"In the beginning, God created [ברא]"

Reading through the story of creation

Everyone knows that the chapter we’ve started reading together is the story of creation.

Everyone knows the first words of the King James translation: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Anyone with a little bit of Hebrew probably knows this verse in Hebrew, too:

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

bereshit bara elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et-ha-aretz

Many people have probably heard what I’m about to say as well: The verb ברא bara ‘create’ is not something that just anyone can do. It is a verb that only God can do. (That is a very, very slight exaggeration that we’ll look into for a moment before we are done.)

Now, what exactly does God create? (And when I use the English word create in this discussion, I’m always talking about the Hebrew verb ברא.) If God creates anything in this story, it must be the heaven and the earth, right? Or as I have translated it, the sky and the earth, or even “the sky and the land.”

But as we’ll see when we begin to read Day Two of creation, the sky is not “created.” Neither is the land on Day Three. There are two specific things that are indeed created with the verb ברא — but neither of them is the heaven or the earth.

We’ll talk about those creations when we get there (in v. 21 and v. 27), but now let’s spend a few moments talking about the verb ברא itself.

The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew notes about this verb bara: “always of God.” The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament notes, more expansively, “in the OT I ברא is a specifically theological term, the subject of which is invariably God.”

They say I ברא because this verb has two homonyms, verbs that use the same root letters but are not (or apparently not) related. ברא II ‘be fat’ occurs just once in the Bible, in 1 Sam 2:29, where Eli and his sons are accused of “feeding on the first portions” of Israelite sacrifices. “Feeding” is להבריאכם, and you don’t need to understand the grammar or know Hebrew to recognize ברא as the root of this verb. Amazingly, “the first portions” are ראשית reshit, the same word that we saw in בראשית ברא bereshit bara ‘at the beginning of God’s creating’.

It’s hard to imagine that’s a coincidence, but this ברא II, even though it occurs only once in the Bible as a verb, is for real; it gives us the adjective בריא bari ‘fat’ — like the fat cows in Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41.

ברא III is a verb that means “cut.” It occurs only five times, but is definitely something a human being can do. Nonetheless, some have linked this root with ברא I to suggest that God’s method of creation was not ex nihilo, out of nothing, but a method of “cutting” some primordial substance into the various aspects of creation.

In our story, though, the words about God’s “creating” the sky and the land apparently treat this activity, somehow unique to God, as an extremely general term — because, as I said a moment ago, this is not the verb that used when sky and land actually come into being. We’ll start our discussion of that, with the creation of the sky on Day Two, next time.