Language Appreciation — Unit 4: Hebrew Word Treasures from Genesis 1

In 1881, a young Lithuanian Jew named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda moved to Jerusalem with a peculiar conviction. He believed that the Hebrew language — which had been a written language only for nearly two thousand years, used for prayer and Scripture and rabbinic study but never as a daily spoken tongue — could be brought back to life. Hebrew had been frozen in its biblical form since the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Mothers did not coo to babies in Hebrew. Children did not argue in Hebrew on playgrounds. It was the language of the dead.

Ben-Yehuda refused to accept this. He told his wife Devorah that they would speak only Hebrew at home. When their son Ben-Zion was born in 1882, the boy became the first child in nineteen hundred years to grow up with Hebrew as his native tongue. Ben-Yehuda forbade Russian lullabies. He chased away Yiddish-speaking neighbors. When his wife's Hebrew vocabulary failed her at the dinner table, mother and son sometimes sat in silence rather than break the rule.

Ben-Yehuda also had a problem larger than vocabulary: Hebrew had no word for "newspaper." No word for "telephone." No word for "ice cream." No word for "bicycle" or "train" or "match" or "dictionary." So he began the most extraordinary act of philological resurrection in human history. He went back to the Hebrew Bible — the same Bible we are reading in this course — and he hunted ancient roots. For "newspaper" he resurrected the old word iton, from the Hebrew root for "time" or "season," the very root used in Genesis 1:14 when God made the lights to mark "seasons and days." A newspaper would be "the times." For "ice cream" he reached into the Psalms for an ancient word for frost and turned it into glidah. By the time Ben-Yehuda died in 1922, modern Hebrew was being spoken by tens of thousands of children. By 1948 it was the national language of an entire country. The language of Moses had come back to life because one man went back to Genesis and refused to let it stay dead.

Why does this open Unit 4? Because what Ben-Yehuda did with the whole language, this unit will do with six words. We will go back to Genesis 1, reach into Hebrew, and bring six ancient words back into your mind alive. Bereshit, Bara, Elohim, Ruach, Or, Adam. Six words. The first verses of the Bible turn on them. By the time you finish Unit 4, these six words will live in your head the way English words do — not as foreign syllables you stumble through, but as friends you can recognize at sight. And every one of them comes with its Strong's number, so you can look it up on any tool, anywhere, any time.

Where we are

You finished Unit 3 having read all twenty-two letters and having sounded out your first Bible verse. From this unit forward, the alphabet does its job: it gives you access to actual words. We will spend Unit 4 inside Genesis 1, Unit 5 inside Isaiah 6, then cross the bridge to Greek in Unit 6. Six Hebrew words at a time. By the end of Unit 5, you will have a working Hebrew vocabulary of about a dozen of the most important theological terms in the Old Testament. That is enough to change the way you read your English Bible forever.

You met Bereshit in Unit 3. Now let us go deeper. The word is built from the prefix be- (in) plus the noun reshit, which means "beginning, first, chief, best part." And reshit is built on the root rosh — "head." A reshit is the head-thing of a series. The firstborn son is the reshit of a man's strength (Genesis 49:3). The "firstfruits" the Israelites brought to the Temple were called reshit (Exodus 23:19). When Solomon writes "the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" in Proverbs 9:10, "beginning" is this same word reshit — the head, the chief thing, the first thing in importance.

So Bereshit does not simply mean "once upon a time, long ago." It means "at the head-point, the chief moment, the first thing of all things." The whole story of the Bible has a head, and the head is what God did before anything else existed. The Hebrew word holds together time-first and importance-first: this is the moment that orders everything that follows.

Look it up on any tool. Strong's H7225 appears about fifty times in the Old Testament — in Deuteronomy describing the firstfruits, in Proverbs describing wisdom, in Jeremiah describing Israel's calling. Every time, it is something at the head of a list. The Bible's first word announces that creation itself is the head of God's story.

And here is the verb that drops the jaw. Bara is one of several Hebrew verbs for "make" — but it is the only one whose subject, in the entire Hebrew Bible, is always God. The verb asah means "to make" generally; humans and God both asah. Yatsar means "to form" or "to fashion," like a potter at a wheel; humans and God both yatsar. Banah means "to build"; humans and God both banah. But bara is reserved. In every single Old Testament occurrence, God is the subject. A man cannot bara. A god of the nations cannot bara. The very grammar of Hebrew encodes the doctrine that creation out of nothing is something only the true God can do.

Bara appears at the great structural seams of the Old Testament. Genesis 1:1 — bara the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:21 — bara the great sea creatures. Genesis 1:27 — bara man in His own image. Isaiah 65:17 — "Behold, I bara new heavens and a new earth." The first creation, the populating of the seas, the making of mankind, and the promise of the new creation all use the same verb. The same God who set in motion the universe is the God who will remake it.

This is why the King James translators in 1611 chose the rare English word "created" rather than "made" or "formed." They wanted a word reserved for the divine act, parallel to the Hebrew. Strong's H1254 occurs about fifty times in the Old Testament. Look it up and watch the pattern: every single time, God is the subject. The Hebrew verb itself preaches the doctrine of creation ex nihilo.

Elohim is the most common Hebrew word for God in the Old Testament. It appears over twenty-five hundred times. Read your English Bible and almost every place you see the word "God" with a capital G — not "the LORD," which is a different word we will meet in Unit 5, but "God" — you are reading Elohim.

The word has a striking peculiarity. Hebrew adds the suffix -im to make a word plural, the same way English adds "s." Cherub becomes cherubim, seraph becomes seraphim, day (yom) becomes days (yamim). So Elohim, with its -im ending, is grammatically plural. The singular form would be Eloah, which also appears in the Bible (about sixty times, mostly in Job) but is the rarer form. The standard, ordinary word for God in the Old Testament is the plural form.

And yet — and here is the wonder — almost every verb attached to Elohim is grammatically singular. Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning Elohim [plural noun] bara [singular verb] the heavens and the earth." A woodenly literal English would read: "In the beginning Gods He-created the heavens and the earth." The grammar holds together a plural-form noun and a singular-form verb in the same breath. Hebrew is incapable of accident at this level. The construction is deliberate.

Jewish commentators have for centuries called this the "plural of majesty" — a way of expressing the fullness, greatness, and weight of God. The way an English king might say "We have decided" using the royal "we," Elohim expresses the bigness of the divine self. Christian commentators have heard in the same construction something further: a quiet, unforced whisper of the doctrine of the Trinity. One God, plural in some way that the New Testament will make explicit. Notice Genesis 1:26: "Let Us make man in Our image." There the plural is not just in the noun but in the pronouns God uses about Himself.

You do not have to choose between the readings. The Hebrew grammar says: God is one, and God is more-than-simple-one. The verb says one. The noun says more. The Bible's very first sentence holds the two together. Strong's H430. Look it up; the word saturates the Old Testament.

Genesis 1:2: "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters." The Hebrew phrase for "Spirit of God" is Ruach Elohim. You now know the second word in that phrase — God. The new word is ruach.

Ruach is one of those Hebrew words that English breaks into three pieces and Hebrew keeps as one. It means, all at once: spirit, wind, and breath. Where English would need three different words depending on context, Hebrew uses ruach for all of them. The wind that drives the autumn leaves is ruach. The breath that comes out of your mouth when you sigh is ruach. The Spirit of God that fell on the prophets is ruach. Hebrew holds these three together because Hebrew thinks they are the same thing: the invisible, the moving, the life-giving, the breath of God in the world.

In Genesis 1:2, the ruach of God is merachefet — "hovering" or "fluttering" — over the face of the waters. The verb is rare. It appears again in Deuteronomy 32:11, where it describes a mother eagle hovering over her young to protect them. So the first picture the Bible gives of the Holy Spirit is not a far-off divine force; it is a mother eagle, beating Her wings over the formless deep, brooding over the new creation the way a mother eagle broods over her young.

Take this word with you to John 3 — the Greek there is pneuma, which is also "spirit / wind / breath." When Jesus says "the wind blows where it wishes" and "you must be born of the Spirit," He is using the Greek twin of ruach. The two Testaments connect by way of the same idea in two languages. Strong's H7307. Look it up — ruach appears nearly four hundred times in the Old Testament, sometimes as wind, sometimes as breath, sometimes as Spirit, always pointing to the same invisible-moving-living reality that comes from God.

Genesis 1:3: "Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light." In Hebrew: "Vayomer Elohim, yehi or, vayehi or." Five words. Notice how short and concentrated the Hebrew is. Vayomer — "and He said." Elohim — God. Yehi — "let there be." Or — light. Vayehi or — "and there was light."

The Hebrew word for light is or. It is one of the simplest words in the Bible: Aleph — Vav — Resh. Three letters. Pronounce it like the English word "ore." This is the first thing God spoke into being. Before the sun (which He made on Day 4), before the stars, before any natural cause of brightness, God created light by speaking it. The light of Day 1 is not the same as the light of Day 4. It is a primal light, a created light, an original brightness that filled the dark formless world the moment God's voice cracked the silence.

The biblical use of or opens out into a whole theology. The Psalmist says "the LORD is my light and my salvation" (Psalm 27:1) — the word is or. Isaiah cries "Arise, shine; for your light has come" (Isaiah 60:1) — or. The Servant of the LORD is given "as a light to the Gentiles" (Isaiah 49:6) — or. By the time we open the New Testament, light has become a name for the Messiah Himself: "I am the light of the world" (John 8:12), where the Greek word phos takes over the same theological role or played in the Old Testament.

God did not begin His creation by making the sun and then letting the sun shine. He began by speaking light directly into existence, before any vessel for it. The first action of God toward His creation is to give it His own brightness, before He gives it anything else. Then He starts shaping the rest. Strong's H216. Look it up — or appears about a hundred and twenty times in the Old Testament, almost always with this sense: God's brightness piercing into His world.

Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." The Hebrew word for "man" is adam. It can mean a single male individual ("Adam," the proper name of the first man), or it can be a collective noun for the whole human race ("mankind"), or it can be a generic word for any human being ("a man, a human"). Hebrew uses one word for all three.

And here is the wonderful thing. Adam is built on the root adamah — the Hebrew word for "ground" or "earth-dirt." When God forms the first adam in Genesis 2:7, He forms him from the dust of the adamah. The pun is right there in the original. The human creature is a ground-creature, a dirt-creature, an earthling. The English language tries to capture this in old words like "earthling" or "humus-being" (the word "human" comes from the Latin humus, which is itself the Latin word for ground). But the Hebrew is more direct: adam from adamah. You are the creature whose name announces that you came from the dirt of God's good earth.

Now keep reading Genesis 1:27. The adam — this dirt-creature — is made betselem Elohim, "in the image of God." The phrase is tselem (image, likeness, statue) plus Elohim (the God you have just learned). The human being is unique in all creation: a dirt-creature shaped to bear the image of the Creator. Earthly stuff plus heavenly stamp. That is what you are. That is what every other human being is.

This tselem Elohim doctrine has done world-changing work in history. William Wilberforce's twenty-year fight to abolish the British slave trade rested on it: every African slave was a bearer of the image of God, and slavery treated as property a being that God had made to bear His likeness. Mother Teresa's care for the dying poor in Calcutta rested on it: every dying beggar in the gutter was an image-bearer of the Almighty. When a believer learns that every other human being he meets is adam made betselem Elohim, his treatment of human beings changes. He cannot help it.

Strong's H120. Adam appears over five hundred times in the Hebrew Old Testament. Sometimes it is the proper name. Sometimes it is mankind. Sometimes it is any individual person. Always the dirt-creature shaped for the image of God.

You now own six Hebrew words. Stop and feel the weight. Bereshit — the head-moment of all things. Bara — the verb only God can do. Elohim — the plural God who speaks as one. Ruach — the breath-Spirit-wind hovering like a mother eagle. Or — the light God spoke before He had a sun. Adam — the dirt-creature shaped to bear God's image. These six words, in their Hebrew flesh, carry the doctrine of the first chapter of the Bible.

This is what learning the original languages does. The English word "God" is a fine word, but it is flat. The Hebrew Elohim carries the plural-singular paradox in its very vowels. The English word "Spirit" is a fine word, but it is abstract. The Hebrew ruach carries wind and breath and brooding mother-eagle in its single syllable. The English word "man" is a fine word, but it is generic. The Hebrew adam tells you what dirt you came from and what image you bear. The translation gives you the meaning; the Hebrew gives you the meaning plus the weight.

Take these six Strong's numbers with you everywhere. H7225 Bereshit. H1254 Bara. H430 Elohim. H7307 Ruach. H216 Or. H120 Adam. The next time you read Genesis 1 in English, your eye will catch on the words "beginning," "created," "God," "Spirit," "light," "man" — and behind each English word a Hebrew word will rise up. The Bible will be louder. The chapter will be denser. You will not need to translate; the translation will simply do more work because you know what is underneath.

In Unit 5 we will climb with Isaiah onto the holy mountain. The seraphim will cry Qadosh, qadosh, qadosh. The smoke will fill the temple. The prophet will see the LORD high and lifted up. And the words you will meet there — qadosh (holy), kavod (glory), YHWH (the divine name), shalom (peace), chesed (covenant love), torah (instruction), berit (covenant) — will join the six you already own. By the end of Unit 5 you will carry thirteen Hebrew words in your head. Then in Unit 6, the Greek alphabet.

Notebook Activity (paper and pen)

Open your notebook to a fresh page. At the top write "Unit 4 — Six Words from Genesis 1." Make a six-row table with these columns: Hebrew word, Transliteration, Strong's Number, Meaning in one sentence, Key verse. Fill in all six words. For "Key verse" write where each word first appears or most powerfully appears: Bereshit (Gen 1:1), Bara (Gen 1:1), Elohim (Gen 1:1), Ruach (Gen 1:2), Or (Gen 1:3), Adam (Gen 1:27). Below the table, write this sentence: "In the beginning Elohim bara the shamayim and the eretz, and the Ruach Elohim hovered over the waters. He said, 'Let there be or,' and there was or. And on the sixth day He bara adam in His own image." Read your sentence out loud. Notice that with six Hebrew words mixed into the English, you have just spoken half the doctrine of creation. That is what this unit was for.