What Does Genesis 1:1 Mean?
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.THE KEY
The word translated “beginning” carries the sense of “head” or “first,” so creation’s beginning also names its source.
THE MEANING
The world you inhabit has God as its source; “the heaven and the earth” hold the whole field of your life within that act. You live within the reality God brings into being.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that existence is self-originating dissolves here: the verse locates its source in God.
THE ROOT
בְּרֵאשִׁית
bəreshit
GROWS FROM
רֹאשׁ
rosh
Head, top, chief; by extension, first or beginning.
Reshit links a beginning with what is first or foremost. The word gives the opening of creation a sense of a leading point, not merely a date on a timeline.
ALSO GROWS
rosh: Head, top, or chief.
רֹאשׁ
This is the root’s concrete image: the beginning is the first point, like a head at the front.
rishon: First or former.
רִאשׁוֹן
This related form shows the same root reaching from “head” toward what comes first.
בָּרָא
bara
GROWS FROM
ברא
b-r-ʾ
Create or bring into being.
“created” in this verse is bara. The same root describes God creating the heavens and earth, the living creatures, and humankind in Genesis 1. One verb carries across the whole scale of creation, from the world itself to the life within it.
ALSO GROWS
bara: He created; the active verb used here for the heaven and the earth.
בָּרָא
The verb places the whole world within one creative act.
yibbare'u: They are created; a form of the same root used for living creatures in Psalm 104:30.
יִבָּרֵאוּ
Here creation is expressed as what receives the creative act, extending the root’s reach from the world’s beginning to its living renewal.
THE PATTERN
God’s creative act gives the world its source and makes it a place for life.
For thus says the LORD, who creates the heavens, God himself, who shapes the earth and makes it. He set it firm; he created it not empty; he shaped it to be settled in. I am the LORD, and there is none else.You send out your breath, and they are created; you renew the face of the ground.All things came to be through him, and apart from him not one thing came to be that has come to be.THE THREAD
For thus says the LORD, who creates the heavens, God himself, who shapes the earth and makes it. He set it firm; he created it not empty; he shaped it to be settled in. I am the LORD, and there is none else.Isaiah uses the same root, ברא (bara), for God’s creating. It opens Genesis’s account further by saying the created earth is formed to be inhabited.
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