The view may be called "newer", but still Rashi and Ibn Ezra gave
their syntactic views hundreds of years ago. The fact "that the whole
construction seems very complicated and drawn out in Hebrew" as you
claim it, is unconvincing. Hebrew is capable of the same complexities
as any other language; it is simply our lack of knowledge of Biblical
Hebrew syntax. After all, the academic study of Biblical Hebrew
started relatively recently.
The idea that bara would be expected to be an infinitive is indeed an
objection, but it is not necessary. A verbal clause as the second part
of a construct is possible in Hebrew.
About the perfect tense: syntactic study has shown that the perfect
tense is quite often used in subordinate clauses in similar situations
as here in Gen 1,1-3. It is not misleading to say that we would here
expect an imperfect consecutive to be the first predicate.
The imperfect consecutive does not necessarily mark continuation,
because the "and" part here is not a temporal marker, it only plays a
syntactic role.
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