standing a language; for my present purpose it suffices to
consider two only: that which knows the words, and the
fundamental principles of the syntactical connection of word
with word; and that which adds to this the apprehension of
the logical connection of clause with clause, and the conse-
quent power to follow a train of argument. Some languages
never rise beyond the first stage; their sentences are separate
assertions, and the logical connection the simplest possible;
but (unless we misinterpret the phenomena, which is often
possible) the mental stage of the nation will be found to
correspond to the simple uninvolved style of their speech.
Most languages, however, advance much higher than this,
but by different ways; some by an elaborate system of
inflexions, making it possible to put a person or thing
(noun) into any conceivable relation towards the deed to be
done (the verb); some by the use of a great variety of par-
ticles (conjunctions or adverbs), expressing every phase of
logical relation between clauses; some relying on still more
delicate and almost intangible devices, seconded by varieties
in the tone of voice, and trusting largely to the quickness
and intelligence of the hearer. Of these three, the Sanskrit,.
the Greek, and the Semitic languages, may be taken as ex-
amples. Languages of the third kind are not necessarily less
perfect, less capable of expressing deep and refined thoughts,
or of continuing a train of thought, than those of the first
or second; but they obviously offer greater difficulties to
the foreign student of them. The student may easily fancy
he has gained a knowledge of them when he knows their
words and the most palpable devices of their syntax. This
is the sort of knowledge which from the days of the Greek
translators of the Old Testament, foreigners have generally
had of Hebrew; and the same, though in a less degree, may
be said of other and more recent Semitic dialects. Now if
the following passage of Virgil (Æn. i. 46—49),

Ipsa, Jovis rapidum jaculata e nubibus ignem,
Disjecitque rates, evertitque æquora ventis :
Illum exspirantem transfixo pectore flammas
Turbine corripuit, scopuloque infixit acuto,

be translated thus: "She hurled Jove's rapid fire out from the clouds, scattered the ships, and turned up the sea with winds; she pierced his breast, and he breathed out flames;

she caught him up in a hurricane, and dashed him on a sharp rock,"-it gives us a good instance of the imperfect mode of understanding and translating a language, and at the same time of the amount of syntactic insight which is thought sufficient for a translator of the Bible. Of course if the syntactic devices in Hebrew were always as plain and tangible as the cases and participles in the third line of the above Latin passage, ignored in the translation, they would not be overlooked. As it is, though somewhat recondite, they are no less real, and always reward a careful search. The ordinary translations, therefore, even where perfectly irreproachable in the rendering of the separate words, may be utterly unsatisfactory (in almost every verse) as to the syntactical combinations.

Verses 1-3 afford one of the most important instances. in the whole Old Testament. The first difficulty that meets us in verse 1 is the expression is, “in the beginning." n (derivative noun from w, head) denotes the headpiece, i.e. front, beginning of something; but always with reference to something else. In almost all the passages where the word occurs, therefore, it stands in the construct state, or has a pronominal suffix attached: as Gen. x. 10, inpbay

-and the beginning of his king " וַתְּהִי רֵאשִׁית מַמְלַכְתּוֹ בָּבֶל

dom was Babylon," &c., and Job xlii. 12,

ingisne zis, “and Jahveh [Jehovah] blessed the end of Job more than his beginning;" and in Is. xlvi. 10, "announcing from the beginning (7) subsequent things," though no genitive follows, still the word is used with the same sort of reference to , and almost adverbially (from before). In short, it belongs to that large class of Hebrew words, nouns in origin and in syntactic usage, but practically playing the part of prepositions: n (place) in place of, under; ? (face) on the face of, before; T, (back) behind, after;

בְּרֵאשִׁית in presence of before. Hence כְּנֶגֶד לְנֶגֶד,(front) נֶגֶד

"at the beginning of," would seem to demand a following genitive as much as, for example, л, instead of. Even the punctuation confesses this; for the absence of the article (, not) makes it the construct state. Now what if the word be really used here in accordance with what has been shewn to be its usage elsewhere, and it be status constructus? then the following words must be governed by se as by a preposition, and the meaning must be: "At the

beginning of God created," &c. But of course when a verb comes under the government of a preposition, the infinitive must be used (πρὸ [or ἐν ἀρχῇ] τοῦ κτίζειν); and we should therefore have to point the verb N instead of 7. A comparison with Gen. v. 1 makes this almost certain. There we have again the beginning of a book, preceded by

-This is the Book of the His" זֶה סֵפֶר תּוֹלְדֹת אָדָם its title

tory of Man" and it runs as follows: "On the day of God's creating Man, into the likeness of God he made him"

-where the form of sentence is iden בְּיוֹם בְּרֹא אֱלֹהִים אָדָם

tical with that in i. 1, and the only verbal difference is that
we have , "on the day of," in place of , "at the
beginning of." As makes no sense except as a status
constructus, so we might infer (apart from the reasons given
above) that
must be so also. I have said that the
verb governed by a prepositional word is in the infinitive;
and this is the only form that would be tolerated in Greek or
Latin: év áρx? TOυ KTíĻELV, in initio creandi. But in Hebrew
the indicative is also possible (horrible as this must appear to
classical scholars), the government being sufficiently indi-
cated by the status constructus, which throws the whole clause
following it into dependence upon itself; of which we have
an example in 2 Sam. xxii. 1 (repeated in Ps. xviii. 1)—a
passage strikingly similar to the present one in its syntactic
form "on the day of Jahveh-delivered-him," ben die

So in Gen. i. 1, the of the text may not even require any alteration of punctuation, but

may denote "At the beginning of God's creating. , generally rendered to create, is so far from necessarily denoting to produce out of nothing, that it rather indicates the reverse-to mould into shape, to form anew from existing materials (which indeed was to be expected from its primitive sense of to cut, hew). This is evident from the fact that it is used as perfectly synonymous with, to form, mould, and with y, to make (properly to work up, prepare) as in Is. xlv. 18, "For thus saith Jahveh who created the heavens-himself that God who formed the earth and made it himself fixed it-created it not for nothingformed it for dwelling in: I am Jahveh," &c.; and as in the very chapter we are considering, verse 26 has, "And God said, We will make Men," and verse 27, "And God created men," of the self-same act; and heaven, earth and sea

monsters are created (vv. 1 and 21), while the firmament, the luminaries and the land-animals are made (vv. 7, 16, 25), the act being obviously the same. Another example proving the close similarity, if not the identity of the three acts,

,,, is found in Is. xliii. 7, "all those called by my name, and whom I created, formed and made for my glory;" and it likewise illustrates the application of the verb especially loved by the later Isaiah, to the forming or training of Israel by Jahveh into a people specially his, according to Ex. vi. 7, xix. 5, 6: see (2 and y) Is. xli. 20, xlv. 7, 12; and (72 and 7) Is. xliii. 1, xlv. 7. Verse 2 is still only a dependent clause, " When the earth had been shapeless and waste;" this is proved by the order of the words, the subject preceding the verb-one of the most important devices of Hebrew syntax, unknown to King James's translators, and only fully understood in the present century. The following clause, "and darkness," &c., is of the same nature, although its verb is not expressed. The next, "and while the breath of God was brooding over the face of the water," is of the same nature (a "proposition of state," or Zustandsatz, as Ewald terms it), and indeed is still more strongly shewn to be so from having its verb put in the participle. Thus it is not till verse 3 that we come to anything that is asserted on its own account; and we see that the first act of creation is the cry, "Let Light be!"

This new conception of verses 1-3, which is the result of the rigid application of the rules of grammar, seems to me to be of the highest importance, and to modify greatly our conception of the creation. In the first verse, according to the received version, we have an assertion that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." This was the source of many difficulties -- the heaven is created afterwards, in verses 6-8, under the name of the Firmament; and the earth is apparently regarded as created on the third day, in verses 9 and 10; in the second we learn that the earth, so created by the God all whose works give us the very idea of order (kóσμos) and law, was a mere shapeless void; and that there was besides a "deep" not mentioned as created in verse 1; and that not till then did the Spirit of God begin to act at all. Moreover, whereas all the subsequent acts of creation are attributed to the spoken Word of God (" And God said"), which

in the New Testament is acknowledged in the Logos of the Proem of the Fourth Gospel, this first and most momentous act seems to be performed without any words at all. The shifts to which interpreters are reduced sufficiently confess all these difficulties. The heaven and the earth of verse 1, we are told, are different from those in verses 68, 9, 10; the vague term Chaos is invented to describe the shapeless, unordered mass, and the double term "heaven and earth" is said to be employed in default of a single word for the chaos. Or, again, it is said that verse 1 announces, as a heading to the chapter, the various acts which are afterwards told fully in regular order; though the expression, "In the beginning," if we adopt the received translation, clearly separates this time from the following days, and precludes us from identifying this first with the subsequent acts. Again, if this creation of the heaven and the earth in the beginning is to be distinct from the later acts, we are told that it must be the creation out of nothing of Matter, which is afterwards moulded into the various forms of earth, heaven and water-thus doing violence not only to what I have shewn to be the necessary and constant signification of the verb 2, but to the usage of it in the later verses of this very history; for if in verse 1 to create the heaven and the earth be to bring into existence the matter from which they are to be moulded, then verse 12 must be assumed to assert that God called into existence the matter out of which the great sea-monsters would be formed; and so of Man in verse 27.

All these absurdities and contradictions vanish at once from the text as I understand it. "At the beginning of God's creating the heaven and the earth ... God said: 'Let Light be:"" no other heaven and earth are spoken of, no earlier act of creation is asserted than those of verses 6-10; no different sort of creation assumed than that of the seamonsters, of man, and of all his work (i. 21, 27, ii. 3). Further, God is not credited with the absurdity of bringing into being a Chaos; his earliest function is now to create in the true Hebrew sense-to form, to mould, to organize; and his first act is to introduce the great organizer and life-giver-Light; which even the Proem of the Fourth Gospel acknowledges as equivalent to Life. And the process of creation on the first day now resembles that on the