21st Century Bible Hebrew -- Genesis 1:7 -- narrator credibility

Genesis 1:7

ז וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת־הָרָקִיעַ וַיַּבְדֵּל בֵּין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מִתַּחַת לָרָקִיעַ וּבֵין הַמַּיִם אֲשֶׁר מֵעַל לָרָקִיעַ וַיְהִי־כֵן:

 

Transliteration: Va-yaas elohim et-haraqia vayavdel ben ha-maim asher mitachat laraqia uven ha-maim asher me-al laraqia va-y’hi khen.

Translation:     Gd must made the raqia for it separated the water that is under the raqia from the water that is above the raqia; it must have been so.

Letters in this lesson: שׂ

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

 

יַּעַשׂ	make, do
מִ, מֵ	from, away from, toward
אֲשֶׁר	that, which
תַּחַת	under
מֵעַל	above
כֵן	thus, true

 

I’m going to give you the qal imperfect of asah, a lamed heh verb which opens this verse in a certainty epistemic. Memorize this to cut down on needing the dictionary.

 

Singular	Plural	Person/gender
אֶעֱשֶה	נַעֲשֶה	First
תַּעֲשֶה	תַּעֲשוּ	Second/masculine
תַּעֲשֶה	תַּעֲשֶינָה	Second/feminine
יַעֲשֶה	יַעֲשוּ	Third/masculine
תַּעֲשֶׁה	תַּעֲשֶינָה	Third/feminine

 

Notice that this is one of those certainty epistemics followed by a narrative past that shows why such a thing had to have happened.

 

Also notice the certainty epistemic at the end; this validates the credibility of what went before it.

 

In oral narratives, narrators always have a credibility problem because their audiences were not witnesses to the events. All the narrator can do is point verbally at something which the audience has witnessed. We already saw one example of this: the existence of light and dark.

 

Later in Torah you will find that narrators not only point at the phenomena of creation, they also name geographical features. The geography thing is part of Axel Olrik’s principles that describe the fine-level structure of oral narratives. The grammatical thing is another take on the same issue. This dovetailing of the two men’s work made me believe Dr. Cook had things right.

 

Why does the narrator have to endorse his own credibility? Because the raqia is not like dark and light, it is not perceptible to mortals.

 

There’s an implication here that above the first raqia there is water. Babylonian Talmud Tractate Chagigah 14 tells the story of four sages, one of whom was the martyr Rabbi Akiva. He warned his fellows, while they prepared for a mortal ascension to heaven, not to say “water, water”. Two other commentaries go on to say from a mystical point of view that the raqia separates two kinds of water, but that the separation itself is unified and in it they are unified. Thus there may be many facets to Gd, but they are not Gd in and of themselves: Gd is One.

 

R. Akiva had three colleagues in this trip. They didn’t heed his warning but focussed on the different aspects of Gd. One was the man who blew his mind over the waters in an earlier verse; his orientation had too much of the material in it. My take: while the raqia separates a physical phenomenon into parts, Gd is not that physical phenomenon and is not separated by the raqia but penetrates it and thus His spirit could waft over the waters without becoming finite. This rabbi didn’t think that far into it, and that’s why he blew his mind.

 

A second colleague named ben Azzai “looked and died”; his orientation focused too much on knowledge which, when not tempered by Divine Mercy, results in strictness in judgments. The strictest punishment in Torah is the death penalty and he suffered by that wherewith he sinned.

 

The third colleague was Elisha ben Abuya, a teacher of the Rabbi Meir who transmitted to posterity a mass of halakhah (Gittin 4) from his other teacher – R. Akiva. R. Elisha “gazed and cut the plants”; he became an apostate. He later told his pupil that he had heard from behind the Heavenly Veil a prophecy that he would never repent of his sins, and he lost all desire to obey the commandments. R. Meir met up with him one Shabbat riding a horse, which is prohibited, and R. Elisha told him that he was sinning so as to lead others into sin. Talmud says such a thing makes true repentance impossible so, in a way, R. Elisha was doing exactly what would fulfill the prophecy. R. Meir never left off trying to bring R. Elisha back into obedience to the commandments.

 

Only R. Akiva had the spiritual purity and strength to survive this ascension in his right mind and without apostasy. Which is a complete refutation to R. Elisha, because R. Akiva rebelled against rabbinical ordinances until he was 40. He fell in love and the lady’s father refused to agree to the match unless R. Akiva changed his ways. The holy maiden convinced him to do that and they were married.

Next week: an important feature of aspectual languages.  

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