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ instead of הבדיל אלהים בן השמים ובן הארץ. Those of you who read Biblical Hebrew can see the issue instantly, but for those of you who don’t read Biblical Hebrew, I’ll attempt an accessible explanation. Genesis 1 narrates clear acts of separation on the first, second, and third “days” of creation: the separation of light from darkness, the separation of the waters above the sky from the waters below the sky, and the separation of the dry land from the seas. In verses 4 and 7, the author uses exactly the phrasing a Hebraist would expect, woodenly translatable as “God separated between [the one thing] and between [the other thing].” The phrasing used in verse 6 differs only slightly: “let [the sky] be a separator between waters to waters.” Notice the pattern: “separate” + “between” + noun + “and between” + noun. This construction (sometimes with “to” instead of the second “[and] between”) appears about a dozen times in the Hebrew Bible, and about another half-dozen times with “from” instead of “between” (both times). One could also write “separate” + noun + “from” + group; constructions like this appear at least half a dozen times in the Hebrew Bible.

Genesis 1:1 uses a completely different construction, a form in which the author explicitly casts “the heavens” and “the earth” as parallel direct objects of the verb ברא. Take, as an English analogy, the sentence “John washed his socks and underwear.” We could restate this in English as two parallel sentences: “John washed his socks” and “John washed his underwear.” (By the way, my choice of “John” as my hypothetical sock-washer has nothing to do with the esteemed Mr. Hobbins.) Similarly, Genesis 1:1 presents readers with a sentence in which the verb ברא takes two parallel direct objects. We could restate that part of the sentence as “God ברא the heavens” and “God ברא the earth.” Given the syntax, treating these two statements independently should yield roughly the same interpretation as treating the actual sentence—but if so, then treating ברא as “to physical separate” rather than “to create” makes no sense at all.

If we attempt to apply Van Wolde’s proposal elsewhere, and treat ברא as meaning “to spatially separate” rather than “to create” in texts other than Genesis 1:1, we again get nonsense. Consider these test cases excerpted from the 48 biblical appearances of ברא I:

And God spatially separated the great sea monsters, and every kind of living creature that moves through the water, and every kind of flying bird. (Gen 1:21)

Translated this way, the sentence becomes gibberish. God separated the sea creatures and birds from what? From one another? No, that doesn’t make sense, either, since the great sea monsters and all the living things that creep through the sea are not spatially separated from one another. I suppose, however, that one could group the sea creatures together and say that God separated them from the birds. To claim that the biblical author intended this sense, though, one would have to rewrite Genesis 1 so that the fish and birds at some point formed a single population—which they don’t in the text as we have it. (By the way, I think this verse, and verses like it, also resist any reduction of ברא to “assigning functions” exclusive of “material creation.”)

God said, “Look, I am making a covenant. In full view of your people I will do marvels that have not been spatially separated in any land or in any nation. (Exodus 34:10)

What on earth could it mean to “spatially separate” a marvel “in” any land or “among” all the lands? I suppose, however, that this example might prove inappropriate, since ברא appears here in the N (niphal) form.

Ask about the earliest times, before you existed, from the day when God spatially separated humanity upon the earth … (Deuteronomy 4:32)

One could make sense of this statement in English, if one supposes that the author wishes to refer to the Tower of Babel incident rather than to the creation of human beings. I can’t imagine getting that sense out of the Hebrew text, though.

I made the earth, and spatially separated humankind upon it; it was my hand that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host. (Isaiah 45:12)

Van Wolde’s proposal yields a translation for Isaiah 45:12 that sounds as silly as that for Deuteronomy 4:3, but I offer the Isaiah passage to make a non-redundant point. In Isaiah 45:12, ברא stands in synonymous parallelism with עשה (‘asah), “to do, to make.” The parallel usage suggests that the author of this passage considered ברא and עשה to have significantly overlapping semantic ranges.

This observation takes us back to Genesis 1. Verse 27 famously reads:

God created humanity in his image;
in the image of God he created it;
male and female he created them.

In each case, “created” translates ברא. Genesis 5:1 picks up on the theme, but with slightly different vocabulary:

When God created humanity, God made it in his image.

Here, I have used “created” to translate ברא and “made” to translate עשה. This verse exhibits the same parallelistic word-pair as does Isaiah 45:12. The same parallelistic word-pair appears in Genesis 2:4; 6:7; Exodus 34:10 (“I will עשה marvels that have not been ברא …”); Isa 41:20; 43:7; 45:7 (“I יצר light and I ברא darkness; I עשה weal and I ברא woe; I the Lord עשה all these things”); 45:12, 18 (this list might not exhaust all the examples). In order to persuade me, Van Wolde’s argument (which, of course, I have seen only in a second-hand snippet from the aforementioned web site) will have to justify translating ברא in Genesis 1:1 in a way that departs so sharply from its stereotypically paired word עשה. (This requirement applies to John Walton’s proposal that we should understand ברא only as “assigning functions,” not as “making things.)

I think that the above analysis adequately, if perhaps incompletely, expresses my initial skepticism about Van Wolde’s proposal. However, I must acknowledge the possibility, however slight it seems to me, that Van Wolde’s argument hangs (precariously) from the branches of a different tree than the one up which I have barked in this post. Lexicographers have recognized not one, but three different verbs in Biblical Hebrew spelled ברא. Hebraists normally translate ברא I with some form of “create.” ברא II apparently means “to be obese”; it appears in the Tanakh only once, in the H (hiphil) form, with the sense “to fatten oneself up.” ברא III, identifiable in four verses in the whole Tanakh, apparently means “to cut.” In Joshua 17:15, 18 the verb ברא III refers to clearing land by cutting away the trees; in Ezekiel 23:47 ברא III refers to cutting people down with the sword; and in Ezekiel 21:24, ברא III refers to a road splitting into two at a fork or crossroads. In my wildest imaginings, I consider it just possible that Van Wolde may want to argue that the ברא in Genesis 1:1 is an instance of ברא III—not of ברא I, as most translators construe it. (According to the Masoretic pointings, ברא III appears only in the D [pi‘el] form, and ברא stands as a G [qal] form in Genesis 1:1; but I find myself reluctant to base any strong objections on this, as one could not distinguish a third masculine singular ברא in G from a third masculine singular ברא in D using an unpointed text.) In order for such an argument to convince me, I would have to see compelling evidence that ברא III made sense throughout the rest of the chapter, or that the author knowingly chose to confuse many generations of readers by mixing ברא I and ברא III in the same passage, even though he (?) had the verbs הבדיל (“he divided”) and עשה (“he made”) near to hand, and used both of them in Genesis 1.

I eagerly await Van Wolde’s actual argument—but at this stage, I do not expect it to convince me. The pattern of usage I see for ברא among the biblical writers just speaks too strongly against her proposal, on the face of it. I understand, though, how dangerous it can be to judge a scholar’s proposals by media coverage, and I will return here to update you on the matter once I’ve read Van Wolde’s presentation or article.