Biblical Hebrew Forum

["JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.apu.ac.uk>]

Joel wrote:
Personally I do not hold with the "had become" camp because I do not
believe that the perfect of HYH to imply that a change had occurred.
In fact I would argue that the perfect indicates that only that there
is no change occurring any more. I think "was" is the best translation
here and that the perfect is used to clearly set this verse in the
past tense. To me it appears to be a description of the world before
the first creative sentence. A lifeless, dark, chaotic mass of waters
with the wind of God blowing across them.
END QUOTE

JCR: Yes. Dr Davila once told me his view of this 'wind 
of God'. He believed the expression to be a hebrew idiom 
which basically meant 'massive wind' or 'strong wind' or 
something like that. Unlike his circular reasoning for 
the meaning of barah he actually had quite a convincing 
arguement for this idiom. He drew from other examples 
of similar constructs in other parts of the tanak where 
the meaning is clearly an idiom for great size. I can't
remember exactly where in the tanak it is but he gave
the example of a place where it talks about 'mountains
of god' where the meaning is something like 'great
mountains' or 'big mountains' or something like that.

James C. Read
UK