21st Century Bible Hebrew -- more idioms

Genesis 2:4

 

ד אֵ֣לֶּה תֽוֹלְד֧וֹת הַשָּׁמַ֛יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם בְּי֗וֹם עֲשׂ֛וֹת יְהוָֹ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶ֥רֶץ וְשָׁמָֽיִם:

 

Translation:     These are the births of heaven and earth at the time of their being created, on the day of the Lord Gd creating earth and heaven.

 

Vocabulary in this lesson:

אֵלֶּה	These
תוֹלְדוֹת	Generations, births
הִבָּרְאָם	Their being created
עֲשׂוֹת	creation

 

The verb hibaram illustrates how the aspectless verb that takes prepositions works. This form can take object suffixes as well as prepositions.

 

When this form of aspectless verb takes the prefix b’, the meaning is “at the time of Xing”.

 

Hibaram is nifal. We know that nifal reflects a legal decree. So this is not just a making, it’s obedience to a decree.

 

The pronoun suffix is for the direct object of bara, “heaven and earth”.

 

The rabbis noticed that with the first verb it says “heavens and earth”, the same formula used with bara in Genesis 1:1, and with the last verb it says “earth and heaven”. They used this to show that neither heaven nor earth was premier in importance.

 

Now, there’s an urban legend that this is a second creation narrative and there are hints as to why people thought so in some of the verses. But here are two clues.

 

One is the use of the aspectless verbs. Nothing happens in this verse to create the world; creation is a given.

 

Second is ba-yom.  We just got through seven days of creation. Why does it say “on the day”?

 

Two reasons. One is that “on the day” is a literal translation. Literal translations have created more urban legends about Torah than you can shake a stick at. Literal translations ignore idioms. Here, we have an idiom for “at the time”.

 

Second is that oral traditions consist of multiple narratives, each self-contained although they may stack up into sagas. There is absolutely no requirement that any narrative in a single oral tradition be consistent with any other narrative.

 

If you ever read Robert Graves’ compilation of Greek myth, you saw this in action although he and the scholarly tradition he worked in never realized it. A given hero or god may have, not only multiple names, but also multiple progenitors. Aphrodite’s father could be any of several Greek gods. Other aspects include four different places in Greece identified as the resting place of the box in which Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the Greek flood story.

 

The point of narratives in an oral tradition is to teach something about the culture transmitting the tradition. We’ll get to the point of this narrative many verses from now.