Dominic Bnonn Tennant (the B is silent)

Genesis 1

1

In the beginning,1 God created the heavens and the land,2

2

and the land was3 welter and waste,4 and darkness upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God brooding5 upon the face of the waters.

3

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.6

4

And God saw the light, that it was good, and God separated between the light and between the darkness.

22

And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and abundant7 and fill the waters in the seas, and the fliers be abundant in the land.”

26

And God said, “Let us make Adam8 in our image, as unto our likeness, and let them hold sway9 in10 the fish of the sea and in the birds of the heavens and in the beasts and in all the land and in all crawlers that crawl upon the land.”

27

And God created Adam in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

28

And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and abundant and fill the land and subjugate it, and hold sway in the fish of the sea and in the birds of the heavens and in every living thing that crawleth upon the land.”

29

And God said, “Lo, I have given to you all herbage11 seeding seed that is upon the face of all the land, and every tree that in it is the fruit of a tree seeding seed; to you it is for eating.12

30

And to every living thing of the land, and to every flier of the heavens, and to every thing crawling upon the land that in it is the lifebreath of life, all green herbage for eating.” And it was so.

31

And God saw all that he had made, and lo, very good. And evening was, and morning was, the sixth day.

Footnotes

  1. beginning (rosh). Or “head,” and that would be my preference if this did not make it sound like God created in a toilet. ↩

  2. land (erets). I resist translating erets as earth, since its central meaning is the land as opposed to the sky and sea; the face of the world which man inhabits. It does not refer to a “planet” as we tend to conceive it. ↩

  3. was (hayah). Or “existed.” The use of the verb “to be” here is unusual, but this is not discernible in English, where we always need a verb. ↩

  4. welter and waste (tohu w-vohu). Alter thinks, and I agree, that this is essentially an invented alliterative phrase, with vohu functioning as a nonce term for the sake of amplifying tohu, “waste.” I am following his translation as I think it is a good option for representing the Hebrew very well in English. ↩

  5. brooding (rachaph). Or “moving” or “fluttering.” ↩

  6. Let there be light, and there was light. Or “Let light exist, and light existed.” Again, the use of the verb “to be” is significant. ↩

  7. abundant (rava). Or, “become abundant.” As with “be fruitful,” this is a verb in Hebrew. Trad. “multiply,” but this is a highly significant term in scripture, and so consistency of translation is of particular importance, and it is better captured in the majority of cases, including in its nominal form rav, by some variation on “abundant.” ↩

  8. Adam. Genesis 5:2 says that adam is the name God gave to humanity when he created them. Some translators thus render this as “humankind.” While I have toyed with translating it “humanity,” because that is the sense throughout most of scripture, I believe this would be untrue to the principle that God’s word must shape ours, not vice versa. It is clear that adam is here a name, and the name of the man specifically; it becomes a collective noun because we all come from him. We therefore should not translate it as “human,” nor as “man,” like most Bibles, for “man” is not a name either, and there is already a word for “man,” ish. Since Adam is a name everyone knows, it seems to me that leaving it untranslated is the best option, as we generally do for names, and converting it to a common noun, “adam,” where appropriate, which the reader can infer means “human.” ↩

  9. hold sway. I am following Robert Alter here. This is not the standard Hebrew word for rule or dominion (mashal; v. 16). I would like an idiom that gets closer to the meaning of the Hebrew root behind this word (“to tread down”); but I prefer “hold sway” to the traditional “have dominion” for two reasons: Firstly, it can be consistently used in every instance the word appears in scripture; secondly, “and let them have dominion” is seven arrhythmic syllables that butcher the cadence of the Hebrew’s three; “and let them hold sway” does much better. ↩

  10. in (b). I have chosen to consistently translate the Hebrew preposition b in these verses, which really does mean “in” (cf. “in our image”). I have two reasons: Firstly, “in” maintains a better cadence than “over.” Secondly, the central idea of what God says is that Adam holds sway “in all the land,” which is perfectly comprehensible in English; thus, Adam’s holding sway “in” the fish etc can be read in light of this. That said, as in English, Hebrew prepositions are flexible and somewhat idiosyncratic, and b could also be translated “with.” ↩

  11. herbage (’esev). English lacks sufficient words to render all the Hebrew terms for different kinds of vegetation. The traditional “herb” is accurate in its time, but in modern English connotes specifically plants used for seasoning, like sage or basil. I have therefore chosen “herbage” to hopefully convey that this means herbs in the scientific sense of a plant whose stem does not produce woody, persistent tissue, and generally dies back at the end of each growing season. ’Esev is a general term for greenery, but especially edible plants. ↩

  12. eating (akla). This is a noun in Hebrew, but is from the root meaning to eat. “Food” fails to capture this connection. ↩