Episteme 2

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appeared for the first time in the 1st century B.C. It was held by the neopythagorean thinkers [8, p. vii]. 5. The first sentence of the Bible says nothing about creation out of nothing The text of Genesis 1:1 - 2:4 discussing the creation of the world by God, which constitutes today the beginning of the Bible, and to which refers 2 Peter 3:5, is translated into contemporary languages in the spirit of the 2nd Book of Maccabees 7:28 as understood by Vulgate. This means that the Hebrew term Bereshit is translated as the absolute beginning of everything. This translation, however, is done against the grammatical rules applied while writing the first sentence of the Bible, i.e. "Bereshit bara Elohim et hashshamaim weet haaras" which, according to present translations means "In the beginnings God created heavens and the earth". Appropriate translation uninfluenced by the future conviction that everything was created out of nothing is completely different and does not mention absolute order. What should the translation of the first sentence of the Bible look like then? Although Rev. St. Lach, a Catholic Biblical expert, is a supporter of the later tradition of God creating everything out of nothing and finds this meanings in the first sentence of the Bible, he also notices, however, that that there are some Biblical experts who translate the first sentences of the Holly Script disregarding that tradition. According to the latter ones, this tradition was unknown at the time Genesis was written. This can be substantiated by the lack of an article before the word "Bereshit" and the word "bara" should be pronounced [bero] when we consider the fact, that ancient Hebrew did not use vowels in spelling. "Scholars dispute whether the first word of Genesis, i.e. bereshit is a noun in its active or passive form (‌). N. Ridderboss mentions Ibn Ezra, A. Dillman, and W. Allbright as the followers of the first interpretation (Genesis 1 und 2, OTS 1958, 227). If we accepted this opinion, verse 1 should be treated as side subordinate clause, verse 2 as a non-restrictive clause, and verse 3 would finally contain the main clause. Thus we would obtain the following interpretation of the verses: 'When God started to create (instead of bara the word was pronounced bero) the heaven and the earth, and the earth was formless and empty


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