"and it was so" (Gen 1:7)

Reading through the story of creation

Before we begin today, a note about another Substack some of you may be interested in. It’s a completely different translation of the beginning of Genesis, by my friend & former student, Donald Antenen, who’s started a project of translating Genesis into poetic English verse. He’s already in Chapter 4 of the book, while our close reading (after several months) is just finishing Chapter 1, verse 7 — two careful readings with two very different purposes.

and it was so וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן׃

Well, of course it was so.  You just told us that.  God thought there should be a cupola and made one.  How could it not be so?

But remember what we said when God thought there should be light and light came into being.  In addition to “and there was light,” Genesis 1 uses the phrase va-yehi-khen ‘and it was so’ six times, for a total of seven.  We assume that this is deliberate because this is a story that takes place over seven “days” (whatever that means before the sun is created).

This is a possible answer – I will let you decide whether it is a good or even reasonable answer – to the question I asked at the beginning.  This first occurrence of “and it was so” is not meant to confirm that God had done what the text just told us. Rather, it nails down that this was Step Two in a seven-step process.

That answer, however, was not good enough for the Greek translators.  Here’s what they wrote (in the English of theNew English Translation of the Septuagint):

6 And God said, “Let a firmament come into being in the midst of the water, and let it be a separator between water and water.” And it became so.

Yes, that is v. 6, not v. 7.  “And it became so” (in Greek, καὶ ἐγένετο οὕτως) is the LXX translation throughout this chapter of the Hebrew phrase וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן va-yehi-khen ‘and it was so’.  But at the end of v. 6 instead of the end of v. 7, it is playing a totally different role in the story.

The Greek version precisely matches the usage we saw in v. 3: God thought Let there be light, and there was light. Now, in v. 6, God thought Let there be a cupola, and it became so.  In the version of the MT (the Masoretic Text, the traditional Hebrew text) God’s actually “making it so” comes before we are told “and it was so.”

Once more: both versions tell us what God wanted or intended.  The Greek text comments, “and it was so,” and then tells us how it became so (God made the cupola).  The Hebrew text explains how it became so (God made the cupola) and then adds, “and it was so.”  The sequence in the LXX seems much more natural to me.  In fact, one of the things I noticed in the Hebrew while reading from this chapter every morning was the seemingly awkward placement of this phrase.

One of the courses you take as a graduate student when you’re working on a Bible PhD is “Textual Criticism of the Bible.”  This has nothing to do with being critical; it’s “criticism” in the sense of analysis.  How did our biblical text come into being?  We’ll talk more about this quite soon, but for now let me give you a quick look at it “on one foot,” as the Jewish expression goes.

The Hebrew text seems to present a difficulty of some kind.  The Greek text is different and clears up the apparent difficulty.  Here are three choices:  Did the Greek translator …

- make a careless mistake?

- use a different original Hebrew text, which he translated faithfully?

- use the same Hebrew text that we have, but thought it had a careless mistake, which he fixed?

And in the latter case, was the Hebrew in fact mistaken?

I will leave you to think about those questions for now.  Don’t be too hasty – we will be talking about the Greek translation again quite soon.