Parshat B'reishit: An Expression of Consciousness
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Parshat B'reishit
(An excerpt from my upcoming book)
The first verse of B'reishit (Genesis) is commonly translated as, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." However, this translation is impossible from the Hebrew text. Further, this statement is also unintelligible- a "beginning" of time and space is as unthinkable as their non-beginning. The Hebrew narrative does not have a "hey" (ה) as a prefix to the word reishit רֵאשִׁית and thus there is no "the beginning" possible in the text and those who have translated the verse thus into the English language have not even attempted to be true to the original Hebrew narrative. If translators have failed to correctly translate the first word of the Bible then what hope does that provide that the rest of the English Bibles are any better?