Biblical Hebrew Forum

[schmuel <schmuel AT nyc.rr.com>]

Hi Folks,

Questions on..

Genesis 1:1-2 (KJB)
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
** And the earth was without form, and void;  **
and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 

There are two controversies on the phrase with the asterisks above.

#1
The conjunction 'and' is not in the Hebrew coming from verse one, 
and some folks claim it really should be the adverb
     'now' -  (At this point in the series of events; then)

Honestly, I don't have the gist of why they think this 'now' 'is significant, 
I think it has something to do with a pre-Adamic race, or a gap theory 
(although how it helps those theories I haven't yet figgered out)
but that is not the issue anyway.  

Could our Hebrew grammarians tell us what translations (and/now/other) 
would be appropriate or inappropriate.  It may relate to the ...

#2
Second question which is, I believe, more substantive ..

A controversy between "was without form" or "became without form".

The late Arthur Custance insisted on "became" 
<http://custance.org/old/time/3ch2.html>http://custance.org/old/time/3ch2.html
 
The Hebrew verb hayah, i.e., "to be" here translated "was," signifies not 
only "to be" but also "to become," "to take place," "to come to pass." When a 
Hebrew writer makes a simple affirmation, or merely predicates the existence 
of anything, the verb hayah is never expressed. Where it is expressed it must 
always be translated by our verb "to become," never by the verb "to be," if 
we desire to convey the exact shade of the meaning of the original...
The Hebrew of Gen. 1:2 requires the rendering of Hayah by the word "became," 
instead of the word "was" or better still "had become," the separation of the 
Waw from the verb being the Hebrew method of indicating the pluperfect tense. 

Another view is taken by in this article....
http://cdelph.org/was.html
Should ‘was’ be ‘became’ in Genesis 1:2? - By John W Adey
Linguistics of ‘become’ / ‘became’
[8] hyth becomes ‘became’ only when it is accompanied (more often followed) 
at some point within the sentence by an additional linguistic component, like 
the Hebrew letter ‘l’ (‘lamed’). Without this additional (prepositional) ‘l’ 
component hyth could not have the sense of ‘became,’ it would remain ‘was.’ 

This additional ‘l’ element acts as a preposition: ‘to’ (sometimes there may 
be another preposition. See [11](a), and n.5). In ‘became’ translations this 
Hebrew ‘l’ (‘lamed’), in English ‘to,’ is rarely apparent. This is because 
‘became’ is a composite of ‘l’ (or some other preposition) combined with the 
verb ‘to be’ (e.g., ‘was’). It could be put literally as: ‘it was to’ = 
‘became.’ 
=====

Then he continues with Genesis 2:10 and Genesis 2:7 and 1 Kings 2:15 and 
Psalm 118:22 and other verses.

=====

Two sophisticated viewpoints, diametrically opposed, giving arguments that 
appear to be like trains passing in the night. 

So we wonder the view of our Hebrew-savvy folks here.
Is one of the above 'right' ... and the other 'wrong' ?  
Or is there a third person in the wings ready to give the most insight.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic




http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic