Elohim Created in the Beginning

According to tradition (Megillah 9a), seventy (or seventy-two) sages translated the Torah into Greek in Alexandria, around 270 BCE, at the request of King Ptolemy II. They worked in parallel, each one on his own, yet when the translations were compared they were all identical. For instance, instead of translating “Bereshit bara Elohim” (“In the beginning God created”), they all wrote “Elohim bara bereshit” (“God created in the beginning”). Rashi there explains: so that the gentiles would not think that “Bereshit” is the name of some primordial being that created “Elohim”, implying two gods.

This explanation faces two difficulties. Who ever heard of a god named “Bereshit”? Moreover, Greek grammar, like that of other Indo-European languages, differs from Hebrew, so the sages’ fear of a misreading was not relevant: the structure of the language does not allow confusion between the agent of the action (God) and the time of the action (in the beginning).

Tosafot (s.v. Elohim) offer a different explanation: the Greeks held that the name of the Creator should come first, and so they might have mistaken “Bereshit” for the Creator. The root of the problem: in biblical Hebrew the verb (“created”) precedes the subject (“Elohim”) – like saying “To school went Dan” instead of “Dan went to school”.

Another angle: the problem lies in the word “Elohim”

One could also say that the problem was not the word “Bereshit” but the word “Elohim” itself – a word in the plural form. Ibn Ezra explains that this is a plural of respect, like the “royal we” in European languages. Maimonides supports this too, explaining that this is why God is addressed in the plural (adnut in the plural, rather than “adoni”, “my lord”).

In the Jerusalem Talmud (Berakhot ch. 9), Rabbi Simlai answers heretics who challenged the plural form: the verse says “bara” (“he created”, singular) and not “bar’u” (“they created”, plural), which shows that a single God is meant. But this proof works only in Hebrew: in European languages there is no difference between “created” in the singular and in the plural (in English, for example, “created” serves for both). One may conjecture that precisely for this reason the word “Elohim” was moved to the start of the verse in Greek – to stress that this is a “royal plural” and not a real plural.

Perhaps “Elohim” here is not the name of a god at all

Interestingly, several commentators (Midrash Rabbah 27:4; Ramban on Genesis 6:6) held that the word “Elohim” (at least in certain places in our parasha) is not the name of God Himself, but refers to an angel to whom God entrusted the running of the world. This idea eases several difficult verses – for instance, “And the Lord regretted that He had made man... and He was grieved in His heart”: it was not God Himself who was disappointed, but the angel in charge.1

Either way, even after the work of translation, there remains something to ponder about the meaning of the verse “In the beginning God created”.