Freethought & Rationalism Archive

muon · 01-17-2005, 04:10 PM

Gesundheit!

I'm reading Gerald Schroeder's book "The Hidden Face of God", which contains the following Biblical exegesis. I'd appreciate some expert evalulation please:

Quote:

Genesis 1:1 is usually translated as "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Unfortunately, that rendition, which the entire English-speaking world has heard repeatedly, misses the meaning of the Hebrew. The mistake stems from the King James Bible, first published in 1611, based on the Latin Vulgate attributed to St. Jerome in the fourth century and the Greek Septuagint that dates from some 2200 years ago. "In the beginning" is thus three translations downstream from the original.

The opening word, usually translated as "in the beginning," is Be'reasheet. Be'reasheet can mean "in the beginning of", but not "in the beginning". The difficulty with the preposition "of" is that its object is absent from the sentence; thus the King James translation merely drops it. But the 2100-year-old Jerusalem translation of Genesis into Aramaic takes a different approach, realizing that Be'resheet is a compound word: the prefix Be', "with", and reasheet, a "first wisdom". The Aramaic translation is thus "With wisdom God created the heavens and the earth." ...

Schroeder goes on to link this with some strange interpretations of quantum mechanics as "wisdom". :rolling:

I'm no Biblical scholar, but the history of the King James translation, the supposed mistranslation of the original Hebrew, and the Aramaic version's very different take on things all strike me as implausible. Anyone care to take this on?

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