Genesis 1:1–5, read as ten cruxes — a difficulty the Latin, the rabbinic and the Greek-Jewish traditions each addressed — with every witness on each dated, sourced, and threaded to the ones it cites, echoes, contests, transmits, or merely runs parallel to.
Three benches, not two: the Latin, the rabbinic, and the Greek-Jewish, which holds the Septuagint and Philo. Where the two larger benches meet at all they mostly meet without knowing it; on one page they are audibly in the same room. The introductionsays what the ten findings add up to.
Neofiti's 'with wisdom' and the Latin 'in the Son' are the same move made from opposite ends of Prov 8:22–30.
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.
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.
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.
Both benches reach for 2 Macc 7:28 and Wis 11:17 and find them pulling in opposite directions.
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.
Chagigah 12a's ten-things list and Augustine's 'what is contained in caelum et terra' answer the same question.
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.
The crux where each tradition's reason for having a commentary is exposed.
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.
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.
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.
The Vulgate's inanis et vacua is a witness in its own right: Latin readers inherited an interpretation, not a transliteration.
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.
Both benches agree the light is not the sun's; they disagree on what it is.
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.
Both traditions allegorize the same verse the same way (light/dark = righteous/wicked); test whether Bede or the Glossa show any Hebrew mediation.
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.
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.
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.