In the Beginnings: Was Genesis 1:1 Translated to Fit a Doctrine?

So since we're starting a new podcast about the Hebrew Bible, I think I have to ask you, Joel, what is the Hebrew Bible?

Yeah, you'd think that would be an easy question to answer.

The term Hebrew Bible is a modern scholarly term that is really shorthand for a much longer way of describing...

These texts.

Right.

So you're probably used to like the Old Testament.

That's, you know, how most people know this stuff.

But of course, you know, once we say the Old Testament, we're assuming that there's a New Testament.

Old Testament is a thing that Christians say because they've got a New Testament.

Like no Jew, for example, would say Old Testament because it's the only testament.

We would just say testament, but we don't say that either.

So, you know, Jews historically have called this by, you know, a bunch of, our biblical text is a bunch of different names, right? In Hebrew, we call it mikra, which is like the reading, the text, the thing.

And in more modern times, Judaism has started calling it like the Tanakh, which is this, you know, acronym for the Torah and the prophets and the writings in Hebrew.

Hebrew Bible is a scholarly term that's meant to not be the Christian Old Testament and not be the Jewish Tanakh, but be a way of talking about these books that became the Tanakh or the Old Testament, but that we're not framing in sort of confessional religious terms.

Like, I think I've said before that if we were to take like the most accurate description of what we're talking about here is like the books or the writings of ancient Israelite literature that became eventually part of what we now call the Bible, but that weren't part of the Bible back when they were first written because there was no Bible.

Anyway, that's what we call, that's what we use the Hebrew Bible to say.

So Hebrew Bible is just, you know, it's shorthand.

That's an important stage setting because you'll hear us use these terms as we talk through Genesis.

And Genesis specifically isn't just part of what we're going to call the Hebrew Bible.

It's part of the Torah.

Can you help break down some other ways to refer to the Torah? What are we talking about when we talk about the Torah? I think this word is going to come up today, too.

Cool.

We're going to do it all.

Okay, so Genesis is the Greek name of an ancient Israelite text that had no name because none of the biblical books of either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament had titles attached to them.

Those are all later developments.