| This article was first published in the Winter 2023 issue of Bible and Spade. |  |
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” —Genesis 1:2
Although for centuries the Hebrew rūaḥ ʾelōhîm of Genesis 1:2 was translated into English as “Spirit of God,” Harry M. Orlinsky published an article in 1957 proposing the translation “a wind from God.”1 This was a possible translation because the Hebrew word rūaḥ can mean either “spirit” or “wind.” Orlinsky pointed out that his translation accorded with the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, where the chief god, Marduk, uses the wind as a weapon to slay Tiamat, another divine being, whose carcass then becomes the earth. “Tiamat” is cognate with the Hebrew word tĕhôm (“deep”), which is also found in Genesis 1:2. (For comparison, the English name “Smith” is cognate with the German “Schmidt.”) Orlinsky further claimed that the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, rendered the Hebrew as “wind,” using the Greek word pneuma. However, I would dispute this claim. According to two authoritative dictionaries,2 pneuma means “spirit” (of God) in the ancient Greek translation of Genesis 1:2. We would also expect a different verbal construction with pneuma, contra to Hiebert’s translation and argument.3 If the subject was “divine wind,” one would expect a corresponding verb that would be expressed as “to blow.” A “divine wind,” in that case, would not be understood verbally to “hover” or “be borne over” the water. Thus, Hiebert’s suggestion that rūaḥ should be translated as “divine wind” is completely inadequate. For example, compare our text to Isaiah 40:7, which uses the verb “to blow” (nāšəḇāh) while speaking poetically of YHWH’s “breath” or “wind” shriveling flowers. This clarified understanding also invalidates the assertion within Orlinsky’s thesis where he states that the translation “spirit” originated very late in the history of Bible translation. His assertion, therefore, is undoubtedly without a sound foundation....
To read the rest of the article and to view the endnotes, open the PDFs below:
“Is ‘Spirit of God’ the Correct Translation in Genesis 1:2 After All?”
