This past Sunday night I taught a class on Genesis 1. Naturally, a good portion of the study was devoted to the first verse, one of the most famous sayings in the history of literature…

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

(Genesis 1:1)

One thing I touched on was the recent desire by some to go back to the Hebrew and re-translate that statement into something more like this…

“When God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth…He said let there be light. (Gen 1:1, 3)”

In other words, they want all of v1-3 to be read as a single sentence, with verse two (“the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the face of the waters”) to be seen more as an inspired parenthetical in the middle of the one sentence.

While it’s true that the Hebrew does allow for such a translation, many of those pushing for this rendering are not doing so in the name of grammatical accuracy (in fact, the more commonly used rendering is an equally accurate way to translate the text). They want to translate it in a new way because they are trying to push the idea that “the heavens and the earth” were already here when God started creating things with it. In other words, they want to argue that the universe was already in existence and that God’s creation in Genesis 1 was more about Him adding and creating onto the canvas that was already on the table.

Why they want to do that is obvious: They’re embarrassed to go out in public and say the universe was created in six days. Well boo hoo. If you reject Moses’ words on page ONE of the Bible, you might as well put the whole rest of the Bible away. You can’t reject Moses and claim Christ. You can’t be ashamed of God’s power here at the beginning of time and profess faith in God’s power as seen through Jesus Christ. God is a doer of the supernatural in the world of the natural. He made the universe, supernaturally, in six natural days. Moses says so, not only in Genesis, but later on to the Israelites at Sinai (Exodus 20:11), where he specifically linked the Israelite work week (six literal days of work and one day off) with the creation week (six literal days of creation and one day off). Jesus did not take Moses’ words to be mythology or allegory, but history to be applied literally (Luke 13:14).

Besides, what proves too much proves nothing at all: If you want to try to argue that God already had a canvas to work with when He began the creation of Genesis 1, then you’re left with the unanswerable question of where the cavass of the universe comes from? Did God make it? If so, when? Moses doesn’t say “when God was beginning to make the earth on the already-existing canvas of the heavens…,” he says “when God was beginning to make the HEAVENS and the earth…” That’s everything around us (the earth) and everything beyond us (the heavens). The canvas was made on day one (Genesis 1:1-5).

So no, Genesis 1:1 is not mistranslated. It could be translated in a different way, but even if it is, the context around it still teaches what it teaches: In six days the Lord made the heavens, the earth, and all that in them is.

~Matthew