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Jun 17, 2020 at 9:51 history edited CommunityBot
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Jan 20, 2019 at 22:13 comment added user2672 @ThinkOnTheseThings you are backprojecting a particular English translation instead of looking at the source text.
Jan 20, 2019 at 22:11 comment added user2672 @Paul please @ me to respond, otherwise I don't get a notification. (1) Could you give a full reference for "Beckel and Korping"? (2) Questioning and refining lexicons is part of her job as an academic. (3) Isa. 46:10 is indeed comparable, Van Wolde deals with that in some of the articles I already mentioned. (4) There are not enough usages of רשׁית to be sure whether it is a verb or not.
Dec 19, 2018 at 1:27 comment added Think On These Things *Psalm 102:25 Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. -- It appears that David did not believe as Rashi.
Oct 20, 2018 at 17:05 comment added Paul van Wolde's arguments in this are not as strong as she wants them to be. Beckel and Korping have pointed that out. She is also against all the major lexicons in this area as well as every single ancient translation. Which means those who were the closest to the language all disagreed with her. Qimhi also showed that Rashi was incorrect. Likewise, van Wolde and Holmstedt both ignore Is 46:10 which is in an absolute temporal phrase with a prep without the article. All usage of rshit in the HB in construct is with a noun that follows (Jer 26:1, 27:1, 28:1, etc); never a verb.
Sep 30, 2018 at 18:54 comment added colboynik Now I follow. :)
Sep 30, 2018 at 18:40 comment added user2672 If you translate ברא with separating, and combine this with Rashi's suggestion, you get, "In the beginning of God's separating of heaven and earth, the earth was without form, and void; ...". Thus heaven and earth would pre-exist and the creative act consisted of their separation, after which more features are added (sun, moon, stars, vegetation, animal life, etc.). This is indeed unlike the creatio ex nihilo dogma in Christian thought (which is primarily based on the Septuagint here), but much more like comparable creation stories from the Ancient Near East.
Sep 30, 2018 at 14:04 comment added colboynik I am on my phone at the moment bit I will look that up when I get back to my computer. I dont think I follow. Even if we translate it like you said (which makes sense), aren't the heavens and the earth still the target of the creating/beginning of creating since they are the direct object?
Sep 30, 2018 at 11:29 comment added user2672 I know what את means, that is not the issue here. The issue is that all other occurrences of ראשׁית are construct forms. By translating 'in the beginning' you assume an otherwise unattested absolute form. By translating 'in the beginning of God's creating/-ion / separating/-ion' you do not, and את can still be the direct object marker in such a clause. I'm not saying your reading is wrong, but it is certainly not the only possibility and your answer could do more right to that. See Rashi for 'in the beginning of God's creating'; on ברא as separating see Van Wolde, JSOT 34.1 (2009), 3–23.
Sep 29, 2018 at 22:49 comment added colboynik There is an את ("et") before the Hebrew words for heaven and earth. That word denotes the direct object of the verb. So in this case, the heavens and the earth were what God created. I lived in Israel for a few months, and every time I asked the locals what that word meant in English they told me "it didn't mean anything", which I thought was bewildering. It took me months to find out what that word was for. In English, we designate the direct object just by putting it after the verb - so את really does translate into... well, nothing.
Sep 27, 2018 at 17:53 comment added user2672 Are you aware of the theories regarding v. 1, that it may mean 'in the beginning of God's creating ...' and hence does not have to indicate that God created heaven and earth and that they may have pre-existed? This is consistent with arguments in present scholarship that ברא should rather be translated "separating", i.e., heaven and earth pre-existed but were not separated (by the 'firmament') yet. Then, v. 2 describes the situation before any act of God, and hence, it is not odd that this situation is described with words with negative connotations.
Sep 19, 2018 at 20:52 history answered colboynik CC BY-SA 4.0