Eleazar (Maccabee)

The Hebrew opens with bereshit, literally "in beginning" — without the definite article. Because of this, some read the clause as dependent: "When God began to create the heavens and the earth..." or "In the beginning of God's creating...", with verse 2 as a parenthesis and verse 3 as the main clause. The rendering here follows the long-standing reading of verse 1 as an independent sentence: a complete, self-standing declaration that stands as a title and a claim over everything that follows. This reading suits oral delivery, where the short, weighted opening line lands with full force. The pair "the heavens and the earth" is kept as a pair rather than collapsed into "the universe," since the Hebrew idiom names the two poles of creation to mean the whole of it.

Bara, "created," is a verb used in the Hebrew Bible only with God as its subject; it never takes a named material as an object. It belongs to divine action alone, unlike yatsar ("to form," as a potter) or asah ("to make"). Elohim is grammatically plural in form but takes a singular verb here (bara is third masculine singular), a standard Hebrew usage for the one God. "The heavens and the earth" is a merism — naming two extremes to include everything between them, much as "young and old" means everyone. Note also the alliteration of the opening words: bereshit bara.

The verse asserts that God precedes and originates all that exists; nothing in the created order is itself divine. If verse 1 is read as an independent declaration, it has traditionally supported the doctrine that God created out of nothing. If read as a dependent temporal clause, the text says less about the absolute beginning and more about God's ordering of the unformed world described in verse 2 — a doctrine of creation as ordering rather than origination. Both readings are ancient and both have been held within the mainstream of Jewish and Christian interpretation. Christian tradition has also heard the plural-form Elohim together with the Spirit of verse 2 and the creative word of verse 3 as an early intimation of the triune God.

The ancient Near East knew many creation accounts, several of which describe the world emerging from conflict among the gods or from the body of a defeated sea-monster. Genesis shares the vocabulary and imagery of that world — the deep, the waters, the darkness — but tells the story without rival deities and without combat. Sun, moon, sea and sky, worshipped as gods by Israel's neighbours, appear here simply as things God made.

The Hebrew tradition is remarkably stable here. Early Greek translation renders the opening as an independent clause, "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth," using the singular "heaven"; the Hebrew shamayim is a dual/plural form. Some ancient versions and paraphrases expand the opening ("From the beginning, with wisdom, God created..."), reflecting interpretation rather than a different underlying text.

This verse opens the annual cycle of synagogue Torah readings and is chanted at the festival marking the completion and renewal of that cycle. In Christian worship it is a principal reading at the Easter Vigil, where the account of creation stands at the head of the night's rehearsal of God's saving acts, and it is widely used at services marking beginnings, thanksgiving for the created order, and the turning of the year.