{ "site": "bereshit", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com", "generated": "2026-09-18", "license_own_work": "CC BY 4.0", "license_note": "Public-domain source texts are not claimed. This edition's own English translations, apparatus, and encoding are CC BY 4.0. Some source texts carry their own third-party licence (CC BY-SA via Sefaria/Wikisource) — see each witness's own license field and https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/colophon for the per-witness breakdown.", "cruxes": [ { "id": "beginning-of-what", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/beginning-of-what/", "verse": "gen.1.1", "question": { "en": "The beginning of what — time, a principle, or a person?", "la": "In principio: cujus principio?", "he": "בְּרֵאשִׁית — רֵאשִׁית שֶׁל מָה?" }, "summary": "Neofiti's 'with wisdom' and the Latin 'in the Son' are the same move made from opposite ends of Prov 8:22–30.", "finding": "Both benches gloss the first word of Scripture as 'in wisdom', prove it from a wisdom text, and mean opposite things by it. Targum Neofiti does not translate bereshit but interprets it — min qadmin be-ḥokhmah — and Bereshit Rabbah reaches the same gloss by proof text, R. Banai from Prov 3:19 ('the Lord founded the earth with wisdom') and R. Hoshaya from Prov 8:22 ('the Lord made me reshit of his way'), where the Wisdom that speaks is the Torah, the architect's plan the King builds from. Augustine, Ambrose, Bede, Bruno and Rupert reach it from Ps 104:24 ('you have made all things in wisdom'), where the Wisdom is the Son. Neither side knows the other is there, and the shared conclusion is the least noticed thing about the crux — which is what the Latin bench looks like from the inside, and is not the whole truth. The contact existed at the head of the tradition and the Latin transmission lost it. Chalcidius, writing Latin in the fourth century, reports of Origen — whose homily is the source of everything the Latins say here — that he was persuaded of the non-temporal beginning ab Hebraeis, by the Hebrews; that initium minime temporarium dici, no beginning in time, since there was no time before the world was furnished; and that there is nevertheless one beginning of all things, de quo Salomo in proverbiis: creavit me Deus progressionis suae semitam — Prov 8:22 quoted at length, and the conclusion drawn that praeeunte divina sapientia caelum terramque factam, that divine Wisdom is the primordium of the universe. That is the rabbinic bench's verse and the rabbinic bench's word, attributed to Hebrew informants, in a Latin commentary of the same century as Jerome. (Baehrens's apparatus to Origen, from which this passage was first verified, gives primitiam where the 1520 print on which the witness is built reads semitam; the witness is quoted here.) And it went nowhere: Prov 8:22 is cited by four witnesses on this daf and every one of them is rabbinic; Ps 104:24 is cited by four and every one of them is Latin. The Latin bench reached wisdom by a different verse, turned it into the Son, and never met the text that had already got there from the other side. The same loss happens a second time and by an unrelated route. Basil's Latin Hexaemeron — which is how the whole west read Basil — carries an accurate report of the rabbinic reading of Gen 1:26, ferunt enim, quod angelis dixerit: Faciamus hominem, which is what Targum Pseudo-Jonathan prints in the biblical line itself; and Bede copies the passage at Jarrow keeping every sentence of the argument and removing every Jew in it, Rabanus and Angelomus copy Bede, and by the twelfth century the reading survives in the Gloss only at Babel and with nobody's name on it. Twice on the Latin side, then, and by two channels that have nothing to do with each other, that bench was handed the other bench's words and kept only the answer. A third loss, and it runs the other way. Philo of Alexandria read these verses in Greek four centuries before Bereshit Rabbah and told the same parable: a king founds a city, a trained architect draws the whole of it within himself first and carries an intelligible city in his soul, and only then builds in stone; so God conceived the types, made an intelligible world out of them, and used it as the model for this one. The midrash's amon, the craftsman's plan the King builds from, is that parable with the Torah put in the architect's hand. Nobody need have borrowed anything for that to matter; what matters is who kept him. The rabbinic bench does not cite Philo once and did not preserve him. He survives because the church copied him, and he was recovered for Judaism only in the sixteenth century, by Azariah dei Rossi. So the mechanism this finding has twice described in one direction runs in the other as well: the Latin bench lost the philology it had been handed, and the rabbinic bench lost the one Jewish reader of Genesis 1 whose reading of this verse its own commentary most resembles. Nor did the Latins who preserved him know what they had. Chalcidius names him and was read by nobody; Ambrose's Hexaemeron follows his De opificio closely and rarely says so. What separates them is not the gloss but what happened to the philology. Jerome, the one Latin who read the Hebrew, refuted the Christological reading outright — the three Greek versions all say 'in the beginning', the Hebrew is bresith, and the Hebrew for 'in the son' would be ba-ben — and then conceded that Christ might be understood 'according to the sense rather than the translation of the word'. Wigbod copies the passage almost entire and drops precisely the refutation, keeping the concession; Alcuin's schoolbook reduces the whole question to four words, In Filio perfecit Deus; and the Glossa prints Alcuin's answer in the margin as a single word, Filio, so that the twelfth century met a reading its best philologist had disproved with nothing on the page to argue against. Rupert of Deutz is the one who repairs it, four hundred years later, by stating the Hebrew evidence himself — 'son is ben in that language, and beginning is bresith' — and then holding the reading anyway on the ground that the identity is of sense and not of speech. Meanwhile the modern translations settle the crux by removing it, as they did at K10: the JPS Tanakh prints 'When God began to create heaven and earth', which is Rashi's plain sense and Ibn Ezra's construct, adopted as the text — the one reading no Latin witness on this bench could have raised, and the one Ramban had already refuted from Isa 46:10 and Deut 33:21.", "witnesses": [ "lxx-1-1", "vulgate-1-1", "targ-onk-1-1", "targ-psj-1-1", "targ-neof-1-1", "br-1-1", "br-1-4", "br-1-8", "rashi-1-1b", "ibn-ezra-1-1", "ramban-1-1", "origen-hom-gen-1-1", "jerome-hq-1-1", "ambrose-hex-1-2", "ambrose-hex-1-3", "aug-gnm-1-2", "aug-gnl-1-1", "aug-gnl-imp-2-6", "aug-conf-11-9", "aug-civ-11-32", "isidore-quaest-1-1", "bede-gen-1-1", "alcuin-int-26", "wigbod-gen-1-1", "rabanus-gen-1-1b", "angelom-gen-1-1", "remigius-gen-1-1", "glossa-1-1", "bruno-gen-1-1", "bruno-gen-1-1b", "rupert-gen-1-1", "abelard-hex-1-1", "hugh-sacr-1-1", "honorius-hex-1-1", "comestor-hs-1-1", "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "chalcidius-initium-non-temporarium", "chalcidius-sapientia-primordium", "philo-opif-17-20", "philo-opif-26-27", "lyra-gen-1-1" ] }, { "id": "why-begin-here", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/why-begin-here/", "verse": "gen.1.1", "question": { "en": "Why does Scripture open with creation at all?", "la": "Cur a creatione incipit Scriptura?", "he": "לָמָּה פָּתַח בִּבְרֵאשִׁית?" }, "summary": "The crux where each tradition's reason for having a commentary is exposed.", "finding": "This is the crux where each tradition's reason for having a commentary is exposed, and the two reasons turn out to be the same shape and opposite in content. Rashi opens the most-read Jewish commentary on the Torah with an objection to the book: R. Isaac said the Torah, which is Israel's law book, ought to have begun at 'this month shall be to you the first of the months', the first commandment given to Israel — and it begins with the creation only so that when the nations call Israel robbers, Israel may answer that the earth is the Lord's and he gave it to whom he pleased. Hugh of St Victor, in Paris within fifty years of Troyes, opens his own summa with the same verdict in scholastic terms: the matter of all divine Scripture is the works of restoration, and the works of foundation — the creation of the world with all its elements — are the matter of secular writings. Both have ruled that Genesis 1 is not what its book is for; both then supply a reason from outside the chapter, and the reasons have nothing to do with each other. Hugh needs a whole further chapter to explain how Scripture descends through the works of foundation on its way to the Incarnation, and Comestor a generation later repairs the difficulty with a builder's metaphor — history is the foundation, allegory the wall leaning on it, tropology the roof — so that starting here is the first course of masonry rather than a detour.\n\nThere is an older answer than either, and it belongs to neither bench. Philo opens De opificio with this crux's exact objection, that this is a book of laws and does not open like one, and answers that the opening is the law's credential: the cosmogony is there so that the world shall be shown to agree with the law and the law with the world, and so that the man who keeps the law shall be a citizen of the cosmos, directing his conduct by the nature that governs the world itself. Rashi's answer secures a title to a particular land and Hugh's concedes that the chapter is not what his own book is for. Philo's is jurisprudential, and it is the only answer on this daf that makes Genesis 1 do work for the legislation that follows it. His framing does survive on the Latin bench, with the philosophy taken out: other lawgivers wrote either bare statutes or myths, and Moses did neither, is Augustine's 'not with ornate and polished speech but with plain facts'.\n\nWhat the Latin bench never does is ask whether the chapter should be expounded at all, and what the rabbinic bench never stops doing is asking exactly that. The Mishnah rules that the work of creation may not be expounded before two, and that whoever looks at four things — what is above, what is below, what is before, what is after — it were fitting for him that he had not come into the world. Bereshit Rabbah puts the same four questions into the shape of the first letter of the first word: the bet is closed on three sides and open at the front, so you have permission to ask only from the day the world was created and onward. And five sections earlier the same commentary curses the people doing what it is doing — may they be silenced, those lying lips — 'with arrogance', is it in order to boast, I am expounding the work of creation? A commentary that makes the case against itself twice in its first chapter has no counterpart on the Latin side at all.\n\nThe reason it has none is visible in Augustine, and it is not that the Latin bench is less reverent. In the first chapter of De Genesi contra Manichaeos he explains why the book exists and why it is written the way it is: the Manichees pursue the learned and the unlearned alike, so they must be refuted 'not with ornate and polished speech but with plain facts' — educated friends had read his earlier books and warned him kindly that ordinary readers could not follow them. And in the next chapter the Manichees put their question: in what beginning, and what was God doing before he made heaven and earth? That is the Mishnah's 'what is before', asked by an opponent instead of a student. On one bench the question is put by someone who must be stopped, and the tradition builds a fence; on the other it is put by someone who must be answered, and the answer becomes the commentary. Ambrose settles the matter from the other end — Moses spoke not in the persuasion of human wisdom but as a witness, testis, of the divine work, and the world is a specimen of the divine working, because while the work is seen the worker is put forward, as a building shows its craftsman when the craftsman is silent. Beginning here is, for the Latin bench, the most natural thing a book about God could do. For R. Isaac it is the one thing that has to be explained away.", "witnesses": [ "rashi-1-1", "br-1-2", "br-1-5a", "br-1-10", "m-chag-2-1", "ambrose-hex-1-1b", "ambrose-hex-1-5", "aug-gnm-1-1", "hugh-sacr-prologus", "comestor-hs-prologus", "philo-opif-1-3", "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo" ] }, { "id": "elohim-and-trinity", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/elohim-and-trinity/", "verse": "gen.1.1", "question": { "en": "Who is the God who creates, and what do grammar and word order say about plurality?", "la": "Quis est Deus qui creat, et quid de Trinitate?", "he": "מִי הוּא אֱלֹהִים הַבּוֹרֵא, וּמַה מַּשְׁמָע לְשׁוֹן רַבִּים?" }, "summary": "One question asked of two different plurals — the noun Elohim at Gen 1:1 and the verb na'aseh at Gen 1:26 — and the second is where the two benches turn out to be arguing with each other rather than past each other.", "finding": "One grammatical fact, three benches, three incompatible conclusions — and it is the same fact each time. Bereshit Rabbah 1:7 observes that the plural-looking Elohim takes singular verbs throughout: vaydaberu is not written but vaydaber, vayomeru is not written but vayomer, bare'u is not written but bara — and concludes that no creature can say that two authorities created the world. Abelard, at the Paraclete about 1133, asks the identical question in Latin — unde dictum est Eloim creavit, non creaverunt? — and answers that a singular verb is referred to a plural noun so that in those three persons one creator should be understood and not three, from which he derives the technical doctrine that the works of the Trinity are undivided. Ibn Ezra, at Lucca about 1155, closes the same argument with the same clause — 'and for this reason Scripture says bara and not bare'u' — having first shown that the plural is simply how the Holy Tongue speaks of the great, as adonim and be'alim are plural for one master and as a king in Arabic speaks of himself in the plural. And Ramban, a century later with Ibn Ezra in front of him, refuses to let the plural be empty at all: the word is a compound, el hem, the force and all the other forces, and 'a secret will yet be disclosed in connection with this'. Nobody is answering anybody. Three of the four could not have read each other, and the fourth is reading only within his own bench.\n\nWhat makes Abelard's page the strangest thing on this daf is that the Latin bench had the information for six hundred years and never used it here. Jerome knew that the Hebrew word is common in number and said so — verbum Hebraicum ELOIM communis est numeri, et Deus quippe et dii similiter appellantur — but he says it at Genesis 6:2, about the sons of God, and Rabanus copies him there verbatim, and neither brings it forward to the first verse. Every other Latin witness on this crux gets its Trinity from the sequence of the sentences rather than from any Hebrew word: the Father in the name of God, the Son in the name of the Beginning, the Spirit borne over the waters. That is Augustine's triad, and he calls it a riddle — ecce apparet mihi in aenigmate Trinitas — and states the order of his own search plainly, that he already held two of the three and believed the third and went looking for it in the holy sayings. Bede, Bruno, Honorius and the Glossa repeat the triad and none of them repeats the word riddle. In the unfinished commentary Augustine is franker still: he sets out the catholic faith before expounding a syllable, because many heretics drag the Scriptures to their own opinion.\n\nThe rabbinic bench, meanwhile, preserves a memory of the whole problem as a translation problem. Megillah 9a's baraita has seventy-two elders shut in seventy-two houses writing the Torah for Ptolemy, and the first two things on the list of what they changed are the two verses the Latin bench builds on: they wrote 'God created in the beginning', moving the divine name to the front so that bereshit could not be read as a subject, and they wrote 'I shall make a human', singular, for the 'let us make' of Gen 1:26. Both changes remove a plurality from the opening of Genesis. Neither is in the Septuagint the Church actually inherited, whose first verse keeps the Hebrew order and whose Gen 1:26 keeps the plural. So the Latin reading of both verses stands in exactly the space the elders are said to have closed — and Bruno of Segni, refuting it at Segni about 1090, refuses the plurality in the rabbinic bench's own words: was he speaking to the angels? God forbid, for otherwise there would be not one creator but many.\n\nAt Gen 1:1 nobody is answering anybody. One verse over, at Faciamus hominem, they are, and the daf now carries the evidence. Basil reports the rabbinic reading by name — ferunt enim, quod angelis dixerit: Faciamus hominem — and it is what Targum Pseudo-Jonathan prints in the biblical line itself; he refutes it with Fecit Deus hominem: non fecerunt, which is R. Simlai's own proof at Bereshit Rabbah 8:9 turned around. Bereshit Rabbah 8:8 has Moses stop while writing the verse to ask why God is giving the minim an opening, and is told to write it and let whoever wants to err, err. So on this verse each bench knows what the other does with the words and says so, which is not true of the first verse at all. The deeper contact is the one neither side could have arranged. R. Yoḥanan at b. Sanhedrin 38b lists the plural verses with their singular refutations beside them, and the first two are Gen 1:26 answered by Gen 1:27 and Gen 11:7 answered by Gen 11:5; Augustine's De civitate Dei XVI.6, in a chapter headed de locutione qua Deus Angelis loquitur, takes the same two verses in the same order and applies the same test, refusing the angels at the first because of the image clause and granting them at the second because nothing forbids it; and the Glossa Ordinaria joins the same pair at PL 113:114D. Three benches choose the same two verses out of the Pentateuch by the same criterion and test them the same way, and none of them has read another. The pairing is not borrowed. It is what the Hebrew does to anyone who reads it carefully, and the disagreement that remains is only about what the plural was doing there — a court of angels, a plurality of persons, the earth beside its maker, or nothing at all.", "witnesses": [ "br-1-7", "br-1-12", "b-meg-9a", "ramban-1-1-elohim", "ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim", "basil-hex-2-6b", "aug-gnl-imp-1-2", "aug-conf-13-5", "wigbod-gen-1-1d", "remigius-gen-1-1c", "bruno-gen-1-1c", "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "rupert-gen-1-3-trinitas", "basil-hex-1-26-judaei", "ambrose-hex-6-7-40", "aug-gnl-imp-16-61", "aug-gnl-3-19-29", "aug-civ-16-6", "bede-gen-1-26", "alcuin-int-36-37", "wigbod-gen-1-26", "remigius-gen-1-26", "glossa-1-26", "glossa-11-7-angeli", "rupert-gen-1-26-consilium", "abelard-hex-1-26-faciamus", "hugh-adnot-1-26", "comestor-hs-1-26", "br-8-3", "br-8-8", "br-8-9", "b-sanh-38b-malachim", "b-sanh-38b-tshuva", "rashi-1-26-anvetanuto", "rashi-1-26-minim", "ibn-ezra-1-26-naaseh", "ramban-1-26-naaseh", "targ-onk-1-26", "targ-psj-1-26", "ambrose-hex-1-8-29", "aug-conf-13-9-10", "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "bede-gen-1-2", "comestor-hs-1-1", "glossa-1-2-ruach", "honorius-hex-1", "lxx-1-1", "rupert-gen-1-8", "targ-neof-1-1", "targ-onk-1-1", "targ-psj-1-1", "vulgate-1-1" ] }, { "id": "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/ex-nihilo-or-matter/", "verse": "gen.1.1", "question": { "en": "Was anything there before?", "la": "Utrum aliquid praecesserit?", "he": "הֲיֵשׁ דָּבָר שֶׁקָּדַם לָעוֹלָם?" }, "summary": "Both benches reach for 2 Macc 7:28 and Wis 11:17 and find them pulling in opposite directions.", "finding": "Both benches meet the same objection, in the same words, from a craftsman. The philosopher tells Rabban Gamliel that his God was a great artist who found good materials — emptiness, disorder, darkness, wind, water, the deeps (BR 1:9); Augustine says we must not be like those who cannot believe God made anything out of nothing, because they are watching craftsmen, and wood helps the carpenter, silver the silversmith, gold the goldsmith, earth the potter (Gnm I.6.10); Basil says with us every art works on a material brought to it, smithcraft on iron and carpentry on wood, and that this is what they have projected on God. Three benches, one analogy, no contact — and three different kinds of answer. Basil answers from the dignity of the unbegotten, Augustine from omnipotence, and Rabban Gamliel with a concordance, producing a verse of creation for each of the six materials. The Latin answer is a doctrine and the rabbinic answer is a list of proof texts, and neither would have satisfied the other.\n\nThe second finding is a philological objection raised three times in forty years by men who could not have read one another, from the same two verses. Scripture uses the creation verb of things made out of something: God created the great sea-creatures (Gen 1:21), God created man in his own image (Gen 1:27). Rupert of Deutz puts the objection to himself at Liège about 1115 and answers that the word is used rightly there because the matter had already been created. Abelard at the Paraclete about 1130 answers it by separating two Latin verbs — created of what has no pre-existing matter, formed of what is shaped out of matter, as at Gen 2:7 and 2:19. Ibn Ezra in Lucca about 1155 brings the identical verses in the identical order and concludes that the commentators are simply wrong: bara does not mean bringing forth something from nothing. The Latin distinction is available only because the translation supplies two verbs where the Hebrew has one at the places that matter — and Ramban, who had Ibn Ezra in front of him and named him, closed the question a century later by asserting the exclusive Ibn Ezra had denied, in the same two-stage form Hugh of St Victor had given it in Paris: one thing was created out of nothing, and everything else was made out of that.\n\nAnd the position everyone refutes is held, on this site, by nobody — except in the two places where the rabbinic bench states it in its own voice and is uncomfortable about it. Bereshit Rabbah 1:5 asks 'from what?' and answers 'the earth was emptiness and disorder', with the formula reserved for saying what may not be said, and a parable about insulting a king by mentioning the sewers his palace stands on. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 3 answers 'from what?' with no embarrassment at all: the heavens from the light of his garment, the earth from the snow beneath the Throne of Glory. Nothing on the Latin bench has that shape, and nothing could have: once matter is the thing at issue, a material that belongs to God is still a material. Two later witnesses widen the frame at both ends. Philo holds, without embarrassment, the position everyone on this daf refutes: there was a substance, of itself without order, quality or life, and God, being good, did not grudge it his own best nature — and he declines to say where the substance came from, which is exactly the clause Augustine adds at Confessions 12 to make the same description orthodox. Ambrose refutes the hyle of the philosophers by name and does not know that the book he is following most closely, the De opificio, is where the vocabulary comes from. And at the far end Paul of Burgos answers eight centuries of the question by ruling it out of order: the philosophers proceed only by opinion, as their disagreeing with each other shows and as geometers do not, so the sense of Scripture must not be made to vary with them — and he reads the whole Latin bench as having agreed with him, sancti doctores modicum curaverunt de huiusmodi opinionibus, which is a remarkable thing to say about a bench that spent eight hundred years on it.", "witnesses": [ "br-1-5b", "br-1-9", "pdre-3-7", "ibn-ezra-1-1c", "ramban-1-1c", "basil-hex-2-2-materia", "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "aug-conf-12-7", "aug-conf-12-22", "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "bede-gen-1-2-materia", "alcuin-int-19-20", "wigbod-gen-1-1c", "angelom-gen-1-1c", "glossa-1-2-materia", "rupert-gen-1-1c", "abelard-hex-1-1c", "hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo", "comestor-hs-1-1c", "philo-opif-21-22", "burgos-add-1", "abelard-hex-1-2", "aug-gnl-5-18", "bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2", "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "lxx-1-1", "lyra-gen-1-1", "ramban-1-2-tohu", "targ-neof-1-1", "targ-onk-1-1", "targ-psj-1-1", "vulgate-1-1" ] }, { "id": "heaven-earth-order", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/heaven-earth-order/", "verse": "gen.1.1", "question": { "en": "Which was created first, and what is 'heaven' here?", "la": "Quid prius, coelum an terra?", "he": "שָׁמַיִם אוֹ אֶרֶץ — מִי נִבְרָא תְּחִלָּה?" }, "summary": "Chagigah 12a's ten-things list and Augustine's 'what is contained in caelum et terra' answer the same question.", "finding": "Both benches ask which was made first, and both end by refusing the question — and they refuse it with the same psalm. Ps 102:26 names the earth before the heavens: R. Yehuda bar Ilai brings it for Beit Hillel, Ambrose brings the same reversal to prove that the order of naming settles nothing, 'lest heaven be reckoned the better by the privilege of being the firstborn creature' — which is R. Shimon ben Yoḥai's stewpot and its lid and Bereshit Rabbah's closing rule that a reversed order teaches equality of honour. Where the two benches genuinely divide is on the second half of the question. Asked what 'heaven' is, the Bavli reads the answer out of the Hebrew noun — sham mayim, 'there is water' — while Latin, whose word will not spell anything, has to import a substance, and imports the empyrean: a fiery heaven, fiery from brightness and not from heat, filled with angels the moment it was made, which Comestor admits in passing that no ancient philosopher knew. Abelard throws it out and puts the four elements back, and Ibn Ezra, who never heard of him, makes the same objection from the other side: if the heavens of v. 1 are the heavens of the heavens, what will you do with the earth? The oldest witnesses on the daf decline the question in a third way. Philo's inventory of what was made first has no heaven overhead in it at all — an incorporeal heaven, an invisible earth, the idea of air and of void — and when the chapter reaches the firmament he explains the second name by a definition of body: stereoma because it is solid, and solid because it is extended in three directions, so that the word itself marks the corporeal heaven off from the intelligible one. Chalcidius carried that reading into Latin in the fourth century and named its author — Philo, who judges heaven and earth to be incorporeal and intelligible essences — which is the only place in this edition where a Latin cites a Jewish author by name and the passage he cites is printed beside him; and then nobody read Chalcidius, so that Remigius arrives at the intelligible heaven six hundred years later with the conclusion and no argument, and Comestor turns it into the container and the thing contained. Lyra ends the Latin side by treating the question as settled physics: the heaven of the first verse is the heavenly bodies distinct in their substantial forms, the earth likewise, and the pair is Abelard's four elements read through a fourteenth-century commentary on the De caelo.", "witnesses": [ "br-1-14", "br-1-15", "b-chag-12a-order", "b-chag-12a-shamayim", "b-chag-12a-akiva", "ibn-ezra-1-1b", "ramban-1-1b", "ambrose-hex-1-6-20", "ambrose-hex-1-6-24", "aug-gnm-1-7-11", "aug-gnl-1-9", "alcuin-int-28", "angelom-gen-1-1b", "remigius-gen-1-1b", "abelard-hex-1-1b", "hugh-sacr-1-1b", "comestor-hs-1-1b", "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "philo-opif-29", "philo-opif-36", "b-chag-12a", "b-chag-15a", "bruno-gen-1-1", "glossa-1-1", "lxx-1-1", "lyra-gen-1-1", "rabanus-gen-1-1b", "targ-neof-1-1", "targ-onk-1-1", "targ-psj-1-1", "vulgate-1-1" ] }, { "id": "tohu-vabohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/tohu-vabohu/", "verse": "gen.1.2", "question": { "en": "What does the pair mean, and is it a state or a thing?", "la": "Quid est inanis et vacua?", "he": "מַהוּ תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ?" }, "summary": "The Vulgate's inanis et vacua is a witness in its own right: Latin readers inherited an interpretation, not a transliteration.", "finding": "The Latin bench is not reading one verse but two. Augustine, Ambrose, Basil-in-Latin and Alcuin expound 'invisibilis et incomposita', the Old Latin of the Septuagint's ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, and answer a question about visibility and order; Jerome's 'inanis et vacua' asks instead what the earth lacked, and its heirs answer with seeds, shoots and living things. Wigbod prints both, five columns apart, without noticing; Angelomus splices them in one paragraph; Hugh of St Victor is the first to tell a reader plainly that there is another translation. Jerome himself never glosses the pair he made — the Hebrew Questions go straight from 'in principio' to 'Spiritus Dei ferebatur', and the phrase that shaped the Latin Middle Ages on this verse is left without a note by the man who wrote it. The Latin bench's second text has a head it did not know about, and the other bench's hardest word has an etymology. Philo describes the substance before God gave it form as ataktos, apoios, apsychos — without order, without quality, without life — a philosophical account of matter as such, written before the Greek Bible's aoratos kai akataskeuastos had any history of interpretation; when Basil reads that Greek clause and refutes the unbegotten matter behind it, the doctrine he is refuting is Philo's and he does not name him. Chalcidius, the one Latin who had read Philo, prints Symmachus's rendering of the pair, otiosum quid confusumque et inordinatum, and glosses tohu as stupor — terra autem stupida quadam erat admiratione — which is Bereshit Rabbah's toheh u-voheh and Rashi's astonishment, given a psychological reading on a Latin page seven hundred years before Rashi. Lyra, who read Rashi and does not take that reading here, gives the pair two physical causes, invisible because covered on every side with water and empty because not yet furnished with plants, and derives the darkness of the verse from the name of the deep: a-byssus, without whiteness, because white is the colour that holds the most light. Asked what the words mean, the rabbinic bench points at a green line encircling the world and the Latin bench takes a Greek loanword apart. Each answers with the language it happens to be reading in.", "witnesses": [ "br-2-1", "br-2-2", "br-2-3", "b-chag-12a-tohu", "rashi-1-2a", "ibn-ezra-1-2", "ramban-1-2-tohu", "basil-hex-2-4", "ambrose-hex-1-7-25", "aug-gnm-1-3-5", "aug-conf-12-4", "aug-conf-12-21", "isidore-quaest-1-2", "alcuin-int-30", "wigbod-gen-1-2-tohu", "angelom-gen-1-2-tohu", "remigius-gen-1-2-tohu", "bede-gen-1-2-tohu", "glossa-1-2-terra", "bruno-gen-1-2-tohu", "rupert-gen-1-2-tohu", "abelard-hex-1-2-tohu", "hugh-adnot-1-2-tohu", "hugh-sacr-1-1-tohu", "comestor-hs-1-2-tohu", "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "lyra-gen-1-2-tohu", "br-2-4", "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "glossa-1-2-ruach", "hugh-adnot-gen-1-2", "lxx-1-2", "origen-hom-gen-1-1", "philo-opif-21-22", "philo-opif-29", "targ-neof-1-2", "targ-onk-1-2", "targ-psj-1-2", "vulgate-1-2" ] }, { "id": "ruach-hovering", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/ruach-hovering/", "verse": "gen.1.2", "question": { "en": "Wind, spirit, or Spirit — and what is 'hovering'?", "la": "Quis est Spiritus Dei, et quid est ferri super aquas?", "he": "מַה הִיא רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים, וּמַהוּ ׳מְרַחֶפֶת׳?" }, "summary": "The Hebrew verb merahefet occurs once more in the Bible, of an eagle over its nest (Deut 32:11). Greek and Latin flattened it to 'was borne over'. Then, on both benches, a bird came back: Jerome and the Syrian read it as brooding warmth, Ben Zoma and Rashi as a dove hovering and not touching. Same verb, opposite pictures; and around each picture a whole doctrine of how God acts on matter. The Latin line splits again between the bird and Augustine's craftsman whose will is 'above' the wood.", "finding": "Rashi's Old French acoveter and Jerome's incubabat are the same word for the same Hebrew, with no contact. Abelard is the one Latin who reports the Hebrew as 'fluttering' (volitabat), on the rabbinic side of the verb. The verb is the whole crux. Merahefet occurs once more in the Bible, of an eagle over its nest at Deut 32:11, and the Seventy flattened it to epephereto, was borne upon — a verb of motion over a surface with no bird in it — and Jerome, who knew better and said so in the Hebrew Questions, left ferebatur standing in the Vulgate anyway. So the Latin bench inherited a verb its own best philologist had already corrected, and spent eight centuries putting the bird back. It came back as two different birds. Basil's unnamed Syrian has the Spirit warm the waters like a hen sitting on eggs, and that hen travels through Ambrose, Augustine, Rupert and Comestor until by Honorius vel aquas fovebat is offered as a bare variant with no Syrian and no bird attached; Jerome's is the same picture claimed from the Hebrew verb itself, incubabat, brooding. On the other bench Ben Zoma's dove hovers over her young and does not touch, and the Bavli turns the not-touching into a measurement, the gap between the upper and the lower waters argued down to a hair's breadth. Same verb, opposite physics: the Latin bird warms by contact and the rabbinic bird is defined by keeping its distance, and Rashi, taking the dove from Chagigah rather than the unspecified bird of Bereshit Rabbah, glosses it in Old French with the Latin bench's own word. The other Latin line has no bird at all. Augustine, against the Manichees, rules that ferebatur is about power and not place, and gives the image that carries the ruling, as the will of a craftsman is borne above the wood; Rabanus makes it a simile, Remigius gives the craftsman wisdom, Bruno makes him a house-builder sorting timber, and by Lyra it has shrunk to a gloss, spiritus Dei, id est voluntas, that no longer needs to say whose image it is. What neither bench does is ask the question Philo asked first: not what the spirit is but why the verse gives it something extra. Of everything in the inventory only the breath is called God's, and Philo's reason is functional, because breath is the most life-giving of things and God is the cause of life. Augustine at Confessions 13 asks the identical question, why only the Holy Spirit is said to be borne above, and answers from the Trinity and from the weight of love. Onkelos had answered it by removing it, a wind from before the Lord; Neofiti by a third route neither bench took, a spirit of mercy.", "witnesses": [ "lxx-1-2", "vulgate-1-2", "targ-onk-1-2", "targ-neof-1-2", "targ-psj-1-2", "br-2-4", "b-chag-15a", "rashi-1-2b", "basil-hex-lat-2-6", "ambrose-hex-1-8-29", "jerome-hq-1-2", "aug-gnm-1-5-8", "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "aug-conf-13-9-10", "aug-gnl-1-18-36", "isidore-quaest-1-3", "bede-gen-1-2", "wigbod-gen-1-2", "alcuin-int-29", "rabanus-gen-1-1", "angelom-gen-1-2", "remigius-gen-1-2", "bruno-gen-1-2", "rupert-gen-1-8", "abelard-hex-1-2", "hugh-adnot-gen-1-2", "honorius-hex-1", "comestor-hs-gen-1", "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "glossa-1-2-ruach", "philo-opif-30", "lyra-gen-1-2-spiritus" ] }, { "id": "first-light", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/first-light/", "verse": "gen.1.3", "question": { "en": "What was the light of day one, before sun and moon?", "la": "Quae lux ante solem?", "he": "מַה הָיָה הָאוֹר שֶׁל יוֹם רִאשׁוֹן?" }, "summary": "Both benches agree the light is not the sun's; they disagree on what it is.", "finding": "The two benches ask the same question and each is shut out of the other's answer by a ruling it made somewhere else. The Latin bench's dominant answer, Augustine's, is that the light is the angelic creation, made and formed on the first day; the rabbinic bench cannot reach for it, because Bereshit Rabbah has already ruled — twice, at 1:3 and again at 3:8, which is K10's witness — that nothing whatever was created on the first day besides God, precisely so that nobody could say Michael held the sky at the south and Gabriel at the north while God measured in the middle. And the rabbinic answer, that the light was too good for the wicked and was stored away for the righteous in the time to come, has no Latin counterpart at all: the Latin either turns the light into angels or turns it into a proto-sun, and the one thing it never does is take the light out of the world and keep it. Where the two do meet, they meet on the compromise nobody on either side prefers. Augustine reports, at De Genesi ad litteram I.11, that 'this too I know to have been said by someone' — that the nature of light was made on the first day and the luminaries were afterwards made out of it — and he cannot say whose opinion it is; b. Chagigah 12a gives it as the sages' answer against R. Yaakov, in the same words and to the same objection from Gen 1:17. On the Latin side alone, the crux is decided twice and each time by weight rather than by argument. Bede does not refute the angelic light, he steps round it in a single sentence by naming three lights instead of two and leaving the angels already made and elsewhere; and Bonaventure, closing the question in the schools eight hundred years after Augustine opened it, grants that Augustine's position is 'multum rationabilis' and declines it because the expositors more generally follow the other. In between, the twelfth century simply builds a physics for the light it has decided on — a body of fire in the sun's stead (Hugh), a brightness like the sky before sunrise on a twelve-hour circuit (Honorius), a luminous cloud thin as the dawn (Comestor) — while Rupert of Deutz, in the same decade, argues that a light of that kind would make the first day the poorest of the six, an unstable accident snuffed out after three days by a God who changed his mind. The crux has a head and an end, and both were found after the argument above was written. Philo's light of the first day is intelligible, an image of the divine Reason and a supercelestial star from which the sun and the moon and the rest draw their beams so far as each has the power — which is Augustine's 'this too I know to have been said by someone', the light out of which the luminaries were made, with the mechanism supplied and four centuries earlier; and it is the same shape as Bereshit Rabbah's light of God's garment, an overflow from God rather than a creature standing on its own, though neither can have read the other. Lyra ends the Latin side by giving the question up. Ista lux est lux solis: the light of the first day is the sun's own light, an accidental quality from which the other luminaries are lit, still unformed in some respect until the fourth day, which is what formed it. Hugh's body of fire and Comestor's luminous cloud were inventions the chapter forced; Lyra's answer requires nothing that is not already in the sky, and after it the Latin bench stops asking.", "witnesses": [ "lxx-1-3", "vulgate-1-3", "br-3-4", "br-3-6", "b-chag-12a-light", "rashi-1-4", "pdre-3-6", "basil-hex-2-7", "ambrose-hex-1-9", "aug-gnl-1-3", "aug-gnl-1-11", "bede-gen-1-3", "bede-gen-1-3b", "alcuin-int-33", "rabanus-gen-1-3", "angelom-gen-1-3", "remigius-gen-1-3", "glossa-1-3", "bruno-gen-1-3", "abelard-hex-1-3", "abelard-hex-1-3b", "hugh-adnot-1-3", "hugh-sacr-1-3", "honorius-hex-1-3", "rupert-gen-1-3", "comestor-hs-1-3", "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-1", "philo-opif-31", "lyra-gen-1-3", "alcuin-int-34", "aug-gnl-4-22", "philo-opif-30" ] }, { "id": "good-and-separated", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/good-and-separated/", "verse": "gen.1.4", "question": { "en": "Why separate light from darkness, and is darkness a creature, an evil, or the wicked?", "la": "Cur divisit lucem a tenebris?", "he": "לָמָּה הִבְדִּיל בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ?" }, "summary": "Both traditions allegorize the same verse the same way (light/dark = righteous/wicked); test whether Bede or the Glossa show any Hebrew mediation.", "finding": "Both benches decide this crux by reading a silence, and they find the same silence at consecutive clauses of the same verse. Augustine notices that on the first day 'and God saw that it was good' stands before the division and not after it, whereas on the fourth day, where the darkness is blameless, it stands after — and concludes that the placing is deliberate: God does not repeat his approval once the darkness is in view, 'lest both should be called good, when one of them was evil'. Bereshit Rabbah reads the next clause the same way and gets the same answer: it is not written 'and to the darkness God called night' but 'and to the darkness he called night', because the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good. And R. Abahu, at Bereshit Rabbah 2:5, argues from the identical omission at the identical clause that God desires the deeds of the righteous and not those of the wicked. Three arguments from what the verse declines to say, on two benches, with no contact — and it is the only place on this site where the two traditions use the same technique on the same words to reach the same conclusion.\n\nWhat they do not share is the question underneath. The Latin bench cannot get past whether darkness is anything, because Augustine settled that it is not — it is the absence of light, as silence is the ceasing of voice and nakedness the absence of a garment — and then had to explain how a nothing can be divided, which he did with the finest thing said on this crux in either language: God did not make the darkness, he ordered it, as a singer orders the rests in his song and a painter the shadows that set off what is prominent. Every Latin witness after him is placed by that doctrine, including the ones who reject it. And they do reject it, in the schoolroom rather than in the controversy: Wigbod's dialogue puts under the rubric AUGUSTINUS the inference that everything divided can also be, so that as there is an essence of light there is an essence of darkness; Remigius says God made both and proves it from the Benedicite, where light and darkness are called together to bless the Lord, which a privation cannot be; and the Glossa prints Remigius' sentence as the standard gloss on Gen 1:4 three columns after printing Augustine's privation as the standard gloss on Gen 1:2. The twelfth century then argues from Augustine's doctrine on a page that no longer teaches it.\n\nThe rabbinic bench never asks the question at all, and its answers are correspondingly unembarrassed. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer lists darkness fourth among the eight things created on the first day, with no proof text and no defence. R. Tanḥuma quotes Isaiah's 'who forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace' and says that after they were created he made peace between them. Ramban says the darkness is the element of fire, which is dark, and that were it red it would redden the night for us. Comestor, who knows perfectly well that shadow is what bodies cast, has to introduce the same thought with a quasi. What the rabbinic bench has instead of the metaphysical question is a liturgical one: R. Ze'eira derives from 'he saw … and he divided' the rule that one does not bless the lamp at havdala until he has used its light, so that the verse ends as the source of a benediction still said every week — and nothing on the Latin bench has that shape, because nothing on the Latin bench is looking for a practice.\n\nThere is one place where the silence stops being a coincidence, and it is four hundred years after the last witness above. Nicholas of Lyra, asking why the second day has no approval, calls the answer of Rabanus and of the Master a piece of trifling, refutes a second Latin answer from the Scriptures, and then takes the reading he wants from Rashi — more according to the intention of the letter, as it seems. Paul of Burgos, who had been a rabbi in that city until he was forty and was afterwards its bishop, replies that the postillator departs from rectitude in three ways, and the third is that he attributes to Ra. Sa. the Hebrew the authority of a literal exposition which our own doctors found first. Matthias Doering, defending Lyra, restates the charge and changes one word: he attributes the true answer to an unbeliever, though it is contained in our own gloss, to which he ought rather to have shown the honour. Nobody in that exchange denies that the answer is right. What they are arguing about is whose it is, what is owed for it, and whether the literal sense is the place where a Christian may be taught by a Jew. Every other page of this edition shows two traditions reading the same verses without knowing the other is in the room; this one shows what it sounds like when they do.", "witnesses": [ "lxx-1-4", "vulgate-1-4", "targ-onk-1-4", "targ-psj-1-4", "br-2-5", "br-3-6b", "br-3-6c", "br-3-8-yanai", "ibn-ezra-1-4", "ramban-1-2-choshech", "pdre-3-5", "basil-hex-2-8", "ambrose-hex-1-9b", "aug-gnm-1-9", "aug-gnl-imp-5-23", "aug-gnl-imp-5-25", "aug-civ-11-19", "aug-civ-11-20", "isidore-quaest-1-4", "bede-gen-1-4", "wigbod-gen-1-4", "rabanus-gen-1-4", "angelom-gen-1-4", "remigius-gen-1-4", "remigius-gen-1-4b", "alcuin-int-35", "glossa-1-4", "abelard-hex-1-4", "hugh-sacr-1-4", "hugh-sacr-1-4b", "rupert-gen-1-4", "honorius-hex-1-4", "comestor-hs-1-4", "philo-opif-33-34", "burgos-add-3", "lyra-gen-1-4-bonum", "doering-repl-3", "lyra-gen-1-4-divisio", "b-chag-12a-light", "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2", "rashi-1-4" ] }, { "id": "one-day-evening-first", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/crux/one-day-evening-first/", "verse": "gen.1.5", "question": { "en": "Why 'one day' and not 'first day', and why evening before morning?", "la": "Quare dicitur dies unus et non dies primus?", "he": "לָמָּה נֶאֱמַר ׳יוֹם אֶחָד׳ וְלֹא ׳יוֹם רִאשׁוֹן׳?" }, "summary": "Augustine's morning/evening knowledge and Rashi's 'alone in his world' both read unus as a claim about God's solitude, not counting. Note: the WEB English base text prints 'the first day' and so takes a side.", "finding": "The ancient versions all kept the cardinal — ἡμέρα μία, dies unus, yoma chad — and the modern English translations on both benches quietly convert it to the ordinal: the WEB prints 'the first day', Etheridge's targum prints 'the First Day', and Silbermann's Rashi glosses the lemma 'THE FIRST DAY (literally, one day)' in the very note that exists to ask why it is not 'first'. The question the whole crux is made of survives only in the languages nobody now reads it in. Where the two benches do meet, they meet on the grammar: Bereshit Rabbah 3:9 objects that 'one, second, third' is not a proper series, and Bruno of Segni answers exactly that objection with the logic of relatives — first and second are correlatives, and with no second yet in being nothing could be called first. Both halves of that meeting have a head, and it is the same man. Philo of Alexandria, writing in Greek before either bench existed, gives the grammatical argument first: Moses does not even call it first, so that it should not be counted in along with the others. That is Bruno's logic of relatives a thousand years early and Bereshit Rabbah 3:9's objection to the series eleven hundred years early. And he gives a reason neither bench states — day not first but one, because of the monosis of the intelligible world, its solitariness, which has a monadic nature. Monosis is not unity and it is not primacy; it is the condition of having nothing beside you, which is exactly what Rashi means by yachid be-olamo, that God was alone in his world that day because there was not yet a second anything to count with. Three benches read the cardinal as a claim about being alone rather than about position in a series, and the oldest of the three is the one neither of the others knew it had. And they part on the calendar: Ben Zoma derives from yom echad that the day follows the night, while Augustine states in so many words that the days are counted a mane usque in mane.", "witnesses": [ "lxx-1-5", "vulgate-1-5", "targ-onk-1-5", "targ-psj-1-5", "br-3-8", "br-3-9", "rashi-1-5", "b-chag-12a", "b-chull-83a", "ambrose-hex-1-10", "aug-gnm-1-10", "aug-gnl-1-17", "aug-gnl-4-22", "aug-gnl-5-18", "aug-civ-11-7", "bede-gen-1-5", "rabanus-gen-1-5", "alcuin-int-34", "wigbod-gen-1-5", "angelom-gen-1-5", "remigius-gen-1-5", "bruno-gen-1-5", "rupert-gen-1-5", "abelard-hex-1-5", "hugh-sacr-1-5", "honorius-hex-1-5", "comestor-hs-1-5", "glossa-1-5", "basil-hex-2-8b", "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2", "bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2", "philo-opif-15", "philo-opif-35", "lyra-gen-1-5", "philo-opif-33-34" ] } ], "witnesses": [ { "id": "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-1-eloim/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1133, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Notandum vero in hoc ipso Genesis exordio fidei nostrae fundamentum circa unitatem Dei ac Trinitatem prophetam diligenter expressisse. Cum enim dixerit Spiritus Domini, simul et personam Spiritus sancti et Patris, a quo ipse Spiritus, ut beatus meminit Augustinus, principaliter procedit, manifeste distinxit. In eo vero quod addidit: Dixit Deus, dictum ipsius Dei, id est Verbum ejus, quod est Filius, cum ipso pariter Patre patenter expressit. Nemo etenim sani capitis ita desipere potest, ut hoc dictum corporale aestimet, cum nec corporalis sit divinitas, nec loqui corporaliter habeat, nec adhuc cui eum loqui corporaliter oporteret, assisteret. Ubi autem nos dicimus: Creavit Deus, pro eo quod est Deus, in Hebraeo habetur Eloim, quod divinarum personarum pluralitatem ostendit. El quippe singulare est quod interpretatur Deus; Eloim vero plurale est, per quod diversitatem personarum, quarum unaquaeque Deus est, intelligimus. Unde autem dictum est: Eloim creavit, non creaverunt? ut videlicet ad plurale nomen singulare verbum referretur; quatenus insinuaretur in tribus illis personis non tres creatores, sed unum tantum debere intelligi. Cum igitur dixit Eloim creavit, in quo divinas personas pariter cooperari docuit, profecto indivisa esse opera Trinitatis praefixit. Cum autem postmodum, ut diximus, Patris et Spiritus et Verbi personas distinxit, in quo illa consisteret Trinitas determinavit.", "source": "PL 178, col. 739B", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It is to be noted that in this very opening of Genesis the prophet carefully expressed the foundation of our faith concerning the unity of God and the Trinity. For when he said 'the Spirit of the Lord', he plainly distinguished at once both the person of the Holy Spirit and that of the Father, from whom that Spirit principally proceeds, as blessed Augustine records. But in that he added 'God said', he openly expressed God's own saying, that is, his Word, which is the Son, together with the Father himself. For no one of sound head can be so foolish as to reckon this saying corporeal, since the Godhead is not corporeal, nor has it to speak in a bodily way, nor was there yet anyone present to whom it would have had to speak bodily. Now where we say 'God created', for what is 'God' the Hebrew has Eloim, which shows a plurality of divine persons. For El is singular, which is interpreted 'God'; but Eloim is plural, by which we understand the diversity of the persons, of which each one is God. But why is it said 'Eloim created' and not 'they created'? — namely, so that a singular verb should be referred to a plural noun; in order that it might be intimated that in those three persons not three creators but one only is to be understood. When therefore he said 'Eloim created', in which he taught that the divine persons work equally together, he assuredly laid down beforehand that the works of the Trinity are undivided. And when afterwards, as we have said, he distinguished the persons of the Father and the Spirit and the Word, he determined wherein that Trinity consists.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-1/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1133, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Cum vero in sequentibus dicit diem secundum et tertium, etc. diem primum intelligit quo coelum et terra creata sunt, sicut dictum est: In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram, in quo etiam lux est creata vel a tenebris divisa. Ad opera quippe primae diei sola creatio coeli et terrae pertinet quae primo diei deputanda est, respectu cujus videlicet primae diei secundus aut tertius dies dicatur, ut tale sit in principio creavit ac si diceretur: In prima die, hoc est ante caetera quae sequuntur opera.", "source": "PL 178, col. 741A", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But when in what follows he says a second day and a third and the rest, he means by the first day that on which heaven and earth were created, as it was said: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth', on which also light was created or divided from the darkness. For to the works of the first day there belongs only the creation of heaven and earth, which is to be assigned to the first day, in respect of which first day the second or third day is so called; so that 'in the beginning he created' is as if it were said: On the first day — that is, before the other works that follow.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-1b/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Coeli et terrae nomine hoc loco quatuor elementa comprehendi arbitror, ex quibus tanquam materiali primordio caetera omnia corpora constat esse composita. Coelum quidem duo levia elementa, ignem videlicet atque aerem dicit. Reliqua vero duo quae gravia sunt, terram generaliter vocat. Coelum quippe tam aereum dicimus, juxta illud, volucres coeli, quam aethereum quod est igneum. Unde non incongrue tam aerem quam ignem coelum hic nominat. Constat etiam coelum aethereum: quo purior est ignis, coelum proprie solere dici. Unde merito nomen coeli, quod quanto purior est ignis, tanto levioris est naturae, pro duobus, ut dictum, levibus elementis igne scilicet atque aere hic positum esse intelligitur. Sicut e contrario per terram, cujus maxime gravis est et ponderosa natura, tam terram ipsam quam ei adhaerentem aquam determinat. Haec itaque quatuor elementa tanquam caeterorum corporum principia Deum in principio fecisse praenuntiat. Et tale est quod dicit, In principio, ac si diceret, ante illa omnia quae consequenter enumerat, et de quorum etiam consummatione postmodum subdit: Igitur perfecti sunt coeli, etc. (Gen. II, 1.) Tale est quod dicit in principio sequentium operum, ac si diceret: In principio mundi, id est antequam quidquam de his quae de mundo sunt efficeret. Non enim angeli, cum incorporeae sint natureae, inter mundanas creaturas comprehenduntur, sicut homines, de quibus in III Topic. philosophus meminit. « Mundus, inquit, Providentia regitur, hemines autem pars mundi sunt; humanae igitur res Providentia reguntur. »", "source": "PL 178, col. 733C", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "By the name of heaven and earth I judge the four elements to be taken in here, out of which, as out of a material first beginning, all other bodies are agreed to be composed. By 'heaven' he means the two light elements, that is fire and air. The remaining two, which are heavy, he calls generally 'earth'. For we call heaven both the airy — as in 'the birds of heaven' — and the ethereal, which is fiery. Whence it is not unfitting that he here names both air and fire 'heaven'. It is agreed too that the ethereal heaven, in that its fire is purer, is properly wont to be called heaven; whence with reason the name of heaven, since the purer the fire the lighter its nature, is here put, as has been said, for the two light elements, fire and air. Just so, on the contrary, by 'earth', whose nature is most heavy and weighty, he marks out both the earth itself and the water that clings to it. These four elements, then, as the first principles of all other bodies, he announces that God made in the beginning. And what he says is as if he said: In the beginning, before all those things which he enumerates in order, and of whose completion he adds afterwards, 'Thus the heavens were finished' (Gen 2:1). What he says, 'in the beginning' of the works that follow, is as if he said: In the beginning of the world, that is, before he brought about anything of those things which belong to the world. For the angels, being of an incorporeal nature, are not included among the creatures of the world, as men are, of whom the philosopher makes mention in the third book of the Topics: 'The world,' he says, 'is governed by Providence; but men are a part of the world; therefore human affairs are governed by Providence.'", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-1c/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Bene autem de elementis dictum est, creavit, potius quam formavit, quia creari proprie id dicitur, quod de non esse ita ad esse producitur, ut praejacentem non habeat materiam, nec in aliquo primitus subsisteret naturae statu. Cum autem de ipsa jam materia praeparata adjunctione formae aliquid fit, recte illud formari dicitur, sicut est illud quod in sequentibus ponitur: Formavit igitur hominem de limo terrae (Gen. II, 7) . Et iterum: Formatis igitur de humo cunctis animantibus terrae (ibid., 19) . Cum enim praejacens materia denotatur, veluti cum praemittitur de humo quoniam in speciem aliquam formaretur, tunc rectissime formari dicitur.", "source": "PL 178, col. 734B", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And it is well said of the elements 'created' rather than 'formed', because that is properly said to be created which is so brought forth from non-being to being that it has no pre-existing matter, and did not first subsist in any state of nature. But when something is made out of matter already prepared, by the joining on of a form, that is rightly said to be formed — as is what is set down in what follows: 'The Lord God therefore formed man of the slime of the earth' (Gen 2:7). And again: 'All the animals of the earth therefore having been formed out of the ground' (Gen 2:19). For when a pre-existing matter is denoted — as when 'out of the ground' is put first, since it was to be formed into some appearance — then a thing is most rightly said to be formed.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inanis et vacua. Quoniam ad hominis creationem de terra formandi et in terra conversaturi specialiter iste spectat tractatus, quo propheta, ut diximus, ad cultum Dei hominem allicere intendens, ad terrena opera stylum convertit, coelestis et superioris naturae, id est angelicae creatione praeterita; ne forte,, si eam perscrutaretur et ad Creatoris sui laudem ejus excellentiam ostenderet, minus hominem ad amorem Dei alliceret, qui sibi aliam praeferri naturam conspiceret. Praemittens itaque terram in creatione sua inanem et vacuam exstitisse, quomodo postmodum ejus inanitati et vacuitati divina operatio consuluerit posteriorum dierum operibus declarat. Inanem, dicit terram a fructu, quem nondum produxerat; vacuam, ab habitatore, non solum homine, verum etiam ab omni penitus animantium genere, cum nulla adhuc animantia vel terrestris vel aquatica mansio contineret, quae utraque, ut diximus, terrae vocabulo comprehendit. Terram itaque dicit, secundum quod expositum est, hanc ex elementis gravibus constantem inferiorem mundi regionem. Et notandum quod, dum ait, terra autem erat inanis et vacua, subinnuit ex illa apposita conjunctione adversativa de coelo non sic esse intelligendum, cum videlicet angeli vel ante ipsum coelum vel cum coelo creati esse intelligantur, qui quasi coelestes habitatores dicuntur, ut, licet eorum creationem propheta non exsequatur, in transitu tamen eam perstringat, ne quid ejus narrationi de divinis operibus deesse videatur.", "source": "PL 178, col. 734C", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was empty and void.' Since this treatise looks especially to the creation of man, who was to be formed from the earth and to live on the earth — in which the prophet, as we have said, intending to draw man to the worship of God, turned his pen to earthly works, passing over the creation of the heavenly and higher nature, that is the angelic; lest perhaps, if he examined it and displayed its excellence to the praise of its Creator, he should draw man less to the love of God, seeing another nature preferred to himself. And so, having said first that the earth in its creation stood empty and void, he declares by the works of the later days how the divine working afterwards saw to its emptiness and its voidness. He calls the earth empty of fruit, which it had not yet brought forth; void of an inhabitant, not only of man but of every kind of living thing whatever, since as yet no dwelling, whether of land or of water, held any living things — both of which, as we have said, he takes in under the word 'earth'. And so he calls 'earth', according to what has been set out, this lower region of the world consisting of the heavy elements. And it is to be noted that when he says 'but the earth was empty and void', he hints, from that adversative conjunction set beside it, that heaven is not to be so understood — since the angels are understood to have been created either before heaven itself or together with heaven, and are called, as it were, the dwellers in heaven; so that although the prophet does not pursue their creation, he yet touches it in passing, lest anything should seem missing from his account of the divine works.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-2/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas. Hebraicum habet, volitabat super faciem aquarum. Translatio vero quaedam habet, fovebat aquas, quaedam, ferebatur super aquas, sicut habet praesens quam prae manibus habemus, ac primum nobis occurrit exponenda. Quantum ergo nobis videtur, aquarum etiam nomine fluidam illam atque instabilem congeriem nondum certa partium suarum collocatione firmatam comprehendit. Super hanc itaque Spiritus Domini ferebatur, quia ut eam ordinaret, tanquam imperio suo subjectam divina disponebat gratia, ne videlicet ulterius esset inanis aut vacua, seu tenebrosa vel fluida. Quid enim Spiritus Dei nisi ejus bonitas intelligitur, cujus participatione sunt bona universa? Quae videlicet Dei bonitas, quia nondum in illa elementorum confusione apparebat, superferri potius illi quam inferri dicebatur, quia nondum in ea operatus fuerat unde aliquid utilitatis ipsa praetenderet. Unde nec in ejus commendatione: dicitur vidit Deus quia bonum est, sicut in commendatione reliquorum operum. Diligenter etiam dicit, ferebatur super aquas potius quam erat, quasi ostendens eum habere quemdam transitum in istis, ut de tenebris ad lucem produceret, non in eis permanentiam habere, quas nequaquam in hac confusione proposuerat relinquere. Alia etiam, ut diximus, translatio habet, et Spiritus Domini fovebat aquas, more videlicet avis, quae ovo incumbit, ut ipsum foveat atque vivificet; unde et bene vivificatorem Spiritum sanctum appellamus. Bene autem ovo nondum vivificato aut formato illa confusa congeries comparatur, in qua tanquam in ovo quatuor in se continenti quatuor elementa comprehendun", "source": "PL 178, col. 735B", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And the Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters.' The Hebrew has 'was fluttering over the face of the waters.' One translation has 'was warming the waters,' another 'was borne over the waters,' as does the present one we have in hand, which first comes to us to be expounded. […] Another translation, as we said, also has 'and the Spirit of the Lord was warming the waters,' after the manner of a bird that sits upon an egg to warm and quicken it; whence we rightly call the Holy Spirit the giver of life. And that confused mass is well compared to an egg not yet quickened or formed, in which, as in an egg containing four things in itself, the four elements are comprised…", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-26-faciamus", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-26-faciamus/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1133, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Cujus quidem creationis excellentiam patenter insinuat, cum quasi ex quodam consilio loquens, dicit: faciamus. Sed cur pluraliter dicitur: faciamus hominem ad imaginem nostram, si nulla prorsus pluralitas in Deo sit, qui solus hominem creasse ad imaginem suam postea memoratur his verbis: Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam, ad imaginem Dei creavit illum. Dicant Judaei si possunt, vel nobiscum fateantur in una Divinitatis essentia pluralitatem personarum magis quam rerum esse. Quod diligenter propheta considerans ad distinctionem personarum faciendam, dicit pluraliter: Faciamus; ad unitatem vero Dei assignandam subjunxit singulariter, et creavit Deus hominem, etc. Quasi ergo aliquis secum loquens se et rationem suam quasi duo constituit cum eam consulit, sicut Boetius in libro De consolatione Philosophiae, vel Augustinus in libro Soliloquiorum. Sic Deus Pater ad creationem hominis tam Sapientiam quam Bonitatem, hoc est Filium et Spiritum sanctum quasi invitans dicit: Faciamus eum talem et tantum, ut imago nostra sit vel similitudo.", "source": "PL 178, col. 760A", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "The excellence of this creation he plainly intimates, when, speaking as though out of a kind of counsel, he says: let us make. But why is it said in the plural — let us make a human to our image — if there is no plurality at all in God, who alone is afterwards recorded to have created the human to his own image in these words: and God created the human to his own image, to the image of God he created him? Let the Jews say, if they can, or else confess with us that in the one essence of the Divinity there is a plurality of persons rather than of things. Considering this carefully, the prophet says in the plural, in order to make a distinction of persons: let us make; and in order to assign the unity of God he added in the singular: and God created the human, etc. So, then, as someone speaking with himself sets up himself and his own reason as though they were two when he consults it — as Boethius does in the book *On the Consolation of Philosophy*, or Augustine in the book of *Soliloquies* — so God the Father, as though inviting both Wisdom and Goodness, that is the Son and the Holy Spirit, to the creation of the human, says: let us make him such and so great, that he may be our image or likeness.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-3/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1133, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Lucem vero istam quae praedictas tenebras removit, ipsam sequentium operum distinctionem accipimus, qua videlicet confusa illa congeries, quae se nondum visibilem praebebat nec usui apta alicui cognosci poterat, vel ad quid creata esset ex ipsa adhuc percipi valebat", "source": "PL 178, col. 738B", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But that light which removed the aforesaid darkness we take to be the distinction itself of the works that follow — that distinction, namely, by which that confused heap, which did not yet present itself as visible, nor could be known as fit for any use, nor could yet be perceived from itself for what it had been created…", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-3b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-3b/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1133, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Notandum vero pro eo quod dicimus: Fiat lux, et facta est lux, in Hebraeo haberi: Sit lux, et fuit lux; et similiter in caeteris quae sequuntur ubicunque nos habemus: Dixit Deus, Fiat hoc, et factum est ita, in Hebraeo est: Sit hoc, et fuit ita. Quibus fortasse verbis maxima celeritas divinae operationis exprimitur. Quippe dum aliquid fit quod nondum est, aliqua mora in faciendo esse potest. Cum vero dicitur, sit et fuit, nulla interposita mora perfectio rei", "source": "PL 178, col. 739D", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It is to be noted that, where we say 'Let there be light, and light was made', in the Hebrew it is: 'Let light be, and light was'; and likewise in the rest that follow, wherever we have 'God said, Let this be made, and it was made so', in the Hebrew it is 'Let this be, and it was so'. By which words perhaps the greatest swiftness of the divine working is expressed. For while something is being made which is not yet, there can be some delay in the making. But when it is said 'let it be' and 'it was', with no delay interposed the perfecting of the thing…", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-4/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1133, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit lucem a tenebris. Hoc est operatione sua perfectum discrevit ab imperfecto et distinctum a confuso. Superius autem ubi ait: Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux, et facta est lux, ad imperium quidem Dei lucem esse factam monstravit. Hic vero cum ait: Et divisit lucem a tenebris, per ipsum quoque hanc distinctionem operum, quam lucem appellat, factam esse demonstrat, ut idem ipse materiae Creator pariter et formator intelligatur, eique tota laus tam de creatione materiae quam de operum formatione tribuatur.", "source": "PL 178, col. 740B", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And he divided the light from the darkness. That is, by his working he distinguished the perfect from the imperfect and the distinct from the confused. Above, where he says, And God said: Let there be light, and light was made, he showed that the light was made at God's command. But here, when he says, And he divided the light from the darkness, he shows that this distinction of works also, which he calls light, was made by him; so that one and the same is understood to be both the Creator of the matter and the former of it, and the whole praise, both for the creation of the matter and for the forming of the works, is attributed to him.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "abelard-hex-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/abelard-hex-1-5/", "author": "Peter Abelard", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et factum est vespere et mane dies unus. Diem unum hic vocat totam illorum operum Dei consummationem, prius in mente habitam et in opere postmodum sexta die completam. Vesperam autem hujus totius temporis quod hic unum diem appellat, totam illam operationem Dei vocat, secundum quod prius in ejus mente latebat, antequam per effectum ad lucem prodiret. Ac rursus ipsam eamdem operationem mane nuncupat secundum quod opere postmodum completa sese visibilem praebuit. Divinae itaque mentis conceptum in dispositione futuri operis vesperam dicit, mane vero appellat ipsam conceptus illius operationem et divinae dispositionis effectum in sex diebus consummatum.", "source": "PL 178, col. 740C", "cc_idno": "11118", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And there was evening and morning, one day.' He here calls 'one day' the whole completion of those works of God — held first in his mind, and afterward completed in the work on the sixth day. And the evening of this whole span of time which he here calls one day, he calls that whole working of God according as it first lay hid in his mind, before it came forth into the light through its effect. And again he names that same working morning, according as, being afterward completed in the work, it showed itself visible. Thus he calls the conception of the divine mind, in the disposing of the work to come, evening; and morning he calls the working out of that conception and the effect of the divine disposition, completed in six days.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-19-20", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-19-20/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 796, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 19. Quot modis est operatio divina?-- Resp. Quatuor. Primo, quod in verbi [Dei] dispensatione omnia aeterna sunt. Secundo, quod in materia informi qui vivit in aeternum, creavit omnia simul (Eccl. XVIII, 1) . Tertio, quod per opera dierum sex varias distinxit creaturas. Quarto, quod ex primordialibus seminibus non incognitae oriuntur naturae, sed notae saepius, ne pereant, reformantur. Inter. 20. Quae creaturae de nihilo factae sunt?-- Resp. Coelum, terra, angeli, lux, aer, aqua [et] anima hominis.", "source": "PL 100, col. 519A", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 19. In how many ways is the divine working? — Answer. Four. First, that in the dispensation of the Word of God all things are eternal. Second, that in formless matter he who lives for ever created all things at once (Sir 18:1). Third, that through the works of the six days he distinguished the various creatures. Fourth, that out of the primordial seeds natures do not arise unknown, but known ones are more often re-formed, lest they perish. Question 20. Which creatures were made out of nothing? — Answer. Heaven, earth, angels, light, air, water, and the soul of man.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-26/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 800, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 26. Quid est: In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram?--Resp. In Filio perfecit [ Ms., fecit] Deus coelum et terram?", "source": "PL 100, col. 519C", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 26. What is: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth'? — Answer. In the Son God completed [ms.: made] heaven and earth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-28", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-28/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 796, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 28. Quid in coeli terraeque nomine significatur, quando dicitur: In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram (Gen. I, 1) ?-- Resp. Informis illa materia, quam de nihilo fecit Deus, appellata est primo coelum et terra: non quia jam hoc erat, sed quia jam hoc esse poterat. Nam secundo die coelum istud sidereum factum esse legitur, et tertio die terram apparuisse et vestiri floribus coepisse. Sive, in coeli et terrae nomine spirituales et terrenae creaturae intelligi possunt.", "source": "PL 100, col. 519C", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 28. What is signified by the name of heaven and earth, when it is said, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth' (Gen 1:1)? — Answer. That formless matter, which God made out of nothing, was first called heaven and earth: not because it already was this, but because it already could be this. For on the second day this starry heaven is read to have been made, and on the third day the earth to have appeared and begun to be clothed with flowers. Or else, by the name of heaven and earth the spiritual and the earthly creatures can be understood.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-29", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-29/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 796, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 29. Quid est: Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas (Gen. I, 2) ?-- Resp. Non pervagatione [ Edit., per vagationem], sed potestate, et regentis imperio, ad formandum et vivificandum informem materiam, quae hoc loco aquae nomine significatur", "source": "PL 100, col. 519D", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 29. What is 'The Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters'? — Answer: Not by wandering over them, but by power and a ruler's command, to form and quicken the formless matter which in this place is signified by the name of water.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-30", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-30/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 796, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 30. Quid est: Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita (Ibid. ex vers. LXX) ?-- Resp. Invisibilis propter obscuritatem; incomposita propter deformitatem.", "source": "PL 100, col. 519D", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 30. What is: 'But the earth was invisible and unordered' (ibid., from the Septuagint version)? — Answer. Invisible because of darkness; unordered because of shapelessness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-33", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-33/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 800, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 33. Quare prima die lux creata legitur?-- Resp. Congruit operibus Dei, ut prima die a [ Ms., de] luce aeterna lux temporalis primo fieret, ut esset unde caetera quae crearet, apparerent.", "source": "PL 100, col. 520A", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 33. Why is light read to have been created on the first day? — Answer. It befits the works of God that on the first day a temporal light should first be made from the eternal light, so that there might be something from which the rest that he would create could appear.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-34", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-34/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 796, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 33. Quare prima die lux creata legitur?-- Resp. Congruit operibus Dei, ut prima die a [ Ms., de] luce aeterna lux temporalis primo fieret, ut esset unde caetera quae crearet, apparerent. Inter. 34. Quid est: Factum est vespere et mane dies unus (vers. 5) ?-- Resp. Id est finis operis perfecti, et initium operis incoepti.", "source": "PL 100, col. 520A", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 33. Why is the light read as created on the first day? — Answer: It suits the works of God that on the first day a temporal light should first be made from the eternal light, so that there might be something by which the rest he would create could appear. Question 34. What is 'there was evening and morning, one day'? — Answer: That is, the end of a work completed, and the beginning of a work begun.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first", "first-light" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-35", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-35/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 800, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 35. Quid est: Vidit Deus, quod esset bonum?--Resp. Id est, in ea bonitate placuit ut maneret, in qua placuit ut fieret, quod fecit.", "source": "PL 100, col. 520B", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 35. What is: God saw that it was good? — Answer. That is: what he made pleased him to remain in that goodness in which it pleased him to be made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "alcuin-int-36-37", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/alcuin-int-36-37/", "author": "Alcuin", "tradition": "latin", "date": 796, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inter. 36. Quare de solo homine dictum est: Faciamus hominem (Gen. I, 26) ; de aliis autem creaturis legitur: Dixit Deus?--Resp. Ut videlicet, quae [ Ms., quia] rationabilis creatura condebatur, cum consilio facta videretur, et ut ejus nobilitas ostenderetur. Inter. 37. Cur plurali numero dixit: Faciamus?--Resp. Ut ostenderetur trium una operatio personarum.", "source": "PL 100, col. 520B", "cc_idno": "21416", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Question 36. Why is it said of the human alone: let us make a human (Gen 1:26); whereas of the other creatures we read: God said? — Answer. So that, since a rational creature was being founded, it might be seen to be made with counsel, and so that its nobility might be shown. Question 37. Why did he say it in the plural number: let us make? — Answer. So that one working of three persons might be shown.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Tantumne opinionis assumpsisse homines, ut aliqui eorum tria principia constituerent omnium, Deum, et exemplar, et materiam, sicut Plato discipulique ejus; et ea incorrupta, et increata, ac sine initio esse asseverarent: Deumque non tamquam creatorem materiae, sed tamquam artificem ad exemplar, hoc est, ideam intendentem, fecisse mundum de materia, quam vocant hylen, quae gignendi causas rebus omnibus dedisse asseratur: ipsum quoque 2 mundum incorruptum, nec creatum, aut factum existimarent: alii quoque, ut Aristoteles cum suis disputandum putavit, duo principia ponerent, materiam et speciem, et tertium cum iis, quod operatorium dicitur, cui suppeteret competenter efficere, quod adoriundum putasset.", "source": "PL 14, col. 123A", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Have men taken up so much opinion that some of them set up three principles of all things — God, and the exemplar, and matter — and asserted that these are incorruptible and uncreated and without beginning, as Plato and his disciples do; and that God made the world not as the creator of matter but as a craftsman looking to an exemplar, that is, to an idea, out of the matter which they call hyle, which is said to have given the causes of generation to all things; and thought the world itself too incorruptible, neither created nor made? Others also, as Aristotle with his followers thought fit to argue, laid down two principles, matter and form, and a third along with them, which is called operative, to which it should belong to bring about fitly what it had judged should be undertaken.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-10/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quaerunt aliqui, cur prius vesperum, postea mane Scriptura memoraverit, ne forte noctem priusquam diem significare videatur. Nec advertunt primo quod praemiserit diem, dicendo: Et vocavit Deus lucem diem, et tenebras vocavit noctem: deinde quod vesper finis diei sit, et mane finis noctis. Ergo ut praerogativam et primatus nativitatis diei daret, prius finem diei significavit, postquam secutura nox esset, deinde postea finem noctis adjunxit. Eo usque autem noctem diei Scriptura anteferre non potuit, ut et diei et noctis tempora, diei appellatione concluserit, tamquam principalis auctoritate nominis vindicaverit. Et hanc Scripturae esse consuetudinem, ut potiori appellationem deputet, frequentibus exemplis probamus. Siquidem et Jacob dixit: Dies vitae meae, pusilli et mali (Gen. XLVII, 9) . Et iterum: Omnes dies vitae meae. Et David posuit: Dies annorum nostrorum (Ps. LXXXIX, 10) ; non dixit et noctes. Unde advertimus ea quae nunc in specie historiae traduntur, vim statuisse legis in posterum. Principium ergo diei, vox Dei est: fiat lux; et facta est lux. Finis diei vesper est. Jam sequens dies ex noctis fine succedit. Sententia autem Dei evidens, quia diem primo vocavit lucem, et secundo vocavit tenebras noctem. 37. Praeclare etiam unum non primum diem dixit; nam secuturo secundo, et tertio die, et deinceps reliquis primum potuit dicere: et hoc ordinis videbatur, sed legem statuit, ut viginti 22 quatuor horae diurnae atque nocturnae diei tantum nomine definiantur, ut si diceret: Viginti quatuor horarum mensura unius diei tempus est. Sicut enim virorum generatio computatur, et intelligitur etiam feminarum, quia nectuntur secunda potioribus; ita etiam dies numerantur, et noctes aestimantur adjunctae. Sicut igitur circuitus unus, ita dies unus.", "source": "PL 14, col. 143C", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Some ask why Scripture recorded evening first and morning afterward, lest it should seem to put night before day. They fail to notice, first, that it put the day first by saying, 'And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night'; and then that evening is the end of the day, and morning the end of the night. So, to give the day the prerogative and the birthright, it named the end of the day first, since night was to follow, and afterward added the end of the night. […] Excellently, too, he said one day and not first day. For with a second day and a third and the rest to follow he could have said 'first,' and that seemed to be the order; but he laid down a law, that twenty-four hours of day and night together be defined by the name of day only — as if he were saying: the measure of twenty-four hours is the time of one day. For as the generation of men is counted and the women are understood along with them, since the lesser are bound to the greater, so too the days are numbered and the nights reckoned as joined to them. Therefore as there is one circuit, so there is one day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-1b/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Denique non in persuasione humanae sapientiae, nec in philosophiae simulatoriis disputationibus, sed in ostensione spiritus et virtutis, tamquam testis divini operis ausus est dicere: In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram. Non ille, ut atomorum concursione mundus coiret, serum atque otiosum exspectavit negotium; neque disciplinam quamdam materiae, quam contemplando, mundum posset effingere, sed auctorem Deum exprimendum putavit. Advertit enim vir plenus prudentiae, quod visibilium atque invisibilium substantias, origines, et causas rerum mens sola divina contineat, non ut philosophi disputant, validiorem atomorum complexionem perseverantiae jugis praestare causam: sed judicavit quod telam araneae texerent qui sic minuta et insubstantiva principia coelo ac terris darent, quae ut fortuito conjungerentur, ita fortuito ac temere dissolverentur, nisi in sui gubernatoris divina virtute constarent. Nec immerito gubernatorem nesciunt, qui non noverunt Deum, per quem omnia reguntur et gubernantur. Sequamur ergo eum, qui et auctorem novit, et gubernatorem, nec vanis abducamur opinionibus.", "source": "PL 14, col. 125B", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Finally it was not in the persuasion of human wisdom, nor in the counterfeit disputations of philosophy, but in the showing of the Spirit and of power, as a witness of the divine work, that he dared to say: In the beginning God made heaven and earth. Not he, so that the world should come together by a concourse of atoms […]. For a man full of prudence perceived that the divine mind alone contains the substances of things visible and invisible, their origins and their causes — not, as the philosophers dispute, that a stronger interlacing of atoms furnishes the cause of unbroken endurance: but he judged that they were weaving a spider's web who gave such minute and unsubstantial first principles to heaven and earth — principles which, as they were joined by chance, would by chance and at random be dissolved, did they not stand fast in the divine power of their governor. Nor is it without cause that they do not know the governor, who have not known God, by whom all things are ruled and governed. Let us follow him, then, who knows both the author and the governor, and let us not be led away by empty opinions.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-2/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Unde divino spiritu praevidens sanctus Moyses hos hominum errores fore, et forte jam coepisse, in exordio sermonis sui sic ait, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram (Gen. I, 1) ; initium rerum, auctorem mundi, creationem materiae comprehendens; ut Deum cognosceres ante initium mundi esse, vel ipsum esse initium universorum; sicut in Evangelio Dei Filius dicentibus sibi, Tu quis es? respondit: Initium quod et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII. 25) : et ipsum dedisse gignendis rebus initium, et ipsum esse creatorem mundi, non idea quadam duce imitatorem materiae, ex qua non ad arbitrium suum, sed ad speciem propositam sua opera formaret. Pulchre quoque ait, In principio fecit; ut incomprehensibilem celeritatem operis exprimeret, cum effectum prius operationis impletae, quam indicium coeptae explicuisset.", "source": "PL 14, col. 124B", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Whence holy Moses, foreseeing by the divine Spirit that these errors of men would come, and had perhaps already begun, speaks thus at the opening of his discourse: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth' (Gen 1:1) — comprehending the beginning of things, the author of the world, and the creation of matter; so that you might know that God is before the beginning of the world, or that he himself is the beginning of all things, as in the Gospel the Son of God answered those who said to him 'Who are you?': 'The Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25); and that he himself gave a beginning to the things to be brought forth, and that he himself is the creator of the world, not an imitator of matter with some idea for his guide, out of which he would shape his works, not at his own will, but to a form set before him. Beautifully too he says 'in the beginning he made', so as to express the incomprehensible speed of the work, since he set forth the effect of the operation completed before any sign of its being begun.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-3/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio, inquit. Quam bonus ordo, ut illud primum assereret, quod negare consueverunt, et cognoscerent principium esse mundi, ne sine principio mundum esse homines arbitrarentur. Unde et David cum de coelo, et terra, et mari loqueretur, ait, Omnia in sapientia fecisti (Ps. CIII, 25) . Dedit ergo principium mundo, dedit etiam creaturae infirmitatem, ne anarchon, ne increatum, et divinae consortem substantiae crederemus. Et pulchre addidit, Fecit, ne mora in faciendo fuisse existimaretur; ut vel sic intelligerent homines quam incomparabilis operator esset, qui tantum opus brevi 5 exiguoque momento suae operationis absolveret, ut voluntatis effectus sensum temporis praeveniret.", "source": "PL 14, col. 126A", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'In the beginning,' he says. What a good order — that he should assert first the very thing they are accustomed to deny, and that they might know the world has a beginning, lest men should think the world is without a beginning. Whence David also, when he was speaking of heaven and earth and sea, said, 'You have made all things in wisdom' (Ps 104:24 [Vg 103:25]). He gave the world a beginning, then, and gave the creature weakness too, lest we should believe it uncaused, uncreated, and a partaker of the divine substance. And beautifully he added 'he made', lest it be supposed there was any delay in the making; that in this way at least men might understand how incomparable a worker he is, who completed so great a work in the brief and slender moment of his operating, so that the effect of his will outran the sense of time.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-5/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Est ergo hic mundus divinae specimen operationis; quia dum opus videtur, 9 praefertur operator. Namque ut istarum artium aliae sunt actuosae, quae sunt in corporis motu, aut sono vocis; cessavit motus aut sonus, nihil superfuit, nec remansit spectantibus vel audientibus: aliae theoreticae, quae vigorem mentis exerceant: aliae hujusmodi, ut cessante quoque operationis officio, operis munus appareat, ut aedificatio atque textura, quae etiam tacente artifice, peritiam ejus ostendunt", "source": "PL 14, col. 130C", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "This world, then, is a specimen of the divine working; because while the work is seen, the worker is put forward. For as of these arts of ours some are active, which consist in the movement of the body or the sound of the voice — the movement or the sound ceased, nothing was left over, nothing remained to those who watched or listened; others are theoretical, which exercise the vigour of the mind; others of such a kind that, the office of working having ceased, the work's own service still appears, as building and weaving, which even when the craftsman is silent show his skill.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-6-20", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-6-20/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio itaque temporis coelum et terram Deus fecit. Tempus enim ab hoc mundo, non ante mundum: dies autem temporis portio est, non principium. Et quamquam lectionis serie possimus adstruere quod primo diem fecerit Dominus et noctem, quae sunt vices temporum; et secundo die firmamentum fecerit, quo discrevit aquam quae sub coelo est, et aquam quae super coelum; tamen satis est ad praesentem assertionem, quod in principio coelum fecerit, unde praerogativa generationis et causa; et terram fecerit, in qua esset generationis substantia. In his enim quatuor illa elementa creata sunt, ex quibus generantur omnia ista quae mundi sunt. Elementa autem quatuor, aer, ignis, aqua, et terra, quae in omnibus sibi mixta sunt.", "source": "PL 14, col. 132A", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning of time, then, God made heaven and earth. For time is from this world, not before the world; and a day is a portion of time, not its beginning. And although from the order of the reading we could establish that the Lord first made day and night, which are the alternations of times, and on the second day made the firmament, by which he divided the water which is under heaven from the water which is above heaven — yet for the present assertion it is enough that in the beginning he made heaven, from which comes the prerogative of generation and its cause; and made earth, in which the substance of generation should be. For in these two the four elements were created, out of which are generated all these things which belong to the world. And the elements are four — air, fire, water, and earth — which are mingled with one another in all things. Indeed you will find fire in the earth too, which is often struck out of stones and iron; and in heaven, since the vault is fiery and glitters with shining stars, water can be understood to be, which is either above heaven, or is often sent down from that upper place upon the earth in a full shower.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-6-24", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-6-24/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Dixit enim David: Principio terram tu fundasti, Domine, et opera manuum tuarum sunt coeli. Ipsi peribunt, tu autem permanes, et omnia sicut vestimentum veterascent, et tamquam amictum mutabis ea, et mutabuntur; tu vero ipse es, et anni tui non deficient (Psal. CI, 26 et seq.) . Quod adeo probavit in Evangelio Dominus, ut diceret: Coelum et terra praeteribunt, mea autem verba non praeteribunt (Matth. XXIV, 35) . Nihil igitur agunt, qui propter coeli asserendam perpetuitatem, quintum corpus aethereum introducendum putarunt; cum aeque videant dissimilem caeteris adjunctam membri unius portionem, labem corpori magis afferre consuevisse. Simul illud adverte, quia propheta David cum terram priori loco nominavit (Ps. CXLVIII, 5) , et postea coelum, credidit opus esse Domini declarandum; quando enim dixit et facta sunt, nihil interest quid prius exprimas, cum simul utrumque sit factum; simul ne haec saltem praerogativa coelo divinae videatur adjudicata substantiae, ut primogenitae creaturae privilegio potior aestimetur.", "source": "PL 14, col. 135B", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "For David said: 'In the beginning you founded the earth, Lord, and the heavens are the works of your hands. They shall perish, but you remain, and all shall grow old as a garment, and as a cloak you shall change them, and they shall be changed; but you are the same, and your years shall not fail' (Ps 102:26 [Vg 101:26]). Which the Lord so confirmed in the Gospel that he said: 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away' (Matt 24:35). Those, then, accomplish nothing who thought a fifth, ethereal body had to be brought in to establish the perpetuity of heaven — since they equally see that a part of a single limb joined on unlike the rest usually brings more harm to the body. Note this at the same time, that when the prophet David named the earth in the first place (Ps 148:5) and heaven afterwards, he judged that the work of the Lord had to be declared; for when he said 'and they were made', it makes no difference which you utter first, since both were made together — and at the same time, lest even this prerogative should seem to be adjudged to heaven's divine substance, that it should be reckoned the better by the privilege of being the firstborn creature.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-7-25", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-7-25/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita (Gen. I, 2) . Bonus artifex prius fundamentum ponit: postea, fundamento posito, aedificationis membra distinguit, et adjungit ornatum. Posito igitur fundamento terrae, et confirmata coeli substantia, duo enim ista sunt velut cardines rerum, subtexuit: Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita. Quid est, Erat, nisi ne forte in infinitum et sine principio extendant opinionem suam, et dicant: Ecce quia materia, id est, hyle, sicut philosophi dicunt, etiam secundum Scripturam divinam non habuit initium. Verum hoc dicentibus respondebis, quia scriptum est: Erat autem Cain operarius terrae (Gen. IV, 2) . Et 14 de eo qui Jubal dictus est, habet Scriptura: Hic erat pater qui demonstravit psalterium et citharam (Ibid., 21) . Et, Homo erat in Ausitide regione, cui nomen Job (Job. I, 1) . Desinant ergo de verbo quaestionem movere, cum praesertim praemiserit Moyses, quia fecit Deus terram. Erat ergo, ex quo facta est.", "source": "PL 14, col. 135D", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was invisible and unordered' (Gen 1:2). A good craftsman lays the foundation first; afterwards, the foundation laid, he distinguishes the parts of the building and adds the adornment. So, the foundation of the earth having been laid and the substance of heaven made firm — for these two are as it were the hinges of things — he wove in below: 'But the earth was invisible and unordered.' What does 'was' mean, unless it is said lest they stretch their opinion out to infinity and without a beginning, and say: See, matter, that is hyle, as the philosophers say, had no beginning even according to divine Scripture. But to those who say this you will answer that it is written: 'And Cain was a worker of the earth' (Gen 4:2). And of the man called Jubal, Scripture has: 'He was the father who showed forth the psaltery and the lyre' (Gen 4:21). And, 'There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job' (Job 1:1). Let them stop raising a question about the word, especially since Moses has said beforehand that God made the earth. It was, then, from the time it was made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-8-29", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-8-29/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "maxime cum sequatur: Et spiritus Dei superferebatur super aquas (Ibid.) . Quem etsi aliqui pro aere accipiant, aliqui pro spiritu quem spiramus et carpimus aurae hujus vitalis spiritum; nos tamen cum sanctorum et fidelium sententia congruentes, Spiritum sanctum accipimus, ut in constitutione mundi operatio Trinitatis eluceat. Praemisso enim quia in principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, id est in Christo fecit Deus, vel Filius Dei Deus fecit, vel per Filium Deus fecit; quia omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil, supererat plenitudo operationis in Spiritu, sicut scriptum est: Verbo Domini coelis firmati sunt, et Spiritu oris ejus omnis virtus eorum (Ps. XXXII, 6) . Itaque quemadmodum in Psalmo docemur operationem Verbi, quod est Verbum Dei, et virtutem quam dedit Spiritus sanctus; ita hic propheticum resultavit oraculum, quia Deus dixit, et Deus fecit. Spiritus quoque Dei superferebatur super aquas. Ornando enim polo coeli, germinaturis terris pulchre Spiritus superferebatur, quia per ipsum habebant novorum partuum semina germinare, secundum quod dixit propheta: 17 Emitte Spiritum tuum et creabuntur, et renovabis faciem terrae (Ps. CIII, 30) . Denique Syrus, qui vicinus Hebraeo est, et sermone consonat in plerisque et congruit, sic habet: Et Spiritus Dei fovebat aquas, id est vivificabat, ut in novas cogeret creaturas, et fotu suo animaret ad vitam. Nam etiam Spiritum sanctum legimus creatorem, dicente Job, Spiritus divinus qui fecit me (Job. XXXIII, 4) .", "source": "PL 14, col. 138C", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "…especially since there follows: 'And the Spirit of God was borne above the waters.' Some take this as the air, others as the breath we draw and take in, the breath of this life-giving atmosphere; but we, agreeing with the judgment of the saints and the faithful, take it as the Holy Spirit, so that in the founding of the world the working of the Trinity may shine out. […] Finally the Syriac, which is neighbor to the Hebrew and in most things agrees and chimes with it in wording, has it thus: 'And the Spirit of God warmed the waters,' that is, quickened them, so as to gather them into new creatures and by his warmth bring them alive. For we also read that the Holy Spirit is creator, Job saying, 'The divine Spirit who made me' (Job 33:4).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-9", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-9/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Fiat, inquit, lux. Unde vox Dei in Scriptura divina debuit inchoare, nisi a lumine? unde mundi ornatus, nisi a luce exordium sumere? Frustra enim esset, si non videretur. Erat quidem Deus ipse in lumine, quia lucem habitat inaccessibilem, et erat lumen verum, quod illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum: sed eam lucem fieri voluit, quae oculis corporalibus comprehenderetur. Qui aedificium aliquod dignum habitaculo patrisfamilias struere desiderat, antequam fundamenta ponat, unde lucem ei infundat explorat, et ea prima est gratia, quae si desit, tota domus deformi horret incultu. Lux est quae reliquos domus commendat ornatus. Fiat, inquit, lux. Plena vox luminis non dispositionis apparatum significat, sed operationis resplendet effectu. Naturae opifex lucem locutus est, et creavit.", "source": "PL 14, col. 141D", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'Let there be light,' he says. Where should the voice of God in divine Scripture begin, if not from light? Whence should the adorning of the world take its start, if not from light? For it would be in vain, if it were not seen. God himself was indeed in light, for he dwells in light inaccessible, and he was the true light, which enlightens every man coming into this world; but he made that light which we see. […] Where the builder lays the foundations he looks out from where he may pour light into it, and that is the first grace, and if it is wanting the whole house bristles with an unlovely neglect. It is light that commends the rest of the house's ornament. 'Let there be light,' he says. A full utterance of light — it does not signify the apparatus of an arrangement, but shines out with the effect of an operation. The maker of nature spoke light, and created it.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-1-9b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-1-9b/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et discrevit inter lucem et tenebras; et vidit Deus lucem quia bona est (Gen. I, 4) . Dixit et sonum vocis nullus audivit: discrevit, et operationis molimina nemo deprehendit: vidit et oculorum ejus intentionem nullus aspexit. Et vidit, inquit, Deus lucem quia bona est. Nec quod ignorabat, vidit; nec id quod nesciebat ante, aut non viderat, comprobavit: sed bonorum operum proprium est, ut externo commendatore non egeant, sed gratiam suam, cum videntur, ipsa testentur. Plus est quod probatur aspectu, quam quod sermone laudatur. Suo enim utitur testimonio, non alieno suffragio. Quod si apud nos oculis judicium emittitur, quibus simul et gratia venustatis, et rerum mensura comprehenditur: quanto magis Deus omnia quae probat, videt, et quae videt, probat, secundum quod scriptum est, quia Oculi Domini super justos (Ps. XXXIII, 16) ? Lucis natura hujusmodi est, ut non in numero, non in mensura, non in pondere, ut alia, sed omnis ejus in aspectu gratia sit. Propriis itaque sermonibus naturam lucis expressit, quae videndo complacet, quoniam ipsa videndi officium subministrat. Nec immerito tantum sibi praedicatorem potuit invenire, a quo jure prima laudatur; quoniam ipsa fecit, ut etiam caetera mundi membra digna sint laudibus. Vidit ergo Deus lucem, et vultu suo illuminavit, et vidit quia bona est. Non ex parte Dei, sed generale judicium est. Itaque non in splendore tantummodo, sed in omni utilitate gratia lucis probatur. Unde et discretio fit inter lucem et tenebras; ut separata lucis natura atque tenebrarum, nihil videatur intra se habere confusum.", "source": "PL 14, col. 142C", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And he distinguished between the light and the darkness; and God saw the light, that it was good (Gen 1:4). He spoke, and no one heard the sound of a voice; he distinguished, and no one caught the labour of the working; he saw, and no one beheld the straining of his eyes. And God saw, it says, the light, that it was good. He did not see what he did not know; nor did he approve what he had not known before, or had not seen: but it is the property of good works that they need no one else to commend them, but attest their own grace when they are seen. What is proved by the sight is more than what is praised by speech. For it uses its own testimony, not another's suffrage. And if among us judgement is issued through the eyes, by which both the grace of beauty and the measure of things is grasped at once, how much more does God see all that he approves, and approve what he sees, according to what is written: The eyes of the Lord are upon the just (Ps 34:16 [Vg 33:16])? Such is the nature of light, that its grace lies not in number, not in measure, not in weight, as other things do, but wholly in the beholding. In its own words, then, he expressed the nature of light, which pleases by being seen, since it is light itself that supplies the office of seeing. Nor was it without cause that it could find so great a herald, by whom it is rightly praised first, since it is light that made the other members of the world worthy of praise too. God therefore saw the light, and lit it with his own face, and saw that it was good. This is not a judgement on God's part, but a general one. And so the grace of light is proved not only in its splendour but in its whole usefulness. And hence the distinction is made between the light and the darkness, so that, the nature of light and of darkness being separated, nothing may be seen to have anything confused within it.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "ambrose-hex-6-7-40", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ambrose-hex-6-7-40/", "author": "Ambrose", "tradition": "latin", "date": 387, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Faciamus, inquit, hominem ad nostram imaginem, et ad similitudinem nostram (Gen., I, 26) . Quis hoc dicit? Nonne Deus, qui te fecit? Quid est Deus? Caro, an spiritus? Non caro utique, sed spiritus, cujus similis caro esse non potest; quia ipse incorporeus et invisibilis est, 128 caro autem comprehenditur et videtur. Cui dicit? Non sibi utique, quia non dicit, faciam, sed faciamus. Non Angelis; quia ministri sunt; servi autem cum domino, et opera cum auctore non possunt operationis habere consortium: sed dicit Filio: etiamsi Judaei nolint; etiamsi Ariani repugnent. Sed et Judaei conticescant, et Ariani cum suis parentibus obmutescant, qui dum unum a consortio divinae operationis excludunt, plures inserunt; et praerogativam quam Filio negant, servulis donant. 41. Sed esto; ut adminiculo servulorum ad operandum Deus vobis indiguisse videatur. Si operatio communis est cum angelis Deo, numquid Deo et angelis imago communis est? Numquid angelis diceret: Faciamus hominem ad nostram imaginem, et ad similitudinem nostram?", "source": "PL 14, col. 257A", "cc_idno": "6958", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Let us make, he says, a human to our image and to our likeness (Gen 1:26). Who says this? Is it not God, who made you? What is God? Flesh, or spirit? Not flesh, surely, but spirit, whose likeness flesh cannot be; because he is incorporeal and invisible, whereas flesh is grasped and seen. To whom does he say it? Not to himself, surely, for he does not say, I shall make, but, let us make. Not to angels; because they are servants; and servants with their lord, and works with their author, cannot have a partnership of working: but he says it to the Son, even if the Jews are unwilling, even if the Arians fight back. Let the Jews be silent, and let the Arians be struck dumb along with their parents, who, while they shut one out from the fellowship of the divine working, bring in many; and the prerogative they deny to the Son they make a gift of to little servants. But be it so — that God should seem to you to have needed the support of little servants in order to work. If the working is common to God with the angels, is the image then common to God and the angels? Would he say to angels: let us make a human to our image and to our likeness?", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-1/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 845, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "libet inquirere quare volumen istud specialiter Genesis vocetur, cum in eo multa commemorantur quae ad generationem non pertinere noscuntur, nisi quia consuetudo est Hebraeorum ex principiis nomina librorum imponere, sicut Exodus, et multi alii nuncupantur. Unde Bresith Hebraice, Latine non immerito Genesis interpretatur: eo quod in ipso exordio de creatione coeli, ac terrae, et generatione hominum animantiumque narratur.", "source": "PL 115, col. 111A", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It is worth asking why this volume is called Genesis in particular, since many things are recorded in it which are known not to pertain to generation — unless it be that the Hebrews have the custom of imposing the names of books from their openings, as Exodus and many others are named. Whence Bresith in Hebrew is not undeservedly rendered Genesis in Latin: because in its very opening the creation of heaven and earth, and the generation of men and living creatures, is narrated.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-1b/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 850, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sed quaeritur cur ita dictum est: In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, et non dictum est: In principio dixit Deus: Fiat coelum et terra, sicut de luce narratur: Dixit Deus: Fiat lux, et reliqua? Nisi quia prius universaliter nomine coeli et terrae comprehendendum erat, et commendandum quod fecit, et deinde per partes exsequendum, sicuti actum legitur.", "source": "PL 115, col. 114C", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But it is asked why it is said thus: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth', and not said: 'In the beginning God said, Let heaven and earth be made', as it is told of the light: 'God said, Let there be light', and the rest? — Unless because first what he made had to be taken in universally under the name of heaven and earth, and commended, and then gone through in its parts, as it is read to have been done.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-1c/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 850, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Deus enim ex nihilo condidit informem materiam, et ex ipsa cuncta creavit, juxta quod scriptum est in libro Sapientiae: Non enim erat manus tua, Domine, invalida, qua creasti mundum ex informi materia (Sap. XI, 18) . Unde philosophi, prout jam dictum est, non valentes penetrare quemadmodum divina Sapientia mundum creavit ex nihilo, aestimabant coaeternum esse mundum. Ista propterea dicunt, quia attendunt fabrum, et non Deum. Aiunt enim: Lignum adjuvat fabrum, et argentum argentarium, et aurum aurificem. His enim quamvis indigeant, tamen creare nequeunt. Dominus autem nihil horum indiguit, sed ex informi materia condidit omnia, non extra se tanquam faber (non enim faber facit lignum, sed de ligno aliquid facit). Omnipotens autem nulla re adjuvandus erat, quam ipse non fecerat, ut quod volebat efficeret, alioquin Deus non esset.", "source": "PL 115, col. 114B", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "For God founded formless matter out of nothing, and out of it created all things, according to what is written in the book of Wisdom: 'For your hand, Lord, was not powerless, which created the world out of formless matter' (Wis 11:17). Whence the philosophers, as has already been said, not being able to penetrate how the divine Wisdom created the world out of nothing, reckoned the world to be coeternal. They say these things because they attend to the craftsman and not to God. For they say: wood helps the craftsman, and silver the silversmith, and gold the goldsmith. Yet although they need these, they cannot create. But the Lord needed none of these, and founded all things out of formless matter, not outside himself as a craftsman does — for the craftsman does not make the wood, but makes something out of wood. And the almighty had no need to be helped by any thing that he had not himself made in order to bring about what he willed; otherwise he would not be God.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 850, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sequitur: VERS. 2.-- Terra autem erat inanis et vacua. Cum superius ait: Creavit Deus coelum et terram, cur dicitur: Terra autem erat inanis et vacua? nisi quia ipsa informis materia, quae nomine terrae dicta est, inanis erat et vacua. Inanis videlicet, id est incomposita et necdum coadunata in species suas. Vacua vero, quia vacabat a gignendis fructibus. Unde alia translatio dicit: Invisa et incomposita. Invisa propter obscuritatem, Incomposita propter deformitatem, quia adhuc tota abysso, id est, immensa profunditate tegebatur aquarum. Unde per hoc quod ait: Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, quale sit coelum, quod primum condiderat, potest intelligi, videlicet quod ab omni hujus mundi volubili statu secretum, divinae praesentiae manet semper quietum.", "source": "PL 115, col. 114D", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "There follows, verse 2: 'But the earth was empty and void.' Since he said above, 'God created heaven and earth', why is it said, 'But the earth was empty and void'? — unless because that formless matter, which is called by the name of earth, was empty and void. Empty, that is, unordered and not yet gathered into its own kinds. Void, because it was free of any fruits to be brought forth. Whence another translation says: 'unseen and unordered'. Unseen because of darkness, unordered because of shapelessness, since it was still wholly covered by the deep, that is, by the measureless depth of the waters. Whence, by what he says — 'But the earth was empty and void' — it can be understood what kind of heaven it was that he had made first: namely that, set apart from all the turning state of this world, it remains always at rest in the divine presence.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-2/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 850, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sed ferebatur non localiter, sed potentialiter, regendo et sustentando ipsam informem materiam; sicut superfertur rebus fabricandis voluntas artificis. Unde bene alia translatio dicit: Incumbebat [ Z., incubabat ], seu confovebat, in similitudine volucris, ova calore animantis, ut manifeste intelligatur de Spiritu sancto, et non de spiritu hujus mundi, sicut haeretici putaverunt.", "source": "PL 115, col. 116A", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But he was borne not by place but by power, ruling and sustaining that formless matter, as the will of a craftsman is borne above the things to be made. Hence another translation well says 'was lying upon,' or 'was warming,' in the likeness of a bird quickening her eggs with her heat, so that it may be plainly understood of the Holy Spirit and not of the spirit of this world, as the heretics thought.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-3/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 845, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Caeterum quod ait, fiat lux, ob celeritatem divinae potentiae dicitur. Si enim quarta die describuntur luminaria facta, quae lucem administrant, quid est quod dixit, Fiat lux? An forsitan jam erat aliqua lux creata supra firmamentum, quo lumine sol illuminaretur? Sed nomine lucis angelica dignitas figuratur, quae profecto per superius coelum significatur, nunc lux dicitur. Prius itaque condita est, sed postea convertendo ad contuendam gloriam sui creatoris lux effecta. Et ideo dictum est: Fiat lux, et facta est lux. Ac si manifeste diceretur: Convertatur ad contemplandum incessabiliter me", "source": "PL 115, col. 116D", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "As for his saying 'let there be light', it is said on account of the swiftness of the divine power. For if the luminaries which supply light are described as made on the fourth day, what is it that he said, 'Let there be light'? Was there perhaps already some light created above the firmament, by whose illumination the sun was lit? Rather, by the name of light the angelic dignity is figured, which is signified by the higher heaven and is here called light. It was founded first, then, but was afterwards made light by turning to behold the glory of its creator. And therefore it was said, 'Let there be light, and light was made' — as if it were plainly being said: Let it turn to contemplate me unceasingly.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-4/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 850, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Caeterum dum dicit, divisitque lucem a tenebris, ostendit quia distinctio facta est inter lucem et tenebras, non tenebrae factae; quemadmodum clamando vocem, silentium autem non clamando dicimus, quia cessatio vocis silentium est. Distinguimus tamen sensu quodam inter ea, et illud vocamus vocem, istud silentium. Quemadmodum ergo recte dicimus facere silentium, sic recte Deus dicitur facere tenebras; quia lucem, quibus vult, temporibus et locis vel dat, vel detrahit. Quia, ut Clemens ait: Unam [ Z., imam], inquit, mundi partem illustrans aliam reliquit obscuram. Lucem videlicet in superiore orbis parte diffundendo, in qua humana erat conversatio futura, inferiora vero ejus priscis in tenebris remanendo. Si cui hoc accipere placuerit, nos, ut coepimus, B. Augustini [Suppl. ex Z., dicta] sequi, et expositionem magistri nisi sumus. Et divisit Deus lucem ac tenebras [ Z., a tenebris ], et reliqua. Id est, coelestes angelorum cives ab inmundis spiritibus, quando Lucifer avertendo a Creatore, et convertendo ad se, aestimans sibi sufficere, superbia tumidus, sine auxilio sui conditoris, ejectus est cum suis sequacibus a coelestibus, et caeteri in sua stabilitate permanserunt, hos nuncupans diem, illos noctem, juxta quod sequitur, appellavitque lucem diem, et tenebras noctem. Quia ruina ruentium aeterna facta est stabilitas permanentium", "source": "PL 115, col. 117C", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But when he says, and he divided the light from the darkness, he shows that a distinction was made between light and darkness, not that darkness was made; as we say we make a voice by crying out, and silence by not crying out, because the ceasing of the voice is silence. Yet we distinguish between them by a kind of sense, and call the one voice and the other silence. As therefore we rightly say that we make silence, so God is rightly said to make darkness; because he either gives or withdraws light, at what times and places he wills. Because, as Clement says: Lighting up one part of the world, he left the other dark — namely by spreading the light over the upper part of the world, in which the human way of life was to be, and the lower parts of it remaining in their ancient darkness. If anyone chooses to take it so, we, as we began, have striven to follow blessed Augustine and the exposition of the master. And God divided the light and the darkness, and the rest. That is, the heavenly citizens of the angels from the unclean spirits, when Lucifer, turning away from the Creator and turning to himself, reckoning that he sufficed to himself, swollen with pride, was cast out from the heavenly places with his followers, without the help of his maker, and the rest remained in their stability — calling these day and those night, according to what follows: and he called the light day, and the darkness night. For the ruin of those who fell became the eternal stability of those who remained.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "angelom-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/angelom-gen-1-5/", "author": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "tradition": "latin", "date": 850, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 5.-- Factumque est vespere et mane dies unus. Quaerendum est cur dicatur, vespere et mane, cum adhuc non erat sol in firmamento, cujus occasu vespere et ortu mane efficerentur? An forte tantum spatium prima, et secunda, et tertia dies habuit, quantum est ab ortu solis usque ad occasum, et iterum aquilonem gyrando revertitur ad orientem, ut suo fulgore tenebras mundi propellat, et quod spatium illi qui in antris et in ergastulis, licet luce careant, sentire per usum possunt; quod fortassis ita intelligi valeret, nisi adderetur vespere et mane. Unde restat ut in [Cod. Z. om. in] vespera intelligatur perfectio praecedentis operis, et mane inchoatio subsequentis. Loquitur enim more nostro Scriptura, ut distinctio operum Dei intelligatur. Porro quod ait, vespere et mane dies unus, potest referii ad angelicam creaturam. Quando enim intuitum avertebat a Deo, et convertebatur ad contuendam creaturam, quodammodo vespere erat; cum vero ad Creatorem convertebatur, ut in ipso clarius intelligeret creaturam, mane erat. Verumtamen si permansisset in consideratione creaturae, non solum vespere, sed etiam nox esset. Dies unus bene additur propter unitatem angelicae dignitatis, quae ita uni Deo contemplando inhaeret, ut nunquam intuitum amoveat a contemplatione.", "source": "PL 115, col. 118B", "cc_idno": "9032", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 5. 'And there was evening and morning, one day.' It must be asked why 'evening and morning' is said, when the sun was not yet in the firmament, by whose setting evening and by whose rising morning would be made. Or did the first and second and third day perhaps have as much space as there is from the rising of the sun to its setting, and again, wheeling by the north, it returns to the east so as to drive off the world's darkness by its brightness — the space which those who are in caves and workhouses, though they lack the light, can feel by habit? Which might perhaps be understood so, were it not that 'evening and morning' is added. So it remains that by evening is understood the perfecting of the preceding work, and by morning the beginning of the one that follows. For Scripture speaks after our manner, so that the distinction of God's works may be understood. Further, what it says, 'evening and morning, one day,' can be referred to the angelic creature. For when it turned its gaze away from God and turned to beholding the creature, in a manner it was evening; but when it turned back to the Creator, so as to understand the creature more clearly in him, it was morning. And yet, if it had remained in the consideration of the creature, it would have been not evening only but night. 'One day' is well added, on account of the unity of angelic dignity, which so clings to contemplating the one God that it never moves its gaze from contemplation.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "aug-civ-11-19", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-civ-11-19/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 417, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quamvis itaque divini sermonis obscuritas etiam ad hoc sit utilis, quod plures sententias veritatis parit et in lucem notitiae producit, dum alius eum sic, alius sic intelligit; ita tamen ut quod in obscuro loco intelligitur, vel attestatione rerum manifestarum, vel aliis locis minime dubiis asseratur; sive cum multa tractantur, ad id quoque perveniatur, quod sensit ille qui scripsit; sive id quidem lateat, sed ex occasione tractandae profundae obscuritatis alia quaedam vera dicantur: non mihi videtur ab operibus Dei absurda sententia, si cum lux illa prima facta est, Angeli creati intelliguntur, et inter sanctos Angelos et immundos fuisse discretum, ubi dictum est, Et divisit Deus inter lucem et tenebras; et vocavit Deus lucem diem, et tenebras vocavit noctem. Solus quippe ille ista discernere potuit, qui potuit etiam priusquam caderent praescire casuros, et lumine privatos veritatis in tenebrosa superbia remansuros. Nam inter istum nobis notissimum diem et noctem, id est inter hanc lucem et has tenebras, vulgatissima sensibus nostris luminaria coeli ut dividerent, imperavit: Fiant, inquit, luminaria in firmamento coeli, ut luceant super terram, et dividant inter diem et noctem. Et Paulo post: Et fecit, inquit, Deus duo luminaria magna; luminare majus in principia diei, et luminare minus in principia noctis; et stellas: et posuit illa Deus in firmamento coeli, lucere super terram, et praeesse diei et nocti, et dividere inter lucem et tenebras (Gen. I, 4, 5, 14, 16-18) . Inter illam vero lucem, quae sancta societas Angelorum est illustratione veritatis intelligibiliter fulgens, et ei contrarias tenebras, id est malorum angelorum aversorum a luce justitiae teterrimas mentes, ipse dividere potuit, cui etiam futurum, non naturae, sed voluntatis malum, occultum aut incertum esse non potuit.", "source": "PL 41, col. 332", "cc_idno": "21364", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Although, then, the obscurity of the divine speech is useful even for this, that it brings forth many opinions of the truth and produces them into the light of knowledge, while one man understands it this way and another that — provided always that what is understood in an obscure place is confirmed either by the attestation of manifest things, or by other passages not at all doubtful; and provided that, when many things are handled, one arrives also at what the writer meant, or, if that lies hidden, that on occasion of handling a deep obscurity some other true things are said: it does not seem to me an opinion at odds with the works of God, if, when that first light was made, the angels are understood to have been created, and a distinction to have been made between the holy angels and the unclean, where it is said, And God divided between the light and the darkness; and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. For he alone could distinguish these, who could also foreknow, before they fell, that they would fall, and that, deprived of the light of truth, they would remain in darksome pride. For between this day and night best known to us — that is, between this light and these darknesses — he commanded the luminaries of heaven most familiar to our senses to divide: Let there be, he said, luminaries in the firmament of heaven, that they may shine upon the earth, and divide between the day and the night. And a little after: And God made, he says, two great luminaries; the greater luminary for the beginning of the day, and the lesser luminary for the beginning of the night; and the stars: and God set them in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and to preside over the day and the night, and to divide between the light and the darkness (Gen 1:4, 5, 14, 16–18). But between that light, which is the holy fellowship of the angels shining intelligibly with the illumination of truth, and the darkness contrary to it — that is, the most foul minds of the evil angels turned away from the light of justice — he alone could divide, to whom even a future evil, not of nature but of will, could not be hidden or uncertain.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "aug-civ-11-20", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-civ-11-20/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 417, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Denique nec illud est praetereundum silentio, quod ubi dixit Deus, Fiat lux, et facta est lux; continuo subjunctum est, Et vidit Deus lucem quia bona est: non posteaquam separavit inter lucem et tenebras; et vocavit lucem diem, et tenebras noctem, ne simul cum luce etiam talibus tenebris testimonium placiti sui perhibuisse videretur. Nam ubi tenebrae inculpabiles sunt, inter quas et lucem istam his oculis conspicuam luminaria coeli dividunt, non ante, sed post infertur, Et vidit Deus quia bonum est. Et posuit illa, inquit, in firmamento coeli, lucere super terram, et praeesse diei et nocti, et separare inter lucem et tenebras. Et vidit Deus quia bonum est. Utrumque enim placuit, quia utrumque sine peccato est. Ubi autem dixit Deus, Fiat lux, et facta est lux. Et vidit Deus lucem, quia bona est; et postmodum infertur, Et separavit Deus inter lucem et tenebras; vocavitque Deus lucem diem, et tenebras vocavit noctem (Gen. I, 3-5, 17, 18) : non hoc loco additum est, Et vidit Deus quia bonum est; ne utrumque appellaretur bonum, cum esset horum alterum malum, vitio proprio, non natura. Et ideo sola ibi lux placuit Conditori: tenebrae autem angelicae, etsi fuerant ordinandae, non tamen fuerant approbandae.", "source": "PL 41, col. 333", "cc_idno": "21364", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And this too is not to be passed over in silence, that where God said, Let there be light, and light was made, there was at once added, And God saw the light, that it was good — not after he had separated between the light and the darkness, and called the light day and the darkness night, lest he should seem to have borne the testimony of his approval to such darkness along with the light. For where the darkness is blameless, between which and this light visible to our eyes the luminaries of heaven divide, it is put not before but after: And God saw that it was good. And he set them, it says, in the firmament of heaven, to shine upon the earth, and to preside over the day and the night, and to separate between the light and the darkness. And God saw that it was good. For both pleased him, because both are without sin. But where God said, Let there be light, and light was made, and God saw the light, that it was good; and afterwards it is added, And God separated between the light and the darkness; and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night (Gen 1:3–5, 17, 18) — in this place it is not added, And God saw that it was good; lest both should be called good, when one of them was evil, by its own vice and not by nature. And therefore the light alone pleased the Creator there: but the angelic darkness, though it had to be ordered, did not have to be approved.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "aug-civ-11-32", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-civ-11-32/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 417, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Cum enim ita dicitur, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, ut Pater fecisse intelligatur in Filio, sicut attestatur Psalmus, ubi legitur, Quam magnificata sunt opera tua, Domine! omnia in sapientia fecisti (Psal. CIII, 24) : convenientissime paulo post commemoratur etiam Spiritus sanctus. Cum enim dictum esset, qualem terram Deus primitus fecerit, vel quam molem materiamve futurae constructionis mundi coeli et terrae nomine nuncupaverit, subjiciendo et addendo, Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum: mox ut Trinitatis commemoratio compleretur, Et spiritus, inquit, Dei superferebatur super aquam (Gen. I, 1-3) .", "source": "PL 41, col. 345", "cc_idno": "21364", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "For when it is said thus, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth', so that the Father is understood to have made in the Son — as the Psalm bears witness, where it reads, 'How magnified are your works, O Lord! you have made all things in wisdom' (Ps 104:24 [Vg 103:24]) — most fittingly a little after the Holy Spirit also is mentioned. For when it had been said what kind of earth God first made, or what mass and matter he had called by the name of heaven and earth for the construction of the world to come, by subjoining and adding, 'But the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the abyss', at once, that the mention of the Trinity might be completed, 'And the Spirit,' he says, 'of God was borne above the water' (Gen 1:1–3).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "aug-civ-11-7", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-civ-11-7/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 417, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Si tamen et vesperam diei hujus et mane aliquatenus congruenter intelligere valeamus. Quoniam scientia creaturae in comparatione scientiae Creatoris quodammodo vesperascit: itemque lucescit et mane fit, cum et ipsa refertur ad laudem dilectionemque Creatoris; nec in noctem vergitur, ubi non Creator creaturae dilectione relinquitur. Denique Scriptura cum illos dies dinumeraret ex ordine, nusquam interposuit vocabulum noctis. Non enim ait alicubi, Facta est nox; sed, Facta est vespera, et factum est mane dies unus (Gen. I, 5) . Ita dies secundus, et caeteri. Cognitio quippe creaturae in se ipsa decoloratior est, ut ita dicam, quam cum in Dei Sapientia cognoscitur, velut in arte qua facta est. Ideo vespera congruentius quam nox dici potest: quae tamen, ut dixi, cum ad laudandum et amandum refertur Creatorem, recurrit in mane. Et hoc cum facit in cognitione sui ipsius, dies unus est", "source": "PL 41, col. 322", "cc_idno": "21364", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "If, that is, we can understand the evening of this day and its morning with any fitness. For the knowledge of the creature, compared with the knowledge of the Creator, in a manner grows dusk; and again it grows light and becomes morning, when that knowledge too is referred to the praise and love of the Creator; nor does it fall away into night, where the Creator is not forsaken through love of the creature. In short, when Scripture numbered those days in order, it nowhere inserted the word 'night.' It nowhere says 'night was made,' but 'evening was made, and morning was made, one day' (Gen 1:5); and so a second day, and the rest. For the knowledge of a creature in itself is, so to speak, more faded than when it is known in the Wisdom of God, as in the art by which it was made. Therefore it can more fittingly be called evening than night; which nevertheless, as I said, when it is referred to the praise and love of the Creator, runs back into morning. And when it does this in the knowledge of itself, it is one day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "aug-civ-16-6", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-civ-16-6/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 417, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Poterat et illud, quando factus est homo, de Angelis intelligi quod dictum est, Faciamus hominem, quia non dixit, Faciam: sed quia sequitur, ad imaginem nostram; nec fas est credere ad imaginem Angelorum hominem factum, aut eamdem esse imaginem Angelorum et Dei; ideo recte illic intelligitur pluralitas Trinitatis. Quae tamen Trinitas, quia unus est Deus, etiam cum dixisset, Faciamus: Et fecit, inquit, Deus hominem ad imaginem Dei (Gen. I, 26, 26) : non dixit, Fecerunt dii, aut, ad imaginem deorum. Poterat et hic eadem intelligi Trinitas, tanquam Pater dixerit ad Filium et Spiritum sanctum, Venite, et descendentes confundamus ibi linguam eorum; si aliquid esset, quod Angelos prohiberet intelligi: quibus potius convenit venire ad Deum motibus sanctis, hoc est cogitationibus piis, quibus ab eis consulitur incommutabilis Veritas, tanquam lex aeterna in illa eorum curia superna.", "source": "PL 41, col. 483", "cc_idno": "21364", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "That too, when the human was made, could have been understood of the angels — what was said, let us make a human, since he did not say, I shall make: but because there follows, to our image; and it is not lawful to believe that the human was made to the image of the angels, or that the image of the angels and of God is the same; therefore the plurality of the Trinity is rightly understood there. Which Trinity, however, because it is one God, even when he had said, let us make, it says, and God made the human to the image of God: he did not say, the gods made, or, to the image of the gods. Here too the same Trinity could be understood, as though the Father had said to the Son and the Holy Spirit, come, and going down let us confound their language there — if there were anything to prevent the angels being understood: to whom it rather belongs to come to God by holy motions, that is, by pious thoughts, by which the unchangeable Truth is consulted by them, as an eternal law in that supernal court of theirs.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "aug-conf-11-9", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-conf-11-9/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 398, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In hoc Principio, Deus, fecisti coelum et terram, in Verbo tuo, in Filio tuo, in Virtute tua, in Sapientia tua, in Veritate tua, miro modo dicens, et miro modo faciens. Quis comprehendet? quis enarrabit?", "source": "PL 32, col. 813", "cc_idno": "7270", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In this Beginning, God, you made heaven and earth: in your Word, in your Son, in your Strength, in your Wisdom, in your Truth, speaking in a wondrous way and in a wondrous way making. Who shall grasp it? who shall tell it?", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "aug-conf-12-21", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-conf-12-21/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 400, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Item quod attinet ad intellectum verborum sequentium, ex illis omnibus veris, aliud sibi tollit qui dicit: Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum, id est, Corporale illud quod fecit Deus, adhuc materies erat corporearum rerum informis, sine ordine, sine luce. Aliud qui dicit: Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum, id est, Hoc totum quod coelum et terra appellatum est, adhuc informis et tenebrosa materies erat, unde fieret coelum corporeum et terra corporea, cum omnibus quae in eis sunt corporeis sensibus nota. Aliud qui dicit: Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum, id est, Hoc totum quod coelum et terra appellatum est, adhuc informis et tenebrosa materies erat, unde fieret coelum intelligibile quod alibi dicitur coelum coeli (Psal. CXIII, 16) ; et terra, scilicet omnis natura corporea, sub quo nomine intelligatur etiam hoc coelum corporeum; id est unde fieret omnis invisibilis visibilisque creatura. Aliud qui dicit: Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum; non illam informitatem nomine coeli et terrae Scriptura appellavit; sed jam erat, inquit, ipsa informitas quam terram invisibilem et incompositam tenebrosamque abyssum nominavit, de qua coelum et terram Deum fecisse praedixerat, spiritualem scilicet, corporalemque creaturam. Aliud qui dicit: Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum, id est, Informitas quaedam jam materies erat, unde coelum et terram Deum fecisse Scriptura praedixit: totam scilicet corpoream mundi molem, in duas maximas partes, superiorem atque inferiorem distributam, cum omnibus quae in eis sunt usitatis notisque creaturis.", "source": "PL 32, col. 837", "cc_idno": "7270", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Again, as regards the understanding of the words that follow, out of all those true meanings one man takes this for himself when he says: 'But the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the deep' — that is, That bodily thing which God made was still the formless matter of bodily things, without order, without light. Another when he says: 'But the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the deep' — that is, This whole which was called heaven and earth was still formless and dark matter, out of which bodily heaven and bodily earth were to be made, with all the things in them known to the bodily senses. Another when he says: 'But the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the deep' — that is, This whole which was called heaven and earth was still formless and dark matter, out of which was to be made the intelligible heaven, which is elsewhere called the heaven of heaven (Ps 115:16 [Vg 113:16]); and earth, that is, every bodily nature, under which name this bodily heaven too is to be understood: that is, out of which every invisible and visible creature was to be made. Another when he says: 'But the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the deep' — Scripture did not call that formlessness by the name of heaven and earth; rather, he says, that formlessness which he named 'earth invisible and unordered' and 'the dark deep' already was, and out of it, as he had said beforehand, God made heaven and earth, that is, the spiritual and the bodily creature. Another when he says: 'But the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the deep' — that is, A certain formlessness was already the matter out of which Scripture said beforehand that God made heaven and earth: namely the whole bodily mass of the world, divided into two greatest parts, the upper and the lower, with all the familiar and known creatures in them.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "aug-conf-12-22", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-conf-12-22/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 398, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Unde si aliquid Genesis tacuit Deum fecisse, quod tamen Deum fecisse nec sana fides, nec certus ambigit intellectus; nec ideo ulla sobria doctrina dicere audebit istas aquas coaeternas Deo, quia in libro Geneseos commemoratas quidem audivimus, ubi autem factae sint non invenimus: cur non informem quoque illam materiem, quam Scriptura haec terram invisibilem et incompositam, tenebrosamque abyssum appellat, docente veritate intelligamus a Deo factam esse de nihilo, ideoque illi non esse coaeternam, quamvis ubi facta sit, omiserit enuntiare ista narratio?", "source": "PL 32, col. 838", "cc_idno": "7270", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Hence if Genesis has passed over in silence something that God made — which nevertheless neither sound faith nor sure understanding doubts that God made — no sober teaching will on that account dare to say that those waters are coeternal with God, merely because we have heard them mentioned in the book of Genesis but do not find where they were made. Why then should we not understand, with truth teaching us, that the formless matter also, which this Scripture calls the invisible and unordered earth and the dark deep, was made by God out of nothing, and is therefore not coeternal with him — although this narrative has omitted to state where it was made?", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "aug-conf-12-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-conf-12-4/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 400, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quid ergo vocaretur, quod etiam sensu tardioribus utcumque insinuaretur, nisi usitato aliquo vocabulo? Quid autem in omnibus mundi partibus reperiri potest propinquius informati omnimodae, quam terra et abyssus? Minus enim speciosa sunt, pro suo gradu infimo, quam caetera superiora perlucida et luculenta omnia. Cur ergo non accipiam informitatem materiae, quam sine specie feceras, unde speciosum mundum faceres, ita commode hominibus intimatam, ut appellaretur terra invisibilis et incomposita? CAPUT V. Cur sic appellata videtur materia informis. 5. Ut cum in ea quaerit cogitatio quid sensus attingat, et dicit sibi, Non est intelligibilis forma sicut vita, sicut justitia, quia materies est corporum; neque sensibilis, quoniam quod videatur et quod sentiatur in invisibili et incomposita non est: dum sibi haec dicit humana cogitatio, conetur eam vel nosse ignorando, vel ignorare noscendo.", "source": "PL 32, col. 827", "cc_idno": "7270", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "What then was it to be called, so as to be conveyed even to those slower of understanding, if not by some familiar word? And what can be found in all the parts of the world nearer to complete formlessness than earth and the deep? For they are less comely, in their lowest degree, than all the other higher things, translucent and full of light. Why then should I not accept that the formlessness of matter — which you had made without form, that from it you might make a world of form — was so conveniently intimated to men that it should be called 'earth invisible and unordered'? [Chapter V. Why formless matter seems to be so called.] So that when thought searches in it for what sense may reach, and says to itself, It is not an intelligible form like life, like justice, since it is the matter of bodies; nor is it perceptible by sense, since what may be seen and what may be felt is not in the invisible and unordered — while human thought says this to itself, let it try either to know it by not knowing, or to be ignorant of it by knowing.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "aug-conf-12-7", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-conf-12-7/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 398, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et unde utcumque erat, nisi esset abs te, a quo sunt omnia in quantumcumque sunt? Sed tanto a te longius, quanto dissimilius; neque enim locis. Itaque tu, Domine, qui non es alias aliud et alias aliter, sed idipsum et idipsum et idipsum, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus omnipotens (Isai. VI, 3) ; in Principio quod est de te, in Sapientia tua quae nata est de substantia tua, fecisti aliquid et de nihilo. Fecisti enim coelum et terram; non de te: nam esset aequale Unigenito tuo, ac per hoc et tibi; et nullo modo justum esset, ut aequale tibi esset, quod de te non esset. Et aliud praeter te non erat unde faceres ea, Deus una Trinitas, et trina Unitas: et ideo de nihilo fecisti coelum et terram, magnum quiddam et parvum quiddam; quoniam omnipotens et bonus es ad facienda omnia bona, magnum coelum et parvam terram. Tu eras, et aliud nihil unde fecisti coelum et terram, duo quaedam; unum prope te, alterum prope nihil: unum, quo superior tu esses; alterum, quo inferius nihil esset.", "source": "PL 32, col. 828", "cc_idno": "7270", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And whence had it any being at all, unless it were from you, from whom are all things in whatever measure they are? Yet the further from you the more unlike — and not by places. And so you, Lord, who are not one thing at one time and another otherwise, but the selfsame and the selfsame and the selfsame, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God almighty (Isa 6:3): in the Beginning which is from you, in your Wisdom which was born of your substance, you made something, and made it out of nothing. For you made heaven and earth; not out of yourself, for then it would be equal to your Only-begotten and thereby to you, and it would in no way be just that what was not out of you should be equal to you. And there was nothing else besides you out of which you might make them, God, one Trinity and threefold Unity: and therefore you made heaven and earth out of nothing, a great something and a small something; since you are almighty and good, to make all things good, a great heaven and a small earth. You were, and there was nothing else out of which you made heaven and earth, two somethings: one near to you, the other near to nothing; one than which you alone were higher, the other than which nothing was lower.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "aug-conf-13-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-conf-13-5/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 400, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Ecce apparet mihi in aenigmate Trinitas, quod es Deus meus; quoniam tu, Pater, in Principio sapientiae nostrae quod est tua Sapientia de te nata, aequalis tibi et coaeterna, id est in Filio tuo, fecisti coelum et terram. Et multa diximus de coelo coeli, et de terra invisibili et incomposita, et de abysso tenebrosa, secundum spiritualis informitatis vagabunda deliquia, nisi converteretur ad eum a quo erat qualiscumque vita, et illuminatione fieret speciosa vita, et esset coelum coeli ejus, quod inter aquam et aquam postea factum est; et tenebam jam Patrem in Dei nomine, qui fecit haec, et Filium in Principii nomine in quo fecit haec; et Trinitatem credens Deum meum, sicuti credebam, quaerebam in eloquiis sanctis ejus, et ecce Spiritus tuus superferebatur super aquas. Ecce Trinitas Deus meus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus sanctus, creator universae creaturae.", "source": "PL 32, col. 847", "cc_idno": "7270", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Behold, the Trinity appears to me in a riddle, which you are, my God; since you, Father, in the Beginning of our wisdom — which is your Wisdom, born of you, equal to you and coeternal, that is, in your Son — made heaven and earth. And we have said many things about the heaven of heaven, and about the earth invisible and unordered, and about the darksome deep, according to the wandering falls of a spiritual formlessness, unless it were turned to him from whom it had whatever life it had, and by illumination were made a beautiful life, and were the heaven of that heaven which was afterwards made between water and water. And I already held the Father in the name of God, who made these things, and the Son in the name of the Beginning, in whom he made these things; and believing my God to be a Trinity, as I did believe, I sought it in his holy sayings — and behold, your Spirit was borne over the waters. Behold the Trinity, my God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, creator of all creation.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "aug-conf-13-9-10", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-conf-13-9-10/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 400, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Numquid aut Pater aut Filius non superferebatur super aquas? Si tanquam loco sicut corpus, nec Spiritus sanctus: si autem incommutabilis divinitatis eminentia super omne mutabile, et Pater et Filius et Spiritus sanctus superferebatur super aquas. Cur ergo tantum de Spiritu tuo dictum est hoc? cur de illo tantum dictum est? Quasi locus ibi esset, qui non est locus, de quo solo dictum est quod sit donum tuum. In dono tuo requiescimus; ibi te fruimur. Requies nostra, locus noster. Amor illuc attollit nos, et Spiritus tuus bonus exaltat humilitatem nostram de portis mortis (Psal. IX, 15) . In bona voluntate pax nobis est (Luc. II, 14) . Corpus pondere suo nititur ad locum suum. Pondus non ad ima tantum est, sed ad locum suum. Ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapsis. Ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt.", "source": "PL 32, col. 848", "cc_idno": "7270", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Was not the Father, or the Son, borne above the waters too? If we mean by place, as a body is, then neither was the Holy Spirit; but if we mean the eminence of unchangeable Godhead over everything changeable, then Father and Son and Holy Spirit were borne above the waters. Why then is this said only of your Spirit? Why of him alone? As if there were a place there, where there is no place, for him alone of whom it is said that he is your gift. In your gift we rest; there we enjoy you. Our rest is our place. Love lifts us there, and your good Spirit raises our lowliness from the gates of death. In good will is our peace. A body by its weight strives toward its own place. Weight is not only toward what is lowest, but toward its own place. Fire tends upward, a stone downward. They are driven by their weights; they seek their places.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-1-1/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 410, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Si ergo utroque modo illa Scriptura scrutanda est, quaeramus quomodo dictum est praeter allegoricam significationem, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram: utrum in principio temporis; an quia primo omnium facta sint; an in principio, quod est Verbum Dei unigenitus Filius.", "source": "PL 34, col. 247", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "If, then, that Scripture is to be searched in both ways, let us ask how it was said, apart from the allegorical signification, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth': whether in the beginning of time; or because they were made first of all; or in the beginning which is the Word of God, the only-begotten Son.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-1-11", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-1-11/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 410, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Utquid ergo factus est sol in potestatem diei (Psal. CXXXV, 8) , qui luceret super terram, si lux illa diei faciendo suffecerat, quae dies etiam vocata est? An illa prior regiones superiores a terra longinquas illustrabat, ut sentiri non posset in terris; atque ita oportebat solem fieri, per quem dies inferioribus mundi partibus appareret? Potest et hoc dici, auctum esse fulgorem dici sole addito, ut per illam lucem minus fulgens dies quam nunc est fuisse credatur. Etiam hoc a quodam dictum scio, primum naturam lucis inductam in opere Creatoris, cum dictum est, Fiat lux, et facta est lux; postea vero cum de luminaribus dicitur, quid ex ipsa luce factum sit fuisse commemoratum, ordine dierum, quo visum est Creatori cuncta esse facienda", "source": "PL 34, col. 254", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Why then was the sun made 'to rule the day' (Ps 136:8), to shine over the earth, if that light was sufficient for making a day — the light that was itself called Day? Or did that earlier light illuminate regions high and far from the earth, so that it could not be felt on earth, and so the sun had to be made, through which day might appear to the lower parts of the world? This too can be said: that the brightness was increased by the addition of the sun, so that the day is believed to have been less bright by that earlier light than it is now. This too I know to have been said by someone: that the nature of light was first brought in in the Creator's work, when it was said 'Let there be light, and light was made'; but afterwards, when the luminaries are spoken of, it was recorded what was made out of that same light, in the order of the days in which it seemed good to the Creator that all things should be made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-1-17", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-1-17/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 401, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "An hic dies totius temporis nomen est, et omnia volumina saeculorum hoc vocabulo includit; ideoque non dictus est primus, sed unus dies? Et facta est enim vespera, et factum est, inquit, mane dies unus: ut per hoc quod facta est vespera, peccatum rationalis creaturae; quod autem factum est mane, renovatio ejus significata videatur.", "source": "PL 34, col. 259", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Or is this day the name of the whole of time, and does it include all the volumes of the ages under this one word — and is that why it was called not 'first' but 'one day'? For 'and there was evening,' he says, 'and there was morning, one day': so that by the evening's being made the sin of the rational creature may be signified, and by the morning's being made, its renewal.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-1-18-36", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-1-18-36/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 410, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sed ante omnia meminerimus, unde jam multa diximus, non temporalibus quasi animi sui aut corporis motibus operari Deum, sicut operatur homo vel angelus; sed aeternis atque incommutabilibus et stabilibus rationibus coaeterni sibi Verbi sui, et quodam, ut ita dixerim, fotu pariter coaeterni sancti Spiritus sui. Nam et illud quod per graecam et latinam linguam dictum est de Spiritu Dei, quod superferebatur super aquas, secundum syrae linguae intellectum, quae vicina est hebraeae, (nam hoc a quodam docto christiano syro fertur expositum) non superferebatur, sed fovebat potius intelligi perhibetur. Nec sicut foventur tumores aut vulnera in corpore aquis vel frigidis vel calore congruo temperatis; sed sicut ova foventur ab alitibus, ubi calor ille materni corporis etiam formandis pullis quodammodo adminiculatur, per quemdam in suo genere dilectionis affectum.", "source": "PL 34, col. 260", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But before all else let us remember, as we have already said at length, that God does not work by temporal motions, as it were of his mind or body, as a man or an angel works, but by the eternal, unchangeable and stable reasons of his Word, coeternal with himself, and by a certain — if I may so put it — brooding warmth of his Holy Spirit, equally coeternal. For even what is said in Greek and in Latin of the Spirit of God, that he 'was borne above the waters,' according to the sense of the Syriac tongue, which is neighbor to Hebrew (for this is reported to have been explained by a certain learned Syrian Christian), is held to mean not 'was borne above' but rather 'was warming.' Not as swellings or wounds in the body are warmed with water, whether cold or tempered to a fitting heat; but as eggs are warmed by birds, where that heat of the mother's body in a way assists even the forming of the chicks, through a certain affection of love after its kind.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-1-3/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 410, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et quid est lux ipsa quae facta est? utrum spirituale quid, an corporale? Si enim spirituale, potest ipsa esse prima creatura, jam hoc dicto perfecta, quae primo coelum appellata est, cum dictum est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram: ut quod dixit Deus, Fiat lux; et facta est lux, eam revocante ad se Creatore, conversio ejus facta atque illuminata intelligatur.", "source": "PL 34, col. 248", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And what is that light itself which was made? Is it something spiritual, or something bodily? For if spiritual, it can itself be the first creature, already made perfect by this saying, which was first called heaven when it was said, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth' — so that what God said, 'Let there be light, and light was made', may be understood as its turning and illumination, the Creator calling it back to himself.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-1-5-11/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 401, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Propterea priusquam scriberetur, Dixit Deus, Fiat lux; praecessit Scriptura dicens, Et Spiritus Dei superferebatur super aquam. Quia sive aquae nomine appellare voluit totam corporalem materiam, ut eo modo insinuaret unde facta et formata sint omnia, quae in suis generibus jam dignoscere possumus, appellans aquam, quia ex humida natura videmus omnia in terra per species varias formari atque concrescere; sive spiritualem vitam quamdam ante formam conversionis quasi fluitantem: superferebatur utique Spiritus Dei; quia subjacebat scilicet bonae voluntati Creatoris, quidquid illud erat quod formandum perficiendumque inchoaverat: ut dicente Deo in Verbo suo, Fiat lux; in bona voluntate, hoc est in beneplacito ejus pro modulo sui generis maneret quod factum est; et ideo rectum est, quod placuerit Deo, Scriptura dicente, Et facta est lux; et vidit Deus lucem quia bona est. CAPUT VI.-- Trinitas insinuata cum in inchoatione, tum in perfectione creaturae. 12. Ut quemadmodum in ipso exordio inchoatae creaturae, quae coeli et terrae nomine, propter id quod de illa perficiendum erat, commemorata est, Trinitas insinuatur Creatoris (nam dicente Scriptura, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram; intelligimus Patrem in Dei nomine, et Filium in principii nomine, qui non Patri, sed per seipsum creatae primitus ac potissimum spirituali creaturae, et consequenter etiam universae creaturae principium est: dicente autem Scriptura, Et Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquam, completam commemorationem Trinitatis agnoscimus); ita et in conversione atque perfectione creaturae, ut rerum species digerantur, eadem Trinitas insinuetur: Verbum Dei scilicet, et Verbi generator, cum dicitur, Dixit Deus; et sancta bonitas, in qua Deo placet quidquid ei pro suae naturae modulo perfectum placet, cum dicitur, Vidit Deus quia bonum est. CAPUT VII.-- Spiritus Dei cur dictus est superferri super aquam. 13. Sed cur commemorata prius quamvis imperfecta creatura, postea commemoratur Spiritus Dei, prius dicente Scriptura, Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum ; ac deinde inferente, Et Spiritus Dei superferebatur super aquam? An quoniam egenus atque indigus amor ita diligit, ut rebus quas diligit, subjiciatur; propterea cum commemoraretur Spiritus Dei, in quo sancta ejus benevolentia dilectioque intelligitur, superferri dictus est, ne facienda opera sua per indigentiae necessitatem potius quam per abundantiam beneficentiae Deus amare putaretur?", "source": "PL 34, col. 250", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Therefore, before it was written 'God said, Let there be light,' Scripture went before it, saying, 'And the Spirit of God was borne above the water.' For whether by the name of water he meant the whole of corporeal matter, so as to intimate by that means whence all the things we can now distinguish in their kinds were made and formed (calling it water because we see everything on earth formed and grown together out of a moist nature through its various species), or a kind of spiritual life, floating as it were before the form of its turning: in either case the Spirit of God was borne above, because whatever it was that he had begun, to be formed and perfected, lay beneath the good will of the Creator; so that when God said in his Word, 'Let there be light,' what was made might abide in his good will, that is in his good pleasure, after the measure of its kind; and so it is right that it pleased God, Scripture saying, 'And light was made; and God saw the light, that it was good.' […] But why, after the creature had first been mentioned, imperfect as it was, is the Spirit of God mentioned afterwards, Scripture first saying 'But the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the abyss,' and then bringing in 'And the Spirit of God was borne above the water'? Is it because a needy and destitute love so loves that it is subjected to the things it loves; and therefore, when the Spirit of God was mentioned, in whom his holy benevolence and love are understood, he was said to be borne above, lest God should be thought to love the works he was to make out of the necessity of want rather than out of the abundance of bounty?", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-1-9", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-1-9/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 410, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et cur ita dictum est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram; et non dictum est, In principio dixit Deus, Fiat coelum et terra; et facta sunt coelum et terra: sicut de luce narratur, Dixit Deus, Fiat lux; et facta est lux? Utrum prius universaliter nomine coeli et terrae comprehendendum erat et commendandum quod fecit Deus; et deinde per partes exsequendum, quomodo fecit, cum per singula dicitur, Dixit Deus; id est, quia per Verbum suum fecit, quidquid fecit?", "source": "PL 34, col. 249", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And why is it said thus, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth', and not said, 'In the beginning God said, Let heaven and earth be made; and heaven and earth were made', as it is told of the light, 'God said, Let there be light; and light was made'? Was it that first, under the name of heaven and earth, what God made had to be taken in universally and commended; and then to be gone through in its parts — how he made it — when at each thing it is said, 'God said', that is, because through his Word he made whatever he made?", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-3-19-29", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-3-19-29/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 401, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "hoc primum breviter dicimus, non indifferenter accipiendum quod in aliis operibus dicitur, Dixit Deus, Fiat; hic autem, Dixit Deus, Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram: ad insinuandam scilicet, ut ita dicam, pluralitatem personarum propter Patrem, et Filium, et Spiritum sanctum. Quam tamen deitatis unitatem intelligendam statim admonet, dicens, Et fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem Dei; non quasi Pater ad imaginem Filii, aut Filius ad imaginem Patris; alioquin non vere dictum est, ad imaginem nostram, si ad Patris solius, aut Filii solius imaginem factus est homo: sed ita dictum est, fecit Deus ad imaginem Dei: tanquam diceretur, fecit Deus ad imaginem suam. Cum autem nunc dicitur, ad imaginem Dei, cum superius dictum sit, ad imaginem nostram; significatur quod non id agat illa pluralitas personarum, ut plures deos vel dicamus, vel credamus, vel intelligamus; sed Patrem et Filium et Spiritum sanctum, propter quam Trinitatem dictum est ad imaginem nostram, unum Deum accipiamus, propter quod dictum est, ad imaginem Dei.", "source": "PL 34, col. 291", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "This first we say briefly, that it is not to be taken as a matter of indifference that in the other works it is said, God said, let it be; but here, God said, let us make a human to our image and likeness: namely, to intimate, if I may so put it, a plurality of persons on account of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Yet he at once warns us that the unity of the deity is to be understood, saying, and God made the human to the image of God; not as though the Father to the image of the Son, or the Son to the image of the Father; otherwise it was not truly said, to our image, if the human was made to the image of the Father alone, or of the Son alone: but it was said thus, God made to the image of God, as though it were said, God made to his own image. And since it now says, to the image of God, when it had said above, to our image, it is signified that that plurality of persons does not work so that we should either say, or believe, or understand many gods; but that we should take the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — on account of which Trinity it was said, to our image — as one God, on account of which it was said, to the image of God.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-4-22", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-4-22/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 410, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et quia caeterae creaturae, quae infra ipsam fiunt, sine cognitione ejus non fiunt, propterea nimirum idem dies ubique repetitur, ut ejus repetitione fiant tot dies, quoties distinguuntur rerum genera creatarum, perfectione senarii numeri terminanda: ut vespera primi diei sit etiam sui cognitio, non se esse quod Deus est; mane autem post hanc vesperam, quo concluditur dies unus, et inchoatur secundus, conversio sit ejus, qua id quod creata est, ad laudem referat Creatoris, et percipiat de Verbo Dei cognitionem creaturae quae post ipsam fit, hoc est firmamenti", "source": "PL 34, col. 312", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And because the other creatures, which are made below it, are not made without its knowledge, therefore of course the same day is repeated throughout, so that by its repetition there come to be as many days as there are kinds of created things to be distinguished, to be brought to an end by the perfection of the number six: so that the evening of the first day is its knowledge of itself, that it is not what God is; and the morning after this evening, by which the one day is closed and the second begun, is its turning, by which it refers what it has been created to the praise of the Creator, and receives from the Word of God the knowledge of the creature that is made after it, that is, of the firmament.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first", "first-light" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-5-18", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-5-18/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 412, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Jam nunc consideremus ea quae fecit Deus omnia simul, a quibus in die sexto consummatis requievit in septimo, postea consideraturi opera ejus, in quibus usque nunc operatur. Ipse enim ante saecula: a saeculo autem ea dicimus, ex quo coepit saeculum, sicut ipsum mundum; in saeculo autem, sicut ea quae nascuntur in mundo. Cum ergo Scriptura dixisset, Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil; paulo post ait, In hoc mundo erat, et mundus per ipsum factus est (Joan. I, 3, 10) . De hoc opere Dei alio loco scriptum est: Qui fecisti mundum de materia informi (Sap. XI, 18) . Hic mundus plerumque coeli et terrae nomine nuncupatur, sicut jam commemoravimus, quae Scriptura dicit Deum fecisse, cum factus est dies: de quibus verbis jam, quantum visum est, disputavimus, quemadmodum congruat conditioni mundi hujus, et quod sex diebus consummatus est cum omnibus quae in eo sunt, et quod tunc factus, cum factus est dies, ut et illud congruat quod creavit omnia simul (Eccli. XVIII. 1) . CAPUT XVIII.-- Creaturae plures nobis ignotae. Qua ratione a Deo et ab Angelis noscuntur. Cognitio matutina et vespertina. 36. Hujus universae Dei creaturae multa non novimus, sive quae in coelis sunt altius, quam ut noster sensus ea possit attingere; sive quae in regionibus terrarum fortassis inhabitabilibus; sive quae deorsum latent, vel in profundo abyssi, vel in occultis sinibus terrae. Haec igitur antequam fierent, utique non erant. Quomodo ergo Deo nota erant quae non erant? Et rursus quomodo ea faceret quae sibi nota non erant? Non enim quidquam fecit ignorans. Nota ergo fecit, non facta cognovit. Proinde, antequam fierent, et erant, et non erant: erant in Dei scientia, non erant in sua natura. Ac per hoc factus est dies ille, cui utroque modo innotescerent, et in Deo et in seipsis: illa velut matutina sive diurna cognitione, hac vero velut vespertina.", "source": "PL 34, col. 333", "cc_idno": "7302", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Now then let us consider those things which God made all at once, from which, when they were completed on the sixth day, he rested on the seventh — intending afterward to consider his works in which he works even now. […] Of this whole creation of God there is much we do not know: whether things in the heavens too high for our sense to reach them, or things in regions of the earth perhaps uninhabitable, or things hidden below, whether in the depth of the abyss or in the secret folds of the earth. Now these things, before they were made, certainly were not. How then were things known to God which were not? And again, how could he make things that were not known to him? For he made nothing in ignorance. He made them known, then; he did not come to know them once made. Accordingly, before they were made they both were and were not: they were in God's knowledge, they were not in their own nature. And therefore that day was made on which they should become known in both ways, both in God and in themselves: by that as it were morning or daylight knowledge, and by this as it were evening knowledge.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first", "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-imp-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-imp-1-2/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 393, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et quoniam multi haeretici ad suam sententiam, quae praeter fidem est catholicae disciplinae, expositionem Scripturarum divinarum trahere consueverunt; ante tractationem hujus libri catholica fides breviter explicanda est. 2. Est autem haec: Deum Patrem omnipotentem universam creaturam fecisse atque constituisse per Filium suum unigenitum, id est Sapientiam et Virtutem suam consubstantialem sibi et coaeternam, in unitate Spiritus sancti, et ipsius consubstantialis et coaeterni. Hanc ergo Trinitatem dici unum Deum, eumque fecisse et creasse omnia quae sunt, in quantum sunt, catholica disciplina credi jubet; ita ut creatura omnis sive intellectualis sive corporalis, vel quod brevius dici potest secundum verba divinarum Scripturarum, sive invisibilis sive visibilis, non de Dei natura, sed a Deo sit facta de nihilo: nihilque in ea esse quod ad Trinitatem pertineat, nisi quod Trinitas condidit, ista condita est. Quapropter creaturam universam neque consubstantialem Deo, neque coaeternam fas est dicere aut credere.", "source": "PL 34, col. 221", "cc_idno": "7310", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And since many heretics have been accustomed to drag the exposition of the divine Scriptures to their own opinion, which is beside the faith of catholic teaching, before the treatment of this book the catholic faith must briefly be set out. It is this: that God the Father almighty made and established the whole creation through his only-begotten Son, that is, his Wisdom and Power, consubstantial with him and coeternal, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, himself also consubstantial and coeternal. That this Trinity, then, is called one God, and that he made and created all things that are, in so far as they are, catholic teaching bids us believe; so that every creature, whether intellectual or corporeal — or, as it may be more briefly said in the words of the divine Scriptures, whether invisible or visible — is made not of God's nature but by God out of nothing: and that there is nothing in it belonging to the Trinity, except that the Trinity founded it and it was founded. Wherefore it is not lawful to say or believe that the whole creation is either consubstantial with God or coeternal.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-imp-16-61", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-imp-16-61/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 393, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Ille autem sensus est potius in his divinis verbis eligendos, ut ideo non dictum intelligamus singulariter, sed pluraliter, Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram; quia non ad solius Patris, aut solius Filii, aut solius Spiritus sancti, sed ad ipsius Trinitatis imaginem factus est homo. Quae Trinitas ita est Trinitas, ut unus Deus sit; ita est unus Deus, ut Trinitas sit. Non enim ait Filio loquens, Faciamus hominem ad imaginem tuam; aut, ad imaginem meam: sed pluraliter ait, ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram: a qua pluralitate Spiritum sanctum separare quis audeat? Quae pluralitas, quoniam non tres dii, sed unus est Deus, ideo intelligendum est postea Scripturam singulariter intulisse, atque dixisse, Et fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem Dei; ut non sic accipiatur, tanquam Deus Pater ad imaginem Dei, hoc est Filii sui: alioquin quomodo verum est, quod dictum est, ad imaginem nostram, si ad Filii solius imaginem factus est homo? Ac per hoc quia verum est quod ait Deus, ad imaginem nostram; ita dictum est, Fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem Dei, tanquam diceretur ad imaginem suam, quod est ipsa Trinitas.", "source": "PL 34, col. 244", "cc_idno": "7310", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But that sense is rather to be chosen in these divine words, that we should understand it as said not in the singular but in the plural — let us make a human to our image and likeness — because the human was made not to the image of the Father alone, or of the Son alone, or of the Holy Spirit alone, but to the image of the Trinity itself. Which Trinity is so a Trinity that it is one God; is so one God that it is a Trinity. For he does not say, speaking to the Son, let us make a human to your image, or, to my image: but he says in the plural, to our image and likeness: and who would dare to separate the Holy Spirit from that plurality? And since that plurality is not three gods but one God, it is therefore to be understood that Scripture afterwards brought it in in the singular, and said, and God made the human to the image of God; so that it should not be taken as though God the Father made him to the image of God, that is, of his Son: otherwise how is it true, what was said, to our image, if the human was made to the image of the Son alone? And by this, since what God says is true, to our image, it was said, God made the human to the image of God, as though it were said, to his own image, which is the Trinity itself.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-imp-2-6", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-imp-2-6/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 393, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Hoc ergo quod scriptum est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, quaeri potest utrum tantummodo secundum historiam accipiendum sit, an etiam figurate aliquid significet, et quomodo congruat Evangelio, et qua causa liber iste sic inchoatus sit. Secundum historiam autem quaeritur quid sit In principio, id est, utrum in principio temporis, an in principio in ipsa Sapientia Dei, quia et ipse Dei Filius principium se dixit, quando ei dictum est, Tu quis es; et dixit, Principium quod et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII, 25) . Est enim Principium sine principio, et est Principium cum alio principio. Principium sine principio solus Pater est, ideo ex uno principio esse omnia credimus: Filius autem ita Principium est, ut de Patre sit. Ipsa etiam prima creatura intellectualis potest dici principium iis quibus caput est, quae fecit Deus. Cum enim recte appelletur principium caput, in illa gradatione Apostolus mulierem tamen non dixit caput alicujus. Nam et virum dixit caput mulieris, et caput viri Christum, et caput Christi Deum (I Cor. XI, 3) : ita Creatori creatura subnectitur.", "source": "PL 34, col. 222", "cc_idno": "7310", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "This, then, that is written, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth', may be asked about: whether it is to be taken only according to history, or whether it also signifies something figuratively, and how it agrees with the Gospel, and for what cause this book was begun so. According to history it is asked what 'In the beginning' is — that is, whether in the beginning of time, or in the beginning which is the very Wisdom of God, since the Son of God also called himself the beginning, when it was said to him, 'Who are you?', and he said, 'The Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25). For there is a Beginning without a beginning, and there is a Beginning with another beginning. The Beginning without a beginning is the Father alone, and therefore we believe all things to be from one beginning; but the Son is a Beginning in such a way as to be from the Father. The first intellectual creature itself can also be called a beginning to those things of which it is the head, which God made. For since a head may rightly be called a beginning, in that gradation the Apostle nevertheless did not call the woman the head of anything. For he called the man the head of the woman, and Christ the head of the man, and God the head of Christ (1 Cor 11:3): so is the creature bound beneath the Creator.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-imp-4-16/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 393, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et Spiritus Dei superferebatur super aquam. Non ita superferebatur sicut oleum aquae, vel aqua terrae, id est, quasi contineretur; sed, si ad hoc de visibilibus exempla capienda sunt, sicut superfertur lux ista solis aut lunae his corporibus, quae illuminat in terra: non enim continetur illis; sed cum coelo contineatur, istis superfertur. Item cavendum est ne quasi locorum spatiis Dei Spiritum superferri materiae putemus, sed vi quadam effectoria et fabricatoria, ut illud cui superfertur efficiatur, et fabricetur; sicut superfertur voluntas artificis ligno, vel cuique rei subjectae ad operandum, vel etiam ipsis membris corporis sui, quae ad operandum movet.", "source": "PL 34, col. 226", "cc_idno": "7310", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And the Spirit of God was borne above the water.' He was not borne above it as oil is above water, or water above earth, that is, as though he were contained; but, if examples are to be taken from visible things for this, as the light of the sun or moon is borne above the bodies it illuminates on earth: for it is not contained in them, but, while it is contained by the sky, it is borne above them. Likewise we must take care not to think the Spirit of God is borne above matter as though across spaces of place, but by a certain effecting and fashioning force, so that what he is borne above is effected and fashioned; as the will of a craftsman is borne above the wood, or above whatever thing is set under him to be worked, or even above the very limbs of his own body, which he moves in order to work.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-imp-5-23", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-imp-5-23/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 393, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit Deus inter lucem et tenebras. Hinc intelligi licet quanta divini operis facilitate ista dicantur effecta. Non enim quisquam est qui sic existimet lucem factam, ut esset confusa cum tenebris, et ob hoc postea separationis indigeret; sed eo ipso quo lux facta est, consecuta est etiam divisio inter lucem et tenebras. Quae enim societas lucis cum tenebris (II Cor. VI, 14) ? Deus ergo divisit inter lucem et tenebras, quia lucem fecit, cujus absentia tenebrae vocantur. Interest autem inter lucem et tenebras, sicut interest inter vestimentum et nuditatem, aut plenum et inane, et similia.", "source": "PL 34, col. 228", "cc_idno": "7310", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God divided between the light and the darkness. From this it may be understood with how great an ease of divine working these things are said to have been effected. For there is no one who so supposes the light to have been made that it was confused with the darkness, and for that reason needed a separation afterwards; but by the very fact that the light was made, the division between light and darkness also followed. For what fellowship has light with darkness (2 Cor 6:14)? God therefore divided between light and darkness, because he made the light, whose absence is called darkness. And there is a difference between light and darkness such as there is between a garment and nakedness, or the full and the empty, and the like.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnl-imp-5-25", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnl-imp-5-25/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 393, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sive ergo lucem aetheream, sive sensualem cujus animalia participant, sive rationalem quam Angeli et homines habent, a Deo factam primitus in rerum natura haec sententia vult intelligi; divisisse Deum inter lucem et tenebras, eo ipso quo lux facta est, oportet accipi, quod aliud est lux, aliud illae privationes lucis, quas in contrariis tenebris ordinavit Deus. Non enim Deum fecisse tenebras dictum est: quoniam species ipsas Deus fecit, non privationes quae ad nihilum pertinent, unde ab artifice Deo facta sunt omnia; quas tamen ab eo ordinatas intelligimus, cum dicitur, Et divisit Deus inter lucem et tenebras, ne vel ipsae privationes non haberent ordinem suum, Deo cuncta regente atque administrante. Sicut in cantando interpositiones silentiorum certis moderatisque intervallis, quamvis vocum privationes sint, bene tamen ordinantur ab iis qui cantare sciunt, et suavitati universae cantilenae aliquid conferunt. Et umbrae in picturis eminentiora quaeque distinguunt, ac non specie, sed ordine placent. Nam et vitiorum nostrorum non est auctor Deus; sed tamen ordinator est, cum eo loco peccatores constituit, et ea perpeti cogit quae merentur. Ad hoc valet quod oves ponuntur ad dexteram, haedi autem ad sinistram (Matth. XXV, 33) . Quaedam ergo et facit Deus, et ordinat; quaedam vero tantum ordinat. Justos et facit, et ordinat; peccatores autem in quantum peccatores sunt, non facit, sed ordinat tantum. Quippe cum illos ad dexteram, illos ad sinistram constituit, et quod in ignem aeternum jubet ire, ad meritorum ordinem valet. Ita species naturasque ipsas et facit, et ordinat; privationes autem specierum defectusque naturarum non facit, sed ordinat tantum. Dixit itaque, Fiat lux; et facta est lux. Non dixit, Fiant tenebrae; et factae sunt tenebrae. Horum ergo unum fecit, alterum non fecit, utrumque tamen ordinavit, cum divisit Deus inter lucem et tenebras. Ita et ipso faciente pulchra sunt singula, et ipso ordinante pulchra sunt omnia.", "source": "PL 34, col. 229", "cc_idno": "7310", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Whether, then, this sentence would have us understand the ethereal light, or the sensitive light in which animals share, or the rational light which angels and men have, to have been made by God first in the nature of things — that God divided between light and darkness, by the very fact that light was made, must be taken to mean that light is one thing and those privations of light another, which God set in order under the name of their contrary, darkness. For it is not said that God made the darkness: since God made the forms themselves, not the privations, which belong to nothing, whence all things were made by God the craftsman; yet we understand that they were set in order by him, when it is said, And God divided between light and darkness — lest even those privations should not have their own order, God ruling and administering all things. As in singing, the interpositions of silences at fixed and measured intervals, although they are privations of sound, are nevertheless well ordered by those who know how to sing, and contribute something to the sweetness of the whole song. And the shadows in paintings set off whatever is more prominent, and please not by their form but by their order. For God is not the author of our vices either; yet he is their orderer, when he sets sinners in that place and compels them to suffer what they deserve. To this belongs it that the sheep are set on the right hand and the goats on the left (Matt 25:33). Some things, then, God both makes and orders; some he only orders. The just he both makes and orders; sinners, in so far as they are sinners, he does not make but only orders. Since when he sets these on the right and those on the left, and bids them go into eternal fire, it belongs to the order of their deserts. So he both makes and orders the forms and natures themselves; but the privations of forms and the defects of natures he does not make, but only orders. And so he said, Let there be light; and light was made. He did not say, Let there be darkness; and darkness was made. Of these, then, he made one and did not make the other, yet ordered both, when God divided between light and darkness. And so, by his making, the several things are beautiful; and by his ordering, all things are beautiful.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-1/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Si eligerent Manichaei quos deciperent, eligeremus et nos verba quibus eis responderemus: cum vero illi et doctos litteris, et indoctos errore suo persequantur, et cum promittunt veritatem, a veritate conentur avertere; non ornato politoque sermone, sed rebus manifestis convincenda est vanitas eorum. Placuit enim mihi quorumdam vere christianorum sententia, qui cum sint eruditi liberalibus litteris, tamen alios libros nostros, quos adversus Manichaeos edidimus, cum legissent, viderunt eos ab imperitioribus, aut non aut difficile intelligi, et me benevolentissime monuerunt ut communem loquendi consuetudinem non desererem, si errores illos tam perniciosos ab animis etiam imperitorum expellere cogitarem. Hunc enim sermonem usitatum et simplicem etiam docti intelligunt, illum autem indocti non intelligunt.", "source": "PL 34, col. 173", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "If the Manichees chose whom they deceive, we too would choose the words with which to answer them: but since they pursue both those learned in letters and the unlearned with their error, and while they promise truth try to turn men away from truth, their emptiness must be refuted not with ornate and polished speech but with plain facts. For I was pleased by the judgement of certain truly Christian men who, being themselves educated in liberal letters, when they had read our other books which we published against the Manichees, saw that they were either not understood by the less skilled, or understood with difficulty, and most kindly warned me not to abandon the common manner of speaking, if I meant to drive errors so ruinous out of the minds even of the unlearned. For this usual and simple speech the learned also understand, but that other the unlearned do not understand.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-10", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-10/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et hic calumniantur Manichaei, dum putant ita dictum esse, quasi a vespera dies coeperit. Non intelligunt operationem illam qua lux facta est, et divi sum est inter lucem et tenebras, et vocata est lux dies, et tenebrae nox; hanc ergo totam operationem non intelligunt ad diem pertinere: post hanc autem operationem tanquam finito die facta est vespera. Sed quia etiam nox ad diem suum pertinet, non dicitur transisse dies unus, nisi etiam nocte transacta cum factum est mane: sic deinceps reliqui dies computantur a mane usque in mane.", "source": "PL 34, col. 180", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Here too the Manichees carp, supposing it was said as though the day began from evening. They do not understand that the whole of that working — by which the light was made, and division was made between light and darkness, and the light was called Day and the darkness Night — that this whole working belongs to the day; and that after this working, the day being as it were finished, evening was made. But because the night also belongs to its own day, the one day is not said to have passed until, the night too being over, morning came: and so thereafter the remaining days are counted from morning to morning.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-2/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quod scriptum est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, quaerunt, in quo principio; et dicunt: Si in principio aliquo temporis fecit Deus coelum et terram, quid agebat antequam faceret coelum et terram? et quid ei subito placuit facere, quod nunquam antea fecerat per tempora aeterna? His respondemus, Deum in principio fecisse coelum et terram, non in principio temporis, sed in Christo, cum Verbum esset apud Patrem, per quod facta et in quo facta sunt omnia (Joan. I, 1, 3) . Dominus enim noster Jesus Christus, cum eum Judaei interrogassent quis esset, respondit, Principium, quia et loquor vobis (Id. VIII, 25) . Sed etsi in principio temporis Deum fecisse coelum et terram credamus, debemus utique intelligere quod ante principium temporis non erat tempus. Deus enim fecit et tempora: et ideo antequam faceret tempora, non erant tempora. Non ergo possumus dicere fuisse aliquod tempus quando Deus nondum aliquid fecerat. Quomodo enim erat tempus quod Deus non fecerat, cum omnium temporum ipse sit fabricator? Et si tempus cum coelo et terra esse coepit, non potest inveniri tempus quo Deus nondum fecerat coelum et terram.", "source": "PL 34, col. 174", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "As to what is written, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth', they ask, in what beginning; and they say: If God made heaven and earth in some beginning of time, what was he doing before he made heaven and earth? And why did it suddenly please him to make what he had never made before through eternal ages? To these we answer that God made heaven and earth in the beginning not in the beginning of time, but in Christ, since the Word was with the Father, through whom and in whom all things were made (John 1:1, 3). For our Lord Jesus Christ, when the Jews had asked him who he was, answered: 'The Beginning, because I also speak to you' (John 8:25). But even if we do believe that God made heaven and earth in the beginning of time, we ought certainly to understand that before the beginning of time there was no time. For God made the times too; and therefore before he made the times, there were no times. We cannot then say that there was some time when God had not yet made anything. For how was there a time that God had not made, since he himself is the fashioner of all times? And if time began together with heaven and earth, no time can be found in which God had not yet made heaven and earth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-3-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-3-5/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quod autem sequitur in libro Geneseos, Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, sic reprehendunt Manichaei, ut dicant: Quomodo fecit Deus in principio coelum et terram, si jam et terra erat invisibilis et incomposita? Ita, cum volunt Scripturas divinas prius vituperare quam nosse, etiam res apertissimas non intelligunt. Quid enim manifestius dici potuit, quam hoc dictum est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram; terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita; id est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram; terra autem ipsa quam fecit Deus, invisibilis erat et incomposita, antequam Deus omnium rerum formas locis et sedibus suis ordinata distinctione disponeret: antequam diceret, Fiat lux, et, Fiat firmamentum, et Congregentur aquae, et, Appareat arida, et caetera quae in eodem libro sic exponuntur per ordinem, quemadmodum possint ea parvuli capere? Quae omnia continent tam magna mysteria, ut quisquis ea didicerit, omnium haereticorum vanitatem vel doleat quia homines sunt, vel derideat quia superbi sunt.", "source": "PL 34, col. 176", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "What follows in the book of Genesis, 'But the earth was invisible and unordered', the Manichaeans find fault with in this way, saying: How did God make heaven and earth in the beginning, if the earth was already invisible and unordered? So, wanting to blame the divine Scriptures before they know them, they fail to understand even the plainest things. For what could have been said more plainly than what is said here: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth; but the earth was invisible and unordered' — that is, In the beginning God made heaven and earth; but that very earth which God made was invisible and unordered, before God set out the forms of all things in their places and seats by an ordered distinction: before he said, 'Let there be light', and 'Let there be a firmament', and 'Let the waters be gathered', and 'Let the dry land appear', and the rest, which are set forth in order in the same book in such a way that little ones can take them in? All of which hold mysteries so great that whoever has learned them either grieves over the emptiness of all the heretics, because they are men, or laughs at it, because they are proud.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-5-8", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-5-8/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quod autem scriptum est, Et Spiritus Dei superferebatur super aquam, sic solent Manichaei reprehendere, ut dicant: Aqua ergo erat habitaculum Spiritus Dei, et ipsa continebat Spiritum Dei? Totum conantur perversa mente pervertere, et excaecantur malitia sua. Cum enim dicimus, Sol superfertur super terram, numquid hoc intelligi volumus, quod in terra habitet sol, et terra solem contineat? Et tamen non sic Spiritus Dei superferebatur super aquam, sicut superfertur sol super terram; sed alio modo quem pauci intelligunt. Non enim per spatia locorum superferebatur aquae ille Spiritus, sicut sol terrae superfertur; sed per potentiam invisibilis sublimitatis suae. Dicant autem nobis isti, quomodo iis rebus quae fabricandae sunt, superferatur voluntas fabri.", "source": "PL 34, col. 177", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "As for what is written, 'And the Spirit of God was borne above the water,' the Manichees are in the habit of carping at it thus: 'So the water was the dwelling of the Spirit of God, and it contained the Spirit of God?' They try to twist everything with a perverse mind, and are blinded by their own malice. When we say 'the sun is borne above the earth,' do we mean by this that the sun lives in the earth and that the earth contains the sun? And yet the Spirit of God was not borne above the water the way the sun is borne above the earth, but in another way, which few understand. For that Spirit was not borne above the water across the spaces of place, as the sun is borne above the earth, but by the power of his invisible loftiness. Let these people tell us how the will of a craftsman is borne above the things that are to be made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-6-10/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et ideo Deus rectissime creditur omnia de nihilo fecisse, quia etiamsi omnia formata de ista materia facta sunt, haec ipsa materia tamen de omnino nihilo facta est. Non enim debemus esse similes istis qui omnipotentem Deum non credunt aliquid de nihilo facere potuisse, cum considerant fabros et quoslibet opifices non posse aliquid fabricare, nisi habuerint unde fabricent. Et ligna enim adjuvant fabrum, et argentum adjuvat argentarium, et aurum aurificem, et terra figulum adjuvat ut possit perficere opera sua. Si enim non adjuventur ea materia unde aliquid faciunt, nihil possunt facere, cum materiam ipsam ipsi non faciant. Non enim faber lignum facit, sed de ligno facit aliquid: sic et caeteri omnes hujusmodi opifices. Omnipotens autem Deus nulla re adjuvandus erat, quam ipse non fecerat, ut quod volebat efficeret. Si enim ad eas res quas facere volebat, adjuvabat eum aliqua res quam ipse non fecerat, non erat omnipotens: quod sacrilegum est credere.", "source": "PL 34, col. 178", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And therefore God is most rightly believed to have made all things out of nothing: because even if all formed things were made out of that matter, that matter itself was made out of nothing at all. For we ought not to be like those who do not believe that almighty God could make anything out of nothing, when they consider that craftsmen and workmen of any kind cannot make anything unless they have something to make it from. For wood helps the craftsman, and silver helps the silversmith, and gold the goldsmith, and earth helps the potter to be able to finish his works. If they are not helped by that matter out of which they make something, they can make nothing, since they do not themselves make the matter. For the craftsman does not make the wood, but makes something out of wood: and so all other workmen of this kind. But almighty God had no need to be helped by any thing that he had not himself made, in order to bring about what he willed. For if some thing that he had not himself made helped him towards the things he willed to make, he was not almighty: which it is sacrilege to believe.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-7-11", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-7-11/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sed illud quod dictum est, In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, coeli et terrae nomine universa creatura significata est, quam fecit et condidit Deus. Ideo autem nominibus visibilium rerum haec appellata sunt, propter parvulorum infirmitatem, qui minus idonei sunt invisibilia comprehendere. Primo ergo materia facta est confusa et informis, unde omnia fierent quae distincta atque formata sunt, quod credo a Graecis chaos appellari. Sic enim et alio loco legimus dictum in laudibus Dei, Qui fecisti mundum de materia informi (Sap. XI, 18) : quod aliqui codices habent, de materia invisa.", "source": "PL 34, col. 178", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But as to what is said, 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth' — by the name of heaven and earth the whole creation is signified, which God made and founded. And these were called by the names of visible things on account of the weakness of little ones, who are less able to grasp invisible things. First, then, was made the confused and formless matter, out of which should be made all the things that are distinguished and formed — which I believe is called chaos by the Greeks. For so we read it said elsewhere too, in the praises of God: 'You who made the world out of formless matter' (Wis 11:17) — which some manuscripts have as 'out of unseen matter'.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "aug-gnm-1-9", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/aug-gnm-1-9/", "author": "Augustine", "tradition": "latin", "date": 389, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit Deus inter lucem et tenebras, et vocavit Deus diem lucem, et tenebras vocavit noctem. Hic non dictum est, Fecit Deus tenebras; quia tenebrae, sicut superius dictum est, lucis absentia est: distinctio tamen facta est inter lucem et tenebras. Quemadmodum nos clamando vocem facimus; silentium autem non sonando facimus, quia cessatio vocis silentium est: distinguimus tamen sensu quodam inter vocem et silentium, et illud vocamus vocem, illud silentium; quemadmodum ergo recte dicimur facere silentium, sic recte multis divinarum Scripturarum locis Deus dicitur facere tenebras, quia lucem quibus vult temporibus et locis vel non dat, vel detrahit.", "source": "PL 34, col. 180", "cc_idno": "7303", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God divided between the light and the darkness, and God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. It is not said here, God made the darkness; because the darkness, as was said above, is the absence of light: yet a distinction was made between light and darkness. Just as we make a voice by crying out, but make silence by not sounding, because the ceasing of the voice is silence — yet we distinguish by a kind of sense between voice and silence, and call the one voice and the other silence: as therefore we are rightly said to make silence, so in many places of the divine Scriptures God is rightly said to make darkness, because he either does not give light, or withdraws it, at what times and in what places he wills.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "b-chag-12a-akiva", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chag-12a-akiva/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "שאל רבי ישמעאל את ר\"ע כשהיו מהלכין בדרך א\"ל אתה ששימשת את נחום איש גם זו כ\"ב שנה שהיה דורש כל אתין שבתורה את השמים ואת הארץ מה היה דורש בהן א\"ל אילו נאמר שמים וארץ הייתי אומר שמים שמו של הקב\"ה עכשיו שנאמר את השמים ואת הארץ שמים שמים ממש ארץ ארץ ממש", "source": "b. Chagigah 12a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "R. Yishmael asked R. Akiva, while they were walking on the road. He said to him, You are one who served Nachum Ish Gamzu for twenty-two years, who expounded the meaning of all the particles \"et\" in the Torah. What was his exposition of \"the heaven and earth\" - \"et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz\"? He said to him, If it had said \"shamayim va'aretz,\" I would have said, \"Shamayim\" is the name of the Holy One, blessed be He. Now that the words are \"et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz,\" \"shamayim\" means the heaven, literally, and aretz means the earth, literally.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "b-chag-12a-light", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chag-12a-light/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "ואור ביום ראשון איברי והכתיב ויתן אותם אלהים ברקיע השמים וכתיב ויהי ערב ויהי בקר יום רביעי כדר' אלעזר דא\"ר אלעזר אור שברא הקב\"ה ביום ראשון אדם צופה בו מסוף העולם ועד סופו כיון שנסתכל הקב\"ה בדור המבול ובדור הפלגה וראה שמעשיהם מקולקלים עמד וגנזו מהן שנאמר (איוב לח, טו) וימנע מרשעים אורם ולמי גנזו לצדיקים לעתיד לבא שנאמר וירא אלהים את האור כי טוב ואין טוב אלא צדיק שנאמר (ישעיהו ג, י) אמרו צדיק כי טוב כיון שראה אור שגנזו לצדיקים שמח שנאמר (משלי יג, ט) אור צדיקים ישמח כתנאי אור שברא הקב\"ה ביום ראשון אדם צופה ומביט בו מסוף העולם ועד סופו דברי רבי יעקב וחכ\"א הן הן מאורות שנבראו ביום ראשון ולא נתלו עד יום רביעי", "source": "b. Chagigah 12a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "And was light created on the first day? But it is written, (Genesis 1:17) \"and God set them in the firmament of the heaven,\" and it is written, (Genesis 1:19) \"and there was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.\" It is like R. Elazar. For R. Elazar said, The light which the Holy One, blessed be He, created on the first day, Adam saw through it from one end of the world to the other. When the Holy One, blessed be He, peered at the generation of the Flood and the generation of the Dispersion, and saw that their actions were destructive, He stood up and hid it from them, as it is said, (Job 38:15) \"And from the wicked their light is withheld.\" And for whom did He take it away? For the righteous of the time to come, as it is said, (Genesis 1:4) \"And God saw the light, that it was good,\" and \"good\" only refers to the righteous, as it is said, (Isaiah 3:10) \" Say of the righteous, that he is good.\" Once He saw the light He hid away for the righteous, He rejoiced, as it is said, (Proverbs 13:9) \"He rejoices at the light of the righteous.\" Like [the following] Tannaic argument: The light which the Holy One, blessed be He, created on the first day, Adam observed and peered through it from one end of the world to the other. These are the words of R. Yaakov. And the sages say, These are the lights which were created on the first day, but were not hung up until the fourth day.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light", "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "b-chag-12a-order", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chag-12a-order/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "ת\"ר ב\"ש אומרים שמים נבראו תחלה ואח\"כ נבראת הארץ שנאמר בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ וב\"ה אומרים ארץ נבראת תחלה ואח\"כ שמים שנאמר (בראשית ב, ד) ביום עשות ה' אלהים ארץ ושמים אמר להם ב\"ה לב\"ש לדבריכם אדם בונה עלייה ואח\"כ בונה בית שנאמר (עמוס ט, ו) הבונה בשמים מעלותיו ואגודתו על ארץ יסדה אמר להם ב\"ש לב\"ה לדבריכם אדם עושה שרפרף ואח\"כ עושה כסא שנאמר (ישעיהו סו, א) כה אמר ה' השמים כסאי והארץ הדום רגלי וחכ\"א זה וזה כאחת נבראו שנאמר (ישעיהו מח, יג) אף ידי יסדה ארץ וימיני טפחה שמים קורא אני אליהם יעמדו יחדו ואידך מאי יחדו דלא משתלפי מהדדי קשו קראי אהדדי אמר ר\"ל כשנבראו ברא שמים ואח\"כ ברא הארץ וכשנטה נטה הארץ ואחר כך נטה שמים", "source": "b. Chagigah 12a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "Our Rabbis have taught, The house of Shammai say, The heavens were created first, and afterwards the earth was created, as it is said, (Genesis 1:1) \"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.\" But the house of Hillel say, The earth was created first, and afterwards the heavens, as it is said, (Genesis 2:4) \"In the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven.\" The house of Hillel said to the house of Shammai, According to you, [does] a person builds an upper story, and afterwards builds the house? [The heavens are called an upper story,] as it is said, (Amos 9:6) \"He builds his upper story in the heavens and sets its foundation on the earth.\" The house of Shammai said to the house of Hillel, According to you, [does] a person makes a footstool and afterwards makes a throne? [The heavens are called a throne,] as it is said, (Isaiah 66:1) \"So says the Lord, The heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool.\" But the sages say, This and that were created at once, as it is said, (Isaiah 48:13) \"My own hand laid the foundations of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens; when I summon them, they all stand up together.\" And the other [opinions of Shammai and Hillel], what is \"together\"? That they cannot be separated the one from the other [once created]. The verses contradicts each other! Resh Lakish said, When they were created, He created the heavens, and afterwards created the earth, but when He stretched them out, He stretched out the earth, and afterwards stretched out the heavens.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "b-chag-12a-shamayim", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chag-12a-shamayim/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "מאי שמים א\"ר יוסי בר חנינא ששם מים במתניתא תנא אש ומים מלמד שהביאן הקב\"ה וטרפן זה בזה ועשה מהן רקיע", "source": "b. Chagigah 12a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "What is heaven? R. Yose bar Chanina said, That there is water. It was taught in a Mishnah, fire and water. Teaching that the Holy One, blessed be He, brought them and mingled them one with the other, and made from them the firmament.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "b-chag-12a-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chag-12a-tohu/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "תנא תהו קו ירוק שמקיף את כל העולם כולו שממנו יצא חשך שנאמר (תהלים יח, יב) ישת חשך סתרו סביבותיו בהו אלו אבנים המפולמות המשוקעות בתהום שמהן יוצאין מים שנאמר (ישעיהו לד, יא) ונטה עליה קו תהו ואבני בהו", "source": "b. Chagigah 12a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "It was taught in a Baraita, Chaos is a green line encompassing all the world, and from it darkness springs, as it is said, (Psalms 18:12) \"He made darkness His hiding place round about Him.\" Desolation, these are smooth stones sunk in the deep, from which waters come forth, as it is said, (Isaiah 34:11) \"and He shall stretch upon it the line of chaos and the stones of desolation.\"", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "b-chag-12a", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chag-12a/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "ואמר רב יהודה אמר רב עשרה דברים נבראו ביום ראשון ואלו הן שמים וארץ תהו ובהו אור וחשך רוח ומים מדת יום ומדת לילה שמים וארץ דכתיב (בראשית א, א) בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ תהו ובהו דכתיב (בראשית א, ב) והארץ היתה תהו ובהו אור וחשך חשך דכתיב (בראשית א, ב) וחשך על פני תהום אור דכתיב (בראשית א, ג) ויאמר אלהים יהי אור רוח ומים דכתיב (בראשית א, ב) ורוח אלהים מרחפת על פני המים מדת יום ומדת לילה דכתיב (בראשית א, ה) ויהי ערב ויהי בקר יום אחד", "source": "b. Chagigah 12a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "And R. Yehudah said in the name of Rav, Ten things were created on the first day, and they are these: Heaven and earth, chaos and desolation, light and darkness, wind and waters, the measure of the day and the measure of the night. \"Heaven and earth\", as it is written, (Genesis 1:1) \"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.\" Chaos and desolation, as it is written, (Genesis 1:2) \"And the earth was chaos and desolation.\" Light and darkness, darkness as it is written, (Genesis 1:2) \"and darkness was upon the face of the deep,\" light as it is written, (Genesis 1:2) \"And God said, Let there be light.\" Wind and water, as it is written, (Genesis 1:3) \"and the wind of God floated upon the face of the waters.\" The measure of the day and the measure of the night, as it is written, (Genesis 1:5) \"And there was evening and there was morning, one day.\"", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first", "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "b-chag-15a", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chag-15a/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "ת\"ר מעשה ברבי יהושע בן חנניה שהיה עומד על גב מעלה בהר הבית וראהו בן זומא ולא עמד מלפניו אמר לו מאין ולאין בן זומא אמר לו צופה הייתי בין מים העליונים למים התחתונים ואין בין זה לזה אלא שלש אצבעות בלבד שנאמר (בראשית א, ב) ורוח אלהים מרחפת על פני המים כיונה שמרחפת על בניה ואינה נוגעת אמר להן רבי יהושע לתלמידיו עדיין בן זומא מבחוץ מכדי ורוח אלהים מרחפת על פני המים אימת הוי ביום הראשון הבדלה ביום שני הוא דהואי דכתיב (בראשית א, ו) ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים וכמה אמר רב אחא בר יעקב כמלא נימא ורבנן אמרי כי גודא דגמלא מר זוטרא ואיתימא רב אסי אמר כתרי גלימי דפריסי אהדדי ואמרי לה כתרי כסי דסחיפי אהדדי", "source": "b. Chagigah 15a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "Our rabbis taught: It once happened that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Ḥananya was standing on a step on the Temple Mount, and Ben Zoma saw him and did not rise before him. He said to him: From where and to where, Ben Zoma? He said to him: I was gazing between the upper waters and the lower waters, and between the one and the other there are only three fingerbreadths, as it is said, 'and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters' (Gen 1:2) — like a dove that hovers over her young and does not touch them. Rabbi Yehoshua said to his disciples: Ben Zoma is still outside. — Now, 'the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters': when was that? On the first day. But the dividing was on the second day, as it is written, 'and let it divide water from water' (Gen 1:6). And how much [lies between them]? Rav Aḥa bar Yaakov said: a hair's breadth. The rabbis say: like the gap between the planks of a bridge. Mar Zutra, or some say Rav Ashi, said: like two cloaks spread one over the other; and some say, like two cups tipped one upon the other.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "b-chull-83a", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-chull-83a/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "מתני׳ (ויקרא כב, כח) יום אחד האמור באותו ואת בנו היום הולך אחר הלילה את זו דרש רבי שמעון בן זומא נאמר במעשה בראשית (בראשית א, ה) יום אחד ונאמר באותו ואת בנו יום אחד מה יום אחד האמור במעשה בראשית היום הולך אחר הלילה אף יום אחד האמור באותו ואת בנו היום הולך אחר הלילה: גמ׳ ת\"ר את זו דרש ר\"ש בן זומא לפי שכל הענין כולו אינו מדבר אלא בקדשים ובקדשים לילה הולך אחר היום יכול אף זה כן נאמר כאן יום אחד ונאמר במעשה בראשית יום אחד מה יום אחד האמור במעשה בראשית היום הולך אחר הלילה אף יום [אחד] האמור באותו ואת בנו היום הולך אחר הלילה", "source": "b. Chullin 83a (Vilna; Mishnah Chullin 5:5 with its gemara)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "MISHNAH. The 'one day' stated with regard to an animal and its young (Lev 22:28) means that the day follows the night. This is what Ben Zoma expounded: it is said in the work of creation 'one day' (Gen 1:5), and it is said with regard to an animal and its young 'one day'; just as the 'one day' stated in the work of creation means that the day follows the night, so too the 'one day' stated with regard to an animal and its young means that the day follows the night. GEMARA. Our rabbis taught: this is what Ben Zoma expounded. Since the whole passage speaks of nothing but consecrated things, and with consecrated things the night follows the day, one might have thought it is so here too; therefore it is said here 'one day' and it is said in the work of creation 'one day' — just as the 'one day' stated in the work of creation means that the day follows the night, so too the 'one day' stated with regard to an animal and its young means that the day follows the night.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "b-meg-9a", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-meg-9a/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "ומשום מעשה דתלמי המלך דתניא מעשה בתלמי המלך שכינס שבעים ושנים זקנים והכניסן בשבעים ושנים בתים ולא גילה להם על מה כינסן ונכנס אצל כל אחד ואחד ואמר להם כתבו לי תורת משה רבכם נתן הקב\"ה בלב כל אחד ואחד עצה והסכימו כולן לדעת אחת וכתבו לו אלהים ברא בראשית (בראשית א, א) אעשה אדם בצלם ובדמות (בראשית א, כו)", "source": "b. Megillah 9a (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "For it was taught: [This is] the case of Ptolemy the King, who gathered seventy-two elders and entered them into seventy-two houses, and he did not reveal to them for what he gathered them. He then met each of them individually and he said to them: \"Write for me the Torah of Moses your teacher [in Greek].\" The Holy One, Blessed Be He put counsel into the heart of each one, and all of them harmonized to one understanding. And they wrote for him: \"God created in the beginning.\" (Genesis 1:1) \"I shall make a human in image and likeness.\" (Genesis 1:26)", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "b-sanh-38b-malachim", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-sanh-38b-malachim/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "אמר רב יהודה א\"ר בשעה שבקש הקב\"ה לבראות את האדם ברא כת אחת של מלאכי השרת אמר להם רצונכם נעשה אדם בצלמנו אמרו לפניו רבש\"ע מה מעשיו אמר להן כך וכך מעשיו אמרו לפניו רבש\"ע (תהלים ח, ה) מה אנוש כי תזכרנו ובן אדם כי תפקדנו הושיט אצבעו קטנה ביניהן ושרפם וכן כת שניה כת שלישית אמרו לפניו רבש\"ע ראשונים שאמרו לפניך מה הועילו כל העולם כולו שלך הוא כל מה שאתה רוצה לעשות בעולמך עשה", "source": "b. Sanhedrin 38b (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "Rav Yehuda said, Rav said: at the hour when the Holy One, blessed be He, sought to create the human, he created one company of ministering angels. He said to them: is it your will that we make a human in our image? They said before him: Master of the world, what are his deeds? He said to them: such and such are his deeds. They said before him: Master of the world, 'what is a mortal, that you remember him, and a human being, that you take account of him?' (Ps 8:5). He put out his little finger among them and burned them. And so with the second company. The third company said before him: Master of the world, the ones who spoke before you first — what did they achieve? The whole world is yours; whatever you wish to do in your world, do.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "b-sanh-38b-tshuva", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/b-sanh-38b-tshuva/", "author": "Babylonian Talmud", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "א\"ר יוחנן כ\"מ שפקרו המינים תשובתן בצידן (בראשית א, כו) נעשה אדם בצלמנו (ואומר) (בראשית א, כז) ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו (בראשית יא, ז) הבה נרדה ונבלה שם שפתם (בראשית יא, ה) וירד ה' לראות את העיר ואת המגדל (בראשית לה, ז) כי שם נגלו אליו האלהים (בראשית לה, ג) לאל העונה אותי ביום צרתי", "source": "b. Sanhedrin 38b (Vilna)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Wikisource Talmud Bavli" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yoḥanan said: everywhere the minim blasphemed, their refutation is beside them. 'Let us make a human in our image' (Gen 1:26) — and it says, 'and God created the human in his image' (Gen 1:27). 'Come, let us go down and confound their language there' (Gen 11:7) — 'and the LORD came down to see the city and the tower' (Gen 11:5). 'For there the divine beings were revealed to him' (Gen 35:7) — 'to the God who answers me in the day of my distress' (Gen 35:3).", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-1-26-judaei", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-1-26-judaei/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "greek", "date": 380, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et dixit Deus, faciamus hominem. Ubi sunt nunc Judaei, qui in sequentibus velut per quasdam cavernas Deitatis luce fulgente, secundaque persona quae mystice quidem declaratur, necdum tamen manifeste conspicitur, repugnabant dicentes sibimet ipsum loqui Deum, quoniam ipse dixit et ipse fecit, Fiat lux, et facta est lux? Erant quidem in promptu, et nunc quae modo proferuntur ab eis ineptiae. Quis enim faber ferrarius, aut carpentarius, aut coriorum confector solus in suo consistens ergastulo, cui nullus artis socius praesto est, sibimet ipse dicit, faciamus gladium, vel aratrum compaginemus, aut formemus calceum; et non magis tacitus speciem quam mente destinavit inceptat? Etenim vana garrulitas est, hominum quempiam, velut judicem aut censorem districte sibimet aliquid imperare. Quanquam hi quoque qui Dominum crucifixerunt, quid non dicturi sint, exercitatas ad mendacium linguas habentes, licet praesens vox eorum penitus ora praecluserit? Et dixit Deus, Faciamus hominem. Donec igitur minime qui doceretur existeret, in profundo fuit abdita praedicatio Deitatis. Ubi vero coepit hominis exspectari creatio, revelata est fides, et evidenter dogma veritatis emicuit. Ausculta, Judaee Christi repugnator, quomodo socium mundificationis alloquitur, per quem saecula fecit, qui agit omnia verbo potentiae suae: sed tuus animus verba non recipit pietatis. Sicut enim ferae cum includuntur in caveis, vulvas earum dentibus exedunt, amaritudinem propriam demonstrantes, furorem tamen suum nequeunt explere: sic Judaeus adversarius veritatis, alligationum coarctatus angustiis, multas asserit esse personas ad quas Verbum Dei processisse mentitur. Ferunt enim, quod angelis dixerit: Faciamus hominem. Judaica vere fictio, suaeque digna perfidiae fabulositas! Ut unum non recipiant, plurimos confitentur, filiumque famulis per participationem dignitatis asciscunt, et conlibertos nostros auctores humanae formationis efficiunt, hominisque perfectorem volunt angelis coaequare, cum sit absurdum ut quaelibet factura possit aequalis esse factori. Consideremus quoque sequentia: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem nostram. Quid respondes? Nunquid Dei et angelorum una imago est? Nam Patris necesse est eamdem esse quam Filii, sic tamen, ut Deo decens intelligatur esse figura, id est, non in habitu corporeo, sed in divina proprietate consistens. Ausculta tu etiam, qui de nova circumcisione progrederis, Judaismi cultum sub Christianitatis simulatione commendans. Cui dicit, Ad imaginem nostram (Hebr. I, 3) , nisi illuminationi gloriae, et titulo paternae substantiae, quae est imago Dei invisibilis? Suae ergo loquitur imagini, quae dixit: Ego et Pater unum sumus (Joan. X, 30) ; et, Qui me videt et Patrem meum videt (Joan. XIV, 9) , huic dicit: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem nostram. Etenim ubi unitas imaginis est, nihil potest esse dissimile. Non enim dixit ad imagines nostras, sicut et Scriptura testatur: Fecit Deus, inquit, hominem: non fecerunt. Prudenter vitavit nunc multitudinem personarum: ut ubi quidem Judaeum confunderet, hic ritum gentilitatis excluderet. Ideo commemoravit unitatem, ut et Filium simul esse cum Patre cognosceres: et periculum de personarum multitudine declinares.", "source": "PL 53, col. 964A", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God said, let us make a human. Where are the Jews now, who in what follows — where the light of the Godhead shines as if through certain caverns, and a second person is indeed declared mystically though not yet plainly seen — used to fight back, saying that God was speaking to himself, since he himself said and he himself made, 'let there be light', and there was light? Their absurdities were ready to hand then, as they are now brought out. For what blacksmith, or carpenter, or tanner of hides, standing alone in his workshop with no partner in the craft at hand, says to himself, let us make a sword, or let us put together a plough, or let us shape a shoe — and does not rather begin in silence upon the thing he has settled in his mind? It is empty chatter that any human being should sternly command something to himself, like a judge or a censor. Though what will these men not say, who crucified the Lord, having tongues trained to lying, even though the very voice now present has stopped their mouths altogether? And God said, let us make a human. So long, then, as there was no one to be taught, the preaching of the Godhead lay hidden in the deep. But when the creation of a human began to be looked for, faith was revealed, and the teaching of the truth plainly flashed out. Listen, Jew, you fighter against Christ, how he addresses the partner of the world's making, through whom he made the ages, who does all things by the word of his power: but your mind does not receive the words of piety. For as wild beasts, when they are shut in cages, gnaw at their own wombs with their teeth, showing their own bitterness and yet unable to work off their fury, so the Jew, the adversary of the truth, hemmed in by the straits of these bindings, asserts that there are many persons to whom the Word of God went out, and lies in saying it. For they say that he said it to the angels: let us make a human. A Jewish fiction, truly, and a fabling worthy of their perfidy! So as not to receive one, they confess many; they take the Son into fellowship with servants by a sharing of dignity, and make our fellow slaves the authors of the human form, and want the one who perfected the human to be equalled with angels — when it is absurd that any thing made should be equal to its maker. Let us consider what follows too: let us make a human to our image. What do you answer? Is there one image of God and of the angels? For the Father's must necessarily be the same as the Son's, yet in such a way that the figure is understood as befits God, that is, not consisting in bodily form but in the divine property. Listen, you too, who come forward out of the new circumcision, commending the cult of Judaism under a pretence of Christianity. To whom does he say, to our image, if not to the radiance of the glory and the stamp of the paternal substance, which is the image of the invisible God? He speaks, then, to his own image, which said: I and the Father are one; and, whoever sees me sees my Father also — to this one he says: let us make a human to our image. For where there is a unity of image, nothing can be unlike. For he did not say, to our images, as Scripture also testifies: God made, it says, the human: they did not make. He prudently avoided a multitude of persons here: so that where he confounded the Jew, here he might shut out the rite of the gentiles. Therefore he called to mind the unity, so that you might know the Son to be together with the Father, and might avoid the danger of a multitude of persons.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-2-2-materia", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-2-2-materia/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "latin", "date": 400, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sed obtrectatores veritatis, sensu proprio Scripturas minime consequentes, ad suumque arbitrium interpretationem trahentes earum, materiam rerum dicunt per hujuscemodi verba monstrari, quae quasi natura invisibilis et incomposita atque informis erat, et omni specie schemateque privata, quam assumptam artifex pro sua sapientia conformavit, atque ita per eam omnia quae videntur effecit. Quam si dixerimus ingenitam, sine dubio coaequari Deo cum in promerendis aestimatur honoribus, et iisdem quibus ille privilegiis digna censebitur. Quo quid sit nefandius ac sceleratius, quam ut res confusa penitusque deformis, pari dignitate praedita judicetur qua sapiens et potens nimiumque bonus et omnium conditor Deus? Deinde si tanta est ut omnem divinam possit capere disciplinam, nihilominus ejus substantiam Dei videbuntur potentiae coaequare, si tamen valet tellus cunctam per se Dei sapientiam metiri. Sin autem minor est materia divinae potentiae, et sic in atrociorem blasphemiam eorum sermo ducetur; quippe qui propter inopiam materiae, inefficacem et otiosum in suis operibus Deum conantur asserere, quos quidem humanae naturae talia sentire decepit indigentia. Sane quoniam apud nos ars unaquaeque erga aliquam adhibitam materiam exercetur, sicut fabrilitas circa ferrum, carpentaria circa lignum, et in his aliud est quod subjacet, aliud species, aliud quod formatur ex specie: nam materia est quae extrinsecus assumitur, species quae ex arte producitur, perfectio autem est quae ex utraque componitur, id est de specie atque materia: sic opinantur et de divina operatione, schema quidem mundo de sapientia conditoris allatum, materiam vero extrinsecus creatori fuisse subjectam: atque ita universum mundum esse constructum, qui substantiam quidem possidet aliunde quaesitam, schema vero et figuram, ex Dei virtute perceptam. Hinc illis datur occasio negandi, causis Deum praeesse mundanis, et tanquam stipis alicujus rerum geniturae portionem exiguam contulisse: minime valentes, propter intellectus inopiam, ad culmen respicere veritatis. Nec considerarunt quia hic quidem ars post materiam noscitur adhibita, vitae gratia dispensandae. Nam lana quidem fuit anterior, texendi autem usus postea repertus est, ut id quod per naturam minus fuerat suppleretur ex arte; lignum quoque prius fuit, quod ars dolatoria postmodum percipiens, in ususque necessarios formans, commoditatem nobis non parvam contulit. Nam et remum nautis, et agricultoribus ventilabrum, et bellatoribus hastam dedit. Deus autem, priusquam fierent quae videntur, omnia mente complexus, volensque in nativitatem producere quae non erant, consideravit qualis mundus esse deberet, ejusque speciei congruam materiam congeneravit. Et coelo quidem deputavit decentem sibi naturam, terrarum vero schemati familiarem debitamque substantiam commodavit. Ignem vero, et aquam, et aerem distinxit ut voluit: et in ordinem deduxit quem singulorum ratio flagitabat. Totum autem mundum, cum esset sui dissimilis, et ex diversitate compositus, inviolabilibus cujusdam concordiae vinculis arctatum, in unam societatem compaginationemque devinxit, ut etiam illa quae multum a se positione distabant, permixtione mutua copulata credantur. Cessent ergo fabulosis figmentis, ac miserabili suarum cogitationum sensu virtutem mente incomprehensibilem et humanis sermonibus ineffabilem contrectare. 3. Fecit Deus coelum et terram, non singula ex dimidia parte, sed integrum coelum et integram terram, id est ipsam substantiam cum specie comprehensam. Non enim schematum repertor est Deus, sed totius naturae creator.", "source": "PL 53, col. 880C", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But the detractors of the truth, in no way following the Scriptures in their proper sense and dragging their interpretation to their own judgement, say that by words of this kind the matter of things is shown — matter which was as it were by nature invisible and unordered and formless, and deprived of every appearance and figure, which the craftsman took up and shaped according to his wisdom, and so through it made all the things that are seen. If we call this matter unbegotten, it is beyond doubt made equal to God when it is weighed in the honours it deserves, and it will be judged worthy of the same privileges as he. And what could be more wicked and more criminal than that a thing confused and utterly deformed should be judged endowed with a dignity equal to the wise and powerful and exceedingly good God, the founder of all? Then, if it is so great that it can take in the whole divine discipline, they will nonetheless be seen to make its substance equal to God's power — if indeed the earth is able of itself to measure out the whole wisdom of God. But if matter is less than the divine power, their argument is drawn into a still more atrocious blasphemy; for they try to assert that God is ineffectual and idle in his works because of a poverty of matter. It is the neediness of human nature that deceived them into thinking such things. For with us each art is exercised upon some matter brought to it — smithcraft upon iron, carpentry upon wood — and in these one thing is what underlies, another the form, another what is made out of the form: for matter is what is taken from outside, the form is what the art produces, and the finished thing is what is composed of both, that is, of the form and the matter. So they suppose it is with the divine working too: that the figure was brought to the world out of the wisdom of its founder, but the matter was subjected to the creator from outside; and that the whole world was so constructed, possessing its substance sought from elsewhere, but its figure and shape received from the power of God. […] But God, before the things that are seen came to be, embracing all things in his mind and willing to bring to birth the things that were not, considered what kind of world it ought to be, and generated along with it a matter suited to its form. To heaven he assigned the nature befitting it, and to the shape of the lands he furnished the substance owed to them. Fire and water and air he distinguished as he willed, and led into the order that the account of each demanded. […] Let them cease, then, to handle with fabulous inventions and with the wretched sense of their own thoughts a power incomprehensible to the mind and unspeakable in human words. God made heaven and earth, not each of them by half, but a whole heaven and a whole earth, that is, the very substance taken together with its form. For God is not the deviser of figures, but the creator of the whole nature.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-2-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-2-4/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "latin", "date": 400, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem, inquit, erat invisibilis et incomposita. Quomodo igitur utrisque elementis, id est coelo et terra, pari honore constructis, coelum quidem perfectum fuerat, tellus vero adhuc incomposita est? Aut quid omnino causae fuit, quo minus perficeretur, et visibilis non esset? Igitur terrae plena compositio est propria fecunditas, id est universarum germinatio plantarum, et arborum fructiferarum vel infructiferarum copia, nec non colores odoresque florei, et alia quae paulo post divino jussu progenita, decoravere tellurem. Quorum quia nondum aliquid exstiterat, merito eam sermo Scripturae incompositam nominavit. Haec autem etiam de coelo imperfecto rite dicemus, quoniam nec ipsum proprium sumpsisset ornatum, quippe quod minime solis adhuc et lunae fuerat fulgore lustratum, nec choris siderum coronatum. Ita non videberis a veritate deflectere, si etiam coelum incompositum dixeris. Terram autem invisibilem dixit ob duas causas, aut quia necdum spectator ejus processerat homo, aut quia sub aquis, quae tunc ei supererant, latens, nullo modo cernebatur. Nondum enim aquae congregatae fuerant in propriis conceptaculis, quas in unum postea collectas Dominus maria nuncupavit. Invisibile itaque est, vel quod oculis non potest carnalibus comprehendi, sicut mens nostra, vel illud quod natura quidem cerni potest, sed propter obductum sibi velamentum corporis alicujus absconditur, sicut ferrum quod in profundo jacet. Hac itaque ratione nunc invisibilem terram dictam esse putandum est, ut pote quae aquarum superficie tegebatur. Deinde quia necdum luce constituta, mirum non est si haberetur invisibilis: cum aer ipse splendore carens esset obscurus.", "source": "PL 53, col. 879C", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth,' he says, 'was invisible and unordered.' How then, when both elements, that is heaven and earth, were built with equal honour, was heaven complete while the ground was still unordered? Or what cause was there at all that it should be less than finished, and should not be visible? The full ordering of the earth is its own fruitfulness — that is, the sprouting of all plants, and the abundance of trees bearing fruit and bearing none, and the colours and scents of flowers, and the other things which, brought forth a little later at the divine command, adorned the ground. Since none of these yet existed, the word of Scripture rightly called it unordered. And we shall be right to say the same of heaven as unfinished, since it had not taken up its own adornment either, having not yet been lit by the brightness of the sun and the moon, nor crowned with the choirs of the stars. So you will not seem to turn aside from the truth if you call heaven too unordered. But he called the earth invisible for two reasons: either because man, the beholder of it, had not yet come forth, or because, lying hidden under the waters that then stood over it, it could in no way be seen. For the waters had not yet been gathered into their own basins, which the Lord afterwards, when they were collected into one, named seas. A thing is invisible either because it cannot be grasped by bodily eyes, as our mind cannot, or because it can indeed be seen by nature but is hidden by the covering of some body drawn over it, as iron is that lies in the deep. It is in this sense, then, that the earth is now to be thought called invisible, inasmuch as it was covered by the surface of the waters. And then, since light was not yet established, it is no wonder if it was held invisible, when the air itself, lacking brightness, was dark.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-2-6b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-2-6b/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "greek", "date": 380, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et spiritus, inquit, Dei ferebatur super aquam. Sive diffusionem aeris istius, spiritum dicit, percipe scriptorem portiones tibi mundi singulas enumerantem; nam fecisse Deum dicit coelum et terram, aquam et aerem, hunc liquidum atque diffusum; sive, quod verum magis existimo, et quod his qui ante nos fuere probatum est, Spiritum Dei dicit, id est sanctum. Reservavit enim Scriptura, ut praecipuam hujus competenter mentionem nominis declararet: nullumque alium spiritum dictum debemus credere, nisi sanctum, qui beatae ac venerabilis Trinitatis expletor est, et hunc intellectum capiens, majus tibi subinde commodum conferri reperies.", "source": "PL 53, col. 886B", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And the Spirit of God, it says, was borne over the water. If by 'spirit' he means the diffusion of this air of ours, understand that the writer is enumerating for you the several portions of the world; for he says that God made heaven and earth, water and air, this liquid and diffused element. Or else — which I judge the truer, and which was approved by those who were before us — by 'the Spirit of God' he means the Holy Spirit. For Scripture reserved it, that it might fittingly declare the special mention of this name; and we ought to believe that no other spirit is spoken of but the Holy, who is the completer of the blessed and venerable Trinity. And taking this understanding, you will find that a greater profit is thereupon conferred on you.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-2-7", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-2-7/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "latin", "date": 550, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et dixit Deus, Fiat lux. Prima vox Dei naturam luminis fabricavit, ac tenebras dispulit, moeroremque dissolvit, et omnem subito laetam speciem jucundamque produxit. Polus tunc apparuit, qui erat interim celatus a Domino; tantaque ejus pulchritudo perclaruit, quantam nunc etiam testificatur aspectus. Aer autem illustrabatur ex ea luce quae sibi erat admixta, acutamque penetrationem proprii fulgoris, ubique per omnes suos terminos intendebat", "source": "PL 53, col. 887A", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God said, Let there be light. The first voice of God fashioned the nature of light, and drove away the darkness, and dissolved gloom, and suddenly brought forth every glad and pleasant appearance. Then the vault appeared, which had until then been hidden by the Lord; and so great a beauty of it shone out as the sight bears witness to even now. And the air was lit up by that light which had been mingled with it, and it stretched the sharp penetration of its own brightness everywhere through all its bounds.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-2-8", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-2-8/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "greek", "date": 380, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et separavit Deus inter lucem et tenebras, id est incommixtam naturam illarum, sibique ex contrarietate disparem fabricavit; quippe quas prolixis a se spatiis et destituit et discrevit, sicut dictum est: Et vocavit Deus lucem diem, et tenebras vocavit noctem.", "source": "PL 53, col. 888A", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God separated between the light and the darkness — that is, he fashioned their nature unmingled, and unlike itself by contrariety; for he both set them apart from one another by long spaces and distinguished them, as it is said: And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-2-8b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-2-8b/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "latin", "date": 380, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Nunc quidem post solis creationem dies appellatur, id est aer sole illustratus, cum in hemisphaerio quod supra terram est commoratur; nox autem dicitur terrae obumbratio, quae sole in occasu condito generatur, tunc autem non solum corporis motu, sed diffusione principalis luminis, modo se subducentis, modo denuo reducentis, secundum divinam praeceptionem dies fiebat, noxque sequebatur. Et facta est vespera, et factum est mane dies unus. Vesperae igitur nuncupatio, communiter intelligenda est. Nam et incipiente die, et ad occasum vergente, nox ei sua vicinitate contigua est: verumtamen ut nativitatis diurnae privilegia reservaret, dixit primo vesperam, dicens quia nox diem comitatur. Nam antequam lux crearetur, nox non habebatur in mundo, sed tenebrae. Obumbratio ergo terrae quam suipra diximus intercidens diem nox appellata est: et deo novo nomine post generationem vocitata est: Facta est itaque vespera, et factum est mane: non dixit dies atque nox, sed vespera et mane, ut vocabuli videlicet dignitatem parti meliori tribueret. Nam dies aeque vesperam maneque contingit, et hanc consuetudinem reperies ubique custodire Scripturam in temporibus numerandis. Dicimus enim tot dies elapsos esse, nullam facientes noctium mentionem", "source": "PL 53, col. 888A", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Now indeed, after the creation of the sun, day is the name for air lit by the sun, when it stays in the hemisphere that is above the earth; and night is called the shadowing of the earth, which is produced when the sun is set at its going down. But then day was made, and night followed, not by the motion of the body but by the diffusion of the principal light, now withdrawing itself and now bringing itself back again, according to the divine command. And there was made evening, and there was made morning, one day. The naming of evening, therefore, is to be understood in the common way. For both when the day begins and when it inclines to its setting, night is next to it by its nearness; yet, so as to keep the privileges of the day's birth, he said evening first, saying that night accompanies the day. For before light was created there was no night in the world, but darkness. The shadowing of the earth, then, of which we spoke above, cutting off the day, was called night, and therefore was named with a new name after its coming to be: And so there was made evening, and there was made morning. He did not say day and night, but evening and morning, so as to give the dignity of the word to the better part. For a day touches evening and morning alike, and you will find that Scripture keeps this custom everywhere in numbering times. For we say that so many days have gone by, making no mention of the nights.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "basil-hex-lat-2-6", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/basil-hex-lat-2-6/", "author": "Basil of Caesarea", "tradition": "latin", "date": 400, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quomodo ergo hic spiritus aquis superferebatur? dicam tibi non meum sermonem, sed viri cujusdam genere Syri, qui tantum aberat a sapientia saeculi quantum verae doctrinae proximus habebatur. Dicebat enim Syrorum vocem facundiorem esse, et propter Hebraicae linguae cognationem, Scripturarum magis sermonibus indulsisse. Sensus itaque dicti illius hoc modo est: Superferebatur, inquit, Spiritus, hoc est fovebat et vivificabat aquarum naturam, ad similitudinem gallinae cubantis: vitalem virtutem his quae fovebantur injiciens. Hujusmodi ergo ratio quod dixit superferebatur, sic interpretatur, id est ad vivificandam aquarum naturam compellebat. Ex quo sufficienter etiam illud quod a quibusdam valde requiritur, approbari potest: quia nec genitali potentia Spiritus sanctus caret.", "source": "PL 53, col. 886C", "cc_idno": "7608", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "How, then, was this Spirit borne above the waters? I will tell you not my own account but that of a certain man, a Syrian by birth, who was as far from the wisdom of this age as he was reckoned near to true doctrine. He used to say that the Syrian tongue is the more expressive, and that because of its kinship with Hebrew it comes closer to the idiom of the Scriptures. The sense of his saying, then, is this: 'was borne above,' he says, means that the Spirit warmed and quickened the nature of the waters, in the likeness of a hen sitting on her eggs, putting a living power into the things that were being warmed. So the reason for the phrase 'was borne above' is explained thus: he was driving the nature of the waters toward being quickened. From this the point that some so insistently demand can be sufficiently proved: that the Holy Spirit does not lack generative power.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-1/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Creationem mundi insinuans Scriptura divina, apte primo statim verbo aeternitatem atque omnipotentiam Dei creatoris ostendit. Quem enim in principio temporum mundum creasse perhibet, ipsum profecto ante tempora aeternaliter exstitisse designat. Et quem ipso conditionis initio coelum et terram creasse narrat, in tanta celeritate operationis omnipotentem esse declarat cui voluisse fecisse est. Nam humana fragilitas cum aliquid operatur; verbi gratia, cum domum aedificamus, in principio operis materiam praeparamus, et post hoc principium fodimus in altum, deinde immittimus lapides in fundamentum, deinde parietes augescentibus lapidum ordinibus apponimus, sicque paulatim ad perfectionem operis propositi proficiendo pervenimus. Deus autem cujus omnipotens manus est ad explendum opus suum, non eguit mora temporum, quia scriptum est: Omnia quaecunque voluit fecit (Psal. CXIII, 3) . Unde beneplacitum est, quia in principio creavit Deus coelum et terram, ut aperte detur intelligi quod utrumque simul a Deo factum est, quamvis utrumque simul ab homine dici non possit. Denique dicit propheta: Initio terram tu fundasti, Domine (Psal. CI, 26) . Hic autem Dominus, in principio coelum et terram creasse narratur; unde liquido colligitur quia factura est utriusque elementi pariter expleta, et hoc tanta velocitate divinae virtutis, ut necdum primum mundi nascentis momentum esset transcensum. Potest autem non improbabiliter intelligi in principio fecisse Deum coelum et terram in Unigenito Filio suo, qui interrogantibus se Judaeis, quid eum credere deberent, respondit: Principium quod et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII, 25) .", "source": "PL 91, col. 13A", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Divine Scripture, in intimating the creation of the world, aptly shows in its very first word the eternity and omnipotence of God the creator. For him whom it declares to have created the world in the beginning of times, it thereby designates as having existed eternally before times. And him whom it relates to have created heaven and earth at the very outset of the founding, it declares to be omnipotent in so great a speed of operation, for whom to have willed is to have done. For when human frailty makes anything — when, for instance, we build a house — at the beginning of the work we prepare the material, and after that beginning we dig deep, then we lay stones in the foundation, then we set up the walls with courses of stone rising, and so little by little we come to the completion of the work proposed. But God, whose hand is omnipotent to accomplish his work, needed no delay of times, because it is written: 'Whatever he willed, he did' (Ps 115:3 [Vg 113B:3]). Whence it is well pleasing that in the beginning God created heaven and earth, so that it may be plainly understood that both were made by God at once, although both cannot be said at once by a man. And then the prophet says: 'In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth' (Ps 102:25 [Vg 101:26]); but here the Lord is related to have created heaven and earth in the beginning; whence it is plainly gathered that the making of both elements was completed together, and this with such swiftness of divine power that not even the first moment of the world's birth had been passed. It can also be understood, not improbably, that God made heaven and earth in the beginning in his Only-begotten Son, who answered the Jews when they asked what they should believe him to be: 'The Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-2-materia", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-2-materia/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Ad haec tantum informis est illa materies, de qua mundum esse factum testatur Scriptura, quae in Dei laudibus dicit: Qui fecisti mundum de materia informi. Nam cuncta quae cum aquis et terra videre solemus in mundo, vel de ipsis exordium naturae, vel sumpsere de nihilo; ipsa autem terra et ipsae aquae propterea nomen sortitae sunt materiae informis, quia priusquam in lucem venirent, unde formositatem haberent non erat.", "source": "PL 91, col. 15C", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Only to this extent is that matter formless out of which Scripture testifies that the world was made, when it says in the praises of God: 'You who made the world out of formless matter' (Wis 11:17). For all the things which we are accustomed to see in the world along with the waters and the earth either took the beginning of their nature from these, or took it out of nothing; but the earth itself and the waters themselves have received the name of formless matter for this reason, that before they came into the light there was nothing from which they might have comeliness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae super faciem abyssi. Ut quid enim haec de terra, praetermisso coelo, intulit, nisi quia nihil tale de coelo intelligi voluit? Ipsum est enim coelum superius, quod ab omni hujus mundi volubili statu secretum divinae gloria praescientiae manet semper quietum. Nam de nostro coelo, in quo sunt posita luminaria, huic saeculo necessaria, in sequentibus scriptura, vel quomodo, vel quando sit factum declarat. Non ergo superius illud coelum, quod mortalium omnium est inaccessibile conspectibus, inane creatum est et vacuum in terra, quae nihil in prima sua creatione virentium germinum vel viventium produxit animantium, quia nimirum suis incolis mox creatum, hoc est beatissimis angelorum agminibus impletum est; quos in principio cum coelo et terra conditos esse, ac mox conditionem suam simul et totius creaturae primordialis ad laudem creatoris retulisse, testatur ipse Conditor, qui loquens ad sanctum famulum suum Job dicit: Ubi eras quando ponebam fundamenta terrae (Job. XXXVIII, 4) ? Et paulo post: Cum me laudarent simul astra matutina, et jubilarent omnes filii Dei (Ibid., 7)", "source": "PL 91, col. 13C", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was empty and void, and darkness upon the face of the deep.' For why did he say these things of the earth, passing heaven by, unless because he wanted nothing of the sort understood of heaven? For that is the heaven above, which, set apart from all the turning state of this world, remains always at rest [in the glory of the divine foreknowledge]. As for our heaven, in which are set the lights necessary to this age, Scripture declares in what follows both how and when it was made. That heaven above, then, which is unreachable by the sight of all mortals, was not created empty and void as the earth was, which in its first creation brought forth nothing of green shoots or of living creatures — because, of course, as soon as it was created it was filled with its own inhabitants, that is, with the most blessed ranks of the angels; and that these were founded in the beginning together with heaven and earth, and at once referred their own founding, and that of the whole first creation, to the praise of the Creator, the Founder himself bears witness, who speaking to his holy servant Job says: 'Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?' (Job 38:4), and a little after: 'When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy' (Job 38:7).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-2/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Bene autem cum in principio Deum, id est, in Filio Patrem fecisse coelum et terram praediceret, etiam sancti Spiritus intulit mentionem addendo: Et Spiritus Dei superferebatur super aquas, ut videlicet totius simul Trinitatis in creatione mundi virtutem cooperatam esse signaret.", "source": "PL 91, col. 16C", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And rightly, having first declared that in the beginning, that is, in the Son, the Father made heaven and earth, he brought in mention of the Holy Spirit too by adding, 'And the Spirit of God was borne above the waters,' so as to signify that the power of the whole Trinity together worked in the creation of the world.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-26/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Cum autem dicitur faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, unitas sanctae Trinitatis aperte commendatur. Si quidem eadem individua Trinitas in praecedente rerum formatione mystice erat insinuata, quando dicebatur: et dixit Deus: Fiat, et fecit Deus; et vidit Deus quod esset bonum. Nunc autem manifestius haec ipsa insinuatur, cum dicitur: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, et recte, quia donec is qui doceretur non erat, in profundo fuit abdita praedicatio Deitatis; ubi vero coepit hominis exspectari creatio, revelata est fides, et evidenter dogma veritatis emicuit. In eo enim quod dicitur. Faciamus, una ostenditur trium personarum operatio; in eo vero quod sequitur, ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, una et aequalis substantia ejusdem sanctae Trinitatis indicatur. Quomodo enim una esset imago et similitudo, si minor Patre Filius, si minor esset Filio Spiritus sanctus, si non consubstantialis ejusdem potestatis esset gloria totius Trinitatis? aut quomodo diceretur Faciamus, si trium in una deitate personarum cooperatrix virtus non esset? neque enim angelis a Deo dici poterat Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, quia nulla prorsus ratio sinit ut Dei et angelorum unam esse eamdemque imaginem sive similitudinem credamus.", "source": "PL 91, col. 28C", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But when it is said, let us make a human to our image and likeness, the unity of the holy Trinity is openly commended. For indeed the same undivided Trinity had been mystically intimated in the preceding forming of things, when it was said: and God said, let it be; and God made; and God saw that it was good. Now, however, this same thing is intimated more plainly, when it is said: let us make a human to our image and likeness — and rightly, because so long as there was no one who might be taught, the preaching of the Godhead lay hidden in the deep; but when the creation of a human began to be looked for, faith was revealed, and the teaching of truth plainly flashed out. For in the fact that it says, let us make, one working of three persons is shown; and in what follows, to our image and likeness, the one and equal substance of that same holy Trinity is indicated. For how would the image and likeness be one, if the Son were less than the Father, if the Holy Spirit were less than the Son, if the glory of the whole Trinity were not consubstantial and of the same power? Or how would it be said, let us make, if the cooperating power of three persons in one deity did not exist? For it could not be said to angels by God, let us make a human to our image and likeness, since no reasoning whatever allows us to believe that the image and likeness of God and of the angels is one and the same.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-3/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Congruit operibus Dei, ut mundi ornatum a luce incipiat: qui cum ipse sit lux vera, lucemque habitet inaccessibilem, cujus beatissima visione mox creati in coelis coelorum angeli jam perfrui coeperant, apte huic quoque saeculo ornando primam materialis gratiam lucis donavit, ut esset unde caetera quae crearet apparerent.", "source": "PL 91, col. 16C", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It befits the works of God that he should begin the adorning of the world from light: he who, being himself the true light and dwelling in light inaccessible, in the beholding of which the angels, newly created in the heaven of heavens, had already begun to rejoice, fittingly gave to this world too, for its adorning, the first grace of material light, so that there might be something from which the rest that he would create could appear.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-3b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-3b/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Si autem quaeritur quibus in locis, jubente Deo, facta sit lux, cum adhuc abyssus omnem terrae amplitudinem contegeret, patet profecto quia in superioribus ejusdem terrae partibus, quas et nunc diurna solis lux illustrare consuevit, tunc principalis illa lux emicuit. Nec mirandum nobis divina operatione lucem in aquis posse resplendere, cum et hominum operatione constet eas saepius illustrari, nautarum videlicet, qui in profundo maris demersi, emisso ex ore oleo, perspicuum sibi hoc ac lucidum reddunt. Si enim homo talia per oleum sui oris potest, quantum Deus per Spiritum oris sui creare posse credendus est", "source": "PL 91, col. 17A", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But if it is asked in what places, at God's bidding, the light was made, since the abyss still covered the whole breadth of the earth — it is quite plain that that first light shone in the upper parts of that same earth, the parts which the daily light of the sun is now accustomed to illumine. Nor should we wonder that by a divine working light can shine in the waters, since it is agreed that they are often lit by a human working too: by sailors, that is, who, sunk in the deep of the sea, make it clear and bright for themselves by letting oil out of their mouths. For if a man can do such things by the oil of his mouth, how much must God be believed able to create by the Spirit of his mouth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-4/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit lucem ac teneoras. Divisit namque eas non solum qualitatis, sed et locorum distantia, lucem videlicet in superiore orbis parte diffundendo, in qua humana erat conversatio futura, inferiora vero ejus priscis in tenebris remanere sinendo.", "source": "PL 91, col. 17C", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And he divided the light and the darkness. For he divided them not only by a difference of quality, but of places: namely by spreading the light over the upper part of the world, in which the human way of life was to be, and by allowing the lower parts of it to remain in their ancient darkness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "bede-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bede-gen-1-5/", "author": "Bede", "tradition": "latin", "date": 720, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Factumque est vespere et mane dies unus. Factumque est vespere occidente paulatim luce post expletum spatium diurnae longitudinis, atque inferiores mundi partes subeunte, quod nunc usitato solis circuitu noctibus agi solet; factum et mane redeunte eadem paulatim super terras, atque alium diem initiante; et huc usque dies expletus est unus, viginti scilicet et quatuor horarum, cujus commendatione verbi Scriptura vigilanter admonet ut lucem quae facta est inferiora orbis occasu suo lustrasse discamus. Nam si non hoc faceret, sed magis facto vespere paulatim tota periret, ac rursum paulatim mane recreata resurgeret, non jam in mane diei sequentis, sed potius in vespera primi unum diceret esse diem perfectum", "source": "PL 91, col. 17D", "cc_idno": "8466", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And there was evening and morning, one day.' There was evening, the light setting little by little after the space of a day's length was spent, and passing beneath the lower parts of the world — which is now done by the accustomed circuit of the sun in the nights; and there was morning, the same light returning little by little over the lands and beginning another day; and up to this point one day was completed, of twenty-four hours, that is. By the commendation of which word Scripture watchfully warns us to learn that the light which was made lit the lower parts of the world by its setting. For if it did not do this, but rather, evening having come, it wholly perished and again little by little revived at morning, it would have said the day was completed not at the morning of the following day but rather at the evening of the first.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2/", "author": "Bonaventure", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1252, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quidam enim Sancti in hac quaestione magis secuti sunt viam theologicam, trahentes rationem ad ea quae sunt fidei. Opinio Augustini. Quidam vero, inter quos praecipuus fuit Augustinus, magis secuti sunt viam philosophicam, quae illa ponit, quae magis videntur rationi consona: unde et intellectum Scripturae traxit ad rationis confirmationem et attestationem. Unde cum videatur rationabilius, a summa potentia omnia produci simul, et mora temporis interiacentis nullius videatur esse utilitatis vel necessitatis; posuit, omnia simul esse producta, suam positionem confirmans per auctoritates sacrae Scripturae, et exponens illud quod videtur sibi contraire, videlicet de dierum distinctione, ostendens, quod illi dies non fuerunt dies materiales, sed potius spirituales, qui omnes simul potuerunt esse. — Et haec positio multum fuit rationabilis et valde subtilis.\n\nNon omnibus placet. Verumtamen, quia ad hanc positionem videtur intellectus Scripturae distrahi, et securius est et magis meritorium, intellectum nostrum et rationem omnino Scripturae supponere, quam ipsam aliquo modo distrahere: ideo communiter alii doctores, et qui praecesserunt Augustinum, et qui secuti sunt, sic intellexerunt et posuerunt, sicut textus et littera sacrae Scripturae Genesis sonare videtur. Unde posuerunt, omnia corporalia Conclusio. simul esse creata in materia, sed non simul, sed per senarium dierum, esse distincta in forma.", "source": "In II Sent., d. XII, a. 1, q. 2 (Quaracchi 1885, II.296–297)", "license": "pd", "edition": "Opera Omnia, Tomus II, Quaracchi 1885; text re-set from the plates in ~/bonaventure-sentences" }, "english": { "text": "For some Saints in this question followed more the theological way, drawing reasoning toward those things which are of the faith. Opinion of Augustine. But others, among whom the principal was Augustine, followed more the philosophical way, which lays down those things which seem more consonant with reason: hence he also drew the meaning of Scripture toward the confirmation and attestation of reason. Therefore, since it seems more reasonable that all things be produced at once by the supreme power, and that an intervening delay of time would seem to be of no utility or necessity, he held that all things were produced at once, confirming his position through the authorities of sacred Scripture, and explaining that which seems to him to contradict it — namely, the distinction of days — by showing that those days were not material days but rather spiritual [days], which could all be at once. — And this position was very reasonable and very subtle.\n\nNot pleasing to all. Nevertheless, because the meaning of Scripture seems to be twisted by this position, and it is safer and more meritorious to submit our understanding and reason wholly to Scripture rather than in any way to twist it: therefore commonly the other doctors, both those who preceded Augustine and those who came after, understood and held [the matter] as the text and letter of sacred Scripture of Genesis seems to sound. Hence they held that all corporeal things were created at once Conclusion. in matter, but not at once — rather, through a senary of days — were distinguished in form.", "translator": "wilson-pruitt", "license": "wroot-bonaventure", "edition": "bonaventure.wrootpress.com, In II Sent. d.12 a.1 q.2" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first", "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-1/", "author": "Bonaventure", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1252, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Respondeo: Dicendum, quod in hac quaestione differenter senserunt Augustinus et alii doctores, sicut et in quaestione de informis materiae productione.\n\nExpositio Augustini. Augustinus[^9] enim voluit, quod per caelum intelligeretur natura spiritualis informis; et quia lux respondebat caelo, per consequens per ipsam lucem spiritualem angelicam naturam formatam dixit intelligi ad litteram; per diem vero dixit intelligi ipsam considerationem angelicam; per septenarium dierum, septemplicem considerationem; et per vesperam diei, considerationem creaturae in se ipsam, quia creatura est sicut tenebra; per mane vero, reductionem ipsius cognitionis creaturae in genere proprio ad cognitionem, quae est in summa luce, et ad laudem ipsius Dei. Et quia post perfectam conversionem a laude Dei non cessat, ideo septimum diem, in quo est requies contemplationis, dixit non habere vesperam.\n\nRationes eiusdem. Ad hanc autem positionem manifestandam, satis Scripturam conformat super Genesim ad litteram[^10], ubi ostendit, quod multa dicuntur de illa sex dierum enumeratione, quae magis competunt diebus spiritualibus et luci spirituali quam luci materiali. Propter quod in productione omnium rerum corporalium dicitur fiat, fecit, et factum est; in productione vero lucis non dicitur nisi fiat, et factum est. — Et huius ratio est, quia omnes aliae res a creatura spirituali habent triplicem modum essendi, videlicet in sua causa producente, et in mente rationali, et in corporali materia sustinente. Creatura autem rationalis non habet nisi duplicem modum essendi, videlicet in Verbo, et in se. — Multa etiam ad hoc adducit, quae ostendunt, ipsam positionem esse consonam tam fidei quam Scripturae quam etiam rationi; et per hoc veritatem fidei et Scripturae a recto rationis tramite nullatenus etiam deviare ostendit. Unde idem super Genesim ad litteram libro primo[^11]: « Habemus quod secundum fidem respondendum est omnibus, qui calumniari libris nostrae salutis affectant, ut quidquid ipsi de rerum natura veracibus documentis demonstrare potuerint, ostendamus, litteris nostris non esse contrarium; quidquid autem de quibuslibet suis voluminibus his nostris litteris, id est catholicae fidei, contrarium protulerint, aut aliqua facultate ostendamus, aut nulla dubitatione credamus ipsum esse falsissimum ».\n\nOpinio aliorum. Quantumcumque autem haec positio probabilis esset et rationabilis, catholici tamen tractatores, qui Augustinum secuti sunt[^12], viam aliam magis approbaverunt, scilicet quod dierum distinctio esset materialis sive sensibilis, et primae diei operatio esset formatio lucis corporalis, quae tres dies fecit ante productionem solis. — Et quia istam positionem magis insinuat textus Scripturae, et magis sequuntur expositores, etiam illi qui Augustinum libenter secuti sunt; ideo positio ista securius et utilius est sustinenda.\n\nConclusio. Secundum hanc igitur positionem dicendum est, quod Scriptura per lucem illam, quam dicit primo esse factam, corporalem lucem insinuat; et concedendae sunt rationes, quae illud probant.", "source": "In II Sent., d. XIII, a. 1, q. 1 (Quaracchi 1885, II.312–313)", "license": "pd", "edition": "Opera Omnia, Tomus II, Quaracchi 1885; text re-set from the plates in ~/bonaventure-sentences" }, "english": { "text": "I respond: It must be said that in this question Augustine and the other doctors thought differently, just as also in the question concerning the production of unformed matter.\n\nAugustine's exposition. For Augustine[^9] wished that by heaven be understood unformed spiritual nature; and because light corresponded to heaven, consequently by light itself he said the angelic nature formed was to be understood according to the letter; but by day he said is understood the angelic consideration itself; by the seven days, sevenfold consideration; and by the evening of the day, consideration of the creature in itself, because the creature is as it were a darkness; but by morning, the reduction of that knowledge of the creature in its proper genus to the knowledge which is in the supreme light, and to the praise of God Himself. And because, after perfect conversion, it does not cease from the praise of God, therefore he said that the seventh day, in which is the rest of contemplation, does not have evening.\n\nReasons of the same [Augustine]. For the manifesting of this position, he sufficiently conforms Scripture [to it] in On Genesis according to the Letter[^10], where he shows that many things are said in that enumeration of the six days which more befit spiritual days and spiritual light than material light. On account of which, in the production of all corporeal things it is said let it be, He made, and it was done; but in the production of light it is not said except let it be, and it was done. — And the reason of this is, that all other things, [as distinguished] from spiritual creation, have a threefold mode of being, namely in the cause producing them, and in the rational mind, and in the corporeal matter sustaining them. But rational creation has only a twofold mode of being, namely in the Word, and in itself. — He also adduces many [things] to this [point] which show that the position itself is consonant both with faith and with Scripture and also with reason; and through this he shows that the truth of faith and Scripture in no way deviates from the straight path of reason. Hence the same [Augustine] On Genesis according to the Letter, book one[^11]: «We have what is to be answered, according to faith, to all who attempt to slander the books of our salvation — that whatever they themselves shall have been able to demonstrate concerning the nature of things by true documents, we should show is not contrary to our letters; but whatever they shall bring forward from any of their volumes contrary to these our letters, that is, to the Catholic faith, either we should show [it false] by some faculty, or with no doubt should believe it to be most false».\n\nOpinion of others. But however probable and reasonable this position was, nevertheless the Catholic treatise-writers who have followed Augustine[^12] have approved another way more — namely that the distinction of days was material or sensible, and the operation of the first day was the formation of corporeal light, which made three days before the production of the sun. — And because this position the text of Scripture more intimates, and the expositors more follow, even those who have willingly followed Augustine, on this account this position is more safely and usefully to be maintained.\n\nConclusion. According to this position, then, it must be said that Scripture by that light which it says was first made intimates corporeal light; and the reasons which prove it are to be conceded.", "translator": "wilson-pruitt", "license": "wroot-bonaventure", "edition": "bonaventure.wrootpress.com, In II Sent. d.13 a.1 q.1" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2/", "author": "Bonaventure", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1252, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Respondeo: Dicendum, quod, sicut praetactum est in principio, duplex est hic modus dicendi: unus secundum doctores Graecos, videlicet Basilium et Gregorium et Damascenum; alter secundum Latinos.\n\nOpinio Graecorum. Dixerunt enim Basilius et Damascenus, quod illa lux emissione et contractione radiorum diem et noctem faciebat; hoc autem dicebant esse in potestate ipsius lucis, non per virtutem propriam, sed per praeceptionem divinam. Et huius simile legimus in Scriptura, Exodi decimo: Extendit Moyses manum in caelum, et factae sunt tenebrae horribiles in tota terra Aegypti tribus diebus. Constat enim, quod in illo triduo sol erat in hemisphaerio terrae nostrae habitabilis, et in terram Iessen et in alias habitabiles regiones radios suae lucis emittebat, et a terra Aegypti radios eiusdem lucis contrahebat. Simile etiam forte factum est in passione Domini, ubi sol dicitur obscuratus fuisse: et hoc totum factum est non natura, sed divino praecepto. Et per hunc modum intellexerunt doctores Graeci fuisse in illo primo triduo; et propterea rationes prius inductae de naturali potestate in nullo eos laedunt. Auctoritates etiam sacrae Scripturae non videntur contraire, quia divisio illa lucis a tenebris non intelligitur quantum ad situm localem, sed quantum ad distinctionem formalem, sicut distinguitur habitus a sua privatione. Et quia ab hoc habitu in privationem et processus erat et regressus; quantum ad regressum in habitum dicitur fecisse mane, quod quidem fiebat radiorum emissione; quantum vero ad progressum in privationem dicitur fecisse vesperam, quod quidem fiebat radiorum contractione.\n\nOpinio Latinorum. Conclusio. Alius modus dicendi est secundum Latinos doctores, qui videtur esse rationabilior, quia virtuti naturali possibilior, scilicet quod lux illa noctem et diem faciebat suo motu, sicut sol sua facit actione. Intelligitur enim lux illa facta fuisse, ubi nunc est sol — nam et ex illa formatus creditur esse sol — producta autem fuit super eam partem, supra quam est nostrum hemisphaerium, et illud hemisphaerium illuminando fecit diem, et progrediens pervenit ad occasum et fecit vespere, et post demum regrediens ad ortum fecit mane. Unde respectu unius et eiusdem hemisphaerii noctem et diem faciebat successive; respectu vero hemisphaerii nostri et alterius simul faciebat diem ex una parte et noctem ex alia, ex obiectu illius naturae densae, quae erat in medio illius materiae; quae quamvis non esset adhuc in forma completa, erat tamen in illa parte ita densata, ut posset proiicere umbram, sicut in parte superiori pro sua raritate et quadam subtilitate poterat suscipere lucis influentiam. Et ideo utrumque horum insinuans Scriptura dicit: Divisit Deus lucem a tenebris, quantum ad existentiam lucis in uno hemisphaerio et tenebrae in alio; et factum est vespere et mane, quantum ad recessum a nostro hemisphaerio et quantum ad regressum.", "source": "In II Sent., d. XIII, a. 1, q. 2 (Quaracchi 1885, II.315)", "license": "pd", "edition": "Opera Omnia, Tomus II, Quaracchi 1885; text re-set from the plates in ~/bonaventure-sentences" }, "english": { "text": "I respond: It must be said that, as was touched on at the outset, there is a twofold mode of speaking here: one according to the Greek doctors, namely Basil and Gregory and Damascene; the other according to the Latins.\n\nOpinion of the Greeks. For Basil and Damascene said that that light made day and night by emission and contraction of rays; and this they said was in the power of the light itself — not by its own power, but by the divine command. And we read of something like this in Scripture, Exodus 10: Moses stretched out his hand to heaven, and there were horrible darknesses in all the land of Egypt for three days. For it is clear that in that three-day period the sun was in the hemisphere of our habitable earth, and was emitting the rays of its light into the land of Goshen and into other habitable regions, and was drawing back the rays of the same light from the land of Egypt. Something similar perhaps occurred at the Lord's passion, where the sun is said to have been darkened: and this whole was done not by nature, but by divine command. And in this manner the Greek doctors understood [the light] to have been in that first three-day period; and on this account the reasons earlier adduced from natural power in no way harm them. The authorities of sacred Scripture also do not seem to be against [them], because that division of light from darkness is not understood as regards local position, but as regards formal distinction, just as a habit is distinguished from its privation. And because from this habit into privation there was both a progress and a regress; as regards the regress into habit, it is said to have made morning, and this indeed came about by emission of rays; but as regards the progress into privation, it is said to have made evening, and this indeed came about by contraction of rays.\n\nOpinion of the Latins. Conclusion. Another mode of speaking is that of the Latin doctors, which seems to be more reasonable, because more possible to natural power — namely that that light made night and day by its [own] motion, just as the sun does by its [own] action. For that light is understood to have been made where the sun now is — for from it the sun is believed to have been formed — and it was produced over that part above which is our hemisphere, and by illuminating that hemisphere it made day, and going forward it reached the setting and made evening, and finally going back to the rising it made morning. Hence with respect to one and the same hemisphere it made night and day in succession; but with respect to our hemisphere and the other [hemisphere] it made day on one side and night on the other at the same time — by the obstruction of that dense nature which was in the middle of that matter, which, although it was not yet in [its] complete form, was nevertheless so densified in that part that it could project a shadow, just as in the upper part, on account of its rarity and a certain subtlety, it could receive the influx of light. And so, intimating both of these, Scripture says: God divided the light from the darkness, as regards the existence of light in one hemisphere and darkness in the other; and evening was made and morning, as regards the withdrawal from our hemisphere and the return.", "translator": "wilson-pruitt", "license": "wroot-bonaventure", "edition": "bonaventure.wrootpress.com, In II Sent. d.13 a.1 q.2" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first", "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "br-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-1/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רַבִּי הוֹשַׁעְיָה רַבָּה פָתַח, (משלי ח, ל): \"וָאֶהְיֶה אֶצְלוֹ אָמוֹן וָאֶהְיֶה שַׁעֲשֻׁעִים יוֹם יוֹם וְגוֹ'\". \"אָמוֹן\", פַּדְגּוֹג. \"אָמוֹן\", מְכוּסֶּה. \"אָמוֹן\", מוּצְנָע. וְאִית דְּאָמַר: \"אָמוֹן\", רַבְּתָא. \"אָמוֹן\", פַּדְגּוֹג – הֵיךְ מָה דְאַתְּ אָמַר (במדבר יא, יב): \"כַּאֲשֶׁר יִשָּׂא הָאֹמֵן אֶת הַיֹּנֵק\". \"אָמוֹן\" מְכוּסֶּה – הֵיךְ מָה דְאַתְּ אָמַר (איכה ד, ה): \"הָאֱמֻנִים עֲלֵי תוֹלָע חִבְּקוּ אַשְׁפַּתּוֹת\". \"אָמוֹן\", מוֹצְנָע – הֵיךְ מָה דְאַתְּ אָמַר (אסתר ב, ז): \"וַיְהִי אֹמֵן אֶת הֲדַסָּה\". אמון, רבתא – כמה דתימא: (נחום ג, ח): \"הֲתֵיטְבִי מִנֹּא אָמוֹן\", ומתרגמינן: \"האת טבא מאלכסנדריא רבתא דיתבא בין נהרותא?\"דבר אחר: אמון – אומן. התורה אומרת: אני הייתי כלי אומנותו של הקב\"ה. בנוהג שבעולם, מלך בשר ודם בונה פלטין, אינו בונה אותה מדעת עצמו אלא מדעת אומן, והאומן אינו בונה אותה מדעת עצמו, אלא דיפתראות, ופינקסאות יש לו, לדעת היאך הוא עושה חדרים, היאך הוא עושה פשפשין, כך היה הקב\"ה מביט בתורה, ובורא את העולם, והתורה אמרה בראשית ברא אלהים, ואין ראשית אלא תורה, היאך מה דאת אמר (משלי ח, כב): \"ה' קָנָנִי רֵאשִׁית דַּרְכּוֹ\".", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:1 (Vilna numbering; Theodor–Albeck differs)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Hoshaya the Great began: “I was with Him as an amon, a delight day after day…” (Proverbs 8:30) – amon means a child’s caretaker, amon means covered, amon means hidden, and some say amon means greatness. Amon means a child’s caretaker, as it says: “As a caretaker [omen] carries a nursing child” (Numbers 11:12). Amon means covered, as it says: “Those covered [ha’emunim] in scarlet…” (Lamentations 4:5). Amon means hidden, as it says: “He was omen Hadassa” (Esther 2:7). Amon means great, as it says: “Are you better than No Amon [which sits in the rivers]?” (Nahum 3:8), which we translate in Targum as: Are you better than the great city of Alexandria, which is located among the rivers? Another matter, amon means artisan [uman]. The Torah is saying: ‘I was the tool of craft of the Holy One blessed be He.’ The way of the world is that when a flesh-and-blood king builds a palace he does not build it based on his own knowledge, but rather based on the knowledge of an artisan. And the artisan does not build it based on his own knowledge, but rather, he has [plans on] sheets and tablets by which to ascertain how he should build its rooms, how he should build its doors. So too, the Holy One blessed be He looked in the Torah and created the world. The Torah says: “Bereshit God created” (Genesis 1:1), and reshit is nothing other than the Torah, as it says: “The Lord made me at the beginning of [reshit] His way” (Proverbs 8:22).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "br-1-10", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-10/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי יונה בשם ר' לוי אמר למה נברא העולם בב' אלא מה ב' זה סתום מכל צדדיו ופתוח מלפניו כך אין לך רשות לומר מה למטה מה למעלה מה לפנים מה לאחור אלא מיום שנברא העולם ולהבא. בר קפרא אמר (דברים ד, לב): \"כִּי שְׁאַל נָא לְיָמִים רִאשׁוֹנִים אֲשֶׁר הָיוּ לְפָנֶיךָ [לְמִן הַיוֹם אֲשֶׁר בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים]\" למן היום שנבראו אתה דורש ואי אתה דורש לפנים מכאן (שם) אתה דורש וחוקר ואי אתה חוקר לפנים מכאן. דרש רבי יהודה בן פזי במעשה בראשית בהדיה דבר קפרא למה נברא העולם בב' להודיעך שהן שני עולמים העוה\"ז והעוה\"ב. ד\"א ולמה בב' שהוא לשון ברכה ולמה לא באל\"ף שהוא לשון ארירה. ד\"א למה לא באל\"ף שלא ליתן פתחון פה לאפיקורסין לומר היאך העולם יכול לעמוד שהוא נברא בלשון ארירה אלא אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא הרי אני בורא אותו בלשון ברכה והלואי יעמוד .ד\"א למה בב' אלא מה ב' זה יש לו שני עוקצין אחד מלמעלה ואחד מלמטה מאחוריו אומרים לב' מי בראך והוא מראה בעוקצו מלמעלה ואמר זה שלמעלה בראני ומה שמו והוא מראה להן בעוקצו של אחריו ואומר ה' שמו. א\"ר אלעזר בר חנינא בשם ר' אחא עשרים וששה דורות היתה האל\"ף קורא תגר לפני כסאו של הקדוש ברוך הוא אמרה לפניו רבש\"ע אני ראשון של אותיות ולא בראת עולמך בי אמר לה הקב\"ה העולם ומלואו לא נברא אלא בזכות התורה שנאמר (משלי ג, יט): \"ה' בחכמה יסד ארץ וגו'\" למחר אני בא ליתן תורה בסיני ואיני פותח תחלה אלא בך שנאמר (שמות כ, ב): \"אנכי ה' אלהיך\" רבי הושעיא אומר למה נקרא שמו אל\"ף שהוא מסכים מאֶלֶף שנאמר (תהלים קה, ח): \"דבר צוה לאלף דור\":.", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:10 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yona said in the name of Rabbi Levi: Why was the world created with the letter beit? It is because just as the beit is closed on all [three of] its sides but open in its front, so, you do not have permission to ask: What is below, what is above, what was before, and what is after, but only from the day when the world created and onward. Bar Kapara said: “For ask now of the early days that were before you, from the day [that God created man upon the earth]” (Deuteronomy 4:32) – from the day they were created, you may inquire, but you may not inquire what was before that. “From one end of the heavens to the other end” (Deuteronomy 4:32), you may inquire and investigate, but what is beyond that you may not investigate. Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi expounded regarding the act of Creation together with bar Kapara: Why was the world created with the letter beit? It is to inform you that there are two worlds, this world and the World to Come. Another matter, why with a beit? Because it alludes to an expression of blessing [berakha]. And why not with an alef? Because it alludes to an expression of curse [arira]. Another matter, why not with an alef? It is to avoid giving recourse to the heretics to say: How can the world endure, as it was created with an expression of curse? Rather, the Holy One blessed be He said: ‘Behold, I will create it with an expression of blessing, and there is hope that perhaps it will endure.’ Another matter, why with a beit? It is because just as the beit has two protrusions, one above it and one below and behind it, if one says to the beit: ‘Who created you?’ It points with its upper protrusion, saying: ‘That One who is above created me.’ ‘And what is His name?’ It points with its rear protrusion and says: ‘The Lord [Adonai] is His name.’ Rabbi Elazar bar Ḥanina said in the name of Rabbi Aḥa: For twenty-six generations the alef complained before the throne of the Holy One blessed be He. It said before Him: ‘Master of the universe, I am the first of the letters, but You did not create Your world with me.’ The Holy One blessed be He said to it: ‘The world and all its contents were created only for the sake of the Torah, as it is stated: “The Lord founded the earth with wisdom…” (Proverbs 3:19). Tomorrow, I will be coming to give the Torah at Sinai, and I will open it at its beginning only with you, as it is stated: “I [anokhi] am the Lord your God”’ (Exodus 20:2). Rabbi Hoshaya says: Why is it called alef? It is because He consented concerning a thousand, as it is stated: “The word that He commanded for one thousand [elef] generations” (Psalms 105:8).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "br-1-12", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-12/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי יודן בשם עקילוס אמר לזה נאה לקראו אלוה בנוהג שבעולם מלך ב\"ו מתקלס במדינה ועדיין לא בנה לה דמוסיות ועדיין לא בנה לה פריבטאות בתחלה מזכיר שמו ולבסוף קטיזמה שלו ברם יחידו של עולם בתחלה פעל ולבסוף נתקלס. שמעון בן עזאי אומר (ש\"ב כב, לו): \"וַעֲנֹתְךָ תַּרְבֵּנִי\" ב\"ו מזכיר שמו ואח\"כ שבחו פלן אגוסטולי פלן פראטאטא אבל הקב\"ה אינו כן אלא משברא צורכי עולמו אחר כך מזכיר שמו \"בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא\" ואח\"כ \"אֱלֹהִים\":", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:12 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yudan said in the name of Akilas: To this One it is fitting to call God. The ordinary way of the world is that a flesh-and-blood king is praised in his province though he has not yet built any public baths in it and has not yet built private baths in it. First he proclaims his name and then presents his works. The Unique One of the world, however, first acted and then He was praised. Shimon ben Azai says: “Your humility has made me great” (II Samuel 22:36) – a flesh-and-blood [king] mentions his name first and then his title of praise: So-and-so Augustoli, So-and-so Pro titulo. But the Holy One blessed be He is not so; instead, after creating the needs of his world, only then does He mention His name: “In the beginning…created [bereshit bara]” and then “God [Elohim].”", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "br-1-14", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-14/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי ישמעאל שאל את רבי עקיבא אמר לו בשביל ששמשת את נחום איש גם זו עשרים ושתים שנה אכין ורקין מיעוטין אתין וגמין רבויין הדין \"אֶת\" דכתיב הכא מה הוא א\"ל אלו נאמר \"בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים\" שמים וארץ היינו אומרים השמים והארץ אלהות הן א\"ל (דברים לב, מז): \"כי לא דבר רק הוא מכם\" ואם רק הוא מכם למה שאין אתם יודעים לדרוש בשעה שאי אתם יגיעין בו (שם) אימתי היא חייכם בשעה שאתם יגיעין בו. אלא \"אֶת הַשָּׁמַיִם\" לרבות חמה ולבנה ומזלות \"וְאֶת הָאָרֶץ\" לרבות אילנות ודשאין וגן עדן.", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:14 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yishmael asked Rabbi Akiva, saying to him: ‘Because you studied under Naḥum of Gam Zo for twenty-two years, [who taught:] The words akh and rak are restrictive expressions, et and gam are inclusive expressions, [I ask you:] What is the meaning of the et that is written here [twice]?’ He said to him: ‘Had it been stated: “In the beginning God created heavens and earth [bereshit bara elohim shamayim vaaretz]” – we might have said that the heavens and the earth are deities.’ He [Rabbi Yishmael] said to him: “For it is not an empty matter for you [mikem]” (Deuteronomy 32:47) – if it is empty, it is because of you [mikem], because you do not know how to expound, because you do not exert yourself in its regard. “As it [the Torah] is your life” (Deuteronomy 32:47) – when is it your life? It is when you exert yourself in its regard. Rather [the explanation is]: “et hashamayim” – to include the sun, the moon, and the constellations; “ve’et haaretz” – to include trees, vegetation, and the Garden of Eden.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "br-1-15", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-15/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "בית שמאי ובית הלל בית שמאי אומרים השמים נבראו תחלה ואחר כך נבראת הארץ ובית הלל אומרים הארץ נבראת תחלה ואח\"כ השמים אלו מביאין טעם לדבריהם ואלו מביאין טעם לדבריהם על דעתיהן דבית שמאי דאינון אמרין השמים נבראו תחלה ואחר כך הארץ משל למלך שעשה לו כסא ומשעשאו עשה איפיפורין שלו כך אמר הקב\"ה (ישעיה סו, א): \"הַשָּׁמַיִם כִּסְאִי וְהָאָרֶץ הֲדֹם רַגְלָי וְגוֹ'\" ועל דעתיהן דבית הילל דאינון אמרין הארץ נבראת תחלה ואח\"כ השמים משל למלך שבנה פלטין משבנה את התחתונים אחר כך בנה את העליונים כך \"בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת ה' אֱלֹהִים אֶרֶץ וְשָׁמָיִם\". אמר רבי יהודה בר אילעי אף דין קרא מסייע לב\"ה (תהלים קב, כו): \"לְפָנִים הָאָרֶץ יָסַדְתָּ\" ואח\"כ \"וּמַעֲשֵׂה יָדֶיךָ שָׁמָיִם\". א\"ר חנין ממקום שהמקרא מסייע לבית שמאי משם בית הילל מסלקין אותו \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה\" כבר היתה. ר' יוחנן בשם חכמים אמר לבריאה שמים קדמו ולשכלול הארץ קדמה. אמר רבי תנחומא אנא אמרי טעמא לבריאה השמים קדמו שנאמר \"בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים\" ולשכלול הארץ קדמה שנאמר \"בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת ה' אֱלֹהִים אֶרֶץ וְשָׁמָיִם\". א\"ר שמעון בן יוחאי תמיה אני היאך נחלקו אבות העולם בית שמאי ובית הילל על בריית שמים וארץ אלא שאני אומר שניהם לא נבראו אלא כאלפס וכסויה שנאמר (ישעיה מח, יג): \"קֹרֵא אֲנִי אֲלֵיהֶם יַעַמְדוּ יַחְדָּו\". אר\"א ב\"ר שמעון אם כדעת אבא למה פעמים שהוא מקדים ארץ לשמים ופעמים שהוא מקדים שמים לארץ אלא מלמד ששניהן שקולין זה כזה. בכל מקום הוא מקדים אברהם ליצחק ויעקב ובמקום אחד הוא אומר (ויקרא כו, מב): \"וזכרתי את בריתי יעקב וגו'\" מלמד ששלשתן שקולין זה כזה. בכ\"מ הוא מקדים משה לאהרן ובמקום אחד הוא אומר (שמות ו, כו): \"הוא אהרן ומשה\" מלמד ששניהן שקולין זה כזה. בכל מקום הוא מקדים יהושע לכלב ובמקום אחד הוא אומר (במדבר יד, ל): \"כי אם כלב בן יפונה הקנזי ויהושע בן נון\" מגיד ששניהן שקולין זה כזה. בכ\"מ הוא מקדים תורין לבני יונה ובמקום אחד הוא אומר (ויקרא יב, ו): \"ובן יונה או תור לחטאת\" מגיד ששניהם שקולין זה כזה. בכל מקום הוא מקדים כיבוד אב לאם ובמקום אחד הוא אומר (שם יט, ג) \"איש אמו ואביו תיראו\" מגיד ששניהן שקולין זה כזה אבל אמרו חכמים האב קודם לאם מפני שהוא ואמו חייבין בכבוד אביו. בכ\"מ הוא מקדים בריאת שמים לארץ ובמקום אחד הוא אומר \"ביום עשות ה' אלהים ארץ ושמים\" מגיד ששניהם שקולין זה כזה.", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:15 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, Beit Shammai say: The heavens were created first and the earth was created thereafter. Beit Hillel says: The earth was created first and the heavens thereafter. These cite a reason for their position and those cite a reason for their position. According to the opinion of Beit Shammai, who say that the heavens were created first and the earth thereafter, it is analogous to a king who had a throne made, and once that was made he had its footstool made. So, the Holy One blessed be He said: “The heavens are My throne and the earth is My footstool…” (Isaiah 66:1). According to the opinion of Beit Hillel, who say that the earth was created first and the heavens thereafter, it is analogous to a king who built a palace; first he built the lower sections and then he built the upper sections, so, “on the day that the Lord God made earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4). Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai said: This verse, too, supports Beit Hillel: “You laid the foundations of earth in times past” (Psalms 102:26), and then, “the heavens are the work of Your hands” (Psalms 102:26). Rabbi Ḥanin said: From the same place where Scripture supports Beit Shammai, from there, Beit Hillel refute them: “The earth was” (Genesis 1:2) – it already was. Rabbi Yoḥanan said in the name of the Sages: In terms of Creation, the heavens were first, but in terms of completion, the earth was first. Rabbi Tanḥuma said: I will say the source; in terms of Creation, the heavens were first, as it is stated: “In the beginning, God created [the heavens].” In terms of completion, the earth was first, as it is stated: “On the day that the Lord God made earth and the heavens.” Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai said: I am surprised how it is that the fathers of the world, Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, disagreed regarding the creation of the heavens and the earth. It is, rather, as I say, that both of them were created [at the same time,] like a stewpot and its lid, as it is stated: “[My hand also laid the foundation of the earth and My right hand measured the heavens]; I appointed them; they arise together” (Isaiah 48:13). Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Shimon said: If it is in accordance with the opinion of my father, why is it that at times the earth is mentioned before the heavens and at times the heavens are mentioned before the earth? Rather, it teaches that both of them are equal in importance to one another. In every place Abraham is mentioned before Isaac and Jacob, but in one place it says: “I will remember My covenant with Jacob, [and also My covenant with Isaac, and also My covenant with Abraham]” (Leviticus 26:42). This teaches that the three of them are equal in importance to one another. In every place Moses is mentioned before Aaron, but in one place it says: “It is Aaron and Moses” (Exodus 6:26). This teaches that both of them are equal in importance to one another. In every place Joshua is mentioned before Caleb, but in one place it says: “Except for Caleb son of Yefuneh the Kenizite and Joshua son of Nun” (Numbers 14:30, Numbers 32:12). This teaches that both of them are equal in importance to one another. In every place turtledoves are mentioned before young pigeons, but in one place it says: “And a young pigeon or a turtledove as a sin offering” (Leviticus 12:6). This tells you that both of them are equal in importance to one another. In every place, honor of the father is mentioned before the mother, but in one place it says: “Each of you shall fear his mother and his father” (Leviticus 19:3). This tells you that both of them are equal in importance to one another. However, the Sages said: The father takes precedence over the mother, because both he [a son] and his mother are obligated to honor his father. In every place the creation of the heavens is mentioned before the earth, but in one place it says: “On the day that the Lord God made earth and the heavens.” This tells you that both of them are equal in importance to one another.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "br-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-2/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי יהושע דסכנין בשם רבי לוי פתח (תהלים קיא, ו): \"כֹּחַ מַעֲשָׂיו הִגִּיד לְעַמּוֹ וְגוֹ'\" מה טעם גילה הקב\"ה לישראל מה שנברא ביום הראשון ומה שנברא ביום השני מפני עובדי כוכבים ומזלות שלא יהיו מונין את ישראל ואומרין להם הלא אומה של בזויים אתם וישראל משיבין אותן ואומרין להם ואתם הלא בזויה היא בידכם הלא כפתורים היוצאים מכפתור השמידום וישבו תחתם העולם ומלואו של הקדוש ברוך הוא כשרצה נתנה לכם וכשרצה נטלה מכם ונתנה לנו הה\"ד \"לָתֵת לָהֶם נַחֲלַת גּוֹיִם וְגוֹ'\" הגיד להם את כל הדורות:", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:2 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yehoshua of Sikhnin began in the name of Rabbi Levi: “The power of His deeds He told to His people, to give them the inheritance of nations” (Psalms 111:6). What is the reason that the Holy One blessed be He revealed what was created on the first day and what was created on the second day? It is due to the idolaters, so they could not rebuke Israel and say to them: ‘You are a nation of robbers.’ Israel responds to them and says to them: ‘And you, is it [your own land] not in your hands by robbery? Is it not so that: “Kaftorim, who emerged from Kaftor, destroyed them [the Avites], and settled in their place”? (Deuteronomy 2:23). The world and all its contents belong to the Holy One blessed be He. When He wished He gave it to you, and when He wished He took it from you and gave it to us.’ That is what is written: “[The power of His deeds He told to His people,] to give them the inheritance of nations…” – He told them [the history of] all the generations.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "br-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-4/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "\"בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים\" ששה דברים קדמו לבריאת העולם יש מהן שנבראו ויש מהן שעלו במחשבה להבראות. התורה והכסא הכבוד נבראו תורה מנין שנאמר (משלי ח, כב): \"ה' קנני ראשית דרכו\" כסא הכבוד מנין דכתיב (תהלים צג, ב): \"נכון כסאך מאז וגו'\". האבות וישראל ובית המקדש ושמו של משיח, עלו במחשבה להבראות האבות מנין שנאמר (הושע ט, י): \"כענבים במדבר וגו'\" ישראל מנין שנאמר (תהלים עד, ב): \"זכור עדתך קנית קדם\" בית המקדש מנין שנאמר (ירמיה יז, יב): \"כסא כבוד מרום מראשון וגו'\" שמו של משיח מנין שנאמר (תהלים עב, יז): \"יהי שמו לעולם וגו' [לפני שמש ינון שמו]\" רבי אהבה ברבי זעירא אמר אף התשובה שנאמר (שם צ, ב) \"בטרם הרים יולדו\" ואותה השעה (שם, ג) \"תשב אנוש עד דכא וגו'\" אבל איני יודע איזה מהם קודם אם התורה קדמה לכסא הכבוד ואם כסא הכבוד קודם לתורה א\"ר אבא בר כהנא התורה קדמה לכסא הכבוד שנאמר \"ה' קנני ראשית דרכו [קדם מפעלו מאז]\" קודם לאותו שכתוב בו \"נכון כסאך \"מאז\"\". ר' הונא ור' ירמיה בשם רבי שמואל בר ר' יצחק אמרו מחשבתן של ישראל קדמה לכל דבר משל למלך שהיה נשוי למטרונה אחת ולא היה לו ממנה בן פעם אחת נמצא המלך עובר בשוק אמר טלו מילנין וקלמין זו לבני והיו הכל אומרין בן אין לו והוא אומר טלו מילנין וקלמין זו לבני והיו הכל אומרין בן אין לו והוא אומר טלו אלולי שצפה המלך שהוא עתיד להעמיד ממנה בן לא היה אומר טלו מילנין וקלמין לבני כך אילולי שצפה הקב\"ה שאחר כ\"ו דורות ישראל עתידין לקבל את התורה לא היה כותב בתורה צו את בני ישראל דבר אל בני ישראל א\"ר בנאי העולם ומלואו לא נברא אלא בזכות התורה שנאמר (משלי ג, יט): \"ה' בחכמה יסד ארץ וגו'\" רבי ברכיה אמר בזכות משה שנאמר (דברים לג,כא): \"וירא ראשית לו\". ר' הונא בשם ר' מתנה אמר בזכות ג' דברים נברא העולם בזכות חלה ובזכות מעשרות ובזכות בכורים ומה טעם \"בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים\" ואין ראשית אלא חלה שנאמר (במדבר טו, כ): \"רֵאשִׁית עֲרִסֹתֵכֶם\" ואין ראשית אלא מעשרות היך דאת אמר (דברים יח, ד): \"ראשית דגנך\" ואין ראשית אלא בכורים שנאמר (שמות כג, יט): \"ראשית בכורי אדמתך וגו'\":", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:4 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "“In the beginning, God created” – six items preceded the creation of the world; some of them were [actually] created, and some of them God contemplated creating, [though He did not actually do so]. The Torah and the Throne of Glory were created. Torah, from where is it derived? As it is stated: “The Lord made me at the beginning of His way” (Proverbs 8:22). The Throne of Glory, from where is it derived? “Your throne stands firm from earliest time, [You are from eternity]” (Psalms 93:2). The patriarchs, Israel, the Temple, and the name of the messianic king – God contemplated creating them [before the world, but did not]. The patriarchs, from where is it derived? “Like grapes in the wilderness [I found Israel, like a first fruit on the fig tree, at its beginning [bereshitah] I saw your fathers]” (Hosea 9:10). Israel, from where is it derived? “Remember Your congregation, that You acquired from old times” (Psalms 74:2). The Temple, from where is it derived? “Throne of glory, exalted from the beginning, [is the place of our Temple]” (Jeremiah 17:12). The name of the messianic king, from where is it derived? “May his name endure forever. His name is praised before the sun” (Psalms 72:17). Rabbi Ahava ben Rabbi Ze’eira said: Repentance as well, as it is stated: “Before the birth of mountains” (Psalms 90:2), and at that same time, “You bring man down until he is crushed, [and then You say: Return, sons of man]” (Psalms 90:3). But I do not know which of them was first – did the Torah precede the Throne of Glory, or did the Throne of Glory precede the Torah? Rabbi Abba bar Kahana said: The Torah preceded the Throne of Glory, as it is stated: “The Lord made me at the beginning of His way, [before His undertakings of old times]” (Proverbs 8:22) – before that in whose regard it is written: “Your throne stands firm from earliest time” (Psalms 93:2). Rabbi Huna and Rabbi Yirmeya said in the name of Rabbi Shmuel bar Rabbi Yitzḥak: The contemplation about [creating] Israel preceded all other things. This is analogous to a king who married a noblewoman, but did not have a son from her. Once the king was found passing in the marketplace. He said: ‘Take this ink and inkwell for my son.’ Everyone was saying: ‘He has no son and yet he says: Take this ink and inkwell for my son?’ Then they said: ‘The king is a great astrologer, had it not been that he is destined to beget a son from her, he would not have said: Take this ink and inkwell for my son.’ So, too, had it not been that the Holy One blessed be He foresaw that after twenty-six generations Israel was destined to receive the Torah, He would not have written in the Torah: “Command the children of Israel”; “speak to the children of Israel.” Rabbi Banai said: The world and its contents were created only due to the merit of the Torah, as it is stated: “The Lord founded the earth with wisdom [beḥochma]” (Proverbs 3:19). Rabbi Berekhya said: It was due to the merit of Moses, as it is stated: “He saw the first [reshit] for himself, [as there the portion of the lawgiver is hidden]” (Deuteronomy 33:21). Rav Huna said in the name of Rav Matana: The world was created for the sake of three things: For the sake of ḥalla, for the sake of tithes, and for the sake of first fruits. What is the source? “In the beginning, [bereshit] God created,” and reshit is nothing other than ḥalla, as it is stated: “The first of [reshit] your kneading basket” (Numbers 15:20). Reshit is nothing other than tithes, as it says: “The first [reshit] of your grain” (Deuteronomy 18:4). And reshit is nothing other than first fruits, as it is stated: “The choicest of [reshit] the first fruits of your land…” (Exodus 23:19).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "br-1-5a", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-5a/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ר' הונא בשם בר קפרא פתח (תהלים לא, יט): \"תאלמנה שפתי שקר וגו'\" אתפרכן אתחרשן אשתתקן. \"אתפרכן אתחרשן\" - היך מה דאת אמר (שמות ד, יא): \"או מי ישום אלם או חרש או פקח או עור הלא אנכי ה'\" ואומר (בראשית לז, ז): \"והנה אנחנו מאלמים אלומים בתוך השדה והנה קמה אלומתי\" \"אשתתקן\" - כמשמעו. \"הַדֹּבְרוֹת עַל צַדִּיק\" חי העולמים \"עָתָק\" שהעתיק בבריותיו בגאוה אתמהה בשביל להתגאות ולומר אני דורש במעשה בראשית \"וָבוּז\" אתמהה מבזה על כבודי דא\"ר יוסי בר חנינא כל המתכבד בקלון חבירו אין לו חלק לעולם הבא בכבודו של מקום על אחת כמה וכמה ומה כתיב אחריו (כ): \"מָה רַב טוּבְך", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:5, first half (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rav Huna began in the name of bar Kapara: “May they be silenced [te’alamna], those lying lips [that speak harsh words against the righteous one with arrogance and contempt]” (Psalms 31:19) – may they be bound up, may they become mute, may they be silenced. May they become mute – as it says: “Who gives a mouth to a person, or who renders one mute [ilem] or deaf, or sighted or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (Exodus 4:11). And [may they be bound up,] as it says: “Behold, we were binding [me’alemim] sheaves in the field and behold, my sheaf arose” (Genesis 37:7). May they be silenced – that is its plain sense. “That speak…against the Righteous One” (Psalms 31:19) – [this refers to] Him of eternal life. “Harsh words [atak]” (Psalms 31:19) – matters that He concealed [shehe’etik] from His creations. “With arrogance” (Psalms 31:19) – this is an expression of bewilderment: [Do they do this] in order to boast arrogantly: I am expounding the act of Creation? “And contempt” (Psalms 31:19) – this [too] is an expression of bewilderment: Is it in order to show contempt for My honor? As Rabbi Yosei bar Ḥanina said: Anyone who attains honor through the degradation of another person has no portion in the World to Come; how much more so is this so regarding the honor of the Omnipresent. What is written following this? “How great is the goodness You have in store for those who fear You” (Psalms 31:20) – for those who fear You, but not for those who demean the [awesome] fear of You. They will not be included in: “How great is the goodness.”", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "br-1-5b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-5b/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "בנוהג שבעולם מלך ב\"ו בונה פלטין במקום הביבים ובמקום האשפה ובמקום הסריות כל מי שהוא בא לומר פלטין זו בנויה במקום הביבים ובמקום האשפה ובמקום הסריות אינו פוגם כך כל מי שהוא בא לומר העוה\"ז נברא מתוך תוהו ובוהו אינו פוגם אתמהה ר' הונא בשם בר קפרא אמר אילולי שהדבר כתוב אי אפשר לאמרו \"בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים\" מנין הן \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹה", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:5 (Vilna numbering), second half", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "The way of the world is that when a flesh-and-blood king builds his palace in [a location that had been] a place of sewers, a place of refuse, and a malodorous place, anyone who comes and says: ‘This palace was built in a place of sewers, a place of refuse, and a malodorous place,’ is this not an insult? So, too, anyone who comes and says: ‘This world was created from emptiness and disorder,’ is this not an insult? This is a rhetorical question. Rav Huna said in the name of bar Kapara: Were the matter not written explicitly it would not have been possible to say it: “In the beginning, God created” (Genesis 1:1) – from what? “The earth was emptiness and disorder” (Genesis 1:2).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "br-1-7", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-7/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ר' יצחק פתח (תהלים קיט, קס): \"ראש דברך אמת וגו'\" א\"ר יצחק מתחלת ברייתו של עולם ראש דברך אמת \"בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים\" (ירמיה י, י): \"וה' אלהים אמת\". \"ולעולם כל משפט צדקך\" שכל גזרה וגזרה שאתה גוזר על בריותיך הן מצדיקין עליהם את הדין ומקבלין אותו באמונה ואין כל בריה יכולה לומר שתי רשויות בראו העולם וידברו אלהים אין כתיב כאן אלא וידבר אלהים ויאמרו אלהים אין כתיב כאן אלא ויאמר אלהים בראשית בראו אלהים אין כתיב כאן אלא ברא אלהים:", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:7 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yitzḥak began: “The beginning of Your word is truth…” (Psalms 119:160) – Rabbi Yitzḥak said: Right from the beginning of the creation of the world [it can be seen that] “the beginning of Your word is truth” – “in the beginning, God created.” “But My Lord God is truth” (Jeremiah 10:10), “All Your righteous laws are eternal” (Psalms 119:160) – as each and every edict that You decree upon Your creations, they accept the judgment upon themselves and receive it faithfully, and no person can come and say that two authorities created the world: “God [Elohim] spoke [vaydaberu]” is not written here [in plural], but rather [in singular], “God spoke [vaydaber];” “God [Elohim] said [vayomeru]” is not written here [in plural], but rather [in singular], “God said [vayomer]”; “In the beginning God created [bare’u]” is not written here [in plural], but rather [in singular], “God created [bara].”", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "br-1-8", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-8/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי יהושע בן לוי בשם ר' לוי אמר זה שהוא בונה צריך ששה דברים מים ועפר ועצים ואבנים וקנים וברזל וא\"ת עשיר הוא ואינו צריך לקנים הרי הוא צריך לקני המדה שנאמר (יחזקאל מ, ג): \"ופתיל פשתים בידו וקנה המדה\" כך התורה קדמה אותן שש קדימות \"קדם\" ו\"מאז\" ו\"מעולם\" ו\"מראש\" ו\"מקדמי\" תרין, בפרשה (משלי ח , כב-כג): \"ה' קנני\":", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:8 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said in the name of Rabbi Levi: A builder requires six items: Water, dirt, wood, stones, reeds, and iron. If you say that he is wealthy and does not need reeds [to build with], he still needs to use them as a measuring rod, as it is stated: “A linen thread and a measuring rod” (Ezekiel 40:3). So, too, the Torah employed these six expressions of precedence: “Of old [kedem]…from earliest time [me’az], from ancient times [meolam]…from the beginning [merosh], from before [mikadmei]…” (Proverbs 8:22–23) – which counts as two, in the section of “the Lord made me” (Proverbs 8:22).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "br-1-9", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-1-9/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "פילסופי אחד שאל את רבן גמליאל אמר ליה צייר גדול הוא אלהיכם אלא שמצא סממנים טובים שסייעו אותו תוהו ובוהו וחושך ורוח ומים ותהומות אמר ליה תיפח רוחיה דההוא גברא כולהון כתיב בהן בריאה תוהו ובוהו - שנאמר (ישעיה מה, ז): \"עושה שלום ובורא רע\" חושך - \"יוֹצֵר אוֹר [וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ]\" מים - (תהלים קמח, ה): \"הללוהו שמי השמים והמים\" למה ש\"צוה ונבראו\" רוח (עמוס ד, יג): \"כי הנה יוצר הרים ובורא רוח\" תהומות (משלי ח, כד): \"באין תהומות חוללתי\":", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:9 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "A certain philosopher once asked Rabban Gamliel, saying to him: ‘Your God is a great artist, however he found many excellent raw materials that helped him: Emptiness, disorder, darkness, wind, water, and depths.’ He said to him: ‘May the spirit of that man depart from him; regarding all of them, creation is written.’ Emptiness and disorder, as it is stated: “Who makes peace and creates evil” (Isaiah 45:7). Darkness, “who forms light [and creates darkness]” (Isaiah 45:7); water, “Praise Him, heavens on heavens, and the water [above the heavens]” (Psalms 148:4). Why? “For He commanded and they were created” (Psalms 148:5). Wind, “For behold, He forms mountains and creates wind” (Amos 4:13); depths, “when there were no depths, I generated” (Proverbs 8:24).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "br-2-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-2-1/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "\"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ\" רבי ברכיה פתח (משלי כ, יא): \"גם במעלליו יתנכר נער\" א\"ר ברכיה עד דהיא פגה אפיקת כובייא הוא מה שהנביא עתיד להתנבאות עליה בסוף (ירמיה ד, כג): \"ראיתי את הארץ והנה תהו ובהו\":", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 2:1 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "“The earth was emptiness and disorder, and darkness was upon the face of the depths, and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water” (Genesis 1:2). “The earth was emptiness and disorder [tohu vavohu]” – Rabbi Berekhya began: “Even a boy is recognized through his deeds” (Proverbs 20:11) – Rabbi Berekhya said: While the plant was still immature, it produced thorns. This is what the prophet would one day prophesy in its regard: “I have seen the land, and behold, it is emptiness and disorder” (Jeremiah 4:23).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "br-2-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-2-2/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי אבהו ורבי יהודה בר סימון רבי אבהו אמר משל למלך שקנה לו שני עבדים שניהם באוני אחת ובטימי אחת על אחד גזר שיהא ניזון מטמיון ועל אחד גזר שיהא יגע ואוכל ישב לו אותו תוהא ובוהא אמר שנינו באוני אחת ובטימי אחת זה ניזון מטמיון ואני אם איני יגע איני אוכל, כך ישבה הארץ תוהא ובוהא אמרה העליונים והתחתונים נבראו בבת אחת העליונים ניזונין מזיו השכינה התחתונים אם אינם יגעים אינם אוכלים. ור' יהודה בר סימון אמר משל למלך שקנה לו שתי שפחות שתיהן באוני אחת ובטימי אחת על אחת גזר שלא תזוז מפלטין ועל אחת גזר טירודין ישבה לה אותה השפחה תוהא ובוהא אמרה שנינו באוני אחת ובטימי אחת זו אינה יוצאה וזזה מפלטין ועלי גוזר טירודין, כך ישבה לה הארץ תוהא ובוהא אמרה העליונים והתחתונים נבראו בבת אחת העליונים חיים והתחתונים מתים לפיכך \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ\". א\"ר תנחומא לבן מלך שהיה ישן ע\"ג עריסה והיתה מניקתו תוהא ובוהא למה שהיתה יודעת שהיא עתידה ליטול את שלה מתחת ידיו כך צפתה הארץ שהיא עתידה ליטול את שלה מתחת ידיו של אדם שנאמר \"אֲרוּרָה הָאֲדָמָה בַּעֲבוּרֶךָ\" לפיכך \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ\":", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 2:2 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Abahu and Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon, Rabbi Abahu said: This is analogous to a king who purchased two slaves for himself, both of them with one bill of sale and with one sum. He decreed for one of them that he should be supported from the royal treasury, and for the other that he would have to toil to eat. That one sat, bewildered and astonished [toheh uvoheh]. He said: ‘Both of us were purchased with one bill of sale and one sum, yet this one is supported from the royal treasury, and I, if I do not toil, I do not eat?’ So, too, the earth sat bewildered and astonished. It said: ‘The celestial beings and the terrestrial beings were created simultaneously. The celestial beings are sustained from the radiance of the Divine Presence; as for the terrestrial beings, if they do not toil they do not eat.’ Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon said: It is analogous to a king who purchased two maidservants, both of them with one bill of sale and with one sum. He decreed for one of them that she should not depart from the palace, and for the other he decreed banishment. That maidservant sat bewildered and astonished [toha uvoha]. She said: ‘Both of us were purchased with one bill of sale and one sum, and this one does not go out and depart from the palace, but for me he decrees banishment?’ So, too, the earth sat bewildered and astonished [toha uvoha]. It said: ‘The celestial beings and the terrestrial beings were created simultaneously. The celestial beings live forever and the terrestrial beings die.’ That is why “the earth was emptiness and disorder [tohu vavohu].” Rabbi Tanḥuma said: It is analogous to the son of a king, who was sleeping in his cradle, and his wet nurse was bewildered and astonished [toha uvoha], as she knew that she would ultimately receive her punishment on his account. So, the earth foresaw that it was destined to receive its punishment on account of man, as it is stated: “Cursed is the ground on your account” (Genesis 3:17). That is why “the earth was emptiness and disorder [tohu vavohu].”", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "br-2-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-2-3/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי יהודה בר סימון פתר קריא בדורות. \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ\" זה אדם הראשון שהיה ללמה ולא כלום. \"וָבֹהוּ\" זה קין שבקש להחזיר את העולם לתוהו ובוהו. \"וְחֹשֶׁךְ\" זה דורו של אנוש על שם (ישעיה כט, טו): \"וְהָיָה בְמַחְשָׁךְ מַעֲשֵׂיהֶם וַיֹּאמְרוּ מִי וְגוֹ'\". \"עַל פְּנֵי תְהוֹם\" זה דור המבול שנאמר (בראשית ז, יא): \"ביום הזה נבקעו כל מעינות תהום\". \"וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם\" על שם (שם ח, א) \"וַיַּעֲבֵר אֱלֹהִים רוּחַ עַל הָאָרֶץ\" אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא עד מתי יהא העולם מתנהג באפילה תבא האורה. \"וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר\" זה אברהם הה\"ד (ישעיה מא, ב): \"מִי הֵעִיר מִמִּזְרָח צֶדֶק וגו'\" אל תקרא העיר אלא האיר. \"וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם\" זה יעקב. \"וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לַיְלָה\" זה עשו. \"וַיְהִי עֶרֶב\" זה עשו \"וַיְהִי בֹקֶר\" זה יעקב ויהי ערב ערבו של עשו ויהי בקר בוקרו של יעקב \"יוֹם אֶחָד\" שנאמר (זכריה יד, ז): \"והיה יום אחד הוא יודע לה' לא יום ולא לילה וגו'\". דבר אחר \"יוֹם אֶחָד\" שנתן לו הקדוש ברוך הוא ואיזה זה יום הכפורים:", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 2:3 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yehuda bar Simon interpreted the verses regarding the generations. “The earth was emptiness and disorder” – this is Adam the first man, who became oblivion and nothingness. “And disorder” – this is Cain, who sought to restore the world to emptiness and disorder. “And darkness” – this is the generation of Enosh, based on the verse: “Their actions are in the dark and they say: Who sees us and who knows of us?” (Isaiah 29:15). “Upon the face of the depths” – this is the generation of the Flood, as it is stated: “On that day all the wellsprings of the great depths were breached” (Genesis 7:11). “And the spirit [ruaḥ] of God was hovering over the surface of the water” – based on the verse: “God passed a wind [ruaḥ] over the earth” (Genesis 8:1). The Holy One blessed be He said: ‘Until when will the world conduct itself in darkness? Let some light come.’ “God said: Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) – this is Abraham. That is what is written [regarding Abraham]: “Who roused [he’ir] righteousness from the east?” (Isaiah 41:2). Do not read it as he’ir, but rather, he’ir. “God called the light, Day, and the darkness, He called Night. It was evening and it was morning, one day” (Genesis 1:5). “God called the light, Day” – this is Jacob. “And the darkness, He called Night” – this is Esau. “It was evening” – this is Esau; “and it was morning” – this is Jacob. “It was evening” – the evening of Esau; “and it was morning” – the morning of Jacob. “One day” – as it is stated: “There will be one day, it will be known to the Lord, that is not day and not night…” (Zechariah 14:7). Alternatively, “one day” – which the Holy One blessed be He provided him. Which is that? It is Yom Kippur.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "br-2-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-2-4/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת\" זה רוחו של מלך המשיח היאך מה דאת אמר (ישעיה יא, ב): \"ונחה עליו רוח ה'\" באיזו זכות ממשמשת ובאה המרחפת על פני המים בזכות התשובה שנמשלה כמים שנאמר (איכה ב, יט): \"שפכי כמים לבך\". רבי חגי בשם רבי פדת אמר ברית כרותה למים שאפילו בשעת שרב רוחה שייפה. וכבר היה ר\"ש בן זומא יושב ותוהא ועבר רבי יהושע ושאל בשלומו פעם ושתים ולא השיבו בשלישית השיבו בבהילות א\"ל בן זומא מאין הרגלים אמר לו מעיין הייתי א\"ל מעיד אני עלי שמים וארץ שאיני זז מכאן עד שתודיעני מאין הרגלים א\"ל מסתכל הייתי במעשה בראשית ולא היה בין מים העליונים למים התחתונים אלא כשתים ושלש אצבעות. ורוח אלהים מנשבת אין כתיב כאן אלא מרחפת כעוף הזה שהוא מרפרף בכנפיו וכנפיו נוגעות ואינן נוגעות נהפך רבי יהושע ואמר לתלמידיו הלך לו בן זומא ולא שהו ימים מועטים ובן זומא בעולם:", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 2:4 (Vilna numbering; Theodor–Albeck differs)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA)" }, "english": { "text": "“And the spirit of God was hovering” – this is the spirit of the messianic king, as it says: “The spirit of the Lord will rest upon him” (Isaiah 11:2). By what merit will it [the Messianic kingdom] come? “Hovering over the surface of the water” – by the merit of repentance, that is likened to water, as it is stated: “Pour out your heart like water [before the face of the Lord]” (Lamentations 2:19). Rabbi Ḥagai said in the name of Rabbi Pedat: A covenant is made with the water, that even when the weather is hot, the wind blows over it. It happened once that Rabbi Shimon ben Zoma was sitting, entranced in thought. Rabbi Yehoshua passed and greeted him once, twice, but he did not answer him. The third time, he answered him with a start. He said to him: ‘Ben Zoma, where were your thoughts?’ He said to him: ‘I have been contemplating.’ He said to him: ‘As the heavens and the earth are my witnesses, I shall not move from here until you inform me where your thoughts were.’ He said to him: ‘I was looking at the act of Creation, and [I saw that] between the upper waters and the lower waters there were only two or three fingerbreadths. “The spirit of the Lord was blowing” is not written, but rather, “was hovering” – like a bird that flaps its wings, they touch [the nest] but do not quite touch.’ Rabbi Yehoshua turned and said to his disciples: Ben Zoma is gone. Not even a few days passed with ben Zoma still in the world.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "br-2-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-2-5/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי אבהו ור' חייא רבה רבי אבהו אמר מתחלת ברייתו של עולם צפה הקדוש ברוך הוא במעשיהן של צדיקים ומעשיהן של רשעים הדא הוא דכתיב (תהלים א, ו): \"כי יודע ה' דרך צדיקים וגו'\". \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ\" אלו מעשיהן של רשעים \"וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר\" אלו מעשיהן של צדיקים אבל איני יודע באיזה מהם חפץ אם במעשה אלו ואם במעשה אלו כיון דכתיב \"וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת הָאוֹר כִּי טוֹב\" הוי במעשיהן של צדיקים חפץ ואינו חפץ במעשיהן של רשעים.", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 2:5 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Abahu and Rabbi Ḥiyya the Great, Rabbi Abahu said: Right from the beginning of the creation of the world, the Holy One blessed be He foresaw the actions of the righteous and the actions of the wicked. That is what is written: “For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish” (Psalms 1:6). “The earth was emptiness and disorder” – these are the actions of the wicked. “God said: Let there be light” – these are the actions of the righteous. But I do not know which He desires, whether it is the actions of these, or the actions of those. When it is written: “God saw the light, that it was good” (Genesis 1:4) – this shows that He desires the actions of the righteous, and does not desire the actions of the wicked.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "br-3-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-3-4/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ר' שמעון בן יהוצדק שאליה לרבי שמואל בר נחמן א\"ל מפני ששמעתי עליך שאתה בעל הגדה מהיכן נבראת האורה א\"ל מלמד שנתעטף בה הקדוש ברוך הוא כשלמה והבהיק זיו הדרו מסוף העולם ועד סופו אמרה ליה בלחישה מקרא מלא הוא (תהלים קד, ב): \"עֹטֶה אוֹר כַּשַּׂלְמָה\" ואת אמרת לי בלחישה אתמהא א\"ל כשם ששמעתיה בלחישה כך אמרתיה לך בלחישה. א\"ר ברכיה אלולי שדרשה רבי יצחק איפשר ממרינה, מקומיכן מה הוון אמרין, רבי ברכיה בשם ר' יצחק ממקום בית המקדש נבראת האורה הה\"ד (יחזקאל מג, ב ): \"וְהִנֵּה כְּבוֹד אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בָּא מִדֶּרֶךְ הַקָּדִים וקולו כקול מים רבים והארץ האירה מכבודו\" ואין כבודו אלא בהמ\"ק היך דאת אמר (ירמיה יז, יב ): \"כִּסֵּא כָבוֹד מָרוֹם מֵרִאשׁוֹן מְקוֹם מִקְדָּשֵׁנוּ וְגוֹ'\":", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:4 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Shimon ben Yehotzadak asked Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥman, saying to him: ‘Since I have about you that you are a master of aggada, [I ask you:] from what was the light created?’ He said to him: ‘It [the verse] teaches that the Holy One blessed be He wrapped himself in it like a garment, and the aura of its radiance shone from the end of the world to its end.’ He said it to him in a whisper. He said to him: ‘It is an explicit verse: “Wrapped in light as if with a garment” (Psalms 104:2), and you say it to me in a whisper? This is bewildering.’ He said to him: ‘Just as I heard it in a whisper, so I said it to you in a whisper.’ Rabbi Berekhya said: Had Rabbi Yitzḥak not expounded this in public, it would not have been possible to say it. Beforehand, what would they say? Rabbi Berekhya said in the name of Rabbi Yitzḥak: It is from the site of the Temple that the light was created. That is what is written: “And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was coming from the direction of the east…[and the earth shone with His glory]” (Ezekiel 43:2). And his glory is nothing other than the Temple, just as it says: “Throne of glory, exalted from the first, the place of our Temple…” (Jeremiah 17:12).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "br-3-6", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-3-6/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "תני אורה שנבראת בששת ימי בראשית להאיר ביום אינה יכולה שהיא מכהה גלגל החמה ובלילה אינה יכולה שלא נבראת להאיר אלא ביום והיכן היא נגנזה והיא מתוקנת לצדיקים לעתיד לבא שנאמר (ישעיה ל, כו ): \"והיה אור הלבנה כאור החמה ואור החמה יהיה שבעתים כאור שבעת הימים\" אתמהא שבעת ולא שלשה הן והלא ברביעי נבראו המאורות אלא כאינש דאמר כן וכן אנא מפקד לשבעת יומיא דמישתותי. רבי נחמיה אמר אלו שבעת ימי אבילות של מתושלח הצדיק. שהשפיע להן הקדוש ברוך הוא אורה.", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:6, the stored light (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "It is taught: The light that was created during the six days of Creation cannot illuminate by day, because it would make the orb of the sun seem dim [by comparison], nor can it [illuminate] at night, as it was created to illuminate only during the day. Where is it, then? It was stored away, and is designated for the righteous for the future, as it is stated: “The light of the moon will be like the light of the sun and the light of the sun will be sevenfold, like the light of the seven days” (Isaiah 30:26). This is bewildering: “Seven [days]”? Are they not three? Is it not so, that the lights were created only on the fourth day? It is, rather, like a person who says: This and that I am preparing for the seven days of the wedding feast. Rabbi Neḥemya said: These are the seven days of mourning for the righteous Methuselah, during which the Holy One blessed be He conferred extra light upon them.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "br-3-6b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-3-6b/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי זעירא בריה דרבי אבהו דרש בקסרין מנין שאין מברכין על הנר עד שיאותו לאורו מן הכא \"וַיַּרְא\" \"וַיַּבְדֵּל\" רבי יהודה בר' סימון אמר הבדילו לו רבנן אמרי הבדילו לצדיקים לעתיד לבוא משל למלך שהיה לו מנה יפה והפרישה לבנו. א\"ר ברכיה כך דרשו שני גדולי עולם רבי יוחנן ור\"ש בן לקיש ויבדל הבדלה ממש משל למלך שהיה לו שני איסטרטיגין א' שליט ביום וא' שליט בלילה והיו שניהם מדיינין זה עם זה זה אומר ביום אני שולט וזה אומר ביום אני שולט קרא המלך לראשון א\"ל פלוני יום יהא תחומך וכן לשני א\"ל פלוני לילה יהא תחומך כך \"ויקרא אלהים לאור יום\" א\"ל יום יהא תחומך ולחשך קרא לילה אמר ליה לילה יהא תחומך. א\"ר יוחנן הוא שהקב\"ה אומר לאיוב (איוב לח, יב ): \"הֲמִיָּמֶיךָ צִוִּיתָ בֹּקֶר יִדַּעְתָּ הַשַּׁחַר מְקֹמוֹ\" הידעת מקומו אי זה הוא אתמהא. א\"ר תנחומא אנא אמרי טעמא (ישעיה מה, ז ): \"יוצר אור ובורא חושך עושה שלום\" משנבראו עושה שלום בינהן", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:6, the va-yavdel block (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Ze’eira son of Rabbi Abahu preached in Caesarea: From where is it derived that someone does not recite a blessing on the candle [at havdala on Saturday night] until he avails himself of its light? It is from here: “[God] saw…and [God] distinguished [vayavdel].” Rabbi Yehuda bar Rabbi Simon said: He set it aside for Himself. The Rabbis say: He set it aside for the righteous in the World to Come. This is analogous to a king who had a fine portion of food and set it aside for his son. “God called the light, Day, and to the darkness He called Night. It was evening and it was morning, one day” (Genesis 1:5). Rabbi Berekhya said: This is what two eminent men of the world, Rabbi Yoḥanan and Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, expounded: “[God] distinguished” – this refers to distinguishing in the literal sense. This is analogous to a king who had two commanders, one to be in charge by day and one to be in charge by night. They were arguing with one another. This one said: ‘I will be in charge by day,’ and that one said: ‘I will be in charge by day.’ The king summoned the first one and said to him: ‘So-and-so, the day will be your realm.’ Likewise for the second one, he said to him: ‘So-and-so, the night will be your realm.’ So, too, “God called the light, Day” – He said to it: ‘The day will be your realm.’ “And to the darkness He called Night” – He said to it: ‘The night will be your realm.’ Rabbi Yoḥanan said: That is what the Holy One blessed be He says to Job: “In all your days, have you commanded the morning and apprised darkness of its place?” (Job 38:12) – have you informed it of its place, where it is? This was a rhetorical question. Rabbi Tanḥuma said: I will say the source for this: “He forms light and creates darkness, He makes peace” (Isaiah 45:7) – after they were created, He made peace [between them].", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "br-3-6c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-3-6c/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "א\"ר אלעזר לעולם אין הקדוש ברוך הוא מיחד שמו על הרעה אלא על הטובה \"וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם\" ולחושך קרא אלהים לילה אין כתיב כאן אלא \"וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לַיְלָה", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:6, R. Elazar on the withheld name (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Elazar said: The Holy One blessed be He never associates His name with the bad, but only with the good. “God called the light, Day and to the darkness God called night” is not written here, but rather, “to the darkness He called night.”", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "br-3-8-yanai", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-3-8-yanai/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "א\"ר ינאי מתחלת ברייתו של עולם צפה הקב\"ה מעשיהן של צדיקים ומעשיהם של רשעים. \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ\" אלו מעשיהם של רשעים \"וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר\" אלו מעשיהן של צדיקים \"וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ\" בין מעשיהן של צדיקים למעשיהן של רשעים. \"וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לָאוֹר יוֹם\" אלו מעשיהן של צדיקים \"וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ קָרָא לַיְלָה\" אלו מעשיהן של רשעים", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:8, opening (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA). Phase 6, 2026-09-05: moved off 'Midrash Rabbah -- TE', whose own site asserts all rights reserved" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Yanai said: Right from the beginning of the creation of the world, the Holy One blessed be He foresaw the actions of the righteous and the actions of the wicked. “The earth was emptiness” (Genesis 1:2) – these are the actions of the wicked. “God said: Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3) – these are the actions of the righteous. “God distinguished between the light and the darkness” (Genesis 1:4) – between the actions of the righteous and the actions of the wicked. “God called the light, Day” (Genesis 1:5) – these are the actions of the righteous. “And to the darkness He called Night” (Genesis 1:5) – these are the actions of the wicked.", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "br-3-8", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-3-8/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "הִי עֶרֶב\" אלו מעשיהן של רשעים \"וַיְהִי בֹקֶר\" אלו מעשיהן של צדיקים. \"יוֹם אֶחָד\" שנתן להם הקדוש ברוך הוא יום אחד ואיזה זה יוה\"כ. א\"ר תנחום בר ירמיה שבו נבראו ארבעה דברים הרים שמים וארץ ואורה א\"ר יודן שבו היה הקב\"ה יחידי בעולמו שלא היה בעולמו אלא הוא אתיא כר' יוחנן ולא אתיא כרבי חנינא רבי יוחנן אמר בשני נבראו המלאכים הה\"ד (תהלים קד, ד ): \"המקרה במים עליותיו השם עבים רכובו המהלך על כנפי רוח\" וכתיב \"עושה מלאכיו רוחות\" רבי חנינא אמר בחמישי נבראו מלאכים שנאמר ועוף יעופף על הארץ וכתיב (ישעיה ו, ב ): \"ובשתים יעופף\" רבי לוליאני בר טבראי בשם ר' יצחק אמר בין על דעתיה דר\"ח בין על דעתיה דר\"י הכל מודים שלא נברא ביום הראשון כלום שלא תאמר מיכאל היה מותח בדרומו של רקיע וגבריאל בצפונו והקדוש ברוך הוא ממדד באמצעיתו אלא (שם מד, כד) \"אנכי ה' עושה כל נוטה שמים לבדי רוקע הארץ מאתי\" מי אתי כתיב מי היה שותף עמי בברייתו של עולם:", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:8 (Vilna numbering; Theodor–Albeck differs)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA)" }, "english": { "text": "“It was evening” (Genesis 1:5) – these are the actions of the wicked. “And it was morning” (Genesis 1:5) – these are the actions of the righteous. “[It was evening and it was morning,] one day” – the Holy One blessed be He gave to them [to Israel] one [unique] day. Which is that? It is Yom Kippur. Rabbi Tanḥum bar Yirmeya said: [It was the day] on which four items were created: Mountains, the heavens, the earth, and light. Rabbi Yudan said: [It was the day] on which the Holy One blessed be He was alone in His world, as there was no one else in His world other than Him. This is in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Yoḥanan, but it is not in accordance with the opinion of Rabbi Ḥanina. Rabbi Yoḥanan said: The angels [malakhim] were created on the second day. That is what is written: “He covers His upper chambers with water; He makes clouds His chariot; He proceeds on the wings of wind” (Psalms 104:3), and it is written: “He makes the winds His messengers [malakhav]” (Psalms 104:4). Rabbi Ḥanina said: The angels were created on the fifth day, as it is stated: “Let birds fly [yeofef] over the earth…” (Genesis 1:20) and it is written: “And with two it would fly [yeofef]” (Isaiah 6:2). Rabbi Lulyana bar Tavrai said in the name of Rabbi Yitzḥak: Both according to the opinion of Rabbi Ḥanina and according to the opinion of Rabbi Yoḥanan, everyone agrees that none were created on the first day, so people should not say: Mikhael was pulling at the south side of the heavens and Gabriel at its north side, while the Holy One blessed be straightened it out it in the middle. Rather, “I am the Lord, who made everything; who stretched out the heavens alone, who spread the earth by Myself [me’iti]” (Isaiah 44:24) – it [the last word] is written [as two]: “who is with Me [mi iti]?” Who was partner with Me in creation of the world?", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "br-3-9", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-3-9/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "א\"ר שמואל בר אמי מתחלת ברייתו של עולם נתאוה הקב\"ה לעשות שותפות בתחתונים מה נפשך אם לענין החשבון לא היה צריך למימר אלא אחד שנים שלשה או ראשון שני ושלישי - שמא אחד שני שלישי אתמהא אימתי פרע להם הקדוש ברוך הוא להלן בהקמת המשכן שנאמר (במדבר ז, יב ): \"ויהי המקריב ביום הראשון את קרבנו\" ראשון לברייתו של עולם אמר הקב\"ה כאילו באותו יום בראתי את עולמי תני עשר עטרות נטל אותו היום ראשון למעשה בראשית ראשון למלכים ראשון לנשיאים ראשון לכהונה ראשון לשכינה שנאמר (שמות כה, ח ): \"ועשו לי מקדש\" ראשון לברכה ראשון לעבודה ראשון לאיסור הבמה ראשון לשחיטה בצפון ראשון לירידת האש שנאמר (ויקרא ט, כד ): \"ותצא אש מלפני ה' וגו'\".", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:9 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "cc-by-sa", "version": "Sefaria 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA)" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Shmuel bar Ami said: From the beginning of the creation of the world, the Holy One blessed be He desired to enter into a partnership with the creations below. Either way, it [the wording of the verse] is difficult. If it [the counting of the days] was for the purpose of a tally, it should have said: ‘One, two, three,’ or else ‘first, second, third’; is it proper to say: ‘One, second, third?’ This is bewildering. When did the Holy One blessed be He repay them? It was later, at the establishment of the Tabernacle, as it is stated: “The one who presented his offering on the first day” (Numbers 7:12) – [alluding to] the first [day] of the creation of the world. The Holy One blessed be He said: ‘It is as though I created the world on that day.’ It was taught: That day was conferred with ten crowns. It was the first day of the act of Creation; the first day for [years of] kings; the first day for the princes; the first day for the priesthood; the first day for the Divine Presence [on earth], as it is stated: “They shall craft a sanctuary for Me [and I will dwell in their midst]” (Exodus 25:8); the first day for blessing; the first day for sacrificial service; the first day for the prohibition of improvised altars; the first day for slaughtering [sacrifices] in the north; and the first day for descent of fire [from heaven], as it is stated: “Fire emerged from before the Lord…” (Leviticus 9:24).", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "br-8-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-8-3/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ויאמר אלהים נעשה אדם. במי נמלך? רבי יהושע בשם ר' לוי אמר:במלאכת השמים והארץ נמלך. משל למלך שהיו לו ב' סנקליטים ולא היה עושה דבר חוץ מדעתן. רבי שמואל בר נחמן אמר: במעשה כל יום ויום נמלך. משל למלך שהיה לו סנקתדרון ולא היה עושה דבר חוץ מדעתו. ר' אמי אמר: בלבו נמלך. משל למלך שבנה פלטין ע\"י ארדכל, ראה אותה ולא ערבה לו על מי יש לו להתרעם, לא על ארדכל אתמהא?! הוי, ויתעצב אל לבו. אמר רבי אסי: משל למלך שעשה לו סחורה על ידי סרסור והפסיד, על מי יש לו להתרעם לא על הסרסור אתמהא?! הוי, ויתעצב אל לבו:", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 8:3 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "daat-br", "version": "Sefaria 'Daat Bereshit Rabbah' (Public Domain). Chapter 8 is not in 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah', the version used for chapters 1-3" }, "english": { "text": "“And God said: Let us make Man” – with whom did He consult? Rabbi Yehoshua said in the name of Rabbi Levi: He consulted with the works of the heavens and the earth. This is analogous to a king who had two members of his council and he would not do anything without their knowledge. Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥman said: He consulted with what was made on each and every day. This is analogous to a king who had an adviser and he would not do anything without his knowledge. Rabbi Ami said: He consulted with His heart. This is analogous to a king who built a palace through the services of an architect, but it was not pleasing for him. At whom should he be angry? Is it not the architect? This is a rhetorical question. That is, “He was saddened in His heart” (Genesis 6:6). Rav Asi said: This is analogous to a king who conducted a business transaction through an intermediary, and he suffered a loss. At whom should he be angry? Is it not the intermediary? This is a rhetorical question. That is, “He was saddened in His heart.”", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "br-8-8", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-8-8/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "רבי שמואל בר נחמן בשם רבי יונתן אמר: בשעה שהיה משה כותב את התורה היה כותב מעשה כל יום ויום, כיון שהגיע לפסוק הזה שנאמר: ויאמר אלהים נעשה אדם בצלמנו כדמותנו. אמר לפניו: רבון העולם מה אתה נותן פתחון פה למינים אתמהא?! אמר לו: כתוב והרוצה לטעות יטעה. אמר לו הקב\"ה: משה! האדם הזה שבראתי לא גדולים וקטנים אני מעמיד ממנו?! שאם יבא הגדול ליטול רשות מן הקטן ממנו, והוא אומר מה אני צריך ליטול רשות מן הקטן ממני?! והן אומרים לו: למוד מבוראך, שהוא ברא את העליונים ואת התחתונים, כיון שבא לבראת את האדם נמלך במלאכי השרת. אמר רבי לוי: לית הכא מלכו אלא, משל למלך שהיה מטייל בפתח פלטין שלו וראה בלורין א' מושלכת, אמר, מה נעשה בה? מהן אומרים דימוסיות, ומהן אומרים פריבטאות. אמר המלך: אינדרטין אני עושה אותה, מי מעכב:", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 8:8 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "daat-br", "version": "Sefaria 'Daat Bereshit Rabbah' (Public Domain). Chapter 8 is not in 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah', the version used for chapters 1-3" }, "english": { "text": "Rabbi Shmuel bar Naḥman said in the name of Rabbi Yonatan: When Moses was writing the Torah, and was writing what was made on each day, when he reached this verse: “And God said: Let us make Man in our image, in our likeness” – he said before Him: ‘Master of the universe, why do you provide the heretics with basis for a claim? This is bewildering.’ He said to him: ‘Just write, and if someone wants to err, let him err.’ The Holy One blessed be He said to Moses: ‘Is it not so regarding this man whom I created, that I will bring forth descendants of greater and lesser status? If someone of greater status is about to seek approval from one of lesser stature than he, but he says: Why do I need to seek approval from one who is of lesser stature than I? One may say to him: Learn from your Creator, as He created the heavenly realms and the earthly realms, but when He came to create man, he consulted with the ministering angels.’ Rabbi Levi said: There is no consultation here; rather, this is analogous to a king who was strolling at the entrance to his palace, and saw a large hewn rock set off to the side. He said: ‘What should we use this for?’ Some of them [of his advisers] said: ‘[Use it for] the public baths,’ and others said: ‘For private bathhouses.’ The king said: ‘I am going to craft it into a statue.’ Who will prevent it?", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "br-8-9", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/br-8-9/", "author": "Bereshit Rabbah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 450, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "שאלו המינים את רבי שמלאי: כמה אלהות בראו את העולם? אמר להם: אני ואתם נשאל לימים הראשונים, הדא הוא דכתיב (דברים ד): כי שאל נא לימים ראשונים למן היום אשר ברא אלהים אדם, אשר בראו אין כתיב כאן, אלא אשר ברא. חזרו ושאלו אותו אמרו לו: מה הוא דין דכתיב בראשית ברא אלהים? אמר להם: בראו אלהים אין כתיב כאן, אלא ברא אלהים. אמר רבי שמלאי: בכל מקום שאתה מוצא פתחון פה למינין, אתה מוצא תשובה בצדה. חזרו ושאלו אותו אמרו לו: מה הוא דין דכתיב: נעשה אדם בצלמנו כדמותנו? אמר להון: קראון מה דבתריה, ויבראו אלהים את האדם בצלמיהם לא נאמר, אלא ויברא אלהים את האדם בצלמו. וכיון שיצאו אמרו לו תלמידיו רבי! לאלו דחית בקנה לנו מה את משיב? אמר להם: לשעבר אדם נברא מן האדמה, חוה נבראת מן האדם, מכאן ואילך בצלמנו כדמותנו, לא איש בלא אשה ולא אשה בלא איש ולא שניהם בלא שכינה.", "source": "Bereshit Rabbah 8:9 (Vilna numbering)", "license": "daat-br", "version": "Sefaria 'Daat Bereshit Rabbah' (Public Domain). Chapter 8 is not in 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah', the version used for chapters 1-3" }, "english": { "text": "The heretics once asked Rabbi Samlai: ‘How many deities created the world?’ He said to them: ‘Let you and I inquire into the early days.’ That is what is written: “For inquire now into the early days that were before you, from the day that God created [bara] man” (Deuteronomy 4:32) – “that [God] baru” is not written here, but rather, “that [God] bara.” They said to him: ‘What is this that is written: “In the beginning God [Elohim] created”?’ He said to them: “Baru Elohim” is not written here, but rather, “bara Elohim.” Rabbi Samlai said [moreover]: Everywhere you find a basis for a claim of the heretics, you find a refutation alongside it. They asked him further, saying to him: ‘What is this that is written: “Let us make Man in our image, in our likeness”?’ He said to them: ‘Read what is written thereafter: God created [vayivre’u] man in their image is not stated, but rather, “God created [vayivra] man in His image,”’ (Genesis 1:27). After they left, his students said to him: ‘Rabbi, those men you pushed off with a reed. What would you respond to us?’ He said to them: ‘In the past, Adam was created from earth and Eve was created from Adam. From now on, “In our image, in our likeness” – a man will not [produce offspring] without a woman, nor will a woman without a man, nor both of them without the Divine Presence.’", "translator": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022", "license": "sefaria-midrash-rabbah", "attribution_required": true }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "bruno-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bruno-gen-1-1/", "author": "Bruno of Segni", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio, inquit, et ante omnem creaturam creavit Deus coelum et terram. Hoc enim et Psalmista testatur, dicens: « Et tu in principio Deus terram fundasti, et opera manuum tuarum sunt coeli (Psal. CI, 26) . » Non igitur prius coelum, quam terram, sed simul et coelum Deus creavit et terram. Unde et istud: « Qui vivit in aeternum creavit omnia simul (Eccli. XVIII, 1) . » Nam et si sex diebus omnia Deus hoc eodem in libro fecisse narratur, simul tamen ex nihilo cuncta creasse dubitari non debet. Ipsam omnium rerum materiam simul creavit, ex qua discretis temporibus caetera, prout voluit, fieri praecepit. Dicatur ergo: In principio creaturarum omnium creavit Deus coelum, et ea scilicet quae continentur in eo, id est angelos, virtutesque coelestes, et terram jam quasi praegnantem et parturientem, omniumque eorum materiam et matrem quae ex ea oriuntur.", "source": "PL 164, col. 147B", "cc_idno": "21403", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'In the beginning,' he says, and before every creature, God created heaven and earth. For this the Psalmist too testifies, saying: 'And you, God, in the beginning founded the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands' (Ps 102:25 [Vg 101:26]). Not, therefore, heaven before earth, but God created heaven and earth together. Whence also this: 'He who lives for ever created all things at once' (Sir 18:1). For even if God is narrated in this same book to have made all things in six days, it is not to be doubted that he nevertheless created all things at once out of nothing. He created at once the very matter of all things, out of which he commanded the rest to be made at distinct times, as he willed. Let it be said, then: In the beginning of all creatures God created heaven — and those things, namely, which are contained in it, that is, the angels and the heavenly powers — and the earth, already as it were pregnant and in labour, and the matter and mother of all those things that arise from it.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "bruno-gen-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bruno-gen-1-1b/", "author": "Bruno of Segni", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In quo principio? In eo utique qui ait: « Ego principium qui et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII, 26) .-- Omnia enim per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil (Joan. I, 3) . » In hoc igitur principio omnem mundi fabricam, ipsosque angelorum ordines ab exordio creavit Deus.", "source": "PL 164, col. 150A", "cc_idno": "21403", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In what beginning? In him, surely, who says: 'I am the Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25) — 'for all things were made through him, and without him was made nothing' (John 1:3). In this beginning, therefore, God created from the outset the whole fabric of the world and the very orders of the angels.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "bruno-gen-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bruno-gen-1-1c/", "author": "Bruno of Segni", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1085, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Deus ergo est qui loquitur. Nunquid ad angelos? Absit! Non enim ab angelis creatus est homo; alioquin non unus, sed multi creatores essent, ut solus Deus est omnium Creator. Sic enim scriptum est: « Creator omnium terribilis, et fortis (II Machab. I, 24) . » Itemque: « Omnia in sapientia fecisti (Psal. CIII, 24) . » Si igitur verum est, quod negari non potest, solus Deus creavit omnia; quos ad hominem creandum invitabat, dicens: « Faciamus hominem. » Audiamus igitur quid in capite libri hujus dicatur: « In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram. » Habes ergo Deum, id est Patrem; habes et principium, id est Filium; sic enim ipse ait: « Ego principium qui et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII, 25) . » Sed quid sequitur? « Et Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. » Habes igitur et Spiritum sanctum. Quod autem non solus Pater coelum creaverit, sed simul cum eo Filius quoque, et Spiritus sanctus, dicat Psalmista: « Verbo, inquit, Domini coeli firmati sunt, et Spiritu oris ejus omnis virtus eorum (Psal. XXXII, 6) . » Tota autem Trinitas, id est Deus, et Verbum ejus, et Spiritus ejus, unus Deus, et iste quidem dicit: « Faciamus hominem; » non extra se auxilium petens, sed in se cum Filio suo, et Spiritu sancto cuncta disponens.", "source": "PL 164, col. 157A", "cc_idno": "21403", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It is God, then, who speaks. Was it to the angels? God forbid! For man was not created by angels; otherwise there would be not one but many creators, whereas God alone is the Creator of all. For thus it is written: The Creator of all, terrible and strong (2 Macc 1:24). And again: You have made all things in wisdom (Ps 104:24 [Vg 103:24]). If therefore it is true, as cannot be denied, that God alone created all things, whom was he inviting to the making of man when he said, Let us make man? Let us hear, then, what is said at the head of this book: In the beginning God created heaven and earth. You have therefore God, that is, the Father; you have also a beginning, that is, the Son — for so he himself says: I am the beginning, who also speak to you (John 8:25). But what follows? And the Spirit of God was borne over the waters. You have therefore the Holy Spirit also. And that not the Father alone created heaven, but the Son and the Holy Spirit together with him, let the psalmist say: By the word of the Lord the heavens were established, and all their power by the spirit of his mouth (Ps 33:6 [Vg 32:6]). Now the whole Trinity, that is, God and his Word and his Spirit, is one God; and it is he who says, Let us make man — not seeking help outside himself, but disposing all things within himself with his Son and the Holy Spirit.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "bruno-gen-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bruno-gen-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Bruno of Segni", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1100, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Adhuc tamen inanis et vacua erat terra, adhuc infecunda, et absque liberis erat Ecclesia, quam etiam propheta de sterilitate consolans, fecunditatemque promittens, dicebat: « Laetare, sterilis, quae non paris; erumpe, et clama, quae non parturis, quia multi filii desertae magis, quam ejus quae habet virum (Isa. LIV, 1; Gal. IV, 27) . » Sed quare inanis et vacua? Quia adhuc tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi. Nemo enim Scripturas intelligebat, utpote profundas et ignorantiae tenebris obvolutas, quae quidem ut intelligi valeant, « abyssus abyssum invocat (Psal. XLI, 8) . » Has autem tenebras Christus amovit, quando apostolis sensum aperuit, ut Scripturas intelligerent. Si enim Judaei has intelligerent, 3 ad Ecclesiam confugerent; sed quia, ut Apostolus ait: « Usque hodie dum legitur Moyses, velamen positum est super corda eorum (II Cor. III, 15) , » eas quidem intelligere non valent. Cum autem plenitudo gentium introierit, tunc amoto velamine Israel salvus fiet (Rom. XI, 25) . Neque enim ulterius inanis, et vacua terra nostra vocabitur, tantorum filiorum plenitudine inhabitata.", "source": "PL 164, col. 150B", "cc_idno": "21403", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Still, however, the earth was empty and void, still unfruitful, and the Church was without children — she whom the prophet also, comforting her for her barrenness and promising fruitfulness, addressed: « Rejoice, barren one, who do not bear; break forth and cry out, you who do not travail, for many are the children of the desolate, more than of her who has a husband » (Isa 54:1; Gal 4:27). But why empty and void? Because darkness was still upon the face of the deep. For no one understood the Scriptures, deep as they are and wrapped in the darkness of ignorance — which, that they may be understood, « deep calls unto deep » (Ps 42:7 [Vg 41:8]). But Christ took away this darkness when he opened the apostles' understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures. For if the Jews understood them, they would take refuge in the Church; but because, as the Apostle says, « to this day, while Moses is read, a veil is placed over their hearts » (2 Cor 3:15), they are not able to understand them. But when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, then, the veil taken away, Israel shall be saved (Rom 11:25). For our earth shall no longer be called empty and void, inhabited by the fullness of so many sons.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "bruno-gen-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bruno-gen-1-2/", "author": "Bruno of Segni", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1100, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Dei. vero Spiritus ferebatur super aquas, quia ut bonus artifex, hanc, quam videmus, tam multiplicem creaturarum varietatem, jam tunc facere disponebat. Sic enim et nos, exempli gratia, domum composituri, lignorum materiam oculis menteque contemplantes, alia trabibus, alia vero columnis, atque alia aliis officiis destinamus.", "source": "PL 164, col. 148C", "cc_idno": "21403", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But the Spirit of God was borne over the waters, because, like a good craftsman, he was even then arranging to make this so manifold variety of creatures that we see. So we too, for example, when about to build a house, looking over the timber with eye and mind, assign some pieces to beams, some to columns, and others to other uses.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "bruno-gen-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bruno-gen-1-3/", "author": "Bruno of Segni", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sed quae est ista lux, quae prior sole, luna, et stellis esse perhibetur? Audi quod sequitur: « Vocavit lucem diem, et tenebras noctem. » Lux igitur pro die ponitur.", "source": "PL 164, col. 149B", "cc_idno": "21403", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But what is that light, which is said to be prior to the sun, the moon and the stars? Hear what follows: 'He called the light Day, and the darkness Night.' Light, therefore, is put for day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "bruno-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/bruno-gen-1-5/", "author": "Bruno of Segni", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1100, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Sequitur: « Factumque est vespere, et mane dies unus. » Vespere et mane noctem et diem quidam intelligunt. Nam quoniam noctibus praetermissis, omnes per ordinem dies enumerat, uno diei nomine, et diem, et noctem intelligere volunt. Sed mirabilis ordo locutionis, in quo ante mane ponitur vespere, quasi non mane, sed a vespere operari coepisset. Si enim dixisset, Factum est mane et vespere dies unus, nulla fortasse quaestio esset, sed quia inter duo mane vespere posuit, ad quid illorum referatur dubitari potest. Si enim ad praecedens mane vespere refertur, nox procul dubio tota relinquitur; quod si ad subsequens, die quidem tota praetermissa, soli noctis termini ponuntur. Unde convenientius factum est vespere et mane dies unus, sed nox una dici potuit. Sed quia divina providentia non ad laborem, sed ad quietem noctem creavit, nullum est inconveniens, si in Dei operatione, quae utique non in nocte, sed in die fiebat, solius diei termini ponantur. Si enim hoc in loco totum, ut volunt, diei noctisque spatium, unum diem intelligimus, frustra Deus utraque a se divisit, divisisque diversa nomina dedit; vocavit enim lucem diem, ac tenebras noctem. Nulla igitur dies ex nocte constat ac die. Quia igitur non somnia, quae in nocte videntur; sed opera, quae in eo fiunt, hic describuntur, dies utique non noctes enumerare necessarium fuit. Fecit ergo Deus in principio coelum, et terram et lucem; quibus patratis, factum est vespere, atque hoc praecedente mane continuato, factus est dies unus, et tunc quidem a tenebris lucem divisit, quo finito die, factum est vespere. Neque enim in die noctem fecit, sed suo ordine post diem fieri praecepit. Quod autem dictum est, factus est dies unus, et non dicitur, factus est dies primus, ad hoc valet quod primus et secundus relativa sunt, neque sine altero alter esse potest. Cum igitur nondum esset secundus, erat utique dies unus, ipse tamen unus primus dici non poterat.", "source": "PL 164, col. 149B", "cc_idno": "21403", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "There follows: 'And there was evening and morning, one day.' Some understand evening and morning as night and day. For since it enumerates all the days in order with the nights passed over, they want both day and night to be understood under the one name of day. But the order of speech is astonishing, in which evening is put before morning, as though he had begun to work not from morning but from evening. For if he had said, 'there was morning and evening, one day,' there would perhaps be no question; but because he put evening between two mornings, it can be doubted which of them it is referred to. For if evening is referred to the preceding morning, the whole night is undoubtedly left out; and if to the following, then the whole day is passed over and only the night's boundaries are set. Hence it was more fitting that there should be 'evening and morning, one day' — but it could have been called one night. But since divine providence created the night not for labour but for rest, there is nothing unfitting if in God's working, which was done not in the night but in the day, only the day's boundaries are set. For if in this place we understand the whole space of day and night, as they wish, to be one day, then God divided the two from each other in vain, and gave the divided things different names; for he called the light Day and the darkness Night. No day, therefore, consists of night and day. Since then it is not the dreams that are seen in the night, but the works that are done in it, that are described here, it was necessary to enumerate days and not nights. […] But as for its being said 'one day was made,' and not 'a first day was made,' this holds good because 'first' and 'second' are relatives, and neither can exist without the other. Since therefore there was not yet a second, it was indeed one day; yet that one could not be called first.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "burgos-add-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/burgos-add-1/", "author": "Paul of Burgos", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1429, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Ex quo presupposito infertur quod postillator minus convenienter se habet circa processum introductorium expositionis litteralis huius capituli. Dicit enim quod ex varietate opinionum de natura materie a philosophis positarum dependet intellectus operationis sex dierum, quod videtur inconvenienter dictum. Constat enim quod philosophi in hoc non demonstrative procedunt, alias non contingeret eos diversimode vel contraria opinari, sicut nec in geometricis et huiusmodi, sed solum procedunt opinative. Unde non debet sensus scripture propter hoc variari, et ideo sancti doctores modicum curaverunt de huiusmodi opinionibus variis in hac materia.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n48, column 2, Additio i (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n48.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "From which presupposition it follows that the postillator conducts himself less fittingly in the introductory procedure of the literal exposition of this chapter. For he says that the understanding of the work of the six days depends on the variety of opinions about the nature of matter put forward by the philosophers, which seems unfittingly said. For it is agreed that the philosophers do not proceed demonstratively in this matter — otherwise it would not happen that they hold different or contrary opinions, as it does not in geometry and the like — but proceed only by opinion. Hence the sense of Scripture ought not to vary on this account; and this is why the holy doctors took little care about such various opinions in this matter.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "burgos-add-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/burgos-add-3/", "author": "Paul of Burgos", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1429, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In eodem capitulo primo, ubi dicitur in postilla: Hic queritur quare in secunda die non dicitur, Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum etc. Additio iij. In hoc loco videtur postillator a rectitudine in tribus deviare: quia primo auctoritates doctorum non mediocrem auctoritatem inter catholicos habentium irreverenter tractat; secundo quia irrationabiliter dicta eorum improbat; tercio quia expositionis litteralis auctoritatem, quam nostri doctores primo invenerunt, Ra. Sa. hebreo attribuit. Primum patet: nam responsio quam ipse vocat truphaticam est illius magni doctoris Rabani, qui in hoc loco ad hanc questionem sic respondet: Nisi forte, sicut quidam patrum exposuit, non esse bonum duplicem numerum, qui ab unitate dividit et prefigurat federa nuptiarum; unde et in arca Noe omnia animalia que bina ingrediuntur immunda sunt, et impar numerus mundus esse ostenditur. Hec ille. Magister etiam in ij dis. xiiij respondens ad hanc questionem sic dicit: Sacramentum aliquod hic commendatur; ideo enim fortasse non est hic dictum quod tamen sicut in aliis factum est, quia binarius principium est alteritatis et signum divisionis ab unitate. Hec ille. Non igitur modica irreverentia est tantorum doctorum seu patrum expositionem truphaticam vocare.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n57, column 1 (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n57.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "On the same first chapter, where it says in the Postilla: 'Here it is asked why on the second day it is not said, And God saw that it was good, etc.' Addition 3. In this place the postillator seems to depart from rectitude in three ways: first, because he treats irreverently the authorities of doctors who hold no small authority among catholics; second, because he refutes what they say unreasonably; third, because he attributes to Rabbi Solomon the Hebrew the authority of a literal exposition which our own doctors found first. The first is plain: for the answer he calls a piece of trifling is that of the great doctor Rabanus, who in this place answers the question thus: 'Unless perhaps, as one of the fathers expounded, the double number is not good, which divides from unity and prefigures the covenants of marriage; whence in Noah's ark all the animals that enter two by two are unclean, and the odd number is shown to be clean.' So he. The Master too, in the second book, distinction 14, answering this question, says: 'Some mystery is here commended; for perhaps it is for this reason that it is not said here what nevertheless was done in the other cases, because two is the beginning of otherness and the sign of division from unity.' So he. It is therefore no small irreverence to call the exposition of doctors and fathers of such standing a piece of trifling.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/chalcidius-caelum-et-terra/", "author": "Chalcidius", "tradition": "latin", "date": 350, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quod autem coelum quamue terram scriptura loquatur intelligendum. Qui tumultuario contenti sunt intellectu, coelum hoc quod uidemus, et terram qua subuehimur dici putant; porro qui altius indagantur negant hoc coelum ab initio factum, sed secundo die. Namque ab initio factum lumen, idque diem esse cognominatum. Hoc uero coelum postea, quod Deus appellauerit soliditatem. Tertio deinceps die remotis aquis apparuit sicca, eique terrae nomen impositum. Ut sit euidens neque hoc coelum cognitum nobis, neque hanc in qua sumus terram ab exordio facta, sed alia esse antiquiora intellectu potius quam sensibus haurienda. Aliud igitur uerum coelum, et aliud quiddam esse soliditatem scriptura testatur; eodemque modo aliud terram, et item aliud siccam. Quod igitur illud coelum prius quam caetera Deus condidit, quamue terram? Philo carentes corpore atque intelligibiles essentias esse censet, ideas et exemplaria tam siccae istius terrae quam soliditatis. Denique etiam hominem prius intelligibilem, et exemplum archetypum generis humani, tunc demum corporeum factum a Deo esse dicit. Alii non ita, sed sciente prophetam duas esse species rerum omnium, alteram intelligibilem, alteram sensilem, eas uirtutes quae utranque naturam circumplexae contineant, coelum et terram cognominasse. Coelum quidem incorpoream naturam, terram uero quae substantia est corporum, quam graeci ὕλην uocant.", "source": "Paris 1520, fo. LVIII recto (archive.org bub_gb_LxGcsxR3tWgC, page/n116.jpg)", "license": "chalcidius-1520", "version": "Chalcidii viri clarissimi luculenta Timaei Platonis traductio, et eiusdem argutissima explanatio (Paris: Josse Bade, 1520)" }, "english": { "text": "But it is to be understood what heaven, or what earth, Scripture is speaking of. Those who are content with a hasty understanding think that this heaven which we see, and the earth on which we are carried, are meant; whereas those who search more deeply deny that this heaven was made in the beginning, but on the second day. For in the beginning light was made, and that was called day. But this heaven afterwards, which God called the solidity. Then on the third day, the waters being removed, the dry appeared, and the name of earth was imposed on it. So that it is evident that neither this heaven known to us, nor this earth on which we are, was made from the outset, but that there are others more ancient, to be drawn in by the understanding rather than by the senses. Scripture therefore testifies that the true heaven is one thing and the solidity another; and in the same way that the earth is one thing and the dry another. What heaven, then, did God found before the rest, or what earth? Philo judges them to be incorporeal and intelligible essences, the ideas and exemplars both of this dry land and of the solidity. And finally he says that the human too was first intelligible, the archetypal exemplar of the human race, and only then made corporeal by God. Others not so: but that the prophet, knowing that there are two species of all things, one intelligible and one perceptible, called those powers which embrace and contain both natures 'heaven and earth' — heaven being the incorporeal nature, and earth that which is the substance of bodies, which the Greeks call hyle.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order", "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/chalcidius-hebraei-versiones/", "author": "Chalcidius", "tradition": "latin", "date": 350, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Hebraei syluam generatam esse confitentur, quorum sapientissimus Moyses non humana facundia, sed diuina, ut ferunt, inspiratione uegetatus in eo libro qui de genitura mundi censetur, ab exordio sic est profatus iuxta interpretationem septuaginta prudentium: Initio Deus fecit coelum et terram. Terra autem erat inuisibilis et incompta. Ut uero ait Aquila: Caput rerum condidit Deus coelum et terram. Terra porro inanis erat, et nihil. Uel ut Symmachus: Ab exordio condidit Deus coelum et terram. Terra porro fuit otiosum quid confusumque et inordinatum. Sed Origenes asseuerat ita sibi ab Hebraeis esse persuasum, quod in aliquantum sit a uera proprietate deriuata interpretatio. Fuisse enim in exemplari: Terra autem stupida quadam erat admiratione. Omnia tamen haec in unum aiunt concurrere, ut et generata sit ea quae subiecta est uniuerso corpori sylua, sermonesque ipsos sic interpretantur.", "source": "Paris 1520, fo. LVII verso (archive.org bub_gb_LxGcsxR3tWgC, page/n115.jpg)", "license": "chalcidius-1520", "version": "Chalcidii viri clarissimi luculenta Timaei Platonis traductio, et eiusdem argutissima explanatio (Paris: Josse Bade, 1520)" }, "english": { "text": "The Hebrews confess that hyle was generated; and the wisest of them, Moses, quickened not by human eloquence but, as they say, by divine inspiration, spoke thus from the outset in that book which is reckoned to be about the begetting of the world, according to the translation of the seventy wise men: 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth. But the earth was invisible and unadorned.' But as Aquila says: 'The head of things God founded, heaven and earth. The earth, moreover, was empty, and nothing.' Or as Symmachus: 'From the outset God founded heaven and earth. The earth, moreover, was an idle something, confused and unordered.' But Origen asserts that he was persuaded by the Hebrews that the translation is in some degree drawn away from the true property of the words; for that there was in the exemplar: 'But the earth was in a certain stupefied wonder.' Yet all these, they say, run together into one, namely that the hyle which underlies the whole body of the universe was generated; and they interpret the words themselves thus.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "chalcidius-initium-non-temporarium", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/chalcidius-initium-non-temporarium/", "author": "Chalcidius", "tradition": "latin", "date": 350, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Initium minime temporarium dici. Neque enim ullum tempus fuisse ante mundi exornationem, dieique et nocturnas uices, quibus temporis spatia dimensa sunt. Tum initii multas esse significationes: ut Initium sapientiae timorem Domini esse Salomon dixit. Item Initium sapientiae cultus Dei. Nihiloque minus Initium uitae bonae, actus iustus. Atque etiam in praeconio sapientiae coelestis auctor: Initium uitae panis, et aqua, et tunica, inquit, domus idonea uelandis pudendis. Quippe in his non una initii, sed diuersa et multiplex habetur significatio.", "source": "Paris 1520, fo. LVII verso–LVIII recto (archive.org bub_gb_LxGcsxR3tWgC, page/n115.jpg–n116.jpg)", "license": "chalcidius-1520", "version": "Chalcidii viri clarissimi luculenta Timaei Platonis traductio, et eiusdem argutissima explanatio (Paris: Josse Bade, 1520)" }, "english": { "text": "That the beginning spoken of is not in any way temporal. For there was no time at all before the furnishing of the world, and the alternations of day and night, by which the spaces of time are measured. Then, that 'beginning' has many significations: as Solomon said that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord (Prov 1:7). Likewise, the beginning of wisdom is the worship of God. And no less is a just act the beginning of a good life. And also, in the proclamation of wisdom, the heavenly author says: 'The beginning of life is bread, and water, and a garment, and a house fit for covering what is shameful' (Sir 29:21). For in these there is not one signification of 'beginning' but a various and manifold one.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "chalcidius-sapientia-primordium", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/chalcidius-sapientia-primordium/", "author": "Chalcidius", "tradition": "latin", "date": 350, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Est tamen unum rerum omnium initium, de quo Salomo in prouerbiis: Creauit me, inquit, Deus progressionis suae semitam, cui nitens efficeret opera diuina; constituitque ante mundi ortum, terraeque et profundi fundatione, ante tractus fontium aggestionesque montanas. Aperte indicans praeeunte diuina sapientia coelum terramque factam, eandemque sapientiam diuinam esse uniuersitatis primordium. Ex quo apparet sapientiam factam quidem a Deo, sed non aliquo in tempore. Neque enim fuerit tempus ullum quo Deus fuerit sine sapientia.", "source": "Paris 1520, fo. LVIII recto (archive.org bub_gb_LxGcsxR3tWgC, page/n116.jpg)", "license": "chalcidius-1520", "version": "Chalcidii viri clarissimi luculenta Timaei Platonis traductio, et eiusdem argutissima explanatio (Paris: Josse Bade, 1520)" }, "english": { "text": "There is nevertheless one beginning of all things, concerning which Solomon says in the Proverbs: 'God created me the path of his progression, leaning upon which he might accomplish his divine works; and he established me before the rising of the world, and before the founding of the earth and of the deep, before the drawing of the springs and the heaping up of the mountains' (Prov 8:22–25). Plainly indicating that heaven and earth were made with divine Wisdom going before, and that this same divine Wisdom is the first beginning of the universe. From which it appears that Wisdom was indeed made by God, but not at any point in time. For there would have been no time at all in which God was without Wisdom.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/chalcidius-terra-sylua/", "author": "Chalcidius", "tradition": "latin", "date": 350, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inuisibilis et informis, hoc est sylua corporea uetus mundi substantia, prius quam efficta Dei opificis sollertia sumeret formas, etiam tunc decolor et omni carens qualitate. Quod uero tale est, inuisibile certe habetur et informe. Inanis porro et nihil propterea dicta, quia cum sit omnium qualitatum receptrix, propriam nullam habet ex natura. Sylua ergo, ut quae cuncta quae accidunt recipiat in se, inanis appellata, ut quae compleri nunquam posse uideatur. Porro quia sit expers omnium, nihil dicta. Otiosa uero et indigesta nuncupatur a Symmacho: quodque quidem per se nihil ualeat, otiosa; quod uero habeat opportunitatem suscipiendi ordinis ab exornante semet Deo mundum moliente, indigesta censetur. Stupide uero ex admiratione significatio animae uim quandam similitudinemque declarat, siquidem opificis et auctoris sui maiestate capta stuperet.", "source": "Paris 1520, fo. LVIII recto (archive.org bub_gb_LxGcsxR3tWgC, page/n116.jpg)", "license": "chalcidius-1520", "version": "Chalcidii viri clarissimi luculenta Timaei Platonis traductio, et eiusdem argutissima explanatio (Paris: Josse Bade, 1520)" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was invisible and formless' — that is, corporeal hyle, the old substance of the world, before it took on forms fashioned by the skill of God the craftsman, still then colourless and lacking every quality. And what is such is certainly held to be invisible and formless. It is called 'empty' and 'nothing' for this reason: that since it is the receiver of all qualities, it has none of its own by nature. Hyle, then, as that which receives into itself all the things that happen, is called empty, as that which can never seem able to be filled. And because it is devoid of all things, it is called nothing. But it is named 'idle' and 'undigested' by Symmachus: idle, in that of itself it avails nothing; and it is reckoned undigested in that it has the fitness to receive order from God adorning it as he sets about the world. But the signification 'stupefied, out of wonder' declares a certain force and likeness of soul, since it would be stupefied, seized by the majesty of its craftsman and author.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu", "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-1/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Moyses vero solum Deum aeternum prophetavit, et sine praejacenti materia mundum creatum. Creatus autem est in principio, id est in Filio, et iterandum est in principio sic: In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram, in principio scilicet temporis. Coaeva enim sunt mundus et tempus. Sicut autem solus Deus aeternus, sic mundus sempiternus, id est semper aeternus, temporaliter aeternus angeli quoque sempiterni. Vel in principio omnium creaturarum, creavit coelum et terram, id est has creaturas primordiales fecit, et simul.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1056A", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But Moses prophesied God alone to be eternal, and the world created without pre-existing matter. And it was created in the beginning, that is, in the Son; and 'in the beginning' is to be repeated thus: In the beginning God created heaven and earth, in the beginning, namely, of time. For the world and time are coeval. And as God alone is eternal, so the world is everlasting, that is, always eternal, eternal in a temporal way; the angels too are everlasting. Or: in the beginning of all creatures he created heaven and earth, that is, he made these primordial creatures, and made them at once.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-1b/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Mundus quatuor modis dicitur: quandoque empyreum coelum mundus dicitur propter sui munditiam; quaudoque sensibilis mundus, qui a Graecis pan, a Latinis omne dictus est quia, philosophus empyreum non cognovit; quandoque sola regio sublunaris, quia haec sola animantia nobis nota habet de qua: Princeps hujus mundi ejicietur foras (Joan. XII) ; quandoque homo mundus dicitur, quia in se totius mundi imaginem repraesentat. Unde a Domino homo omnis creatura dictus est, et Graecus hominem microcosmum, id est minorem mundum vocat. Empyreum autem et sensibilem mundum, et sublunarem regionem creavit Deus, id est de nihilo fecit; hominem vero creavit, id est plasmavit. De creatione ergo illorum trium inquit legislator: In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram (Gen. I) , id est continens et contentum, id est coelum empyreum et angelicam naturam. Terram vero materiam omnium corporum, id est quatuor elementa, id est mundum sensibilem ex his constantem. Quidam coelum superiores partes mundi sensibilis intelligunt; terram inferiores et palpabiles.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1055A", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'World' is said in four ways: sometimes the empyrean heaven is called world, on account of its cleanness; sometimes the sensible world, which is called by the Greeks pan and by the Latins 'all', because the philosopher did not know the empyrean; sometimes the region below the moon alone, because this alone has the living creatures known to us — of which it is said, 'The prince of this world shall be cast out' (John 12:31); sometimes man is called a world, because he presents in himself the image of the whole world, whence by the Lord man was called 'every creature', and the Greek calls man microcosm, that is, the lesser world. Now the empyrean and the sensible world and the sublunary region God created, that is, made out of nothing; but man he created, that is, moulded. Of the creation, then, of those three the lawgiver says: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth' (Gen 1) — that is, the container and the thing contained, that is, the empyrean heaven and the angelic nature. But 'earth' is the matter of all bodies, that is, the four elements, that is, the sensible world consisting of them. Some understand 'heaven' as the upper parts of the sensible world, and 'earth' as the lower and palpable.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-1c/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Cum vero dixit Moyses, creavit trium errores elidit, Platonis, Aristotelis et Epicuri. Plato dixit tria fuisse ab aeterno, scilicet Deum ideas, ile, et in principio temporis, de ile mundum factum fuisse. Aristoteles duo, mundum et opificem, qui de duobus principiis, scilicet materia et forma, operatus est sine principio, et operatur sine fine. Epicurus duo, inane et atomos: et in principio natura quosdam atomos solidavit in terram, alios in aquam, alios in aera, alios in ignem.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1055B", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But when Moses said 'created', he struck down the errors of three men: Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus. Plato said that three things were from eternity, namely God, the ideas, and hyle, and that in the beginning of time the world was made out of hyle. Aristotle said two, the world and the workman, who worked out of two principles, namely matter and form, without a beginning, and works without an end. Epicurus said two, the void and the atoms: and in the beginning nature solidified certain atoms into earth, others into water, others into air, others into fire.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inanis et vacua (Gen. I) , id est machina mundialis adhuc erat inutilis, et infructuosa, et vacua ornatu suo. Et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi. Eamdem machinam quam terram dixerat, abyssum vocat pro sui confusione et obscuritate. Unde et Graecus eam chaos dixit.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1056B", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was empty and void' (Gen 1) — that is, the world-machine was still useless, and unfruitful, and void of its adornment. 'And darkness was upon the face of the deep.' The same machine which he had called earth he calls the deep, on account of its confusion and darkness. Whence the Greek called it chaos.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-26/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Deinde subditur de creatione hominis sic: Faciamus hominem, etc. (Gen. I) . Et loquitur Pater ad Filium, et Spiritum sanctum. Vel est quasi communis vox trium personarum, Faciamus, et nostram: factus est autem homo ad imaginem Dei, quantum ad animam.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1063C", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Then it is added concerning the creation of the human thus: let us make a human, etc. (Gen 1). And the Father speaks to the Son and the Holy Spirit. Or it is as it were the common voice of the three persons, 'let us make', and 'our': and the human was made to the image of God, as regards the soul.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-3/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux (Gen. I) , id est verbum genuit in quo erat, ut fieret lux, id est tam facile, ut si quis diceret verbo. Lucem vocat quamdam nubem lucidam, illuminantem superiores mundi partes, claritate tamen tenui, ut fieri solet diluculo! et hoc admodum solis circumagitata. Praesentia sui superius hemisphaerium, et inferius vicissim illuminat.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1057B", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God said: Let there be light. And light was made (Gen 1) — that is, he begot the Word in whom it was that light should be made; that is, as easily as if someone were to say it in a word. By 'light' he means a kind of luminous cloud, lighting the upper parts of the world, but with a thin brightness, such as comes about at dawn; and this driven round much as the sun is. By its presence it lights the upper hemisphere and in turn the lower.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-4/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et vidit Deus lucem, quod esset bona, id est quae placuerat in praesentia, vel praescientia, ut fieret; placuit in essentia, ut maneret. Vel tropice, vidit. id est videre fecit. Et divisit lucem, ac tenebras; hic incipit dispositio. Et tamen aliquid dicit de creatione, quasi cum luce tenebras creavit, id est umbram ex objectione corporum luci; et creatas divisit locorum distantia, et qualitate, ut scilicet nunquam simul, sed semper e regione diversa hemisphaeria vicissim sibi vindicarent. Intelligitur etiam hic angelorum facta divisio: stantes lux, cadentes tenebrae dicti sunt.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1057B", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God saw the light, that it was good — that is, which had pleased him in his presence, or in his foreknowledge, that it should be made; it pleased him in its being, that it should remain. Or figuratively, he saw, that is, he made to be seen. And he divided the light and the darkness; here the disposing begins. And yet he says something of creation too, as though he created the darkness together with the light — that is, the shadow made by bodies set against the light; and he divided the created things by distance of place, and by quality, so that they should never be together, but always claim opposite hemispheres in turn. Here too the division of the angels is understood: those who stood were called light, those who fell darkness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-1-5/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et factum est vespere, et post factum est mane. Et sic completus est dies unus naturalis. Primo enim cum coelo et terra lux est creata: qua paulatim occidente, factum est vespere primae diei usualis, et eadem migrante sub terras et ad ortum veniente, factum est mane, id est terminata est nox, et inchoavit dies secunda. Itaque praecedente luce diei, et sequente nocte terminata, exstitit dies unus.", "source": "PL 198, col. 1057D", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And there was evening, and after that there was morning.' And so one natural day was completed. For first, with heaven and earth, light was created; and as it set little by little, there was made the evening of the first usual day; and as the same light passed under the earth and came to the rising, there was made morning — that is, the night was ended and the second day began. And so, with the light of the day preceding and the night following being ended, one day came to be.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-gen-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-gen-1/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Hebraeus habet pro super ferebatur, incubabat, vel Syra lingua, fovebat, sicut avis ova. In quo etiam omne cum regimine nascentis mundi notatur initium. Hunc locum male intellexit Plato, dictum hoc putans de anima mundi. Sed dictum est de Spiritu sancto creante, de quo legitur: Emitte Spiritum tuum, et creabuntur (Psal. CIII) .", "source": "PL 198, col. 1057A", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "The Hebrew has, for 'was borne above,' 'was brooding,' or in the Syriac tongue 'was warming,' as a bird her eggs. In this, too, the whole beginning of the world being born is noted, together with its governance. Plato misunderstood this passage, thinking it was said of the world-soul. But it is said of the Holy Spirit creating, of whom we read, 'Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created' (Ps 104:30).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "comestor-hs-prologus", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/comestor-hs-prologus/", "author": "Peter Comestor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1170, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Imperatoriae majestatis est, in palatio tres habere mansiones: auditorium vel consistorium in quo jura decernit: coenaculum, in quo cibaria distribuit; thalamum, in quo quiescit. Ad hunc modum Imperator noster, qui imperat ventis et mari, mundum hunc habet pro auditorio: ubi ad nutum ejus omnia disponuntur. Unde illud Isaiae: Coelum et terram ego impleo (Isa. XXV) . Secundum hanc dicitur Dominus. Unde: Domini est terra, et plenitudo ejus (Psal. XXII) . Animam justi habet pro thalamo, quia deliciae sunt ei ibi quiescere, et esse cum filiis hominum (Prov. VIII) : secundum hanc dicitur sponsus, et anima cujusque sponsa (Ose. II) : Sacram Scripturam habet pro coenaculo, in qua sic suos inebriat, ut sobrios reddat. Unde: Ambulavimus in domo Dei cum consensu (Psal. LIV) , in sacra Scriptura id ipsum sapientes. Secundum hanc dicitur paterfamilias: Coenaculi hujus tres sunt partes, fundamentum, paries, tectum. Historia fundamentum est, cujus tres sunt species: annalis, kalendaria, ephimera. Allegoria paries superinnitens, quae per factum aliud factum figurat. Tropologia, doma culmini superpositum, quae per id quod factum est quid a nobis sit faciendum insinuat. Prima planior, secunda acutior, tertia suavior", "source": "PL 198, col. 1053", "cc_idno": "11575", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It belongs to imperial majesty to have three chambers in the palace: the hall of audience or council, in which it decrees laws; the dining-hall, in which it distributes food; the bedchamber, in which it rests. After this manner our Emperor, who commands the winds and the sea, has this world for his hall of audience, where all things are disposed at his nod — whence that word of Isaiah: I fill heaven and earth. According to this he is called Lord: whence, The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof. He has the soul of the just for his bedchamber, because his delights are to rest there and to be with the sons of men: according to this he is called the bridegroom, and each soul the bride. He has holy Scripture for his dining-hall, in which he so makes his own drunk that he renders them sober: whence, We walked in the house of God with consent — being of one mind in holy Scripture. According to this he is called the householder. Of this dining-hall there are three parts: foundation, wall, roof. History is the foundation, of which there are three kinds: annals, calendars, day-books. Allegory is the wall leaning upon it, which figures one deed by another. Tropology is the roof set on the summit, which by what has been done intimates what is to be done by us. The first is plainer, the second sharper, the third sweeter.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "doering-repl-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/doering-repl-3/", "author": "Matthias Doering", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1440, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Primam dicit truphaticam, secundam abicit tanquam non fundatam, terciam approbat a Ra. Sa. acceptam. In quo passu Burgensis dicit eum in tribus deviare a rectitudine: quia rationem sanctorum irreverenter dicit truphaticam; secundo quia contra eos non adducit validam rationem; tercio quia veram responsionem attribuit infideli, que tamen in nostra glosa continetur, cui potius debuit honorem exhibere. Quo ad primum respondeo quod postillator non truphatur de sanctis doctoribus sed imperitis lectoribus, qui id pro sensu litterali eligunt quod sancti mystice per quasdam particulares congruentias adducunt, ut patet in multis lecturis super Genesim.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n61, column 2 (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n61.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "The first he calls trifling; the second he throws out as unfounded; the third he approves, taken from Rabbi Solomon. On which passage Burgos says that he departs from rectitude in three ways: because he irreverently calls the reasoning of the saints trifling; second, because he brings no valid argument against them; third, because he attributes the true answer to an unbeliever, though it is contained in our own gloss, to which he ought rather to have shown the honour. As to the first I answer that the postillator is not scoffing at the holy doctors but at unskilled readers, who choose for the literal sense what the saints adduce mystically by way of certain particular fitnesses, as is plain in many lectures on Genesis.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-1/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 1.-- « In principio creavit, » etc. Non dicit: In principio dicit Deus, Fiat coelum et terra. Sed dixit: « Fiat lux, et facta est lux, » quoniam universaliter nomine coeli et terrae comprehendendum erat quidquid fecit Deus, deinde per partes explicandum quomodo fecit. Unde sequitur: « Dixit Deus, Fiat, » id est, per verbum suum fecit. Vel quia cum primum fiebat informis materia spiritualis, vel corporalis, non erat dicendum: « Dixit Deus, Fiat; » incongruum enim erat a Deo dici, « fiat, » quia formam verbi non imitatur imperfectio, nisi cum generis sui conversione ad creatorem sit perfecta creatura; ut cum dicitur: « Dixit Deus, Fiat, » intelligamus eum ad se imperfectionem creaturae revocare. Cum ergo dicitur: « In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, » commemoratio Filii fit, quia principium est; sed cum dicitur: « Dixit Deus, Fiat, » commemoratur quia Verbum est. Per principium notat exordium creaturae existentis ab illo; per Verbum, perfectionem creaturae ab illo ad ipsum revocatae, ut formetur imitando formam Verbi incommutabilem. Non enim habet vitam informem Verbum Dei, cui est idem esse quod vivere; imo idem vivere quod beate vivere. Creatura vero spiritualis habet informem vitam, cui non est hoc esse quod vivere; nec vivere quod beate vivere: quia, aversa a sapientia Dei, stulte et misere vivit. « In principio, » etc. (BEDA, Hexaem. lib. I, tom. II, col. 13 ª.) Creationem mundi insinuans Scriptura, primo verbo aeternitatem et omnipotentiam Dei ostendit: quem enim in principio temporum mundum creasse perhibet, eumdem ante tempora aeternaliter significat exstitisse. Et quem in conditionis initio coelum et terram creasse narrat, tanta celeritate operationis omnipotentem esse declarat, cui voluisse, facere est. Bene ergo dicitur: « In principio creavit, » etc. Utrumque scilicet, simul, quamvis utrumque simul ab homine non dicatur. Unde propheta terram in initio factam ostendit dicens, psal. CI: « Initio tu, Domine, terram fundasti, » etc. « In principio, » etc. Coelum non visibile firmamentum, sed empyreum, id est, igneum vel intellectuale, quod non ab ardore, sed a splendore dicitur, quod statim repletum est angelis. Unde in Job XXXVIII: « Ubi eras cum me laudarent astra matutina, » etc. Et nota tria hic commemorari elementa. Nomine coeli, aerem intelligimus. Nomine terrae, ipsam et ignem qui in ea latet. Quarti, id est, aquae in sequentibus fit mentio. (ALCUIN. in Gen. tom. I.) « In principio. » Filio, quo humanato patuit qui essent coelestes, qui terreni. Coelum, creatura spiritualis, ab exordio perfecta et beata. Terra, corporalis materies adhuc imperfecta. Coelum, informem materiam spiritualis vitae, sicut in se potest existere non conversa ad Creatorem in quo formatur. Terram, corporalem, sine omni qualitate quae apparet in materia formata. (BEDA in Gen., tom. II, col. 191.) Scriptura ait: « Qui fecisti mundum de materia informi (Sap. XI) . » Materia facta est de nihilo. Species mundi de materia informi. Proinde duas res fecit Deus ante omne tempus, angelicam creaturam et materiam informem. Quamvis enim Salomon dicat: « Qui vivit in « aeternum, creavit omnia simul (Eccli. XVIII) , secundum originem tamen informis materies antecedit formatam speciem. Itaque mundum, et angelos, et animam de nihilo fecit Deus: hominem et creaturas caeteras de aliquo. (Ibid., col. 192.) Septem sunt coeli, quorum haec sunt nomina, aer, aether, olympus, spatium vel igneum, firmamentum, coelum angelorum, et Trinitatis. Hieronymus autem dicit coelum Trinitatis primum, secundum angelorum, tertium firmamentum. Mystice. « In principio creavit Deus coelum. » Eos scilicet qui coelestis imaginem portaverunt. « Et terram, » id est eos qui postea superbiendo, terram, id est terreni hominis imaginem, portantes, se recerunt deformes. « Terra autem erat inanis, » quia deposuerat formam bonam. « Et vacua, » boni operis fructu. « Et tenebrae erant, » veri scilicet luminis privatio; « super faciem abyssi, » corda scilicet superborum.", "source": "PL 113, col. 67B", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 1. 'In the beginning he created,' etc. He does not say: In the beginning God says, Let heaven and earth be made. But he said, 'Let there be light, and light was made' — because under the name of heaven and earth was to be comprehended universally whatever God made, and then it was to be set out in parts how he made it. Whence there follows: 'God said, Let it be' — that is, he made it through his Word. Or, because when formless matter, spiritual or bodily, was first coming to be, it was not to be said 'God said, Let it be'; for it was unfitting that 'let it be' should be said by God, since imperfection does not imitate the form of the Word except when a creature is perfected by the turning of its kind to the Creator; so that when it is said 'God said, Let it be', we may understand him to be calling the creature's imperfection back to himself. When therefore it is said 'In the beginning God made heaven and earth', mention is made of the Son, because he is the Beginning; but when it is said 'God said, Let it be', mention is made that he is the Word. By 'beginning' he notes the origin of the creature existing from him; by 'Word', the perfecting of the creature called back from him to himself, that it may be formed by imitating the unchangeable form of the Word. […] 'In the beginning,' etc. (BEDE, Hexaemeron I, vol. II, col. 13.) Scripture, in intimating the creation of the world, shows in its first word the eternity and omnipotence of God: for him whom it declares to have created the world in the beginning of times, it signifies to have existed eternally before times. […] 'In the beginning,' etc. Heaven — not the visible firmament, but the empyrean, that is, the fiery or intellectual heaven, so called not from burning but from splendour, which was at once filled with angels. […] (ALCUIN, on Genesis, vol. I.) 'In the beginning.' In the Son, by whose becoming man it became plain who were the heavenly and who the earthly. Heaven, the spiritual creature, perfect and blessed from its outset. Earth, bodily matter, still imperfect. […] Mystically. 'In the beginning God created heaven' — namely those who bore the image of the heavenly. 'And earth', that is, those who afterwards, by growing proud, bore the earth, that is, the image of the earthly man, and made themselves deformed. 'But the earth was empty', because it had laid aside its good form. 'And void', of the fruit of good work. 'And there were darknesses', namely the privation of the true light; 'over the face of the abyss', namely the hearts of the proud.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-2-materia", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-2-materia/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "(BEDA ubi supra.) « Tenebrae erant, » etc. Non sunt audiendi qui reprehendendo dicunt Deum prius creasse tenebras quam lucem: quia nullas in aqua, vel aere fecit tenebras; sed distincto ordine providentiae prius aquas cum coelo creavit, et terra, et has cum voluit lucis gratia venustavit. Et notandum quod cum coelo duo elementa mundi creata sunt, quibus alia duo inserta sunt, aqua, scilicet, et terra, quibus insunt ignis et aer. Aquae autem totam superficiem terrae tanta altitudine tegebant, ut ad illos usque locos pertingerent, ubi nunc usque super firmamentum partim resident. Ipsa autem terra et aqua informis dicuntur materia, quia omnia quae videmus, vel ex istis sumpserunt exordium, vel ex nihilo: et priusquam in lucem venirent, non erat unde formam haberent.", "source": "PL 113, col. 69D", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "(Bede, in the place cited.) 'There was darkness,' etc. Those are not to be listened to who say by way of reproach that God created darkness before light: for he made no darkness in the water or the air; but by a distinct order of providence he first created the waters together with heaven, and the earth, and adorned them with the grace of light when he willed. And note that with heaven two elements of the world were created, into which two others were inserted, namely water and earth, in which are fire and air. The waters covered the whole surface of the earth to such a height that they reached to those places where they still in part remain above the firmament. But the earth itself and the water are called formless matter, because all the things we see either took their beginning out of these, or out of nothing: and before they came into the light there was nothing from which they might have form.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-2-ruach/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "« Et Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas. » [n: (AUG., lib. I de Gen. ad lit., c. 5, tom. III.)] Sive totam corporalem materiam aquam appellavit, ut insinuaret unde facta et formata sunt omnia quae ex humida natura per species varias in terra formari videmus; sive spiritualem vitam ante conversionis [0070B] formam quasi fluitantem. Spiritus Dei superferebatur, quia subjacebat bonae voluntati Creatoris, quod formandum et perficiendum inchoaverat. Dictum est etiam « Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas. » Ne faciendo opera potius per necessitatem indigentiae quam per abundantiam beneficentiae Deus amare putaretur. Commode enim prius insinuatur aliquid inchoatum, cui superferretur: non loco, sed omnia superante potentia.\n\n« Et Spiritus Domini ferebatur, » etc. [n: (HIERON. in Gen. t. III, col. 939.)] In Hebraeo habet *merahephet,* id est, incubabat, vel fovebat, more volucris ova calore animantis. Intelligimus ergo non de spiritu mundi dici, ut putant multi; sed de Spiritu [0070C] sancto, qui et ipse est omnium vivificator: si autem vivificator, et conditor; si conditor, et Deus. Psal. CIII: « Emitte, ait, Spiritum tuum et creabuntur. »\n\n« Et Spiritus, » etc. In quo subsistentes requiesceremus flatu ejus vivificati, et unda baptismi abluti. « Et Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas, » etc. Sicut Deus, scilicet et conditor, praeerat fluitanti et confusae materiei, ut distingueret quando vellet. Tota ergo Trinitas hic operata intelligitur, Deus, Pater scilicet; principium, Filius; Spiritus Dei, Spiritus sanctus.\n\n« Et Spiritus, » etc. [n: (ISID., in Gen.? )] Corda scilicet fluctuantia, quae mentis quietem amiserant, [0070D] quia eis spiritus non innitebatur, sed superferebatur: quasi potens naturam a confusione in melius revocare. Deinde per totum hujus Scripturae textum sex quasdam operosas aetates videmus, licet quasi proximis limitibus distinctas, ut in septima quies speretur; et eas habere similitudinem sex dierum, quibus ea facta sunt, quae Deum fecisse Scriptura commemorat. Primordium enim generis humani, quo ista luce frui coepit, comparatur primo diei quo lucem Deus fecit. Haec aetas tanquam infantia est totius saeculi, quod tanquam unum hominem proportione magnitudinis suae cogitamus. Homo enim cum primo nascitur in lucem, infantiam agit primam aetatem, quae tendit ab Adam usque ad Noe generationibus decem: diluvium quasi vespera hujus [0071A] diei est, quia infantia nostra oblivionis diluvio deletur.\n\n[n: (STRAB.)] « Inanis et vacua. » Inutilis scilicet, et infructuosa, et incomposita. Omnia enim elementa commixta, confusa, et totum hoc aeris spatium aquis plenum; non quales nunc sunt, sed sicut nebulae tenues erant, quales adhuc supercoelestes sunt.", "source": "PL 113, col. 70A–70D (marginal glosses on 1:2, in the order printed; the 'inanis et vacua' gloss from 69D appended)", "license": "pd", "cc_idno": "8950" }, "english": { "text": "« And the Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters. » [var: Vulg. Gen. 1:2 *Spiritus Dei*, \"the Spirit of God\"] [n: (AUG., lib. I de Gen. ad lit., c. 5, tom. III.)] Either he called the whole corporeal matter water, that he might intimate whence were made and formed all the things which we see formed on the earth out of a moist nature through divers species; or the spiritual life, as it were floating, before the [0070B] form of its conversion. The Spirit of God was borne above, because that which he had begun to be formed and perfected lay beneath the good will of the Creator. It is also said, « The Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters. » Lest, by doing works, God should be thought to love through the necessity of want rather than through the abundance of beneficence. For fittingly is something first intimated to have been begun, over which he might be borne: not in place, but by a power surpassing all things.\n\n« And the Spirit of the Lord was borne, » etc. [n: (HIERON. in Gen. t. III, col. 939.)] In the Hebrew it has *merahephet,* that is, it brooded, or cherished, after the manner of a bird warming eggs with the heat of a living thing. We understand therefore that this is not said of the spirit of the world, as many suppose; but of the [0070C] Holy Spirit, who is himself the quickener of all things: and if the quickener, also the founder; if the founder, also God. Psal. CIII: « Send forth, he says, thy Spirit, and they shall be created. » [var: Vulg. Ps. 103:30 *Emittes*, \"Thou shalt send forth\"]\n\n« And the Spirit, » etc. In whom, subsisting, we might rest, quickened by his breath and washed by the wave of baptism. « And the Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters, » etc. As God, namely, and Creator, he presided over the floating and confused matter, that he might distinguish it when he willed. The whole Trinity therefore is understood to have worked here, God, that is, the Father; the beginning, the Son; the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit.\n\n« And the Spirit, » etc. [n: (ISID., in Gen.? )] The hearts, namely, that were tossing to and fro, which had lost the quiet of the mind, [0070D] because the Spirit did not rest upon them, but was borne above them: as one able to call back their nature from confusion into something better. Then throughout the whole text of this Scripture we see certain six laborious ages, though distinguished as it were by neighbouring bounds, so that in the seventh rest may be hoped for; and we see that they have a likeness to the six days in which those things were made which Scripture records God to have made. For the first beginning of the human race, in which it began to enjoy this light, is compared to the first day, on which God made light. This age is as it were the infancy of the whole world, which we think of, by the proportion of its greatness, as one man. For man, when he is first born into the light, passes his infancy, the first age, which extends from Adam to Noah in ten generations: the flood is as it were the evening of this [0071A] day, because our infancy is blotted out by the flood of forgetfulness.\n\n[n: (STRAB.)] « Void and empty. » Useless, namely, and unfruitful, and unordered. For all the elements were mingled and confused, and this whole space of air was full of waters; not such as they now are, but they were like thin clouds, such as those above the heavens still are.", "translator": "wilson-pruitt", "license": "wroot-glossa", "edition": "migne.app/glossa, Liber Genesis (8950), chunk 0" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-2-terra", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-2-terra/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 2.-- « Terra autem erat inanis, » etc. (BEDA, Hexaem. tom. II.) Quod vel quale coelum in principio cum terra factum est, ostendit. Hoc enim de terra subdit, quod de coelo intelligi noluit. Hoc enim superius coelum quod a volubilitate mundi secretum est, mox ut creatum est, sanctis angelis est impletum: quos in principio cum coelo et terra conditos testatur Dominus dicens Job XXXVIII: « Ubi eras cum me laudarent astra matutina, et jubilarent omnes filii Dei? » Astra matutina eosdem angelos et filios Dei vocat. De coelo enim in quo posita sunt luminaria, quomodo vel quando factum sit postea dicit.", "source": "PL 113, col. 69C", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 2. « But the earth was empty, » etc. [n: (BEDE, Hexaemeron, vol. II.)] He shows which heaven, and of what kind, was made in the beginning together with the earth. For he adds this of the earth, which he did not want understood of heaven. For that upper heaven, which is set apart from the turning of the world, as soon as it was created was filled with the holy angels — whom the Lord bears witness were founded in the beginning together with heaven and earth, saying in Job 38: « Where were you when the morning stars praised me, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? » He calls the same angels morning stars and sons of God. For of the heaven in which the lights are set, he says afterwards how and when it was made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-26/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 26.-- « Faciamus hominem. » (AUG., ibid., c. 19.) Insinuatur pluralitas personarum Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus sancti, et statim unitas deitatis, cum dicitur: « Et fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem Dei, » non Pater ad imaginem tantum Filii. Non enim vere diceretur ad imaginem nostram; sed ita dictum est: « Fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem Dei, » ac si diceretur « ad imaginem suam. » Cum autem dicitur « ad imaginem Dei, » cum superius dictum sit, « ad imaginem nostram, » significatur quod non agit pluralitas personarum, ut plures deos credamus, sed ut Patrem, et Filium, et Spiritum sanctum unum Deum accipiamus.", "source": "PL 113, col. 80B", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 26. 'Let us make a human.' (AUG., ibid., c. 19.) A plurality of persons is intimated — of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit — and at once the unity of the deity, when it is said: 'and God made the human to the image of God', not the Father to the image only of the Son. For it would not truly be said, to our image; but it was said thus: 'God made the human to the image of God', as if it were said 'to his own image'. And when it says 'to the image of God', when above it had said 'to our image', it is signified that the plurality of persons does not work so that we should believe in many gods, but so that we should take the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit as one God.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-3/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 3.-- « Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. » (AUG., de Gen. ad litt., lib. I, c. 17, tom. III.) Lux primo die facta spiritualis vel corporalis intelligitur, etc., usque ad mane futuri inchoatio. (BEDA, Hexaem. ) Si autem primo die corporalis lux facta est, congrue mundi ornatus a luce inchoatur, unde caetera, quae creanda erant, videbantur. Si autem quaeritur, ubi est facta, cum abyssus omnem terrae altitudinem tegeret? patet quod in illis partibus, quas nunc illustrat solis diurna lux. Nec mirum lucem in aquis posse lucere, cum etiam nautarum operatione saepius illustrentur, qui in profundo mersi, misso ex ore oleo, aquas sibi illustrant: quae tunc multo rariores quam sint modo, fuere in principio, quia nondum congregatae in uno loco. « Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. » (AUG. ibid., c. 2.) Non temporaliter: si enim temporaliter, et mutabiliter; si mutabiliter, et per subjectam creaturam, non est lux prima creatura. Sed forsitan, etc., usque ad ut sit et ut maneat. « Fiat lux. » (AUG. ibid., c. 4, 5, 9.) Ea conditione scilicet qua cuncta subsistunt intemporaliter in Dei sapientia, priusquam in seipsis. « Et facta est lux, » id est angelica et coelestis substantia, in se temporaliter; sicut erat in sapientia, quantum ad ejus incommutabilitatem, aeternaliter. Vel notatur hujus creaturae informitas scilicet et imperfectio antequam formaretur in amore Conditoris: formatur enim cum convertitur ad incommutabile lumen Verbi. « Fiat lux. » (AUG. ibid., c. 10, 11, 16.) Si corporaliter lux facta est, etc., usque ad nondum enim erant animalia quibus haec vicissitudo exhiberetur.", "source": "PL 113, col. 71A", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 3. 'And God said: Let there be light.' (AUGUSTINE, on Genesis to the letter, book I, ch. 17, vol. III.) The light made on the first day is understood as spiritual or bodily, etc., down to: morning, the beginning of what is to come. (BEDE, Hexaemeron.) But if bodily light was made on the first day, fittingly is the adorning of the world begun from light, whence the rest that were to be created might be seen. And if it is asked where it was made, since the abyss covered the whole height of the earth — it is plain that it was in those parts which the daily light of the sun now illumines. Nor is it a wonder that light can shine in the waters, since they are often lit even by the working of sailors, who, sunk in the deep, let oil out of their mouths and light the waters for themselves: which waters were then much thinner than they now are, in the beginning, because they were not yet gathered into one place. 'And God said: Let there be light.' (AUGUSTINE, ibid., ch. 2.) Not temporally: for if temporally, then changeably; if changeably, then through a creature subject to him, and light is not the first creature. But perhaps, etc., down to: that it may be and may abide. 'Let there be light.' (AUGUSTINE, ibid., ch. 4, 5, 9.) On that condition, namely, by which all things subsist timelessly in the wisdom of God before they subsist in themselves. 'And light was made', that is, the angelic and heavenly substance, in itself temporally; as it was in wisdom, so far as concerns its unchangeableness, eternally. Or the unformedness of this creature is noted, that is, its imperfection before it was formed in the love of its Maker: for it is formed when it is turned to the unchangeable light of the Word. 'Let there be light.' (AUGUSTINE, ibid., ch. 10, 11, 16.) If light was made bodily, etc., down to: for there were not yet animals to whom this alternation might be exhibited.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-4/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 4.-- « Et vidit Deus lucem, » etc. (STRAB.) Lucem et tenebras fecit Deus, unde Dan. III. « Benedicite, lux et tenebrae, Domino, » cum omnis creatura ad benedicendum invitatur. (ISID., in Gen., c. 2.) Habet quisque in operibus et recta vita, distinctos sex dies, post quos requiem speret: primo die, lucem fidei, quoniam primo invisibilibus credit propter quam fidem Dominus apparere dignatus est.", "source": "PL 113, col. 71C", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "VERSE 4. 'And God saw the light,' etc. (STRABO.) God made both the light and the darkness, whence Daniel 3: 'Bless the Lord, light and darkness,' since every creature is invited to bless. (ISIDORE, on Genesis, ch. 2.) Everyone has in his works and upright life six distinct days, after which he may hope for rest: on the first day, the light of faith, since he first believes in things invisible, for which faith the Lord deigned to appear.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "glossa-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-1-5/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 5.--. . . . « Factumque est vespere, » etc. (GREG., l. VIII Moral., c. 6, tom. I.) Nequaquam in hac vita per exercitationem justitiae peccatum deseritur, ut in ipsa inconcusse maneatur: quia si culpam rectitudo eliminat, cogitationis nostrae foribus assidens, ut sibi aperiatur, pulsat. Unde ait Moyses: « Facta est lux; » et paulo post: « Factum est vespere. » Creator enim, humanae culpae praescius, tunc expressit in tempore quod nunc versatur in mente. Lumen namque rectitudinis sequitur umbra tentationis. Sed quia electorum lux tentatione non exstinguitur, non nox, sed vespera facta memoratur, quia tentatio lumen justitiae abscondit, non interimit. (AUG., de Gen. ad litt., l. IV, c. 22, 23, tom. III, col. 311, 312.) Notandum, quod caeterae creaturae, etc., usque ad ut illud scilicet ad diem pertineat, hoc ad vesperam.", "source": "PL 113, col. 71D", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 5. […] 'And there was evening,' etc. (GREGORY, Moralia VIII.6.) By no means in this life is sin so forsaken through the exercise of justice that one may remain in it unshaken: for if rectitude drives out the fault, the fault sits at the doors of our thought and knocks to be let in. Whence Moses says: 'Light was made'; and a little after: 'Evening was made.' For the Creator, foreknowing human guilt, then set forth in time what is now enacted in the mind. For the shadow of temptation follows the light of rectitude. But because the light of the elect is not put out by temptation, it is recorded that not night but evening was made: for temptation hides the light of justice, it does not destroy it. (AUGUSTINE, on Genesis to the letter, book IV, ch. 22, 23, vol. III, col. 311, 312.) Note that the other creatures, etc., down to: that the one may belong to the day, and this to the evening.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "glossa-11-7-angeli", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/glossa-11-7-angeli/", "author": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "VERS. 7.-- « Venite igitur, » etc. Ad angelos dixisse intelligitur; vel secundum illud: « Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. » Nam singulari numero subjunctum est: « et divisit eos, » etc., sicut ibi: « Fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem suam. »", "source": "PL 113, col. 114D", "cc_idno": "8950", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 7. 'Come, therefore', etc. He is understood to have said it to the angels; or according to that: 'let us make a human to our image and likeness.' For it is added in the singular number: 'and he divided them', etc., just as there: 'God made the human to his own image and likeness.'", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "honorius-hex-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/honorius-hex-1-1/", "author": "Honorius Augustodunensis", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et notandum, quod Moyses propheta Filium principium, et in eo omnia creata commemorat: Joannes autem apostolus Patrem principium, et Filium in eo semper, ei coaequalem mansisse, et omnia per ipsum facta praedicat. Quia nimirum unam utriusque substantiam concorditer nobis denuntiant. Dicitur itaque (Gen. I) : In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram, hoc est, Deus Pater creavit in Filio simul coelestia, et terrestria, visibilia et invisibilia.", "source": "PL 172, col. 254B", "cc_idno": "10991", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And it is to be noted that Moses the prophet records the Son as the beginning, and all things created in him; but John the apostle proclaims the Father as the beginning, and that the Son always remained in him, coequal to him, and that all things were made through him. For without doubt they announce to us in concord the one substance of both. It is said therefore (Gen 1): 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth' — that is, God the Father created in the Son, at once, the heavenly and the earthly, the visible and the invisible.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "honorius-hex-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/honorius-hex-1-3/", "author": "Honorius Augustodunensis", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1120, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et dixit Deus: Fiat lux. Cum de Deo, dixit, scribitur, nostro more dicitur, et efficacia jubentis exprimitur. Dei autem dicere nihil est aliud, quam per verbum suum omnia condere. Per hoc verbum hanc corporalem lucem de elemento ignis protulit, et eam huic mundo intulit. Quae lux tunc talem claritatem, qualem nunc ante solis exortum, exhibuit: et tenues tunc aquas, ut nunc aerem, illustravit. Per duodecim autem horas super terram, ut nunc sol mansit: per duodecim vero, inferiora orbis illuminavit.", "source": "PL 172, col. 255C", "cc_idno": "10991", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God said: Let there be light. When 'he said' is written of God, it is said after our manner, and the efficacy of the one commanding is expressed. But for God to speak is nothing other than to found all things through his Word. Through this Word he brought forth this bodily light from the element of fire, and brought it into this world. Which light then showed such a brightness as there now is before the rising of the sun; and it lit the waters, then thin, as it now lights the air. For twelve hours it remained above the earth, as the sun does now; and for twelve it lit the lower parts of the globe.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "honorius-hex-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/honorius-hex-1-4/", "author": "Honorius Augustodunensis", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et vidit Deus lucem, quod esset bona. Hoc est, rationali creaturae intelligere dedit: quam bona sint cuncta, quae per lucem cernit. Et divisit lucem ac tenebras: scilicet ut lux duodecim horas super terram, et duodecim sub terra splendesceret: tenebrae quoque a luce fugatae duodecim horas sub terra totidemque super terram delitescerent.", "source": "PL 172, col. 255D", "cc_idno": "10991", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God saw the light, that it was good. That is, he gave the rational creature to understand how good are all the things it discerns by the light. And he divided the light and the darkness: namely, so that the light should shine twelve hours above the earth and twelve below the earth; and the darkness, put to flight by the light, should lie hidden twelve hours below the earth and as many above it.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "honorius-hex-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/honorius-hex-1-5/", "author": "Honorius Augustodunensis", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1140, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus. Vespere est finis diei; mane autem finis noctis: quae duo juncta, viginti quatuor horae fiunt, et unum diem conficiunt. Ideo autem non primus, sed unus dies dicitur, quia idem semper repetitur; ut scribitur: Ordinatione tua perseverat dies (Psal. CXVIII, 91) . Illo primo triduo nox prorsus tenebrosa manebat; quia eam nec luna, nec sidera illuminabant. Notandum autem, quod dies a luce inchoatur et in luce terminatur: quia omnia opera Dei a Christo, qui est lux vera, inchoantur, et in eodem cuncta consummantur.", "source": "PL 172, col. 255D", "cc_idno": "10991", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And there was evening and morning, one day.' Evening is the end of the day; morning, however, is the end of the night: which two joined together make twenty-four hours and complete one day. And it is called not first but one day, because the same day is always repeated, as it is written: 'By your ordinance the day continues' (Ps 119:91). During that first three days the night remained wholly dark, because neither moon nor stars lit it. It is to be noted, moreover, that the day begins from light and ends in light: because all the works of God are begun from Christ, who is the true light, and in him all are completed.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "honorius-hex-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/honorius-hex-1/", "author": "Honorius Augustodunensis", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1140, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et Spiritus Domini ferebatur super aquas, vel aquas fovebat, id est cuncta de aquis procreanda animabat. Et nota Trinitatem. Deo Patri ascribitur mundi creatio, Filio rerum dispositio, Spiritui sancto omnium vivificatio, vel ornatio.", "source": "PL 172, col. 254C", "cc_idno": "10991", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And the Spirit of the Lord was borne over the waters,' or 'was warming the waters,' that is, was giving life to all that was to be brought forth from the waters. And note the Trinity: to God the Father is ascribed the creation of the world, to the Son the disposing of things, to the Holy Spirit the quickening, or adorning, of all.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "hugh-adnot-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-adnot-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inanis et vacua. Inanis a seminibus; vacua a germinibus; vel inanis propter concavitatem: vacua, quia in tanta concavitate terrae non erat nisi aer et nebula.", "source": "PL 175, col. 35D", "cc_idno": "11054", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was empty and void.' Empty of seeds; void of shoots; or empty on account of its hollowness; void, because in so great a hollowness of the earth there was nothing but air and mist.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "hugh-adnot-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-adnot-1-26/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Faciamus hominem ad imaginem, et similitudinem nostram. Primo dixit: In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram. Deinde dixit: Fiat lux, hic tertio adjungit: Faciamus hominem, etc. In hoc vocari possunt tres progressus. Primum opus, deinde informans verbum, tertio consilium, per hoc, quod hic adjungit: Faciamus hominem, etc. Nec propterea consilium inducit, quin aeque possit facere et magna et parva; sed ut dignitatem creati hominis ostenderet, et ut nos cautos reddat, ne dedignemur consilium accipere et ab aequalibus et a minoribus; cum ipse ad angelos ita loquatur, quorum ministerio forsitan formatum est corpus hominis. Vel quod melius est, accipiamus consilium Trinitatis fuisse, et per verbum plurale distinctionem personarum; per hoc quod subjungit singulariter ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, unitatem essentiae.", "source": "PL 175, col. 37B", "cc_idno": "11054", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Let us make a human to our image and likeness. First he said: in the beginning God created heaven and earth. Then he said: let there be light; here, thirdly, he adds: let us make a human, etc. In this three advances may be named. First the work, then the informing word, thirdly the counsel — by this, that he here adds: let us make a human, etc. Nor does he bring in counsel because he could not equally well make both great things and small; but in order to show the dignity of the human that was created, and to make us careful not to disdain to take counsel both from equals and from lesser people — since he himself so speaks to the angels, by whose ministry perhaps the human body was formed. Or, what is better, let us take it that it was the counsel of the Trinity, and that by the plural word there is a distinction of persons; and by this, that he adds in the singular, to our image and likeness, a unity of essence.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "hugh-adnot-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-adnot-1-3/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Ignis vero distinctus lumen praebuit mundo inferiori qualecunque et motum habens circularem; quasi quaedam lucida nubes circumferebatur, sicut modo sol.", "source": "PL 175, col. 34C", "cc_idno": "11054", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But fire, once distinguished, furnished light of some kind to the lower world, and had a circular motion: it was carried round like a kind of luminous cloud, as the sun is now.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "hugh-adnot-gen-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-adnot-gen-1-2/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1130, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Spiritum Dei vocat ejus intentionem, qui quasi artifex operi formando praecerat, aquas vocat nebulam illam propter mobilitatem: et ita eamdem rem modo abyssum propter profunditatem, modo tenebras propter absentiam lucis, modo aquas propter mobilitatem appellat.", "source": "PL 175, col. 36A", "cc_idno": "11054", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' He calls 'the Spirit of God' his intention, who like a craftsman presided over the work to be formed; 'the waters' he calls that mist, on account of its mobility; and so he names the same thing now 'abyss' for its depth, now 'darkness' for the absence of light, now 'waters' for its mobility.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram (Gen. I) . Quod creatum est de nihilo factum est. Nam quod de aliquo factum est, factum quidem est sed creatum non est; quia de nihilo factum non est. Fecit ergo Deus coelum et terram; nec solum fecit sed creavit, hoc est de nihilo fecit. Philosophi gentilium tria quaedam rerum principia sine principio posuerunt: opificem, materiam et formam; profitentes ea quae facta sunt omnia ex materia quidem in formam per opificem esse producta. Sed isti factorem solum non creatorem Deum professi sunt. Fides autem vera unum solummodum primum principium confitetur quod semper erat; et per ipsum solum factum est ut esset quod aliquando non erat. Cujus ineffabilis omnipotentiae virtus, sicut non potuit aliud praeter se habere coaeternum, quo in faciendo juvaretur; ita ipsi cum voluit suberat, ut quod voluit et quando et quantum voluit de nihilo crearetur. Omnia ergo quae facta sunt, Deus non solum ex materia fecit, sed materiam omnium ipse de nihilo creavit.", "source": "PL 176, col. 187A", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'In the beginning God created heaven and earth' (Gen 1:1). What was created was made out of nothing. For what was made out of something was indeed made, but was not created, because it was not made out of nothing. God therefore made heaven and earth; and not only made but created, that is, made out of nothing. The philosophers of the gentiles laid down three principles of things without a principle: the workman, matter, and form — professing that all the things that were made were brought forth out of matter into form through the workman. But they professed God to be only a maker and not a creator. The true faith, however, confesses one only first principle, which always was; and through it alone it came about that what once was not should be. And the power of his unspeakable omnipotence, just as it could not have anything coeternal besides itself by which it might be helped in making, so it had at hand, when it willed, that what it willed and when and how much it willed should be created out of nothing. All things therefore that were made, God not only made out of matter, but himself created the matter of all things out of nothing.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-1-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-1-tohu/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inanis et vacua (Gen. I) ; sive, ut alia translatio habet, « incomposita, » et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi (ibid.) . Per coelum namque et terram, materiam illam omnium coelestium terrestriumque, hoc loco significari puto, de qua postea succedenter in forma facta sunt quae in ipsa prius per essentiam simul creata fuerunt. Ibi namque terra erat ipsum terrae elementum, et coelum mobile erat illa et levis confusio reliquorum trium quae in circuitu medio jacentis terrae suspensa ferebatur; et his duobus omnium corporum coelestium sive terrestrium formandorum materia continebatur.", "source": "PL 176, col. 190D", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was empty and void' (Gen 1) — or, as another translation has it, « unordered » — 'and darkness was upon the face of the deep' (ibid.). For by 'heaven and earth' I think there is signified in this place that matter of all things heavenly and earthly, out of which were afterwards made, one after another, in form, the things which had first been created in it together in their essence. For there 'earth' was the element of earth itself, and 'heaven' was that mobile and light confusion of the remaining three, which was carried suspended around the earth lying in the middle; and in these two was contained the matter of all bodies, heavenly or earthly, that were to be formed.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-1/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Nam quod illa prima rerum omnium materia, in principio temporis, vel potius cum ipso tempore exorta sit, constat ex eo quod dictum est: In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram. Quamdiu autem in hac informitate sive confusione permanserit, Scriptura manifeste non ostendit. Mihi autem videtur (quantum ego conjicere valeo) inter creationem et dispositionem rerum, ordinem quidem temporis sed nullam fuisse moram interjectam; ita ut vere quidem dici possit, hoc post illud factum fuisse; sed inter hoc factum et illud nullam omnino dilationem intervenisse.", "source": "PL 176, col. 192A", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "For that that first matter of all things arose in the beginning of time, or rather with time itself, is clear from what was said: 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth.' But how long it remained in this unformedness or confusion, Scripture does not plainly show. To me, however, it seems, so far as I can conjecture, that between the creation and the disposing of things there was indeed an order of time but no delay interposed; so that it can truly be said that this was made after that, yet that between this making and that no postponement whatever came between.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-1b/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Duo in principio posita sunt coelum et terra. Quid horum putas subtus, aut quod supra fuisse dicemus? Aut terra supra et coelum subtus; aut terra subtus et coelum supra? Sed nunquid credendum est prima illa conditione rerum coelum subter creatum fuisse; et postea in formatione supra dispositum? Fortassis quia prius Scriptura nominavit coelum quam terram, propterea coelum quasi fundamentum subtus creatum fuisse quis dicat. Ego aut non ordinis sed dignitatis causa sic positum reor; et quia etiam sermo sequens de elemento terrae quasi de proximo (et ob hoc posterius nominato) habendus fuit, ideo et prius coelum et postea terra nominari debuit. Sed neque ipsa conditorum natura alium positionis aut locationis ordinem pateretur, quam ut ponderosa deorsum, et sursum levia disponerentur. Ergo terra deorsum erat et coelum sursum, et quod supra terram erat coelum erat. Ergo coelum supra terram erat.", "source": "PL 176, col. 191B", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Two things are set down in the beginning, heaven and earth. Which of these do you suppose was below, and which shall we say was above? Either earth above and heaven below, or earth below and heaven above? But is it to be believed that in that first condition of things heaven was created underneath, and afterwards in the forming was set above? Perhaps, because Scripture named heaven before earth, someone may say that heaven was created below as a foundation. But I judge it to be so placed not for the sake of order but of dignity; and because the discourse that follows had to be about the element of earth, as about the nearer thing — and for this reason named later — therefore heaven had to be named first and earth afterwards. Nor indeed would the very nature of the things founded allow any other order of position or placing than that the weighty should be disposed downward and the light upward. Therefore the earth was below and heaven above, and what was above the earth was heaven. Therefore heaven was above the earth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-3/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "corporalibus rebus et visibilibus illuminandis, non nisi lucem corpoream congruere potuisse. Omne autem corpus quantumlibet subtile et spirituali naturae approximans, loco circumscribi necesse est. Rursumque nisi mobilis fuisset lux illa, nequaquam alterna vicissitudine diem ac noctem distinguere, nec temporis spatium ullatenus sine motu peragere valuisset. Secundum hanc itaque considerationem, convenientius puto ut credamus lucem illam in principio factam ad illuminanda corporea sine dubio corpoream fuisse, quale fortasse esse potuisset corpus aliquod lucidum, cujus praesentia cuncta illustrarentur, quemadmodum nunc in sole videri potest, ipsamque vice et loco solis factam, ut interim motu suo circumagitaretur, et noctem diemque discerneret.", "source": "PL 176, col. 194A", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "…for the lighting of bodily and visible things, nothing but a bodily light could have been suitable. And every body, however fine and however near it comes to a spiritual nature, must be circumscribed by place. And again, unless that light had been mobile, it could in no way have distinguished day and night by their alternating turns, nor traversed any space of time at all without motion. According to this consideration, then, I think it more fitting that we believe that light, made in the beginning for the lighting of bodily things, to have been beyond doubt bodily — such as some luminous body might perhaps have been, by whose presence all things were lit, as can now be seen in the sun — and that it was made in the sun's stead and place, so that for the time being it was carried round by its own motion, and marked off night and day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-4/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et ut mihi videtur eodem prorsus temporis momento quo visibiliter et corporaliter divisa est lux a tenebris; invisibiliter quoque boni angeli discreti sunt a malis illis in tenebras peccati cadentibus: et istis ad lucem justitiae conversis illuminatisque a luce, ut lux essent et non tenebrae. Sic enim consonare debuerunt exemplaria operum Dei, ut quae visibilia erant opera sapientiae, invisibilium proventus sequerentur, secundum quod ipsa quae utrobique operabatur sapientia, ibi judicium exercuit, hic formavit exemplum. Divisa est lux ergo a tenebris; et erat lux visibilis et visibiles tenebrae erant; similiter et lux invisibilis erat, et tenebrae invisibiles erant; et utrorumque divisio facta est; et simul facta est divisio tenebrarum et lucis. Et vocata est lux dies et tenebrae nox. Utrumque quidem Deus divisit, et utrumque nominavit; sed et utrumque non fecit. Deus enim auctor tenebrarum non est sed lucis; quia peccatum est tenebrae et peccatum nihil est: Et sine ipso nihil factum est (Joan. III) . Lux ab ipso facta est; quia justitia et veritas lux est, et de luce audivimus quod dixit Deus: Fiat lux, et statim lux facta est (Gen. I) . Nusquam dixit Deus: Fiant tenebrae. Sed de luce dixit: Fiat lux, et divisit lucem a tenebris; et vocavit lucem diem, et tenebras noctem (ibid.) . Ergo non fecit utrumque; tamen utrumque divisit, et utrumque nominavit. Divisit per judicium; et per meritum nominavit, judicavit et disposuit. Quia nec hoc apud eum judicantem inordinatum esse potuit, quod apud delinquentes inordinatum fuit, vocavit lucem diem, et tenebras noctem.", "source": "PL 176, col. 194D", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And as it seems to me, at precisely the same moment of time at which the light was visibly and bodily divided from the darkness, invisibly also the good angels were distinguished from those evil ones falling into the darkness of sin, these being turned to the light of justice and illuminated by the light, so that they should be light and not darkness. For thus the patterns of God's works had to agree, that the outcome of invisible things should follow the works of wisdom which were visible, according as that same wisdom which was working in both places here exercised judgement and there formed the pattern. The light, then, was divided from the darkness; and there was visible light and there were visible darknesses; likewise there was invisible light, and there were invisible darknesses; and a division of both was made, and the division of the darknesses and of the light was made at once. And the light was called day and the darkness night. God indeed divided both, and named both; but he did not make both. For God is not the author of darkness but of light; because sin is darkness and sin is nothing: And without him was made nothing (John 1:3). Light was made by him; because justice and truth are light, and of light we have heard what God said: Let there be light, and at once light was made (Gen 1). Nowhere did God say: Let there be darkness. But of light he said: Let there be light, and he divided the light from the darkness; and he called the light day, and the darkness night. Therefore he did not make both; yet he divided both, and named both. He divided by judgement; and by merit he named, judged and disposed. For since not even that could be disordered in his judging which was disordered among the offenders, he called the light day, and the darkness night.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-4b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-4b/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "CAP. XIII. Quare dicit Scriptura: « Vidit Deus lucem. » Sed occurrit fortassis quomodo vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona et divisit lucem a tenebris et vocavit lucem diem, et tenebras noctem (Gen. I) . Nam si caetera opera sua in luce vidit quod essent bona, in qua luce vidit lucem quod esset bona et divisit lucem a tenebris vocavitque lucem diem et tenebras noctem? Nihil enim videri potest sine luce; sed nec tenebrae sine luce videntur, quanto magis lux non videtur sine luce? Quae fuit ergo illa lux per quam Deus vidit lucem quod esset bona, et divisit lucem a tenebris? An per ipsam eam vidit quod esset bona, an per aliam lucem vidit quod esset bona? Sed quomodo per ipsam videre potuisset quod esset bona, si aliam lucem non habuisset per quam et in qua ipsam lucem vidisset quod esset bona? Nam, si vidit quod esset bona lux ista et vere vidit, in aliquo vidit de cujus bonitate dubitari non potuit. Ergo, alia lux increata, in qua ista lux creata videbatur quod esset bona; quia illam imitabatur quae semper est bona. In illa enim luce cum ipsa solum sit bona, videntur et mala et bona; et non solum mala et bona in ea videntur, sed mala etiam esse mala, bona esse bona in ea videntur: propterea quod ipsa vere et summe est bona. Quod enim ab ipsa discordare videtur, malum esse videtur; et quod ei simile esse videtur, bonum esse videtur; et utrumque non nisi in ipsa et per ipsam videtur. Per lucem ergo probavit lucem: quia in luce incommutabili vidit quod lux ista commutabilis suo modo et ordine bona esset.", "source": "PL 176, col. 197B", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "CHAPTER XIII. Why Scripture says: 'God saw the light.' But perhaps it occurs to someone: how did God see the light, that it was good, and divide the light from the darkness, and call the light day and the darkness night (Gen 1)? For if he saw his other works in the light, that they were good, in what light did he see the light, that it was good, and divide the light from the darkness, and call the light day and the darkness night? For nothing can be seen without light; but neither are darknesses seen without light — how much more is light not seen without light? What, then, was that light through which God saw the light, that it was good, and divided the light from the darkness? Did he see by that same light that it was good, or by another light? But how could he have seen through it that it was good, if he had not had another light through which and in which he saw that light, that it was good? For if he saw that this light was good, and truly saw it, he saw it in something of whose goodness there could be no doubt. Therefore there was another light, uncreated, in which this created light was seen to be good; because it imitated that light which is always good. For in that light, since it alone is good, both evils and goods are seen; and not only are evils and goods seen in it, but evils are seen to be evil and goods to be good in it, for the reason that it is truly and supremely good. For what is seen to disagree with it is seen to be evil; and what is seen to be like it is seen to be good; and both are seen only in it and through it. By light, therefore, he proved light: because in the unchangeable light he saw that this changeable light was good in its own mode and order.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-1-5/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et propterea quia primus dies auroram praecedentem non habuit, quoniam antequam lux crearetur plenae tenebrae fuerunt, mox autem luce apparente super terram plenus dies, propterea quod a perfecto opus Dei inchoari debuisset, ideo dixisse Scripturam: Factum est vespere et mane dies unus (Gen. I) . Non enim dixit Factum est mane et vespere; sed: Factum est, inquit, vespere et mane dies unus. Quia, sicut diximus, primus dies mane praecedens non habuit, quoniam a luce plena atque perfecta initium sumpsit; propterea omnis aurora praecedentis diei est, et omnis dies ab ortu solis initium sumit. Estque dies naturalis illud spatium temporis quod ab ortu solis usque ad ortum pertransiens noctem in se diemque concludit; in qua (quoniam naturaliter dies noctem praecedit) et finem diei vesperam dicimus, finem noctis auroram, constat indubitanter quod aurora semper ad praecedentem diem referenda sit.", "source": "PL 176, col. 194B", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And therefore, because the first day had no dawn preceding it — since before the light was created there was full darkness, and as soon as the light appeared over the earth there was full day, and because God's work ought to have begun from what is perfect — therefore Scripture said: 'There was made evening and morning, one day.' For it did not say, 'There was made morning and evening,' but 'There was made,' it says, 'evening and morning, one day.' Because, as we have said, the first day had no morning preceding it, since it took its beginning from full and perfect light; and therefore every dawn belongs to the preceding day, and every day takes its beginning from sunrise. And the natural day is that space of time which, passing from sunrise to sunrise, encloses within itself both night and day; in which — since day naturally precedes night — we call the end of the day evening and the end of the night dawn; and it stands beyond doubt that dawn is always to be referred to the preceding day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "hugh-sacr-prologus", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/hugh-sacr-prologus/", "author": "Hugh of St Victor", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1134, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "CAP. II. Quae sit materia divinarum Scripturarum. Materia divinarum Scripturarum omnium, sunt opera restaurationis humanae. Duo enim sunt opera in quibus universa continentur quae facta sunt. Primum est opus conditionis. Secundum est opus restaurationis. Opus conditionis est quo factum est, ut essent quae non erant. Opus restaurationis est quo factum est ut melius essent quae perierant. Ergo opus conditionis est creatio mundi cum omnibus elementis suis. Opus restaurationis est incarnatio Verbi cum omnibus sacramentis suis; sive iis quae praecesserunt ab initio saeculi, sive iis quae subsequuntur usque ad finem mundi. Verbum enim incarnatum rex noster est, qui in hunc mundum venit cum diabolo pugnaturus; et omnes sancti qui ante ejus adventum fuerunt, quasi milites sunt ante faciem regis praecedentes; et qui postea venerunt et venient usque ad finem mundi milites sunt regem suum subsequentes. Et ipse rex medius est in exercitu suo; hinc inde vallatus incedens et stipatus agminibus suis. Et licet in hac tanta multitudine diversae armorum species in sacramentis et observationibus praecedentium et subsequentium populorum appareant, omnes tamen uni regi militare et unum vexillum sequi probantur, et hostem unum persequi et una victoria coronari. In his omnibus opera restaurationis considerantur; in quibus divinarum Scripturarum tota vertatur intentio. Mundanae sive saeculares scripturae materiam habent opera conditionis. Divina Scriptura materiam habet opera restaurationis. Propterea tanto excellentior omnibus scripturis jure creditur, quanto dignior est et sublimior materia in qua ejus consideratio tractatio quae versatur. Nam opera restaurationis multo digniora sunt operibus conditionis; quia illa ad servitutem facta sunt, ut stanti homini subessent; haec ad salutem, ut lapsum erigerent. Propterea illa quasi modicum aliquid sex diebus perfecta sunt; haec vero non nisi aetatibus sex compleri possunt.", "source": "PL 176, col. 183A", "cc_idno": "11082", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "CHAPTER II. What is the matter of the divine Scriptures. The matter of all the divine Scriptures is the works of human restoration. For there are two works in which is contained everything that has been made. The first is the work of foundation. The second is the work of restoration. The work of foundation is that by which it was brought about that the things which were not should be. The work of restoration is that by which it was brought about that the things which had perished should be better. Therefore the work of foundation is the creation of the world with all its elements. The work of restoration is the incarnation of the Word with all its sacraments, whether those which went before from the beginning of the age or those which follow to the end of the world. For the incarnate Word is our King, who came into this world to fight with the devil; and all the saints who were before his coming are as soldiers going before the face of the King, and those who came after and will come to the end of the world are soldiers following their King. And the King himself is in the midst of his army, walking hedged about on this side and that and thronged by his companies. And although in so great a multitude various kinds of arms appear in the sacraments and observances of the peoples going before and following after, yet all are proved to serve one King and to follow one standard, and to pursue one enemy and to be crowned with one victory. In all these the works of restoration are considered; on which the whole intention of the divine Scriptures turns. Worldly or secular writings have for their matter the works of foundation. The divine Scripture has for its matter the works of restoration. Therefore it is rightly believed to be more excellent than all writings, by as much as the matter is worthier and more sublime in which its consideration and treatment is engaged. For the works of restoration are far worthier than the works of foundation; because those were made for service, that they might be under man while he stood; these for salvation, that they might raise him fallen. Therefore those, as some small thing, were completed in six days; but these cannot be completed save in six ages.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim/", "author": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1155, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "אלהים, אחר שמצאנו אלוה, ידענו כי אלהים לשון רבים, ושרש זה מדרך הלשון, כי כל לשון יש לו דרך כבוד, וכבוד לשון לועז שיאמר הקטן לנכח הגדול לשון רבים, ובלשון ישמעאל דרך כבוד שידבר הגדול כמו המלך בלשון רבים, ובלשון הקדש דרך כבוד לומר על הגדול לשון רבים כמו \"אדנים\" \"ובעלים\", שאמרו \"אדנים קשה\" (ישעי' י\"ט ד'), \"ולקה בעליו\" (שמות כ\"ב, י') וכן מלת עליו, אליו, ועדיו, על כן יאמר הכתוב ברא, ולא בראו", "source": "Ibn Ezra on Gen 1:1, s.v. אלהים", "license": "pd", "version": "Piotrkow, 1907–1911" }, "english": { "text": "“E-lohim” – After we have found [the word] e-loah, we know that E-lohim is its plural form, and the root [of this] is in the nature of language. For every language has a formal form. The way of expressing formality in non-Hebrew languages is by the lesser using the plural in the presence of the greater. In Arabic the way of formal expression is for the greater to speak, as royalty, in the plural. In the Holy Tongue, the way is to refer to the greater in the plural. Like “master” (adonim), “owner” b’alim as they said, “a harsh master” (b’alim) Isaiah 19:4, “his master (b’alim) shall take”. Likewise the word “upon him” (alav), “to him” (elav), “until him” (adav). For this reason does Scripture state “He created” and not “they created”.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "ibn-ezra-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ibn-ezra-1-1/", "author": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1155, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "בראשית חכמינו אמרו שהבי\"ת נוסף כבי\"ת בָראשונָה (בראשית י\"ג ד'), כי נמצא \"ראשונה יסעו\" (במדבר ב' ט') ואילו היה טעמו כן, היה הבי\"ת נקמץ בקמץ גדול וי\"א כי בראשית לעולם סמוך והטעם בראשית הערב או הלילה או החשך והנה שכחו \"וירא ראשית לו\" (דבר' ל\"ג כ\"א), וי\"א שהבי\"ת נושא (צ\"ל נוסף) בלי טעם וטעמם שלא יעלה על לב שאין ראשית לשמים ולארץ ע\"כ אמר בראשית, ולפי דעתי שהוא סמוך, כמו, \"בראשית ממלכת יהויקים\" (ירמי' כ\"ו א'), ואל תתמה איך נסמך על פועל עבר והנה כן \"תחלת דבר ד' בהושע ויאמר ד' אל הושע\" (הושע א' ב'), קרית חנה דוד (ישעי' כ\"ט א') והטעם יתבאר לך בפסוק השני,", "source": "Ibn Ezra on Gen 1:1, s.v. בראשית", "license": "pd", "edition": "Piotrkow, 1907–1911" }, "english": { "text": "Our sages have said that the [letter] bet was added, like the bet in barishonah (“in the beginning”) Bereshit 13:4, for you find “at the beginning (rishonah) they travelled” Bamidbar 2:9. But were that the meaning, the bet would have been vocalized with a kamatz gadol. And there are those who say that [the word] bereshit always [appears in] attached [form], where the meaning is “at the beginning of the evening, or the night, or the darkness”. But behold, they forgot “he saw a beginning reishit for himself” Devarim 33:21. And there are those who say that the bet is a subject without meaning. Their reason is that it is unthinkable that there is no beginning to the heavens and the earth. Therefore, it said “bereshit. But according to my opinion, it is indeed an attached form, like “At the beginning (bereshit) of the rule of Yehoyakim” Yirmiyahu 26:1. Now don’t wonder how can it be attached to a past tense verb [instead of a noun], for behold, thus: “At the beginning (techilat) spoke Hashem with Hoshea, and Hashem said to Hoshea” Hoshea 1:2, “The city (kiryat) where David camped” Yishayahu 29:1. The meaning [of this usage] will be explained for you in the second verse.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "ibn-ezra-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ibn-ezra-1-1b/", "author": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1155, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ואל תתמה על וי\"ו והארץ כי פירושו כפ\"א רפה בלשון ישמעאל, וכמוהו \"ואד יעלה מן הארץ\" (בראשית ב ו), כי לא דבר משה על העולם הבא, שהוא עולם המלאכים כי אם על עולם ההויה והשחתה, והמפרשים שהשמים בפסוק הראשון הם שמי השמים, מה יעשו בארץ, והנה ראיות גמורות לאנשי שיקול הדעת שאין שם רק ארץ אחת ודרש שבע ארצות הוא שהיישוב נחלק על שבעה ובית המקדש היה באמצע היישוב כי רחוק הוא מאמצע הארץ", "source": "Ibn Ezra on Gen 1:2, s.v. והארץ (on the heavens of v. 1)", "license": "pd", "version": "Piotrkow, 1907–1911" }, "english": { "text": "Now don’t be surprised by the vav of veha’aretz (“and the earth’), for its meaning is like the feh in Arabic and like “and a mist” v’ed would rise up from the earth” Genesis 2:6, for Moshe did not speak about the World to Come, which is the world of the angels, but rather of this transitory world. And those who explain that the heavens in the first verse are really the heavenly heavens, what will they do [here] with the earth? Behold, complete proofs, for reasonable people, that there is only earth. Now it is expounded that there were seven earths is [actually] that the earth is divided into seven and the Temple was in the center of the settled region, for it was distant from the center of the earth.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "ibn-ezra-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ibn-ezra-1-1c/", "author": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1155, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ברא רובי המפרשים אמרו שהבריאה להוציא יש מאין, וכן \"אם בריאה יברא ד'\" (במדבר ט\"ז ל'), והנה שכחו \"ויברא אלהים את התנינים\" (בראשית א כא), ושלש בפסוק אחד, \"ויברא אלהים את האדם\" (בראשית א כז), \"ובורא חושך\" (ישעי' מ\"ה ו') שהוא הפוך האור שהוא יש, וזה דקדוק המלה ברא לשני טעמים זה האחד, והשני \"לא ברא אתם לחם\" (ש\"ב י\"ב י\"ז), וזה השני אל\"ף תחת ה\"א, כי כמוהו \"ויבוא כל העם להברות את דוד\" (ש\"ב ג' ל\"ה), כי הוא מהבנין הכבד הנוסף, ואם היה באל\"ף, היה, כמו \"להבריאכם מראשית כל מנחת ישראל (ש\"א ב' כ\"ט), ומצאנו מהבנין הכבד, \"ובראת לך שם\" (יהושע י\"ז ט\"ו), ואיננו כמו ברו לכם איש (ש\"א י\"ו ח'), רק כמו \"וברא אותהן\" (יחז' כ\"ג מ\"ז), וטעמו, לגזור ולשום גבול נגזר, והמשכיל יבין", "source": "Ibn Ezra on Gen 1:1, s.v. ברא", "license": "pd", "version": "Piotrkow, 1907–1911" }, "english": { "text": "Most commentators have said that creation means bringing forth something from nothing, and thus: “But if Hashem will created a creation” [referring to something never seen before] Bamidbar 16:30. But they have forgotten “And G-d created the crocodiles” Bereshit 1:21, as well as three times in the same verse: “G-d created man in His image…” Bereshit 1:27; “and Who creates darkness” Isaiah 45:7 – which is the opposite of light, which is something. Now here is the precise grammar of the word barat - it has two meanings. One is as stated. The other: “He did not revive them with bread” Samuel II 12:17. In this second one, aleph is in place of hey, for similar to it is “And the whole people came to revive David” – this is in the hif’il verb construction. If it were with an aleph, it would be like “To revive you from the beginning of every grain-gift of Yisrael” Samuel I 2:29. We also find [the same root] in the pi’el verb construction: “You will clear for yourselves there” Joshua 17:15. It’s not like “choose for yourselves a man” Samuel I 17:8, rather like “And He BARAed them” Ezekiel 23:47. And its meaning is to cut, to place a divided border – and the enlightened will understand.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "ibn-ezra-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ibn-ezra-1-2/", "author": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1155, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "תהו, אמר הגאון תהו שהוא מתהום, וזה לא יתכן כי מ\"ם תהום שרש כמו מ\"ם \"הדום\", ובס' יצירה תהו זה קו ירוק ובהו אלו אבנים מפולמות והנכון כאשר אמר המתרגם ארמית, וכן \"ובתהו יליל ישימון\" (דבר' לב י), וכן \"אחרי התהו\" (ש\"א יב כא) שאין בו ממש: ובהו אחי תהו, והווי\"ן תהת ה\"א, כוי\"ו \"וישתחו\" (בראשית יח ב) \"ותרענה באחו\" (בראשית מא ב), והטעם כי בראשית בריאת הרקיע והיבשה לא היה בארץ יישוב כי היתה מכוסה במים וכן שם אלהים כח תולדתה להיות למטה מהמים", "source": "Ibn Ezra on Gen 1:2, s.v. תהו", "license": "pd", "version": "Piotrkow, 1907–1911" }, "english": { "text": "“Void” (tohu) – The Ga’on [Rav Sa’adiah] said that [this word] is from “deep” (tehom), but that is not possible, since the mem of tehom is a root letter, like the mem of hadom. Now in Sefer Yetzira: “tohu - this [refers to] the green line”, and bohu - this [refers to] MEFULAM stones”. What’s correct is as the Aramaic translator has said, and likewise with “the howling, desolate tohu Deuteronomy 32:10, and likewise, “after tohu” Samuel I 12:21 – without substance. “And confused” – \"The brother of\", and the vav in place of the hey, like the vav in [the word] vayishtachu (“and he bowed”) Genesis 18:2, “and they pastured amongst he reeds (achu)” Genesis 41:2. The meaning is [as follows:] The creation of the firmament and the dry land was not in a area to be settled, since it was covered with water, and thus G-d placed its generative power to be beneath the water.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "ibn-ezra-1-26-naaseh", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ibn-ezra-1-26-naaseh/", "author": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1155, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ואמר במלת נעשה, ואם היא לשון רבים, שכן מנהג המלכים לדבר, וכמוהו וְנִתְּנָה לך גם את זאת (בראשית כח כז), \"נאמר קדם מלכא (דניאל ב לו) \"אולי אוכל נכה בו\" (במדבר כב ו), ואלה העדים עדי שקר הם, כי \"ונתנה לך\" בנין נפעל, וכמוהו \"והעיר נתנה\" (ירמיה לב כד), והוי\"ו השיבו לעתיד כמשפט כל פעל עבר, והטעם וַתִנָתַן לך \"ונכה בו\" הוא ומחנהו, או יהיה שם הפועל כמו \"ונקה לא אנקך\" (ירמיה מו כח) ואף כי שמצאנו \"לא נכו\" (שמות ט, לב) כי לא יבוא בנין שלא נזכר שם פועלו, כי אם מהכבד, ור' משה הכהן הספרדי טעה בספרו, ומלת \"נאמר קדם מלכא\" (דניאל ב לו) ארמית היא ואיך ידבר דניאל בלשון גדולה עם נבוכדנצר שהיה מלך מלכים, ועתה אפרש, דע כי כל מעשה בראשית, לכבוד האדם נברא במצות השם, והצמחים הוציאה אותם הארץ והמים, וכל נפשות החיות, ואח\"כ אמר השם למלאכים, נעשה אדם, אנחנו נתעסק בו, ולא המים והארץ", "source": "Ibn Ezra on Gen 1:26, s.v. נעשה אדם", "license": "pd", "version": "Piotrkow, 1907–1911" }, "english": { "text": "And he said [further] that the word na’aseh, though it is in plural, is the manner of royal speak [i.e., the plural of majesty]. Similarly, “we shall give nitnah to you also this one” Genesis 29:27. “We say before the king” Daniel 2:36, “perhaps I will be able and we will smite him” Numbers 22:6. But these witnesses are false witnesses, for nitnah is [actually] the nif’al verb construction, and similarly “the city is given” nitnah Jeremiah 32:24, and the vav converts it to the future tense, like is the rule with all past-tense verbs, meaning “she will be given to you”. And “we shall smite him” – he [Balak] and his camp, or it could be the infinitive of the verb, like “clease nakeh, I shall not clease you” Jeremiah 46:28. And even though we do find “they were not smitten” Exodus 9:32, [nevertheless], only that verb construction (pu'al) lacks an infinitive form – and R. Moshe of Spain erred in his book [on this matter]. And the word “we shall say (before the king)” Daniel 2:37 is Aramaic, and [further], how could Daniel speak hautily with Nebuchadnezzar, who was the king of kings? Now I shall explain: Know that all of the work of creation was created for the honor of man at the command of Hashem. The plants – the earth and the water brought them forth, and all the living souls [i.e., the animals]. And afterwards, Hashem said to the angels, “let US make man” – WE will busy ourselves with him, not the water and the earth.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "ibn-ezra-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ibn-ezra-1-4/", "author": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1155, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וירא כמו וראיתי אני (קהלת ב יג, דניאל יו\"ד ז) והוא במחשבה, וטעם ויבדל בקריאת השמות,", "source": "Ibn Ezra on Gen 1:4", "license": "pd", "version": "Piotrkow, 1907–1911" }, "english": { "text": "And He saw: Like “I myself saw…” Ecclesiastes 2:13; Daniel 10:7, it is [seeing] in [one’s] thought. And the meaning of “and He separated” – through calling of names.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "isidore-quaest-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/isidore-quaest-1-1/", "author": "Isidore of Seville", "tradition": "latin", "date": 630, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram. Principium Christus est, sicut ipse in Evangelio Judaeis interrogantibus respondit: Ego principium, qui et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII, 25) . In hoc igitur principio fecit Deus coelum, id est, spirituales, qui coelestia meditantur et quaerunt; in ipso fecit et carnales, qui necdum terrenum hominem deposuerunt.", "source": "PL 83, col. 209B", "cc_idno": "21433", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'In the beginning God made heaven and earth.' The Beginning is Christ, as he himself answered in the Gospel to the Jews when they questioned him: 'I am the Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25). In this beginning, therefore, God made heaven — that is, the spiritual, who meditate on and seek heavenly things; and in him he made the carnal also, who have not yet laid aside the earthly man.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "isidore-quaest-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/isidore-quaest-1-2/", "author": "Isidore of Seville", "tradition": "latin", "date": 620, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inanis et vacua. Terra scilicet carnis nostrae inanis erat et vacua, priusquam doctrinae acciperet formam. Et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi, quia delictorum caecitas et ignorantiae profunda obscuritas corda nostra tegebat.", "source": "PL 83, col. 209B", "cc_idno": "21433", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'But the earth was empty and void.' The earth, that is, of our flesh was empty and void, before it received the form of doctrine. 'And darkness was upon the face of the deep', because the blindness of our sins and the deep obscurity of ignorance covered our hearts.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "isidore-quaest-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/isidore-quaest-1-3/", "author": "Isidore of Seville", "tradition": "latin", "date": 620, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Spiritus autem Dei super cor nostrum tenebrosum et fluidum, quasi super aquas, jam 262 superferebatur; in quo subsistentes requiesceremus, cujusque vivificaremur flatu, et cujus unda ablueremur.", "source": "PL 83, col. 209C", "cc_idno": "21433", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' The Spirit of God was already being borne over our dark and fluid heart, as over waters: that standing in him we might find rest, be quickened by his breath, and be washed in his wave.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "isidore-quaest-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/isidore-quaest-1-4/", "author": "Isidore of Seville", "tradition": "latin", "date": 630, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit lucem a tenebris; nam tunc Deus juxta praescientiae suae gratiam divisit justos, id est, filios Dei et lucis, a peccatoribus, tanquam a tenebris; justos vocans diem, et illos noctem; nam quod in Ecclesia lucis nomine justi appellentur, audi Apostolum: Fuistis, inquit, aliquando tenebrae, nunc autem lux in Domino (Ephes. V, 8) .", "source": "PL 83, col. 210A", "cc_idno": "21433", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And he divided the light from the darkness; for then God, according to the favour of his foreknowledge, divided the just — that is, the sons of God and of light — from sinners, as from darkness; calling the just day, and those others night. For that in the Church the just are called by the name of light, hear the Apostle: You were once, he says, darkness, but now light in the Lord (Eph 5:8).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "jerome-hq-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/jerome-hq-1-1/", "author": "Jerome", "tradition": "latin", "date": 392, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram. Plerique existimant, sicut in Altercatione quoque Jasonis et Papisci scriptum est, et Tertullianus in libro contra Praxeam disputat: necnon Hilarius in expositione cujusdam Psalmi affirmat, in Hebraeo haberi: In filio fecit Deus coelum et terram: quod falsum esse, ipsius rei veritas comprobat. Nam et Septuaginta Interpretes, et Symmachus, et Theodotion, in principio, transtulerunt. Et in Hebraeo scriptum est, BRESITH ( ); quod Aquila interpretatur, in capitulo: et non BABEN ( ), quod appellatur [ Al. interpretatur], in filio. Magis itaque secundum sensum quam secundum verbi translationem de Christo accipi potest: qui tam in ipsa fronte Geneseos, quae caput librorum omnium est, quam etiam in principio Joannis Evangelistae, coeli et terrae conditor approbatur. Unde et in Psalterio (Psal. XXXIX, 9) de seipso ait: In capitulo [Al. capite] libri scriptum est de me, id est, in principio 306 Geneseos. Et in Evangelio: Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil (Joan. I, 3) . Sed et hoc sciendum, quod apud Hebraeos liber hic BRESITH vocatur: hanc habentes consuetudinem, ut voluminibus ex principiis eorum nomina imponant.", "source": "PL 23, col. 937C", "cc_idno": "7160", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning God made heaven and earth. Very many suppose — as is written also in the Altercation of Jason and Papiscus, and as Tertullian argues in his book against Praxeas, and as Hilary too asserts in his exposition of a certain Psalm — that the Hebrew has: 'In the Son God made heaven and earth.' That this is false, the truth of the thing itself proves. For both the Seventy Translators and Symmachus and Theodotion rendered 'in the beginning'; and in the Hebrew it is written BRESITH, which Aquila translates 'in the head', and not BABEN, which is rendered 'in the son'. It can therefore be taken of Christ rather according to the sense than according to the translation of the word: he who, both at the very forehead of Genesis, which is the head of all the books, and also at the beginning of John the Evangelist, is shown to be the founder of heaven and earth. Whence also in the Psalter he says of himself: 'In the head of the book it is written of me' (Ps 40:8 [Vg 39:9]) — that is, in the beginning of Genesis. And in the Gospel: 'All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing' (John 1:3). But this too is to be known, that among the Hebrews this book is called BRESITH: they have the custom of giving volumes their names from their opening words.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "jerome-hq-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/jerome-hq-1-2/", "author": "Jerome", "tradition": "latin", "date": 391, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Pro eo quod in nostris codicibus scriptum est, ferebatur, in Hebraeo habet MEREFETH ( ), quod nos appellare possumus, incubabat, sive confovebat, in similitudinem volucris, ova calore animantis. Ex quo intelligimus, non de spiritu mundi dici, ut nonnulli arbitrantur, sed de Spiritu Sancto, qui et ipse vivificator omnium a principio dicitur. Si autem vivificator, consequenter et conditor. Quod si conditor, et Deus. Emitte enim, ait, Spiritum tuum, et creabuntur (Psal. CIII, 30) .", "source": "PL 23, col. 939A", "cc_idno": "7160", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' For what our copies have as 'was borne,' the Hebrew has MERAHEFET, which we may render 'was brooding' or 'was warming,' in the likeness of a bird quickening her eggs with her heat. From this we understand that it is not said of the spirit of the world, as some suppose, but of the Holy Spirit, who is himself called the giver of life to all things from the beginning. And if giver of life, then consequently creator; and if creator, then God. 'Send forth,' he says, 'your Spirit, and they shall be created' (Ps 104:30).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "lxx-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lxx-1-1/", "author": "The Seventy", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": -250, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν.", "source": "LXX Gen 1:1 (Rahlfs)", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order", "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "lxx-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lxx-1-2/", "author": "The Seventy", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": -250, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "ἡ δὲ γῆ ἦν ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, καὶ σκότος ἐπάνω τῆς ἀβύσσου, καὶ πνεῦμα θεοῦ ἐπεφέρετο ἐπάνω τοῦ ὕδατος.", "source": "LXX Gen 1:2 (Rahlfs)", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But the earth was unsightly and unfurnished, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the water.", "translator": "Brenton 1851", "license": "pd" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "lxx-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lxx-1-3/", "author": "The Seventy", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": -250, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός Γενηθήτω φῶς. καὶ ἐγένετο φῶς.", "source": "LXX Gen 1:3 (Rahlfs)", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God said, Let light be made. And light was made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "lxx-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lxx-1-4/", "author": "The Seventy", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": -250, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "καὶ εἶδεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ φῶς ὅτι καλόν. καὶ διεχώρισεν ὁ θεὸς ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ φωτὸς καὶ ἀνὰ μέσον τοῦ σκότους.", "source": "LXX Gen 1:4 (Rahlfs)", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God saw the light, that it was beautiful. And God separated between the light and between the darkness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "lxx-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lxx-1-5/", "author": "The Seventy", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": -250, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "καὶ ἐκάλεσεν ὁ θεὸς τὸ φῶς ἡμέραν καὶ τὸ σκότος ἐκάλεσεν νύκτα. καὶ ἐγένετο ἑσπέρα καὶ ἐγένετο πρωί, ἡμέρα μία.", "source": "LXX Gen 1:5 (Rahlfs)", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "lyra-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lyra-gen-1-1/", "author": "Nicholas of Lyra", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1330, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Dicit igitur: In principio, scilicet temporis vel productionis rerum. Creavit Deus, id est de nihilo produxit, quod est proprium ipsius Dei. Celum, id est corpora celestia omnia in suis formis substantialibus distincta, licet adhuc in aliquibus proprietatibus accidentalibus essent informia, ut patebit infra. Et terram in sua forma substantiali distinctam, et aliquibus proprietatibus formam substantialem necessario concomitantibus; quia tamen adhuc quantum ad aliqua erat informis, ideo sequitur.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n43 recto, right column, lemmas a-d (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n43.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "He says therefore: In the beginning, that is, of time or of the production of things. God created, that is, produced out of nothing, which belongs to God alone. Heaven, that is, all the heavenly bodies distinct in their substantial forms, although as yet they were unformed in certain accidental properties, as will appear below. And the earth, distinct in its substantial form and in certain properties necessarily accompanying a substantial form; but because as regards certain things it was still unformed, therefore there follows.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "lyra-gen-1-2-spiritus", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lyra-gen-1-2-spiritus/", "author": "Nicholas of Lyra", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1330, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et spiritus etc. aquas, id est super illam congeriem et commixtionem elementorum predictam; et vocatur nomine aquarum, quia sicut dictum est ipsa aqua cooperiebat terram, et aliis duobus elementis commixta erat modo predicto. Et accipitur hic spiritus Dei, id est voluntas, que ferebatur super illam congeriem elementorum, sicut voluntas artificis super materiam quam formare et ornare intendit.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n43 recto, right column, lemma h (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n43.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "And the spirit etc. the waters, that is, over that heap and commixture of the elements spoken of above; and it is called by the name of waters because, as has been said, the water itself covered the earth and was mixed with the other two elements in the way described. And the spirit of God is taken here as the will, which was borne over that heap of the elements, as the will of the craftsman is borne over the material he means to form and to furnish.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "lyra-gen-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lyra-gen-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Nicholas of Lyra", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1330, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Inanis, id est invisibilis, quia erat undique aquis cooperta. Et vacua, quia non erat adhuc plantis et herbis ornata. Sequitur. Et tenebre etc. abyssi, id est super faciem elementorum. Abyssus enim dicitur ab a, quod est sine, et byssus, quod est genus lini candidissimi; unde abyssus dicitur quasi sine candore vel splendore, quia color candidus habet plurimum de luce.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n43 recto, right column, lemmas e-g (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n43.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "Empty, that is, invisible, because it was covered on every side with waters. And void, because it was not yet furnished with plants and herbs. There follows. And darkness etc. of the abyss, that is, over the face of the elements. For abyssus is so called from a, which means 'without', and byssus, which is a kind of the whitest linen; whence abyssus is as it were 'without whiteness or brightness', because a white colour has the most of light in it.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "lyra-gen-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lyra-gen-1-3/", "author": "Nicholas of Lyra", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1330, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Fiat lux. Ista lux est lux solis, que est qualitas accidentalis, a qua luce alia celi luminaria illustrantur, propter quod ii de anima dicitur quod sol est pater virorum deorumque, quia celi luminaria que ab antiquis vocabantur dii recipiunt lumen a sole. Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona, quia utilis est ad multa, ut patebit infra in opere quarte diei. Advertendum tamen quod ista lux solaris, que facta dicitur prima die, adhuc fuit informis quantum ad aliquid usque ad quartum diem, secundum quod dicit Dyonisius iiij capitulo de divinis nominibus. Qualiter autem fuerit formata quarta die patebit infra.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n44, left column, lemmas k-l (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n44.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "Let there be light. This light is the light of the sun, which is an accidental quality, and it is from this light that the other lights of heaven are illuminated; on which account it is said in the second book On the Soul that the sun is the father of men and of gods, because the lights of heaven, which the ancients used to call gods, receive their light from the sun. And God saw the light, that it was good, because it is useful for many things, as will appear below in the work of the fourth day. It is to be noted, however, that this solar light, which is said to have been made on the first day, was still unformed in some respect until the fourth day, according to what Dionysius says in the fourth chapter of On the Divine Names. In what way it was formed on the fourth day will appear below.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "lyra-gen-1-4-bonum", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lyra-gen-1-4-bonum/", "author": "Nicholas of Lyra", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1330, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Hic queritur quare in secunda die non dicitur, Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum, sicut in aliis diebus. Ad quod respondent aliqui quod hoc est quia numerus binarius est infamis, eo quod primus recedit ab unitate. Sed ista responsio videtur truphatica, maxime quia in sacro evangelio numerus binarius laudabilis et mysticus designatur; unde super illud Luce x, Misit illos binos et binos ante faciem suam, dicit Gregorius quod per binarium designavit caritatem, que est excellentissima virtus et forma virtutum. Alii autem dicunt quod hoc ideo est quia angeli peccantes ceciderunt secunda die; sed hoc de scripturis auctoritatem non habet, ideo eadem facilitate contemnitur qua probatur, maxime quia doctores dicunt communiter quod inter creationem angelorum et eorum lapsum fuit modica morula temporis, secundum autem istam responsionem interfuisset ad minus spacium unius diei naturalis, quia secundum omnes angeli fuerunt creati a principio. Ideo aliter respondet Ra. Sa., et magis secundum intentionem littere ut videtur, dicens et verum est, quod hoc verbum, vidit Deus quod esset bonum etc., in aliis diebus dicitur ad approbationem operis illarum dierum; approbatio autem proprie respicit opus completum.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n44, right column (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n44.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "Here it is asked why on the second day it is not said, And God saw that it was good, as on the other days. To which some answer that it is because the number two is of ill repute, in that it is the first to depart from unity. But that answer seems to be trifling, especially because in the holy Gospel the number two is marked out as praiseworthy and mystical; whence on that passage of Luke 10, He sent them out two by two before his face, Gregory says that by the pair he signified charity, which is the most excellent of the virtues and the form of the virtues. Others say that the reason is that the angels who sinned fell on the second day; but this has no authority from the Scriptures, and so is dismissed as easily as it is proved, especially because the doctors commonly say that between the creation of the angels and their fall there was a brief moment of time, whereas on that answer there would have been at least the space of one natural day, since on everyone's account the angels were created at the beginning. Therefore Rabbi Solomon answers otherwise, and more according to the intention of the letter, as it seems, saying, and it is true, that this word, God saw that it was good, is said on the other days for the approval of the work of those days; and approval properly regards a work that is complete.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "lyra-gen-1-4-divisio", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lyra-gen-1-4-divisio/", "author": "Nicholas of Lyra", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1330, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit lucem a tenebris. Ista divisio est per motum solis, quia quando movetur super unum hemisperium fiunt tenebre in opposito hemisperio, propter opacitatem terre que est in medio. Appellavitque lucem diem, quia dies est latio solis super terram. Et tenebras noctem, quia sicut per presentiam solis efficitur dies, ita per suam occultationem efficitur nox.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n44, left column, lemmas m-o (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n44.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "And he divided the light from the darkness. This dividing is by the motion of the sun, because when it moves over one hemisphere darkness comes to be in the opposite hemisphere, on account of the opacity of the earth which is in the middle. And he called the light Day, because day is the passage of the sun over the earth. And the darkness Night, because just as day is brought about by the presence of the sun, so night is brought about by its being hidden.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "lyra-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/lyra-gen-1-5/", "author": "Nicholas of Lyra", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1330, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Factumque est vespere et mane dies unus. Loquitur de naturali, que est xxiiij horarum, et complectitur diem et noctem, et ideo dicit. Factumque est vespere et mane dies unus. In vespere enim completur dies artificialis, qui est prima pars diei naturalis; et in mane diei sequentis completur nox, que est secunda pars diei naturalis; et ideo opponit vespere ipsi mane, ut ostendat expletionem diei naturalis exprimendo terminos diei artificialis et noctis, qui sunt partes integrantes diem naturalem.", "source": "Koberger 1486-87, leaf n44, left column, lemma p (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n44.jpg)", "license": "lyra-koberger-1487", "version": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i" }, "english": { "text": "And there was evening and morning, one day. He is speaking of the natural day, which is of twenty-four hours and takes in both day and night; and therefore he says, And there was evening and morning, one day. For at evening the artificial day is completed, which is the first part of the natural day; and at the morning of the following day the night is completed, which is the second part of the natural day. And therefore he sets evening over against morning, so as to show the completing of the natural day by naming the boundaries of the artificial day and of the night, which are the parts that make up the natural day.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "m-chag-2-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/m-chag-2-1/", "author": "the Mishnah", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 210, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "אֵין דּוֹרְשִׁין בַּעֲרָיוֹת בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה. וְלֹא בְמַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית בִּשְׁנַיִם. וְלֹא בַמֶּרְכָּבָה בְּיָחִיד, אֶלָּא אִם כֵּן הָיָה חָכָם וּמֵבִין מִדַּעְתּוֹ. כָּל הַמִּסְתַּכֵּל בְּאַרְבָּעָה דְּבָרִים, רָאוּי לוֹ כְּאִלּוּ לֹא בָּא לָעוֹלָם, מַה לְּמַעְלָה, מַה לְּמַטָּה, מַה לְּפָנִים, וּמַה לְּאָחוֹר. וְכָל שֶׁלֹּא חָס עַל כְּבוֹד קוֹנוֹ, רָאוּי לוֹ שֶׁלֹּא בָּא לָעוֹלָם:", "source": "m. Chagigah 2:1", "license": "pd", "version": "Torat Emet 357" }, "english": { "text": "One does not expound the forbidden sexual relations before three, nor the work of creation before two, nor the Chariot before one — unless he was wise and understood of his own knowledge. Whoever looks at four things, it were fitting for him that he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what is before, and what is after. And whoever has no care for the honour of his Maker, it were fitting for him that he had not come into the world.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "origen-hom-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/origen-hom-gen-1-1/", "author": "Origen", "tradition": "latin", "date": 240, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "»In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram«. Quod est omnium principium nisi Dominus noster et »Salvator omnium« Iesus Christus »primogenitus omnis creaturae«? In hoc ergo principio, hoc est in verbo suo, »Deus coelum et terram fecit«, sicut et Evangelista Iohannes in initio Evangelii sui ait dicens: »in principio erat verbum, et verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil«. Non ergo hic temporale aliquod principium dicit, sed »in principio«, id est in Salvatore, factum esse dicit coelum et terram et omnia, quae facta sunt. »Terra autem erat invisibilis et incomposita, et tenebrae erant super abyssum, et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas«. »Invisibilis et incomposita terra erat«, antequam Deus diceret: »fiat lux« et antequam »divideret inter lucem et tenebras«, secundum quod sermonis ordo declarat.", "source": "Hom. in Gen. I.1 (GCS 29, ed. W. A. Baehrens, Leipzig 1920, p. 1, lines 1–14)", "license": "gcs-baehrens", "version": "Rufinus's Latin. ⚠ The ONLY Latin on this site not sliced from the local TEI bench: Origen in Rufinus is PG 12 and the harvest is PL only. Transcribed from the archive.org page image of GCS 29 p. 1 (item origenes-werke.-bd-6-1920, leaf n37 — the item's own djvu OCR is badly degraded here, printing prineipium, feeit, dieit, ineomposita, and was not used). Baehrens's editorial quotation marks are kept as he prints them." }, "english": { "text": "'In the beginning God made heaven and earth.' What is the beginning of all things but our Lord and 'Saviour of all' Jesus Christ, 'the firstborn of every creature'? In this Beginning, then, that is, in his Word, 'God made heaven and earth', as the Evangelist John also says at the opening of his Gospel: 'in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing.' He does not, then, say here any temporal beginning, but says that heaven and earth and all things that were made were made 'in the beginning', that is, in the Saviour. 'And the earth was invisible and unordered, and darkness was over the abyss, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' 'The earth was invisible and unordered' before God said, 'let there be light', and before he 'divided between the light and the darkness', according to what the order of the discourse declares.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "pdre-3-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/pdre-3-5/", "author": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 800, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "שְׁמוֹנָה דְבָרִים נִבְרְאוּ בַּיּוֹם רִאשׁוֹן, וְאֵלּוּ הֵן: שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ, וְאוֹר, וְחֹשֶׁךְ, וְתֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ, וְרוּחַ וּמַיִם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר ״וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם״. וְיֵשׁ אוֹמְרִים אַף יוֹם וָלַיְלָה, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר ״וַיְהִי עֶרֶב וַיְהִי בֹקֶר יוֹם אֶחָד״. וּשְׁמוֹנָה בַּיּוֹם הַשֵּׁנִי, וְאֵלּוּ הֵן: הַבְּאֵר וְהַמָּן וְהַמַּטֶּה וְהַקֶּשֶׁת וְהַכְּתָב וְהַמִּכְתָּב וְהַכְּתֹנֶת וְהַמַּזִּיקִין. וַעֲשָׂרָה דְבָרִים עָלוּ בַמַּחֲשָׁבָה: יְרוּשָׁלַיִם וְרוּחוֹת אָבוֹת וְאָרְחוֹת הַצַּדִּיקִים וְגֵיהִנֹּם וּמֵי הַמַּבּוּל וְלוּחוֹת הַשְּׁנִיִּים, וְהַשַּׁבָּת וְהַמִּקְדָּשׁ וְהָאָרוֹן וְאוֹר לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא.", "source": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 3", "license": "pd", "version": "Pirke DeRabbi Eliezer, Sefaria Vocalized Edition" }, "english": { "text": "Eight things were created on the first day, namely, Heaven, Earth, Light, Darkness, Tohu (Chaos), Bohu (Void), Wind (or Spirit), and Water, as it is said, \"And the wind of God was moving upon the face of the waters\" (Gen. 1:2). Some (wise men) say that day and night also, as it is said, And there was evening and morning, one day (Gen. 1:5). Eight things were created on the second day, namely, the Well, the Manna, the Rod, the Rainbow, the art of writing, the written characters, the Garments, and the destroying spirits. Ten things arose in the thought (of the Creator), namely, Jerusalem,\" the spirits of the patriarchs, the paths of the righteous, Hell (Gehenom), the waters of the flood, the second tables, the shabbat, the temple and the light of the world to come.", "translator": "Gerald Friedlander, 1916", "license": "pd" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "pdre-3-6", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/pdre-3-6/", "author": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 800, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "שָׁמַיִם מֵאֵיזֶה מָקוֹם נִבְרְאוּ? מֵאוֹר לְבוּשׁוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא שֶׁהוּא לָבוּשׁ. לָקַח מִמֶּנּוּ וּפָרַשׂ כַּשַּׂלְמָה וְהָיוּ מוֹתְחִין וְהוֹלְכִין עַד שֶׁאָמַר לָהֶם: דַּי, וְעַל כֵּן נִקְרָא שְׁמוֹ שַׁדַּי, שֶׁאָמַר לַשָּׁמַיִם דַּי וְעָמְדוּ. וּמִנַּיִן שֶׁמֵּאוֹר לְבוּשׁוֹ נִבְרָא? שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (תהלים קד, ב): ״עֹטֶה אוֹר כַּשַּׂלְמָה נוֹטֶה שָׁמַיִם כַּיְרִיעָה״.", "source": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 3", "license": "pd", "version": "Sefaria Vocalized Edition" }, "english": { "text": "Whence were the heavens created? From the light of the garment with which He was robed. He took (of this light) and stretched it like a garment and (the heavens) began to extend continually until He caused them to hear, \"It is sufficient.\" Therefore is He called God Almighty (El Shaddai), who said to the world: \"It is sufficient,\" and it stood (firm). Whence do we know that the heavens were created from the light of His garment? Because it is said, \"Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain\" (Ps. 104:2).", "translator": "Gerald Friedlander, 1916", "license": "pd" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "pdre-3-7", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/pdre-3-7/", "author": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 800, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "הָאָרֶץ מֵאֵיזֶה מָקוֹם נִבְרֵאת? מִשֶּׁלֶג שֶׁתַּחַת כִּסֵּא הַכָּבוֹד, לָקַח וְזָרַק עַל הַמַּיִם וְנִקְפְּאוּ הַמַּיִם וְנַעֲשָׂה עֲפַר הָאָרֶץ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (איוב לז, ו): ״כִּי לַשֶּׁלֶג יֹאמַר הֱוֵא אָרֶץ״.", "source": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer 3", "license": "pd", "version": "Sefaria Vocalized Edition" }, "english": { "text": "Whence was the earth created? He took of the snow (or ice) which was beneath His Throne of Glory and threw it upon the waters, and the waters became congealed so that the dust of the earth was formed, as it is said, “He saith to the snow, Be thou earth” (Job 37:6).", "translator": "Gerald Friedlander, 1916", "license": "pd" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-1-3/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "Τῶν ἄλλων νομοθετῶν οἱ μὲν ἀκαλλώπιστα καὶ γυμνὰ τὰ νομισθέντα παρ’ αὐτοῖς εἶναι δίκαια διετάξαντο, οἱ δὲ πολὺν ὄγκον τοῖς νοήμασι προσπεριβαλόντες ἐξετύφωσαν τὰ πλήθη μυθικοῖς πλάσμασι τὴν ἀλήθειαν ἐπικρύψαντες. Μωυσῆς δ’ ἑκάτερον ὑπερβάς, τὸ μὲν ὡς ἄσκεπτον καὶ ἀταλαίπωρον καὶ ἀφιλόσοφον, τὸ δ’ ὡς κατεψευσμένον καὶ μεστὸν γοητείας, παγκάλην καὶ σεμνοτάτην ἀρχὴν ἐποιήσατο τῶν νόμων, μήτ’ εὐθὺς ἃ χρὴ πράττειν ἢ τοὐναντίον ὑπειπὼν μήτ’, ἐπειδὴ προτυπῶσαι τὰς διανοίας τῶν χρησομένων τοῖς νόμοις ἀναγκαῖον ἦν, μύθους πλασάμενος ἢ συναινέσας τοῖς ὑφ’ ἑτέρων συντεθεῖσιν. ἡ δ’ ἀρχή, καθάπερ ἔφην, ἐστὶ θαυμασιωτάτη κοσμοποιίαν περιέχουσα, ὡς καὶ τοῦ κόσμου τῷ νόμῳ καὶ τοῦ νόμου τῷ κόσμῳ συνᾴδοντος καὶ τοῦ νομίμου ἀνδρὸς εὐθὺς ὄντος κοσμοπολίτου πρὸς τὸ βούλημα τῆς φύσεως τὰς πράξεις ἀπευθύνοντος, καθ’ ἣν καὶ ὁ σύμπας κόσμος διοικεῖται.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 1-3 (Cohn-Wendland i. 1)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "Of the other lawgivers, some set down what were held among them to be just things bare and unadorned, while others, wrapping their conceptions about with a great bulk, blinded the multitude by hiding the truth under mythical fictions. But Moses, going beyond both, the one as unconsidered and unlaboured and unphilosophical, the other as false and full of trickery, made the beginning of his laws altogether beautiful and most solemn: he neither said outright at the start what must be done or not done, nor, since it was necessary to shape beforehand the minds of those who were to use the laws, did he invent myths or assent to those composed by others. And his beginning, as I said, is most marvellous, containing a cosmogony: for the world is in harmony with the law and the law with the world, and the man who keeps the law is at once a citizen of the world, directing his actions towards the will of nature, by which the whole world too is governed.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-15", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-15/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "ἑκάστῃ δὲ τῶν ἡμερῶν ἀπένειμεν ἔνια τῶν τοῦ παντὸς τμημάτων τὴν πρώτην ὑπεξελόμενος, ἣν αὐτὸς οὐδὲ πρώτην, ἵνα μὴ ταῖς ἄλλαις συγκαταριθμῆται, καλεῖ, μίαν δ’ ὀνομάσας ὀνόματι εὐθυβόλῳ προσαγορεύει, τὴν μονάδος φύσιν καὶ πρόσρησιν ἐνιδών τε καὶ ἐπιφημίσας αὐτῇ. λεκτέον δὲ ὅσα οἷόν τέ ἐστι τῶν ἐμπεριεχομένων, ἐπειδὴ πάντα ἀμήχανον· περιέχει γὰρ τὸν νοητὸν κόσμον ἐξαίρετον, ὡς ὁ περὶ αὐτῆς λόγος μηνύει.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 15 (Cohn-Wendland i. 4)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "To each of the days he assigned some of the parts of the whole, excepting the first, which he himself does not even call first, lest it be counted in with the others; but naming it 'one' he addresses it by a name that hits the mark, having seen in it, and pronounced upon it, the nature and the appellation of the monad. We must say as much as can be said of what it contains, since to say all is impossible; for it contains the intelligible world as its own peculiar possession, as the account of it shows.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-17-20", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-17-20/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "Τὸν δ’ ἐκ τῶν ἰδεῶν συνεστῶτα κόσμον ἐν τόπῳ τινὶ λέγειν ἢ ὑπονοεῖν οὐ θεμιτόν· ᾗ δὲ συνέστηκεν, εἰσόμεθα παρακολουθήσαντες εἰκόνι τινὶ τῶν παρ’ ἡμῖν. ἐπειδὰν πόλις κτίζηται κατὰ πολλὴν φιλοτιμίαν βασιλέως ἤ τινος ἡγεμόνος αὐτοκρατοῦς ἐξουσίας μεταποιουμένου καὶ ἅμα τὸ φρόνημα λαμπροῦ τὴν εὐτυχίαν συνεπικοσμοῦντος, παρελθὼν ἔστιν ὅτε τις τῶν ἀπὸ παιδείας ἀνὴρ ἀρχιτεκτονικὸς καὶ τὴν εὐκρασίαν καὶ εὐκαιρίαν τοῦ τόπου θεασάμενος διαγράφει πρῶτον ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὰ τῆς μελλούσης ἀποτελεῖσθαι πόλεως μέρη σχεδὸν ἅπαντα, ἱερὰ γυμνάσια πρυτανεῖα ἀγορὰς λιμένας νεωσοίκους στενωπούς, τειχῶν κατασκευάς, ἱδρύσεις οἰκιῶν καὶ δημοσίων ἄλλων οἰκοδομημάτων· εἶθ’ ὥσπερ ἐν κηρῷ τῇ ἑαυτοῦ ψυχῇ τοὺς ἑκάστων δεξάμενος τύπους ἀγαλματοφορεῖ νοητὴν πόλιν, ἧς ἀνακινήσας τὰ εἴδωλα μνήμῃ τῇ συμφύτῳ καὶ τοὺς χαρακτῆρας ἔτι μᾶλλον ἐνσφραγισάμενος, οἷα δημιουργὸς ἀγαθός, ἀποβλέπων εἰς τὸ παράδειγμα τὴν ἐκ λίθων καὶ ξύλων ἄρχεται κατασκευάζειν, ἑκάστῃ τῶν ἀσωμάτων ἰδεῶν τὰς σωματικὰς ἐξομοιῶν οὐσίας. τὰ παραπλήσια δὴ καὶ περὶ θεοῦ δοξαστέον, ὡς ἄρα τὴν μεγαλόπολιν κτίζειν διανοηθεὶς ἐνενόησε πρότερον τοὺς τύπους αὐτῆς, ἐξ ὧν κόσμον νοητὸν συστησάμενος ἀπετέλει καὶ τὸν αἰσθητὸν παραδείγματι χρώμενος ἐκείνῳ. καθάπερ οὖν ἡ ἐν τῷ ἀρχιτεκτονικῷ προδιατυπωθεῖσα πόλις χώραν ἐκτὸς οὐκ εἶχεν, ἀλλ’ ἐνεσφράγιστο τῇ τοῦ τεχνίτου ψυχῇ, τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον οὐδ’ ὁ ἐκ τῶν ἰδεῶν κόσμος ἄλλον ἂν ἔχοι τόπον ἢ τὸν θεῖον λόγον τὸν ταῦτα διακοσμήσαντα· ἐπεὶ τίς ἂν εἴη τῶν δυνάμεων αὐτοῦ τόπος ἕτερος, ὃς γένοιτ’ ἂν ἱκανὸς οὐ λέγω πάσας ἀλλὰ μίαν ἄκρατον ἡντινοῦν δέξασθαί τε καὶ χωρῆσαι;", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 17-20 (Cohn-Wendland i. 5-6)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "But that the world composed of the ideas should be said, or supposed, to be in some place is not lawful; how it is composed we shall know by following out an image drawn from things among us. When a city is founded out of the great ambition of a king, or of some ruler who lays claim to absolute power and, being splendid in mind, adorns his good fortune the more, there comes forward at times a man trained in architecture who, having observed the good temper and good situation of the place, first draws out within himself well-nigh all the parts of the city that is to be completed: temples, gymnasia, town halls, market places, harbours, docks, alleys, the building of walls, the setting of houses and of other public buildings. Then, having received the impressions of each of these in his own soul as in wax, he carries about an intelligible city, whose images he stirs up by the memory native to him; and stamping the characters yet more firmly, like a good craftsman, looking to the model, he begins to build the city of stone and timber, making the corporeal substances like each of the incorporeal ideas. The like must be held concerning God: that when he purposed to found the great city, he first conceived its types, out of which he composed an intelligible world, and then completed the perceptible one, using that as a model. Therefore, just as the city that was fashioned beforehand within the architect had no place outside, but was stamped upon the artificer's soul, in the same way neither would the world composed of the ideas have any other place than the divine Reason, which set these in order. For what other place could there be for his powers, one that would be sufficient to receive and contain, I do not say all of them, but a single unmixed one, whichever it might be?", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-21-22", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-21-22/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "δύναμις δὲ καὶ ἡ κοσμοποιητικὴ πηγὴν ἔχουσα τὸ πρὸς ἀλήθειαν ἀγαθόν. εἰ γάρ τις ἐθελήσειε τὴν αἰτίαν ἧς ἕνεκα τόδε τὸ πᾶν ἐδημιουργεῖτο διερευνᾶσθαι, δοκεῖ μοι μὴ διαμαρτεῖν σκοποῦ φάμενος, ὅπερ καὶ τῶν ἀρχαίων εἶπέ τις, ἀγαθὸν εἶναι τὸν πατέρα καὶ ποιητήν· οὗ χάριν τῆς ἀρίστης αὑτοῦ φύσεως οὐκ ἐφθόνησεν οὐσίᾳ μηδὲν ἐξ αὑτῆς ἐχούσῃ καλόν, δυναμένῃ δὲ πάντα γίνεσθαι. ἦν μὲν γὰρ ἐξ αὑτῆς ἄτακτος ἄποιος ἄψυχος ἀνόμοιος , ἑτεροιότητος ἀναρμοστίας ἀσυμφωνίας μεστή· τροπὴν δὲ καὶ μεταβολὴν ἐδέχετο τὴν εἰς τἀναντία καὶ τὰ βέλτιστα, τάξιν ποιότητα ἐμψυχίαν ὁμοιότητα ταυτότητα, τὸ εὐάρμοστον, τὸ σύμφωνον, πᾶν ὅσον τῆς κρείττονος ἰδέας.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 21-22 (Cohn-Wendland i. 6-7)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "And the world-making power too has for its spring the truly good. For if anyone should wish to search out the cause for the sake of which this all was fashioned, it seems to me he would not miss the mark in saying, as one of the ancients also said, that the Father and Maker is good; and for that reason he did not grudge his own most excellent nature to a substance which had nothing beautiful of itself, but was able to become all things. For of itself it was without order, without quality, without life, unlike itself, full of unevenness and of discord and of dissonance; but it admitted a turn and a change to the opposites and to the best things, to order, quality, ensoulment, likeness, sameness, the well-fitted, the concordant, all that belongs to the better idea.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-26-27", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-26-27/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "Φησὶ δ’ ὡς „ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν\", τὴν ἀρχὴν παραλαμβάνων οὐχ ὡς οἴονταί τινες τὴν κατὰ χρόνον· χρόνος γὰρ οὐκ ἦν πρὸ κόσμου, ἀλλ’ ἢ σὺν αὐτῷ γέγονεν ἢ μετ’ αὐτόν· ἐπεὶ γὰρ διάστημα τῆς τοῦ κόσμου κινήσεώς ἐστιν ὁ χρόνος, προτέρα δὲ τοῦ κινουμένου κίνησις οὐκ ἂν γένοιτο, ἀλλ’ ἀναγκαῖον αὐτὴν ἢ ὕστερον ἢ ἅμα συνίστασθαι, ἀναγκαῖον ἄρα καὶ τὸν χρόνον ἢ ἰσήλικα κόσμου γεγονέναι ἢ νεώτερον ἐκείνου· πρεσβύτερον δ’ ἀποφαίνεσθαι τολμᾶν ἀφιλόσοφον. εἰ δ’ ἀρχὴ μὴ παραλαμβάνεται τανῦν ἡ κατὰ χρόνον, εἰκὸς ἂν εἴη μηνύεσθαι τὴν κατ’ ἀριθμόν, ὡς τὸ „ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν\" ἴσον εἶναι τῷ πρῶτον ἐποίησε τὸν οὐρανόν· καὶ γὰρ εὔλογον τῷ ὄντι πρῶτον αὐτὸν εἰς γένεσιν ἐλθεῖν, ἄριστόν τε ὄντα τῶν γεγονότων κἀκ τοῦ καθαρωτάτου τῆς οὐσίας παγέντα, διότι θεῶν ἐμφανῶν τε καὶ αἰσθητῶν ἔμελλεν οἶκος ἔσεσθαι ἱερώτατος.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 26-27 (Cohn-Wendland i. 8)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "He says that 'in the beginning God made the heaven and the earth', taking the beginning not, as some think, the one according to time; for there was no time before the world, but it either came into being together with it or after it. For since time is the interval of the world's motion, and there could be no motion earlier than the thing moved, but it must necessarily be constituted either later or at the same time, it is necessary that time too came to be either of the same age as the world or younger than it; and to dare to declare it older is unphilosophical. But if the beginning taken here is not the one according to time, it would be reasonable that the one according to number is signified, so that 'in the beginning he made' is equivalent to 'he made the heaven first'. For it is indeed reasonable that it should come first into being, being the best of the things that have come to be and set fast out of the purest of the substance, because it was to be the most holy house of the manifest and perceptible gods.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-29", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-29/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "πρῶτον οὖν ὁ ποιῶν ἐποίησεν οὐρανὸν ἀσώματον καὶ γῆν ἀόρατον καὶ ἀέρος ἰδέαν καὶ κενοῦ· ὧν τὸ μὲν ἐπεφήμισε σκότος, ἐπειδὴ μέλας ὁ ἀὴρ τῇ φύσει, τὴν δ’ ἄβυσσον, πολύβυθον γὰρ τό γε κενὸν καὶ ἀχανές· εἶθ’ ὕδατος ἀσώματον οὐσίαν καὶ πνεύματος καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἑβδόμου φωτός, ὃ πάλιν ἀσώματον ἦν καὶ νοητὸν ἡλίου παράδειγμα καὶ πάντων ὅσα φωσφόρα ἄστρα κατὰ τὸν οὐρανὸν ἔμελλε συνίστασθαι.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 29 (Cohn-Wendland i. 9)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "First, then, the Maker made an incorporeal heaven, and an invisible earth, and the idea of air and of void; of which the one he named darkness, since air is black by nature, and the other the abyss, for the void is very deep and yawning. Then the incorporeal substance of water and of breath, and over all, seventh, of light, which again was incorporeal, an intelligible model of the sun and of all the light-bearing stars that were to be constituted throughout the heaven.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-30", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-30/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "Προνομίας δὲ τό τε πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ φῶς ἠξιοῦτο· τὸ μὲν γὰρ ὠνόμασε θεοῦ, διότι ζωτικώτατον τὸ πνεῦμα, ζωῆς δὲ θεὸς αἴτιος, τὸ δὲ φῶς φησιν ὅτι ὑπερβαλλόντως καλόν (Gen. 1,4)· τοσούτῳ γὰρ τὸ νοητὸν τοῦ ὁρατοῦ λαμπρότερόν τε καὶ αὐγοειδέστερον ὅσῳπερ ἥλιος, οἶμαι, σκότους καὶ ἡμέρα νυκτὸς καὶ [τὰ κριτήρια] νοῦς, ὁ τῆς ὅλης ψυχῆς ἡγεμών, ὀφθαλμῶν σώματος.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 30 (Cohn-Wendland i. 9)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "Both the breath and the light were counted worthy of a privilege: the one he named God's, because breath is the most life-giving thing, and God is the cause of life; and of the light he says that it is surpassingly beautiful (Gen 1:4). For the intelligible is more radiant and more full of brightness than the visible by as much as the sun, I think, is than darkness, and day than night, and the mind, the leader of the whole soul, than the eyes of the body.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "first-light" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-31", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-31/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "τὸ δὲ ἀόρατον καὶ νοητὸν φῶς ἐκεῖνο θείου λόγου γέγονεν εἰκὼν τοῦ διερμηνεύσαντος τὴν γένεσιν αὐτοῦ· καὶ ἔστιν ὑπερουράνιος ἀστήρ, πηγὴ τῶν αἰσθητῶν ἀστέρων, ἣν οὐκ ἂν ἀπὸ σκοποῦ καλέσειεν ἄν τις παναύγειαν, ἀφ’ ἧς ἥλιος καὶ σελήνη καὶ οἱ ἄλλοι πλάνητές τε καὶ ἀπλανεῖς ἀρύτονται, καθ’ ὅσον ἑκάστῳ δύναμις, τὰ πρέποντα φέγγη, τῆς ἀμιγοῦς καὶ καθαρᾶς αὐγῆς ἐκείνης ἀμαυρουμένης, ὅταν ἄρξηται τρέπεσθαι κατὰ τὴν ἐκ νοητοῦ πρὸς αἰσθητὸν μεταβολήν·", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 31 (Cohn-Wendland i. 9-10)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "And that invisible and intelligible light has come to be an image of the divine Reason, which interpreted its genesis; and it is a supercelestial star, spring of the perceptible stars, which one would not be wide of the mark in calling all-brightness, from which the sun and the moon and the other wandering and fixed stars draw, so far as each has the power, the beams that befit them, that unmixed and pure radiance being dimmed when it begins to turn by the change from the intelligible to the perceptible.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-33-34", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-33-34/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "μετὰ δὲ τὴν τοῦ νοητοῦ φωτὸς ἀνάλαμψιν, ὃ πρὸ ἡλίου γέγονεν, ὑπεχώρει τὸ ἀντίπαλον σκότος, διατειχίζοντος ἀπ’ ἀλλήλων αὐτὰ καὶ διιστάντος θεοῦ τοῦ τὰς ἐναντιότητας εὖ εἰδότος καὶ τὴν ἐκ φύσεως αὐτῶν διαμάχην. ἵν’ οὖν μὴ αἰεὶ συμφερόμεναι στασιάζωσι καὶ πόλεμος ἀντ’ εἰρήνης ἐπικρατῇ τὴν ἀκοσμίαν ἐν κόσμῳ τιθείς, οὐ μόνον ἐχώρισε φῶς καὶ σκότος, ἀλλὰ καὶ ὅρους ἐν μέσοις ἔθετο διαστήμασιν, οἷς ἀνεῖρξε τῶν ἄκρων ἑκάτερον· ἔμελλε γὰρ γειτνιῶντα σύγχυσιν ἀπεργάζεσθαι τῷ περὶ δυναστείας ἀγῶνι κατὰ πολλὴν καὶ ἄπαυστον φιλονεικίαν ἐπαποδυόμενα, εἰ μὴ μέσοι παγέντες ὅροι διέζευξαν καὶ διέλυσαν τὴν ἀντεπίθεσιν. οὗτοι δ’ εἰσὶν ἑσπέρα τε καὶ πρωΐα, ὧν ἡ μὲν προευαγγελίζεται μέλλοντα ἥλιον ἀνίσχειν ἠρέμα τὸ σκότος ἀνείργουσα, ἡ δ’ ἑσπέρα καταδύντι ἐπιγίνεται ἡλίῳ τὴν ἀθρόαν τοῦ σκότους φορὰν πρᾴως ἐκδεχομένη. καὶ ταῦτα μέντοι, πρωΐαν λέγω καὶ ἑσπέραν, ἐν τῇ τάξει τῶν ἀσωμάτων καὶ νοητῶν θετέον· ὅλως γὰρ οὐδὲν αἰσθητὸν ἐν τούτοις, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἰδέαι καὶ μέτρα καὶ τύποι καὶ σφραγῖδες, εἰς γένεσιν ἄλλων ἀσώματα σωμάτων.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 33-34 (Cohn-Wendland i. 10)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "After the kindling of the intelligible light, which came to be before the sun, the adversary darkness withdrew, God walling them off from one another and setting them apart, he who knew well their contrarieties and the battle that is in their nature. So that they should not always be borne together in strife, and war prevail instead of peace, setting disorder within the ordered world, he not only separated light and darkness, but also set borders in the intervals between, by which he fenced off each of the extremes. For being neighbours they would have wrought confusion, stripping for the contest over dominion in much and unceasing rivalry, had not borders been set fast between them to sunder and dissolve the assault. And these are evening and morning: of which the one heralds beforehand the sun that is to rise, gently fencing off the darkness; and evening comes on when the sun has set, mildly receiving the massed onset of the darkness. And these too, morning I mean and evening, must be placed in the order of the incorporeal and intelligible things; for there is nothing perceptible at all among them, but all are ideas and measures and types and seals, incorporeal things for the genesis of other bodies.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated", "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-35", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-35/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "ἐπεὶ δὲ φῶς μὲν ἐγένετο, σκότος δ’ ὑπεξέστη καὶ ἀνεχώρησεν, ὅροι δ’ ἐν τοῖς μεταξὺ διαστήμασιν ἐπάγησαν ἑσπέρα καὶ πρωΐα, κατὰ τἀναγκαῖον τοῦ χρόνου μέτρον ἀπετελεῖτο εὐθύς, ὃ καὶ ἡμέραν ὁ ποιῶν ἐκάλεσε, καὶ ἡμέραν οὐχὶ πρώτην, ἀλλὰ μίαν, ἣ λέλεκται διὰ τὴν τοῦ νοητοῦ κόσμου μόνωσιν μοναδικὴν ἔχοντος φύσιν.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 35 (Cohn-Wendland i. 10-11)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "But when light had come to be, and darkness had given way and withdrawn, and borders had been set fast in the intervals between them, evening and morning, then straightway, by the necessary measure of time, there was brought to completion that which the Maker also called day: and day not first, but one, which is so said because of the solitariness of the intelligible world, which has a monadic nature.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "philo-opif-36", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/philo-opif-36/", "author": "Philo of Alexandria", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "date": 40, "original": { "lang": "el", "text": "Ὁ μὲν οὖν ἀσώματος κόσμος ἤδη πέρας εἶχεν ἱδρυθεὶς ἐν τῷ θείῳ λόγῳ, ὁ δ’ αἰσθητὸς πρὸς παράδειγμα τούτου ἐτελειογονεῖτο. καὶ πρῶτον αὐτοῦ τῶν μερῶν, ὃ δὴ καὶ πάντων ἄριστον, ἐποίει τὸν οὐρανὸν ὁ δημιουργός, ὃν ἐτύμως στερέωμα προσηγόρευσεν ἅτε σωματικὸν ὄντα· τὸ γὰρ σῶμα φύσει στερεόν, ὅτιπερ καὶ τριχῆ διαστατόν· στερεοῦ δὲ καὶ σώματος ἔννοια τίς ἑτέρα πλὴν τὸ πάντῃ διεστηκός; εἰκότως οὖν ἀντιθεὶς τῷ νοητῷ καὶ ἀσωμάτῳ τὸν αἰσθητὸν καὶ σωματοειδῆ τοῦτον στερέωμα ἐκάλεσεν.", "source": "Philo, De opificio mundi 36 (Cohn-Wendland i. 11)", "license": "first1k-greek", "version": "Cohn-Wendland, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin 1896), TEI text from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek" }, "english": { "text": "The incorporeal world, then, had already reached its end, established in the divine Reason; and the perceptible was being brought to completion after the model of that one. And first of its parts, the best of them all, the craftsman made the heaven, which he rightly named 'firmament', inasmuch as it is corporeal; for body is by nature solid, since it is also extended in three directions, and what other notion is there of the solid and of body than what is extended in every direction? Fittingly, then, setting the perceptible and body-formed against the intelligible and incorporeal, he called this one 'firmament'.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "rabanus-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rabanus-gen-1-1/", "author": "Rabanus Maurus", "tradition": "latin", "date": 822, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Non est opinandum pueriliter quod Spiritus creator, de quo scriptum est: Quia Spiritus Domini replevit orbem terrarum (Sap. I) , positione loci his quae erant creanda superferretur. Sed intelligendum potius quia virtute divina praecellebat creaturis, habens in propria potestate quando aquarum illustraret abyssum, quando in locum eas secerneret unum, ut appareret arida, quando et quomodo creaturas caeteras pro suo nutu disponeret, in similitudinem videlicet fabri, cujus voluntas his quae fabricandae sunt rebus solet superferri.", "source": "PL 107, col. 446D", "cc_idno": "8885", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' It is not to be supposed childishly that the creator Spirit, of whom it is written 'The Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole earth' (Wis 1:7), was borne above the things to be created by position in place. Rather it is to be understood that by divine power he excelled the creatures, holding in his own power when he would illumine the abyss of waters, when he would part them into one place so that the dry land might appear, when and how he would dispose the other creatures at his nod — in the likeness, that is, of a craftsman, whose will is accustomed to be borne above the things that are to be made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "rabanus-gen-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rabanus-gen-1-1b/", "author": "Rabanus Maurus", "tradition": "latin", "date": 822, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio itaque temporis, coelum et terram Deus fecit. Tempus enim ab hoc mundo, non ante mundum: dies autem temporis est portio, non principium. Deus autem, cujus omnipotens manus est, ad explendum opus suum non eguit mora temporum: quia, sicut scriptum est, Omnia quaecunque voluit fecit (Psal. CXIII) . Unde bene dictum est: quia in principio creavit Deus coelum et terram: ut aperte detur intelligi, quia utrumque simul ab eo factum est, quamvis utrumque simul ab homine dici non possit. Denique dicit Propheta: Initio terram tu fundasti, Domine (Psal. CI) : hic autem Dominus in principio coelum et terram creasse narratur. Unde liquido colligitur, quia factura est elementi utriusque pariter expleta, et hoc tanta velocitate divinae virtutis, ut necdum primum mundi nascentis momentum esset transcensum. Potest autem non improbabiliter intelligi, in principio fecisse Deum coelum et terram in unigenito Filio suo, qui interrogantibus se Judaeis quid eum credere deberent, respondit: Principium qui et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII) ; quia in ipso, ut ait Apostolus, condita sunt omnia in coelis et terra (Coloss. I)", "source": "PL 107, col. 444B", "cc_idno": "8885", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning of time, therefore, God made heaven and earth. For time is from this world, not before the world; and a day is a portion of time, not its beginning. But God, whose hand is omnipotent, needed no delay of times to accomplish his work, because, as it is written, 'Whatever he willed, he did' (Ps 115:3 [Vg 113B:3]). Whence it is well said that in the beginning God created heaven and earth, so that it may be plainly understood that both were made by him at once, although both cannot be said at once by a man. And then the prophet says: 'In the beginning, Lord, you founded the earth' (Ps 102:25 [Vg 101:26]); but here the Lord is related to have created heaven and earth in the beginning. Whence it is plainly gathered that the making of both elements was completed together, and this with such swiftness of divine power that not even the first moment of the world's birth had been passed. It can also be understood, not improbably, that God made heaven and earth in the beginning in his Only-begotten Son, who answered the Jews when they asked what they should believe him to be: 'The Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25); because in him, as the Apostle says, 'all things were created in the heavens and on the earth' (Col 1:16).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "rabanus-gen-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rabanus-gen-1-3/", "author": "Rabanus Maurus", "tradition": "latin", "date": 822, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Congruit operibus Dei ut mundi ornatum a luce incipiat, cum ipse sit lux vera, lucemque habitet inaccessibilem (I Tim. VI) ; cujus beatissima visione mox creati in coelis coelorum angeli jam perfrui coeperant. Apte huic quoque saeculo ornando primam materialis gratiam lucis donavit, ut esset unde caetera quae crearet apparerent. Quod autem dixisse Deus, sive ut lux fieret, sive alia quaeque perhibetur, non nostro more per sonum vocis corporeum fecisse credendus est, sed altius intelligendum dixisse Deum ut fieret creatura, quia per Verbum suum omnia, id est, per unigenitum Filium fecit. De quo manifestius evangelista Joannes: In principio, inquit, erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum; omnia per ipsum facta sunt (Joan. I) . Quod ergo ait, omnia facta per Verbum Dei Joannes, hoc est, quod Moyses ait, quia dixit Deus, Fiat lux; dixit, Fiat firmamentum; dixit, Fiat caetera creatura. Hoc quod psalmus adjuncta et Spiritus sancti persona dicit: Verbo Domini coeli firmati sunt, et Spiritu oris ejus omnis virtus eorum (Psal. XXXII) . Si autem quaeritur quibus in locis jubente Deo facta sit lux, cum adhuc abyssus omnem terrae amplitudinem contegeret, patet profecto quia in superioribus ejusdem terrae partibus", "source": "PL 107, col. 447C", "cc_idno": "8885", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It befits the works of God that he should begin the adorning of the world from light, since he himself is the true light and dwells in light inaccessible (1 Tim 6:16); in the most blessed beholding of which the angels, newly created in the heaven of heavens, had already begun to rejoice. Fittingly he gave to this world too, for its adorning, the first grace of material light, so that there might be something from which the rest that he would create could appear. […] But if it is asked in what places, at God's bidding, the light was made, since the abyss still covered the whole breadth of the earth — it is quite plain that it was in the upper parts of that same earth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "rabanus-gen-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rabanus-gen-1-4/", "author": "Rabanus Maurus", "tradition": "latin", "date": 825, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit lucem ac tenebras. Divisit namque eas, non solum qualitatis, sed et locorum distantia: lucem videlicet in superiore orbis parte diffundendo, in qua humana erat conversatio futura; inferiora vero ejus priscis in tenebris remanere sinendo.", "source": "PL 107, col. 448C", "cc_idno": "8885", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And he divided the light and the darkness. For he divided them not only by a difference of quality, but of places: namely by spreading the light over the upper part of the world, in which the human way of life was to be, and by allowing the lower parts of it to remain in their ancient darkness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "rabanus-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rabanus-gen-1-5/", "author": "Rabanus Maurus", "tradition": "latin", "date": 822, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Factumque est vespere et mane dies unus. Factum est vespere, id est, occidente paulatim luce post expletum spatium diurnae longitudinis, atque inferiores mundi partes subeunte, quod nunc usitato solis circuitu noctibus agi solet; factum et mane redeunte eadem paulatim supra terras, atque alium diem initiante; et huc usque dies expletus est unus, viginti scilicet et quatuor horarum. Cujus commendatione verbi, Scriptura vigilanter admonet ut lucem quae facta est inferiora orbis occasu suo lustrasse dicamus. Nam si non hoc faceret, sed magis facto vespere paulatim tota periret, ac rursum mane paulatim in re creata resurgeret, non jam in mane diei sequentis, sed potius in vespera primi, unum diceret esse diem perfectum.", "source": "PL 107, col. 448D", "cc_idno": "8885", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'And there was evening and morning, one day.' There was evening, that is, the light setting little by little after the space of a day's length was spent, and passing beneath the lower parts of the world — which is now done by the accustomed circuit of the sun in the nights; and there was morning, the same light returning little by little above the lands and beginning another day; and up to this point one day was completed, of twenty-four hours, that is. By the commendation of which word Scripture watchfully warns us to say that the light which was made lit the lower parts of the world by its setting. For if it did not do this, but rather, evening having come, it wholly perished and again at morning rose up in the thing created, it would have said the day was completed not at the morning of the following day but rather at the evening of the first.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "ramban-1-1-elohim", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ramban-1-1-elohim/", "author": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1267, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וְאָמַר אֱלֹהִים בַּעַל הַכֹּחוֹת כֻּלָּם, כִּי הַמִּלָּה עִקָּרָהּ \"אֵל\", שֶׁהוּא כֹּחַ, וְהִיא מִלָּה מֻרְכֶּבֶת, \"אֵל הֵם\", כְּאִלּוּ \"אֵל\" סָמוּךְ, \"וְהֵם\" יִרְמֹז לְכָל שְׁאָר הַכּוֹחוֹת; כְּלוֹמַר, כֹּחַ הַכּוֹחוֹת כֻּלָּם. וְעוֹד יִתְבָּאֵר סוֹד בָּזֶה.", "source": "Ramban on Gen 1:1, s.v. אלהים", "license": "sefaria-vocalized", "version": "Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition'" }, "english": { "text": "AND ‘ELOKIM’ (G-D) SAID. The word Elokim means “the Master of all forces,” for the root of the word is e-il, meaning force, and the word Elokim is a composite consisting of the words e-il heim, as if the word e-il is in a construct state, and heim, [literally] “they,” alludes to all other forces. Thus Elokim means “the Force of all forces.” A secret will yet be disclosed in connection with this.", "translator": "Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76", "license": "chavel-ramban" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "ramban-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ramban-1-1/", "author": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1267, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "בְּרֵאשִׁית כָּתַב רַשִׁ\"י (רש\"י על בראשית א':א'): וְאִם בָּאתָ לְפָרְשׁוֹ כִּפְשׁוּטוֹ כָּךְ פָּרְשֵׁהוּ: בְּרֵאשִׁית בְּרִיַּת שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ, וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ, וַיֹּאמֶר הקב\"ה יְהִי אוֹר. אִם כֵּן, הַכֹּל נִמְשַׁךְ לִבְרִיאַת הָאוֹר. וְרַבִּי אַבְרָהָם פֵּרֵשׁ כְּעִנְיָן זֶה בְּעַצְמוֹ, אֲבָל תִּקֵּן כִּי הַו\"ו בְּמִילַת \"וְהָאָרֶץ\" אֵינָהּ מְשַׁמֶּשֶׁת, וְרַבּוֹת כֵּן בַּמִּקְרָאוֹת. וְהַטַּעַם, כִּי בְּרֵאשִׁית בְּרִיאַת הָרָקִיעַ וְהַיַּבָּשָׁה לֹא הָיָה בָּאָרֶץ יִשּׁוּב, אֲבָל הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ מְכֻסָּה בְּמַיִם, וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר. וּלְפִי דַּעְתּוֹ, לֹא נִבְרָא בְּיוֹם רִאשׁוֹן רַק הָאוֹר. וְהַקֻּשְׁיָא לְרַבֵּינוּ שְׁלֹמֹה בַּפֵּרוּשׁ הַזֶּה, כִּי אָמַר, שֶׁאִם בָּא לְהוֹרוֹת סֵדֶר הַבְּרִיאָה בְּאֵלּוּ לוֹמַר שֶׁהֵם קָדְמוּ – הָיָה לוֹ לִכְתֹּב \"בָּרִאשׁוֹנָה\", שֶׁאֵין \"רֵאשִׁית\" בַּמִּקְרָא שֶׁאֵינוֹ סָמוּךְ. וְהִנֵּה \"מַגִּיד מֵרֵאשִׁית אַחֲרִית\" (ישעיהו מו י). וְאִם יִסְמֹךְ אוֹתוֹ לְ\"דָּבָר\", גַּם זֶה תִּסְמֹךְ אוֹתוֹ. וְעוֹד, \"וַיַּרְא רֵאשִׁית לוֹ\" (דברים לג כא). וְטָעַן בָּזֶה עוֹד טְעָנוֹת.", "source": "Ramban on Gen 1:1, s.v. בראשית", "license": "sefaria-vocalized", "version": "Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition'" }, "english": { "text": "IN THE BEGINNING. Rashi wrote: “If you wish to explain it [the word bereshith] in accordance with its plain meaning, explain it thus: at the beginning of the creation of the heaven and earth, and the earth was formless and void and there was darkness, the Holy One, blessed be He, said, Let there be light.” If so, the whole text leads into the creation of light. Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra explained it in an identical way. However, he established that the letter vav in the word veha’aretz (and the earth) does not şerve [as a connecting letter as it normally does and which would mean “and,” but it serves rather as the word “when.”] There are many such examples in Scripture. The meaning then according to Rabbi Abraham would be: at the beginning of the creation of heaven and dry land, there was no habitable place on earth; rather, it was unformed and void and covered with water, and G-d said, Let there be light. According to Abraham ibn Ezra’s opinion, only light was created on the first day. The difficulty which Rabbi Shlomo [Rashi] had which led him to the above interpretation is, as he said: For if Scripture intended to teach the order in which the acts of creation took place, it should have written barishonah [instead of bereshith], since wherever the word reshith occurs in Scripture it is in the construct state. But there is the verse, Declaring the end ‘mereshith’ [from the beginning]. And if one will connect it with the missing word davar [thing — thus making the verse read: “Declaring the end of a thing from the beginning of a thing”—] here too it could be connected to a missing word. There is also the verse, And he chose ‘reshith’ (a first part) for himself. [Here again the word reshith is not used in the construct state.] And Rashi raised other objections.", "translator": "Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76", "license": "chavel-ramban" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "ramban-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ramban-1-1b/", "author": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1267, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "\"וְהָאָרֶץ\" תִּכְלֹל אַרְבַּע הַיְּסוֹדוֹת כֻּלָּם, כְּמוֹ \"וַיְכֻלּוּ הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ וְכָל צְבָאָם\" (בראשית ב':א'), שֶׁתִּכְלֹל כָּל הַכַּדּוּר הַתַּחְתּוֹן. וְכֵן \"הַלְלוּ אֶת ה' מִן הָאָרֶץ תַּנִּינִים וְכָל תְּהֹמוֹת\" (תהלים קמח ז), וְזוּלָתָם רַבִּים. וְהִנֵּה בַּבְּרִיאָה הַזֹּאת, שֶׁהִיא כִּנְקֻדָּה קְטַנָּה דַּקָּה וְאֵין בָּהּ מַמָּשׁ, נִבְרְאוּ כָּל הַנִּבְרָאִים בַּשָּׁמַיִם וּבָאָרֶץ. וּמִלַּת אֵת, כְּמוֹ עֶצֶם הַדָּבָר. וְדָרְשׁוּ בָּהּ שֶׁהִיא לְעוֹלָם לְרַבּוֹת, כִּי הִיא נִגְזְרָה מִן \"אָתָה בֹקֶר וְגַם לָיְלָה\" (ישעיהו כא יב). וְכֵן אָמְרוּ רַבּוֹתֵינוּ (ברשית רבה פרשה א): \"אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם\", לְרַבּוֹת חַמָּה וּלְבָנָה כּוֹכָבִים וּמַזָּלוֹת; \"וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ\", לְרַבּוֹת הָאִילָנוֹת וּדְשָׁאִים וְגַן עֵדֶן. וְאֵלּוּ כְּלַל כָּל הַנִּבְרָאִים בַּעַל הַגּוּף.", "source": "Ramban on Gen 1:1, s.v. בראשית (the four elements and the particle et)", "license": "sefaria-vocalized", "version": "Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition'" }, "english": { "text": "And the earth, includes all the four elements, [not merely the land] as in the verse, And the heaven and the earth were finished, which includes the entire lower sphere, and in Praise the Eternal from the earth, ye sea-monsters, and all deeps, and as in many other verses. Now with this creation, which was like a very small point having no substance, everything in the heavens and on the earth was created. The word eth —[eth hashamayim ve’eth ha’aretz] — is like “the essence of a thing.” The Sages have always set it forth as serving to include, since it is derived from the expression, The morning ‘atha’ (cometh), and also the night. And so did our Rabbis say: “‘Eth hashamayim (the heavens)’ — eth includes the sun, moon, stars and constellations. ‘Ve’eth ha’aretz (and the earth)’ — ve’eth includes the trees, herbs, and the Garden of Eden.” These include all created things which are corporeal.", "translator": "Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76", "license": "chavel-ramban" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "ramban-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ramban-1-1c/", "author": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1267, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וְעַתָּה שְׁמַע פֵּרוּשׁ הַמִּקְרָא עַל פְּשׁוּטוֹ נָכוֹן וּבָרוּר. הקב\"ה בָּרָא כָּל הַנִּבְרָאִים מֵאֲפִיסָה מֻחְלֶטֶת. וְאֵין אֶצְלֵנוּ בִּלְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ בְּהוֹצָאַת הַיֵּשׁ מֵאַיִן אֶלָּא לְשׁוֹן \"בָּרָא\"; וְאֵין כָּל הַנַּעֲשֶׂה – תַּחַת הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ אוֹ לְמַעְלָה – הוֹוֶה מִן הָאַיִן הַתְחָלָה רִאשׁוֹנָה. אֲבָל הוֹצִיא מִן הָאֶפֶס הַגָּמוּר הַמֻּחְלָט יְסוֹד דַּק מְאֹד, אֵין בּוֹ מַמָּשׁ, אֲבָל הוּא כֹּחַ מַמְצִיא, מוּכָן לְקַבֵּל הַצּוּרָה וְלָצֵאת מִן הַכֹּחַ אֶל הַפֹּעַל. וְהוּא הַחֹמֶר הָרִאשׁוֹן, נִקְרָא לַיְּוָנִים \"הִיּוּלִי\". וְאַחַר הַהִיּוּלִי לֹא בָּרָא דָּבָר, אֲבָל יָצַר וְעָשָׂה, כִּי מִמֶּנּוּ הִמְצִיא הַכֹּל וְהִלְבִּישׁ הַצּוּרוֹת וְתִקֵּן אוֹתָן. וְדַע, כִּי הַשָּׁמַיִם וְכָל אֲשֶׁר בָּהֶם – חֹמֶר אֶחָד, וְהָאָרֶץ וְכָל אֲשֶׁר בָּהּ – חֹמֶר אֶחָד. והקב\"ה בָּרָא אֵלּוּ שְׁנֵיהֶם מֵאַיִן, וּשְׁנֵיהֶם לְבַדָּם נִבְרָאִים, וְהַכֹּל נַעֲשִׂים מֵהֶם.", "source": "Ramban on Gen 1:1, s.v. בראשית (the hyle)", "license": "sefaria-vocalized", "version": "Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition'" }, "english": { "text": "Now listen to the correct and clear explanation of the verse in its simplicity. The Holy One, blessed be He, created all things from absolute non-existence. Now we have no expression in the sacred language for bringing forth something from nothing other than the word bara (created). Everything that exists under the sun or above was not made from non-existence at the outset. Instead He brought forth from total and absolute nothing a very thin substance devoid of corporeality but having a power of potency, fit to assume form and to proceed from potentiality into reality. This was the primary matter created by G-d; it is called by the Greeks hyly (matter). After the hyly, He did not create anything, but He formed and made things with it, and from this hyly He brought everything into existence and clothed the forms and put them into a finished condition. Know that the heavens and all that is in them consist of one substance, and the earth and everything that is in it consist of one substance. The Holy One, blessed be He, created these two substances from nothing; they alone were created, and everything else was constructed from them.", "translator": "Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76", "license": "chavel-ramban" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "ramban-1-2-choshech", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ramban-1-2-choshech/", "author": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1267, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וְהָאֵשׁ נִקְרֵאת \"חֹשֶׁךְ\", מִפְּנֵי שֶׁהָאֵשׁ הַיְּסוֹדִית חֲשׁוּכָה; וְאִלּוּ הָיְתָה אֲדֻמָּה, הָיְתָה מַאֲדִימָה לָנוּ הַלַּיְלָה. וְהַמַּיִם שֶׁנִּגְבַּל בָּהֶם הֶעָפָר יִקָּרֵא \"תְּהוֹם\", וְלָכֵן יִקָּרְאוּ מֵי הַיָּם \"תְּהֹמוֹת\", כְּדִכְתִיב (שמות טו ה): \"תְּהֹמֹת יְכַסְיֻמוּ\"; \"קָפְאוּ תְּהֹמֹת\" (שם ח); \"תְּהוֹם יְסֹבְבֵנִי\" (יונה ב ו). וְיִקָּרֵא קַרְקַע הַיָּם \"תְּהוֹם\": \"וַיִּגְעַר בְּיַם סוּף וַיֶּחֱרָב וַיּוֹלִיכֵם בַּתְּהֹמוֹת כַּמִּדְבָּר\" (תהלים קו ט); \"מוֹלִיכָם בַּתְּהֹמוֹת כַּסּוּס בַּמִּדְבָּר\" (ישעיהו סג יג). וְהָאֲוִיר יִקָּרֵא \"רוּחַ\". וּכְבָר נוֹדַע כִּי הַיְּסוֹדוֹת הָאַרְבָּעָה – מִקְשָׁה אַחַת, וְהָעַמּוּד שֶׁלָּהּ הוּא עִגּוּל הָאָרֶץ. וְהַמַּיִם מַקִּיפִין עַל הָאָרֶץ, וְהָאֲוִיר מַקִּיף עַל הַמַּיִם, וְהָאֵשׁ מַקִּיף עַל הָאֲוִיר. וְאָמַר הַכָּתוּב כִּי הָאָרֶץ לָבְשָׁה צוּרָה, וְהָיָה הָאֵשׁ מַקִּיף לְמַעְלָה עַל הַמַּיִם וְהֶעָפָר הַמְעֹרָבִים, וְהָרוּחַ מְנַשֶּׁבֶת וְתִכָּנֵס בַּחֹשֶׁךְ וּתְרַחֵף עַל הַמַּיִם.", "source": "Ramban on Gen 1:1–2, s.v. בראשית (the four elements under the words of v. 2)", "license": "sefaria-vocalized", "version": "Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition'" }, "english": { "text": "In this verse, the element of fire is called “darkness” because the elemental fire is dark. Were it red, it would redden the night for us. The element of water with which the dust was kneaded is here called “deep.” This is why the waters of the oceans are called “the deeps,” as it is written, The deeps cover them; The deeps were congealed; The deep was round about me. The bottom of the ocean is also referred to as “deep:” And He rebuked the Red Sea, and it was dried up, and He led them through the depths, as a wilderness; He led them through the deep as a horse in the wilderness. And the element air is here called “spirit.” Now it is already known that the four elements fill up the whole space with matter. That which stands still is the sphere of earth. The waters surround the earth, the air encompasses the waters, and the fire envelopes the air. Scripture thus states that the earth took on form, and the fire above enveloped the intermingled waters and dust, and the wind blew and rose in the darkness and hovered over the waters.", "translator": "Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76", "license": "chavel-ramban" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "ramban-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ramban-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1267, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וְהַחֹמֶר הַזֶּה, שֶׁקָּרְאוּ הִיּוּלִי, נִקְרָא בִּלְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ \"תֹּהוּ\", וְהַמִּלָּה נִגְזְרָה מִלְּשׁוֹנָם (קידושין מ ב): \"בְּתוֹהֶא עַל הָרִאשׁוֹנוֹת\". מִפְּנֵי שֶׁאִם בָּא אָדָם לִגְזֹר בּוֹ שֵׁם, תּוֹהֶא וְנִמְלָךְ לְקוֹרְאוֹ בְּשֵׁם אַחֵר, כִּי לֹא לָבַשׁ צוּרָה שֶׁיִּתָּפֵשׂ בָּהּ הַשֵּׁם כְּלָל. וְהַצּוּרָה הַנִּלְבֶּשֶׁת לַחֹמֶר הַזֶּה נִקְרֵאת בִּלְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ \"בֹּהוּ\", וְהַמִּלָּה מֻרְכֶּבֶת, כְּלוֹמַר \"בּוֹ הוּא\", כְּמִלַּת \"לֹא תוּכַל עֲשֹׂהוּ\" (שמות יח יח), שֶׁמְּחֻסַּר הַו\"ו וְהָאָלֶ\"ף, עֲשׂוֹ הוּא. וְזֶהוּ שֶׁאָמַר הַכָּתוּב (ישעיהו לד יא): \"וְנָטָה עָלֶיהָ קַו תֹהוּ וְאַבְנֵי בֹהוּ\", כִּי הוּא הַקַּו אֲשֶׁר בּוֹ יְתַחֵם הָאֻמָּן מַחְשֶׁבֶת בִּנְיָנוֹ וּמָה שֶׁיְּקַוֶּה לַעֲשׂוֹת, נִגְזַר מִן \"קַוֵּה אֶל ה'\" (תהלים כז יד), וְהָאֲבָנִים הֵם צוּרוֹת בַּבִּנְיָן. וְכֵן כָּתוּב: \"מֵאֶפֶס וָתֹהוּ נֶחְשְׁבוּ לוֹ\" (ישעיהו מ יז), כִּי הַתֹּהוּ אַחַר הָאֶפֶס, וְאֵינֶנּוּ דָּבָר. וְכָךְ אָמְרוּ בְּסֵפֶר יְצִירָה: \"יָצַר מִתֹּהוּ מַמָּשׁ וְעָשָׂה אֵינוֹ יֶשְׁנוֹ\". וְעוֹד אָמְרוּ בְּמִדְרַשׁ רַבִּי נְחוּנְיָא בֶּן הַקָּנָה (ספר הבהיר): אָמַר רַבִּי בֶּרֶכְיָה, מַאי דִכְתִיב: \"וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ\"? מַאי מַשְׁמַע \"הָיְתָה\"? שֶׁכְּבָר הָיְתָה תֹּהוּ. וּמַאי \"בֹּהוּ\"? אֶלָּא תֹּהוּ הָיְתָה, וּמַאי \"תֹּהוּ\"? דָּבָר הַמַּתְהֶא בְּנֵי אָדָם, וְחָזְרָה לְבֹהוּ. וּמַאי \"בֹּהוּ\"? דָּבָר שֶׁיֵּשׁ בּוֹ מַמָּשׁ, דִּכְתִיב \"בּוֹ הוּא\"", "source": "Ramban on Gen 1:1, s.v. בראשית (the tohu–bohu paragraph)", "license": "sefaria-vocalized", "version": "Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition'" }, "english": { "text": "This substance, which the Greeks called hyly, is called in the sacred language tohu, the word being derived from the expression of the Sages: “betohei (when the wicked bethinks himself) of his doings in the past.” If a person wants to decide a name for it [this primordial matter], he may bethink himself, change his mind and call it by another name since it has taken on no form to which the name should be attached. The form which this substance finally takes on is called in the sacred language bohu, which is a composite word made up of the two words bo hu (in it there is [substance]). This may be compared to the verse, Thou art not able ‘asohu’ (to perform it), in which case the word asohu is missing a vav and an aleph [and is a composite of the two words] aso hu. It is this which Scripture says, And he shall stretch over it the line of ‘tohu’ (confusion) and the stones of ‘bohu.’ [The tohu in Hebrew or hyly in Greek] is the line by which the craftsman delineates the plan of his structure and that which he hopes to make. This is derived from the expression, Kavei (Hope) unto G-d. The stones are forms in the building. Similarly it is written, They are accounted by Him as nought and ‘tohu,’ as tohu comes after nothingness and there is nothing yet in it. So the Rabbis have also said in Sefer Yetzirah: “He created substance from tohu, and made that which was nothing something.” They have furthermore said in the Midrash of Rabbi Nechunya ben Hakanah: “Rabbi Berachyah said: ‘What is the meaning of the verse, And the earth was ‘tohu’ (without form) ‘vavohu’ (and void)? What is the meaning of the word “was?” It had already been tohu. And what is tohu? It is a thing which astonishes people. It was then turned into bohu. And what is bohu? It is a thing which has substance, as it is written, [bohu is a composite of the two words] ‘bo hu’ (in it there is substance)", "translator": "Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76", "license": "chavel-ramban" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu", "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "ramban-1-26-naaseh", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/ramban-1-26-naaseh/", "author": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1267, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וְהַפְּשָׁט הַנָּכוֹן בְּמִלַּת \"נַעֲשֶׂה\" הוּא מִפְּנֵי שֶׁכְּבָר הָרְאֵיתָ לָדַעַת (רמב\"ן על בראשית א':א') כִּי הָאֱלֹהִים בָּרָא יֵשׁ מֵאַיִן בַּיּוֹם הָרִאשׁוֹן לְבַדּוֹ, וְאַחַר כָּךְ מִן הַיְּסוֹדוֹת הָהֵם הַנִּבְרָאִים יָצַר וְעָשָׂה, וְכַאֲשֶׁר נָתַן בַּמַּיִם כֹּחַ הַשֵּׁרוּץ לִשְׁרֹץ נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה, וְהָיָה הַמַּאֲמָר בָּהֶם \"יִשְׁרְצוּ הַמַּיִם\" (בראשית א':כ'), וְהָיָה הַמַּאֲמָר בַּבְּהֵמָה \"תּוֹצֵא הָאָרֶץ\" (בראשית א':כ\"ד), אָמַר בָּאָדָם \"נַעֲשֶׂה\", כְּלוֹמַר אֲנִי וְהָאָרֶץ הַנִּזְכֶּרֶת נַעֲשֶׂה אָדָם, שֶׁתּוֹצִיא הָאָרֶץ הַגּוּף מִיְּסֹדֶיהָ כַּאֲשֶׁר עָשְׂתָה בַּבְּהֵמָה וּבַחַיָּה, כְּדִכְתִיב (בראשית ב':ז') \"וַיִּיצֶר ה' אֱלֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם עָפָר מִן הָאֲדָמָה\", וְיִתֵּן הוּא יִתְבָּרַךְ הָרוּחַ מִפִּי עֶלְיוֹן, כְּדִכְתִיב (שם) \"וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים\". וְאָמַר \"בְּצַלְמֵנוּ כִּדְמוּתֵנוּ\", כִּי יִדְמֶה לִשְׁנֵיהֶם, בְּמַתְכֹּנֶת גּוּפוֹ לָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר לֻקַּח מִמֶּנָּה, וְיִדְמֶה בָּרוּחַ לָעֶלְיוֹנִים, שֶׁאֵינָהּ גּוּף וְלֹא תָּמוּת. וְאָמַר בַּכָּתוּב הַשֵּׁנִי בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ (בראשית א':כ\"ז), לְסַפֵּר הַפֶּלֶא אֲשֶׁר נִפְלָא בּוֹ מִשְּׁאָר הַנִּבְרָאִים. וְזֶה פְּשַׁט הַמִּקְרָא הַזֶּה מְצָאתִיו לְרַבִּי יוֹסֵף הַקִּמְחִי, וְהוּא הַנִּרְאֶה מִכָּל מָה שֶׁחָשְׁבוּ בּוֹ.", "source": "Ramban on Gen 1:26, s.v. נעשה אדם", "license": "sefaria-vocalized", "version": "Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition'" }, "english": { "text": "The correct explanation of na’aseh (let us make) [which is in the plural form when it should have been in the singular] is as follows: It has been shown to you that G-d created something from nothing only on the first day, and afterwards He formed and made things from those created elements. Thus when He gave the waters the power of bringing forth a living soul, the command concerning them was Let the waters swarm. The command concerning cattle was Let the earth bring forth. But in the case of man He said, Let us make, that is, I and the aforementioned earth, let us make man, the earth to bring forth the body from its elements as it did with cattle and beasts, as it is written, And the Eternal G-d formed man of the dust of the ground, and He, blessed be He, to give the spirit from His mouth, the Supreme One, as it is written, And He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And He said, In our image, and after our likeness, as man will then be similar to both. In the capacity of his body, he will be similar to the earth from which he was taken, and in spirit he will be similar to the higher beings, because it [the spirit] is not a body and will not die. In the second verse, He says, In the image of G-d He created him, in order to relate the distinction by which man is distinguished from the rest of created beings. The explanation of this verse I have found ascribed to Rabbi Joseph the Kimchite, and is the most acceptable of all interpretations that have been advanced concerning it.", "translator": "Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76", "license": "chavel-ramban" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-1/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "אָמַר רַבִּי יִצְחָק לֹֹֹֹֹא הָיָה צָרִיךְ לְהַתְחִיל אֶת הַתּוֹרָה אֶלָּא מֵהַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה לָכֶם, שֶׁהִיא מִצְוָה רִאשׁוֹנָה שֶׁנִּצְטַוּוּ בָּהּ יִשׂרָאֵל, וּמַה טַּעַם פָּתַח בִּבְרֵאשִׁית? מִשׁוּם כֹּחַ מַעֲשָׂיו הִגִּיד לְעַמּוֹ לָתֵת לָהֶם נַחֲלַת גּוֹיִם (תהילים קי\"א), שֶׁאִם יֹאמְרוּ אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם לְיִשְׁרָאֵל לִסְטִים אַתֶּם, שֶׁכְּבַשְׁתֶּם אַרְצוֹת שִׁבְעָה גוֹיִם, הֵם אוֹמְרִים לָהֶם כָּל הָאָרֶץ שֶׁל הַקָּבָּ\"ה הִיא, הוּא בְרָאָהּ וּנְתָנָהּ לַאֲשֶׁר יָשַׁר בְּעֵינָיו, בִּרְצוֹנוֹ נְתָנָהּ לָהֶם, וּבִרְצוֹנוֹ נְטָלָהּ מֵהֶם וּנְתָנָהּ לָנו", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:1, s.v. בראשית", "license": "pd", "version": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann, 1929–34" }, "english": { "text": "בראשית IN THE BEGINNING — Rabbi Isaac said: The Torah which is the Law book of Israel should have commenced with the verse (Exodus 12:2) “This month shall be unto you the first of the months” which is the first commandment given to Israel. What is the reason, then, that it commences with the account of the Creation? Because of the thought expressed in the text (Psalms 111:6) “He declared to His people the strength of His works (i.e. He gave an account of the work of Creation), in order that He might give them the heritage of the nations.” For should the peoples of the world say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan”, Israel may reply to them, “All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased. When He willed He gave it to them, and when He willed He took it from them and gave it to us” (Yalkut Shimoni on Torah 187)", "translator": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34", "license": "silbermann" }, "cruxes": [ "why-begin-here" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-1b/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "בראשית ברא אֵין הַמִּקְרָא הַזֶּה אוֹמֵר אֶלָּא דָּרְשֵׁנִי, כְּמוֹ שֶׁדְּרָשׁוּהוּ רַבּוֹתֵינוּ בִּשְׁבִיל הַתּוֹרָה שֶׁנִקְרֵאת רֵאשִׁית דַּרְכּוֹ (משלי ח'), וּבִשְׁבִיל יִשְׂרָאֵל שֶׁנִקְרְאוּ רֵאשִׁית תְּבוּאָתוֹ (ירמיה ב'); וְאִם בָּאתָ לְפָרְשׁוֹ כִּפְשׁוּטוֹ, כָּךְ פָּרְשֵׁהוּ בְּרֵאשִׁית בְּרִיאַת שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ, וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וְלֹא בָא הַמִּקְרָא לְהוֹרוֹת סֵדֶר הַבְּרִיאָה לוֹמַר שֶׁאֵלּוּ קָדְמוּ, שֶׁאִם בָּא לְהוֹרוֹת כָּךְ, הָיָה לוֹ לִכְתֹּב בָּרִאשׁוֹנָה בָּרָא אֶת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְגוֹ' שֶׁאֵין לְךָ רֵאשִׁית בַּמִּקְרָא שֶׁאֵינוֹ דָבוּק לַתֵּבָה שֶׁלְּאַחֲרָיו, כְּמוֹ בְּרֵאשִׁית מַמְלֶכֶת יְהוֹיָקִים (שׁם כ\"ז), רֵאשִׁית מַמְלַכְתּוֹ (בראשית י'), רֵאשִׁית דְּגָנְךָ (דברים י\"ח, ד'), – אַף כָּאן אַתָּה אוֹמֵר בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים וְגוֹ', כְּמוֹ בְּרֵאשִׁית בְּרֹא; וְדוֹמֶה לוֹ תְּחִלַּת דִּבֶּר ה' בְּהוֹשֵׁעַ (הושע א'), כְּלוֹמַר תְּחִלַת דִּבּוּרוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּבָּ\"ה בְּהוֹשֵׁעַ, וַיֹּאמֶר ה' אֶל הוֹשֵׁעַ וְגוֹ'. וְאִ\"תֹּ לְהוֹרוֹת בָּא שֶׁאֵלּוּ תְּחִלָּה נִבְרְאוּ, וּפֵרוּשׁוֹ בְּרֵאשִׁית הַכֹּל בָּרָא אֵלוּ – וְֵישׁ לְךָ מִקְרָאוֹת שֶׁמְּקַצְּרִים לְשׁוֹנָם וּמְמַעֲטִים תֵּבָה אַחַת, כְּמוֹ כִּי לֹא סָגַר דַּלְתֵי בִטְנִי (איוב ג'), וְלֹא פֵּרֵשׁ מִי הַסּוֹגֵר וּכְמוֹ יִשָּׂא אֶת חֵיל דַּמֶּשֶׂק (ישעיהו ח'), וְלֹא פֵּרֵשׁ מִי יִשָּׂאֶנּוּ; וּכְמוֹ אִם יַחֲרוֹשׁ בַּבְּקָרִים (עמוס ו'), וְלֹא פֵּרֵשׁ אִם יַחֲרוֹשׁ אָדָם בַּבְּקָרִים, וּכְמוֹ מַגִּיד מֵרֵאשִׁית אַחֲרִית (ישעיהו מ\"ו), וְלֹא פֵּרֵשׁ מַגִּיד מֵרֵאשִׁית דָּבָר אַחֲרִית דָּבָר – אִ\"כֵּ, תְּמַהּ עַל עַצְמְךָ, שֶׁהֲרֵי הַמַּיִם קָדְמוּ, שֶׁהֲרֵי כְתִיב וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם, וְעַדַיִין לֹא גִלָּה הַמִּקְרָא, בְּרִיאַת הַמַּיִם מָתַי הָיְתָה, הָא לָמַדְתָּ, שֶׁקָּדְמוּ הַמַּיִם לָאָרֶץ, וְעוֹד, שֶׁהַשָּׁמַיִם מֵאֵשׁ וּמַיִם נִבְרְאוּ, עַל כָּרְחֲךָ לֹא לִמֵּד הַמִּקְרָא סֵדֶר הַמֻּקְדָמִים וְהַמְאֻחָרִים כְּלוּם:", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:1, s.v. בראשית ברא", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "בראשית ברא IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED — This verse calls aloud for explanation in the manner that our Rabbis explained it: God created the world for the sake of the Torah which is called (Proverbs 8:22) “The beginning (ראשית) of His (God’s) way”, and for the sake of Israel who are called (Jeremiah 2:3) “The beginning (ראשית) of His (God’s) increase’’. If, however, you wish to explain it in its plain sense, explain it thus: At the beginning of the Creation of heaven and earth when the earth was without form and void and there was darkness, God said, “Let there be light”. The text does not intend to point out the order of the acts of Creation — to state that these (heaven and earth) were created first; for if it intended to point this out, it should have written 'בראשונה ברא את השמים וגו “At first God created etc.” And for this reason: Because, wherever the word ראשית occurs in Scripture, it is in the construct state. E. g., (Jeremiah 26:1) “In the beginning of (בראשית) the reign of Jehoiakim”; (Genesis 10:10) “The beginning of (ראשית) his kingdom”; (Deuteronomy 18:4) “The first fruit of (ראשית) thy corn.” Similarly here you must translate בראשית ברא אלהים as though it read בראשית ברוא, at the beginning of God’s creating. A similar grammatical construction (of a noun in construct followed by a verb) is: (Hosea 1:2) תחלת דבר ה' בהושע, which is as much as to say, “At the beginning of God’s speaking through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea.” Should you, however, insist that it does actually intend to point out that these (heaven and earth) were created first, and that the meaning is, “At the beginning of everything He created these, admitting therefore that the word בראשית is in the construct state and explaining the omission of a word signifying “everything” by saying that you have texts which are elliptical, omitting a word, as for example (Job 3:10) “Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb” where it does not explicitly explain who it was that closed the womb; and (Isaiah 8:4) “He shall take away the spoil of Samaria” without explaining who shall take it away; and (Amos 6:12) “Doth he plough with oxen,\" and it does not explicitly state, “Doth a man plough with oxen”; (Isaiah 46:10) “Declaring from the beginning the end,” and it does not explicitly state, “Declaring from the beginning of a thing the end of a thing’ — if it is so (that you assert that this verse intends to point out that heaven and earth were created first), you should be astonished at yourself, because as a matter of fact the waters were created before heaven and earth, for, lo, it is written, (v. 2) “The Spirit of God was hovering on the face of the waters,” and Scripture had not yet disclosed when the creation of the waters took place — consequently you must learn from this that the creation of the waters preceded that of the earth. And a further proof that the heavens and earth were not the first thing created is that the heavens were created from fire (אש) and water (מים), from which it follows that fire and water were in existence before the heavens. Therefore you must admit that the text teaches nothing about the earlier or later sequence of the acts of Creation.", "translator": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34", "license": "silbermann" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-26-anvetanuto", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-26-anvetanuto/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "נעשה אדם. עַנְוְתָנוּתוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּבָּ\"ה לָמַדְנוּ מִכָּאן, לְפִי שֶׁאָדָם הוּא בִּדְמוּת הַמַּלְאָכִים וְיִתְקַנְּאוּ בוֹ, לְפִיכָךְ נִמְלַךְ בָּהֶם, וּכְשֶׁהוּא דָן אֶת הַמְּלָכִים הוּא נִמְלָךְ בְּפָמַלְיָא שֶׁלּוֹ, שֶׁכֵּן מָצִינוּ בְאַחְאָב, שֶׁאָמַר לוֹ מִיכָה רָאִיתִי אֶת ה' יֹשֵׁב עַל כִּסְאוֹ וְכָל צְבָא הַשָּׁמַיִם עוֹמְדִים עָלָיו מִימִינוֹ וּמִשְּׂמֹאלוֹ (מלכים א כ\"ב), וְכִי יֵש יָמִין וּשְׂמֹאל לְפָנָיו? אֶלָּא אֵלּוּ מַיְמִינִים לִזְכוּת וְאֵלוּ מַשְׂמְאִילִים לְחוֹבָה, וְכֵן בִּגְזֵרַת עִירִין פִּתְגָמָא וּבְמֵאמַר קַדִּישִׁין שְׁאֵלְתָא (דניאל ד'), אַף כָּאן בְּפָמַלְיָא שֶׁלוֹ נָטַל רְשׁוּת, אָמַר לָהֶם יֵשׁ בָּעֶלְיוֹנִים כִּדְמוּתִי; אִם אֵין כִּדְמוּתִי בַתַּחְתּוֹנִים הֲרֵי יֵשׁ קִנְאָה בְמַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית:", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:26, s.v. נעשה אדם (first comment)", "license": "silbermann", "version": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann, 1929–34" }, "english": { "text": "נעשה אדם WE WILL MAKE MAN — The meekness of the Holy One, blessed be He, they (the Rabbis) learned from here: because the man is in the likeness of the angels and they might envy him, therefore He took counsel with them (Midrash Tanchuma, Shemot 18 and see Genesis Rabbah 8). And when He judges the kings He likewise consults His heavenly council, for thus we find in the case of Ahab to whom Micha said, (1 Kings 22:19) “I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right hand and on His left.” Has God, then, a right hand and a left hand? But it means that some stood on the right side to plead in favour of the accused and others stood on the left side to accuse; and similarly we read (Daniel 4:14), “the matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the sentence by the word of the holy ones”, — here, also, He consulted His heavenly council and asked permission of them, saying to them: “There are in the heavens beings after My likeness; if there will not be on earth also beings after My likeness, there will be envy among the beings that I have created” (Sanhedrin 38b).", "translator": "M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929–34", "license": "silbermann" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-26-minim", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-26-minim/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "נעשה אדם. אַעַ\"פִּ שֶׁלֹּא סִיְּעוּהוּ בִיצִירָתוֹ וְיֵשׁ מָקוֹם לַמִּינִים לִרְדּוֹת, לֹא נִמְנַע הַכָּתוּב מִלְּלַמֵּד דֶרֶך אֶרֶץ וּמִדַּת עֲנָוָה שֶׁיְּהֵא הַגָּדוֹל נִמְלָךְ וְנוֹטֵל רְשׁוּת מִן הַקָּטָן; וְאִם כָּתַב אֶעֱשֶׂה אָדָם, לֹא לָמַדְנוּ שֶׁיְּהֵא מְדַבֵּר עִם בֵּית דִינוֹ, אֶלָּא עִם עַצְמוֹ, וּתְשׁוּבַת הַמִּינִים כָּתַב בְּצִדּוֹ, וַיִּבְרָא אֶת הָאָדָם, וְלֹא כָתַב וַיִּבְרְאוּ:", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:26, s.v. נעשה אדם (second comment)", "license": "silbermann", "version": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann, 1929–34" }, "english": { "text": "נעשה אדם WE WILL MAKE MAN — Although they did not assist Him in forming him (the man) and although this use of the plural may give the heretics an occasion to rebel (i. e. to argue in favour of their own views), yet the verse does not refrain from teaching proper conduct and the virtue of humbleness, namely, that the greater should consult, and take permission from the smaller; for had it been written, “I shall make man”, we could not, then, have learned that He spoke to His judicial council but to Himself. And as a refutation of the heretics it is written immediately after this verse “And God created the man”, and it is not written “and they created” (Genesis Rabbah 8:9)", "translator": "M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929–34", "license": "silbermann" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-2a", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-2a/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "תהו ובהו. תֹּהוּ לְשׁוֹן תֵּמַהּ וְשִׁמָּמוֹן, שֶׁאָדָם תּוֹהֵא וּמִשְׁתּוֹמֵם עַל בֹּהוּ שֶׁבָּהּ: תהו. אשטורדי\"שון בְּלַעַ\"ז: בהו. לְשׁוֹן רֵקוּת וְצָדוּ:", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:2, s.v. תהו ובהו", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "תהו ובהו DESOLATE AND VOID — The word תהו signifies astonishment and amazement, for a person would have been astonished and amazed at its emptiness. תהו is estordison in old French. בהו VOID — The word signifies emptiness and empty space.", "translator": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34", "license": "silbermann" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-2b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-2b/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "ורוח אלהים מרחפת. כִּסֵא הַכָּבוֹד עוֹמֵד בָּאֲוִיר וּמְרַחֵף עַל פְּנֵי הַמַּיִם בְּרוּחַ פִּיו שֶׁל הַקָּבָּ\"ה וּבְמַאֲמָרוֹ, כְּיוֹנָה הַמְרַחֶפֶת עַל הַקֵּן, אקוב\"טיר בְּלַעַ\"ז:", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:2, s.v. ורוח אלהים מרחפת", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "ורוח אלהים מרחפת AND THE SPIRIT OF GOD WAS HOVERING — The throne of Divine Glory was standing in space, hovering over the face of the waters by the breath of the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, and by His command, even as a dove hovers over its nest. In old French acoveter.", "translator": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34", "license": "pd" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-4/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "וירא אלהים את האור כי טוב ויבדל. אַף בָּזֶה אָנוּ צְרִיכִין לְדִבְרֵי אַגַּדָה, רָאָהוּ שֶׁאֵינוֹ כְדַאי לְהִשְׁתַּמֵשׁ בּוֹ רְשָׁעִים, וְהִבְדִּילוֹ לַצַּדִּיקִים לֶעָתִיד לָבֹא. וּלְפִי פְּשׁוּטוֹ כָּךְ פָּרְשֵׁהוּ, רָאָהוּ כִּי טוֹב, וְאֵין נָאֶה לוֹ וְלַחֹשֶׁךְ שֶׁיִּהְיוּ מִשְׁתַּמְּשִׁים בְּעִרְבּוּבְיָא, וְקָבַע לָזֶה תְחוּמוֹ בַּיּוֹם, וְלָזֶה תְחוּמוֹ בַּלַּיְלָה:", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:4, s.v. וירא אלהים את האור כי טוב ויבדל", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "וירא אלהים את האור כי טוב ויבדל AND GOD SAW THE LIGHT THAT IT WAS GOOD, AND GOD CAUSED A DIVISION — Here, also, we must depend upon the statement of the Agada: He saw that the wicked were unworthy of using it (the light); He, therefore, set it apart (ויבדל), reserving it for the righteous in the world to come (Chagigah 12a). But according to the plain sense explain it thus: He saw that it was good, and that it was not seemly that light and darkness should function together in a confused manner. He therefore limited this one’s sphere of activity to the daytime, and this one’s sphere of activity to the nighttime (see Genesis Rabbah 3:6).", "translator": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34", "license": "silbermann" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light", "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "rashi-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rashi-1-5/", "author": "Rashi", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 1090, "original": { "lang": "he", "text": "יום אחד. לְפִי סֵדֶר לְשׁוֹן הַפָּרָשָׁה הָיָה לוֹ לִכְתֹּב יוֹם רִאשׁוֹן, כְּמוֹ שֶׁכָּתוּב בִּשְׁאָר הַיָּמִים שֵׁנִי, שְׁלִישִׁי, רְבִיעִי, לָמָּה כָתַב אֶחָד? לְפִי שֶׁהָיָה הַקָּבָּ\"ה יָחִיד בְּעוֹלָמוֹ, שֶׁלֹא נִבְרְאוּ הַמַּלְאָכִים עַד יוֹם שֵׁנִי, כָּךְ מְפֹרָשׁ בּבְ\"רַ:", "source": "Rashi on Gen 1:5, s.v. יום אחד", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "יום אחד THE FIRST DAY (literally, one day) — According to the regular mode of expression used in this chapter it should be written here “first day”, just as it is written with regard to the other days “the second”, “the third”, “the fourth”. Why, then, does it write אחד “one”? Because the Holy One, blessed be He, was then the Only One (Sole Being) in His Universe, since the angels were not created until the second day. Thus it is explained in Genesis Rabbah (Genesis Rabbah 3:8).", "translator": "Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34", "license": "pd" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-1/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 900, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio hujus voluminis philosophi confutantur, qui de mundi creatione conati disputare, sicut Plato, qui tria dixit esse principia, Deum videlicet, exemplar, et materiam, et Deum non quasi auctorem ex nihilo cuncta creasse, sed quasi opifici in rebus creandis materiam adjutorium praestitisse. Aristoteles autem duo dixit esse principia, materiam scilicet et speciem, tertium quiddam nescio quid volens dicere operatorium appellavit. Quorum erroribus obvians Moyses utpote a Deo electus veritatem dicitur demonstrasse, ostendens Deum cuncta simul ex nihilo formasse, non quidem in tempore, sed in initio temporis dicens: In principio, et subauditur: temporis, patet procul dubio tunc tempus coepisse quod antea minime erat.", "source": "PL 131, col. 53D", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "At the beginning of this volume the philosophers are refuted, who tried to argue about the creation of the world: Plato, for instance, who said there were three principles, namely God, the exemplar, and matter, and that God did not create all things from nothing as their author, but that matter furnished help to him as to a workman in the making of things. Aristotle said there were two principles, namely matter and form, and something third which he wished to call, I know not what, the operative. Opposing their errors, Moses, as chosen by God, is said to have shown the truth, showing that God formed all things at once out of nothing — not indeed in time, but at the beginning of time, saying 'In the beginning', with 'of time' understood; whence it is beyond doubt that time then began, which before was not at all.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-1b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-1b/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 900, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Creavit enim coelum et terram. Coelum non istud visibile firmamentum accipere debemus, sed illud empyreum, id est igneum, vel intellectuale coelum quod non ab ardore, sed a splendore igneum dicitur, quod statim repletum est angelicis spiritibus de quibus in Job dicitur: Cum me laudarent simul astra matutina et jubilarent omnes filii Dei (Job XXXVIII, 7) . Et nota tria hic elementa commemorari. Nomine enim coeli aerem collige, nomine terrae ipsam terram, et ignem qui in ejus visceribus latet. Quarti vero elementi, id est aquae, in sequentibus fit commemoratio.", "source": "PL 131, col. 54D", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'For he created heaven and earth.' By 'heaven' we ought not to understand this visible firmament, but that empyrean — that is, fiery, or intellectual — heaven, which is called fiery not from burning but from brightness, and which was at once filled with the angelic spirits, of whom it is said in Job: 'When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy' (Job 38:7). And note that three elements are named here. For under the name of heaven gather the air; under the name of earth, the earth itself, and the fire that lies hidden in its bowels. Of the fourth element, that is water, mention is made in what follows.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "heaven-earth-order" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-1c/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 890, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Allegorice quod dictum est: in principio fecit Deus coelum et terram, nomine principii Filium Dei non incongrue possumus accipere, sicut ipse de se Judaeis dixit: ego principium qui et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII, 28) . Deus enim Pater principium est, sed non de principio, quia a Patre non factus nec creatus, sed genitus est: per quod principium Deus Pater coelum et terram creavit, id est coelestes et terrenos. Per coelum enim coelestes sive coelestem vitam ducentes: per terram vero terrenis negotiis inhiantes signantur. Qui utrique per principium creati sunt, quia nato Jesu Christo patuit qui essent coelestes, quique terreni.", "source": "PL 131, col. 55C", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Allegorically, in what is said, In the beginning God made heaven and earth, by the name of 'beginning' we may not inappropriately understand the Son of God, as he himself said of himself to the Jews: I am the beginning, who also speak to you (John 8:25). For God the Father is a beginning, but not from a beginning, since he was not made or created by the Father but begotten; through which Beginning God the Father created heaven and earth, that is, the heavenly and the earthly. For by 'heaven' are signified the heavenly, or those leading a heavenly life; by 'earth', those gaping after earthly business. Both of these were created through the Beginning, because when Jesus Christ was born it became plain who were heavenly and who were earthly.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 900, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Vers. 2. Terra autem inanis et vacua. Id est, inutilis, infructuosa et incomposita. Omnia enim elementa commista erant et confusa, et totum hoc aeris spatium quod est a terra usque ad coelum plenum erat aquis, quae tamen non erant ejusmodi qualitatis cujus nunc sunt, sed in modum nubium tenues, quam qualitatem adhuc illae supercoelestes aquae retinent.", "source": "PL 131, col. 55A", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 2. 'But the earth was empty and void.' That is, useless, unfruitful, and unordered. For all the elements were mingled and confused, and this whole space of air which is from the earth up to heaven was full of waters — which, however, were not of the same quality as they now are, but thin, after the manner of clouds, a quality which those waters above the heavens still keep.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-2/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 900, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas. Sicut mens vel sapientia alicujus artificis superfertur operi quod facturus est, ut quomodo vult ita illud faciat: ita et Spiritus sanctus superferebatur, praeordinans et quasi disponens quid, qualiter facere vellet.", "source": "PL 131, col. 55B", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'The Spirit of God was borne over the waters.' As the mind or wisdom of some craftsman is borne above the work he is going to make, so that he may make it as he wills, so too the Holy Spirit was borne above, fore-ordaining and as it were arranging what, and in what manner, he willed to make.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-26/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 890, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Vers. 26. Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. Cum caetera jubendo fecerit, quasi maximam rem facturus Deus et cunctis quae fecerat praeferendam, quasi quodam concilio dicit: Faciamus. Quod, licet quidam ad angelos referendum dicant, melius tamen ad sanctam Trinitatem refertur.", "source": "PL 131, col. 56D", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 26. Let us make a human to our image and likeness. Whereas he made the rest by commanding, God — as though about to make the greatest thing, and one to be preferred to all that he had made — says, as though by a kind of council: let us make. And although some say that this is to be referred to the angels, it is better referred to the holy Trinity.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-3/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 900, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Fiat lux. Lux dicitur a luendo, id est a purgando tenebras. Lux autem illa non ejusmodi erat quae nunc est sole superposito, sed qualis esse solet vel ante solis ortum, vel post ejus occubitum.", "source": "PL 131, col. 55B", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "'Let there be light.' Light (lux) is so called from cleansing (luendo), that is, from purging away the darkness. But that light was not of the kind that now is, with the sun set above; rather it was such as it is wont to be before the rising of the sun, or after its setting.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-4/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 890, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et divisit lucem a tenebris. Tenebrae a tenendo dictae sunt, quia tenent oculos ne videant. Utrumque autem fecit Deus et lucem et tenebras, scilicet ut in luce operarentur homines, et in nocte requiescerent. Ergo et tenebrae opus Dei sunt. Unde in hymno trium puerorum in quo omnis creatura ad benedicendum Deum invitatur, etiam tenebrae cum luce ponuntur.", "source": "PL 131, col. 55C", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And he divided the light from the darkness. Darkness (tenebrae) is so called from holding (tenendo), because it holds the eyes so that they may not see. But God made both, the light and the darkness — namely, that men might work in the light and rest in the night. Therefore the darkness too is a work of God. Whence in the hymn of the three young men, in which every creature is invited to bless God, the darkness also is set down along with the light.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-4b", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-4b/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 890, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Divisit lucem a tenebris in hac die: quia hac aetate filii Dei, id est, filii Seth separati sunt ab impia generatione Cain, cujus vespera fuit multiplicata iniquitas hominum ideo ut induceret Deus diluvium.", "source": "PL 131, col. 58C", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "He divided the light from the darkness on this day: because in this age the sons of God, that is, the sons of Seth, were separated from the impious generation of Cain, whose evening was the multiplied iniquity of men, that God might bring on the flood.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "remigius-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/remigius-gen-1-5/", "author": "Remigius of Auxerre", "tradition": "latin", "date": 900, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Vers. 5. Factum est vespere et mane dies unus. Per mane initium fidei: per vesperam vero perfectio bonae operationis intelligitur. Cujus diei mane in vesperam deducitur cum initium fidei completione bonae operationis perficitur.", "source": "PL 131, col. 56A", "cc_idno": "9346", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Verse 5. 'There was evening and morning, one day.' By morning is understood the beginning of faith; by evening, the perfection of good work. The morning of this day is drawn out into evening when the beginning of faith is perfected by the completion of good work.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-1/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1117, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Cum ipsa creatio principium mundi sit, cur sic dictum est: In principio creavit? Idem enim est ac si diceretur: In principio principium fecit; sed si hoc modo vulgariter hic accipias principium, cum dicitur in principio creavit, vitium est in superfluitate dictionis. Bene ergo hoc loco principium sic accipitur, tanquam proprium quoddam Filii vocabulum, quia videlicet sic ipse voluit, qui cum interrogaretur a Judaeis: Tu quis es? Principium, ait, qui et loquor vobis (Joan. VIII) . Nam vere in hoc principio creavit coelum et terram Deus, quia omnia per ipsum facta sunt (Joan. I) . Hoc et alia Scriptura fatetur, cum dicit: Omnia in sapientia fecisti (Psal. CIII) , quae videlicet sapientia non est alia quam Verbum Dei, Verbum Deus, qui, ut jam dictum est, seipsum principium nuncupavit. Non quidem nativa Scripturae hujus lingua, scilicet Hebraica filium et principium eadem voce significat, filius quippe ben, principium vero bresith dicitur in illa lingua, sed et hoc dicimus, quod et si non voce, sensu tamen Filius principium est. Filius est, quia de Deo natus. Principium, quia creaturarum omnium prima et efficiens causa esse probatur. Itaque in principio, id est in Filio, in Verbo suo, in sapientia sua creavit Deus coelum et terram. Creavit, inquam, id est, non ut philosophi gentilium vane putaverunt, sibi coaevam habuit hylen, sive materiam, sed de nihilo fecit coeli et terrae substantiam.", "source": "PL 167, col. 202A", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Since the creation itself is the beginning of the world, why was it said thus: 'In the beginning he created'? For it is the same as if it were said: In the beginning he made the beginning; and if you take 'beginning' here in the ordinary way when it is said 'in the beginning he created', it is a vice of superfluity of expression. Well, therefore, is 'beginning' taken in this place as a kind of proper name of the Son, because he himself so willed it, who when he was asked by the Jews, 'Who are you?', said: 'The Beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25). For truly in this Beginning God created heaven and earth, because all things were made through him (John 1:3). Another Scripture confesses this too when it says: 'You have made all things in wisdom' (Ps 104:24 [Vg 103:24]) — which wisdom is none other than the Word of God, the Word God, who, as has been said, named himself the beginning. Not indeed that the native tongue of this Scripture, that is Hebrew, signifies son and beginning by one word: for son is ben in that language, and beginning is bresith. But we say this too, that though not in word, yet in sense the Son is the Beginning. He is Son, because born of God; Beginning, because he is shown to be the first and efficient cause of all creatures. And so in the beginning, that is, in the Son, in his Word, in his Wisdom, God created heaven and earth. Created, I say — that is, not, as the philosophers of the gentiles vainly supposed, that he had matter or hyle coeval with himself, but he made the substance of heaven and earth out of nothing.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-1c/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1115, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quod si quis objiciat hominem quoque, cum non de nihilo, sed de terra factus sit, creatum dici, sicut scriptum est: Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam, ad imaginem Dei creavit illum; vel quod item dictum est: Creavitque Deus cete grandia; dicimus ad haec, recte dictum, eo duntaxat respectu quia jam ipsa, de qua productae vel sumptae sunt species, creata fuerat materia, quibus nominibus, scilicet coelo et terra, ut supra dictum est, significari universam creaturam visibilem et invisibilem simul. Et nihil excipi, ex symbolo quoque comprobatur apostolico, quocum dicimus: Credo in Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, creatorem coeli et terrae, nihil creaturarum adjicientes, cuncta his nominibus visibilia simul et invisibilia, nos comprehendisse non dubitamus. Nam in alio nihilominus catholico fidei symbolo cum dicimus: Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae, statim exponentes quid dixerimus coeli et terrae, subjungimus visibilium omnium et invisibilium. Igitur, quod dictum est, in principio creavit Deus coelum et terram, idem est ac si diceretur: Per Filium suum Deus Pater creavit omnium visibilium et invisibilium substantiam universam, talem adhuc qualem subsecutus terram exprimit: Terra autem erat inanis et vacua.", "source": "PL 167, col. 202C", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But if anyone should object that man too, though made not out of nothing but out of the earth, is said to be created — as it is written, 'And God created man to his own image; to the image of God he created him' (Gen 1:27); or again what is likewise said, 'And God created the great sea-creatures' (Gen 1:21) — we say to this that it is rightly said, but in this respect only, that the matter out of which those forms were produced or taken had already been created. And by these names, that is heaven and earth, as was said above, the whole creation visible and invisible together is signified. That nothing is excepted is proved from the apostolic creed also, in which we say: I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth — adding nothing of the creatures; we do not doubt that under these names we have taken in all things visible and invisible together. For in the other creed of the catholic faith no less, when we say: I believe in one God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, at once, explaining what we have said by heaven and earth, we add: of all things visible and invisible. Therefore what is said, 'in the beginning God created heaven and earth', is the same as if it were said: through his Son, God the Father created the whole substance of all things visible and invisible, such as yet as the earth that follows expresses: 'But the earth was empty and void.'", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1114, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Caeterum secundum quod jam dictum est, terra erat inanis et vacua, quia nondum illam Creator ab aquis aridam segregaverat, nondum firmaverat, nondum sidera coeli hujus palla vestiverat, nondum tot creaturarum generibus exornaverat. Itaque si diligenter litteram consideres, non cum sua, quae tunc apparet visibili specie, creata est in principio terra, sed erat inanis, inanis scilicet ab omni germine, quod nunc in ea radicatur, et vacua, videlicet a cunctis animantibus quae nunc in ea moventur.", "source": "PL 167, col. 205A", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "For the rest, according to what has already been said, the earth was empty and void, because the Creator had not yet separated it as dry land from the waters, had not yet made it firm, had not yet clothed it with the mantle of the stars of this heaven, had not yet furnished it with so many kinds of creatures. And so, if you consider the letter carefully, the earth was not created in the beginning with the visible appearance of its own which it now shows, but was empty — empty, that is, of every shoot which is now rooted in it — and void, namely of all the living things which now move in it.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-26-consilium", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-26-consilium/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1117, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Ait: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. Mutavit vocem suam, quippe qui hactenus de singulis dixit: Fiat, et factum est; producat terra, producant aquae, et factum est. Nunc autem tanquam a circuitu terrae, coeli et maris, lassabundus resederit, et inter respirandum in mentem illi venerit, adhuc unum deesse quod deceret vel oporteret fieri: Faciamus, inquit, hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. Domine, inquit propheta, consilium tuum antiquum, verum fiat. An tibi parvum videtur consilium, his paucis sanctae Trinitatis dictiunculis esse significatum? Magnum plane consilium in illo Sapientiae consilio, in illo talium personarum, Patris, et Filii et Spiritus sancti, non tam senatu quam soliloquio venerando de nobis peccatoribus habitum est.", "source": "PL 167, col. 247B", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "He says: let us make a human to our image and likeness. He changed his voice — he who until now had said of each single thing: let it be, and it was made; let the earth bring forth, let the waters bring forth, and it was made. But now, as though he had sat down wearied from the circuit of earth and heaven and sea, and while catching his breath it had come into his mind that one thing was still lacking which it would be fitting or needful to make: let us make, he says, a human to our image and likeness. Lord, says the prophet, let your ancient counsel be made true. Or does the counsel seem to you a small one, to have been signified by these few little sayings of the holy Trinity? A plainly great counsel was held in that counsel of Wisdom, in that — not so much a senate as a venerable soliloquy — of such persons, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, concerning us sinners.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-3-trinitas", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-3-trinitas/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1117, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quia creatricis Trinitatis haec sunt opera, bene testimonium suum sancta Scriptura ubique triplicat. Tria nempe dicat sunt, imo ter unum idemque dictum est. Dixit Deus, cujus dixisse fecisse est. Factumque est ita, et protulit terra. Et primum quidem secundum vespere est, id est verbi Dei secretum, in quo vita erat; quidquid mane, id est substantiali rerum productione; factumque est aliud secundum hoc ipsum mane, tertium secundum diem continuum quomodocunque perseverantis creaturae. Hoc in cunctis sex dierum operibus invenies: Dixit Deus: Fiant luminaria, et factum est ita, et fecit Deus duo luminaria magna. Item: Producant aquae reptilia, creavitque Deus cete grandia, benedixitque illis Deus, etc. Sed in creatione lucis dixit Deus: Fiat lux, et facta est lux, et divisit lucem et tenebras. Ubique tria consonant testimonii verba, quia tota ubique vespere et mane et tota die creatrix operatur Trinitas. Et haec est sanctae ac justae legis originalis causa, qua scriptor idem sanxit, ut testibus plus quam tribus nulla judicialis indigeat causa.", "source": "PL 167, col. 229D", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Because these are the works of the creating Trinity, holy Scripture rightly triples its testimony everywhere. For there are three sayings, or rather one and the same thing said three times. God said, whose saying is doing. And so it was done, and the earth brought forth. And the first is according to the evening, that is, the secret of the Word of God, in which was life; whatever is according to the morning, that is, by the substantial bringing forth of things; and another was done according to this same morning, and a third according to the continuing day of the creature persevering in whatever manner. You will find this in all the works of the six days: God said, Let there be luminaries, and it was so, and God made two great luminaries. Again: Let the waters bring forth creeping things, and God created the great sea-creatures, and God blessed them, and so on. But in the creation of the light, God said: Let there be light, and light was made, and he divided the light and the darkness. Everywhere three words of testimony agree, because everywhere, at evening and at morning and through the whole day, the creating Trinity works. And this is the original cause of the holy and just law by which the same writer laid down that no judicial case needs more than three witnesses.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-3/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1117, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Quid autem est hoc ipsum quod dixit: Fiat lux? Quaenam est ista lux? Videtur enim nonnullis lucem tunc esse factam, non aliam quam aeris illustrationem, et tenebras illas quae erant super faciem abyssi, sic alterantibus nocte et die divisas, ut, peracto diurni temporis spatio, duodecim horarum scilicet, lux exstingueretur et tenebrae succederent, et itidem transacto nocturni temporis spatio, lux refulgeret, atque ita, per triduum, dies et nox, absque luminaribus istis corporeis, sole scilicet et luna et stellis, ultro sibi invicem cesserint atque successerint. Sed hoc sensu unus hic dies omnium dierum pauperrimus est, quippe cum singuli dierum caeterarum substantiarum creatione vel formatione illustrati sint, hic dies non nisi accidentis cujusdam colore instabili injecto dimissus sit, cum dictum sit, fiat lux. Nam quaecunque caeteris diebus facta sunt, substantialia sunt et permanent, illa autem accidentalis lux tertio reaccensa deinceps omnino deperiit. Et vide utrum condignum sit tantae majestati ut caeterorum dierum opera, verbi gratia, solem, lunam et stellas quae quarto die facta sunt, et aquarum divisionem quae secundo die facta est, statuerit in saeculum et in saeculum saeculi, praeceptumque poneret illis quod non praeteribit (Psal. CXLVIII) , opus autem primae lucis tale faceret, quod mutato consilio post exiguum triduum funditus exstingueret. Quid ergo? An idcirco Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas, et dixit, fiat, quod dictum, ut vere boni verbi eructationem, sancta miratur et concelebrat Scriptura, ut talis tantummodo lux fieret accidens aeri mox interitura et nulla crearetur substantia? Melius magni et nominatissimi Patres intellexerunt naturam angelicam, lucis nomine significatam. Eorum sensum rationabilem magis approbamus et sequimur, angelicam creaturam recte lucem esse appellatam, lucem intellectualem, lucem, inquam, non solum quia vim discernendi habentem, verum etiam quia veri et incircumscripti luminis gratia refulgentem.", "source": "PL 167, col. 207A", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But what is this very thing that he said, 'Let there be light'? What kind of light is that? For it seems to some that the light then made was nothing other than an illumination of the air, and that those darknesses which were over the face of the abyss were divided by night and day so alternating that, when the space of daytime — twelve hours, that is — was passed, the light was put out and darkness succeeded; and again, when the space of nighttime was over, the light shone out; and so for three days, day and night, without these bodily luminaries, that is without sun and moon and stars, gave way and succeeded to one another of their own accord. But on this reading this one day is the poorest of all days: for whereas each of the other days is made illustrious by the creation or forming of substances, this day is dismissed with nothing but an unstable colour of some accident thrown over it, when it is said 'let there be light'. For whatever was made on the other days is substantial and abides; but that accidental light, once relit on the third day, thereafter perished utterly. And see whether it be worthy of so great a majesty that the works of the other days — the sun, for instance, and moon and stars that were made on the fourth day, and the division of the waters that was made on the second — he should establish for ever and ever, and lay upon them a decree that shall not pass away (Ps 148:6), but should make the work of the first light such that, changing his counsel, he should utterly put it out after a scant three days. What then? Was it for this that the Spirit of God was borne over the waters, and that he said 'let it be' — a saying that holy Scripture wonders at and celebrates as the uttering of a truly good word — that only such a light should come to be, an accident of the air soon to perish, and no substance be created? The great and most renowned Fathers understood better: the angelic nature, signified by the name of light. Their view we approve as the more reasonable and follow it, that the angelic creature is rightly called light — an intellectual light; light, I say, not only as having the power of discerning, but also as shining with the grace of the true and uncircumscribed light.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-4/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1117, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Notandum in primis quod dictum est: Vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona. (Nemo enim bonus, nisi unus Deus [Matth. X] ). Porro quicunque bonus praedicatur, sive homo, sive angelus, nonnisi respectu boni Dei recte bonus praedicatur, quia cum nemo sit bonus nisi unus Deus, quicunque bonus est, vel esse dicitur, nonnisi in tantum bonus est in quantum bono Deo participatur. Proinde non dictum est: Vidit Deus terram quod esset bona, vel luminaria quod essent bona, quia videlicet bonitatis capacia non sunt. Dictum est autem de singulis, vidit Deus quod esset bonum, id est, bona res, bona, inquam, id est, utilis res. Sola namque rationalis creatura divinae bonitatis, id est spiritus Dei, capax est; et ideo homo vel angelus tantummodo bonus absolute dicendus est, videlicet in quantum homo vel angelus boni Dei particeps factus est. Igitur et hoc ipsum judicium quo vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona, lucem illam cogit intelligi quae capax divinae est bonitatis, lucem rationalem, lucem intellectualem, angelicae creaturae splendidam dignitatem. Quomodo autem dictum est, et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona? Nonne antequam faceret, hoc ipsum viderat quia facere bonum erat? Nonne et evangelista sic dicit de Verbo isto in quo dixit, fiat, quia quod factum est, in ipso vita erat? (Joan. I.) Ergo quod vidit, id est, justo judicio ponderavit et conspectu suo dignum duxit. Sequitur enim: Et divisit lucem et tenebras. Divisio ista lucis et tenebrarum terribile Dei judicium super diabolum esse factum insinuat. De quo Psalmista: Tu terribilis es, inquit, et quis resistet tibi? Extunc ira tua (Psal. LXXV) . Tanquam diceret: Quis tibi resistere 6 potest, cum ex quo tibi quis resistit, extunc terribilis exardescat ira tua? Nam ex quo diabolus resistit, id est, resistere voluit tibi, tu iratus es, et resistere non potuit; cecidit enim angelus et factus est diabolus. Hoc terribile judicium per divisionem insinuatur lucis et tenebrarum. Quae enim sunt istae tenebrae, nisi omnes angeli Satanae cum eodem suo principe? Has utique tenebras Deus lucemque divisit, quia malos angelos a bonis separavit. Divisit, inquam, separatione immutabili, ita ut nec isti qui ceciderunt, resurgere, nec illi qui, cum peccare possent, peccando cadere noluerunt, ulterius unquam habeant vel possint peccando cadere. Verbo namque Dei coeli firmati sunt, et spiritu oris ejus omnis virtus eorum (Psal. XXXII) . Ista lux, isti sunt coeli. Lux, inquam, quam Deus a tenebris divisit, et coeli quos Verbo suo, quos Spiritu, id est amore suo: Deus firmavit, ut jam obscurari vel dissolvi non possint: congregans sicut in utre aquas maris, ponens in thesauris abyssos (ibid.) : quae omnia secundum litteram jam in illo exordio facta esse dubium non est. Timeat ergo Dominum omnis terra, ab eo autem commoveantur omnes inhabitantes orbem (ibid.) , quia profecto qualis tunc destruxit consilia superborum spirituum, talis et usque in finem Dominus dissipat consilia gentium; reprobat autem cogitationes populorum, et reprobat consilia principium (ibid.) . Unde autem venerint istae tenebrae, jam dictum est, videlicet unde venit praedicta lux, inde venerunt et istae tenebrae; fuerunt enim lucentes angeli, et proprio vitio facti sunt daemones tenebrosi.", "source": "PL 167, col. 210A", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It is to be noted first of all that it is said: God saw the light, that it was good. (For none is good but one, God — Matt 19:17.) Further, whoever is called good, whether man or angel, is rightly called good only in respect of the good God, since, as none is good but one, God, whoever is good, or is said to be good, is good only in so far as he partakes of the good God. Accordingly it is not said: God saw the earth, that it was good, or the luminaries, that they were good, because they are not capable of goodness. But it is said of each: God saw that it was good — that is, a good thing, good, I say, that is, a useful thing. For the rational creature alone is capable of the divine goodness, that is, of the Spirit of God; and therefore man or angel alone is to be called good absolutely, namely in so far as man or angel has been made a partaker of the good God. Therefore this very judgement by which God saw the light, that it was good, compels that light to be understood which is capable of the divine goodness: a rational light, an intellectual light, the shining dignity of the angelic creature. But how is it said, And God saw the light, that it was good? Had he not seen, before he made it, that to make it was good? Does not the evangelist say of that Word in which he said 'let it be', that what was made, in him was life (John 1:3–4)? Therefore what he saw, he weighed with a just judgement and reckoned worthy of his regard. For there follows: And he divided the light and the darkness. This division of light and darkness intimates that a terrible judgement of God was made upon the devil. Of which the psalmist says: You are terrible, and who shall resist you? From then your anger (Ps 76:8 [Vg 75:8]). […] For since the devil resisted — that is, willed to resist you — you were angry, and he could not resist; for the angel fell and was made a devil. This terrible judgement is intimated by the division of light and darkness. For what are those darknesses, unless all the angels of Satan with their prince? These darknesses, surely, God divided from the light, because he separated the evil angels from the good. He divided them, I say, by an unchangeable separation, so that neither can those who fell rise again, nor can those who, though they could have sinned, refused to fall by sinning, ever fall by sinning any more. […] But whence those darknesses came has already been said: namely, from where the aforesaid light came, thence came those darknesses also; for they were shining angels, and by their own vice were made darksome demons.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-5/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1114, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Notandum hic in primis est quod non dixit: Factaeque sunt tenebrae et lux dies unus. Hoc bene et prudenter a scriptore sacro observatum est. Quae enim Deus divisit, quomodo conjungi vel unum quid efficere possint? 9 Divisit autem lucem et tenebras, appellavitque lucem diem, diem, inquam, totum et plenum absque consortio tenebrarum. Bene ergo dictum est: Factae sunt tenebrae et lux dies unus, quia, sicut jam dictum est, quae Deo dividente separata sunt, sociari vel unum quid efficere non possunt.", "source": "PL 167, col. 217A", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "It is to be noted here first of all that he did not say, 'And there were made darkness and light, one day.' This was well and prudently observed by the sacred writer. For how can the things God divided be joined together, or make some one thing? Now he divided light and darkness, and called the light Day — day, I say, whole and full, without partnership of darkness. […] For, as has been said already, things separated by God's dividing cannot be associated or make some one thing.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "rupert-gen-1-8", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/rupert-gen-1-8/", "author": "Rupert of Deutz", "tradition": "latin", "date": 1114, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Deinceps namque creaturae ejusdem formatio vel exornatio succedit, tantamque ex intentione Spiritus Dei meliorationem et tantum inopiae suae supplementum capit, quantum pro modulo suo melioratur ovum in eo quod calore volucris animatur et pullum producit. Quid autem putamus esse hunc spiritum, nisi bonitatem amoremque Dei, amorem non affectuum, sed substantialem, amorem, inquam, et vitam, virtutemque vivam in Filio et Patre manentem, vel ab utroque procedentem, Patri Filioque consubstantialem.", "source": "PL 167, col. 205C", "cc_idno": "10873", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "For next follows the forming or adorning of that same creature, and it receives from the attention of the Spirit of God as great a bettering and as great a supplying of its poverty as, in its own small measure, an egg is bettered in that it is quickened by a bird's warmth and brings forth a chick. And what do we think this spirit is, but the goodness and love of God — a love not of feelings but substantial; love, I say, and life, and living power abiding in the Son and the Father, or proceeding from both, consubstantial with Father and Son.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "targ-neof-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-neof-1-1/", "author": "Targum Neofiti", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 300, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "מלקדמין בחכמה [בחוכמתא] ברא (ד)יי שכלל [ושכלל] ית שמיא וית ארעא:", "source": "Targum Neofiti, Gen 1:1 (Vatican, Neofiti 1)", "license": "neofiti-vatican", "version": "Sefaria, 'The Vatican Manuscript of the Targum Neofiti'" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning and in great wisdom, God created and finished the heavens and the earth.", "translator": "Sefaria Community Translation", "license": "cc0" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order", "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "targ-neof-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-neof-1-2/", "author": "Targum Neofiti", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 300, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "מלקדמין בחכמה [בחוכמתא] ברא (ד)יי שכלל [ושכלל] ית שמיא וית ארעא: וארעא הוות תהיא ובהיא וצדי [וצדיה] מן בר נש ומן בעיר וריקנא מן כל פלחן צמחין ומן אילנין וחשוכא פריס על אפי תהומא ורוח דרחמין מן קדם יי הוה מנשבא על אפי מיא: ואמר ממ(רא) [נ\"א ממרה] דיי יהוי נהור והות נהור כגזירת ממריה׃ וגלי קדם יי ית נהורא ארום טב הוא ואפשר ממרא דיי בין נהורא לבין חשוכא׃ וקרא ממרא דיי לנהורא איממ׳ ולחשוכא קרא לליא והוא רמש והוה צפר סדר עבד בראשית יום קדמאיי׃ ואמר ממרא דיי יהוי רקיעא במציעות מיא ויהוי מפרש בין מיא ארעא לבין מיא עיליא׃ וברא יי ית רקיעא ואפרש בין מיא די מן תחות רקיעא ובין מיא די מלעיל לרקיעא [לרקיע שמיא] והוה כן כמימריה׃ וקרא ממרא דיי לרקיעא שמיא והוה רמש והוה צפר סדר עבד בראשית יום תניין׃", "source": "Sefaria, Vatican MS Neofiti 1 (whole of 1:1–5 in one segment)", "license": "neofiti-vatican" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning, with wisdom, the Word of the LORD created and perfected the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and empty, desolate of human and beast, empty of all tillage of plants and of trees; and darkness was spread over the face of the deep, and a spirit of mercy from before the LORD was blowing over the face of the waters.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "targ-onk-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-onk-1-1/", "author": "Targum Onkelos", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 200, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "בְּקַדְמִין בְּרָא יְיָ יָת שְׁמַיָּא וְיָת אַרְעָא", "source": "Sefaria, 'Onkelos Genesis'", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning the LORD created the heavens and the earth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order", "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "targ-onk-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-onk-1-2/", "author": "Targum Onkelos", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 200, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וְאַרְעָא הֲוַת צָדְיָא וְרֵיקַנְיָא וַחֲשׁוֹכָא פָּרַשׂ עַל אַפֵּי תְהוֹמָא וְרוּחָא מִן קֳדָם יְיָ מְנַשְּׁבָא עַל אַפֵּי מַיָּא", "source": "Sefaria, 'Onkelos Genesis'", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And the earth was waste and empty, and darkness was spread over the face of the deep, and a wind from before the LORD was blowing over the face of the waters.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "targ-onk-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-onk-1-26/", "author": "Targum Onkelos", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 200, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וַאֲמַר יְיָ נַעֲבִיד אֶינָשָׁא בְּצַלְמֵנָא כִּדְמוּתָנָא וְיִשְׁלְטוּן בְּנוּנֵי יַמָּא וּבְעוֹפָא דִּשְׁמַיָּא וּבִבְעִירָא וּבְכָל אַרְעָא וּבְכָל רִחֲשָׁא דְּרָחֵשׁ עַל אַרְעָא", "source": "Targum Onkelos, Gen 1:26", "license": "pd", "version": "Sefaria 'Onkelos Genesis'" }, "english": { "text": "And the LORD said: let us make a human in our image, as our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the bird of the heavens and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "targ-onk-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-onk-1-4/", "author": "Targum Onkelos", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 150, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וַחֲזָא יְיָ יָת נְהוֹרָא אֲרֵי טָב וְאַפְרֵשׁ יְיָ בֵּין נְהוֹרָא וּבֵין חֲשׁוֹכָא", "source": "Targum Onkelos Gen 1:4", "license": "pd", "version": "Onkelos Genesis" }, "english": { "text": "And the LORD saw the light, that it was good; and the LORD set apart between the light and between the darkness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "targ-onk-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-onk-1-5/", "author": "Targum Onkelos", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 200, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וּקְרָא יְיָ לִנְהוֹרָא יְמָמָא וְלַחֲשׁוֹכָא קְרָא לֵילְיָא וַהֲוָה רְמַשׁ וַהֲוָה צְפַר יוֹמָא חָד", "source": "Sefaria, 'Onkelos Genesis'", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And the LORD called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "targ-psj-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-psj-1-1/", "author": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 750, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "מִן אַוְולָא בְּרָא יְיָ יַת שְׁמַיָא וְיַת אַרְעָא", "source": "Sefaria, 'Targum Jonathan on Genesis'", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "At the beginning the LORD created the heavens and the earth.", "translator": "J. W. Etheridge, 1862", "license": "etheridge" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order", "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "targ-psj-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-psj-1-2/", "author": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 750, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וְאַרְעָא הֲוַת תַּהֲיָיא וּבַהֲיָיא צַדְיָא מִבְּנֵי נַשׁ וְרֵיקַנְיָא מִן כָּל בְּעִיר וַחֲשׁוֹכָא עַל אַפֵּי תְהוֹמָא וְרוּחַ רַחֲמִין מִן קֳדָם יְיָ מְנַתְבָא עַל אַנְפֵּי מַיָא", "source": "Sefaria, 'Targum Jonathan on Genesis'", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And the earth was vacancy and desolation, solitary of the sons of men, and void of every animal; and darkness was upon the face of the abyss, and the Spirit of mercies from before the Lord breathed upon the face of the waters.", "translator": "J. W. Etheridge, 1862", "license": "pd" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "targ-psj-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-psj-1-26/", "author": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 750, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וַאֲמַר יְיָ לְמַלְאָכַיָא דִמְשַׁמְשִׁין קוֹמוֹי דְאִיתְבְּרִי בְּיוֹם תִּנְיָן לִבְרִיַית עַלְמָא נַעֲבֵיד אָדָם בְּצַלְמָנָא בִּדְיוֹקְנָנָא וְיִשְׁלְטוּן בְּכַוְורֵי יַמָא וּבְעוֹפָא דְאַוִיר שְׁמַיָא וּבִבְעִירָא וּבְכָל אַרְעָא וּבְכָל רִיחֲשָׁא דִרְחֵישׁ עֲלוֹי אַרְעָא", "source": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Gen 1:26", "license": "pd", "version": "Sefaria 'Targum Jonathan on Genesis'" }, "english": { "text": "And the Lord said to the angels who ministered before Him, who had been created in the second day of the creation of the world, Let us make man in Our image, in Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl which are in the atmosphere of heaven, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every reptile creeping upon the earth.", "translator": "J. W. Etheridge, 1862", "license": "etheridge" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "targ-psj-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-psj-1-4/", "author": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 650, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וַחֲזָא יְיָ יַת נְהוֹרָא אֲרוּם טַב וְאַפְרֵישׁ יְיָ בֵּין נְהוֹרָא וּבֵין חֲשׁוֹכָא", "source": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Gen 1:4", "license": "pd", "version": "Targum Jonathan on Genesis" }, "english": { "text": "And the Lord beheld the light, that it was good; and the Lord divided between the light and the darkness.", "translator": "J. W. Etheridge, 1862", "license": "etheridge" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "targ-psj-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/targ-psj-1-5/", "author": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan", "tradition": "rabbinic", "date": 750, "original": { "lang": "arc", "text": "וּקְרָא יְיָ לִנְהוֹרָא יְמָמָא וְעַבְדֵהּ לְמִפְלַח בֵּיהּ דַיְירֵי עַלְמָא וְלַחֲשׁוֹכָא קָרָא לֵילְיָא וְעַבְדֵיהּ לְמֵינַח בֵּיהּ בִּרְיָיתָא וַהֲוָה רְמַשׁ וַהֲוָה צְפַר יוֹמָא חָד", "source": "Sefaria, 'Targum Jonathan on Genesis'", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And the LORD called the light Day, and made it that the inhabitants of the world might labour in it; and the darkness he called Night, and made it that in it the creatures might have rest. And it was evening, and it was morning, one day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "vulgate-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/vulgate-1-1/", "author": "Jerome", "tradition": "latin", "date": 392, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "In principio creavit Deus coelum et terram.", "source": "PL 28, col. 163C", "cc_idno": "7204", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what", "heaven-earth-order", "ex-nihilo-or-matter", "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "vulgate-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/vulgate-1-2/", "author": "Jerome", "tradition": "latin", "date": 392, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae [ Vulg. addit erant] super faciem abyssi, et Spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.", "source": "PL 28, col. 163C", "cc_idno": "7204", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "But the earth was empty and void, and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was borne over the waters.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering", "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "vulgate-1-3", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/vulgate-1-3/", "author": "Jerome", "tradition": "latin", "date": 392, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux. Et facta est lux.", "source": "PL 28, col. 163C", "cc_idno": "7204", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God said: Let there be light. And light was made.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "first-light" ] }, { "id": "vulgate-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/vulgate-1-4/", "author": "Jerome", "tradition": "latin", "date": 392, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et vidit Deus lucem quod esset bona: et divisit lucem a tenebris.", "source": "PL 28, col. 163C", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And God saw the light, that it was good: and he divided the light from the darkness.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "vulgate-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/vulgate-1-5/", "author": "Jerome", "tradition": "latin", "date": 392, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Appellavitque lucem Diem, et tenebras Noctem: Factumque est vespere et mane, dies unus.", "source": "PL 28, col. 163C", "cc_idno": "7204", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night. And there was made evening and morning, one day.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-1", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-1/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "D. Genesis unde hoc nomen accepit? M. LXX etenim Interpretes, Symmachus et Theodotion in principio transtulerunt, et in Hebraeo scriptum est Bresith, quod Aquila interpretatur in capitulo. Et ideo secundum sensum magis quam secundum verbi translationem, de Christo accipi potest, qui tam in ipso fronte Geneseos, qui caput omnium librorum est, quam in principio Joannis evangelistae, coeli et terrae conditor approbatur. Unde et in Psalterio de seipso ait: In capite libri scriptum est de me (Psal. XXXIX, 8) . Id est in principio Geneseos. Et in Evangelio, Omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil (Joan. I, 3) . Ideo sciendum quod liber hic apud Hebraeos Bresith vocetur, hanc habentes consuetudinem ut voluminibus ex principibus eorum nomina imponant.", "source": "PL 96, col. 1105C", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "D. Whence did Genesis take this name? — M. For the Seventy Translators, Symmachus and Theodotion rendered 'in the beginning', and in the Hebrew it is written Bresith, which Aquila translates 'in the head'. And therefore it can be taken of Christ according to the sense rather than according to the translation of the word: he who, both at the very forehead of Genesis, which is the head of all the books, and at the beginning of John the Evangelist, is shown to be the founder of heaven and earth. Whence also in the Psalter he says of himself: 'In the head of the book it is written of me' (Ps 40:8 [Vg 39:8]) — that is, in the beginning of Genesis. And in the Gospel, 'All things were made through him, and without him was made nothing' (John 1:3). Therefore it is to be known that this book is called Bresith among the Hebrews, they having the custom of giving volumes their names from their opening words.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "beginning-of-what" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-1c", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-1c/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "Et ideo Deus rectissime creditur omnia de nihilo fecisse, quia etiamsi omnia formata de ista materia facta sunt, haec ipsa tamen materia de nihilo facta est. Non enim debemus esse similes istis, qui omnipotentem Deum non credunt aliquid de nihilo facere potuisse, cum considerant fabros et quoslibet opifices non posse aliquid fabricare, nisi habuerint unde fabricent. Et ligna enim adjuvant fabrum, et argentum adjuvat argentarium, et aurum aurificem, et terra figulum adjuvat, ut possit perficere opera sua. Si enim non adjuventur ea materia unde aliquid faciunt, nihil possunt facere, cum materiam ipsam non ipsi faciunt. Non enim faber facit lignum, sed de ligno aliquid facit, sic et caeteri omnes opifices. Omnipotens autem Deus nulla re adjuvandus erat, quam ipse non fecerat, ut quod volebat efficeret; si enim ad eas res quas facere volebat, adjuvabat eum aliqua res quam ipse non fecerat, non erat omnipotens; quod sacrilegum est credere.", "source": "PL 96, col. 1113B", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "And therefore God is most rightly believed to have made all things out of nothing: because even if all formed things were made out of that matter, that matter itself was made out of nothing. For we ought not to be like those who do not believe that almighty God could make anything out of nothing, when they consider that craftsmen and workmen of any kind cannot make anything unless they have something to make it from. For wood helps the craftsman, and silver helps the silversmith, and gold the goldsmith, and earth helps the potter to be able to finish his works. If they are not helped by that matter out of which they make something, they can make nothing, since they themselves do not make the matter. For the craftsman does not make the wood, but makes something out of wood: and so all other workmen. But almighty God had no need to be helped by any thing that he had not himself made, in order to bring about what he willed; for if some thing that he had not himself made helped him towards the things he willed to make, he was not almighty: which it is sacrilege to believe.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ex-nihilo-or-matter" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-1d", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-1d/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "M. Dicamus quia in principio sibi coaeterno fecit Deus coelum et terram, in unigenito Filio qui est sapientia Patris, de quo dicit Apostolus, Christum Dei virtutem et Dei sapientiam (I Cor. I, 24) .", "source": "PL 96, col. 1115A", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "M[aster]. Let us say that in a Beginning coeternal with himself God made heaven and earth — in the only-begotten Son, who is the Wisdom of the Father, of whom the Apostle says: Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:24).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-2-tohu", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-2-tohu/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "D. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua (Gen. I, 2) . Cur inanis et vacua? M. Id est quia non erat a mari distincta; vacua, inquit, quia littoribus non erat circumdata, vel vicibus suis ornata, id est arboribus et animalibus. Item spiritaliter: Terra scilicet carnis nostrae inanis et vacua erat, priusquam doctrinae acceperit formam.", "source": "PL 96, col. 1116B", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "D. 'But the earth was empty and void' (Gen 1:2). Why empty and void? M. That is, because it was not divided off from the sea; void, he says, because it was not surrounded by shores, nor adorned with its own furnishings, that is, with trees and animals. Likewise spiritually: the earth, namely, of our flesh was empty and void, before it received the form of doctrine.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "tohu-vabohu" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-2", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-2/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "D. Quomodo spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas, edissere? HIERONYMUS. M. Pro eo quod in nostris codicibus scriptum est, ferebatur; in Hebraeo habetur merephet, quod nos appellare possumus, incubabat, sive confovebat in similitudinem volucris ova calore animantis. Ex quo intelligimus, non de spiritu mundi dici, ut nonnulli arbitrantur, sed de Spiritu sancto, qui et ipse vivificator omnium a principio dicitur.", "source": "PL 96, col. 1116C", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Disciple: Explain how the Spirit of God was borne over the waters. — JEROME. Master: For what our copies have as 'was borne,' the Hebrew has merephet, which we may render 'was brooding' or 'was warming,' in the likeness of a bird quickening her eggs with her heat. From this we understand that it is not said of the spirit of the world, as some suppose, but of the Holy Spirit, who is himself called the giver of life to all things from the beginning.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "ruach-hovering" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-26", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-26/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "D. Hoc primum breviter dicimus non indifferenter accipiendum, quod in aliis operibus dicitur, dixit Deus, Fiat, hic autem dixit Deus, Faciamus. M. Ad insinuandum, ut ita dicam, pluralitatem personarum, propter Patrem et Filium et Spiritum sanctum, quam tamen deitatis unitatem intelligendam statim admonuit dicens: Et fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam.", "source": "PL 96, col. 1132C", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "D. This first we say briefly, that it is not to be taken as a matter of indifference that in the other works it is said, God said, let it be; but here, God said, let us make. M. To intimate, if I may so put it, a plurality of persons, on account of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit — yet he at once warned that the unity of the deity is to be understood, saying: and God made the human to his own image.", "translator": "claude-draft", "license": "cc-by", "status": "draft-awaiting-approval" }, "cruxes": [ "elohim-and-trinity" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-4", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-4/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "AUGUSTINUS. D. Et divisit lucem a tenebris (Ibid.) . Divisit, inquit scriptura, lucem a tenebris: omne enim quod dividitur, et esse potest. Sicut ergo est essentia lucis, ita essentia tenebrarum. Et cur non dicit Scriptura, vidit Deus tenebras quod essent bonae, sicut de luce dictum est? M. Deus bona et incommutabili voluntate creavit omnes angelos bonos, sed quia ex his quosdam per superbiam praesciebat casuros, per incommutabilitatem praescientiae suae divisit inter bonos et malos. Malos igitur appellans tenebras, bonos appellans lucem, in his dicens quia boni sunt, in illis nullatenus dicens, ne peccata quae erant tenebrae adprobare videretur. ITEM ALIBI. D. Divisit lucem a tenebris. Quid est lucem a tenebris dividere? M. Id est, distinctio rei formatae ab informi.", "source": "PL 96, col. 1120A", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "AUGUSTINE. D[isciple]. And he divided the light from the darkness. Scripture says he divided the light from the darkness: for everything that is divided can also be. As therefore there is an essence of light, so there is an essence of darkness. And why does Scripture not say, God saw the darkness, that it was good, as was said of the light? M[aster]. God with a good and unchangeable will created all the angels good, but because he foreknew that some of them would fall through pride, by the unchangeableness of his foreknowledge he divided between the good and the evil. Calling the evil darkness, then, and the good light, he says of these that they are good, and of those he says it not at all, lest he should seem to approve the sins which were the darkness. ELSEWHERE AGAIN. D. He divided the light from the darkness. What is it to divide the light from the darkness? M. It is the distinction of the formed thing from the unformed.", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "good-and-separated" ] }, { "id": "wigbod-gen-1-5", "url": "https://bereshit.wrootpress.com/witnesses/wigbod-gen-1-5/", "author": "Wigbod", "tradition": "latin", "date": 790, "original": { "lang": "la", "text": "D. Factumque est vespere et mane dies unus (Ibid.) . Quomodo hoc intelligendum est? M. Quid per vesperam nisi perfectio singulorum operum, et mane est inchoatio sequentium? AUGUSTINUS. D. Primum enim diem astruis spiritalem esse creaturam, et quomodo habuit vespere et mane? M. Omnis namque creatura antequam tempore suo fieret, in ipso Dei Verbo erat, prius ab angelis cognoscenda, et sic suo tempore facienda. Quapropter ipsa creaturae cognitio in semetipsa vespera erat, in Deo autem mane, quia plus videtur ipsa creatura in Domino, quam in seipsa videtur creatura. Plus scilicet videtur in arte qua facta est, quam in seipsa quae facta est.", "source": "PL 96, col. 1120D", "cc_idno": "8606", "license": "pd" }, "english": { "text": "Disciple: 'And there was evening and morning, one day.' How is this to be understood? — Master: What is evening but the perfecting of each several work, and morning the beginning of those that follow? — AUGUSTINE. Disciple: You maintain that the first day is a spiritual creature; how then did it have evening and morning? — Master: Every creature, before it was made in its own time, was in the Word of God itself, to be known first by the angels and so to be made in its own time. Wherefore the creature's own knowledge of itself was evening; in God, however, morning — because the creature is seen more fully in the Lord than the creature is seen in itself; seen more fully, that is, in the art by which it was made than in itself which was made. For this reason the evangelist John says: 'What was made, in him was life' (John 1:3–4).", "translator": "claude-draft-approved", "license": "cc-by" }, "cruxes": [ "one-day-evening-first" ] } ], "threads": [ { "id": "t-k3-01", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "to": "br-1-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The star thread of the site. Both ask why the plural noun Elohim takes a singular verb, in the same words. R. Yitzḥak: 'bereshit bare'u Elohim is not written here, but bara Elohim' — and therefore no creature can say that two authorities created the world. Abelard: 'unde autem dictum est Eloim creavit, non creaverunt? ut videlicet ad plurale nomen singulare verbum referretur; quatenus insinuaretur in tribus illis personis non tres creatores, sed unum tantum debere intelligi.' One grammatical fact, seven hundred years apart, no contact, and the same conclusion drawn about the verb — one creator — from opposite conclusions about the noun.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-02", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The same question and the opposite answer, twenty years apart and with no possible contact. Abelard: Eloim is plural, showing a plurality of divine persons, each of which is God, and the singular verb shows they are one creator. Ibn Ezra: Elohim is the plural of eloah, and the plural is how the Holy Tongue speaks of the great — as adonim and be'alim are plural for one master, and as a king in Arabic speaks of himself in the plural — 'and for this reason Scripture says bara and not bare'u.' Each has the whole of the other's evidence and takes the plural to mean the opposite thing.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-03", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim", "to": "br-1-7", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Ibn Ezra's closing clause is Bereshit Rabbah's argument reduced to a grammarian's note: 'for this reason Scripture says bara and not bare'u.' What the midrash offers as a refutation of two authorities, he offers as the expected concord of an honorific plural — the same reading with the polemic taken out and a comparative philology of Arabic, Hebrew and the vernaculars put in.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-04", "from": "ramban-1-1-elohim", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ramban has Ibn Ezra open in front of him throughout the comment on this verse and takes the plural the other way: not an honorific but a compound, el hem, the force and 'they' — all the other forces — so that Elohim is the force of all forces. He does not deny the grammar; he refuses to let the plural be empty. 'A secret will yet be disclosed in connection with this' says that the real answer is one he will not print.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-05", "from": "ramban-1-1-elohim", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two witnesses on this daf who make the plurality of the noun a plurality in God, and they could not be further apart on what it is. Abelard: a diversity of persons, of which each one is God, and the doctrine is preachable and technical — opera Trinitatis indivisa. Ramban: the master of all the forces, and a secret that will be disclosed elsewhere. A century apart, in Paris and in Girona, with nothing between them but the same three consonants.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-06", "from": "b-meg-9a", "to": "br-1-7", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same anxiety twice, once as exegesis and once as translation history. R. Yitzḥak proves from the singular verbs that no one can say two authorities created the world; the elders before Ptolemy move the divine name to the front of the sentence — 'God created in the beginning' — so that bereshit cannot be read as the subject of bara, that is, as a power that made God. Both are defending the first verse against a reading that finds more than one maker in it.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-07", "from": "b-meg-9a", "to": "br-1-12", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The elders reverse the word order that R. Yudan and Ben Azzai explain and praise. For the Bavli's baraita the sequence bereshit bara … Elohim is a danger to be removed for a Greek reader; for Bereshit Rabbah it is the Holy One's modesty — a mortal king proclaims his name and produces his works afterwards, but God acted first and was named after. The same three words are a liability in Alexandria and a virtue in Caesarea.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-08", "from": "b-meg-9a", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The baraita reports the elders removing from the Greek exactly the two features the Latin bench builds on, and neither removal reached the Church. The first item on their list is the word order of Gen 1:1; the second is the plural of Gen 1:26 turned singular. The Septuagint as transmitted has neither change. Abelard's argument needs the plural noun standing next to a singular verb in the first verse, which is what the elders are said to have rearranged, and Bruno's needs the 'let us make' of Gen 1:26, which is what they are said to have made singular.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-09", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1c", "to": "br-1-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both refuse a plurality of creators in the same words and against different opponents. R. Yitzḥak: no creature can say that two authorities created the world. Bruno: was he speaking to the angels? God forbid — for otherwise there would be not one creator but many, whereas God alone is the creator of all. The premise is shared exactly; what Bruno does next with it, and the midrash cannot, is find the second and third persons in the same verses.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-10", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1c", "to": "aug-conf-13-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Habes ergo Deum, id est Patrem; habes et principium, id est Filium … Habes igitur et Spiritum sanctum' is Augustine's three-term reading turned into a schoolroom enumeration, with the same John 8:25 for the Son and the same Spirit of v. 2 for the third. What Augustine reached at the end of a search and called a riddle, Bruno hands over in three sentences as something the reader can check.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-11", "from": "aug-conf-13-5", "to": "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same triad in the same order in two works: the Father in the name of God, the Son in the name of the Beginning, the Spirit borne over the waters, which De Genesi ad litteram calls the completa commemoratio Trinitatis. What the Confessions add is the sequence of the search — he held two, he already believed the third, and he went looking for it in the text.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-12", "from": "aug-gnl-imp-1-2", "to": "aug-conf-13-5", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine on both sides of the question this crux really turns on. In the unfinished commentary the catholic faith is set out before the exposition begins, expressly because heretics drag Scripture to their own opinion, so that the Trinity is the rule the chapter will be read under. In the Confessions the Trinity 'appears to me in a riddle' out of the first words. The two are not incompatible and he never reconciles them, and every later Latin witness on this daf writes as though only the second were true.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-13", "from": "basil-hex-2-6b", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-8-29", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Ambrose is reading Basil at Milan and makes the same choice between the same two readings: either the spirit of v. 2 is the air, or it is the Holy Spirit — 'but we, agreeing with the judgement of the saints and the faithful, take it as the Holy Spirit, so that the working of the Trinity may shine out in the constitution of the world.' Basil's reason is that Scripture reserved the name; Ambrose's is that the third person is needed to complete the triad the first verse began.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-14", "from": "basil-hex-2-6b", "to": "bede-gen-1-2", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Expletor and the same argument from the shape of the sentence, three centuries and a language apart: Basil, that no other spirit is meant but the Holy, who is the completer of the venerable Trinity; Bede, that having first declared that in the beginning, that is in the Son, the Father made heaven and earth, Scripture brought in mention of the Holy Spirit too, so as to signify the power of the whole Trinity together in the creation of the world.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-15", "from": "aug-conf-13-5", "to": "bede-gen-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Bede's sentence is Augustine's triad with the two halves welded: 'in principio, id est in Filio, Pater fecit coelum et terram' and then the Spirit added 'ut totius simul Trinitatis in creatione mundi virtutem significaret'. The riddle has become a demonstration, and the word aenigma is gone.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-16", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-1d", "to": "aug-conf-13-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'In principio sibi coaeterno fecit Deus coelum et terram, in unigenito Filio qui est sapientia Patris' is Augustine's 'in Principio sapientiae nostrae quod est tua Sapientia de te nata, aequalis tibi et coaeterna, id est in Filio tuo' with the possessives dropped and 1 Cor 1:24 put in for the identification. The Carolingian dialogue asked a question about time and was answered with a person.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-17", "from": "remigius-gen-1-1c", "to": "wigbod-gen-1-1d", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same identification with the same proof text, and Remigius adds the guard the dialogue does not have: God the Father too is a beginning, but not from a beginning, since he is begotten of none. Once 'in the beginning' names the Son because the Son is a principium, the word will fit the Father as well, and only Remigius notices.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-18", "from": "remigius-gen-1-1c", "to": "br-1-12", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both benches ask what may properly be predicated of the creator and answer it out of the first verse's word order. R. Yudan in the name of Akilas: to this one it is fitting to call God — because he acted first and was named afterwards, unlike a king acclaimed before he has built anything. Remigius: the Father is a beginning, but not from a beginning. The rabbinic argument is about the order of the words in the sentence and the Latin about the order of the persons in God, and both are reading the same three words.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-19", "from": "rupert-gen-1-3-trinitas", "to": "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Rupert builds his whole Hexaemeron on the reading Augustine considered and refused. Augustine asks whether the Trinity is to be understood in 'God said, let it be — and God made — and God saw that it was good', and answers that it does not befit the unity of the Trinity for the Son to be understood as making under orders and the Spirit as freely approving. Rupert takes the threefold formula as the Trinity's signature everywhere in the six days, and escapes the objection by making the three words a testimony rather than three offices.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-20", "from": "rupert-gen-1-3-trinitas", "to": "rupert-gen-1-8", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "One design stated twice. At Gen 1:2 the Spirit's brooding is what betters the creature as a bird's warmth betters an egg; here the threefold formula of every day's work is the trace of the creating Trinity, tied to the law of three witnesses. Both are claims about how the chapter was written, not about what happened in it.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-21", "from": "honorius-hex-1", "to": "aug-conf-13-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Honorius states the triad and then does something Augustine does not: he distributes the works. 'Note the Trinity: to God the Father is ascribed the creation of the world, to the Son the disposition of things, to the Holy Spirit the quickening or adorning of all.' That is the appropriation doctrine of the twelfth-century schools laid over the first two verses, and it is the distribution of labour Augustine had warned against.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-22", "from": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "to": "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The standard gloss on the Spirit clause is Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram I.5 printed under his name, so that what the twelfth-century schoolroom reads on Gen 1:2 is the third term of Augustine's triad in Augustine's own words — the Spirit borne over the waters not by place but as the will of a craftsman is over what he makes, a love that comes not from need but from bounty.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-23", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "to": "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Abelard names Augustine for the procession — 'the person of the Holy Spirit and of the Father, from whom that Spirit principally proceeds, as blessed Augustine records' — and gets the first half of his Trinity the Augustinian way, out of the sequence of the verses: the Spirit from 'the Spirit of the Lord', the Word from 'God said'. Only then does he turn to the Hebrew noun, which Augustine did not have and could not have used.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-24", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1c", "to": "remigius-gen-1-1c", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same identification of the Son with the principium of Gen 1:1 from the same verse of John — 'ego principium qui et loquor vobis' — in Auxerre about 890 and at Segni about 1090. It is the most stable single move on the Latin bench and it is what makes the three-term reading possible at all: without a person in the second word there is no triad to complete.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-25", "from": "aug-gnl-imp-1-2", "to": "br-1-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both texts open their treatment of Genesis by fencing it against a dualism, and both do it before expounding a word. Augustine sets out the catholic faith first, because many heretics drag the Scriptures to their own opinion, and ends by ruling that nothing in the creature belongs to the Trinity except that the Trinity made it. R. Yitzḥak rules that no creature can say that two authorities created the world. The heresies are not the same and the manoeuvre is identical: the first verse is made to exclude a second maker before it is made to say anything else.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-x1", "from": "comestor-hs-1-1", "to": "aug-conf-13-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 4. 'Creatus autem est in principio, id est in Filio' is Augustine's second term reduced to an apposition and taught as settled — the riddle of Confessions XIII.5 become a gloss a reader passes over. Written at Phase 4 because `comestor-hs-1-1` was built for K1 and its opening clause belongs to this crux.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-x2", "from": "b-meg-9a", "to": "lxx-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Phase 4. The baraita says the seventy-two elders wrote 'God created in the beginning' for Ptolemy, moving the divine name to the front so that bereshit could not be read as a subject. The Septuagint as transmitted has not moved it: en archē epoiēsen ho theos keeps the Hebrew order. The change the rabbinic bench remembers making is not in the Greek the Church inherited, and the Latin reading of the verse stands in the space it would have closed.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-x3", "from": "targ-onk-1-1", "to": "br-1-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 4. The targum removes the difficulty the midrash has to argue about. Where the Hebrew has the plural-looking Elohim with a singular verb, Onkelos writes YY — the Tetragrammaton, which is not plural in form — so that no reader of the Aramaic could raise the question of two authorities at all. R. Yitzḥak has to answer it three times from the verbs.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-26", "from": "basil-hex-1-26-judaei", "to": "targ-psj-1-26", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Basil reports the position and Pseudo-Jonathan is the position. 'Ferunt enim, quod angelis dixerit: Faciamus hominem' — for they say that he said it to the angels — is answered as a Judaica fictio; and the targum reads, in the biblical line itself, 'and the LORD said to the angels who minister before him … let us make a human in our image'. Basil's argument against it is the image clause: is there one image of God and of the angels? The targum has already met that by dating the angels to the second day, so that they are creatures and no rival makers. Neither text has the other, and the caricature turns out to be a quotation.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-27", "from": "basil-hex-1-26-judaei", "to": "br-8-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The same grammatical proof on both benches, aimed in opposite directions, and each aimed at the other's people. Basil: 'Non enim dixit ad imagines nostras, sicut et Scriptura testatur: Fecit Deus, inquit, hominem: non fecerunt' — God made the human, they did not make — used to show that the plural is of persons and not of makers. R. Simlai, asked by the minim how many divinities created the world: 'va-yivre'u Elohim et ha-adam be-tzalmeihem is not said, but va-yivra Elohim et ha-adam be-tzalmo.' One verse, one observation about the number of the verb, two disputations, and each bench is arguing with the other's readers.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-28", "from": "ambrose-hex-6-7-40", "to": "basil-hex-1-26-judaei", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Ambrose is working through Basil at Milan and keeps the order of the questions: to whom does he say it — not to himself, because he does not say faciam; not to the angels, because a servant is no partner in the master's work; therefore to the Son. What he adds is the second front: 'etiamsi Judaei nolint; etiamsi Ariani repugnent', so that the Jewish reading of the plural and the Arian subordination of the Son are refuted by one argument, and whoever denies the Son a share in the working ends by making a gift of it to servuli.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-29", "from": "ambrose-hex-6-7-40", "to": "rashi-1-26-minim", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same grammatical fact, the same use made of it, and opposite conclusions about the hearer. Ambrose: 'Cui dicit? Non sibi utique, quia non dicit, faciam, sed faciamus' — he cannot be speaking to himself, because the verb is not singular. Rashi: 'had it written e'eseh adam, we should not have learned that he speaks with his court but with himself.' Both rule out the soliloquy from the form of the verb; Ambrose concludes that the hearer is the Son, Rashi that it is the household above. Milan about 387 and Troyes about 1090, with no possible contact, reasoning identically to incompatible ends.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-30", "from": "aug-gnl-imp-16-61", "to": "ambrose-hex-6-7-40", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine takes away the answer Ambrose had just given, and on grammatical grounds. If the Father were speaking to the Son, then 'ad imaginem nostram' would have to be 'ad imaginem tuam' or 'ad imaginem meam'; and if the plural covered the Father and the Son only, 'a qua pluralitate Spiritum sanctum separare quis audeat?' So the plural is not a conversation between two persons but the Trinity speaking of itself, and the human is made to the image of the whole. Comestor will print both readings side by side eight hundred years later without noticing that the second was written to exclude the first.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-31", "from": "aug-gnl-3-19-29", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-16-61", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same reading twenty years on, with the polemic gone and one sentence added that the whole Latin bench will quote: it is not a matter of indifference that elsewhere Scripture says dixit Deus, fiat, and here dixit Deus, faciamus. The unfinished commentary argued from ad imaginem nostram; the finished one argues from the change of formula, which is a claim about how the chapter is written rather than about what the words mean, and is therefore the version that can be abridged into a gloss.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-32", "from": "aug-civ-16-6", "to": "b-sanh-38b-tshuva", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The strongest structural parallel on the site, and neither side can have known the other. R. Yoḥanan's rule at Sanhedrin 38b lists the places where the minim broke loose with the refutation beside each, and the first two are Gen 1:26, answered by the singular of Gen 1:27, and Gen 11:7 — havah nerdah, come let us go down — answered by the singular of Gen 11:5. Augustine's chapter is headed 'qualis intelligenda sit esse locutio, qua Deus Angelis loquitur' and takes up the same two verses in the same order: at Gen 1:26 the angels are excluded, because ad imaginem nostram forbids them, and 'non dixit, Fecerunt dii'; at Gen 11:7, where there is no image clause, 'si aliquid esset, quod Angelos prohiberet intelligi' — and nothing is, so the angels stand. Two benches select the same pair out of the Pentateuch by the same criterion, a plural verb of divine speech, and apply the same test, the singular that follows. They disagree only about what the plural was doing there.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-33", "from": "glossa-11-7-angeli", "to": "b-sanh-38b-tshuva", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The Gloss joins Gen 11:7 to Gen 1:26 and answers both with their singulars — 'Ad angelos dixisse intelligitur; vel secundum illud: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram. Nam singulari numero subjunctum est: et divisit eos, sicut ibi: Fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem suam' — which is R. Yoḥanan's list and R. Yoḥanan's test, in a Latin schoolbook, with the conclusion left open. It is the one place in the Gloss where the angel reading is printed as the plain sense, and it is printed at the verse where the argument from the image cannot be run.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-34", "from": "glossa-11-7-angeli", "to": "aug-civ-16-6", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The gloss is Augustine's chapter reduced to its verdict. De civitate Dei XVI.6 grants the angels at Babel because nothing prevents them, having refused them at Gen 1:26 because of the image; the Gloss keeps the grant, keeps the cross-reference to faciamus hominem, and drops the reason for the difference — so that a twelfth-century reader meets the angel reading of one plural without the argument that had excluded it from the other.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-35", "from": "glossa-1-26", "to": "aug-gnl-3-19-29", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The standard gloss on Gen 1:26 is De Genesi ad litteram III.19 printed under Augustine's name and cut to its two moves: the plural intimates the persons, the singular of v. 27 gives the unity of the deity. What is cut is the argument — Augustine's 'alioquin non vere dictum est, ad imaginem nostram, si ad Patris solius, aut Filii solius imaginem factus est homo' becomes a bare 'non enim vere diceretur ad imaginem nostram'. This is the page on which Hugh, Abelard and Comestor all begin.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-36", "from": "bede-gen-1-26", "to": "basil-hex-1-26-judaei", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Bede is copying the Latin Basil and keeping the sentence while dropping the fight. 'Donec is qui doceretur non erat, in profundo fuit abdita praedicatio Deitatis; ubi vero coepit hominis exspectari creatio, revelata est fides' stands word for word in both. What Bede removes is every Jew in the passage, and what he puts in its place is a reason: it could not be said to angels, 'quia nulla prorsus ratio sinit ut Dei et angelorum unam esse eamdemque imaginem sive similitudinem credamus'. The argument survives the polemic, and it is the argument, not the polemic, that Rabanus and Angelomus then copy from Bede.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-37", "from": "alcuin-int-36-37", "to": "br-8-8", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both take the change of formula to be about the standing of the creature rather than about God, and they draw opposite morals from it. Alcuin: why of the human alone is it said faciamus? — so that, a rational creature being founded, it might be seen to be made with counsel, 'et ut ejus nobilitas ostenderetur'. Bereshit Rabbah: the plural was worth the opening it gives the minim because a great man who will not ask leave of a lesser must learn from his Creator, who consulted the ministering angels. Nobility on one bench, humility on the other, out of the same observation that this verse and no other has a consultative form.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-38", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-26", "to": "aug-gnl-3-19-29", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Augustine's sentence cut in half and given to two speakers, D and M, so that the observation is a pupil's and the doctrine a master's, and headed AMBROSIUS. One word changes and it matters: Augustine wrote 'ad imaginem Dei' and argued for a page why it is not 'ad imaginem Filii'; Wigbod writes 'ad imaginem suam', which settles the question by removing it.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-39", "from": "remigius-gen-1-26", "to": "br-8-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same question in one word each. Remigius: 'quasi quodam concilio dicit: Faciamus' — as though by a kind of council he says, let us make. Bereshit Rabbah: 'be-mi nimlakh', with whom did he take counsel. Both take the change of formula to imply a consultation and then have to say with whom; and Remigius adds the line that shows the Latin bench knew there was more than one answer available — 'quod, licet quidam ad angelos referendum dicant, melius tamen ad sanctam Trinitatem refertur'. Some do refer it to the angels, at Auxerre about 890, and he neither names them nor refutes them.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-40", "from": "rupert-gen-1-26-consilium", "to": "br-8-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Bereshit Rabbah 8:3 sets out two extremes and does not choose: R. Yehoshua in R. Levi's name has God consult the work of heaven and earth, with a parable of a king and his two sanqlitin — Greek synklētikoi, senators — and R. Ami has him take counsel be-libbo, with his own heart. Rupert names both in Latin and chooses: the counsel of the Trinity was 'non tam senatu quam soliloquio venerando … habitum'. The Roman word for the one and the Augustinian word for the other, six hundred years later, at Liège, with no contact; and the soliloquy that proves for R. Ami that nobody else was present proves for Rupert that three persons were.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-41", "from": "abelard-hex-1-26-faciamus", "to": "br-8-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "R. Ami's answer with a bibliography. 'Quasi ergo aliquis secum loquens se et rationem suam quasi duo constituit cum eam consulit, sicut Boetius in libro De consolatione Philosophiae, vel Augustinus in libro Soliloquiorum' — a man who consults his own reason sets up himself and his reason as two. That is be-libbo nimlakh, he took counsel with his heart, made into a philosophical model; and where the midrash uses the inward counsel to show that no second party was present, Abelard uses it to show how a real plurality speaks with one mouth.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-42", "from": "abelard-hex-1-26-faciamus", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1-eloim", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "One man, one argument, two verses, and the pair is the whole of this crux. At Gen 1:1 the evidence is a Hebrew noun plural in form beside a singular verb — 'unde autem dictum est Eloim creavit, non creaverunt?' At Gen 1:26 it is a Latin verb plural in form beside the singular of v. 27 — 'sed cur pluraliter dicitur: faciamus hominem ad imaginem nostram, si nulla prorsus pluralitas in Deo sit … et creavit Deus hominem'. The inference is identical both times, the plural for the persons and the singular for the one creator, and both times it is addressed to Jews by name: dicant Judaei si possunt.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-43", "from": "abelard-hex-1-26-faciamus", "to": "rashi-1-26-minim", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The opening and the man who takes it, forty years apart and about two hundred miles. Rashi grants that na'aseh gives the minim room to rebel, and keeps it anyway for the sake of the lesson in humility, writing the refutation beside it: va-yivra and not va-yivre'u. Abelard walks into precisely that opening — 'dicant Judaei si possunt, vel nobiscum fateantur in una Divinitatis essentia pluralitatem personarum' — and takes Rashi's own refutation, the singular of v. 27, as the second half of his proof rather than as an answer to it. Neither has read the other and the argument fits together exactly.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-44", "from": "hugh-adnot-1-26", "to": "br-8-8", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The identical moral drawn from the identical difficulty, at St Victor about 1130 and in Galilee seven hundred years earlier. Hugh: God brings in counsel 'ut nos cautos reddat, ne dedignemur consilium accipere et ab aequalibus et a minoribus; cum ipse ad angelos ita loquatur'. Bereshit Rabbah: if a great man will not seek leave from one lesser than himself, let him learn from his Creator, who consulted the ministering angels when he came to make a human. Both make the verse a lesson in taking advice downwards, and both ground the lesson in the angels — which is the one thing about this verse the rest of the Latin bench will not concede.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-45", "from": "hugh-adnot-1-26", "to": "targ-psj-1-26", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Hugh goes further than the targum. Pseudo-Jonathan has God address the ministering angels and stops there, and guards the point by dating them to the second day so that they cannot be co-creators. Hugh writes 'ad angelos ita loquatur, quorum ministerio forsitan formatum est corpus hominis' — by whose ministry perhaps the human body was formed — which grants the angels a hand in the work itself. That is the position Basil calls a Jewish fiction, Ambrose refuses because a servant is no partner, and Bruno says would make many creators; it is in a Victorine schoolbook, offered before the Trinitarian reading and only then set aside with vel quod melius est.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-46", "from": "hugh-adnot-1-26", "to": "remigius-gen-1-26", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same two-reading structure two hundred and forty years apart, and the interval shows the angel reading losing ground without ever being refuted. Remigius: some refer it to the angels, but it is better referred to the holy Trinity. Hugh: he speaks to the angels, by whose ministry perhaps the body was formed — or, what is better, take it as the counsel of the Trinity. Both put the angels first and prefer the Trinity comparatively, neither argues against the angels, and by Comestor's Historia scholastica forty years after Hugh the option is simply not mentioned.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-47", "from": "comestor-hs-1-26", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-16-61", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The handbook prints as an alternative the reading Augustine wrote to exclude. 'Et loquitur Pater ad Filium, et Spiritum sanctum. Vel est quasi communis vox trium personarum' — the first is Ambrose's and Basil's, the second is Augustine's, and Augustine's objection to the first is that ad imaginem nostram would then have to be tuam or meam. Comestor ranks neither and argues for neither. What a priest examined on the Historia scholastica about 1170 knows about this verse is that there are two acceptable answers and no reason to prefer either.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-48", "from": "br-8-9", "to": "br-1-7", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same proof twice in the same compilation, once as exegesis and once as a disputation. R. Yitzḥak at 1:7 observes that the plural-looking Elohim takes singular verbs — not vaydaberu but vaydaber, not bare'u but bara — and concludes that no creature may say two authorities created the world. R. Simlai at 8:9 is asked by the minim how many divinities created the world and answers with the same verb: baru Elohim is not written here but bara Elohim. What 8:9 adds is the occasion. The grammatical observation this crux is built on is, in its own tradition, an answer given to opponents who had asked the question out loud.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-49", "from": "br-8-9", "to": "br-8-8", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Two paragraphs, one anxiety, and they name it the same way: pitchon peh la-minim, an opening for the minim. At 8:8 Moses sees the opening while he is writing the verse and is told to write it anyway; at 8:9 the minim walk through it and are met at the door. R. Simlai's rule states the policy the earlier paragraph enacted — everywhere you find an opening for the minim, you find the refutation beside it — so that the danger and its answer are treated as a designed pair rather than as an accident to be explained away.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-50", "from": "b-sanh-38b-tshuva", "to": "br-8-9", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "R. Simlai's rule become R. Yoḥanan's, with the disputation dropped and the list extended. In the midrash the rule is said between two exchanges and is illustrated by them; in the Bavli it is stated flat and followed by three verse-pairs, Gen 1:26 with 1:27, Gen 11:7 with 11:5, Gen 35:7 with 35:3. The verb hardens too: she'alu ha-minim, the minim asked, becomes kol makom she-pakru ha-minim, everywhere the minim broke loose.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-51", "from": "b-sanh-38b-malachim", "to": "br-8-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Bereshit Rabbah asks with whom God took counsel and gives four answers without choosing; the Bavli tells the story that answers it and lets the answer cost something. Rav Yehuda in Rav's name has God create a company of ministering angels and put the verse to them as a question — retzonkhem na'aseh adam be-tzalmenu — and burn them when they object, and the second company after them, until the third says that the world is his and he may do as he wishes. The consultation is real, in the words of the verse; the partnership is destroyed in the telling.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-52", "from": "rashi-1-26-anvetanuto", "to": "b-sanh-38b-malachim", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rashi's first comment is the Bavli's story turned into a doctrine of God, and he ends by quoting it: 'there are in the heavens beings after my likeness; if there will not be on earth also beings after my likeness, there will be envy among the beings that I have created.' What the daf leaves as a narrative — the angels object, they are burnt — Rashi makes a habit: this is how God judges kings too, as Micaiah saw, and as Daniel's decree of the watchers shows. The word for the court is pamalya shel ma'alah, from the Latin familia.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-53", "from": "rashi-1-26-minim", "to": "br-8-9", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rashi ends the second comment with R. Simlai's answer verbatim in Hebrew — 'and the refutation of the minim he wrote beside it, va-yivra et ha-adam, and he did not write va-yivre'u' — and with it he takes over the midrash's whole posture: name the risk, keep the verse, point to the answer alongside. The one thing he does not take over is R. Simlai's caution. Where the midrash has the disciples object that the minim were pushed off with a reed, Rashi lets the grammatical answer stand as the answer.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-54", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-26-naaseh", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim", "type": "contests", "evidence": "One grammarian, two plurals, two incompatible accounts, and the daf can only show it because both pages are here. At Gen 1:1 the plural noun Elohim is the honorific plural and means nothing more: every language honours the great with a plural, as adonim and be'alim are plural for one master and as a king in Arabic speaks of himself in the plural. At Gen 1:26 Saadia Gaon offers him the identical explanation for the plural verb — na'aseh is the manner of royal speech — and he calls the proof texts false witnesses, parses every one of them away, and puts a real hearer in their place: God said to the angels, let us make a human, we shall occupy ourselves with him and not the water and the earth. The plural of majesty is a fact about nouns and does not reach a verb with a subject; but the reader who has only the Gen 1:1 page would take Ibn Ezra's answer to this crux to be the opposite of what it is.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-55", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-26-naaseh", "to": "rashi-1-26-anvetanuto", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two great northern and southern commentators arrive at the same hearer by different routes and with different tempers. Rashi gets to the angels from the humility of God and the court of 1 Kgs 22, and has to defend the reading against the minim in his next comment. Ibn Ezra gets to them by elimination: the earth and the waters brought forth the plants and the animals, and at the human God says we shall occupy ourselves with him and not they. No court, no humility, no polemic, and no acknowledgement that anybody reads the verse otherwise.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-56", "from": "ramban-1-26-naaseh", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-26-naaseh", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ramban keeps the plural literal and takes the angels out of it. 'Ani ve-ha-aretz ha-nizkeret na'aseh adam' — I and the aforementioned earth, let us make a human: the earth to bring forth the body from its elements as it did for the beasts, and God to give the spirit, exactly as Gen 2:7 then describes in two clauses. The plural has a second party and the second party is the ground. He credits R. Yosef Kimḥi and calls it the most acceptable of all that have been thought about the verse, which is how he sets aside both the angels of Ibn Ezra and Rashi and the plural of majesty of Saadia without arguing with any of them.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-57", "from": "ramban-1-26-naaseh", "to": "ramban-1-1-elohim", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same man refusing, twice, to let a plural be either empty or personal, and needing a secret only once. At Gen 1:1 Elohim is a compound, el hem, the force of all the forces, and 'a secret will yet be disclosed in connection with this'. At Gen 1:26 the plural verb has a plain second subject, the earth, and nothing is withheld — the mystery is moved to the following verse, where 'the way of truth in this verse will be known to him who understands'. Of the four answers this crux collects, Ramban's is the only one that makes the plural real without making it a plurality in God or a company of angels.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-58", "from": "targ-onk-1-26", "to": "targ-onk-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The same targum, the same difficulty, opposite hands. At Gen 1:1 Onkelos writes YY for Elohim, so that the plural-looking noun disappears and no reader of the Aramaic could raise the question of two authorities from it. At Gen 1:26 he leaves the plural verb standing — na'avid enasha be-tzalmana — and adds nothing, addresses nobody, and supplies no angels. Whatever governed the first choice, it was not a policy of removing plurals from the creation account, and the contrast is the best evidence on the daf that the Gen 1:1 substitution was about the divine name rather than about number.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-59", "from": "targ-psj-1-26", "to": "targ-onk-1-26", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Two Aramaic versions of one verse, one adding the hearers and one refusing to. Pseudo-Jonathan: 'and the LORD said to the angels who minister before him, who were created on the second day of the creation of the world, let us make a human in our image, in our likeness.' Onkelos: 'and the LORD said, let us make a human in our image, as our likeness.' The later targum answers the question the earlier one left open, and guards its answer by dating the angels after the beginning so that they cannot be makers.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-60", "from": "targ-psj-1-26", "to": "glossa-11-7-angeli", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "An Aramaic targum of the eighth century and a Latin schoolbook of the twelfth put the same hearers behind the same kind of plural. 'Va-amar YY le-malakhaya di-meshamshin qomoi' — and the LORD said to the angels who minister before him. 'Ad angelos dixisse intelligitur' — he is understood to have said it to the angels. Neither argues for it; both simply state it as what the verse means. The Gloss says it at Gen 11:7 and cross-refers to Gen 1:26; the targum says it at Gen 1:26 outright.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-61", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1c", "to": "targ-psj-1-26", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Bruno's rhetorical question has a literal answer in a book he could not read. 'Quos ad hominem creandum invitabat, dicens: Faciamus hominem?' — whom was he inviting to create the human? — and his answer is that it cannot be the angels, since otherwise there would be not one creator but many. Pseudo-Jonathan names them: the angels who minister before him, created on the second day. The targum has already conceded Bruno's premise, that no creature may be a maker, and secured it by the date; Bruno takes the reading to be refuted by the premise alone.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k3-62", "from": "aug-civ-16-6", "to": "hugh-adnot-1-26", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine allows the angels one plural and not the other, and gives the reason; Hugh allows them both, and takes the reason back. De civitate Dei XVI.6 refuses them at Gen 1:26 because ad imaginem nostram forbids it, and grants them at Gen 11:7 because nothing prevents it. Hugh writes 'cum ipse ad angelos ita loquatur, quorum ministerio forsitan formatum est corpus hominis' at Gen 1:26 itself, where Augustine's objection stands unanswered, and then prefers the Trinity for a different reason altogether — that it is better, not that the angels are excluded.", "crux": "elohim-and-trinity" }, { "id": "t-k2-01", "from": "rashi-1-1", "to": "br-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rashi's answer is Bereshit Rabbah 1:2 almost entire — Ps 111:6, 'he declared to his people the power of his works, in order to give them the inheritance of the nations'; the nations calling Israel robbers; and Israel's reply that the whole earth belongs to the Holy One, who gave it and took it and gave it again. What Rashi adds, and what makes it the opening of a commentary rather than a piece of polemic, is R. Isaac's premise: the Torah should have begun at Exod 12:2.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-02", "from": "hugh-sacr-prologus", "to": "rashi-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The star thread of this crux, and both benches say it about the book they are expounding. R. Isaac: the Torah is Israel's law book and ought to have begun with the first commandment given to Israel, at Exod 12:2. Hugh: the matter of all divine Scripture is the works of restoration, and the works of foundation are the matter of secular writings. Each has ruled that the first chapter of Genesis is not what its book is for, in Troyes and in Paris within fifty years, and each then supplies a reason external to the chapter — a claim on the land, a descent toward the Incarnation.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-03", "from": "m-chag-2-1", "to": "br-1-10", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Bereshit Rabbah reads the Mishnah's four forbidden matters out of the shape of the first letter of the verse: as the bet is closed on its three sides and open at the front, you have no permission to ask what is below, what is above, what was before and what is after. The list is the Mishnah's, item for item and in the same order; what is new is that it is now a property of the text rather than a rule of the school.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-04", "from": "br-1-5a", "to": "m-chag-2-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The Mishnah restricts the audience and the midrash curses the motive. Rav Huna in the name of Bar Kappara reads Ps 31:19 against those who speak 'with arrogance' — is it in order to boast, I am expounding the work of creation? — and 'with contempt', for the honour of the Maker. The Mishnah's closing clause is the same: whoever has no care for the honour of his Maker, it were fitting he had not come into the world.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-05", "from": "br-1-5a", "to": "br-1-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Two fences in one chapter of the same commentary, five sections apart, and both about the same book they are introducing: a curse on those who expound the work of creation for their own honour, and a letter shaped so that the questions before and behind may not be put. Bereshit Rabbah opens by making the case against itself twice.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-06", "from": "aug-gnm-1-1", "to": "m-chag-2-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The identical question and the opposite discipline. The Mishnah: whoever looks at what is above, what is below, what is before, what is after, it were fitting for him that he had not come into the world. Augustine, in the chapter following this one: the Manichees ask 'in what beginning? if God made heaven and earth in some beginning of time, what was he doing before he made heaven and earth?' — and he answers it, at length and in the plainest Latin he can manage. On one bench the question is put by a student who must be stopped; on the other by an opponent who must be answered, and being answered it becomes part of the commentary tradition for good.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-07", "from": "aug-gnm-1-1", "to": "br-1-5a", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Both texts stand at the head of an exposition of Genesis 1 and both are about who should be doing the expounding. Bereshit Rabbah: may they be silenced, may they be made mute — is it in order to boast, I am expounding the work of creation? Augustine: since the Manichees pursue the learned and the unlearned alike, the reply must be made not in ornate and polished speech but in plain facts, and educated friends warned him kindly that his earlier books could not be followed by ordinary readers. One tradition's answer to a wide audience is to restrict the teaching; the other's is to change the prose.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-08", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-1b", "to": "rashi-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The two benches' reasons for the chapter, and they do not meet at any point. Ambrose: Moses spoke not in the persuasion of human wisdom nor in philosophy's counterfeit disputations but as a witness of the divine work, and therefore dared to say 'in the beginning God made heaven and earth'. R. Isaac: the book should have begun at the first commandment, and begins here so that Israel may answer the charge of robbery. One answers from the writer's authority, the other from the reader's need; neither would recognise the other's question as the question.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-09", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-5", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1b", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Two answers a few columns apart and they are the two halves of one: Moses could write it because he was a witness of the divine work, and it is worth writing because a work goes on showing its worker after he has fallen silent, as building and weaving do. The first secures the text, the second secures the subject.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-10", "from": "comestor-hs-prologus", "to": "hugh-sacr-prologus", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Two Paris prologues a generation apart, and the second answers the difficulty the first creates. Hugh has left the works of foundation to secular writings and must explain how Scripture descends through them; Comestor makes history the foundation of the building and allegory the wall that leans upon it, so that beginning with the creation is not a detour but the first course of masonry. Comestor is Hugh's pupil's pupil and the metaphor is doing structural work.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-11", "from": "comestor-hs-prologus", "to": "br-1-5a", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The most complete opposition on the daf, and neither text knows the other exists. Comestor's Scripture is a dining-hall in which the Emperor makes his own drunk so as to render them sober, with a threefold curriculum built on it and a book to follow. Bereshit Rabbah's fifth section curses those who expound the work of creation for their own honour and reserves the concealed matters to the Righteous One. One tradition institutionalises the exposition; the other keeps warning itself against it — and both then produce the exposition anyway.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-12", "from": "hugh-sacr-prologus", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-5", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ambrose puts the world in the class of works that keep showing their maker when the maker is silent, which makes the creation the natural first subject of any book about God. Hugh assigns the works of foundation to secular writings and keeps the works of restoration for Scripture, which makes it the least natural. The Latin bench holds both, seven hundred years apart, and Hugh does not mention that anyone had thought otherwise.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-13", "from": "br-1-10", "to": "aug-gnm-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both fence the same question from opposite sides at the head of the same chapter. R. Yona in the name of R. Levi: the bet is closed behind, so you may not ask what was before, only from the day the world was created onward. Augustine's opponents ask precisely what was before, and his answer — that no time could pass before God made time, since none can be the maker of times except one who is before times — is the fence rebuilt as an argument. Bar Kappara reaches for Deut 4:32, 'ask now of the early days that were before you, from the day God created man'; Augustine reaches for Titus 1:2, 'before eternal times'. Each has a verse for the boundary and only one of them will say what lies past it.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-14", "from": "rashi-1-1", "to": "m-chag-2-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The first sentence of the most-read Jewish commentary on the Torah asks why the book begins with the work of creation, in a tradition whose Mishnah says the work of creation may not be expounded before two. Rashi does not cite the rule and does not need to break it: his answer removes the chapter from the domain the Mishnah is fencing by making it a matter of public law rather than of hidden things — the peoples of the world say, and Israel answers.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-15", "from": "br-1-2", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both make the creation account public evidence, and for opposite audiences. R. Yehoshua of Sikhnin in R. Levi's name: God revealed what was made on each day because of the idolaters, so that Israel could answer the charge of robbery. Ambrose: the world is a specimen of the divine working, so that while the work is seen the worker is put forward, as a building shows its craftsman when he is silent. The rabbinic bench's evidence is a text and its jury is the nations; the Latin bench's evidence is the world and its jury is anyone with eyes.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-x1", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-1b", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 4. Two halves of Ambrose's first chapter, split between two cruxes. The earlier passage sets out what the philosophers held — Plato's three principles, uncreated and coeternal with God, and the atomists' concourse; this one clears them away in a sentence by making Moses a witness rather than a disputant. The refutation is unintelligible without the doxography that precedes it.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-x2", "from": "hugh-sacr-prologus", "to": "hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 4. Hugh sets out in his prologue that the matter of secular writings is the works of foundation, and then, when he reaches the works of foundation himself, opens by refuting the philosophers of the nations who posited three first principles without a beginning — workman, matter and form. The prologue explains why that refutation has to come first: he is on ground he has just assigned to somebody else.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-p1", "from": "philo-opif-1-3", "to": "rashi-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same question, put from the same premise, answered in two directions that have nothing to do with each other. Both begin from the fact that the Torah is a book of law and does not open like one. Rashi, quoting R. Yitzhak, says it should have begun at Exodus 12:2 and answers with Ps 111:6: God told his people the power of his works, so that when the nations call Israel robbers Israel can answer that the whole earth is his and he gave it to whom he pleased. Philo says the opening is what makes the law binding: it shows that world and law agree, and that the law-keeper is a citizen of the cosmos. One answer secures a title to a particular land; the other secures the authority of the code over anyone anywhere. Eleven hundred years apart, and there is no channel between them.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-p2", "from": "philo-opif-1-3", "to": "aug-gnm-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Philo's contrast, without Philo. Philo divides earlier lawgivers into those who wrote bare statutes and those who wrapped them in mythical fictions, and praises Moses for doing neither. Augustine, defending Genesis against the Manichees, says Scripture speaks not with ornate and polished speech but with plain facts, and that this is deliberate. The move is identical, the frame is identical, and Augustine's version has lost the third term: Philo's Moses avoids bareness as well as ornament, because he has a philosophical programme to state, and Augustine's Moses is bare on purpose because his readers are simple.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k2-p3", "from": "philo-opif-1-3", "to": "comestor-hs-prologus", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Comestor says history is the foundation and that the narrative comes first because everything built on it needs it. Philo says the cosmogony comes first because the minds of those who will use the laws have to be shaped beforehand. Both make the opening a pedagogical necessity rather than a chronological one, and Comestor states as a rule of the schools what Philo states as a reading of Moses's intention.", "crux": "why-begin-here" }, { "id": "t-k9-01", "from": "aug-civ-11-20", "to": "br-3-6c", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The star thread of this crux, and both benches reach it by reading a silence in the syntax. Augustine: on day one 'and God saw that it was good' is placed before the division and not after it, 'lest he should seem to have borne the testimony of his approval to such darkness along with the light' — and on day four, where the darkness is blameless, it is placed after. R. Elazar: 'the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good, for it is not written and to the darkness GOD called night, but and to the darkness he called night.' One argues from where a clause of approval stands, the other from where the divine name is dropped, at consecutive verses, with no contact of any kind.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-02", "from": "aug-civ-11-20", "to": "br-2-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same inference from the same omission at the same clause. R. Abahu: 'but I do not know which of them he desires — since it is written and God saw the light that it was good, he desires the deeds of the righteous and does not desire the deeds of the wicked.' Augustine: 'lest both should be called good, when one of them was evil.' Both take the absence of an approval of the darkness to be a deliberate withholding, and both make it decisive.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-03", "from": "br-3-8-yanai", "to": "br-2-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same reading twice in the same midrash, once as an argument and once as a mapping. R. Abahu at 2:5 states the difficulty ('I do not know which of them he desires') and resolves it from Gen 1:4; R. Yanai at 3:8 runs the same identifications through every clause of 1:2–1:5 without raising a difficulty at all. The mapping is identical: tohu the deeds of the wicked, 'let there be light' the deeds of the righteous.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-04", "from": "isidore-quaest-1-4", "to": "br-3-8-yanai", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The moral reading on both benches at the same clause, and the difference between them is exact. R. Yanai: 'and God divided between the light and the darkness — between the deeds of the righteous and the deeds of the wicked.' Isidore: 'then God, according to the favour of his foreknowledge, divided the just, that is, the sons of God and of light, from sinners, as from darkness; calling the just day and those others night.' The rabbinic bench divides deeds, the Latin bench divides people. Neither ever discusses the difference, and it holds across every allegory on this verse.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-05", "from": "aug-gnl-imp-5-25", "to": "br-3-8-yanai", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine reaches the righteous and the wicked at this clause too, and gets there by a route the rabbinic bench does not need: God is not the author of our vices but is their orderer, when he sets sinners in the place they deserve — sheep on the right, goats on the left. Because he has made the darkness a privation he cannot let the wicked be the darkness outright, only be ordered under it; R. Yanai, under no such constraint, simply says the darkness is their deeds.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-06", "from": "aug-gnm-1-9", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-5-23", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Four years apart, the same doctrine argued from two different angles: at De Genesi contra Manichaeos from the analogy of silence, which explains how Scripture can say God makes darkness; at De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus from the analogy of the garment and nakedness, which explains why no separate act of dividing was needed.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-07", "from": "aug-gnl-imp-5-25", "to": "aug-gnm-1-9", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The privation doctrine completed. The earlier work says God does not make the darkness but is rightly said to make it by withholding light; the later adds the term that the whole tradition will use — he does not make it, but he orders it, 'lest even those privations should not have their own order' — and supplies the rests in music and the shadows in painting to show what ordering a nothing can mean.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-08", "from": "aug-civ-11-19", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-5-25", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine against Augustine, and he knows it: the earlier work takes the light of day one as possibly ethereal, sensitive or rational and the darkness as the privation of whichever it is; the City of God offers the reading in which the light is the angels and the darkness the apostate spirits, and hedges it — 'it does not seem to me an opinion at odds with the works of God'. Every later Latin witness on this crux has to hold both, and Hugh's solution is to say that both divisions happened at the same instant.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-09", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-4", "to": "aug-civ-11-20", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Et cur non dicit Scriptura, vidit Deus tenebras quod essent bonae, sicut de luce dictum est? … in his dicens quia boni sunt, in illis nullatenus dicens, ne peccata quae erant tenebrae adprobare videretur' reproduces City of God XI.20's argument and its reason almost word for word, under the rubric AUGUSTINUS — on the same page as the proposition that there is an essence of darkness, which Augustine denies everywhere.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-10", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-4", "to": "aug-gnm-1-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The sharpest disagreement on the Latin bench, and it is invisible because it is filed under Augustine's name. Augustine: Scripture does not say God made the darkness, because darkness is the absence of light. Wigbod's pupil: everything that is divided can also be, so as there is an essence of light, so there is an essence of darkness. The inference is valid on its own terms and it destroys the doctrine the same compilation is transmitting.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-11", "from": "angelom-gen-1-4", "to": "aug-gnm-1-9", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The silence analogy copied close enough to be certain — clamando vocem, silentium autem non clamando, cessatio vocis silentium est — with one word altered: Augustine writes that God makes darkness because he 'either does not give light or withdraws it', Angelomus that he 'either gives or withdraws light'. The change turns a withholding into a conferring, and Angelomus names Augustine two sentences later as the authority he is following.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-12", "from": "angelom-gen-1-4", "to": "bede-gen-1-4", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Lucem videlicet in superiore orbis parte diffundendo, in qua humana erat conversatio futura, inferiora vero ejus priscis in tenebris remanendo' is Bede's sentence with one verb changed, introduced by 'as Clement says: lighting up one part of the world, he left the other dark.' Angelomus has the words from Bede and the attribution from somewhere else.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-13", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-4", "to": "bede-gen-1-4", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Verbatim and unnamed, from 'Divisit namque eas non solum qualitatis, sed et locorum distantia' to the end of the sentence. The transmission is what makes 'by quality and by place' the standing literal answer of the Latin bench.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-14", "from": "comestor-hs-1-4", "to": "bede-gen-1-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Et creatas divisit locorum distantia, et qualitate' is Bede's pair of terms four centuries on, with the mechanism supplied — 'so that they should never be together, but always claim opposite hemispheres in turn' — and with the darkness made a created shadow rather than an ancient dark left in place.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-15", "from": "honorius-hex-1-4", "to": "bede-gen-1-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same answer turned into a timetable: twelve hours above the earth and twelve below, the darkness put to flight and lying hidden. Bede's 'difference of places' has become a circuit with a count of hours, and the darkness has become the kind of thing that can be driven off and can hide.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-16", "from": "basil-hex-2-8", "to": "bede-gen-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both answer 'why divide them?' with distance, and neither could have got it from the other in this form: Basil, that God fashioned their natures unmingled and set them apart from one another by long spaces; Bede, that he divided them not only by quality but by place, the light over the upper part of the world. Basil's Latin was available in Northumbria, but the shared term is the commonplace, not a phrase.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-17", "from": "remigius-gen-1-4", "to": "aug-gnm-1-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The flattest contradiction of Augustine on this crux, without naming him and without argument from authority: 'God made both, the light and the darkness … therefore the darkness too is a work of God', proved from the Benedicite, where light and darkness are called together to bless the Lord (Dan 3:72). If darkness is the absence of light it cannot be summoned to praise; the canticle summons it.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-18", "from": "glossa-1-4", "to": "remigius-gen-1-4", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The Glossa's whole literal gloss on this verse is Remigius' sentence with its proof text — 'Lucem et tenebras fecit Deus, unde Dan. III: Benedicite, lux et tenebrae, Domino, cum omnis creatura ad benedicendum invitatur' — printed under the name of Strabo. What the twelfth-century schoolroom reads on Gen 1:4 is therefore the anti-Augustinian answer.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-19", "from": "glossa-1-4", "to": "isidore-quaest-1-4", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Habet quisque in operibus et recta vita, distinctos sex dies, post quos requiem speret: primo die, lucem fidei' is Isidore's six ages of the Christian life, named as such, reduced to its first day. The Glossa keeps the moral reading and drops the division of the just from sinners that was its content.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-20", "from": "remigius-gen-1-4b", "to": "isidore-quaest-1-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same six-day allegory carried from the individual life to the history of the world: Isidore's first day is the light of faith and the dividing of the just from sinners, Remigius' is the separation of the sons of Seth from the generation of Cain, with the flood as its evening. The scheme is Isidore's, the datable content is not.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-21", "from": "remigius-gen-1-4b", "to": "remigius-gen-1-4", "type": "contests", "evidence": "One commentator, one verse, two incompatible readings a few columns apart, and no attempt to reconcile them: on the literal pass the darkness is a work of God made so that men might rest, and on the allegorical pass the darkness is the impious line of Cain that God drowned. The Latin bench's habit of running the six days twice is what allows the same writer to hold both.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-22", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-4", "to": "aug-civ-11-19", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Hugh takes over the angelic division and removes Augustine's hedge, then adds what Augustine does not say: that the visible division and the invisible one happened at precisely the same moment of time, because the visible works of wisdom and the invisible outcomes had to correspond.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-23", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-4", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-5-23", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The instantaneity argument transferred. Augustine: no separate act of separation was needed, because the division followed by the very fact that the light was made. Hugh: the division of the darknesses and of the light was made at once — and applies it to the angels, so that the fall and the confirmation are one instant with the making of light.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-24", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-4", "to": "br-3-6c", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "'He divided by judgement, and by merit he named' and R. Elazar's 'the Holy One never joins his name to the bad but only to the good' are the same doctrine of naming: what a thing is called follows what it deserves, and the naming is therefore a second act after the judging, not a label. Hugh gets it from the order divisit … vocavit, R. Elazar from a missing subject in the second half of the verse.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-25", "from": "rupert-gen-1-4", "to": "aug-civ-11-19", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The angelic reading with a new argument under it. Augustine offers it as one true reading among several; Rupert derives it from the word 'good' — none is good but God, only a rational creature can partake of him, therefore the light of which it is said 'that it was good' must be intellectual — and then makes the division a sentence pronounced on the devil, unchangeable in both directions.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-26", "from": "rupert-gen-1-4", "to": "aug-civ-11-20", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Both build on the placing of 'God saw that it was good', and they build opposite things. Augustine: the approval is put before the division so that God should not seem to approve the darkness. Rupert: the approval is put where it is because it is a judgement passed on a rational light — and the division that follows is the judgement passed on the rest. Where Augustine finds a refusal to approve, Rupert finds a verdict delivered.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-27", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-4b", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-9b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same difficulty and two refusals to let it become a problem about God's knowledge. Ambrose: 'he did not see what he did not know; nor did he approve what he had not known before' — the seeing is the self-attestation of a good work. Hugh takes the question seriously and answers it with a second light: in the unchangeable light he saw that this changeable light was good in its own mode and order.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-28", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-4b", "to": "alcuin-int-35", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Alcuin dissolves the difficulty — what pleased him to be made pleased him to remain — and Hugh reopens it as a question about the medium of the seeing. Both are answering the objection that if God saw the light was good he learned something; the Carolingian schoolbook answers in one sentence what the Paris schoolroom takes a chapter over.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-29", "from": "comestor-hs-1-4", "to": "alcuin-int-35", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Quae placuerat in praesentia, vel praescientia, ut fieret; placuit in essentia, ut maneret' is Alcuin's answer with the moment divided in two, foreknowledge and being; the doubling is Comestor's and the pattern — what pleased to be made pleased to remain — is Alcuin's.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-30", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-4", "to": "aug-gnm-1-9", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both come to the possibility that the dividing and the naming are one act, and only one of them takes it. Augustine: 'perhaps, then, the dividing between light and darkness just is the calling of the light day and the darkness night, so that to have ordered these is to have named them' — and he leaves it as a perhaps and goes on. Ibn Ezra states it flatly as the meaning of the word: 'and the sense of and he divided is by the calling of names.' Nothing else on the Latin bench even entertains it.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-31", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-4", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-9b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The seeing removed from the world in two ways. Ibn Ezra: 'and he saw' is like Qohelet's 'I myself saw' — it is in the thought, so no act is reported. Ambrose: God did not see what he did not know, and the seeing is the good work attesting itself. Both refuse to let the verse describe an inspection, and neither has to posit anything to do it, which is what separates them from Hugh's second light.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-32", "from": "ramban-1-2-choshech", "to": "comestor-hs-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two most physical accounts of what the darkness is, from benches that cannot borrow. Ramban: the darkness is elemental fire, which is dark, 'and were it red, it would redden the night for us'. Comestor: God created the darkness with the light, that is, the shadow made by bodies set against the light. Both make the darkness a real thing with a cause, and Comestor has to introduce his with quasi because Augustine stands behind him; Ramban states his as the plain sense.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-33", "from": "pdre-3-5", "to": "remigius-gen-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Darkness as a creature, stated without argument on both benches. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer puts it fourth in a list of eight things created on the first day, between light and tohu, with no proof text and no defence. Remigius says God made both and proves it from the Benedicite. Neither is arguing with anybody; each is the settled answer of a tradition, and they are the same answer.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-34", "from": "pdre-3-5", "to": "alcuin-int-35", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two enumerations of what was made at the beginning, answering the same question with incompatible inventories. Alcuin, at the question next but one to this: heaven, earth, angels, light, air, water and the soul of man. Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer: heaven, earth, light, darkness, tohu, bohu, wind and water. The Latin list has the angels and the soul and no darkness; the rabbinic list has the darkness and the tohu and no angels. Neither list argues, and between them they contain the whole disagreement of this crux.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-35", "from": "abelard-hex-1-4", "to": "wigbod-gen-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "'Distinctio rei formatae ab informi', given as a third answer in a Carolingian dialogue, and 'operatione sua perfectum discrevit ab imperfecto et distinctum a confuso', argued at the Paraclete three hundred years later to prove that the creator of the matter and the former of the works are one and the same. The same reading of the darkness — not a privation, not a creature, but the unordered state of the world — put to two entirely different uses.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-36", "from": "abelard-hex-1-4", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-5-25", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Both make the division an ordering rather than a making, and they mean opposite things by it. Augustine orders privations, so that even a nothing has its place. Abelard orders works, so that the distinction of the works just is the light and the confusion before them is the darkness — which leaves nothing for the privation doctrine to be about.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-37", "from": "vulgate-1-4", "to": "lxx-1-4", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "The Greek keeps the Hebrew's doubled preposition, ana meson tou photos kai ana meson tou skotous, and the Old Latin behind Augustine keeps it too: divisit inter lucem et tenebras. Jerome writes divisit lucem a tenebris. Which form a Latin witness quotes tracks his text closely enough to be visible on this daf: Augustine, Angelomus and Alcuin have the older form, Bede, Remigius, the Glossa and Comestor Jerome's, and Rupert has neither.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-38", "from": "targ-psj-1-4", "to": "targ-onk-1-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Pseudo-Jonathan reproduces Onkelos word for word at Gen 1:4 and expands freely at Gen 1:5 — the light made so that the inhabitants of the world might labour by it, the darkness so that the creatures might rest in it. The expansive targum finds nothing to expand in the dividing, which is the whole of the Latin bench's difficulty.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-39", "from": "remigius-gen-1-4", "to": "targ-psj-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same reason for the division, given in Aramaic and in Latin with no possible contact: Pseudo-Jonathan, that God made the day so that the inhabitants of the world might labour by it and the night so that the creatures might rest in it; Remigius, that God made both the light and the darkness 'that men might work in the light and rest in the night'. Remigius uses it to prove the darkness is a creature; the targum draws no conclusion from it at all.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-40", "from": "br-3-6b", "to": "bede-gen-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "R. Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish's king with two generals, each claiming the day, told 'day shall be your bound' and 'night shall be your bound', and Bede's division 'not only by quality but by place', with the light over the upper part of the world and the lower left dark. Both make va-yavdel an assignment of territory, and the midrash says outright what Bede assumes: havdala mamash, a real separating and not a figure.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-41", "from": "br-3-6b", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-5-25", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The two benches at their furthest apart on the same clause. Augustine: God did not make the darkness, he ordered it, as a singer orders his silences. R. Tanḥuma, on Isa 45:7, 'who forms light and creates darkness, who makes peace': after they were created he made peace between them — the darkness is created, the making of peace is the dividing, and both are works. The rabbinic text has no term for a privation and never needs one.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-42", "from": "rupert-gen-1-4", "to": "br-3-6b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The division as a judicial sentence, on both benches, with the same insistence that it is irreversible. Rupert: a terrible judgement of God upon the devil, 'by an unchangeable separation, so that neither can those who fell rise again, nor can those who refused to fall ever fall'. The midrash: the king calls each general and fixes his bound, and R. Berekhya introduces it as havdala mamash. The Latin makes it a verdict on persons and the rabbinic a decree about times, and both are about what may never be crossed again.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-43", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-4", "to": "br-3-6b", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ibn Ezra's 'the sense of and he divided is by the calling of names' is the flat denial of R. Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish's havdala mamash, a real separating, and he does not name them. He is also refusing R. Ze'eira's derivation, since a naming cannot be the source of a rule about looking at a flame. The grammarian dismantles in one clause the two things the midrash builds on this word.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-44", "from": "aug-civ-11-19", "to": "br-3-6b", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Both benches read the darkness of this verse as something set aside, and the thing set aside is not the same. For Augustine it is the apostate angels, ordered but not approved; for R. Yehuda bar Simon and the Rabbis it is the light that is set aside — hivdilo lo, he separated it for himself, or for the righteous in the time to come. One tradition takes the division to be a removal of the darkness from fellowship, the other a reservation of the light from use, and each is unavailable to the other.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-45", "from": "glossa-1-4", "to": "aug-gnm-1-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The Glossa's own gloss on Gen 1:2, three columns earlier, is 'and there were darknesses, namely the privation of true light'; its gloss on Gen 1:4 is 'God made both the light and the darkness'. The standard schoolbook prints Augustine's doctrine on one verse and its contradiction on the next, and marks neither as disputed.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-x1", "from": "rashi-1-4", "to": "br-3-6b", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Phase 4. Rashi's plain sense names Bereshit Rabbah 3:6 for it: 'he saw that it was good, and that it was not seemly that light and darkness should function together in a confused manner. He therefore limited this one's sphere of activity to the daytime, and this one's to the nighttime' — which is R. Yoḥanan and Resh Lakish's king with two generals, each told his bound. Written at Phase 4 because `rashi-1-4` was built for K8 and carries both cruxes' answers in one dibbur.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-x2", "from": "rashi-1-4", "to": "b-chag-12a-light", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Phase 4. Rashi's aggadic half names Chagigah 12a: 'he saw that the wicked were unworthy of using it; he therefore set it apart, reserving it for the righteous in the world to come'. The dibbur gives its two sources in order, the aggadah first and the peshat second, and each belongs to a different crux on this site.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-x3", "from": "rashi-1-4", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-9b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 4. The same purpose clause in Troyes and in Milan, seven hundred years apart. Rashi: it was not seemly that light and darkness should function together in a confused manner. Ambrose: the distinction is made between the light and the darkness so that, their natures being separated, nothing may be seen to have anything confused within it. Neither could have known the other, and it is the closest verbal agreement between the benches on this crux.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-x4", "from": "b-chag-12a-light", "to": "br-3-6b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 4. Two redactions of one answer to va-yavdel: the Bavli that the light was stored away for the righteous, and Bereshit Rabbah's Rabbis that 'he separated it for the righteous in the time to come, like a king who had a fine portion and set it aside for his son' — beside R. Yehuda bar Simon's harder reading, that he separated it for himself.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-p1", "from": "philo-opif-33-34", "to": "basil-hex-2-8", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Basil says God kept their nature unmingled, and the Greek word for the mingling he denies is Philo's word for the confusion the borders prevent. Basil had read Philo and the Hexaemeron is one of the standard places to see it; nothing here names him. What Basil does not take over is the machinery: for Philo the separating is not enough on its own, because contiguity alone would restart the war, and it is the borders in the intervals that do the work.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-p2", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-9b", "to": "philo-opif-33-34", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Ambrose's Hexaemeron follows Basil's, and Basil's follows Philo's, and neither of the two Christians says so. Ambrose: nothing may be seen to have anything confused within it. Philo: had not borders been set fast between them, being neighbours they would have wrought confusion. Ambrose has the conclusion and the word; Philo has the reason, which is that light and darkness are natural enemies contending for mastery. The direction of this edge is the direction of the transmission, from the later text back to the source it does not name, and it is the same shape as Bede copying Basil's Latin at Jarrow and removing the Jews from it.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-p3", "from": "philo-opif-33-34", "to": "bede-gen-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Bede reads the dividing as real and local, not only by a difference of quality but of places, and Rabanus copies the sentence. Philo reads it as local for a reason Bede does not have: separated things that touch will fight, so God set borders in the intervals. Both refuse the reading that the division is only the naming, which is Ibn Ezra's, and both refuse the reading that it is only a judgement, which is Hugh's.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-p4", "from": "philo-opif-33-34", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-5-23", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine reaches for 2 Cor 6:14, what fellowship has light with darkness, and makes the incompatibility a moral one. Philo makes it a physical enmity between two natures, which is why his God has to build a border rather than pronounce a separation. Same premise, that these two cannot share a space, and two different kinds of reason for it.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-b1", "from": "burgos-add-3", "to": "rashi-1-4", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The only witness in this edition that argues about the rabbinic bench's standing rather than merely agreeing or disagreeing with it. Burgos's third charge is that Lyra attributes to Ra. Sa. the authority of a literal exposition which the Latin doctors found first. Rashi is on this daf, four hundred years earlier, doing exactly what is being fought over: giving the plain sense of the verse and being followed for it. The edge is contests because the dispute is real and named, even though the man contested is dead and the contesting is done by a third party who says he owes him less than the postillator thinks.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-b2", "from": "burgos-add-3", "to": "rabanus-gen-1-4", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Burgos's defence is a citation, and it is of the witness this daf already carries. Rabanus is the doctor whose answer Lyra called truphatica, a piece of trifling; Burgos quotes him at length on the second day and calls the dismissal irreverence. What makes this worth an edge is what it shows about the Latin bench's own memory: by the fifteenth century a Latin has to argue that Rabanus said something first, and the argument has to be made against another Latin who has been reading Hebrew.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-b3", "from": "burgos-add-3", "to": "aug-civ-11-20", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine's account of why the approval is withheld -- lest both should be called good -- is the Latin bench's own answer to the question Burgos and Lyra are fighting about, and neither of them uses it. Burgos reaches instead for Rabanus's arithmetic of the unclean binary and for the Master's sacramentum, both of which make the missing formula a fact about the number two rather than about what was made on that day.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-b4", "from": "burgos-add-3", "to": "lyra-gen-1-4-bonum", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The indictment and the page it indicts, printed a hundred leaves apart in the same volume and now on the same daf. Every charge checks out. Lyra calls the answer of Rabanus and the Master truphatica, in that word; he refutes them from Luke 10 and Gregory on the pair; and he prefers Rashi in the sentence Burgos quotes back at him, Ideo aliter respondet Ra. Sa., et magis secundum intentionem littere. What Burgos does not say is that Lyra rejected a second Latin answer too, the angels falling on the second day, on grounds that have nothing to do with any Hebrew.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-b5", "from": "doering-repl-3", "to": "burgos-add-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Doering answers Burgos point by point, and in restating the third charge he changes one word. Burgos wrote that Lyra attributes the exposition to Ra. Sa. hebreo. Doering writes that he attributes the true answer to an unbeliever, infideli, and grants in the same clause that the answer is true. The dispute is therefore not about the reading at all, but about whose it is and what honour is owed for it -- which is the question this edition has been circling from the first crux, asked out loud for the only time.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-b6", "from": "doering-repl-3", "to": "rashi-1-4", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Rashi is the third party to this quarrel and the only one who cannot answer. Doering calls him infidelis and says the answer credited to him is in the Latins' own gloss; Burgos, born a rabbi, says the Latin doctors found it first; Lyra says it is more according to the intention of the letter. The daf carries Rashi on this verse, four hundred years earlier, doing the thing that is being fought over.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-b7", "from": "lyra-gen-1-4-bonum", "to": "aug-civ-11-20", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine's reason for the withheld approval is that the two should not both be called good; Lyra's is that approval regards a completed work and the work of the second day was not finished until the third. Both make the silence deliberate and neither needs the arithmetic of the binary that Rabanus and the Master reached for and that Lyra dismisses. Augustine is on the daf and is not cited by any of the three men arguing about it.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-l1", "from": "lyra-gen-1-4-divisio", "to": "comestor-hs-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Comestor has the physics and cannot commit to it: the darkness is as it were the shadow made by bodies set against the light, and the quasi is doing the work of keeping Augustine's doctrine intact. Two hundred years later Lyra states the same physics flat -- the sun moves over one hemisphere and the earth's opacity puts the other in shadow -- and does not signal that anything is being conceded. The distance between those two sentences is the distance the Latin bench travelled on this crux.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-l2", "from": "lyra-gen-1-4-divisio", "to": "aug-gnm-1-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine's darkness is the absence of light, as silence is the ceasing of voice, and the difficulty he then has to solve is how God can divide a nothing; his answer, that God ordered rather than made it, as a singer orders the rests, is the finest thing on this crux in either language. Lyra keeps the privation and dissolves the difficulty by putting a body in the middle. Nothing is divided from anything: the earth is opaque and stands between. The doctrine survives and the question it was invented to answer has gone.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-l3", "from": "lyra-gen-1-4-divisio", "to": "honorius-hex-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Honorius already had the mechanism in the twelfth century -- twelve hours above the earth and twelve below -- and used it to explain the length of the day rather than the dividing of v. 4. Lyra applies the same fact to the verse itself, so that vayavdel reports what the sun does rather than what God decided about darkness.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k9-l4", "from": "lyra-gen-1-4-divisio", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Ibn Ezra says the meaning of and he divided is by the calling of names, which empties the verb of any physical content; Lyra fills it with nothing but physical content. Both refuse to let the dividing be an act performed on darkness, and they refuse it from opposite ends -- one because the verse is doing grammar, the other because it is doing astronomy.", "crux": "good-and-separated" }, { "id": "t-k1-01", "from": "jerome-hq-1-1", "to": "lxx-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Jerome names the Seventy as his first witness against the reading 'in the Son': 'Nam et Septuaginta Interpretes, et Symmachus, et Theodotion, in principio, transtulerunt.' The Greek is what decides the Latin.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-02", "from": "vulgate-1-1", "to": "lxx-1-1", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "in principio renders ἐν ἀρχῇ and nothing else, and the translator says in the Hebrew Questions why he refused in Filio. Every Latin argument on this crux is conducted on a word Jerome chose against pressure to choose another.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-03", "from": "targ-onk-1-1", "to": "lxx-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "be-qadmin and ἐν ἀρχῇ make the same decision independently: turn the Hebrew word into a plain adverb of time, supply nothing, and let no construct be heard. Pseudo-Jonathan's min avvela does the same a third time.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-04", "from": "targ-neof-1-1", "to": "targ-onk-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Two Aramaic versions of one Hebrew word, and only one of them interprets: Onkelos writes be-qadmin, 'in former times'; Neofiti writes min qadmin be-ḥokhmah, 'from the first, in wisdom', and adds a second verb, 'and finished'. What Onkelos leaves as a time, Neofiti makes an instrument.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-05", "from": "targ-psj-1-1", "to": "targ-onk-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "min avvela beside be-qadmin: the same refusal to interpret, in a different word. Three targums on one verse give three renderings of bereshit and only Neofiti's carries a doctrine.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-06", "from": "br-1-4", "to": "br-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same proof text put to the same use two sections later: 'The Lord made me reshit of his way' (Prov 8:22) makes the Torah the reshit in 1:1, and in 1:4 makes the Torah the first of the six things that preceded the world and settles its precedence over the Throne of Glory.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-07", "from": "br-1-8", "to": "br-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "1:1 reads Prov 8:30's amon as uman, artisan; 1:8 counts the builder's six materials against Prov 8:22–23's six words of precedence. Both treat Proverbs 8 not as a proof text reached for but as the chapter that comments on Genesis 1:1.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-08", "from": "rashi-1-1b", "to": "br-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rashi reproduces the midrashic answer with its two proof texts — the Torah called reshit darko (Prov 8:22) and Israel called reshit tevu'ato (Jer 2:3) — and marks it as what 'our rabbis expounded', before setting his own plain sense against it.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-09", "from": "rashi-1-1b", "to": "br-1-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Bereshit Rabbah 1:4 derives a series of referents for reshit from a series of verses — Torah, ḥalla, tithes, first fruits; Rashi keeps the method and reduces the list to two, Torah and Israel, which are the two that make the verse a claim about election.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-10", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-1", "to": "rashi-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same conclusion from the same evidence with no acknowledgement: bereshit is a construct, like 'in the reshit of the reign of Jehoiakim' (Jer 26:1), and the objection that a construct cannot govern a finite verb is answered from Hos 1:2 by both. Ramban, reading them side by side, says Ibn Ezra 'explained it in an identical way'.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-11", "from": "ramban-1-1", "to": "rashi-1-1b", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ramban quotes Rashi's plain sense verbatim and then breaks its premise: reshit is not everywhere construct — 'declaring the end mereshit' (Isa 46:10) and 'he chose reshit for himself' (Deut 33:21) stand absolute. The grammatical argument that made the modern translations is refuted inside the tradition that made it, two centuries on.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-12", "from": "ramban-1-1", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Ramban names R. Abraham and reports the refinement that is Ibn Ezra's own and not Rashi's — that the vav of ve-ha'aretz serves as 'when' — and draws its consequence, that on Ibn Ezra's reading only light was created on the first day.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-13", "from": "targ-neof-1-1", "to": "br-1-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "R. Banai proves that the world was created for the merit of the Torah from Prov 3:19, 'the Lord founded the earth be-ḥokhmah, with wisdom'; Neofiti puts that same be-ḥokhmah inside Genesis 1:1 as the translation of bereshit. A proof text in one place is the text itself in the other.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-14", "from": "aug-civ-11-32", "to": "br-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The identical inference on both benches. Augustine: in principio means in the Son, because Ps 104:24 says 'you have made all things in wisdom' and Wisdom is the Son. Bereshit Rabbah: bereshit means by the Torah, because Prov 8:22 says 'the Lord made me reshit of his way' and that speaker is the Torah. One move, one kind of proof text, two Wisdoms, and no contact in either direction.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-15", "from": "aug-conf-11-9", "to": "targ-neof-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "'In this Beginning, God, you made heaven and earth: in your Word, in your Son, in your Wisdom' is, as a sentence, what Neofiti prints as the text of Genesis 1:1. A Latin bishop's prayer and a Palestinian targumist's translation arrive at the same clause, and mean by Wisdom the second person of the Trinity and the Torah respectively.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-16", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1", "to": "rashi-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both make the first word relative to what follows rather than absolute — Abelard because a second and third day are named and something must be first for them to be second to, Rashi because reshit is a construct and the clause is subordinate. The closest the two benches come on this crux, reached from opposite ends of two grammars.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-17", "from": "remigius-gen-1-1", "to": "ramban-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same doctrinal stake stated on both benches at the same place in the commentary: for Remigius the verse exists to refute Plato and Aristotle and prove that time began; for Ramban whoever thinks the world eternal 'denies the essential principle and has no Torah at all'.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-18", "from": "aug-gnm-1-2", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The John 8:25 answer, taken over from the man Augustine had been hearing preach at Milan a year or two before: 'or he himself is the beginning of all things … the Son of God answered, The Beginning, who also speak to you.' After Ambrose no Latin witness on this crux argues without that verse.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-19", "from": "aug-gnl-imp-2-6", "to": "aug-gnm-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same author returning to the same question with the terms sharpened: what had been 'not in the beginning of time but in Christ' becomes a distinction — a Beginning without a beginning, who is the Father, and a Beginning with another beginning, who is the Son.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-20", "from": "aug-gnl-1-1", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-2-6", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The unfinished commentary asks whether 'in the beginning' means time or the Wisdom of God; the finished one opens by listing three possibilities instead of two, adding 'or because they were made first of all', and declining to choose among them.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-21", "from": "aug-conf-11-9", "to": "aug-gnm-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The argument of the anti-Manichaean book turned into prayer: 'in Christ, since the Word was with the Father' becomes 'in your Word, in your Son, in your Strength, in your Wisdom, in your Truth' — five names where the treatise had one, and no opponent in view.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-22", "from": "aug-civ-11-32", "to": "aug-conf-11-9", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same identification with its proof supplied: the Confessions name the Beginning as Wisdom without arguing, and the City of God adds the psalm that licenses it, 'omnia in sapientia fecisti' (Ps 104:24).", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-23", "from": "aug-civ-11-32", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Ps 104:24 is Ambrose's proof text on this verse before it is Augustine's, and it does different work for each: Ambrose cites it to show that the world was given a beginning at all, Augustine to show that the beginning is the Son.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-24", "from": "isidore-quaest-1-1", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Principium Christus est', with John 8:25 attached and no argument at all. What Ambrose offered as one limb of a vel and Augustine as one of three readings has become a premise from which the allegory starts.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-25", "from": "bede-gen-1-1", "to": "aug-gnl-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Bede takes Augustine's three undecided readings and ranks them: the beginning of times at length and first, the Only-begotten Son last and qualified as 'not improbable'. The hierarchy, not the list, is what the Carolingians inherit.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-26", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-1b", "to": "bede-gen-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Bede's exposition reproduced almost entire and unattributed — the simultaneity argument, Ps 115:3, Ps 102:25, the 'not improbably … in his Only-begotten Son' — with the house-building simile cut and Rabanus' own thesis set at its head. The same silent copying the K7 and K10 threads trace at PL 107:447C and 448D.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-27", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-1b", "to": "aug-gnm-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The sentence Rabanus adds in front of Bede is Augustine's answer to the Manichees compressed to an axiom: 'time is from this world, not before the world; and a day is a portion of time, not its beginning.'", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-28", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-1", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Verbatim Jerome, minus the argument: the three Greek versions, Bresith, Aquila's in capitulo, the forehead of Genesis, Ps 40:8, John 1:3 and the Hebrew custom of naming books are all kept, while the authorities who read 'in the Son' and Jerome's refutation of them — including the decisive point that the Hebrew for 'in the son' would be ba-ben — are dropped. The concession survives; the correction does not.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-29", "from": "angelom-gen-1-1", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Jerome's closing remark, that the Hebrews name volumes from their opening words, becomes the first question of Angelomus' commentary and acquires a conclusion Jerome did not draw: that Bresith is therefore rightly rendered Genesis.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-30", "from": "alcuin-int-26", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The reading Jerome had declared false, printed as the answer to the question and in four words: 'In Filio perfecit Deus coelum et terram.' No Hebrew, no versions, no 'according to the sense rather than the word'.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-31", "from": "remigius-gen-1-1", "to": "bede-gen-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Remigius takes over Bede's empyrean heaven — fiery or intellectual, so called not from burning but from splendour, filled at once with angels, proved from Job 38:7 — and puts it after a doxography of Plato and Aristotle that Bede does not have.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-32", "from": "remigius-gen-1-1", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Ambrose's polemical use of the verse, given names: what Ambrose argued against those who would make the world anarchon, Remigius argues against Plato's three principles and Aristotle's two, and supplies the missing word out loud — 'In principio, and of time is understood'.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-33", "from": "glossa-1-1", "to": "bede-gen-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Three of the five glosses on this verse are Bede, the first of them cited by book and Migne column ('BEDA, Hexaem. lib. I, tom. II, col. 13'), and the margin keeps his eternity argument, his simultaneity argument and his empyrean heaven while dropping the house-building simile that carried them.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-34", "from": "glossa-1-1", "to": "alcuin-int-26", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The Glossa prints Alcuin's answer as a gloss of one word — '(ALCUIN. in Gen. tom. I.) « In principio. » Filio' — so that the twelfth-century reader meets the reading Jerome refuted as a bare equation under a great name, with nothing on the page to argue with.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-35", "from": "glossa-1-1", "to": "isidore-quaest-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The Glossa's Mystice paragraph reads heaven and earth as those who bore the image of the heavenly and those who grew proud and bore the earthly; Isidore's Quaestiones read the same two words as the spiritual and the carnal in the Church. Same allegory, same verse, five centuries apart, and the Glossa does not name him.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-36", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1b", "to": "bruno-gen-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "One commentator giving both answers in order and treating them as layers rather than rivals: the literal exposition takes in principio as 'in the beginning of all creatures', and then, the letter disposed of, 'in what beginning? in him, surely, who says: I am the Beginning.' Neither reading is asked to yield to the other.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-37", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1", "to": "aug-gnl-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Augustine's second reading — 'or because they were made first of all' — is the one Bruno builds on, and he builds on it to get simul out of the verse, so that Sir 18:1's 'he created all things at once' and the six days can both stand.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-38", "from": "rupert-gen-1-1", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Rupert concedes Jerome's philology in Jerome's own terms and with the Hebrew words in his mouth — 'son is ben in that language, and beginning is bresith' — and then holds the Christological reading anyway, on the ground that the identity is of sense and not of speech. He reaches Jerome's conclusion about the word and refuses Jerome's conclusion about the sense.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-39", "from": "rupert-gen-1-1", "to": "aug-civ-11-32", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The Ps 104:24 chain taken over entire — 'you have made all things in wisdom, which wisdom is none other than the Word of God' — but reached only after an argument Augustine never makes, that principium in the common sense would be a superfluity of expression and so must be a proper name.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-40", "from": "honorius-hex-1-1", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Jerome had read Genesis and John together as evidence for one another; Honorius notices what that costs — in Genesis the beginning is the Son, in John the beginning is the Father — and resolves it by the unity of substance rather than by choosing.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-41", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-1", "to": "aug-gnm-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Augustine's 'time began together with heaven and earth' becomes Hugh's 'in the beginning of time, or rather with time itself', and Hugh draws the school's conclusion from it: between creation and the disposing of things there was an order of time but no delay interposed.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-42", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1", "to": "bruno-gen-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both read the phrase as a place in a series — Bruno 'in the beginning of all creatures', Abelard 'as if it were said, on the first day' — and both do it to keep the six days without losing the simultaneity of the first making.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-43", "from": "comestor-hs-1-1", "to": "aug-gnl-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Augustine's three questions, printed as three answers with an instruction: 'in the beginning' is to be repeated, once for the Son and once for time, with 'in the beginning of all creatures' offered as a third. The handbook that taught Europe the Bible resolves the crux by refusing to resolve it.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-45", "from": "jerome-hq-1-1", "to": "origen-hom-gen-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Phase 6. Jerome refutes the reading this homily states, and names his opponents: the Altercation of Jason and Papiscus, Tertullian against Praxeas, Hilary on a Psalm. Origen is not among them — and could not have been, since Rufinus's Latin is a decade later than the Quaestiones. But notice what Jerome actually refutes and what he concedes. He refutes the claim that the HEBREW has 'in the Son', with the philology: the Seventy, Symmachus and Theodotion all render 'in the beginning', the Hebrew is BRESITH and not BABEN. Origen never made that claim; his is an exegetical claim about what in principio means. And Jerome's own last sentence grants it — 'it can therefore be taken of Christ rather according to the sense than according to the translation of the word'. The distinction the Latin bench will need for nine hundred years is Jerome's, made in the act of refusing the reading he then allows.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-46", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-2", "to": "origen-hom-gen-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 6. The same conclusion from different verses, and the difference is the whole later history. Origen gets the Son out of in principio by John 1:1–3 and Col 1:15 — the Word through whom all things were made, the firstborn of every creature — and never says wisdom. Ambrose gets him out of John 8:25, 'The Beginning, who also speak to you', which makes Principium a name rather than an instrument. Ambrose's route is the one the Latin bench takes; and it is Ambrose, three columns later, who adds Ps 104:24 and so brings in the wisdom the rabbinic bench is arguing about at the same moment, meaning something else by it.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-44", "from": "comestor-hs-1-1", "to": "bruno-gen-1-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Comestor's third sense, 'in the beginning of all creatures he created heaven and earth, that is, he made these primordial creatures, and made them at once', is Bruno's opening sentence and Bruno's simul, carried into the schools' handbook.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c1", "from": "chalcidius-sapientia-primordium", "to": "br-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same verse and the same conclusion, in Latin about 350 and in Galilee about 450, with nothing between them. R. Hoshaya reads reshit of Prov 8:22 — 'the Lord made me reshit of his way' — and makes the Torah the amon, the artisan's plan the King builds from. Chalcidius quotes the same verse at length and concludes praeeunte diuina sapientia coelum terramque factam, eandemque sapientiam diuinam esse uniuersitatis primordium: that heaven and earth were made with Wisdom going before, and that Wisdom is the primordium of the universe. Primordium and reshit are the same claim about the same word of the same verse. This is the contact K1's finding says existed at the head of the tradition, and it is on the page.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c2", "from": "chalcidius-sapientia-primordium", "to": "targ-neof-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Neofiti does not translate bereshit but interprets it — min qadmin be-ḥokhmah, from the first, in wisdom — and Chalcidius gets to the same gloss by argument rather than by rendering, and from the verse Neofiti's tradition uses. Neither can have known the other. What separates them from the Latin bench that later reaches 'in wisdom' by Ps 104:24 is that both of these stop at Wisdom, and neither says the Son.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c3", "from": "chalcidius-sapientia-primordium", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The two Latins of the fourth century who had access to what the other bench was saying, and the opposite outcomes. Chalcidius quotes Prov 8:22, concludes that divine Wisdom is the primordium of the universe, adds that Wisdom was made by God but not in time — and stops there, without naming Christ. Jerome, at Bethlehem forty years later, states the Christological reading, refutes it on the Hebrew (the three Greek versions all say 'in the beginning'; the Hebrew for 'in the son' would be ba-ben), and then concedes it 'according to the sense rather than the translation of the word'. It is Jerome's concession and not Chalcidius's restraint that the Latin bench inherits.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c4", "from": "chalcidius-initium-non-temporarium", "to": "origen-hom-gen-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Chalcidius is reporting Origen and says so on the same page: Origenes asseuerat ita sibi ab Hebraeis esse persuasum. Origen's homily says the beginning here is not temporal but is Christ; Chalcidius keeps the first half exactly — initium minime temporarium dici, and no time before the furnishing of the world, since day and night are what measure it — and does not take the second. He is the earliest Latin trace of the homily that is the source of everything the Latin bench says on this verse, and he is a trace with the Christology missing.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c5", "from": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both Latins reach for the Greek versions against the Septuagint, and only one of them is remembered for it. Jerome's Hebrew Questions argue from the fact that Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion all render bereshit 'in the beginning'. Chalcidius, fifty years earlier, prints Aquila and Symmachus in Latin with their variants intact — Aquila's caput rerum condidit Deus coelum et terram, Symmachus's ab exordio condidit Deus — so that the Latin reader can see the disagreement Jerome will later summarise away. Aquila's caput is reshit read as head, which is the reading the rabbinic bench builds on and which no Latin on this daf reaches.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c6", "from": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Aquila's Greek, in a fourth-century Latin dress, is the grammarian's reading eight hundred years early. Caput rerum condidit Deus coelum et terram takes reshit as a construct governing what follows — the head of things — which is exactly Ibn Ezra's argument at Lucca, that bereshit is a construct and must be read with what comes after it. Chalcidius prints it as one of four possible renderings and draws nothing from it; Ibn Ezra makes it the plain sense of the verse; and the reading reaches modern Bibles from the second bench and not the first.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c7", "from": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "to": "angelom-gen-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "What a Latin knew about the Greek versions in the fourth century and what he knew in the ninth. Chalcidius names Aquila and Symmachus, quotes each on Gen 1:1–2, and marks off a fourth reading as coming from the Hebrews through Origen. Angelomus at Luxeuil has the etymological question — why bresith in Hebrew is rendered Genesis — and no versions at all to check it against. The philological apparatus does not develop over those five centuries; it is lost.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-c8", "from": "chalcidius-sapientia-primordium", "to": "chalcidius-initium-non-temporarium", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "One argument in two movements on facing leaves. First the word: the beginning of Gen 1:1 is not temporal, because time is measured by day and night and the chapter has not made them yet, and in ordinary Latin 'beginning' has a various and manifold signification anyway. Then the thing: there is nevertheless one beginning of all things, and Prov 8:22 names it Wisdom, which was made by God but not at any point in time. The lexical clearing comes first and the identification second, which is the reverse of how the Latin bench after him proceeds.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-p1", "from": "philo-opif-17-20", "to": "br-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "One story, told twice, four hundred years and one language apart, and neither telling knows the other. Philo: a king founds a city, a trained architect draws the whole of it within himself first and carries an intelligible city in his soul, and only then builds in stone; so God conceived the types, made the intelligible world of them, and used it as the model for this one. Bereshit Rabbah 1:1: a king does not build a palace of his own head but from an amon, a craftsman's plan, and the Holy One looked into the Torah and created the world. Same king, same plan, same order of operations, and the whole difference is what is in the architect's hand. Philo puts the divine Reason there, which is not a person and has no text; the midrash puts the Torah there, which is a book. This crux's finding rests on the midrash's parable; this is where the parable comes from, or at least where it is older.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-p2", "from": "philo-opif-26-27", "to": "origen-hom-gen-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two oldest witnesses on this daf say the same thing about the same word, and the one who is Greek, Jewish and Alexandrian says it first. Philo: the beginning is taken not, as some think, according to time. Origen, in Rufinus's Latin: he does not say here any temporal beginning. Both are in Alexandria; Origen's library held Philo; and yet nothing in the homily names him, and Origen's positive answer, that the beginning is the Saviour, is one Philo could not have given. The negative half is shared and the positive half is not.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-p3", "from": "philo-opif-26-27", "to": "rabanus-gen-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The identical proof, eight hundred years apart, with no possible channel. Rabanus at Fulda: time is from this world, not before the world. Philo at Alexandria: time is the interval of the world's motion, and there could be no motion before the thing moved, so time is the world's coeval or younger. Rabanus has the conclusion as an axiom he inherited through Bede from Augustine; Philo has it as an argument in three steps with a premiss drawn from the Timaeus. The Latin bench holds this position for eight centuries without once being able to say where it comes from.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-p4", "from": "philo-opif-26-27", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Ambrose's Hexaemeron is substantially Philo's De opificio and rarely says so, which makes every agreement between them a question rather than a fact. Here the agreement is on the point Ambrose most cares about: that the world has a beginning, against those who make it eternal. Philo's route is the argument from motion and time; Ambrose's is that the world is visible and what is visible has come to be. That second argument is also Philo's, at section 12, which is not built here. Where Ambrose has the doctrine, the possibility of a channel is real; where he has the argument in Philo's order, it is more than a possibility.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-p5", "from": "philo-opif-17-20", "to": "jerome-hq-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The near miss that makes this crux what it is. Jerome: in the Son God made heaven and earth, and the Hebrew has bresith. Philo: the world of the ideas has no place but the divine Reason. Both read the beginning of Gen 1:1 as something rather than some time, and the something is in both cases the Logos. But Philo's Logos is not a person, is not begotten, and is not distinguished from God as a Son from a Father: it is the place where the ideas are, which is to say the mind of the maker planning. The Latin bench inherits the reading and not the metaphysics, and inherits it from a channel it cannot name.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-p6", "from": "philo-opif-17-20", "to": "targ-neof-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Neofiti alone among the targums renders bereshit as be-chokhmah, in wisdom, making the beginning an instrument rather than a date. Philo makes it the intelligible world in the divine Reason, which is the same move in a philosophical vocabulary: not when God made, but with what. The two are the only Jewish witnesses on this crux to answer the question that way, they are four centuries and one language apart, and neither can be shown to have known the other.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-l1", "from": "lyra-gen-1-1", "to": "glossa-1-1", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The Glossa's first word on this verse is Filio: in the beginning, that is, in the Son. Lyra's Postilla litteralis, printed in the same Bibles two centuries later and often on the same opening, gives in principio, scilicet temporis vel productionis rerum, and does not mention the Son at all. Nothing is denied; the Christological reading is simply not the literal sense any more. This is the end of the line this crux has been tracing since Jerome refuted the reading and Wigbod dropped the refutation.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-l2", "from": "lyra-gen-1-1", "to": "rashi-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Lyra read Rashi constantly and by name, and here the two are close without a citation: Rashi's plain sense makes bereshit a construct governing the act of creating, and Lyra makes the beginning that of time or of the production of things -- in both, a beginning of the making rather than a beginning who is somebody. Paul of Burgos's whole complaint against Lyra, printed a hundred pages later in the same volume, is that on the literal sense he does this too often and credits Ra. Sa. for what the Latin doctors found first.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k1-l3", "from": "lyra-gen-1-1", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Abelard: as if it were said, on the first day. Lyra: of time or of the production of things. Two Paris masters, two hundred years apart, both refusing to let in principio carry a person, and both doing it by supplying a plain temporal or causal sense instead of arguing against the Christological one.", "crux": "beginning-of-what" }, { "id": "t-k7-01", "from": "vulgate-1-2", "to": "lxx-1-2", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Vulgate 'ferebatur' renders LXX ἐπεφέρετο, not the Hebrew merahefet; the Latin bench inherits a Greek verb of motion.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-02", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-8-29", "to": "basil-hex-lat-2-6", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Syrus, qui vicinus Hebraeo est … fovebat aquas, id est vivificabat' reproduces Basil Hex. II.6's Syrian and his gloss 'warmed and quickened'. Ambrose read Basil's Greek; Eustathius' Latin is the bench's later access to the same source.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-03", "from": "aug-gnl-1-18-36", "to": "basil-hex-lat-2-6", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'a quodam docto christiano syro fertur expositum … non superferebatur sed fovebat' names Basil's Syrian at one remove ('fertur'); 'sicut ova foventur ab alitibus' extends the gallina cubans.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-04", "from": "aug-gnl-1-18-36", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-8-29", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Augustine's access to the Syrian is most plausibly Ambrose's Hexaemeron (heard in Milan 386–7); the 'vivificatio' motif matches Ambrose's 'vivificabat … animaret ad vitam'.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-05", "from": "jerome-hq-1-2", "to": "b-chag-15a", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both derive a bird from merahefet. Jerome: incubabat/confovebat, a bird warming eggs. Ben Zoma: a dove hovering over her young and NOT touching. Same verb, opposite physical claim. No citation either way; Jerome's 'in Hebraeo' points at the word, not at a rabbinic informant.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-06", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-2", "to": "jerome-hq-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Wigbod prints Jerome's paragraph verbatim under the label HIERONYMUS (PL 96:1116C).", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-07", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-2", "to": "aug-gnm-1-5-8", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Wigbod prints Augustine's sun-over-earth paragraph verbatim (PL 96:1112D).", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-08", "from": "angelom-gen-1-2", "to": "jerome-hq-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'alia translatio dicit: Incumbebat seu confovebat, in similitudine volucris, ova calore animantis' is Jerome's wording, unnamed and re-labelled as a translation variant.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-09", "from": "angelom-gen-1-2", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'non localiter sed potentialiter … sicut superfertur rebus fabricandis voluntas artificis' is Augustine's craftsman (Gnl imp. §16 / Gnm I.5).", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-10", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-1", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'in similitudinem fabri, cujus voluntas his quae fabricandae sunt rebus solet superferri' restates Augustine's voluntas artificis; 'positione loci' = 'spatia locorum'.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-11", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-1", "to": "bede-gen-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "PL 107:447C copies Bede's 'totius simul Trinitatis in creatione mundi virtutem cooperatam esse signaret' verbatim.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-12", "from": "alcuin-int-29", "to": "aug-gnm-1-5-8", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Non pervagatione, sed potestate' compresses 'non per spatia locorum … sed per potentiam'.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-13", "from": "remigius-gen-1-2", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'mens vel sapientia alicujus artificis superfertur operi' = voluntas artificis, with 'sapientia' added.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-14", "from": "bruno-gen-1-2", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'ut bonus artifex … disponebat' with the house-builder sorting timber elaborating Augustine's 'voluntas artificis ligno'.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-15", "from": "hugh-adnot-gen-1-2", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'quasi artifex operi formando praeerat'; Hugh keeps the craftsman but replaces will with 'intentio'.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-16", "from": "rupert-gen-1-8", "to": "aug-gnl-1-18-36", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'ovum … calore volucris animatur et pullum producit' is Augustine's 'ova foventur ab alitibus … formandis pullis'; the Syrian is gone.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-17", "from": "rupert-gen-1-8", "to": "aug-conf-13-9-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'bonitatem amoremque Dei … amorem et vitam' develops Conf. XIII.9's Spirit-as-gift-and-love reading of the same verse.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-18", "from": "abelard-hex-1-2", "to": "aug-gnl-1-18-36", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'more avis quae ovo incumbit, ut ipsum foveat atque vivificet' = Augustine's warming bird; 'quaedam translatio fovebat' = the Syriac variant as transmitted by Augustine.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-19", "from": "abelard-hex-1-2", "to": "jerome-hq-1-2", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Abelard reports 'Hebraicum habet volitabat' against Jerome's 'in Hebraeo … incubabat'. He does not name Jerome, but the claim about the Hebrew is contradictory and deliberate.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-20", "from": "abelard-hex-1-2", "to": "rashi-1-2b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Abelard's 'volitabat' (flutter) is the sense Rashi's 'dove hovering over the nest' gives merahefet. Abelard consulted Jews on Hebrew elsewhere; no citation here. [CHECK for a documented channel]", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-21", "from": "honorius-hex-1", "to": "aug-gnl-1-18-36", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'vel aquas fovebat, id est … animabat' offers the Syriac 'warmed' as a bare variant; the wording 'animabat' follows Ambrose/Augustine's vivificatio.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-22", "from": "comestor-hs-gen-1", "to": "jerome-hq-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Hebraeus habet pro superferebatur incubabat' is Jerome's rendering, attributed to 'the Hebrew'.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-23", "from": "comestor-hs-gen-1", "to": "basil-hex-lat-2-6", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'vel Syra lingua fovebat, sicut avis ova' is Basil's Syrian, via Augustine Gnl I.18.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-24", "from": "rashi-1-2b", "to": "b-chag-15a", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rashi's 'like a dove (yonah) hovering over the nest' follows the Bavli's dove (Chagigah 15a), not Bereshit Rabbah's unspecified bird ('of); the dove settles which source he is quoting.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-25", "from": "rashi-1-2b", "to": "br-2-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The Ben Zoma story is in both BR 2:4 and Chagigah 15a; Rashi's wording is the Bavli's, but Rashi elsewhere cites BR by name on 1:1–5.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-26", "from": "b-chag-15a", "to": "br-2-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Same Ben Zoma story, two redactions. BR: bird beating its wings, touching-and-not-touching. Bavli: dove over her young, not touching, three fingerbreadths. Compiled independently from a shared Palestinian tradition.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-27", "from": "targ-psj-1-2", "to": "targ-neof-1-2", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both render ruach Elohim as 'a spirit of mercy/mercies from before the LORD'; the Palestinian targum tradition shared the phrase.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-29", "from": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "to": "aug-gnl-1-5-11", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Labelled 'AUG., lib. I de Gen. ad lit., c. 5' in the margin; reproduces 'sive totam corporalem materiam aquam appellavit … sive spiritualem vitam … quasi fluitantem' and 'ne … per necessitatem indigentiae quam per abundantiam beneficentiae … amare putaretur' from PL 34:250–251.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-30", "from": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "to": "jerome-hq-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Labelled 'HIERON. in Gen. t. III, col. 939' — the Glossa (as printed by Migne) cites the very column; 'incubabat vel fovebat, more volucris ova calore animantis' is Jerome's sentence lightly recast.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-31", "from": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "to": "bede-gen-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Tota ergo Trinitas hic operata intelligitur, Deus, Pater scilicet; principium, Filius; Spiritus Dei, Spiritus sanctus' compresses Bede's 'totius simul Trinitatis in creatione mundi virtutem cooperatam' (PL 91:16C) as relayed by Rabanus (107:447C); unlabelled in the margin.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-32", "from": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "to": "isidore-quaest-1-3", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'In quo subsistentes requiesceremus flatu ejus vivificati, et unda baptismi abluti' is Isidore's 'in quo subsistentes requiesceremus, cujusque vivificaremur flatu, et cujus unda ablueremur' (PL 83:209C); a second gloss is labelled 'ISID. in Gen.?' by Migne.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-33", "from": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "to": "alcuin-int-29", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both carry the Old Latin lemma 'Spiritus Domini' against the Vulgate's 'Spiritus Dei'; no citation, but a shared Carolingian text-form.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-28", "from": "jerome-hq-1-2", "to": "rashi-1-2b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Jerome's incubabat and Rashi's Old French acoveter ('to cover, brood') give the same vernacular sense to merahefet, 700 years apart, with no possible contact. The only place on this crux where the two benches reach the same word.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-p1", "from": "philo-opif-30", "to": "aug-conf-13-9-10", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same question, seven centuries and one theology apart. Augustine asks why only the Holy Spirit was borne above the waters, and answers from the Trinity and from the weight of love that carries a thing to its place. Philo asks why only the breath and the light were given something extra in the verse, and answers that breath is the most life-giving of things and God is the cause of life. Both are reading the verse's asymmetry as deliberate; neither has read the other; and Philo's answer is available to a reader with no doctrine of persons at all.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-p2", "from": "philo-opif-30", "to": "targ-onk-1-2", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Onkelos renders the ruach as a wind from before the Lord, which takes the divine name in the verse as a genitive of origin and removes any question of the spirit's status. Philo keeps the genitive and reads it as a genitive of cause: the breath is called God's because breath gives life and God gives life. Two Jewish readings, four centuries apart, of the same two words, and they go in opposite directions from the same grammatical instinct, that of God is doing work in the sentence.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-p3", "from": "philo-opif-30", "to": "br-2-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The midrash makes the hovering spirit the spirit of the Messiah, hovering over the face of the waters by the merit of repentance. Philo makes it the most life-giving thing, named God's for that reason. Both bench readings decline the plain meteorological sense that Onkelos takes, and both do so by asking what pneuma or ruach is for rather than what it is.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-l1", "from": "lyra-gen-1-2-spiritus", "to": "rabanus-gen-1-1", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Five hundred years of the same simile, and the difference is what it is a simile for. Rabanus: like a craftsman, whose will is borne above the things to be made. Lyra: as the will of the craftsman over the material he means to form and to furnish. Rabanus is answering a difficulty about how God can be said to move; Lyra is not answering anything, because the reading has become the plain sense of the words, and he spends his sentence instead on identifying what the waters are.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-l2", "from": "lyra-gen-1-2-spiritus", "to": "aug-gnl-imp-4-16", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Augustine's as the will of a craftsman is borne above the wood, reproduced almost word for word seven hundred years later without attribution, in a commentary that names its authorities constantly. That is the ordinary end state of a successful reading on this bench: it stops being anyone's.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k7-l3", "from": "lyra-gen-1-2-spiritus", "to": "rashi-1-2b", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Lyra read Rashi on this chapter and cites him by name on the very next question, but not here. Rashi has the Throne of Glory standing in the air and hovering over the face of the waters as a dove hovers over the nest; Lyra has a will over a heap of elements. Where the rabbinic reading is a picture, the Latin one at this date is a definition, and Lyra is the witness who shows that he had both in front of him and chose.", "crux": "ruach-hovering" }, { "id": "t-k5-01", "from": "b-chag-12a-order", "to": "br-1-15", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same dispute in two redactions. Both give Beit Shammai the throne and footstool (Isa 66:1), Beit Hillel Gen 2:4, and the sages 'both at once' from Isa 48:13. Bereshit Rabbah adds the palace built from the ground up, R. Ḥanin's turning of Beit Shammai's proof, and R. Shimon ben Yoḥai's stewpot and lid; the Bavli adds Amos 9:6 for the upper storey and Resh Lakish's created-first/stretched-first distinction. Independent redactions of one Palestinian dispute.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-02", "from": "b-chag-12a-akiva", "to": "br-1-14", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "One encounter, two answers. Both have R. Yishmael asking R. Akiva what Naḥum of Gam Zo made of the two ets. In Bereshit Rabbah, Akiva's first answer is that without them we might have said heaven and earth were deities, and he is rebuked for it with Deut 32:47 before the real answer (the sun, moon and constellations; the trees, plants and Eden). In the Bavli the danger is narrower — shamayim would be a name of the Holy One — and the answer, that heaven means heaven literally, stands unchallenged.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-03", "from": "b-chag-12a-shamayim", "to": "b-chag-12a-order", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The sugya passes from when heaven was made to what heaven is without a break: Resh Lakish's stretching, then 'mai shamayim' — sham mayim, or fire and water mingled into the firmament. The Bavli treats the two halves of this crux as one question.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-04", "from": "ramban-1-1b", "to": "br-1-14", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'And so did our Rabbis say: eth hashamayim — eth includes the sun, moon, stars and constellations; ve'eth ha'aretz — ve'eth includes the trees, herbs, and the Garden of Eden.' Ramban names Bereshit Rabbah (parashah 1) and reproduces the inventory, adding only the derivation of et from 'atha boker' (Isa 21:12).", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-05", "from": "ramban-1-1b", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "'The word ha'aretz includes these four elements' and 'by the name of heaven and earth I judge the four elements to be taken in here' are the same reading of the verse, reached in Girona and at the Paraclete a century and a half apart with no possible contact. The distribution differs: Abelard splits the four between the two words, Ramban puts all four under 'earth'.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-06", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1b", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-6-20", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "'In these two the four elements were created' (Ambrose) and 'by the name of heaven and earth the four elements are taken in' (Abelard) are one doctrine, and both argue it from the mixture of the elements in each other. Abelard does not cite Ambrose, and his division of the four is his own: Ambrose puts all four in the pair without assigning them, Abelard gives fire and air to heaven, earth and water to earth.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-07", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-6-24", "to": "br-1-15", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The star thread of this crux. Both turn on Ps 102:26 [Vg 101:26], 'you founded the earth … and the heavens are the work of your hands' — which names the earth first. R. Yehuda bar Ilai brings it as proof for Beit Hillel that the earth was created first. Ambrose brings the same reversal (from Ps 148:5) to prove that the order of naming settles nothing, since both were made together, and adds the reason: lest heaven be reckoned the better by the privilege of being the firstborn creature. That is R. Shimon ben Yoḥai's stewpot and lid and Bereshit Rabbah's closing rule that a reversed order teaches equality of honour, in Milan, four hundred years earlier, with no contact of any kind.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-08", "from": "b-chag-12a", "to": "aug-gnm-1-7-11", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both answer the question 'what is contained in heaven and earth?' — and answer it in opposite modes. Rav Yehudah in Rav's name enumerates: ten things were created on the first day, and heaven and earth head the list, each proved from its verse. Augustine generalises: by the name of heaven and earth the whole creation is signified, put in visible words for the weakness of little ones. An enumeration and a generalisation of the same clause, at roughly the same date, with no contact.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-09", "from": "aug-gnl-1-9", "to": "aug-gnm-1-7-11", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Twenty years apart, the same observation about the shape of v. 1 — that it commends the whole before the parts — first as a remark about visible names for little ones, then as the answer to why Scripture does not say 'let heaven and earth be made'.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-10", "from": "angelom-gen-1-1b", "to": "aug-gnl-1-9", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Sed quaeritur cur ita dictum est … Nisi quia prius universaliter nomine coeli et terrae comprehendendum erat, et commendandum quod fecit, et deinde per partes exsequendum' reproduces De Genesi ad litteram I.9 sentence for sentence, unnamed, and drops the second answer that made the first one provisional.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-11", "from": "alcuin-int-28", "to": "aug-gnm-1-7-11", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Informis illa materia, quam de nihilo fecit Deus, appellata est primo coelum et terra' is Augustine's answer with the proleptic reason added ('not because it already was this, but because it already could be this'); the alternative Alcuin appends without weighing it — 'or else the spiritual and the earthly creatures' — is not Augustine's here and is the seed of the empyrean reading.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-12", "from": "comestor-hs-1-1b", "to": "remigius-gen-1-1b", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The empyrean heaven, fiery from brightness and not from heat, filled at once with the angelic spirits: Remigius states it at PL 131:54D, the Glossa prints it almost verbatim at 113:68C, and Comestor has it as 'the empyrean heaven and the angelic nature'. Comestor adds the admission Remigius does not make — that the philosopher did not know the empyrean.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-13", "from": "comestor-hs-1-1b", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1b", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Terram vero materiam omnium corporum, id est quatuor elementa' is Abelard's reading of the second word, absorbed into a scheme that keeps the empyrean for the first; Comestor then reports the rival reading — 'some understand heaven as the upper parts of the sensible world, and earth as the lower' — without deciding between them.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-14", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1b", "to": "remigius-gen-1-1b", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Directly opposed on what 'heaven' names in this verse. Remigius: not the visible firmament but the empyrean, filled at once with angels. Abelard: fire and air, and 'the angels, being of an incorporeal nature, are not included among the creatures of the world at all'. Abelard does not name Remigius, but the empyrean-with-angels is the standing gloss he is writing against.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-15", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-1b", "to": "remigius-gen-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The objection to the empyrean reading, made from the other bench and with no knowledge of it: those who explain that the heavens of the first verse are the heavens of the heavens — what will they then do with the earth beside it? Ibn Ezra's symmetry argument is exactly what forces Remigius, the Glossa and Comestor to turn 'earth' into prime matter or the four elements once they have made 'heaven' the empyrean.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-16", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-1b", "to": "br-1-15", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both refuse to read the sequence of the words as the sequence of the acts, and both put something else in its place. Hugh: 'not for the sake of order but of dignity', and because the discourse that follows is about the earth, which is therefore named last. R. Yoḥanan in the sages' name: in creation the heavens were first, in completion the earth. The Latin reason is compositional, the rabbinic one is about the work itself.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-17", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-1b", "to": "b-chag-12a-order", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Resh Lakish resolves the contradiction of the proof-texts by splitting the act — created in one order, stretched out in the other. Hugh resolves the same difficulty by splitting the sentence from the act. Neither will let one verse's word order overrule the other's.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-18", "from": "br-1-15", "to": "b-chag-15a", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Both measure the relation of the upper and lower by a physical image and refuse to let them come apart: the stewpot and its lid, which are made together and belong together (Isa 48:13); Ben Zoma's three fingerbreadths between the upper and lower waters, a gap that is not a separation. The same instinct about heaven and earth, in the two Chagigah contexts this project has built.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-19", "from": "comestor-hs-1-1b", "to": "alcuin-int-28", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Alcuin's unweighed alternative — 'or else, by the name of heaven and earth the spiritual and the earthly creatures can be understood' — is what Comestor has hardened into 'the container and the thing contained, that is, the empyrean heaven and the angelic nature' on one side and the four elements on the other.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-20", "from": "ramban-1-1b", "to": "b-chag-12a-akiva", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Ramban gives the Palestinian form of the et-derivation (sun, moon, stars, constellations; trees, herbs, Eden) and not the Babylonian one (that without the particles shamayim would be a divine name), although both were before him — the inventory is usable for his physics and the anxiety about the divine name is not.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-x1", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1", "to": "br-1-15", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 4. The closest Latin analogue to Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel anywhere on the bench, and it turns on the same psalm. Bruno quotes Ps 102:25 [Vg 101:26], 'you in the beginning founded the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands', and concludes: 'not, therefore, heaven before earth, but God created heaven and earth together'. R. Yehuda bar Ilai brings the identical verse for Beit Hillel to prove the earth was first, and R. Shimon ben Yoḥai closes the section with the stewpot and its lid. Written at Phase 4 because `bruno-gen-1-1` was built for K1.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-x2", "from": "bruno-gen-1-1", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-6-24", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 4. Both answer the order question with Sir 18:1, 'he who lives for ever created all things at once', set against a psalm that names the earth first, and both conclude that the sequence of the words gives heaven no privilege. Bruno does not name Ambrose and the argument is the same argument.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-x3", "from": "glossa-1-1", "to": "aug-gnl-1-9", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Phase 4. 'Quia universaliter nomine coeli et terrae comprehendendum erat quidquid fecit Deus, deinde per partes explicandum quomodo fecit' is De Genesi ad litteram I.9 reproduced almost word for word at the head of the standard gloss on Gen 1:1. Written at Phase 4 because the VERS. 1 block was sliced whole for K1 and carries several cruxes' glosses at once.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-x4", "from": "glossa-1-1", "to": "remigius-gen-1-1b", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 4. The empyrean gloss inside the Glossa's VERS. 1 block — a heaven fiery not from burning but from brightness, filled at once with the angelic spirits — is Remigius at PL 131:54D almost verbatim, and it is how the empyrean reading became the schoolroom default that Abelard and Ibn Ezra each attack from their own side.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-x5", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-1b", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-6-20", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Phase 4. PL 107:444B copies Ambrose Hexaemeron I.6.20 verbatim and unnamed, from 'In principio itaque temporis, coelum et terram Deus fecit' — time is from this world, not before the world, and a day is a portion of time, not its beginning. The transmission is what puts Ambrose's answer into the Carolingian schools. Written at Phase 4 because `rabanus-gen-1-1b` was built for K1.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-c1", "from": "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "to": "b-chag-12a-shamayim", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both benches decide that the heaven of the first verse is not the one overhead, and both get there by reading the chapter against itself. Chalcidius: those content with a hasty understanding think this heaven is meant, but the firmament is not called heaven until the second day and the dry is not called earth until the third, so the heaven and earth of the beginning must be older, and drawn in by the understanding rather than by the senses. The Bavli asks what shamayim is and answers by decomposing the word. The move is the same — the name in v. 1 cannot be the thing the chapter later names — and the machinery is entirely different.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-c2", "from": "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "to": "remigius-gen-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Remigius's empyrean, six hundred years early and argued rather than asserted. Remigius says the heaven of v. 1 is that empyrean, fiery or intellectual heaven, and leaves it there. Chalcidius reaches the same conclusion from the chapter's own sequence and then names two schools for what the intelligible heaven and earth are — Philo's ideas and exemplars, or the two species of all things, incorporeal nature and hyle. There is no line of transmission: Remigius has the doctrine without the argument.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-c3", "from": "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "to": "aug-gnm-1-7-11", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The same question, opposite answers, and Augustine's is the one that wins. Augustine takes heaven and earth in v. 1 as a name for the whole creation, universally stated and then unfolded in its parts. Chalcidius takes them as two things older than what we see and knowable only by the understanding — the intelligible against the perceptible. Augustine's reading makes the verse a summary; Chalcidius's makes it a report of a prior order. Every Latin after Augustine on this daf takes the summary.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-c4", "from": "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "to": "comestor-hs-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Comestor's container and thing contained is Chalcidius's two species with the Platonism removed. Both split the pair of v. 1 into two orders rather than two places, and both need the split because the chapter names a heaven on day two and an earth on day three. Comestor has the distinction as a schoolroom formula; Chalcidius has it as the position of a named school, alii non ita, set against Philo's.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-p1", "from": "chalcidius-caelum-et-terra", "to": "philo-opif-29", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The only edge in this edition where a Latin witness names a Jewish author and the passage he is naming is printed beside him. Chalcidius: what heaven, then, did God found before the rest, or what earth? Philo judges them to be incorporeal and intelligible essences, the ideas and exemplars both of this dry land and of the solidity. Philo, De opificio 29: first the Maker made an incorporeal heaven and an invisible earth and the idea of air and of void. The report is accurate, including the detail Chalcidius adds next, that Philo said the human too was first intelligible and only then corporeal, which is De opificio 134. Everywhere else on this daf a Latin knows a Jewish reading and does not say so; here one says so, and he is the one Latin nobody after him read.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-p2", "from": "philo-opif-29", "to": "b-chag-12a-order", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two inventories where the verse gives a narrative. The Bavli asks which was created first and stages Beit Shammai against Beit Hillel, and the sugya's answer is a list of ten things created on the first day. Philo also answers with a list, and his has seven items: incorporeal heaven, invisible earth, the idea of air, the idea of void, the substance of water, of breath, and seventh light. Both readings decide that the first verse under-reports, and both fill it out by enumeration rather than by exegesis of a word. Neither list can be got from the other and the two do not share a single item's rationale.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-p3", "from": "philo-opif-36", "to": "comestor-hs-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Comestor's container and the thing contained, argued from a definition of body instead of asserted as a formula. Both split the heaven of the first verse from the firmament of the second day; Comestor because the schools require the distinction, Philo because stereoma means solid and solid means extended in three directions, so the name itself marks the corporeal off from the intelligible. Comestor is a thousand years later and has the distinction without the reason for it.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-p4", "from": "philo-opif-36", "to": "b-chag-12a-shamayim", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both benches answer what is heaven by taking the word apart, and each takes apart a different word in a different language. The Bavli decomposes shamayim, there is water, sham mayim. Philo etymologises the Greek stereoma, which is the Seventy's word and not Moses's, and gets the corporeal heaven out of it. The method is the same and neither could have used the other's word.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k5-p5", "from": "philo-opif-36", "to": "remigius-gen-1-1b", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Remigius says the heaven of the first verse is that empyrean, that is fiery, or intellectual heaven, and stops. Philo says it is the incorporeal heaven established in the divine Reason and gives the argument, from the second name the chapter uses. This is the same relation Chalcidius stands in to Remigius, and for the same reason: Chalcidius got the argument from Philo, and Remigius got the conclusion from a tradition that had lost it.", "crux": "heaven-earth-order" }, { "id": "t-k6-01", "from": "vulgate-1-2", "to": "lxx-1-2", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Jerome renders tohu va-vohu 'inanis et vacua', where the Greek had ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος and the Old Latin 'invisibilis et incomposita'. The two Latin lemmas ask different questions — what the earth looked like, and what it lacked — and both are on the bench from the fifth century on.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-02", "from": "aug-gnm-1-3-5", "to": "lxx-1-2", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Augustine's lemma throughout is 'terra invisibilis et incomposita', the Old Latin of the Greek pair; he never quotes Jerome's 'inanis et vacua' on this verse, in the Manichaean books, the Confessions or De Genesi ad litteram.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-03", "from": "basil-hex-2-4", "to": "lxx-1-2", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Basil expounds ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος word by word — invisible for two reasons, unordered because not yet fruitful — and Eustathius' Latin keeps the Old Latin pair, so the Greek argument reaches the Latin bench with its lemma intact.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-04", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-7-25", "to": "basil-hex-2-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Basil asks why, of two elements built with equal honour, heaven was complete and the earth still unordered; Ambrose answers with the good craftsman who lays a foundation before he distinguishes the parts and adds the adornment. Ambrose is expounding Basil's Hexaemeron through this book (cf. the Syrian at K7).", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-05", "from": "aug-conf-12-21", "to": "aug-gnm-1-3-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The first of the five readings set out in Confessions XII.21 — 'that bodily thing which God made was still the formless matter of bodily things, without order, without light' — is the answer Augustine had given the Manichaeans thirteen years earlier; in the Confessions it is one true reading among five rather than the reading.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-06", "from": "alcuin-int-30", "to": "lxx-1-2", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Alcuin's question carries its own source-note, '(Ibid. ex vers. LXX)': he knows the lemma he is glossing is the Septuagint's and not the text his pupils read.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-07", "from": "angelom-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "alcuin-int-30", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Invisa propter obscuritatem, Incomposita propter deformitatem' is Alcuin's answer to Interrogatio 30 word for word, unattributed, with 'invisa' for 'invisibilis' — and Angelomus has moved it inside a discussion of the Vulgate's lemma, where it glosses 'the other translation'.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-08", "from": "angelom-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "bede-gen-1-2-tohu", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'quale sit coelum, quod primum condiderat, potest intelligi, videlicet quod ab omni hujus mundi volubili statu secretum … manet semper quietum' is Bede's sentence (PL 91:13C), unnamed; Angelomus reads 'divinae praesentiae' where the Corpus Corporum Bede prints 'divinae gloria praescientiae'.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-09", "from": "glossa-1-2-terra", "to": "bede-gen-1-2-tohu", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The gloss is labelled '(BEDA, Hexaem. tom. II.)' and compresses Bede's paragraph — the two heavens, the upper one filled with angels as soon as it was made, Job 38:7 with the morning stars glossed as the angels — to five sentences.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-10", "from": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "to": "remigius-gen-1-2-tohu", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The gloss Migne prints under '(STRAB.)' on this lemma — 'Inanis et vacua. Inutilis scilicet, et infructuosa, et incomposita. Omnia enim elementa commixta, confusa, et totum hoc aeris spatium aquis plenum; non quales nunc sunt, sed sicut nebulae tenues' — is Remigius of Auxerre at PL 131:55A, verbatim to the last clause about the waters above the heavens.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-11", "from": "comestor-hs-1-2-tohu", "to": "glossa-1-2-ruach", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'machina mundialis adhuc erat inutilis, et infructuosa, et vacua ornatu suo' keeps two of the Glossa's three adjectives and replaces the third ('incomposita') with a phrase of his own; the subject has moved from the earth to the world-machine.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-12", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "isidore-quaest-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Item spiritaliter: Terra scilicet carnis nostrae inanis et vacua erat, priusquam doctrinae acceperit formam' is Isidore, Quaestiones in Genesim I.2 (PL 83:209B), verbatim.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-13", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "aug-gnm-1-3-5", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The same compilation prints Augustine's Manichaean paragraph on this verse verbatim at PL 96:1111B under the Old Latin lemma 'terra invisibilis et incomposita', five columns before it asks 'Cur inanis et vacua?' under the Vulgate's. One book, two Latin texts of Gen 1:2, no seam.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-14", "from": "abelard-hex-1-2-tohu", "to": "bede-gen-1-2-tohu", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both withhold the pair from heaven on the ground that heaven had its inhabitants from the first: Bede from the silence ('why did he say these things of the earth, passing heaven by?'), Abelard from the adversative conjunction in 'terra AUTEM erat inanis'. Abelard does not name Bede, and the reasons for the angels' being passed over are different.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-15", "from": "abelard-hex-1-2-tohu", "to": "rupert-gen-1-2-tohu", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same split of the pair into two privations, sixteen years apart and with the terms distributed differently: Abelard, empty of fruit and void of an inhabitant; Rupert, empty of every shoot and void of all living things. No citation either way.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-16", "from": "hugh-adnot-1-2-tohu", "to": "abelard-hex-1-2-tohu", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "'Inanis a seminibus; vacua a germinibus' is the same operation again with a third distribution — and Hugh then offers a fourth, hollowness and the mist in the hollow, as an alternative in the same breath. The formula is school property by 1130; no one on this crux claims it.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-17", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-1-tohu", "to": "lxx-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'sive, ut alia translatio habet, « incomposita »' names the variant in the act of expounding the Vulgate — the first place on this bench where a reader is told plainly that the clause exists in two Latin forms.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-18", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-1-tohu", "to": "aug-conf-12-21", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Hugh's reading — 'heaven and earth' name the matter of all things heavenly and earthly, in which all were created together in essence before they were made one after another in form — is Augustine's fifth reading in Confessions XII.21, reached without citation and stated as the single sense rather than as one of five.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-19", "from": "bruno-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "br-2-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same clause read as a periodization of sacred history, from opposite ends. R. Yehuda bar Simon: tohu is Adam, va-vohu is Cain, the darkness is the generation of Enosh, the deep is the Flood, 'let there be light' is Abraham. Bruno: the earth is empty while the Church is without children, the darkness is the unread Scripture, and the emptiness ends when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in and Israel is saved. No contact is possible; the shape is identical and the contents are opposed.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-20", "from": "bruno-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "isidore-quaest-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Isidore's 'terra carnis nostrae', the flesh before it takes the form of doctrine, moved from the soul to the Church: Bruno's 'terra nostra' will no longer be called empty and void when it is inhabited by the fullness of so many sons.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-21", "from": "rashi-1-2a", "to": "br-2-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Rashi's 'tohu is a word for astonishment and desolation, for a person would be astonished and appalled at the bohu in it' is the verb of Bereshit Rabbah 2:2, where the earth sits toheh u-voheh over her lot. The midrash's parable has become a lexical entry, and the one who is astonished has changed from the earth to the reader.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-22", "from": "rashi-1-2a", "to": "targ-onk-1-2", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Rashi glosses bohu as 'reikut ve-tzadu', emptiness and waste — the two Aramaic words Onkelos uses to render the whole pair, 'tzadya ve-reikanya', in the other order. Rashi's peshat on the pair is the targum's, split between the two Hebrew words.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-23", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-2", "to": "b-chag-12a-tohu", "type": "contests", "evidence": "'Now in Sefer Yetzira: tohu — this is the green line, and bohu — these are the mefulamot stones. What is correct is as the Aramaic translator said.' Ibn Ezra names the tradition the Chagigah baraita carries and sets it aside in favour of Onkelos: the pair is a privation, not two objects.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-24", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-2", "to": "targ-onk-1-2", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'as the Aramaic translator has said' — Onkelos' tzadya ve-reikanya, supported from 'the howling waste of tohu' (Deut 32:10) and 'after tohu' (1 Sam 12:21), where the word means without substance.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-25", "from": "ramban-1-2-tohu", "to": "b-chag-12a-tohu", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Both build on Isa 34:11, 'the line of tohu and the stones of bohu', and read it as an inventory of what tohu and bohu are. The baraita: a green line encircling the world, and slimy stones sunk in the deep. Ramban: the cord with which the craftsman marks out the plan of his building, and the stones as the forms in it. Ramban cites Sefer Yetzirah by name in the same paragraph, so the tradition is in front of him.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-26", "from": "ramban-1-2-tohu", "to": "rashi-1-2a", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Ramban quotes the Bahir's R. Berekhya — 'what is tohu? a thing which astonishes people' — which is Rashi's etymology from the same root; but in Ramban the thing that astonishes is the primary matter itself, which cannot hold a name, rather than the sight of an empty land.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-27", "from": "ramban-1-2-tohu", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-2", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ibn Ezra sets Sefer Yetzirah's green line aside and takes tohu as 'without substance', following Onkelos; Ramban keeps Sefer Yetzirah, cites it approvingly, and makes tohu a substance — the hyle — with bohu for its form. The two commentators Ramban reads side by side on 1:1 divide here on whether the word names anything at all.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-28", "from": "br-2-3", "to": "br-2-1", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Both hang on Jer 4:23, 'I have seen the land, and behold, it is tohu va-vohu'. The prophet's re-use of the phrase for a land under judgement is what licenses the whole series of historical readings in Bereshit Rabbah 2; no Latin witness on this crux cites Jer 4:23 at all.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-x1", "from": "bruno-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "br-2-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 4. Both read the whole of Gen 1:2 as a periodization of sacred history running to a final redemption, and neither could have known the other. Resh Lakish: tohu is Babylon (Jer 4:23), va-vohu Media, the darkness Greece, the deep Edom, and the spirit hovering is the spirit of the messianic king (Isa 11:2). Bruno of Segni reads the same clause as the ages of the Church. Written at Phase 4 because `br-2-4` was built for K7 and did not carry this crux until then.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-c1", "from": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "to": "br-2-2", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The rabbinic reading of tohu va-vohu reaches the Latin bench in the fourth century, is explained, and goes nowhere. Bereshit Rabbah 2:2 hears tohe u-bohe in the words — bewildered and astonished — and Rashi's word for tohu at Troyes is astonishment. Chalcidius reports, from Origen and credited to the Hebrews, an exemplar reading terra autem stupida quadam erat admiratione, and then glosses it: the signification declares a certain force and likeness of soul, since the earth would be stupefied, seized by the majesty of its maker. A Latin has the other bench's reading of this verse, with its psychology, seven hundred years before Rashi writes it down.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-c2", "from": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "to": "angelom-gen-1-2-tohu", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Angelomus knows there is another translation and does not know whose. 'Whence another translation says: unseen and unordered' is as far as the ninth century can get. Chalcidius names him — otiosa uero et indigesta nuncupatur a Symmacho — quotes him twice, and explains both words: idle because of itself it avails nothing, undigested because it has the fitness to receive order. The alia translatio of the Carolingian glosses is a named Greek version whose Latin attribution had been in print since the fourth century and was lost.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-c3", "from": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "to": "aug-conf-12-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine groping for the word Chalcidius already has. Confessions XII asks what the formless is to be called if not by some familiar word, and settles on a nothing-something, a is-that-is-not. Chalcidius states the receptacle argument flat: it is called empty because, being the receiver of all qualities, it has none of its own by nature, and nothing because it is devoid of all things. The two men are describing the same thing and only one of them has the Platonic vocabulary intact; Augustine is reaching for it through a Latin Bible.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-c4", "from": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "to": "basil-hex-2-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two fourth-century texts that give a Latin reader the Greek behind inuisibilis et incomposita, and only one of them stays on the bench. Basil, in Eustathius's Latin, expounds the earth as invisible and unordered and explains why the terms are apt. Chalcidius gives the same clause four renderings — the Septuagint's, Aquila's inanis et nihil, Symmachus's otiosum quid confusumque et inordinatum, and the Hebrews' stupida admiratione — and explains each. Basil is copied by Bede and reaches the twelfth century; Chalcidius is copied by nobody.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-c5", "from": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Both name hyle and take opposite views of it. Ambrose at Milan reports the philosophers' matter in order to refuse it, as a rival to the God who makes out of nothing. Chalcidius uses sylua as the plain sense of the verse — 'the earth was invisible and formless', that is, corporeal hyle, the old substance of the world before it took on forms — and has already said on the previous leaf that the Hebrews confess hyle was generated, which is what removes Ambrose's objection. The concession Ambrose needed was on a Latin page he never saw.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-p1", "from": "philo-opif-21-22", "to": "basil-hex-2-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same two Greek words, once as a doctrine and once as a lemma, and the Latin bench only ever saw the second. Basil's text of Gen 1:2 reads the earth was invisible and unordered, aoratos kai akataskeuastos, and the whole Latin argument about invisibilis et incomposita descends from it. Philo, writing before that Greek Bible reading had a history of interpretation, uses ataktos, without order, of substance in general, and pairs it with apoios, without quality. So the phrase the Latins treat as a fact reported about the earth is in Philo a philosophical description of matter as such. Basil then denies exactly what Philo asserted, that there is an unbegotten substance, and does not name him.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-p2", "from": "philo-opif-29", "to": "aug-conf-12-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both are looking for names for what has no form, and both borrow from the verse. Augustine asks what it was to be called if not by some familiar word, and settles on earth and abyss as names given for the sake of our slowness. Philo takes the same two words and assigns them referents in his inventory: the darkness is the air, because air is black by nature, and the abyss is the void, because the void is deep and yawning. Augustine treats the words as a concession to the reader; Philo treats them as precise. The daf has the same problem solved in opposite directions eight hundred years and one language apart.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-p3", "from": "philo-opif-29", "to": "b-chag-12a-tohu", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both give tohu and the abyss a physical identification rather than a moral one, and the two identifications have nothing in common. The Bavli: tohu is a green line that encircles the whole world and from which darkness goes out. Philo: the darkness is the air, which is black by nature, and the abyss is the void. Each bench reaches for the physics it has, and each ends with the same conviction, that the second verse names things and not merely states.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-p4", "from": "philo-opif-21-22", "to": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Chalcidius reports that the Hebrews confess hyle was generated. Philo is a Hebrew who confesses nothing of the kind: he says the substance was of itself without order, quality or life, and he never says who made it. Chalcidius had read Philo and names him twice elsewhere in the commentary, so his generalisation about the Hebrews is made in full knowledge of the one Hebrew author he could actually read, and does not fit him. This is the sharpest place in the edition to watch a Latin report of a Jewish position round off its edges.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-l1", "from": "lyra-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "rashi-1-2a", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Rashi glosses tohu as a word for astonishment and desolation, a state of the beholder. Lyra, who read Rashi and cites him by name all over this chapter, does not take it here: he gives inanis a physical cause, the water covering the earth, and vacua another, the absence of plants. Where he follows Rashi he says so; this is a place where the Latin tradition's own answer, Bede's invisible-because-dark and unordered-because-shapeless, is the one he refines.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-l2", "from": "lyra-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "bede-gen-1-2-tohu", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Bede asks why these things are said of the earth and heaven passed by, and answers from what the earth lacked. Lyra six hundred years later keeps the two-part answer and supplies a cause for each half, water for the invisibility and the absence of plants for the emptiness. The Latin bench's account of tohu va-vohu changes very little between Jarrow and Paris; what changes is that Lyra thinks the question is answerable by physics.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k6-l3", "from": "lyra-gen-1-2-tohu", "to": "b-chag-12a-tohu", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two benches derive the meaning of the verse's hardest words from the words themselves, and neither could have used the other's language. The Bavli makes tohu a green line that encircles the world and from which darkness goes out. Lyra takes the Greek-derived Latin abyssus apart into a-byssus, without whiteness, and gets the darkness of v. 2 out of the etymology of the name for the deep. Both are answering the same question -- what does the verse mean by darkness -- with the resources of the language each happens to be reading it in.", "crux": "tohu-vabohu" }, { "id": "t-k8-01", "from": "pdre-3-6", "to": "br-3-4", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The garment of Ps 104:2, no longer whispered: Bereshit Rabbah has the Holy One wrap himself in the light like a garment; Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer takes the next clause of the same verse — 'who stretches out the heavens like a curtain' — and makes the heavens out of that light.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-02", "from": "br-3-4", "to": "br-3-6", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two sections of one compilation asking the crux from opposite ends: 3:4 asks what the light was made from and answers with God's garment and the site of the Temple; 3:6 asks where it is now and answers that it was stored away for the righteous.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-03", "from": "b-chag-12a-light", "to": "br-3-6", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same doctrine on two proof texts and neither cites the other: the midrash hides the light because it would dim the sun's disc, and proves the storing from Isa 30:26; the Talmud hides it from the generations of the Flood and the Dispersion, and proves it from Job 38:15 and from 'God saw the light, that it was good' read through Isa 3:10, since 'good' means the righteous.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-04", "from": "rashi-1-4", "to": "b-chag-12a-light", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rashi names his source — 'here too we must depend upon the statement of the Agada' — and gives R. Elazar's answer: God saw the wicked were unworthy of the light and set it apart for the righteous in the world to come. Silbermann's note supplies the reference to Chagigah 12a.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-05", "from": "rashi-1-4", "to": "br-3-6", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The plain sense, taken from Bereshit Rabbah: it was not seemly that light and darkness should work in confusion, so he assigned each its own hours. Rashi keeps the aggadic hiding and the peshat division side by side and does not merge them.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-06", "from": "aug-gnl-1-11", "to": "b-chag-12a-light", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The one place on this crux where the benches hold the same opinion in the same words. Augustine: 'this too I know to have been said by someone, that the nature of light was first brought in when it was said Let there be light, but afterwards, when the luminaries are spoken of, it was recorded what was made out of that same light.' The Bavli: 'the sages say, these are the lights that were created on the first day but were not hung up until the fourth.' Augustine cannot name whose opinion it is; the Talmud names the party that holds it, against R. Yaakov.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-07", "from": "alcuin-int-33", "to": "pdre-3-6", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both make the first light derive from God himself rather than merely follow him: Alcuin adds to Bede's sentence the words a luce aeterna, so that the temporal light is made out of the eternal one, and Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer makes the heavens out of the light of the garment God wears. Neither argues for it; both state it as though it needed none.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-08", "from": "bede-gen-1-3b", "to": "br-3-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same question — where — and two answers that could not be further apart. Bede: in the upper parts of the earth, the parts the sun's daylight now falls on, and he defends it with the divers who let oil from their mouths. R. Berekhya in the name of R. Yitzḥak: the light was created from the site of the Temple, proved from Ezek 43:2 and Jer 17:12.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-09", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-3", "to": "b-chag-12a-light", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both make the first light continuous with the sun rather than replaced by it: the sages hold that the lights were created on the first day and hung on the fourth; Hugh holds that a luminous body was made in the sun's stead and place, turning as the sun turns, until the sun came. The Latin argument is from the fitness of means, the rabbinic from the wording of Gen 1:17.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-10", "from": "pdre-3-6", "to": "aug-gnl-1-11", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both make the first light the material of something later: Augustine's unnamed authority has the luminaries made out of it, and Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer has the heavens made out of it. On the Latin side this is one option among three and is not adopted; on the rabbinic side it is stated as cosmogony.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-11", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-9", "to": "basil-hex-2-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Ambrose's Hexaemeron follows Basil's Greek homilies closely and this passage is no exception — the light as the world's first ornament, the air taking it up, the suddenness. The witness date here is that of Eustathius' Latin version, which is later than Ambrose; Basil's Greek (378) precedes him and is his source, so the dependence runs the other way from what the dates on this page suggest.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-12", "from": "aug-gnl-1-3", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ambrose says God dwells in inaccessible light and is the true light of John 1:9, 'but he made that light' — hanc, the one in the verse, a thing among things. Augustine asks whether the light is spiritual or bodily and answers that it can be the first creature, the spiritual nature called heaven in verse 1, and that 'let there be light' is its conversion. The two positions the rest of the bench divides between are already both in place by 410.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-13", "from": "aug-gnl-1-11", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Book I asks what the light is; eight chapters later the same book asks what the sun can be for if that light already made a day. The second question is the pressure that produces every physical answer on this crux, and Augustine raises it against himself.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-14", "from": "bede-gen-1-3", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Bede does not refute the angelic light; he steps round it, and the step is in one sentence. He names three lights — God who is the true light, the inaccessible light the angels already enjoyed in the heaven of heavens, and 'the first grace of material light' given to this world — so that the angels are on the page, already made, and are not the light. Alcuin, Rabanus and the Glossa's Bede gloss all inherit the step.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-15", "from": "bede-gen-1-3b", "to": "bede-gen-1-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same exposition a page later, asking the question a material light forces: where was it, since the abyss covered everything? Bede's answer, the upper parts of the earth, only makes sense because he has already declined to make the light angelic.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-16", "from": "alcuin-int-33", "to": "bede-gen-1-3", "type": "cites", "evidence": "'Congruit operibus Dei … ut esset unde caetera quae crearet apparerent' is Bede word for word, compressed into a schoolroom answer, with a luce aeterna added and the angels of the heaven of heavens dropped.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-17", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-3", "to": "bede-gen-1-3", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Bede reproduced verbatim and unattributed, as at K1, K7 and K10; the only visible editorial act is the chapter heading Rabanus sets over it, 'Ubi lux primum fieri jubetur', which turns a continuous exposition into a lemma.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-18", "from": "angelom-gen-1-3", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Angelomus takes the side of the bench Bede stepped away from, and states it more sharply than Augustine: the angelic dignity was founded first and was made light afterwards by turning to behold its creator, so that 'let there be light' means 'let it turn to contemplate me unceasingly'.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-19", "from": "angelom-gen-1-3", "to": "b-chag-12a-light", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same objection in the same form on both benches: if the luminaries are made on the fourth day, what is this light? The Talmud raises it from Gen 1:17 and answers with R. Elazar's hidden light; Angelomus raises it, floats a light above the firmament from which the sun was lit, and answers with the angels.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-20", "from": "glossa-1-3", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Three of the four glosses on this verse are Augustine, cited by book and chapter, and between them they give the angelic reading entire: 'et facta est lux, id est angelica et coelestis substantia, in se temporaliter', with the doctrine that the creature is formed when it turns to the unchangeable light of the Word.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-21", "from": "glossa-1-3", "to": "bede-gen-1-3b", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The Bede gloss keeps the bodily light with its location and its divers letting oil from their mouths, and cuts the pun that carried Bede's argument — if a man can do it by the oil of his mouth, what can God do by the Spirit of his mouth. What is left is the observation without the reason for making it.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-22", "from": "bruno-gen-1-3", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Bruno asks Augustine's question in Augustine's terms — what is that light, said to be prior to sun and moon and stars? — and then refuses to answer it: God called the light Day, so light here is put for day, and there is nothing further to look for.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-23", "from": "abelard-hex-1-3", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Neither limb of Augustine's disjunction. Abelard makes the light the distinction of the works themselves, the coming-into-distinctness of the confused heap so that it could be seen and known for what it was made for — which is Augustine's own doctrine that darkness is privation, moved from optics to knowledge, and used against him.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-24", "from": "abelard-hex-1-3b", "to": "vulgate-1-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "'Notandum vero pro eo quod dicimus: Fiat lux, et facta est lux, in Hebraeo haberi: Sit lux, et fuit lux.' Abelard reports the Hebrew against the Latin he is expounding, as K7 found him doing with volitabat at PL 178:735B; the observation is right, and where he got it is unknown.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-25", "from": "abelard-hex-1-3b", "to": "lxx-1-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The feature Abelard finds in the Hebrew — one verb twice, 'let it be' and 'it was' — is exactly what the Greek does with γενηθήτω and ἐγένετο, and exactly what the Latin's fiat / facta est does not. He draws from it the conclusion the whole bench had been reaching for by other means: no delay is interposed.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-26", "from": "honorius-hex-1-3", "to": "remigius-gen-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Remigius' twilight — 'not of the kind that now is, with the sun set above, but such as is wont to be before sunrise or after sunset' — becomes Honorius' 'such a brightness as there now is before the rising of the sun', with twelve hours above the earth and twelve below added.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-27", "from": "hugh-adnot-1-3", "to": "honorius-hex-1-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two Paris and Regensburg sentences of the same decade with the same physics: the light is the element of fire, separated out, carried round the world in a circuit like a luminous cloud, as the sun is now.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-28", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-3", "to": "hugh-adnot-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same author giving the picture in the Adnotationes and the argument in De sacramentis: bodily things can only be lit by a bodily light, every body is in a place, and a light that made evening and morning must have moved, since without motion no span of time is traversed.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-29", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-3", "to": "aug-gnl-1-11", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Augustine's question — what is the sun for, if that light already made a day — answered by making the first light the sun's placeholder: made vice et loco solis, turning by its own motion until the sun came.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-30", "from": "rupert-gen-1-3", "to": "honorius-hex-1-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Rupert states the physical reading with its details — an illumination of the air, twelve hours, three days, no luminaries — and demolishes it on a ground nobody else uses: every other day makes a substance that abides, and this one would make an unstable accident thrown over the air and snuffed out after three days, which is unworthy of the majesty that laid on sun and moon a decree that shall not pass away.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-31", "from": "rupert-gen-1-3", "to": "angelom-gen-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Melius magni et nominatissimi Patres intellexerunt naturam angelicam, lucis nomine significatam' — Rupert appeals to the Fathers for the angelic light and then goes further than they do, insisting in the next chapter that it is said not by likeness but of the thing itself: the visible light and the stars were made in the likeness of that light, not the other way about.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-32", "from": "comestor-hs-1-3", "to": "hugh-adnot-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The luminous cloud verbatim — nubes lucida, driven round much as the sun is — with Hugh's element of fire dropped and the dawn brightness of Remigius and Honorius kept.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-33", "from": "comestor-hs-1-3", "to": "remigius-gen-1-3", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Claritate tamen tenui, ut fieri solet diluculo' is Remigius' before-sunrise light, two hundred and seventy years on, stated in a handbook as fact rather than as opinion.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-34", "from": "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-1", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine's position set out at length and fairly — heaven the unformed spiritual nature, light the angelic nature formed, day the angelic consideration — granted to be probable and reasonable, and then declined: the Catholic treatise-writers approved another way, the text more readily intimates it, and the expositors more generally follow it, so it is the safer and more useful to hold.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-35", "from": "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-1", "to": "comestor-hs-1-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The schools' settled answer in its two registers, as at K10: Comestor prints the luminous cloud in a handbook without noticing that anyone ever thought otherwise, and Bonaventure raises the question in a disputation in order to rule the same way. The corporeal light wins by handbook and by quaestio at once.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-p1", "from": "philo-opif-31", "to": "br-3-4", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same question, asked in the same terms, with two answers that are structurally identical and materially unrelated. Bereshit Rabbah 3:4: from what was the light created? R. Shimon says the Holy One wrapped himself in it like a garment and the splendour of his majesty shone from one end of the world to the other. Philo: the intelligible light is an image of the divine Reason, a supercelestial star and the spring of the perceptible stars. Both make the first light an overflow from God rather than a creature standing on its own, and both make the visible lights derivative from it. Neither can have read the other.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-p2", "from": "philo-opif-31", "to": "aug-gnl-1-3", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine's whether something spiritual or something bodily is the question Philo has already answered, and answered in a way that dissolves the alternative. For Philo the light of the first day is intelligible and the visible lights draw from it, so it is neither a body nor a substitute for one; it is the model. Augustine has no such category available at this point in the Genesis literature and works the question as a disjunction, which is how the Latin bench holds it for the next seven hundred years.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-p3", "from": "philo-opif-31", "to": "pdre-3-6", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer: the light was created from the light of his garment. Philo: it is an image of the divine Reason. The two answers are the same shape, an emanation from something of God's own rather than a thing made from nothing, and they are the only two on this daf that make the first light continuous with its source. The Latin witnesses that come nearest, the angelic light of Angelomus and the Glossa's spiritual light, all make it a creature.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-p4", "from": "philo-opif-30", "to": "b-chag-12a-light", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The Bavli says the light the Holy One created on the first day was such that a man could see from one end of the world to the other, and that seeing what the generations would do he stored it away for the righteous. Philo says the intelligible outshines the visible as the mind outshines the eyes of the body. Both are saying that the first light is out of proportion to any use the world has for it; the Bavli answers by removing it from the world, Philo by putting it in a different order of being.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-l1", "from": "lyra-gen-1-3", "to": "hugh-sacr-1-3", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Hugh says the light of the first day was made in the sun's stead and place, which concedes that it is not the sun. Lyra says it is: ista lux est lux solis. The two are answering the same objection, that the sun comes on the fourth day, and Lyra's answer costs less -- he does not have to invent a light, only to say that the sun's was not yet finished. Two hundred years apart, and the second is the one that ends the argument.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-l2", "from": "lyra-gen-1-3", "to": "aug-gnl-1-11", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine's question -- why then was the sun made -- is the one this crux is made of, and Lyra answers it in a clause: the light of the first day was solar light still unformed in some respect, and the fourth day is what formed it. Where Augustine cannot decide between a spiritual and a bodily light, Lyra has stopped treating the alternative as live.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k8-l3", "from": "lyra-gen-1-3", "to": "b-chag-12a-light", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The two most confident answers on this daf, and they are opposites. The Bavli: the light of the first day was such that a man could see by it from one end of the world to the other, and God stored it away for the righteous, so it is not in the world at all. Lyra: it is the light of the sun, which is in the sky now. Both refuse the compromise the middle of this crux is made of; one removes the light from creation, the other identifies it with the most ordinary thing in it.", "crux": "first-light" }, { "id": "t-k4-01", "from": "br-1-9", "to": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The philosopher: 'Your God was a great artist, but he found good materials that helped him.' Augustine: 'those who do not believe that almighty God could make anything out of nothing, when they consider that craftsmen and workmen cannot make anything unless they have something to make it from … wood helps the craftsman, silver the silversmith.' The same inference from the same analogy, and the verb is the same in both — the materials help. Thagaste 389, Galilee c. 450, no contact.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-02", "from": "br-1-9", "to": "basil-hex-2-2-materia", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Basil diagnoses the position the philosopher states: 'with us each art is exercised upon some matter brought to it — smithcraft upon iron, carpentry upon wood … so they suppose it is with the divine working too.' Two trades where the midrash has none and Augustine has four, and the same conclusion drawn about God's poverty.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-03", "from": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "to": "basil-hex-2-2-materia", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both answer the craftsman analogy by denying that God receives anything from outside: Basil, 'God is not the deviser of figures but the creator of the whole nature'; Augustine, 'if some thing that he had not himself made helped him, he was not almighty'. Augustine did not read Eustathius' Latin Basil in 389, and the arguments differ in kind — Basil's from the dignity of the unbegotten, Augustine's from omnipotence.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-04", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-1c", "to": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Verbatim to the last clause, including the four trades and 'quod sacrilegum est credere'; Wigbod reads 'de nihilo facta est' where Augustine has 'de omnino nihilo'. Wigbod does not name Augustine here, though he names Jerome elsewhere in the same work.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-05", "from": "angelom-gen-1-1c", "to": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Aiunt enim: Lignum adjuvat fabrum, et argentum argentarium, et aurum aurificem … non enim faber facit lignum, sed de ligno aliquid facit' — Augustine's clauses reused without his name and recast as reported speech, with the potter dropped and a diagnosis added ('quia attendunt fabrum, et non Deum').", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-06", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Ambrose: 'tria principia constituerent omnium, Deum, et exemplar, et materiam … de materia, quam vocant hylen'. Hugh: 'Philosophi gentilium tria quaedam rerum principia sine principio posuerunt: opificem, materiam et formam.' The same three-item list with the same qualification (without a principle / uncreated and without beginning), abbreviated to single words and unattributed.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-07", "from": "comestor-hs-1-1c", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Plato dixit tria fuisse ab aeterno, scilicet Deum ideas, ile' is Ambrose's 'Deum, et exemplar, et materiam … quam vocant hylen' with exemplar resolved into ideae, and Aristotle's two principles, materia et forma, follow in the same order. Epicurus is Comestor's addition.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-08", "from": "basil-hex-2-2-materia", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same position described from the two sides of the Latin/Greek divide within about fifteen years: Ambrose names it (Plato's three principles, hyle uncreated) and Basil argues against it without naming anyone ('if we call this matter unbegotten it is made equal to God'). Ambrose knew Basil's Greek Hexaemeron; this Latin Basil is Eustathius' later version, so the Latin words are not a source for Ambrose's.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-09", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-1c", "to": "rupert-gen-1-1c", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same objection from the same two verses, in the same order, answered in opposite directions. Rupert: 'if anyone should object that man too … is said to be created — as it is written, God created man to his own image … or again, God created the great sea-creatures'. Ibn Ezra: 'they have forgotten And God created the crocodiles (Gen 1:21), as well as three times in the same verse, God created man in his image (Gen 1:27)'. Rupert saves the doctrine with a distinction about the matter; Ibn Ezra concludes the verb has a second sense. Liège c. 1115, Lucca c. 1155, no possible contact.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-10", "from": "ibn-ezra-1-1c", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1c", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Abelard secures ex nihilo on the difference between two Latin verbs — creavit of the elements, formavit of man at Gen 2:7 and the animals at 2:19 — where Ibn Ezra dissolves it by showing that the one Hebrew verb bara stands at 1:21 and 1:27 of things made out of something. The Latin distinction is available only because the translation supplies two words where the Hebrew has one at the decisive places.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-11", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1c", "to": "rupert-gen-1-1c", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two Latin answers to one difficulty within about fifteen years: Rupert grants that creavit is used of things shaped from matter and refers the word back to the creation of the matter; Abelard denies that it is properly so used at all and assigns those cases to formare. Neither cites the other, and the two answers are incompatible.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-12", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo", "to": "abelard-hex-1-1c", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same definition by contrast, in Paris within four years: Abelard, 'creari proprie id dicitur, quod de non esse ita ad esse producitur, ut praejacentem non habeat materiam'; Hugh, 'quod de aliquo factum est, factum quidem est sed creatum non est; quia de nihilo factum non est'. Neither names the other, and the school relations between them make silence the interesting fact.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-13", "from": "glossa-1-2-materia", "to": "bede-gen-1-2-materia", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Migne prints the gloss under (BEDA ubi supra.). Bede: 'cuncta quae cum aquis et terra videre solemus in mundo, vel de ipsis exordium naturae, vel sumpsere de nihilo; ipsa autem terra et ipsae aquae propterea nomen sortitae sunt materiae informis, quia priusquam in lucem venirent, unde formositatem haberent non erat.' Glossa: 'Ipsa autem terra et aqua informis dicuntur materia, quia omnia quae videmus, vel ex istis sumpserunt exordium, vel ex nihilo: et priusquam in lucem venirent, non erat unde formam haberent.' The restriction that opened Bede's paragraph — 'Ad haec tantum informis est illa materies' — is not carried over.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-14", "from": "bede-gen-1-2-materia", "to": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both hang the difficulty on Wisdom 11:17, 'qui fecisti mundum de materia informi', and take opposite routes out of it: Augustine grants the formless matter and pushes creation one step behind it; Bede restricts the phrase to the earth and the waters before the light came, so that no substrate is conceded at all.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-15", "from": "angelom-gen-1-1c", "to": "bede-gen-1-2-materia", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Wisdom 11:17 again, quoted in full by Angelomus in the form 'non enim erat manus tua, Domine, invalida, qua creasti mundum ex informi materia', and used to the opposite end: for Angelomus the verse proves that God made the matter and then made everything out of it, for Bede that 'formless matter' is only a name for the earth and waters in the dark.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-16", "from": "alcuin-int-19-20", "to": "aug-gnl-5-18", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Alcuin's second mode of divine working — 'in materia informi qui vivit in aeternum, creavit omnia simul (Eccli. XVIII, 1)' — is Augustine's simul doctrine with Augustine's proof text, reduced to one clause and set in a list of four.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-17", "from": "br-1-5b", "to": "br-1-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Four sections apart in one compilation, and the second answers the first. BR 1:5: 'were the matter not written explicitly it would not be possible to say it — In the beginning God created — from what? The earth was emptiness and disorder.' BR 1:9: the philosopher names emptiness, disorder, darkness, wind, water and the deeps as the materials God found, and Rabban Gamliel answers that of every one of them creation is written. The same list of six, read once as the stuff the world was made of and once as a list of created things.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-18", "from": "pdre-3-7", "to": "br-1-9", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer answers 'from what?' with substances — the earth from the snow beneath the Throne of Glory, congealed on the waters, with Job 37:6 for proof; the heavens, in the preceding section, from the light of his garment. Rabban Gamliel's answer to the same question is that nothing was found and everything was created. Neither text acknowledges the other, and both stand in the rabbinic bench's own tradition.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-19", "from": "ramban-1-1c", "to": "ibn-ezra-1-1c", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ramban names R. Abraham a few lines above this passage and then writes 'there is no expression in the sacred tongue for bringing forth something from nothing other than the word bara' — which is the exact claim Ibn Ezra had refuted from Gen 1:21, Gen 1:27 and Isaiah 45:7. The contest is direct and is the reason the sentence is phrased as an exclusive.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-20", "from": "ramban-1-1c", "to": "hugh-sacr-1-1-nihilo", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Hugh: 'omnia ergo quae facta sunt, Deus non solum ex materia fecit, sed materiam omnium ipse de nihilo creavit.' Ramban: 'the Holy One, blessed be He, created these two substances from nothing; they alone were created, and everything else was constructed from them.' The same two-stage doctrine — one creation out of nothing, everything afterwards made out of what was created — with the Greek word for the matter on the Hebrew side and not on the Latin.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-21", "from": "ramban-1-1c", "to": "br-1-5b", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Ramban's tohu is bar Kappara's difficulty resolved: BR 1:5 asks 'from what?' and answers 'the earth was tohu va-vohu', with an apology; Ramban makes tohu the name in the sacred tongue for the hyle, so that the verse now says the world was made out of the one thing that was created out of nothing. He quotes the rabbinic material of this section (and Sefer Yetzirah, 'he created substance from tohu') by name in the lines that follow.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-22", "from": "aug-conf-12-22", "to": "br-1-9", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "One difficulty, two opposite methods. Augustine argues that Genesis' silence about when a thing was made cannot prove it coeternal, and makes the case with a second silence (the waters above the firmament). Rabban Gamliel meets the same objection by breaking the silence item by item: Isaiah 45:7 for tohu and darkness, Psalm 148:4–5 for the waters, Amos 4:13 for the wind, Proverbs 8:24 for the deeps.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-23", "from": "aug-conf-12-22", "to": "aug-conf-12-7", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same conclusion reached twice in one book by different routes — at XII.7 from the exhaustive dilemma (not out of God, and nothing else was there, therefore out of nothing), at XII.22 from the failure of the argument from Scripture's silence. The second is the defensive form of the first.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-24", "from": "aug-conf-12-7", "to": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'De nihilo fecisti coelum et terram' restates in prayer what De Genesi contra Manichaeos argued nine years earlier, with the same two-stage structure — formed things out of the matter, the matter out of nothing — now expressed as 'unum prope te, alterum prope nihil'.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-25", "from": "alcuin-int-19-20", "to": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine's doctrine turned into an inventory: 'Quae creaturae de nihilo factae sunt? — Coelum, terra, angeli, lux, aer, aqua et anima hominis.' The list form has no Latin precedent on this crux and exact rabbinic counterparts (b. Chagigah 12a's ten things, PdRE 3's eight), and Alcuin's items are chosen so that no unformed substrate appears on it.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-x1", "from": "ramban-1-2-tohu", "to": "ramban-1-1c", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 4. One continuous argument that the crux boundaries split in two: having said that the Holy One created all things from absolute non-existence and that after the hyle he created nothing, Ramban goes straight on to name it — the substance the Greeks called hyly is what the sacred tongue calls tohu. The hyle and the tohu are the same thing, and the two witnesses are consecutive sentences.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-x2", "from": "abelard-hex-1-1c", "to": "vulgate-1-1", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Phase 4. Abelard's whole definition of creation rests on a distinction between two Latin verbs — created of what has no pre-existing matter, formed of what is shaped out of matter — and the distinction is available only because the translation supplies two verbs where the Hebrew has one at the places that matter. Ibn Ezra brings the same two verses (Gen 1:21, 1:27) to the opposite conclusion, that bara does not mean bringing forth from nothing, because in Hebrew there is no second verb to escape into.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-c1", "from": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "to": "br-1-9", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "A Latin reporting the rabbinic position on this crux, correctly, and by name. Hebraei syluam generatam esse confitentur — the Hebrews confess that hyle was generated. At Bereshit Rabbah 1:9 a philosopher tells R. Gamliel that his God was a great artist but had good materials to hand — tohu and bohu, darkness, wind, water, the deeps — and is answered that Scripture says of every one of them that it was created. That is the rabbinic bench refusing coeval matter, which is exactly what Chalcidius says the Hebrews hold. He is a fourth-century Latin who knows the other bench's answer to this crux, states it accurately, and is read by nobody who argues the crux afterwards.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-c2", "from": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ambrose sets up the hyle of the philosophers as the position a Christian must refuse, and Chalcidius had already reported the concession that dissolves it. For Ambrose, matter that the craftsman merely finds is a rival to God; for Chalcidius, the Hebrews grant that hyle itself was generated, so the Platonist account of the world's substance and the scriptural account of its origin are not in competition. Ambrose is refuting a Platonism that this Latin Platonist does not hold, forty years earlier and in the same language.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-c3", "from": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "to": "aug-conf-12-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same doctrine reached from opposite directions. Augustine works down from God to a formless something 'near to nothing', and needs a page to say what it is not. Chalcidius works up from the Timaeus and has the definition ready: the receiver of all qualities has none of its own by nature, and is therefore called empty; being devoid of all things, it is called nothing. Augustine has the Bible and is short of the vocabulary; Chalcidius has the vocabulary and is using the Bible to confirm it.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-c4", "from": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "to": "ramban-1-1c", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two witnesses on this daf who take the plain sense of the verse to be about matter and still hold that the matter was made. Ramban: bara means from absolute non-existence, and what was drawn out on the first day was a formless substance from which everything after was formed. Chalcidius: the earth of v. 2 is corporeal hyle, the old substance of the world before it took form — and the Hebrews, he has just said, confess it was generated. Girona 1267 and a Latin commentary on the Timaeus of about 350, agreeing on both halves of the crux.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-p1", "from": "philo-opif-21-22", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Ambrose refutes this position by name and does not know he is refuting Philo, whom he is elsewhere copying. Ambrose: they say the world was made out of the matter they call hyle, and this is to make God a craftsman rather than a creator. Philo: the substance was of itself without order, without quality, without life, and God being good did not grudge it his own best nature. Every term Ambrose objects to is in the Greek, in that order, in the book his own Hexaemeron follows most closely.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-p2", "from": "philo-opif-21-22", "to": "aug-conf-12-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine's near-nothing is Philo's substance with the one addition that makes it orthodox. Augustine: you made two things, one near to you and one near to nothing, and the formless matter is yours too, made by you out of nothing. Philo: the substance had nothing beautiful of itself but was able to become all things. The description matches almost word for word; what Augustine adds is the clause about where it came from, and that clause is exactly what Philo does not supply.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-p3", "from": "philo-opif-21-22", "to": "chalcidius-terra-sylua", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The one Latin here who had read Philo, describing hyle in Philo's terms: because it is the receiver of all qualities it has none of its own. That is Philo's apoios, without quality, and Philo's able to become all things. Chalcidius names Philo twice elsewhere in the commentary and does not name him here, which is the ordinary shape of this transmission: the doctrine crosses and the attribution does not.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-p4", "from": "philo-opif-21-22", "to": "aug-gnm-1-6-10", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The craftsman argument, from both sides. Augustine reports the objection that craftsmen and workmen of any kind cannot make anything unless they have something to make it from, and answers that God is not a craftsman. Philo is the position Augustine is answering, and he holds it as a description of God's goodness rather than of God's limits: the maker is good, and goodness is what makes him give form to what has none. The Latin bench inherits the objection without the argument that made it worth holding.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-b1", "from": "burgos-add-1", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-1-hyle", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Ambrose and Burgos both want the philosophers' matter kept out of Genesis, and they want it for opposite reasons. Ambrose argues against the doctrine: they say the world was made out of the matter they call hyle, and that makes God a craftsman rather than a creator. Burgos argues against the genre: the philosophers proceed only by opinion, as their disagreeing shows, so nothing in Scripture may be made to depend on which of them is right. The first is a refutation and the second is a ruling about jurisdiction, and only the second could have been written after the schools had spent three centuries on Aristotle.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-b2", "from": "burgos-add-1", "to": "chalcidius-hebraei-versiones", "type": "contests", "evidence": "The two ends of this edition's Latin bench on the same question. Chalcidius in the fourth century reports what the Hebrews hold about hyle in order to agree with it, and takes the philosophers' vocabulary into the exposition without apology. Burgos in the fifteenth, himself born a Jew, rules that the philosophers' opinions about matter have no business determining the sense of the chapter at all. A thousand years apart, and it is the convert who fences the text off from philosophy.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k4-b3", "from": "burgos-add-1", "to": "aug-conf-12-22", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine says that formless matter too was made by God and is not to be feared, and he reaches that by taking the philosophical question seriously enough to answer it. Burgos cites the holy doctors as having taken little care about such opinions, which is not what Confessions 12 looks like. The disagreement is about the Latin bench's own history: Burgos needs the fathers to have been uninterested in a question they in fact worked hard at, because his argument is that a Christian exposition should not have to wait on the philosophers.", "crux": "ex-nihilo-or-matter" }, { "id": "t-k10-01", "from": "vulgate-1-5", "to": "lxx-1-5", "type": "transmits", "evidence": "Jerome's 'dies unus' renders the LXX's cardinal ἡμέρα μία, not an ordinal; the whole Latin quarrel over unus and primus rests on a word the Greek had already kept from the Hebrew.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-02", "from": "targ-psj-1-5", "to": "lxx-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Aramaic 'yoma chad' and Greek ἡμέρα μία make the same decision independently: keep the cardinal, though every following day in the chapter is an ordinal. Onkelos does the same.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-35", "from": "targ-psj-1-5", "to": "targ-onk-1-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 6. Pseudo-Jonathan keeps Onkelos's yoma chad unaltered and then expands the clause it sits in, giving the day to labour and the night to rest — an expansion of the reason and not of the number. Where the targum that adds most adds nothing to a word, the word was not felt to need help.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-37", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "to": "basil-hex-2-8b", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Phase 6, and the strongest single edge on the daf. Basil: nox diem comitatur, and evening is named first ut nativitatis diurnae privilegia reservaret. Ambrose, five years later in Milan: evening is the end of the day and morning the end of the night, so 'to give the day the prerogative and the birthright, it named the end of the day first, since night was to follow'. Prerogative and birthright is privilegia and nativitas, in that order, on the same clause. Ambrose is reading Basil's Greek, not this Latin — Eustathius translated a generation after the Hexaemeron of Milan — so the two Latin texts here are independent renderings of one Greek sentence, and every later Latin answer to 'why evening first', Bede's and Bruno's included, comes down from Ambrose's.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-38", "from": "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2", "to": "basil-hex-2-8b", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Bonaventure quotes this sentence by name — 'Et Basilius in Hexaëmero' — as the Greek doctors' position, and quotes it with a variant that decides its sense. Quaracchi prints non solaris corporis motu, 'not by the motion of the solar body'; the Patrologia column reads non solum corporis motu, 'not only by the motion of the body'. The first makes Basil deny that the first light moved as the sun does, which is the whole ground of Bonaventure's division into Greeks and Latins; the second makes him concede motion and add diffusion to it, and so dissolves the division. Basil's own context favours Quaracchi — the sentence has just distinguished what happens after the sun's creation from what happened then, when there was no solar body to move — and the same TEI column carries two plain OCR faults within six lines. Reported as a divergence, not adjudicated: neither the Greek nor a second Latin witness was consulted.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-39", "from": "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2", "to": "bede-gen-1-5", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The Latin half of Bonaventure's division is Bede, named and quoted: 'Beda autem et alii expositores Latini dicunt, quod diem et noctem faciebat sua revolutione; et hoc habitum fuit in auctoritate prius posita, quae inducitur in littera: Occidente luce paulatim' — the opening words of the Bede witness on this daf. What Bede argued from the behaviour of light, the schools have by the thirteenth century filed as the position of the Latins.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-40", "from": "bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2", "to": "bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 6. The same judgement twice, one distinction apart, and both times against the more spiritual reading on the same ground. At d.12 he grants Augustine's simultaneous days are 'multum rationabilis et valde subtilis' and declines them because Scripture would have to be twisted; at d.13 he grants the Greek doctors their emission and contraction of rays and declines it because the Latin account is 'rationabilior, quia virtuti naturali possibilior'. Reasonableness in the first case is fidelity to the letter, in the second what nature can do — and both times the literal, physical day wins.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-36", "from": "targ-onk-1-5", "to": "lxx-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Phase 6. Onkelos's yoma chad and the Seventy's ἡμέρα μία, with yom tinyan and δευτέρα after each: two independent translators out of one Hebrew, and both let the unevenness stand rather than regularise the series. Every Latin argument in this crux descends from a Greek decision that an Aramaic translator had already made on his own.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-03", "from": "rashi-1-5", "to": "br-3-8", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rashi names his source — 'thus it is explained in Bereshit Rabbah' — and reproduces R. Yudan's answer, that God was alone (yachid) in his world, adding the datum that fixes it: the angels were not created until the second day.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-04", "from": "br-3-9", "to": "br-3-8", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two consecutive sections of one compilation asking the same thing from opposite ends: 3:8 asks what 'one day' is a name for, 3:9 asks why the series is 'one, second, third' at all. The second states the grammar as an unresolved difficulty.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-05", "from": "b-chull-83a", "to": "br-3-8", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both fix a meaning on the words yom echad and neither cites the other: the midrash makes it the day God was alone, the Talmud makes it the rule that reckoning follows the night. The halakhic use is the one that governs practice.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-06", "from": "b-chag-12a", "to": "br-3-8", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both list what was made on day one and both must decide whether anything besides God was there. Chagigah counts ten things and includes the measures of day and night from our verse; Bereshit Rabbah rules that nothing at all was created on the first day, so that no partner in creation can be alleged.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-07", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "to": "lxx-1-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Ambrose reads a Latin text that keeps the Greek cardinal and builds his chapter on it: 'Praeclare etiam unum non primum diem dixit.' Without ἡμέρα μία behind the Latin there is no question to ask.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-08", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "to": "rashi-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The same question in two languages seven hundred years apart: he could have said 'first,' with a second and third to follow, and that seemed the order — so why 'one'? Ambrose answers from the twenty-four-hour circuit, Rashi from God's solitude. No contact is possible in either direction.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-09", "from": "bruno-gen-1-5", "to": "br-3-9", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Bereshit Rabbah objects that 'one, second, third' is not a proper series; Bruno answers precisely that objection with the logic of relatives — first and second are correlative terms, and with no second yet in being nothing could be called first. The best-matched pair on the crux, and there is no channel between them.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-10", "from": "aug-gnm-1-10", "to": "b-chull-83a", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Augustine: the day does not begin at evening, and 'reliqui dies computantur a mane usque in mane'. Ben Zoma: 'yom echad' in the work of creation means the day follows the night. The same five words of Genesis 1:5 are made to yield two calendars. Neither knows of the other; the contest is real and is in the text.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-11", "from": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "to": "aug-gnm-1-10", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Both refuse the evening start and both do it by making vespera the end of a completed day rather than the opening of a new one. Ambrose adds the birthright argument, Augustine the Manichean opponent; Augustine was hearing Ambrose preach at Milan in the years before he wrote.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-12", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-5", "to": "aug-gnm-1-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Omnis dies ab ortu solis initium sumit' with the natural day running sunrise to sunrise is Augustine's 'a mane usque in mane' given the computists' vocabulary; Hugh adds the reason Augustine does not give, that the first day had no dawn to name.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-13", "from": "bruno-gen-1-5", "to": "aug-gnm-1-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Bruno keeps Augustine's conclusion — the day's own boundaries are what Scripture sets, and the night is not counted in — and hardens it into a thesis Augustine never states: nulla dies ex nocte constat ac die.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-14", "from": "bruno-gen-1-5", "to": "targ-psj-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "'Divina providentia non ad laborem, sed ad quietem noctem creavit' is the reason Pseudo-Jonathan gives in Aramaic for the same pair — the light made that the world's inhabitants might labour, the darkness that the creatures might rest. Neither could have read the other.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-15", "from": "aug-gnl-4-22", "to": "aug-gnl-1-17", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The same author's two answers, a decade apart in the same work: in book I 'one and not first' because the word holds all time, offered and set aside as allegory; in book IV 'one' because there is only one day, the angelic light, presented six times over.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-16", "from": "aug-gnl-5-18", "to": "aug-gnl-4-22", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Book V supplies the name for what book IV describes: the two knowledges become cognitio matutina and vespertina, and the doctrine is tied to 'creavit omnia simul' (Sir 18:1), which is what makes the six days non-successive.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-17", "from": "aug-civ-11-7", "to": "aug-gnl-4-22", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The City of God restates the Genesis commentary compactly and rests it on the textual observation that carries the argument — Scripture numbers six days and never once writes 'night was made.'", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-18", "from": "rabanus-gen-1-5", "to": "bede-gen-1-5", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Rabanus reproduces Bede's paragraph on the verse almost word for word, including the counterfactual about the light perishing at evening; the same silent copying the K7 threads trace at PL 107:447C.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-19", "from": "alcuin-int-34", "to": "aug-gnm-1-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Finis operis perfecti, et initium operis incoepti' compresses Augustine's account of evening as a finished work and morning as the next beginning into a single schoolroom answer.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-20", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-5", "to": "aug-gnl-4-22", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Wigbod puts the compressed formula first and then, under the label AUGUSTINUS, the doctrine it came from: the creature's knowledge of itself is evening, its knowledge in God is morning, 'plus videtur in arte qua facta est, quam in seipsa quae facta est.'", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-21", "from": "wigbod-gen-1-5", "to": "alcuin-int-34", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two Carolingian question-and-answer books give the same compressed gloss on the verse — evening a work perfected, morning a work begun — in almost the same words; the shared source is Augustine, and neither names him for that sentence.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-22", "from": "angelom-gen-1-5", "to": "alcuin-int-34", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'In vespera intelligatur perfectio praecedentis operis, et mane inchoatio subsequentis' is the Carolingian formula verbatim, before Angelomus goes on to the angelic reading.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-23", "from": "angelom-gen-1-5", "to": "aug-gnl-4-22", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The angelic mind turning from God to the creature is evening and turning back is morning; Angelomus keeps Augustine's guard rail — had it stayed with the creature it would have been night — and then adds 'one day' as a name for the unity of angelic dignity, which is his own.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-24", "from": "remigius-gen-1-5", "to": "aug-gnl-1-17", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Remigius takes the moral reading Augustine had offered and set aside — evening as sin, morning as renewal — and turns it to the ordinary Christian's progress; but he reverses the terms, making morning the beginning and evening the perfection.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-25", "from": "glossa-1-5", "to": "aug-gnl-4-22", "type": "cites", "evidence": "The margin cites 'AUG., de Gen. ad litt., l. IV, c. 22, 23, tom. III, col. 311, 312' and abbreviates the passage with the Glossa's usual 'etc., usque ad' — a pointer to a book the reader is assumed to own, not a quotation.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-26", "from": "glossa-1-5", "to": "aug-civ-11-7", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Gregory's gloss and Augustine's City of God fasten on the identical textual fact — that Scripture writes evening and never night — and draw different conclusions from it: for Augustine the creature's knowledge dims but does not fall away; for Gregory temptation hides the light of justice but does not destroy it.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-27", "from": "honorius-hex-1-5", "to": "aug-gnl-4-22", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Non primus, sed unus dies dicitur, quia idem semper repetitur' is Augustine's repeated day reduced to a clause and given a proof text from Ps 119:91.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-28", "from": "honorius-hex-1-5", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "'Vespere est finis diei; mane autem finis noctis: quae duo juncta, viginti quatuor horae fiunt' is Ambrose's definition of evening and morning and his twenty-four hours, in the same order.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-29", "from": "comestor-hs-1-5", "to": "bede-gen-1-5", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The light setting little by little, passing under the earth and coming to the rising, is Bede's travelling light; Comestor names the result dies unus naturalis and drops the argument Bede built it to support.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-30", "from": "hugh-sacr-1-5", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Both make evening the end of the day and dawn the end of the night, and both conclude that day naturally precedes night; Hugh adds that the first day had no dawn of its own, which is why evening had to be named first.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-31", "from": "abelard-hex-1-5", "to": "aug-gnl-1-17", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "Abelard adopts as his own reading what Augustine raised and put aside: 'one day' names the whole span of the work, not the first of a series. His evening and morning are the work in God's mind and the work made visible.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-32", "from": "rupert-gen-1-5", "to": "bruno-gen-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Two contemporaries reach the same conclusion by different routes: what God divided cannot be recombined into one thing (Rupert), and no day consists of night and day since God named them separately (Bruno). Neither cites the other.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-33", "from": "bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2", "to": "aug-gnl-5-18", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Bonaventure states Augustine's simul thesis with its Scriptural support and its account of the days as spiritual and simultaneous, grants that it is 'multum rationabilis et valde subtilis', and then declines it: to hold it, the sense of Scripture must be twisted, and it is safer to submit reason to Scripture than Scripture to reason.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-34", "from": "bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2", "to": "comestor-hs-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The schools' settled reading in its two registers within a century: Comestor simply narrates a natural day and never raises Augustine's question, and Bonaventure raises it in order to rule against it. The literal six days win by handbook and by disputation at once.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-p1", "from": "philo-opif-35", "to": "rashi-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The two poles of this crux's finding, and they turn out to be one reading held four hundred years apart in two languages by two Jews, neither of whom could have read the other. Rashi, out of Bereshit Rabbah: it says one and not first because the Holy One was yachid be-olamo, alone in his world, the angels not having been created until the second day. Philo: day not first but one, because of the monosis of the intelligible world, which has a monadic nature. Both take the cardinal as a report about solitude rather than about position in a series; both need it to mean that on that day there was nothing to count with. What is alone differs entirely, God in the one and the intelligible world in the other, and the grammatical argument underneath is the same argument.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-p2", "from": "philo-opif-35", "to": "ambrose-hex-1-10", "type": "echoes", "evidence": "The Latin channel for this whole reading, and it does not name its source. Ambrose: excellently, too, he said one day and not first day. Philo: day not first but one. Ambrose's Hexaemeron follows Philo's De opificio closely enough that agreements of this kind are the rule rather than the exception, and here the agreement is at the level of the sentence. What Ambrose does not take over is the reason, the monosis of the intelligible world, which is unavailable to him; he supplies the eternity of the day instead. Every Latin after him has the observation without the argument that produced it.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-p3", "from": "philo-opif-35", "to": "aug-gnl-1-17", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Augustine reaches the same formula and gives it a Christian ground: it was called not first but one, and the day is the knowledge of the creature in the Word. Philo has the formula and grounds it in the solitariness of the intelligible world. Both refuse to let the cardinal be a scribal looseness for an ordinal, and both are looking for something that day has and the other days do not.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-p4", "from": "philo-opif-15", "to": "bruno-gen-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Bruno's grammar, a thousand years early and used for the same purpose. Bruno: first and second are relatives, so to call it first would require a second. Philo: he does not even call it first, so that it should not be counted in with the others. The argument is the same argument about what an ordinal commits you to, and the two men reach it from opposite ends, Bruno from the schoolroom logic of relatives and Philo from the arithmetic of the monad.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-p5", "from": "philo-opif-33-34", "to": "glossa-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The Glossa notes that night is not recorded as made, only evening. Philo has already turned that observation into a doctrine: evening and morning are the borders God set in the intervals between light and darkness, and they belong among the incorporeal and intelligible things, not among the perceptible ones. On that reading there is nothing for night to be, which is exactly the gap the Glossa is pointing at without being able to fill it.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-p6", "from": "philo-opif-35", "to": "lxx-1-5", "type": "cites", "evidence": "Philo is quoting the Seventy and the crux exists because they translated as they did. His whole argument stands on hemeran mian, day one, against hemeran proten, and he is reading the Greek word for word: the Maker called it day, and day not first but one. This is the edition's one place where a witness on the greek-jewish bench cites the other witness on the same bench, and it shows what the LXX is for on this daf, a text somebody argued from and not only a version to compare.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-p7", "from": "philo-opif-15", "to": "br-3-9", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Bereshit Rabbah 3:9 works the same list, one, second, third, and asks why the first alone is out of pattern; its answers are theological. Philo asks the same question of the same list in Greek and answers that Moses withheld the first day from the count on purpose. The rabbinic bench does not have Philo and reaches the observation independently, which is what makes the agreement worth an edge rather than a footnote.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-l1", "from": "lyra-gen-1-5", "to": "bede-gen-1-5", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "Bede: one day was completed, of twenty-four hours. Lyra: he is speaking of the natural day, which is of twenty-four hours. The conclusion is identical and the argument is not there in Bede at all. What Lyra adds is why the verse names evening and morning and not anything else: they are the boundaries of the two parts, the artificial day and the night, that make the natural day up. Six hundred years to supply the reason for a number the bench had been repeating.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-l2", "from": "lyra-gen-1-5", "to": "hugh-sacr-1-5", "type": "contests", "evidence": "Hugh rules that every dawn belongs to the preceding day, which puts the join at morning. Lyra puts it at evening: the artificial day is completed at evening, and the night that follows is completed at the next morning, so that evening and morning together mark one natural day. Both are answering the calendar question this crux parts on, and they answer it in opposite directions with the same vocabulary.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" }, { "id": "t-k10-l3", "from": "lyra-gen-1-5", "to": "b-chull-83a", "type": "parallel", "evidence": "The Bavli settles from yom echad that the day follows the night, and it matters because a rule of practice hangs on it. Lyra reaches the same structure -- the day begins in the evening, since evening closes the light part and the following morning closes the dark -- from a schoolroom distinction between the artificial and the natural day, and nothing hangs on it but the sense of the verse.", "crux": "one-day-evening-first" } ], "persons": { "lxx-translators": { "name": "The Seventy", "dates": "3rd c. BCE", "tradition": "greek-jewish" }, "jerome": { "name": "Jerome", "la": "Hieronymus Stridonensis", "dates": "c. 347–420", "tradition": "latin" }, "onkelos": { "name": "Targum Onkelos", "dates": "2nd c. (redaction 3rd–4th)", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "targum-neofiti": { "name": "Targum Neofiti", "dates": "1st–4th c.", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "targum-pseudo-jonathan": { "name": "Targum Pseudo-Jonathan", "dates": "7th–8th c. (older strata)", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "bereshit-rabbah": { "name": "Bereshit Rabbah", "dates": "compiled 400–500", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "bavli": { "name": "Babylonian Talmud", "dates": "redacted 500–600", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "rashi": { "name": "Rashi", "he": "רש״י", "dates": "1040–1105", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "ben-zoma": { "name": "Shimon ben Zoma", "he": "בן זומא", "dates": "fl. c. 110–135", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yehoshua-b-hananya": { "name": "R. Yehoshua ben Ḥananya", "dates": "fl. c. 90–130", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "resh-lakish": { "name": "R. Shimon ben Lakish", "dates": "c. 200–275", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-hagai": { "name": "R. Ḥaggai", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-pedat": { "name": "R. Pedat", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "rav-aha-b-yaakov": { "name": "Rav Aḥa bar Yaakov", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "mar-zutra": { "name": "Mar Zutra", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "basil": { "name": "Basil of Caesarea", "la": "Basilius Magnus (tr. Eustathius)", "dates": "c. 330–379", "tradition": "greek-christian-in-latin" }, "syrian-informant": { "name": "The Syrian", "la": "vir quidam genere Syrus", "dates": "before 378", "tradition": "syriac", "role": "informant", "note": "Basil's unnamed source; often identified with Ephrem, without proof." }, "ambrose": { "name": "Ambrose", "la": "Ambrosius Mediolanensis", "dates": "c. 339–397", "tradition": "latin" }, "augustine": { "name": "Augustine", "la": "Augustinus Hipponensis", "dates": "354–430", "tradition": "latin" }, "isidore": { "name": "Isidore of Seville", "dates": "c. 560–636", "tradition": "latin" }, "bede": { "name": "Bede", "dates": "c. 673–735", "tradition": "latin" }, "wigbod": { "name": "Wigbod", "la": "Wicbodus", "dates": "fl. c. 790", "tradition": "latin" }, "alcuin": { "name": "Alcuin", "dates": "c. 735–804", "tradition": "latin" }, "rabanus": { "name": "Rabanus Maurus", "dates": "c. 780–856", "tradition": "latin" }, "angelomus": { "name": "Angelomus of Luxeuil", "dates": "d. c. 855", "tradition": "latin" }, "remigius": { "name": "Remigius of Auxerre", "dates": "c. 841–908", "tradition": "latin" }, "bruno-of-segni": { "name": "Bruno of Segni", "la": "Bruno Astensis", "dates": "c. 1045–1123", "tradition": "latin" }, "glossa-ordinaria": { "name": "Glossa ordinaria (school of Laon)", "dates": "c. 1110–1130", "tradition": "latin", "note": "Not Walafrid Strabo." }, "rupert": { "name": "Rupert of Deutz", "dates": "c. 1075–1129", "tradition": "latin" }, "abelard": { "name": "Peter Abelard", "dates": "1079–1142", "tradition": "latin" }, "hugh-of-st-victor": { "name": "Hugh of St Victor", "dates": "c. 1096–1141", "tradition": "latin" }, "honorius": { "name": "Honorius Augustodunensis", "dates": "c. 1080–1154", "tradition": "latin" }, "comestor": { "name": "Peter Comestor", "dates": "c. 1100–1178", "tradition": "latin" }, "r-yannai": { "name": "R. Yannai", "dates": "fl. c. 220–250", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yudan": { "name": "R. Yudan", "dates": "fl. c. 350", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yochanan": { "name": "R. Yoḥanan bar Nappaḥa", "dates": "c. 180–279", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-hanina": { "name": "R. Ḥanina bar Ḥama", "dates": "d. c. 250", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-tanchum-b-yirmeya": { "name": "R. Tanḥum bar Yirmeya", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-shmuel-b-ami": { "name": "R. Shmuel bar Ami", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-lulyana": { "name": "R. Lulyana bar Tavrai", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "rav": { "name": "Rav (Abba Arikha)", "dates": "c. 175–247", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "rav-yehuda": { "name": "Rav Yehuda bar Yeḥezkel", "dates": "c. 220–299", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "gregory-the-great": { "name": "Gregory the Great", "la": "Gregorius Magnus", "dates": "c. 540–604", "tradition": "latin" }, "bonaventure": { "name": "Bonaventure", "la": "Bonaventura de Balneoregio", "dates": "c. 1217–1274", "tradition": "latin" }, "r-hoshaya": { "name": "R. Hoshaya Rabbah", "dates": "fl. c. 230", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-abba-b-kahana": { "name": "R. Abba bar Kahana", "dates": "fl. c. 300", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-huna": { "name": "R. Huna", "dates": "d. 297", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-banai": { "name": "R. Banai", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-berekhya": { "name": "R. Berekhya", "dates": "fl. c. 350", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "rav-matana": { "name": "Rav Matana", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yehoshua-b-levi": { "name": "R. Yehoshua ben Levi", "dates": "fl. c. 230", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-levi": { "name": "R. Levi", "dates": "fl. c. 300", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "ibn-ezra": { "name": "Abraham ibn Ezra", "he": "אַבְרָהָם אִבְּן עֶזְרָא", "dates": "1089–1167", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "ramban": { "name": "Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)", "he": "מֹשֶׁה בֶּן נַחְמָן", "dates": "1194–1270", "tradition": "rabbinic" }, "pirkei-derabbi-eliezer": { "name": "Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer", "he": "פִּרְקֵי דְּרַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר", "dates": "c. 750–850", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "compilation" }, "r-shimon-b-yehotzadak": { "name": "R. Shimon ben Yehotzadak", "dates": "fl. c. 250", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-shmuel-b-nachman": { "name": "R. Shmuel bar Naḥman", "dates": "fl. c. 280", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yitzchak": { "name": "R. Yitzḥak", "dates": "fl. c. 300", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-nechemya": { "name": "R. Neḥemya", "dates": "fl. c. 150", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-zeeira": { "name": "R. Ze'eira son of R. Abahu", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yehuda-b-simon": { "name": "R. Yehuda bar Simon", "dates": "fl. c. 320", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-elazar": { "name": "R. Elazar ben Pedat", "dates": "d. c. 279", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yaakov": { "name": "R. Yaakov", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-abahu": { "name": "R. Abahu", "he": "רַבִּי אַבָּהוּ", "dates": "c. 250–320", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "bet-shammai": { "name": "Beit Shammai", "he": "בֵּית שַׁמַּאי", "dates": "1st c.", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "bet-hillel": { "name": "Beit Hillel", "he": "בֵּית הִלֵּל", "dates": "1st c.", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yishmael": { "name": "R. Yishmael", "he": "רַבִּי יִשְׁמָעֵאל", "dates": "d. c. 135", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-akiva": { "name": "R. Akiva", "he": "רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא", "dates": "c. 50–135", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "nachum-of-gam-zo": { "name": "Naḥum of Gam Zo", "he": "נַחוּם אִישׁ גַּם זוּ", "dates": "fl. c. 90–110", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yehuda-b-ilai": { "name": "R. Yehuda bar Ilai", "dates": "fl. c. 140–165", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-hanin": { "name": "R. Ḥanin", "dates": "fl. c. 300", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-tanchuma": { "name": "R. Tanḥuma", "dates": "fl. c. 380", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-shimon-b-yochai": { "name": "R. Shimon ben Yoḥai", "he": "רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן יוֹחַאי", "dates": "fl. c. 140–165", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-elazar-b-r-shimon": { "name": "R. Elazar be-Rabbi Shimon", "dates": "fl. c. 165–200", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yose-b-chanina": { "name": "R. Yose bar Ḥanina", "dates": "fl. c. 270", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "bar-kappara": { "label": "Bar Kappara", "dates": "fl. c. 200–220", "note": "Tanna/amora of the transitional generation; quoted here by Rav Huna." }, "rabban-gamliel": { "label": "Rabban Gamliel", "dates": "fl. c. 90–110", "note": "Rabban Gamliel II of Yavneh, to whom the philosopher puts the question at Bereshit Rabbah 1:9." }, "the-philosopher": { "label": "A philosopher", "dates": "unnamed", "note": "The unnamed philosopher of Bereshit Rabbah 1:9, who tells Rabban Gamliel that God found good materials. The rabbinic bench's only speaker for the position the whole Latin bench argues against." }, "akilas": { "name": "Akilas (Aquila)", "he": "עֲקִילַס", "dates": "fl. c. 130", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent", "note": "The proselyte translator of the Bible into Greek, cited in the midrash as a tradent." }, "ben-azzai": { "name": "Shimon ben Azzai", "he": "שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן עֲזַאי", "dates": "fl. c. 110–135", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "mishnah": { "name": "the Mishnah", "he": "מִשְׁנָה", "dates": "redacted c. 200–220", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "work" }, "r-yehoshua-of-sikhnin": { "name": "R. Yehoshua of Sikhnin", "dates": "fl. c. 330", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-yona": { "name": "R. Yona", "dates": "fl. c. 350", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-shimon-b-pazi": { "name": "R. Shimon ben Pazi", "dates": "fl. c. 280", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "origen": { "name": "Origen", "la": "Origenes Adamantius", "dates": "c. 185–253", "tradition": "latin" }, "r-ami": { "name": "Rabbi Ami", "he": "רַבִּי אַמִּי", "dates": "fl. c. 290–320", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "rav-asi": { "name": "Rav Asi", "he": "רַב אַסִּי", "dates": "fl. c. 290–320", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "r-simlai": { "name": "Rabbi Simlai", "he": "רַבִּי שִׂמְלַאי", "dates": "fl. c. 250–280", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent", "note": "The tradent of the disputation with the minim at Bereshit Rabbah 8:9, and the source of the rule that wherever the verse gives them an opening the refutation stands beside it." }, "r-yonatan": { "name": "Rabbi Yonatan", "he": "רַבִּי יוֹנָתָן", "dates": "fl. c. 220–250", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "tradent" }, "saadia-gaon": { "name": "Saadia Gaon", "he": "רַב סְעַדְיָה גָּאוֹן", "dates": "882–942", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "author", "note": "Cited by Ibn Ezra simply as ha-Gaon. His reading of na'aseh as a plural of royal speech is the position Ibn Ezra demolishes at Gen 1:26." }, "r-yosef-kimchi": { "name": "Rabbi Yosef Kimḥi", "he": "רַבִּי יוֹסֵף קִמְחִי", "dates": "c. 1105–c. 1170", "tradition": "rabbinic", "role": "author", "note": "Credited by Ramban with the reading 'I and the earth, let us make a human'." }, "chalcidius": { "name": "Chalcidius", "dates": "fl. c. 300–400", "tradition": "latin", "role": "author", "note": "Latin translator of and commentator on Plato's Timaeus, and the earliest Latin on this daf. Almost nothing about him is settled: the commentary is dedicated to an Osius who is traditionally, but not certainly, identified with Hosius of Cordoba, which is the only ground for placing him there; the date has been argued anywhere from the early fourth century to the fifth; and whether he was a Christian at all is disputed, though he quotes Genesis, Origen and 'the Hebrews' as authorities. He is outside the Patrologia and off this edition's Latin bench, and his Latin is transcribed from a printed page rather than sliced from the TEI." }, "aquila-translator": { "name": "Aquila of Sinope", "dates": "fl. c. 130", "tradition": "greek", "role": "translator", "note": "The proselyte translator of the Hebrew Bible into an extremely literal Greek, cited here by Chalcidius for Gen 1:1–2. The same man appears on the rabbinic bench as the tradent Akilas at Bereshit Rabbah 1:12." }, "symmachus-translator": { "name": "Symmachus", "dates": "fl. c. 190", "tradition": "greek", "role": "translator", "note": "Greek translator of the Hebrew Bible, quoted by Chalcidius for Gen 1:1–2. His otiosum quid confusumque et inordinatum for tohu va-vohu is the source of the alia translatio the Carolingian and twelfth-century Latins cite without attribution." }, "philo": { "name": "Philo of Alexandria", "dates": "c. 20 BCE - c. 50 CE", "tradition": "greek-jewish", "role": "author", "note": "The one Hellenistic-Jewish reader of Gen 1:1-5 in this edition, and the head of streams that both other benches are the tail of. He was built at Phase 6 part five; before that he was in this edition only as a name Chalcidius cites. The transmission is this edition's own thesis in mirror: the rabbinic bench does not cite him once and did not preserve him, while Ambrose's Hexaemeron is substantially his and rarely says so, and Cohn's own prolegomena open by saying that Philo's memory, neglected by Jews no less than by pagans, hangs wholly on the Christian church. He was recovered for Judaism only in the sixteenth century, by Azariah dei Rossi." }, "nicholas-of-lyra": { "name": "Nicholas of Lyra", "dates": "c. 1270-1349", "tradition": "latin", "role": "author", "note": "Franciscan of Paris, whose Postilla litteralis is the most widely copied and printed Latin commentary on the whole Bible. He read Hebrew and used Rashi constantly, by name, as Ra. Sa. -- which is what Paul of Burgos attacks him for, and the reason this edition prints him: he is the one Latin on this daf who reads the rabbinic bench, credits it, and is taken to task by another Latin for crediting it too much." }, "paul-of-burgos": { "name": "Paul of Burgos", "dates": "c. 1351-1435", "tradition": "latin", "role": "author", "note": "Solomon ha-Levi of Burgos, rabbi, baptised in 1390 and afterwards bishop of Burgos and chancellor of Castile. His Additiones to Lyra's Postilla were printed inside the Latin Bible from the 1480s on. On this daf he is the sharpest instrument the edition has: a man who had read the rabbinic bench from the inside, writing as a Christian bishop, arguing about how much of the literal sense the Latins owe to Rashi." }, "matthias-doering": { "name": "Matthias Doering", "dates": "c. 1390-1469", "tradition": "latin", "role": "author", "note": "Franciscan provincial of Saxony, whose Replicae (he called them Correctorium corruptorii Burgensis) defend Lyra against Burgos and are printed beside both." } }, "places": { "alexandria": { "name": "Alexandria", "lat": 31.2, "lon": 29.92 }, "bethlehem": { "name": "Bethlehem", "lat": 31.7, "lon": 35.2 }, "babylonia": { "name": "Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)", "lat": 32.5, "lon": 44.4 }, "palestine": { "name": "Palestine", "lat": 32, "lon": 35.3 }, "galilee": { "name": "Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)", "lat": 32.79, "lon": 35.53 }, "troyes": { "name": "Troyes", "lat": 48.3, "lon": 4.08 }, "caesarea-cappadociae": { "name": "Caesarea in Cappadocia", "lat": 38.72, "lon": 35.49 }, "milan": { "name": "Milan", "lat": 45.46, "lon": 9.19 }, "thagaste": { "name": "Thagaste", "lat": 36.29, "lon": 7.95 }, "hippo": { "name": "Hippo Regius", "lat": 36.88, "lon": 7.75 }, "seville": { "name": "Seville", "lat": 37.39, "lon": -5.99 }, "jarrow": { "name": "Jarrow", "lat": 54.98, "lon": -1.49 }, "aachen": { "name": "Aachen", "lat": 50.78, "lon": 6.08 }, "tours": { "name": "Tours", "lat": 47.39, "lon": 0.69 }, "fulda": { "name": "Fulda", "lat": 50.55, "lon": 9.68 }, "luxeuil": { "name": "Luxeuil", "lat": 47.82, "lon": 6.38 }, "auxerre": { "name": "Auxerre", "lat": 47.8, "lon": 3.57 }, "segni": { "name": "Segni", "lat": 41.69, "lon": 13.02 }, "laon": { "name": "Laon", "lat": 49.56, "lon": 3.62 }, "liege": { "name": "Liège", "lat": 50.63, "lon": 5.57 }, "paraclete": { "name": "The Paraclete (Nogent-sur-Seine)", "lat": 48.49, "lon": 3.5 }, "paris": { "name": "Paris", "lat": 48.86, "lon": 2.35 }, "regensburg": { "name": "Regensburg", "lat": 49.02, "lon": 12.1 }, "rome": { "name": "Rome", "lat": 41.9, "lon": 12.5 }, "lucca": { "name": "Lucca", "lat": 43.84, "lon": 10.5 }, "girona": { "name": "Girona", "lat": 41.98, "lon": 2.82 }, "aquileia": { "name": "Aquileia", "lat": 45.77, "lon": 13.37 }, "caesarea-palaestinae": { "name": "Caesarea Maritima", "lat": 32.5, "lon": 34.89 }, "cordoba": { "name": "Cordoba (?)", "lat": 37.88, "lon": -4.78, "note": "The question mark is load-bearing. Chalcidius is placed at Cordoba only because his commentary is dedicated to an Osius traditionally identified with Hosius, bishop of Cordoba — an identification that is contested, as is his date. Milan has also been argued. The coordinates exist so that the map view has a point to draw; they are not evidence." }, "burgos": { "name": "Burgos", "lat": 42.34, "lon": -3.7 } }, "answers": { "borne-over": { "label": "Borne over", "gloss": "The verb is motion: a spirit carried above the water (LXX ἐπεφέρετο, Vulgate ferebatur)." }, "wind": { "label": "A wind", "gloss": "Ruach is weather, not a person; Onkelos keeps God at a remove." }, "spirit-of-mercy": { "label": "Spirit of mercy", "gloss": "A divine disposition blowing over the waters (Palestinian targums)." }, "messiah": { "label": "Spirit of the Messiah", "gloss": "Resh Lakish: the ruach of Isa 11:2, brought by repentance-as-water." }, "bird-hovering": { "label": "Dove hovering, not touching", "gloss": "Ben Zoma and Rashi: the bird measures a gap; it does not land." }, "fluttering": { "label": "Fluttering", "gloss": "Abelard's report of the Hebrew: volitabat, as the eagle of Deut 32:11." }, "brooding-warmth": { "label": "Bird brooding, warming", "gloss": "Jerome from the Hebrew, Basil's Syrian, then the Latin schools: the Spirit quickens matter like a hen on eggs." }, "power-not-place": { "label": "Power, not place", "gloss": "Augustine: 'above' means sovereignty, not position; the Manichees misread it." }, "craftsman": { "label": "The craftsman's will", "gloss": "The Spirit over the waters as the maker's intention over the wood." }, "love-gift": { "label": "Love, gift, weight", "gloss": "Confessions XIII: why the Spirit alone is said to be above; pondus meum amor meus." }, "trinity": { "label": "The Trinity named", "gloss": "The verse completes Father (in principio), Son (principium), Spirit." }, "heart": { "label": "Over the heart", "gloss": "Isidore's moral reading: the waters are our fluid, dark heart." }, "throne": { "label": "Throne of Glory", "gloss": "Rashi: the throne stands in the air, held by the breath of God's mouth." }, "unus-cardinal": { "label": "The versions keep the cardinal", "gloss": "ἡμέρα μία, dies unus, yoma chad: 'one', not 'first', in every ancient version." }, "unus-grammatical": { "label": "'First' needs a second", "gloss": "The series 'one, second, third' is improper (Bereshit Rabbah); or, first and second are relatives and there was no second yet (Bruno)." }, "unus-alone": { "label": "God was alone that day", "gloss": "Yachid in his world: no angels were made on the first day, so there was no second anything (Bereshit Rabbah, Rashi)." }, "unus-yom-kippur": { "label": "The one day given to Israel", "gloss": "'One day' is the Day of Atonement, the day the Holy One gave them." }, "unus-24-hours": { "label": "One circuit, twenty-four hours", "gloss": "Day and night together make one revolution, and the whole is named from the day alone." }, "unus-repeated": { "label": "The same day repeated", "gloss": "There is one day only — the angelic light — presented once for each kind of thing made (Augustine)." }, "unus-all-time": { "label": "One day = all time", "gloss": "The word holds the whole span of the ages, or the whole work of the six days (Augustine's set-aside reading; Abelard's own)." }, "unus-angelic-unity": { "label": "The unity of angelic dignity", "gloss": "'One' names the undivided attention of the angelic mind, not a place in a series (Angelomus)." }, "unus-eternal-day": { "label": "The true first day is eternal", "gloss": "This day is first only by number and order of creation; the day that is first by nature is uncreated light (Rupert)." }, "day-precedes-night": { "label": "Day before night", "gloss": "Evening is the end of a finished day, morning the end of the night; days are counted from morning to morning." }, "day-follows-night": { "label": "Night before day", "gloss": "'One day' rules that reckoning begins at evening (Ben Zoma, b. Chullin 83a)." }, "night-for-rest": { "label": "Night made for rest", "gloss": "Day is for labour and night for rest, so only the day's bounds are counted." }, "day-is-a-measure": { "label": "The day's measure is a creature", "gloss": "The measure of day and of night was itself made on day one (b. Chagigah 12a)." }, "evening-is-completion": { "label": "Evening completes a work", "gloss": "Vespera is a work perfected, mane the beginning of the next — the Carolingian formula." }, "evening-is-self-knowledge": { "label": "Evening and morning knowledge", "gloss": "The creature known in itself is evening; known in the Word and referred back in praise, morning (Augustine)." }, "evening-moral": { "label": "Evening as sin or temptation", "gloss": "Evening and morning are the deeds of the wicked and the righteous, or sin and renewal, or temptation and the light of justice." }, "simul": { "label": "All things made at once", "gloss": "Creavit omnia simul (Sir 18:1): the days are not successive." }, "six-days-literal": { "label": "Six real days", "gloss": "Created at once in matter, distinguished in form through six successive days (the common doctors, Bonaventure)." }, "principio-temporis": { "label": "In the beginning of time", "gloss": "The word dates the making: time began with the world, and there was no before (Onkelos, Bede, Rabanus, Remigius, Hugh)." }, "principio-in-filio": { "label": "In the Son", "gloss": "Principium is a proper name of the Word, on the strength of John 8:25 and Ps 104:24 (Ambrose, Augustine, Isidore, Alcuin, the Glossa, Rupert, Honorius)." }, "principio-first-of-all": { "label": "First of all things", "gloss": "'In the beginning' means before everything else that follows — in the beginning of the creatures, or on the first day (Augustine's second reading; Bruno, Abelard)." }, "principio-is-first-creature": { "label": "The first creature is a beginning", "gloss": "The first intellectual creature may be called a beginning to the things it heads (Augustine, De Genesi imperfectus)." }, "beginning-is-wisdom": { "label": "In Wisdom", "gloss": "The beginning is Wisdom — which is the Torah on one bench (Prov 8:22, Prov 3:19, Neofiti) and the Son on the other (Ps 104:24)." }, "reshit-is-torah": { "label": "The beginning is the Torah", "gloss": "Reshit is the Torah, called reshit darko: God looked into it as an architect into his plans and created the world (Bereshit Rabbah, Rashi)." }, "reshit-is-israel": { "label": "For the sake of Israel", "gloss": "Reshit is Israel, called reshit tevu'ato (Jer 2:3); the world was made for their sake." }, "reshit-construct": { "label": "'When God began to create'", "gloss": "Bereshit is a construct and the verse a subordinate clause: at the beginning of God's creating (Rashi's plain sense, Ibn Ezra; contested by Ramban)." }, "world-has-a-beginning": { "label": "The world is not eternal", "gloss": "The point of saying 'in the beginning' at all is that the world had one, against the philosophers (Ambrose, Remigius, Hugh, Ramban)." }, "bereshit-book-name": { "label": "It is the book's name", "gloss": "The Hebrews name volumes from their opening words, so bresith is the title of Genesis (Jerome, Wigbod, Angelomus)." }, "six-preceded": { "label": "Six things preceded the world", "gloss": "Torah and the Throne of Glory were made before it; the patriarchs, Israel, the Temple and the Messiah's name were contemplated (Bereshit Rabbah 1:4)." }, "read-it-twice": { "label": "Say the phrase twice", "gloss": "In principio is to be repeated — once in the Son, once at the beginning of time — rather than decided (Comestor)." }, "lux-corporalis": { "label": "A bodily light", "gloss": "A material light made to light material things, standing in the sun's place until the fourth day (Basil, Ambrose, Bede, Hugh, Honorius, Comestor, Bonaventure)." }, "lux-angelica": { "label": "The angelic creation", "gloss": "The light is the spiritual creature called 'heaven' in v. 1, made light by turning to its Creator (Augustine, Angelomus, Rupert)." }, "lux-hidden": { "label": "Stored for the righteous", "gloss": "Too good for the wicked, it was hidden away and is kept for the righteous in the time to come (Bereshit Rabbah, b. Chagigah, Rashi)." }, "lux-garment": { "label": "From the light of his garment", "gloss": "God wrapped himself in it like a garment (Ps 104:2); the heavens were stretched out of it (Bereshit Rabbah, Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer)." }, "lux-from-temple": { "label": "From the site of the Temple", "gloss": "The light was created from the place of the sanctuary (Ezek 43:2; Jer 17:12)." }, "lux-becomes-luminaries": { "label": "The luminaries were made from it", "gloss": "The nature of light was made on day one and hung in the firmament on day four (the sages in b. Chagigah 12a; an unnamed opinion in Augustine)." }, "lux-twilight": { "label": "A light like the dawn", "gloss": "Not the sun's brightness but what the sky is before sunrise or after sunset (Remigius, Honorius, Comestor, Hugh)." }, "lux-is-day": { "label": "'Light' just means day", "gloss": "The verse answers itself: he called the light Day, so light here is put for day (Bruno)." }, "lux-is-distinction": { "label": "The distinguishing of the works", "gloss": "The light is the confused heap becoming distinct and knowable, not a thing at all (Abelard)." }, "fiat-is-instantaneous": { "label": "Speaking is making", "gloss": "No interval between the command and the thing: the Hebrew says only 'let it be, and it was' (Ambrose, Basil, Angelomus, Abelard)." }, "pair-is-formless-matter": { "label": "Unformed matter", "gloss": "The pair names the matter God had made and not yet given form to (Augustine, Angelomus, Hugh, Comestor)." }, "pair-is-under-water": { "label": "Hidden under the waters", "gloss": "Invisible because the waters covered it, and because there was neither light nor anyone to see (Basil, Alcuin, Angelomus, Ibn Ezra)." }, "pair-is-unfurnished": { "label": "No seed, no living thing", "gloss": "Empty of shoots and void of animals: a list of what was not there yet (Bede, Remigius, Rupert, Abelard, Hugh, Comestor, the targums)." }, "pair-is-a-name-for-us": { "label": "A name fitted to slow minds", "gloss": "Not a description but the most serviceable word for formlessness, since earth and the deep are the least comely things men know (Augustine, Confessions XII)." }, "pair-many-senses": { "label": "More than one true reading", "gloss": "Five readings of the clause are all true and none can be shown to be Moses' own (Augustine, Confessions XII.21)." }, "pair-is-two-things": { "label": "A green line and slimy stones", "gloss": "Tohu and bohu are two creatures made on the first day: a line encircling the world, and stones sunk in the deep (b. Chagigah 12a, Sefer Yetzirah)." }, "pair-is-matter-and-form": { "label": "Matter and its form", "gloss": "Tohu is the hyle, which can hold no name; bohu is bo hu, the form it puts on (Ramban)." }, "pair-is-astonishment": { "label": "Astonishment", "gloss": "Tohu is what astonishes whoever looks at it — the earth bewildered at her lot, or the reader appalled at the emptiness (Bereshit Rabbah 2:2, Rashi, the Bahir)." }, "pair-is-history": { "label": "The verse tells history", "gloss": "The clause is the first term of a periodization: the generations from Adam, the four kingdoms, or the Church before her children (Bereshit Rabbah 2:1, 2:3, 2:4; Bruno)." }, "pair-is-our-flesh": { "label": "The earth of our flesh", "gloss": "The soul before it has taken the form of doctrine (Isidore, Wigbod, Rabanus, Remigius, Bruno)." }, "pair-is-not-of-heaven": { "label": "Said of earth, not of heaven", "gloss": "The phrase is withheld from heaven, which was filled with angels as soon as it was made (Bede, the Glossa, Angelomus, Abelard)." }, "heaven-first": { "label": "Heaven first", "gloss": "Beit Shammai: the word order is the order of the acts, and a king has his throne made before its footstool (Isa 66:1)." }, "earth-first": { "label": "Earth first", "gloss": "Beit Hillel: a builder raises the lower storey first (Amos 9:6), and Gen 2:4 and Ps 102:26 name the earth before the heavens." }, "both-at-once": { "label": "Both together", "gloss": "The sages, and R. Shimon ben Yoḥai's stewpot and its lid (Isa 48:13); Ambrose, that the order of naming gives heaven no privilege of the firstborn." }, "order-of-dignity": { "label": "Named for dignity, not order", "gloss": "Heaven stands first because it is worthier, or because the account is about to turn to the earth (Hugh of St Victor; R. Yoḥanan's creation-and-completion)." }, "created-then-stretched": { "label": "Created in one order, stretched in the other", "gloss": "Resh Lakish: heaven was created first, the earth was stretched out first — so both proof-texts stand." }, "heaven-earth-is-everything": { "label": "A name for the whole creation", "gloss": "Two visible words standing for all that God made, given so for the weakness of little ones (Augustine, Alcuin, Angelomus, Comestor)." }, "heaven-is-empyrean": { "label": "The empyrean heaven", "gloss": "Not the visible firmament but a fiery — from brightness, not heat — and intellectual heaven, filled with angels as soon as it was made (Remigius, the Glossa, Comestor)." }, "heaven-earth-four-elements": { "label": "The four elements", "gloss": "Heaven names fire and air, earth names earth and water; the verse announces the material first principles of bodies (Ambrose, Abelard, Ramban, Comestor)." }, "et-includes": { "label": "The particle includes", "gloss": "Et ha-shamayim brings in the sun, moon and constellations; ve-et ha-aretz the trees, the plants and the Garden of Eden (Bereshit Rabbah 1:14, b. Chagigah 12a, Ramban)." }, "shamayim-is-water": { "label": "Sham mayim — 'there is water'", "gloss": "The name itself says what heaven is made of: water, or fire and water mingled into the firmament (b. Chagigah 12a)." }, "one-earth-only": { "label": "One earth, and no heaven of heavens here", "gloss": "If the heavens of v. 1 were the intelligible heaven, the earth beside it could not be the ground; the seven earths are seven regions of the one (Ibn Ezra; Abelard, from the other end)." }, "whole-then-parts": { "label": "The whole first, then the parts", "gloss": "V. 1 is a heading: Scripture commends everything God made in two words before going through it with 'God said' (Augustine, Angelomus, the Glossa)." }, "de-nihilo": { "label": "Out of nothing", "gloss": "God made the world, and the matter of the world, from nothing whatever." }, "matter-then-formed": { "label": "Matter first, then formed", "gloss": "Formless matter was created first — first in origin, not in time — and everything else made out of it." }, "matter-is-coeval": { "label": "Matter was already there", "gloss": "God is a craftsman working on a material he did not make. Reported on both benches, held by neither." }, "three-principles": { "label": "God, exemplar, matter", "gloss": "The philosophers' three principles without a principle, named as the position to be refuted." }, "all-of-them-created": { "label": "Of every one of them, creation is written", "gloss": "Each thing the objector calls a pre-existing material has its own verse saying God created it." }, "bara-is-not-ex-nihilo": { "label": "'Created' does not mean from nothing", "gloss": "The verb bara is used of the sea-creatures and of man, who were made from something." }, "creare-vs-formare": { "label": "Created, not formed", "gloss": "Scripture keeps two verbs apart: what has no pre-existing matter is created, what is shaped out of matter is formed." }, "hyle-is-tohu": { "label": "The hyle is tohu", "gloss": "The one created thing is a substance without form, which the Greeks call hyle and Scripture calls tohu." }, "made-from-something-of-god": { "label": "From the light and the snow", "gloss": "Heaven from the light of his garment, earth from the snow beneath the Throne of Glory." }, "craftsman-needs-matter": { "label": "A craftsman needs a material", "gloss": "Wood helps the carpenter, silver the silversmith — the analogy that makes creation from nothing unthinkable." }, "silence-proves-nothing": { "label": "Scripture's silence proves nothing", "gloss": "That Genesis does not say when a thing was made does not make it coeternal with God." }, "world-from-tohu": { "label": "The world was made out of tohu va-vohu", "gloss": "Said with embarrassment, and only because the verse says it." }, "tenebrae-privatio": { "label": "Darkness is not a thing", "gloss": "Darkness is the absence of light, as silence is the ceasing of voice and nakedness the absence of a garment; Scripture never says God made it (Augustine, Angelomus, Hugh)." }, "tenebrae-creatura": { "label": "God made the darkness too", "gloss": "The darkness is a work of God like the light — it is called with the light to bless the Lord in Dan 3, and it is on the rabbinic lists of what was made on the first day (Remigius, the Glossa, Wigbod's pupil; Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, R. Tanḥuma)." }, "tenebrae-angeli": { "label": "The darkness is the apostate angels", "gloss": "The light of day one is the angelic creation and the division is between the holy angels and the unclean (Augustine, City of God XI.19; Angelomus, Hugh, Rupert, Comestor)." }, "tenebrae-peccatores": { "label": "The wicked, or their deeds", "gloss": "The division is moral: the just from sinners (Isidore, Remigius, the Glossa), or the deeds of the righteous from the deeds of the wicked (R. Yanai, R. Abahu)." }, "tenebrae-ignis": { "label": "Darkness names the element of fire", "gloss": "'Darkness' in v. 2 is elemental fire, which is dark; the deep is water and the spirit is air (Ramban)." }, "divisio-loci": { "label": "Divided by place and quality", "gloss": "The two were set apart in space and time — light over the upper part of the world, twelve hours above and twelve below, opposite hemispheres in turn (Basil, Bede, Rabanus, Honorius, Comestor; and R. Yoḥanan's two generals, each given his bound)." }, "divisio-nominis": { "label": "The dividing is the naming", "gloss": "There is no separate act of separation: 'and he divided' means by the calling of names (Ibn Ezra; entertained once by Augustine and dropped)." }, "divisio-est-ordinatio": { "label": "He did not make it but ordered it", "gloss": "God makes the forms and orders the privations, as a singer orders his rests and a painter his shadows, so that even a nothing has its place (Augustine)." }, "divisio-est-judicium": { "label": "The division is a judgement", "gloss": "A sentence passed, and irreversible: on the devil and his angels (Rupert, Hugh), or on the just and sinners by foreknowledge (Isidore)." }, "divisio-est-instantanea": { "label": "The division needed no second act", "gloss": "The two were never mixed: by the very fact that light was made, the division followed, as putting on a garment ends nakedness (Augustine, Hugh)." }, "formatum-ab-informi": { "label": "The formed from the unformed", "gloss": "The dividing is the distinction of the formed thing from the unformed, of the perfect from the imperfect and the distinct from the confused (Wigbod, Abelard, Honorius)." }, "bonum-approbatio": { "label": "'He saw' is approval, not discovery", "gloss": "God did not learn that the light was good: what pleased him to be made pleased him to remain (Alcuin, Comestor), or the seeing is in the thought (Ibn Ezra), or a good work attests itself when seen (Ambrose)." }, "bonum-withheld": { "label": "The approval is deliberately withheld", "gloss": "'It was good' is not repeated after the division, and the divine name is dropped from the naming of the night, so that the darkness should not be approved along with the light (Augustine, Wigbod; R. Elazar, R. Abahu)." }, "havdala-derived": { "label": "The verse is the source of the havdala rule", "gloss": "'He saw … and he divided' — one does not bless over the lamp until he has used its light (R. Ze'eira of Caesarea)." }, "lux-hivdil-set-aside": { "label": "He set the light aside", "gloss": "Va-yavdel means he separated it off — for himself (R. Yehuda bar Simon), or for the righteous in the time to come, like a king setting aside a fine portion for his son (the Rabbis)." }, "one-authority-singular-verb": { "label": "The verb is singular, so one maker", "gloss": "Not vaydaberu but vaydaber, not bare'u but bara — no one may say that two authorities created the world (Bereshit Rabbah 1:7; Ibn Ezra; and, to the opposite end, Abelard)." }, "elohim-is-plural-of-persons": { "label": "Eloim is plural: three persons", "gloss": "El is singular and Eloim plural, showing a diversity of persons each of which is God; the singular verb shows that they are one creator and their works undivided (Abelard)." }, "elohim-is-honorific-plural": { "label": "A plural of honour", "gloss": "Every language honours the great with a plural — adonim, be'alim, the king speaking of himself in Arabic — so Elohim is the plural of eloah and means nothing more (Ibn Ezra). This is his account of the NOUN. He refuses the same reading of the plural VERB at Gen 1:26, where Saadia offers it to him: see plural-of-majesty-refused." }, "elohim-is-plural-of-powers": { "label": "The force of all forces", "gloss": "El hem: the root el is force, and 'they' points to all the other forces, so Elohim is the master of them all — with a secret not disclosed (Ramban)." }, "trinity-in-the-triad": { "label": "Father, Beginning, Spirit", "gloss": "The three persons are named in order across the first two verses: God the Father, the Beginning who is the Son, the Spirit borne over the waters (Augustine, Basil, Ambrose, Bede, Bruno, Honorius, the Glossa)." }, "trinity-in-the-formula": { "label": "The threefold formula of the six days", "gloss": "God said — and it was so — and God made: the testimony is tripled everywhere because the creating Trinity works everywhere (Rupert; considered and refused by Augustine)." }, "trinity-is-brought-to-the-text": { "label": "The rule of faith comes first", "gloss": "The catholic faith is set out before the exposition begins, because heretics drag Scripture to their own opinion; the doctrine is what the chapter is read under (Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus)." }, "spirit-is-holy-spirit": { "label": "The spirit of v. 2 is the Holy Spirit", "gloss": "Not the air and not a wind: Scripture reserved the name, and no other spirit is meant but the one who completes the Trinity (Basil, Ambrose)." }, "principium-is-the-son": { "label": "The Beginning is the Son", "gloss": "'I am the beginning, who also speak to you' (John 8:25) — though the Father too is a beginning, and not from a beginning (Wigbod, Remigius, Bruno)." }, "not-to-angels": { "label": "Not spoken to the angels", "gloss": "Whoever the 'let us' addresses, it is not angels: man was not created by angels, or there would be many creators and not one (Bruno)." }, "word-order-is-modesty": { "label": "God is named after his works", "gloss": "A mortal king proclaims his name and builds afterwards; the Holy One made the needs of his world and was named after — bereshit bara, and only then Elohim (R. Yudan in the name of Akilas; Ben Azzai)." }, "word-order-is-dangerous": { "label": "The word order had to be changed", "gloss": "The seventy-two elders wrote 'God created in the beginning' for Ptolemy, so that bereshit could not be read as the subject (b. Megillah 9a)." }, "should-have-begun-at-exodus": { "label": "It should have begun at Exodus 12:2", "gloss": "The Torah is Israel's law book and ought to have opened with the first commandment given to Israel; the creation account has to be accounted for (R. Isaac, in Rashi)." }, "claim-on-the-land": { "label": "Title to the land", "gloss": "'He declared to his people the power of his works, to give them the inheritance of the nations' (Ps 111:6) — so that Israel may answer the charge of robbery (Bereshit Rabbah 1:2; Rashi)." }, "do-not-expound-it": { "label": "It may not be expounded", "gloss": "Not before two, and not the four questions — what is above, what is below, what is before, what is after (m. Chagigah 2:1; Bereshit Rabbah 1:5 and 1:10)." }, "honour-of-the-maker": { "label": "For the honour of the Maker", "gloss": "Whoever has no care for the honour of his Maker, it were fitting he had not come into the world; and the concealed matters are not to be published for the expositor's own glory (m. Chagigah 2:1; Rav Huna in the name of Bar Kappara)." }, "the-bet-is-closed": { "label": "The bet is closed behind", "gloss": "The world was made with a bet, closed on three sides and open in front: you may ask only from the day of creation onward (R. Yona in the name of R. Levi)." }, "beginning-is-blessing": { "label": "Bet for blessing, not alef for curse", "gloss": "Made with the letter of berakhah rather than of arirah, so that the heretics could not say the world was created with a curse (Bereshit Rabbah 1:10)." }, "moses-is-a-witness": { "label": "Moses wrote as a witness", "gloss": "Not in the persuasion of human wisdom nor in the counterfeit disputations of philosophy, but in the showing of the Spirit and of power, as a witness of the divine work (Ambrose)." }, "against-the-philosophers": { "label": "Against the philosophers", "gloss": "Plato's three principles and the atomists' concourse are a spider's web; the divine mind alone contains the origins and causes of things (Ambrose)." }, "against-the-heretics": { "label": "Because the heretics attack it", "gloss": "The Manichees mock the Old Testament before the unlearned, so the first book must be defended, and defended plainly (Augustine)." }, "written-for-the-unlearned": { "label": "In plain speech, for the unlearned", "gloss": "Not with ornate and polished speech but with plain facts — the usual and simple speech the learned also understand (Augustine)." }, "the-work-shows-the-maker": { "label": "The work shows the worker", "gloss": "The world is a specimen of the divine working: like building and weaving, it shows the craftsman's skill even when the craftsman is silent (Ambrose)." }, "scripture-is-about-restoration": { "label": "Scripture is about restoration", "gloss": "The matter of all divine Scripture is the works of human restoration, completed not in six days but in six ages (Hugh of St Victor)." }, "foundation-is-for-secular-writings": { "label": "Foundation belongs to secular writings", "gloss": "The works of foundation are the matter of worldly writings; divine Scripture only descends through them on its way to the Incarnation (Hugh of St Victor)." }, "history-is-the-foundation": { "label": "History is the foundation", "gloss": "Scripture is a hall with foundation, wall and roof — history, allegory, tropology — and nothing can be built before the foundation is laid (Comestor)." }, "faciamus-is-the-trinity": { "label": "'Let us make' is the Trinity", "gloss": "The formula changes at this one verse — everywhere else 'let it be', here 'let us make' — to intimate a plurality of persons; the singular of v. 27 then gives the unity of the deity (Augustine, Bede, Alcuin, Wigbod, Remigius, the Glossa, Rupert, Abelard, Hugh, Comestor)." }, "faciamus-to-the-son": { "label": "The Father speaks to the Son", "gloss": "Not to himself, since the verb is not 'I shall make', and not to servants: the address is to the Son, who is the image (Basil, Ambrose, Comestor; refused by Augustine, since 'to our image' would then have to be 'to yours')." }, "faciamus-to-the-angels": { "label": "He said it to the angels", "gloss": "God took counsel with, or spoke to, the ministering angels — stated outright by Pseudo-Jonathan, argued by Rashi and Ibn Ezra, reported as an option by Remigius, taught with a moral by Hugh, printed at Gen 11:7 by the Glossa, and called a Jewish fiction by Basil." }, "image-of-the-whole-trinity": { "label": "To the image of the Trinity itself", "gloss": "Not to the image of the Father alone, or the Son alone, or the Spirit alone — and who would dare separate the Holy Spirit from that plurality? (Augustine, and the Gloss after him)." }, "counsel-with-the-household-above": { "label": "He took counsel with the household above", "gloss": "Be-mi nimlakh — with the ministering angels, the court that stands to right and left, out of the humility of the Holy One (Bereshit Rabbah 8:3 and 8:8, b. Sanhedrin 38b, Rashi)." }, "consilium-not-senate": { "label": "A soliloquy, not a senate", "gloss": "The counsel was held inwardly — be-libbo nimlakh, he took counsel with his heart; non tam senatu quam soliloquio — though the rabbinic bench draws from it that no second party was present and the Latin bench that three persons were (R. Ami, Rupert, Abelard)." }, "refutation-beside-the-claim": { "label": "The refutation is beside the opening", "gloss": "Wherever the verse gives the minim an opening, the answer stands next to it: 'let us make' answered by 'and he created', 'let us go down' by 'and the LORD came down' (R. Simlai, R. Yoḥanan, Rashi)." }, "dignity-of-the-creature": { "label": "The consultative form marks the creature's standing", "gloss": "A rational creature is made with counsel, so that its nobility may be shown — or, on the other bench, so that the great may learn to ask leave of the lesser (Alcuin, Bede, Hugh, Abelard; Bereshit Rabbah 8:8)." }, "plural-of-majesty-refused": { "label": "Not a plural of majesty", "gloss": "Saadia's reading of na'aseh as royal speech is refused and its proof texts parsed away one by one — 'these witnesses are false witnesses' (Ibn Ezra, against the Gaon, and against his own account of the plural noun at Gen 1:1)." }, "i-and-the-earth": { "label": "I and the earth", "gloss": "The plural has a second subject and it is the ground: the earth to bring forth the body from its elements, God to give the spirit (Ramban, crediting R. Yosef Kimḥi)." }, "beginning-is-the-intelligible-world": { "label": "The plan in the maker's mind", "gloss": "The beginning is the intelligible world, which has no place but the Reason of the God who set it in order, as the city planned by an architect has no place but his soul (Philo). The rabbinic bench says the same thing of the Torah as amon." }, "law-agrees-with-the-cosmos": { "label": "The law and the world agree", "gloss": "Moses opened with a cosmogony so that the world should be in harmony with the law and the law with the world, and the man who keeps it be a citizen of the world (Philo). The oldest answer on this crux, and the only one that makes the opening a claim about the law rather than about creation." }, "heaven-earth-are-incorporeal": { "label": "An incorporeal heaven and an invisible earth", "gloss": "What was made first was not this heaven and this earth but their incorporeal models, along with the idea of air and of void, which the verse calls darkness and abyss (Philo, reported in Latin by Chalcidius)." }, "firmamentum-is-the-corporeal-heaven": { "label": "'Firmament' names the heaven as body", "gloss": "The perceptible heaven is called stereoma precisely because it is corporeal, body being by nature solid and extended in three directions: the name marks it off from the intelligible heaven (Philo)." }, "spirit-is-life-giving": { "label": "Named God's because it gives life", "gloss": "The breath of Gen 1:2 is called God's because breath is the most life-giving thing and God is the cause of life: an argument from what pneuma does, not from who it is (Philo)." }, "lux-intelligibilis": { "label": "An intelligible light, model of the sun", "gloss": "The light of the first day is incorporeal and intelligible, the model of the sun and of the stars, and an image of the divine Reason; the visible lights draw their beams from it (Philo)." }, "divisio-prevents-war": { "label": "Separated so they should not be at war", "gloss": "Light and darkness are natural enemies; God not only separated them but set borders in the intervals between, so that neighbouring they should not fight for mastery and put disorder inside the ordered world. The borders are evening and morning (Philo)." }, "unus-not-counted-with-the-rest": { "label": "Not counted in with the other days", "gloss": "Moses does not even call it first, so that it should not be numbered along with the others; he calls it one, having seen in it the nature of the monad (Philo)." }, "unus-monad": { "label": "The monad's solitariness", "gloss": "It is called one because of the solitariness of the intelligible world, which has a monadic nature: a claim about being alone, not about position in a series (Philo)." }, "evening-morning-are-incorporeal": { "label": "Evening and morning are among the intelligibles", "gloss": "Morning and evening are to be placed in the order of the incorporeal and intelligible things, ideas and measures and types and seals, so the evening of the fifth verse is not a time of day (Philo)." }, "bonum-is-owed-to-the-fathers": { "label": "The answer belongs to the Latin doctors", "gloss": "Not an answer to the crux but a claim about who owns one: the literal exposition Lyra credits to Rashi was found first by our own doctors, and Rabanus and the Master had already given it (Paul of Burgos against Lyra)." }, "bonum-awaits-completion": { "label": "The approval waits for the work to be complete", "gloss": "Approval properly regards a completed work; the separating of the waters was not finished until the third day, so the formula is held back on the second and said twice on the third (Rashi, adopted by Lyra as the intention of the letter)." }, "lux-est-lux-solis": { "label": "It is the sun's own light", "gloss": "Not a light in the sun's stead but the light of the sun itself, an accidental quality from which the other heavenly lights are lit; it was unformed in some respect until the fourth day, and the fourth day formed it (Lyra)." }, "divisio-per-motum-solis": { "label": "The earth's shadow", "gloss": "The dividing is the sun's motion: when it moves over one hemisphere darkness falls on the opposite one, because of the opacity of the earth in the middle. Day is the sun's passage over the earth and night its hiding (Lyra)." }, "philosophy-cannot-move-the-sense": { "label": "The philosophers only have opinions", "gloss": "The philosophers do not proceed demonstratively about matter, as is shown by their disagreeing with each other, so the sense of Scripture must not be made to vary with them; and this is why the holy doctors took little notice of such opinions (Paul of Burgos, against Lyra's introduction to Genesis 1)." } }, "licenses": { "pd": { "label": "Public domain" }, "cc-by": { "label": "CC BY 4.0 — the edition's own fresh English", "attribution": "Fresh English drafted by Claude and approved by Wilson Pruitt for Bereshit / In Principio, 2026, licensed CC BY 4.0.", "note": "197 passages. Wilson ruled 2026-09-05 that the edition carries CC BY 4.0 and NOT the Wroot Press default of CC BY-NC 4.0 — a deliberate departure, made so that our English sits without friction beside the third-party CC BY and CC BY-SA texts on the same page. The colophon should say it is deliberate." }, "cc-by-sa": { "label": "CC BY-SA — Wikisource Talmud Bavli and Miqra according to the Masorah", "attribution": "Hebrew and Aramaic from he.wikisource.org, licensed CC BY-SA, via www.sefaria.org.", "note": "Share-alike attaches to the Hebrew/Aramaic text as republished; the fresh English beside it is our own work and is CC BY." }, "check": { "label": "Licence to confirm before publication" }, "sefaria-midrash-rabbah": { "label": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022 — CC BY 4.0", "attribution": "The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022, licensed CC BY 4.0. Managing Editor: Jason Rappoport. Translator: Joshua Schreier. Editors: Michael Siev, Yaacov Francus. Copy-editors: Deborah Meghnagi Bailey, Ilana Sobel. Via www.sefaria.org.", "note": "Filled at Phase 6 from the version record Sefaria's own v3 API returns (versionTitle, license CC-BY, and the credits in versionNotes), not from a boilerplate: Sefaria publishes no separate per-version attribution string, and the credits it ships with the version are the attribution it specifies. Twenty-three witnesses use this key; until Phase 6 they were keyed to the generic cc-by, which carries no attribution line, so the colophon rendered none." }, "silbermann": { "label": "Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary, M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929–34 — public domain (via Sefaria)" }, "etheridge": { "label": "J. W. Etheridge, The Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan ben Uzziel, 1862 — public domain" }, "brenton": { "label": "L. C. L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha, 1851 — public domain" }, "pl": { "label": "Patrologia Latina (Migne, 1844–65) — public domain text. Located and extracted with the Corpus Corporum TEI (mlat.uzh.ch); the TEI files themselves are not republished." }, "wroot-glossa": { "label": "Wilson Pruitt's Englished Glossa ordinaria — CC BY 4.0", "attribution": "Glossa ordinaria, English by Wilson Pruitt, published at migne.app/glossa (Wroot Press). Licensed CC BY 4.0.", "note": "Set 2026-09-05 by Wilson's ruling, as wroot-bonaventure. One witness: glossa-1-2-ruach.", "home": "https://migne.app/glossa" }, "claude-draft": { "label": "Fresh English draft (Claude, 2026-09-05), awaiting Wilson Pruitt's revision — CC BY on approval" }, "cc0": { "label": "CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication)" }, "wroot-bonaventure": { "label": "Wilson Pruitt's English of Bonaventure, In II Sent. — CC BY 4.0", "home": "https://bonaventure.wrootpress.com", "attribution": "Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, Book II, English by Wilson Pruitt, published at bonaventure.wrootpress.com (Wroot Press). Licensed CC BY 4.0.", "note": "Set 2026-09-05 by Wilson's ruling: his own Englishings carry the same licence as the edition, CC BY 4.0, with the colophon linking each back to its published home per the one-translation-one-home rule. Three witnesses: bonaventure-sent-2-12-1-2, bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-1, bonaventure-sent-2-13-1-2 — the third is fresh English of Phase 6 and is credited to the same edition." }, "chavel-ramban": { "label": "Charles B. Chavel's English of Ramban, Commentary on the Torah (New York: Shilo, 1971–76) — shown as CC BY on Sefaria", "attribution": "Ramban (Nachmanides), Commentary on the Torah, translated and annotated by Charles B. Chavel (New York: Shilo, 1971–76). Shown as CC BY on Sefaria. Via www.sefaria.org.", "note": "✅ Wilson ruled 2026-09-05: trust Sefaria and ship it. The evidence weighed: the v3 API returns license 'CC-BY' for this versionTitle with versionSource nli.org.il AND digitizedBySefaria true — Sefaria digitized the text themselves, which implies they secured terms, and the two other Chavel versions on Sefaria are marked 'unknown', so CC-BY here is a deliberate assertion and not a default. The licence claim is Sefaria's and is named as theirs above. Six witnesses." }, "sefaria-vocalized": { "label": "Ramban's Hebrew, Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition' — CC BY 4.0", "attribution": "Ramban, Commentary on the Torah, Hebrew: Sefaria 'Vocalized Edition', licensed CC BY 4.0. Via www.sefaria.org.", "note": "Split out of the generic cc-by key at Phase 6 for the same reason as the Midrash Rabbah English: cc-by is also the key on our own fresh drafts and carries no attribution, and CC BY requires one. Six witnesses." }, "gcs-baehrens": { "label": "Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller, vol. 29: Origenes Werke VI, ed. W. A. Baehrens (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1920) — public domain", "note": "Phase 6. Origen in Rufinus's Latin is PG 12, and this edition's Latin bench is a PL harvest, so this is the one witness whose Latin came from outside it. Published 1920, so public domain in the United States; Baehrens died 1929, so public domain in the EU since 2000. Transcribed from the archive.org page image, not from the item's OCR." }, "daat-br": { "label": "Daat Bereshit Rabbah — public domain (via Sefaria)", "note": "The Bereshit Rabbah Hebrew on this site comes from two versions, by chapter, and this is not an editorial preference. Chapters 1–3 are from 'Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah' (CC BY-SA), which does not cover chapter 8; chapter 8 is from 'Daat Bereshit Rabbah' (public domain), which returns no text at all for chapters 1–3. The third version Sefaria lists for the work, 'Midrash Rabbah — TE' (Torat Emet), is not used anywhere here: its own site prints an all-rights-reserved notice. The two versions differ in orthography — abbreviations printed rather than expanded, plene and defective spelling varying freely — so an anchor phrase retyped from one will not always match the other; see the note on _HFUZZ in scripts/bench.py." }, "neofiti-vatican": { "label": "Targum Neofiti, Vatican MS Neofiti 1 — public domain (transcription via Sefaria)", "attribution": "Aramaic of Targum Neofiti transcribed from Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Neofiti 1, via www.sefaria.org.", "note": "Sefaria records this version's licence as 'unknown', and it is the only Hebrew of Neofiti it carries. That is a metadata gap and not a rights assertion: the version is sourced from the Vatican Library's own digitisation of a manuscript copied in 1504, and the manuscript is centuries out of copyright. This edition treats the transcription as public domain on the same principle it states in every Wroot Press rights statement and applies against itself — a faithful transcription of a public-domain text creates no new copyright, and claiming one over it would be copyfraud. Note the limit of the reasoning: it covers the TEXT, not the Vatican's page images, which this edition does not reproduce. If the Vatican Library or Sefaria asserts a right in the transcription, these two witnesses come down." }, "chalcidius-1520": { "label": "Chalcidius on the Timaeus, Paris: Josse Bade, 1520 — public domain", "note": "Transcribed from the page images of archive.org item bub_gb_LxGcsxR3tWgC (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, digitised by Google), which carries no rights notice of any kind. The 1520 print is not a critical edition and this edition cites the edition actually used rather than a modern one; where a reading matters, the variant is recorded in the witness notes. One is worth naming here: this print gives Prov 8:22 as creauit me Deus progressionis suae SEMITAM, where the text quoted in K1's finding, from Baehrens's apparatus to Origen's first homily, has PRIMITIAM. Chalcidius was escalated at Phase 6 part one as wanting Waszink's Plato Latinus, on the ground that the only free text was uncorrected OCR of a 1617 print whose images carry a ProQuest notice. That was true of the 1617 item and not of this one." }, "first1k-greek": { "label": "Cohn's Greek text of Philo, TEI edition by OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek - CC BY-SA 4.0", "attribution": "Philo, De opificio mundi, ed. Leopold Cohn, Philonis Alexandrini opera quae supersunt i (Berlin: Reimer, 1896). TEI text tlg0018.tlg001.1st1K-grc1 from OpenGreekAndLatin/First1KGreek (University of Leipzig / Perseus, Digital Divide Data), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.", "note": "Cohn's 1896 text is itself in the public domain and this edition holds that a faithful transcription of a public-domain text creates no new right. What is licensed here is the file actually used, including its correction and encoding, and the site already carries CC BY-SA components under per-component licensing (Wikisource Talmud Bavli, Wikisource Bereshit Rabbah, Miqra according to the Masorah). This key does the same. The critical apparatus that the file carries inside its section divisions is not reproduced; it is stripped in the loader, and where a reading matters the variant is recorded in the witness notes." }, "lyra-koberger-1487": { "label": "Biblia Sacra cum postillis Nicolai de Lyra, additionibus Pauli Burgensis et replicis Matthiae Doering (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 1486-87), pars i -- public domain", "note": "Transcribed from the page images of archive.org item biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, which carries no rights notice. A SUBSTITUTION, accepted by Wilson Pruitt on 2026-09-06: PLAN.md named the 1492 Venice Biblia cum glossa, which did not surface on archive.org; this Koberger folio carries the same three-layer apparatus (Postilla, Burgos's Additiones, Doering's Replicae) and is cited throughout as the edition actually used, as Chalcidius is cited from the Bade print of 1520 rather than from Waszink. Leaf numbers in `source` are the archive.org leaf index (page/nN.jpg), which is the only stable reference the item has: the scandata carries no printed folio numbers, and the hOCR page index is offset from the leaves by an amount that drifts along the volume. Expansion convention as frozen for Chalcidius: abbreviations expanded silently and consistently, u/v normalised, nothing else altered." } } }