The Syntax of Genesis 1:1–3

Abstract

It is well known that Gen 1:1–3 contains considerably more linguistic complexity than readers may initially notice. As the first verses in the Hebrew Bible, they have engendered significant theological and scholarly analysis and been caught up in the modern “creation-science” debate. Yet, for all this attention, the linguistic details are often overlooked or, in some cases, disregarded in favour of ideologically-bound analyses that preference tradition over plain grammatical sense. In this essay, I address two basic linguistic issues methodically: (1) the grammar of the first orthographic word, bereshit, and its implications for the syntactic analysis of verse 1, and (2) the syntactic analysis of verse 2. I conclude that there are only two linguistically plausible analyses of Gen 1:1–3, neither of which matches the traditional rendering “In the beginning, God created ... ”.