I was wondering what you made of this. Seems a bit thin to me on the face of it but whether that's a reflection of the original work or of the journalist's understanding I couldn't say.
I looked at early verses of Genesis and the first uses of bara I found were 1:1 and 1:27 - the latter also using vaiyivra which turns up in other verses as referring to creation. So it seemed reasonable to wonder why there were two different-seeming words being used to refer to creating things (without of course being able to infer that they differ any more than English make and create do.)
Looking closer I notice that the two words a suffix that differs only in combining marks (vowel marks?). So are they actually inflected forms of the same word, or otherwise closely related? (I know nothing about Hebrew morphology, sorry!) I'd reproduce them here but FF seems to have some difficulty correctly pasting them.
(And of course separating an undivided whole into two parts is a form of creation - so even if van Wolde were right that the word should be translated separated then I don't think it would change the meaning as much as the article suggests.)
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Date: 2009-10-14 08:14 am (UTC)I was wondering what you made of this. Seems a bit thin to me on the face of it but whether that's a reflection of the original work or of the journalist's understanding I couldn't say.
I looked at early verses of Genesis and the first uses of bara I found were 1:1 and 1:27 - the latter also using vaiyivra which turns up in other verses as referring to creation. So it seemed reasonable to wonder why there were two different-seeming words being used to refer to creating things (without of course being able to infer that they differ any more than English make and create do.)
Looking closer I notice that the two words a suffix that differs only in combining marks (vowel marks?). So are they actually inflected forms of the same word, or otherwise closely related? (I know nothing about Hebrew morphology, sorry!) I'd reproduce them here but FF seems to have some difficulty correctly pasting them.
(And of course separating an undivided whole into two parts is a form of creation - so even if van Wolde were right that the word should be translated separated then I don't think it would change the meaning as much as the article suggests.)