Posted on Tuesday, 13th October 2009 by Interloper
Professor Ellen van Wolde, who studies at Radboud University in the Netherlands, claims to have retranslated the opening passage of Genesis, shedding new light on what she believes to be the true meaning of the words: “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth”.
Van Wolde, a respected bible scholar, believes that the current translation is not an accurate representation of the actual Hebrew meaning. After analysing the original Hebrew text and comparing it against the Bible as a whole, Van Wolde concluded that the Hebrew verb “bara”, which appears in the first sentence of Genesis, refers to a process of “spatial seperation” and does not imply any direct act of creation.
This would mean that, according to the oldest Hebrew texts available, the Judeo-Christian God did not actually create the Earth, but simply seperated it from the Heavens.
Interestingly, this translation would bring the Judeo-Christian concept of creation in line with the mythologies of a number of other belief systems, including Hinduism in which the earth and the sky are propped apart as recounted in the Rig Veda:
“He by whom the awesome sky and the earth were made firm, by whom the dome of the sky was propped up…”
– The Golden Embryo, Rig Veda 10.121 (trans. Wendy Doniger)
Professor Van Wolde is soon to release her thesis on the subject, which includes comparisons with the creation myths of ancient Mesopotamia.
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