Creating & Making (Gen 2:3)
Reading through the story of creation
asher bara elohim la’asot אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים לַעֲשֽׂוֹת׃ פ
We have finally reached the last four words of the first version of the creation story, the seven-day creation that begins — oops, forgot to translate them.
Kidding. I didn’t translate them, but not because I forgot. It’s because I don’t understand them. Or rather (since the words themselves are easy to translate) it’s because I don’t understand how they fit together.
Since we are still finishing Day Seven, I have R. Chaim Brovender in mind, who made the quip about Shabbat being created on Shabbes. A Brovenderism he uses regularly, which applies perfectly to our case, is this: “If you understand the words, there’s no hope.”
The point is that if there’s a word you don’t understand, some new archaeological or textual evidence might come to light that will reveal its meaning. This has happened many times over the last century and a half, when investigations of remains from the ancient Near East have enlightened us about obscure biblical passages.
But when you understand the words, all you can do is mimic what Red Smith once said about writing: “It’s easy. All you have to do is roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter and stare at it until drops of blood appear on your forehead.”
And we do understand these words:
asher — which
bara — created
elohim — God [remember that in Biblical Hebrew, the subject normally comes after the verb]
la’asot — to do.
Here is Nahum Sarna, in the JPS Torah Commentary series, commenting on the New Jewish Publication Society translation used in that series:
all the work of creation that He had done This smooth English conceals a difficulty in the Hebrew, which literally translates “all His work that God created to do.” Ibn Ezra and Radak understood the final verb as connoting “[for man] to [continue to] do [thenceforth].” Ibn Janaḥ and Ramban connected the final verb with the preceding “ceased,” thereby taking it to mean: “He ceased to perform all His creative work.”
Sarna’s comment has a footnote pointing to “a similar syntactic construction” in Gen 41:50, but this unfortunately seems to be a typographical error.
Here are a bunch of translations I’ve collected of this phrase. Remember that each of these is following “in that on it He had sabbathed from all His work …”
that he had done in creation. (ESV)
of creating that he had done. (NIV)
which God created and made. (KJVA)
which God in creating had made. (OJPS)
that he had done in creation. (NRSV)
of creation that He had done. (NJPS)
that by creating, God had made. (Everett Fox)
ὧν ἤρξατο ὁ θεὸς ποιῆσαι. (LXX)
[that God had begun to make. (NETS)]
that He had created to do. (Alter)
which he had undertaken. (Speiser [AB])
That last one is quite interesting. One might guess that Speiser is following the Greek text here, but he does not explain in his commentary why he chose that translation.
It is really only that last word, לעשות la’asot ‘to do, make’ that messes things up. All these translations I’ve collected understand that it has something to do with God making things; as Sarna noted, the 12th-century commentator Abraham ibn Ezra wants to understand it as one would use it literally in later Hebrew: God created [man] “to do” [something]. In my Commentators’ Bible translation, I took Ibn Ezra to mean not just humanity but
all the various species who would now “make” offspring of their own kind. For He had given them the power to reproduce their own likeness.
He continues:
I do not agree that “making” is the same as “creating.”
And that is an important, if extremely confusing, issue.
You remember that we are told, in the first three words of the Bible (in Hebrew), that the following paragraphs would tell us about God “creating” the universe. Further on in Genesis 1, God …
makes the cupola (v. 7)
arranges for plants that will make other plants of their same species (vv. 11–12)
makes the big lights (v. 16)
creates the sea-serpents and other creatures of Sea and Sky (v. 21)
makes the animals of Earth (v. 25)
proposes to make earthlings (v. 26), but …
creates them instead (repeated three times in v. 27)
evaluates everything he made as really good (v. 28)
But just now Gen 2:2 has referred twice to “His work that He had made.”
Ibn Ezra’s frenemy, the 13th-century Spanish commentator Nahmanides, says:
It seems to me that this expression is saying that He ceased “to make” (as the end of our verse literally says) anything more out of what He had created (from nothing). So He ceased both the “creating” of the first day and the “making” of the subsequent days. Perhaps it could be that the last Hebrew word of the verse really connects to “cease,” which would make it “God ceased [from] doing all the work of creation.”
He goes on to offer an extraordinarily long analysis of how the first six days of creation map on to the 6,000 years of projected human history, adding:
The seventh day, the Sabbath, alludes to the World to Come, which will be entirely Sabbath and eternal rest. May God preserve us during all these “days” and assign our lot with those who serve Him wholeheartedly.
Now we turn from the sublime to the syntactical. I’ll quote from two of the standard reference grammars of Biblical Hebrew that cite Gen 2:3 among their examples:
GKC § 114o 4: Finally, the infinitive with לְ is very frequently used in a much looser connexion to state motives, attendant circumstances, or otherwise to define more exactly.
Jouön-Muraoka 124o: The infinitive with ל is very often used after a verb to express an action which gives more details about or explains the preceding action; it is then equivalent to the Latin gerund in -do, e.g. faciendo = Eng. by doing.
N. 27 to this last paragraph adds: Gn 2.3 (?) שָׁבַת מכּל־מְלַאכְתּוֹ אשׁר בָּרָא אלהים לַעֲשׂוֹת would then mean He ceased all his work which God had created by doing (and not which he had done by creating).
So I can translate the end of this verse with the best of them:
that God had created by making אֲשֶׁר־בָּרָ֥א אֱלֹהִ֖ים לַעֲשֽׂוֹת׃ פ
And it makes good English sense. But I have not managed to convince myself that I understand the Hebrew words here. Why was it written this odd way and not in some clearer way? Still, clarity about what I don’t understand is progress if I previously thought that I did understand it.
Literarily, even rhythmically, Gen 1:1–2:3 is an absolutely beautiful and seemingly straightforward description of how our world came into being. The fact that it is full of things that (as Mozart put it) “only the cognoscenti will understand,” and that there are aspects of it that have still left us wondering, does not contradict this.
The remake, starting in Gen 2:5, will paint a quite different picture. But first we must discuss Gen 2:4, the verse that provides the hinge between the two stories of creation. That’s what we’ll turn to next time.