"separated" (Gen 1:7)

Reading through the story of creation

and it/he separated the water below the cupola and the water above the cupola.

 וַיַּבְדֵּ֗ל בֵּ֤ין הַמַּ֙יִם֙ אֲשֶׁר֙ מִתַּ֣חַת לָרָקִ֔יעַ וּבֵ֣ין הַמַּ֔יִם אֲשֶׁ֖ר מֵעַ֣ל לָרָקִ֑יעַ

As we saw when we looked at the words ר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים in v. 2, translators sometimes must make a choice that eliminates some of the richness of the original Hebrew. That means it’s time for some more grammar.

Gender doesn’t play any role in the English verbal system, but we do have some gendered pronouns: he/him for males, she/her for females, and it for things that don’t have gender.  Perhaps because we use the same verbs for all, the pronouns can be, and have been, used quite loosely. A ship can be a “she,” and a pet can be an “it.”  Male and female refer to sex, but the grammatical terms are masculine, feminine, and neuter.

We need to be thinking about this now because Hebrew does not have a neuter gender.  Every noun in Hebrew is either masculine or feminine.  (An extremely well-done book that discusses this topic among many others is Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.)

All of that is to explain the words “it/he” in my translation of Gen 1:7.

The verb ויבדל va-yavdel has no subject.  That is extremely common in Biblical Hebrew, because Biblical Hebrew verbs change their form depending on whether the subject is singular or plural; 1st-person (I or we), 2nd-person (you) or 3rd-person (someone else); and whether the subject is masculine or feminine. The pronoun is built into the verb.  This verb, va-yavdel, is a 3rd-person, masculine, singular verb.

As we discussed in a much earlier post, elohim has an apparently plural form, but when it refers to God with a capital G it is treated as a singular noun.  (Sneak preview of Deut 6:4 – God is one.)  The problem in this particular verse is that raqia (the “cupola”) is also a masculine noun in Hebrew.  Which of them is the subject of this verb?  Is it the cupola, which according to v. 6 was made to be a separator, or is it God, who separated the water into two parts by making this cupola? If God is the subject of this verb, our pronoun is “he”; if the cupola is the subject, we need to say “it.”

Note: Remember that when I say “God” I am always talking about the character in the Bible who’s being called that. The fact that Hebrew has only two genders means that this God is referred to as masculine throughout the Bible. I’m not making any claim about the creator of the universe, and even the Bible itself, constrained here by human language, may not be doing so.

Here are some English translations of our phrase:

• KJV – God made the firmament, and [] divided the waters

• Everett Fox – God made the dome and [] set apart the waters

• NRSV – God made the dome and [] separated

These three have implicitly chosen God as the subject, but (matching the Hebrew) do not use an extra word to indicate it.  The Septuagint chooses God as the subject too, but makes the choice explicit:

• LXX – καὶ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ στερέωμα, καὶ διεχώρισεν ὁ θεὸς

• NETS¹ – God made the firmament, and God separated

These next two make the opposite decision – that the raqia, which was intended to do the job of separating, is now doing it:

• Robert Alter – God made the vault and it divided

• JPS – God made the expanse, and it separated

When there is a difficulty in the Hebrew text, scholars often look to “the versions,” by which we mean the ancient translations – primarily the Greek translation, often referred to as the Septuagint or LXX (70 in Roman numerals, a nod to the legend that the Greek translation of the Pentateuch was made by 70 scholars), and the Aramaic translation(s); secondarily the Latin and Syriac versions.

The first three of these examples “replicated” the Hebrew syntax — even though the English syntax does not leave the subject ambiguous as the Hebrew does. The others, braver or more reckless, made their choice explicit by adding a word to clarify the subject that was not sharply defined in the original Hebrew. 

Does it matter whether the water was split in two by God or by the cupola that God created? Perhaps not in the grand scheme of things. But what we’re doing here is trying to understand what the biblical writer wanted to convey. So let’s think it through.

If it was God who separated the water into two parts, this is something we have seen him do before, in v. 4. Thinking in English as I do, distinguishing between light and dark is not the same as physically blocking out two regions of the world, but the Hebrew verb להבדיל (l’havdil) is being used in both places. As we’ve seen, this action seems to be intrinsic to holiness.

Could it be the cupola that separated the water into two parts, as Robert Alter and NJPS think? (The 1917 “Old” JPS translation uses the syntax that makes God the implicit second subject.) There is no sign that the cupola is a self-aware being; it is an object hammered out by God. The medieval philosophers, though, most certainly understood the cupola as an “intelligence.” And the Bible itself is quite happy to personify the raqia:

הַשָּׁמַ֗יִם מְֽסַפְּרִ֥ים כְּבֽוֹד־אֵ֑ל • ha-shamayim m’saprim k’vod el • the sky recounts God’s glory וּֽמַעֲשֵׂ֥ה יָ֝דָ֗יו מַגִּ֥יד הָרָקִֽיעַ • u-ma’aseh yadav maggid ha-raqia • and the cupola tells of the work of his hands

More remarkably, if raqia is the subject of this verb, we have the very first instance of one of God’s creations actually doing anything — and something that God himself had done the day before, no less. I will leave it to you to decide which of these translations you think is correct, or whether you think the Hebrew was intended to leave both possibilities open.

The LXX translator here made a choice that was undoubtedly aimed at clarifying the meaning of the Hebrew, though we don’t know for sure if this was a clarification or an alteration. Next time, we’ll look at a more complicated difference between the Greek and Hebrew versions.

1. NETS is the New English Translation of the Septuagint.