Transcription
Hi, my name is Elan, and today you and I are about to read the first verse of the Bible in the original. Don't worry, you don't need any previous knowledge of Hebrew. And yes, the Tanak, if you're Jewish, or the Old Testament, if you're a Christian, was indeed written in Hebrew. The language of King David, Elijah, Ezekiel, and many, many others. And as it happens, this is also the language spoken in Israel, where I was born and raised and have been living my entire life.
There are only about 5 million of us native Hebrew speakers, accounting for just 0.06% of the world's population. And we have the high privilege of being able to pick up a copy of the Bible in its authentic version, open the book, and just start reading without any problems, and in most cases, understand everything. Of course, there are translations into English and many other languages, but as you're about to see, there is quite a bit that is being lost in translation. So reading the Hebrew might give you a slightly different perspective or even a few insights.
Which brings me to my next point. This video is not about religious meanings. It doesn't matter if you're Jewish, Christian, Muslim, affiliated with another faith, or an atheist. This book is universal. It's probably the most important text in history and has had an immense impact on human civilization. My intention here is to try and bridge the language gap and make the Hebrew more accessible to all of you non-speakers. So with all of that in mind, and without further ado, let's go straight to the verse.
Here are the first few words of the Book of Genesis as written in the original in Hebrew. I know it most likely doesn't mean anything to you yet, but this just might change by the end of this video. As you will see, Hebrew is written and read from right to left. There are only a handful of other languages working that way, most notably Arabic, Persian, and Aramaic. For this reason, it might be a bit confusing using at first for most viewers, but rest assured, each word being pronounced or even individual syllables will be clearly marked for you to follow along.
What I'm going to do now is read the verse so you'll be able to hear what it sounds like. So the verse goes like this: "Bereshit Elohim." One thing to note, even before going into the meaning, is that the Hebrew original has seven words, while most English versions usually have more. The number seven in the story of the creation is symbolic and reappears throughout the chapter. For example, the seven days of the week, the seven times the word "good" can be found, and more. So the Hebrew verse is trying to make a point. This is the header of the chapter, and the number seven motif is introduced here for the first time, but not in English.
What I'm going to do now is dive deeper and go over each individual Hebrew word in the verse relatively in depth and see what we can gain. The first word of the verse, and indeed of the whole Bible, is "Bereshit." By the way, this is also the name of the book of Genesis in Hebrew. The Jewish titles of the first five books, or Torah, just use the first word of each book, or one of the first words, right?
So to appreciate this word more, I need to explain to you a grammatical concept in Hebrew. Even if you're totally uninterested in Hebrew grammar, please bear with me for about a minute. I think it will be worth it. Okay, every word in Hebrew has a root. Almost always, this root is composed of three letters. This is really useful because we can take that root, put the letters in different grammatical molds, and create new related words. In this case of the word "Bereshit," this is the root. The letter on the right is "resh," which sounds very much like R. The second one is "aleph," which is actually the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It can sound like many of the vowels in English, but in this case, it is silent. The last one is "shin," which has the sound of SH, but sometimes of an S. Great.
Now, this root is used in several important words in Hebrew. The most obvious one is "Rosh," which is created by taking the root and just adding those diacritical signs we call nikud, which are basically equivalent to vowels in European languages. This word "Rosh" means head. "Rosh" describes the bodily organ head, but is also used in several common expressions like "Rosh hamemshala." So "Rosh" is head, and "hamemshala" is the government. So this is the head of the government, or simply the prime minister. So "head" in Hebrew had has a metaphorical meaning of prime or the most important. Using a similar logic, this same word "Rosh" can also mean beginning, such as in the name of the Jewish holiday marking the new Hebrew year called "Rosh Hashanah," or "Rosh Hashanah" as pronounced in English, literally meaning "the head of the year."
Another word we better go over is " Rishon." Again, this is the same root, but we planted the three letters inside a different mold with other diacritical signs and a couple of additional letters at the end, and this means first. Now, let's move back to "Bereshit," the first word of the entire Bible. And again, here are the letters of the root, again in a different mold. The takeaway from all of this is that "Bereshit" does denote "in the beginning," but with a more figurative tone to it and appears more fitting for the occasion than just "in the beginning." Note that we Hebrew speakers do not use "Bereshit" on a daily basis, but only in very formal or lyrical contexts. The normal word for "in the beginning" in Hebrew is "Tchila," which is very different in terms of root and other aspects.
You might have asked yourself, how come the Hebrew has just one word, "Bereshit," while the English almost always has three, "in the beginning"? Well, the answer is that in Hebrew, instead of separate words for prepositions and articles like the English words "in," "the," and "to," etc., we have one-letter prefixes. So this letter "bet," the second in the alphabet and equivalent here to B in English, is the prefix that denotes "in."
Another thing to note is that "Bereshit" is the name of the first Israeli spacecraft to the Moon. You might be able to recognize the word in this image, printed on the model of the lunar lander, right here. The connection to the whole story of the creation, which mentions the Moon, is probably kind of clear. This concludes our discussion about "Bereshit." So congratulations, you have just read the first word of the Bible in Hebrew.
Moving on to the next word, it's "bara," which means "created," but has a more specific meaning compared to the most frequent translation in English. You can create a new file, create noise, or create art. In Hebrew, the verb you're seeing here, "bara," is much more nuanced. It refers to creating something from nothing. We don't create a file from nothing; the computer already exists. The same goes for noise, since we already have objects around to make a lot of racket with, and so on. It follows then that the verb "bara" is basically reserved to the creation. For this reason, we Hebrew speakers use "bara" only when referring to that primal moment, which is quite rare in day-to-day situations, unlike using "create" in English.
Also, note that the verb "bara" comes in Hebrew before the subject. This is, of course, not the case in English. The subject being God, and the verb being "created." This inversion between the subject and the verb is extremely common in Biblical Hebrew, as we will see in subsequent videos, but much less so in modern Hebrew.
The next word is an important one: "Elohim," which is one of the several names of God in the Hebrew Bible. Interestingly, the word "Elohim" is in the plural form. The two highlighted letters are basically a suffix for the masculine plural in Hebrew, pretty much like the letter S added to nouns to create the plural form in English. Know that the word "Elohim" is also used to refer to many gods. For example, in the Ten Commandments, it says, "You shall have no other gods before me." It's basically the very same word.
So, wait a minute. If God is presented here in the plural, how do we know that the Bible doesn't talk about many gods? To get the answer, we need to go back to the previous word, "bara," that we've just talked about. Unlike in English, Hebrew verbs are conjugated and gendered, and in this case, the verb "bara" is in the third person masculine singular. This means that "Elohim" is in the plural here only as a form of respect, just like the word "God" is capitalized in English, or the Royal "we."
By now, you can already understand the first three words of the Bible in Hebrew: "Bereshit Elohim bara." The next word is an interesting one. It's "et," and as you can see, it appears twice in the verse. In terms of letters, the word "et" is composed of the first and last letters of the alphabet, "aleph" and "tav." It's like having a word that spells "AZ." But what's more bizarre about it is the fact that "et" has no real function. Function, I mean, it's extremely common in connection to the direct object. We Israelis use it multiple times every day. However, it has no equivalent in any other language, and it's possible to drop it altogether without changing the meaning one bit.
For example, you go with a toddler to the grocery store. She spots something she likes, points at it, and says, "An et zeh!" "I want this." You see, no word like this in English. And if we omit the word "et," the toddler will be perfectly understood, albeit sound a bit funny to us native speakers. Logically, we don't need this word. This fact did not escape David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel and its first prime minister. He famously refused to use this word "et," which made his Hebrew very distinct. He claimed that "et" is just a waste of breath and ink.
By the way, if you ever visit Ben-Gurion's home in Tel Aviv, which is now a museum and a library, you will see that the only book he always had on the night table in his very modest bedroom was the Tanak, or the Old Testament. And stepping through that door on the right, there is a sizable library with thousands of titles he collected. This means that Ben-Gurion, despite being an avid Bible enthusiast, would not use a word that appears twice in the first verse of the Bible and 9,510 times in the whole Bible. With all due respect to Ben-Gurion, I think it's kind of cool that we have a word that is unique to our language, in spite of being redundant.
Next up is the word "hashamayim." The first letter "heh" is the prefix that serves as the definite article in Hebrew, similarly to "the" in English. The word "shamayim" is another case where the translation differs from the original. "Shamayim" is just the normal word to denote sky. For example, if we see a colorful hot air balloon flying overhead, we might say colloquially, "Mala ba'shamayim," "Look up in the sky." However, in most English translations of the verse, the word used here is "heaven." What I wish to argue is that "shamayim" has a more tangible meaning compared to "heaven." You see, saying "I'm in heaven" is not quite the same as "I'm in the sky." This doesn't mean that "shamayim" only has a straightforward meaning. It sure can have a deeper spiritual meaning. However, "shamayim" has both meanings, while "heaven" not really.
Another interesting thing to note is that "shamayim" is one of several important words in Hebrew that always come in the plural form. Remember that suffix for the plural in "Elohim"? Frankly, in the case of "shamayim," I don't know what the singular form is, or even if there is one. Just would like to mention that as a learner of English way back, it was really strange for me to realize that "the sky is blue," because my natural way of saying it would be "the sky are blue."
The next word is again "et," which we've already discussed. The only difference here is that letter "vav," which is the prefix for the coordinating conjunction "and." And the last word of this first verse is "ha'aretz." The translation is commonly "the Earth," which by and large corresponds to the Hebrew, but with some important qualifications. So, for example, we in Hebrew call our planet "Eretz Israel." The second word in this expression is exactly the same word as in the verse. The additional word "Eretz" means sphere or a ball. So, basically, "Earth" is a good translation, right? Or is it?
In Leviticus 11:41, it says, "And every creature that swarms on the ground is unclean." Once again, this is exactly the same word as in the verse. So "Eretz" also means ground. But that's not all. "Eretz" can also mean land. For example, in Genesis 13:15, God tells Abraham, "As all the land that you see I shall give to you and your seed forever." Taken together, when reading the verse in Hebrew, the words look like they refer to a much more physical sense relative to the English. So instead of "creating Heaven and Earth," God might have created "the land and the sky."
Another point to make is that "Earth" can mean soil, like "a handful of Earth." This meaning is not shared with "Eretz," and we have a different word for it in Hebrew, "Adama," which will come very handy later on in this chapter. So you should now be able to at least recognize the first words of the Bible in Hebrew, even if you don't speak any Hebrew other than "Shalom" or "Hava Nagila." Let's read the verse in Hebrew one more time and see if it feels any differently now: "Bereshit Elohim bara et hashamayim et ha'aretz."
In my next video, we will read the second verse of the Bible, much as we have just done, and it certainly can be as insightful. So this is not a one-time video about one verse. I intend to cover at least the first chapter of Genesis, and probably much more. So if this is something that you might find interesting, I would really appreciate it if you could like this video, share it, and hit the subscribe button and notification bell. Thank you for watching, and see you next time.