PhiloAlexandria, c. 40
greek jewish · floruit 30–45 · Alexandria
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.
The question this crux is built on, asked as a question about privilege rather than about identity. Philo notices that of everything in the inventory only two things are given something extra: the breath is called God's and the light is called beautiful. Then he asks why, and the answer for the breath is functional, not personal: pneuma is named God's because breath is the most life-giving of things and God is the cause of life. That is neither the targums' wind from before the Lord nor the Latin bench's third person of the Trinity; it is a reason drawn from what breath does. Augustine at Confessions 13 asks Philo's exact question, why only the Holy Spirit was borne above the waters, and answers from the doctrine of the Trinity. The other half of the sentence belongs to K8: the light of the first day is praised because the intelligible outshines the visible as the mind outshines the eyes, which is the comparison the whole Latin argument about a spiritual light is trying to make and never states this cleanly.
Named God's because it gives lifeAn intelligible light, model of the sun
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
Patres378–720
latin · 300–400 · Cordoba (?)
'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.
Tohu va-vohu given four Latin renderings in one paragraph, each explained, by the earliest Latin on this daf. Invisible and formless is hyle: the old corporeal substance of the world, colourless and without quality before the craftsman's skill gave it forms. Empty and nothing are explained by the receptacle argument in its clean Platonic form — it is called empty because it receives all qualities and has none of its own, and nothing because it is devoid of all things — which is what Augustine will grope toward in Confessions XII, calling it a nothing-something, and what the Gloss will flatten into materia informis. Symmachus's otiosa and indigesta are then glossed separately: idle because of itself it avails nothing, undigested because it has the fitness to receive order. And the reading Origen credits to the Hebrews, stupide ex admiratione, is given a psychological explanation — the earth would be stupefied, seized by the majesty of its maker. That last one is the crux's rabbinic answer arriving on the Latin bench and being taken seriously: Bereshit Rabbah 2:2 reads tohu va-vohu as tohe u-bohe, bewildered and astonished, and Rashi's word for tohu is astonishment. Alcuin, Angelomus and Hugh all know that alia translatio says inordinata, without knowing whose translation it is or that a fourth-century Latin had named him and explained the word.
The hyle is tohuUnformed matterMatter was already there
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
greek · 370–380 · Caesarea in Cappadocia
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The most violent page on the site, and the one that proves the two benches were in contact on this question, because it is an answer to an argument the rabbinic bench is on record making. Basil — in Eustathius's Latin, which is how the Latin bench read him — knows three Jewish readings of the plural and takes them in order: that God spoke to himself, which he answers with the workshop analogy (no smith alone says 'let us make a sword'); that God spoke to the angels, which he calls a Jewish fiction and answers from the image (there is not one image of God and of the angels); and, underneath both, that the plural cannot mean persons. Then the sentence that matters most for this daf: Fecit Deus, inquit, hominem: non fecerunt — 'God made the human: they did not make'. That is the singular-verb argument of Bereshit Rabbah 1:7 and of R. Simlai at Bereshit Rabbah 8:9, in Latin, used to the opposite end. The abuse is not incidental and is not softened here: the Jew is a beast gnawing its own womb, the reading is perfidia, and the passage ends by turning on judaizing Christians. It is also, and this is the point for the finding, a Christian text that knows what the other bench says and answers it by name.
Not spoken to the angelsThe Father speaks to the SonThe verb is singular, so one maker
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
greek · 370–380 · Caesarea in Cappadocia
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.
The Greek bench identifying the third term, and doing it as a decision between two readings rather than as an assumption. Either the spirit of v. 2 is the diffusion of the air, in which case the verse is finishing an inventory of the elements — heaven, earth, water, air — or it is the Holy Spirit; and Basil takes the second, on the authority of those before him, with a reason drawn from the shape of the sentence: Scripture held the word back so that the mention of this name should carry its full weight. The word he uses for the Spirit is expletor, the one who completes or fills out the Trinity, which is an odd and strong term and is the whole of the Latin bench's argument in one noun: the Father and the Son are in the first verse, and the third person has been kept for the second. Ambrose, who is reading Basil, makes the same choice at Milan a few years later and says so.
Father, Beginning, SpiritThe spirit of v. 2 is the Holy Spirit
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 387 · Milan
'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.
Ambrose does not argue about the pair at all; he argues about the verb standing in front of it. If the earth 'was' invisible and unordered, someone will say that the matter it was made of has no beginning, which is what the philosophers say of hyle — and the answer is grammatical and slightly impatient: Scripture says Cain 'was' a worker of the earth and Job 'was' in the land of Uz, and nobody makes them eternal. It was, from the time it was made. The image before it is the builder's: foundation first, then the parts distinguished, then the adornment, which is the order of the six days and is Basil's answer to the same question turned into a plan of work.
The world is not eternalNo seed, no living thing
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 387 · Milan
…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).
Ambrose is reading Basil's Greek directly (Milan, 387; Eustathius' Latin is later). He carries the Syriac 'warmed' but drops the hen. The Latin excerpt here spans two columns; the middle (Ps 33:6 on Word and Spirit) is elided in the English.
Bird brooding, warmingThe Trinity named
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 387 · Milan
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?
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Ambrose puts the question in the sharpest possible form — cui dicit?, to whom does he say it? — and works through the same three candidates as Basil, whom he is reading, in the same order: not to himself, because the verb is not faciam; not to the angels, because a servant is no partner in the master's work; therefore to the Son. What he adds to Basil is the polemical pairing: the Jews and the Arians are refuted in one breath, and by the same argument, that whoever denies the Son a share in the working has to give that share to somebody, and ends by handing it to servuli, little servants. The rabbinic bench's own answer — that God took counsel with the household above — is thus not merely rejected on this daf but is treated as the position a Christian falls into by mistake if he gets the Son wrong. Note also that the Latin argument turns on a Latin fact: faciam against faciamus is exactly the alternative Rashi weighs at Troyes seven hundred years later, in Hebrew, when he writes that had it said e'eseh adam we could not have learned that God speaks with his court.
Not spoken to the angelsThe Father speaks to the Son
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · 388–389 · Thagaste
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.
The crux in the sharpest form anyone puts it, and it is put by an opponent: if God made the earth in the beginning, how was it already invisible and unordered? The objection assumes the pair describes something God had not yet made, and Augustine's whole answer is a single word of grammar — 'that very earth which God made was invisible and unordered', before he distinguished the forms of things. Everything the Latin bench does with this verse for the next eight hundred years is a development of that reading of the sentence. Note the lemma: Augustine's text is the Old Latin invisibilis et incomposita, from the Greek, and not Jerome's inanis et vacua, which he never quotes.
Unformed matter
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 388–389 · Thagaste
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.
Augustine's first answer, against the Manichees: the verb is about power, not position. The craftsman's will (voluntas fabri) is born here and becomes the Carolingian bench's stock answer.
Power, not place
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 391 · Bethlehem
'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).
Jerome claims the bird from the Hebrew verb itself, not from the Syrian. His bird broods and warms (incubare, confovere); Ben Zoma's hovers and does not touch. Same verb, opposite physical picture. The star thread's Latin end.
Bird brooding, warming
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 393 · Hippo Regius
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Augustine refuses the reading Ambrose and Basil had settled on, and he does it on grammatical grounds. If the Father is speaking to the Son, then ad imaginem nostram would have to mean 'to your image' or 'to my image', and it says neither; and if the plural is the Father and the Son only, who would dare to shut the Holy Spirit out of it? So the plural is neither a conversation nor a plural of two: it is the Trinity speaking about itself, and the human is made to the image of the whole. Then the second half, which is the move the whole Latin bench inherits: the plural of v. 26 and the singular of v. 27 are read as one argument, the plural giving the persons and the singular the one God. That pairing is the exact formal structure of R. Simlai's answer to the minim at Bereshit Rabbah 8:9 — let us make is met with and he created, not and they created — with the conclusion reversed. Augustine is not answering the midrash and cannot have known it; he has arrived at the same reading of the same two verses as a pair, and taken the plural to be real.
To the image of the Trinity itself'Let us make' is the Trinity
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 393 · Hippo Regius
'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.
The craftsman image sharpened: will over wood, will over one's own limbs. Remigius, Bruno and Hugh's 'artifex' all come from here.
The craftsman's willPower, not place
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 397–401 · Hippo Regius
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?
The argument that had to be made because the doctrine has no verse. Genesis never says that God made the formless matter, and the objection from that silence is real; Augustine answers it with a second silence in the same chapter. The waters above the firmament are mentioned and their making is never narrated either, and nobody is willing to call them coeternal with God — so the silence cannot be what decides. It is exactly the ground the philosopher takes at Bereshit Rabbah 1:9, and Rabban Gamliel's answer is the opposite method: not an argument about what silence can prove, but a verse produced for each item on the list, tohu from Isaiah, darkness from Isaiah, the waters from the Psalm, the wind from Amos, the deeps from Proverbs. Augustine has the more general answer and Rabban Gamliel the more convincing one, and neither could have used the other's.
Out of nothingScripture's silence proves nothing
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 400 · Hippo Regius
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.
Augustine sets out five readings of this one clause, each introduced with the same formula, and does not choose. They differ over what the formlessness is the matter of — bodies only, or the whole of heaven and earth, or the intelligible heaven as well — and over whether Scripture called that formlessness 'heaven and earth' in verse 1 or only named it here. His point is that all five are true and none of them can be shown to be Moses' own, so a reader who insists on one against the others is defending himself rather than Scripture. This is the only place on either bench where the plurality of answers is itself the answer, and it is worth setting beside Bereshit Rabbah 2, which likewise prints four readings of the pair without adjudicating — though there the readings are of history and here they are of physics.
More than one true readingUnformed matter
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 400 · Hippo Regius
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.
The answer that takes the question away. The pair is not a description of the earth and not the name of a thing: it is the most serviceable word available for formlessness, chosen because earth and the deep are what slower minds already know as the least comely things there are. Augustine keeps it strictly as a name — formless matter is neither an intelligible form like justice nor anything the senses can reach, so the mind can only try to know it by not knowing. That is the exact opposite of the Chagigah baraita, which answers the same question by pointing at a green line and a heap of stones.
A name fitted to slow minds
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 400 · Hippo Regius
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.
The question turned inward: not what 'above' means but why the Spirit alone is said to be above. Answer: because the Spirit is gift, and love is weight. 'Pondus meum amor meus' follows a few lines on.
Love, gift, weight
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 400 · Caesarea in Cappadocia
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.
The Greek bench's answer, and the argument it refutes is the philosopher's at Bereshit Rabbah 1:9 stated as a philosophy. Those who read 'invisible and unordered' as a description of an unbegotten matter make that matter God's equal in honour, since whatever is unbegotten shares his privilege; and if the matter is instead less than God, they have made God poor. Then the diagnosis, and it is the same analogy the philosopher used and Augustine will use: with us every art works on a material brought to it, smithcraft on iron and carpentry on wood, so that the finished thing is composed of a form supplied by the art and a substance supplied from outside — and they project this on the divine working, giving God the shape of the world and someone else the stuff of it. Basil's answer is that God generated the matter along with the form it was to have, and made not half of heaven and half of earth but the whole substance with its form: he is not the deviser of figures but the creator of the whole nature. The paragraph before this one is K6's basil-hex-2-4. Two elisions are marked in the English: at PL 53:881B, 'Hinc illis datur occasio … commoditatem nobis non parvam contulit', where Basil argues that the human arts came after their materials (wool before weaving, wood before the adze) and that God's making is the reverse; and at PL 53:881C, 'Totum autem mundum … permixtione mutua copulata credantur', on the bonds of concord that hold the unlike world together. The Latin excerpt is continuous.
Out of nothingMatter was already thereA craftsman needs a material
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 400 · Caesarea in Cappadocia
'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.
The Greek pair expounded as a report on conditions, and every answer is a physical one. Unordered means not yet fruitful — and Basil is willing to say heaven was unordered too, since it had no sun or stars yet, which no Latin after him will say. Invisible means either that there was no one to see it, or that it was under water; and he adds a small definition of invisibility that a modern reader can use — invisible as a mind is invisible, or invisible as iron lying at the bottom of the sea. Ibn Ezra reaches the second of these in Lucca seven centuries later from the Aramaic rather than the Greek. The paragraph that follows in Eustathius (PL 53:880C), against those who take the pair to prove an unbegotten matter, is a different argument and belongs to K4.
Hidden under the watersNo seed, no living thing
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 400 · Caesarea in Cappadocia
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.
Basil, Hexaemeron II.6, delivered in Greek in 378; the Latin bench read it in Eustathius' version (c. 400). The unnamed Syrian is the source of the whole Latin 'warming' line: Ambrose, Augustine, Rupert, Abelard, Comestor all descend from this paragraph. Basil's bird is a hen (gallina); Jerome's, independently, is a generic volucris.
Bird brooding, warming
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 401–415 · Hippo Regius
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?
The passage the Glossa quotes in its margin on 1:2 (as 'lib. I de Gen. ad lit., c. 5'). Two answers at once: water is matter or formless spiritual life, and the Spirit is 'above' because divine love is not needy. The middle chapter, which finds the Trinity in the verse, is elided in the English.
Power, not placeLove, gift, weightThe Trinity named
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 401–415 · Hippo Regius
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The mature statement of the same reading, twenty years after the unfinished commentary, and the sentence the twelfth century will read as the settled Latin answer: the change of formula is not indifferent. Everywhere else dixit Deus, fiat; here dixit Deus, faciamus — and the difference is there to intimate a plurality of persons. Augustine's whole argument is an argument from the shape of the sentence and from nothing else: he has no Hebrew, no grammatical claim about the verb, and no interest in what the word for God is. The observation that the formula changes at this one verse is, on the other bench, R. Yeshoshua's and R. Ami's question at Bereshit Rabbah 8:3 — be-mi nimlakh, with whom did he take counsel — and Rupert of Deutz will state it as mutavit vocem suam, he changed his voice. It is this passage, and not the Confessions, that the Glossa prints on Gen 1:26 under Augustine's name, so it is the form in which the schoolroom of 1150 receives the question.
'Let us make' is the TrinityTo the image of the Trinity itself
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · 401–415 · Hippo Regius
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.
Augustine's mature answer joins his own 'power not place' to the Syrian's warming and adds the mother-bird's love. He cites the Syrian at one remove ('fertur'), almost certainly through Ambrose.
Bird brooding, warmingPower, not place
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 413–427 · Hippo Regius
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The chapter is headed what kind of speech is to be understood, by which God speaks to the angels, and it is the closest the two benches come to holding the same page open. Augustine treats Gen 1:26 and Gen 11:7 — venite, et descendentes confundamus ibi linguam eorum — as one problem with one shape: both are plural, both could be addressed to angels, and each has to be decided on its own evidence. At Gen 1:26 he decides against the angels, because of ad imaginem nostram; at Gen 11:7, where there is no image clause, he grants that nothing prevents the angels being understood, and takes it that way. Now the other bench pairs the same two verses. R. Yoḥanan at b. Sanhedrin 38b lists the places where the minim found an opening and the refutation beside each: 'let us make a human in our image' answered by 'and God created the human in his image', and 'come, let us go down and confound their language' answered by 'and the LORD came down to see the city and the tower'. The same two verses, chosen for the same reason — a plural verb of divine speech — and set out as a pair. Augustine is refuting the angel reading of the first and accepting it for the second; R. Yoḥanan is refuting a plurality of makers in both. Neither knows the other. The pairing is not a topic they share but a structure the Hebrew text itself imposes, and both benches found it.
Not spoken to the angels'Let us make' is the TrinityThe verb is singular, so one maker
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 620 · Seville
'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.
Two sentences that found a lineage. Isidore is not asking what the earth was; he says at the head of the work that he is setting down how the Church's teachers take these things spiritually, and the earth is the flesh of the reader before it has taken the form of doctrine. Wigbod copies it verbatim, Rabanus copies it verbatim (PL 107:467A), Remigius has it at PL 131:55D, and Bruno of Segni turns the same move on the Church rather than the soul. It is the one Latin reading of the pair that does not ask a question about the world at all — and it is, in its structure, what Bereshit Rabbah 2:3 does with the generations.
The earth of our flesh
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 620 · Seville
'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.
Isidore does not answer the physical question at all; the waters are the heart. The allegorical reading the Glossa will carry in its margin.
Over the heart
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 720 · Jarrow
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.
Bede has no bird and no Syrian on this verse: his 1:2 is Trinitarian (K3). Included here because Rabanus copies this sentence verbatim and it becomes the Glossa's spine.
The Trinity named
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 717–725 · Jarrow
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.
Bede taking the sting out of the word. Wisdom 11:17 says the world was made out of formless matter, and the whole Latin difficulty is in that verse: it appears to concede the philosopher's point in Scripture's own voice. Bede's answer is a restriction — the matter is formless only to this extent, that the earth and the waters had nothing to give them comeliness until the light came — so that 'formless matter' names two visible things at a stage of their history, not a substrate. And the sentence that follows keeps both possibilities open without choosing: what we see either began from the earth and the waters, or was taken out of nothing. Rabanus copies this paragraph verbatim at PL 107:446C and the Glossa prints it condensed at 113:69D–70A, which is where most readers after 1150 met it.
Matter first, then formedUnformed matter
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 720 · Jarrow
'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).
Bede answers the crux by asking what the verse does not say. The pair is predicated of the earth and withheld from heaven, and that silence is information: the upper heaven was not empty, because it was filled with its inhabitants as soon as it was made, and Job 38:7 supplies the angels singing at the founding. It is the argument Abelard will make four hundred years later from the adversative conjunction, and the Glossa carries it in the margin at the head of verse 2. The Corpus Corporum text reads 'divinae gloria praescientiae' where Angelomus and the Glossa both have 'divinae praesentiae'; the English brackets the phrase. [CHECK the PL plate.]
Said of earth, not of heavenNo seed, no living thing
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 720 · Jarrow
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Bede takes the whole question over from the Latin Basil — 'so long as there was no one who might be taught, the preaching of the Godhead lay hidden in the deep' is Eustathius's sentence word for word — and turns a polemic into a lesson. The Jews are gone; what is left is a clean division of the verse into two proofs: faciamus gives one working of three persons, ad imaginem nostram gives one substance, and the angels are excluded by a ratio rather than by abuse. He also does something Augustine does not, and it is Rupert's argument three centuries early: the Trinity was already intimated mystically in the threefold formula of the earlier days — God said, God made, God saw that it was good — and is intimated more plainly here. This is the version that travels. Rabanus copies it verbatim at Fulda (PL 107:459C) and Angelomus at Luxeuil (PL 115:145A); neither is on this daf, because neither adds a word.
'Let us make' is the TrinityNot spoken to the angelsThe threefold formula of the six days
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
VersionesLXX · Vulgate
greek jewish · c. 250 BCE · Alexandria
But the earth was unsightly and unfurnished, and darkness was over the deep, and the Spirit of God moved over the water.
ἐπεφέρετο ('was borne upon') is the reading every Latin 'ferebatur / superferebatur' descends from. The Greek already drops the bird: the verb is motion-over, not brooding.
Borne over
English: Brenton 1851
latin · c. 392 · Bethlehem
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.
Jerome's own Vulgate keeps the Old Latin/LXX 'ferebatur' even though his Hebrew Questions (same decade) insist the Hebrew means brooding. The Latin bench inherits the verb he declined to change. PL 28 prints Jerome's text without 'erant' and flags the Vulgate's addition.
Borne over
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
Glossa ordinariaLaon, c. 1120
latin · compilation 1110–1130 · Laon
(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.
The third of the Glossa's marginal glosses on Gen 1:2, Bede again, and it is the only place in the Glossa on this verse where formless matter is defined. Bede's paragraph at PL 91:15C is here cut to its last two sentences and lightly rewritten — 'omnia quae videmus, vel ex istis sumpserunt exordium, vel ex nihilo' for Bede's 'cuncta quae cum aquis et terra videre solemus in mundo, vel de ipsis exordium naturae, vel sumpsere de nihilo' — and the qualification that made Bede's sentence careful, that the matter is formless only to this extent, is gone with the sentence that carried it. What a twelfth-century reader met in the margin, then, is the flat statement that earth and water are called formless matter, with the alternative 'or out of nothing' still attached and no longer doing any work. The first half of this gloss, on the darkness, belongs to K9; the two glosses printed before it on the same lemma are K6's glossa-1-2-terra and the Strabo gloss carried inside K7's glossa-1-2-ruach.
Matter first, then formedUnformed matter
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · compilation 1110–1130 · Laon
« 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.
« 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"]
« 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.
« 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: (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.
Four glosses stand on the verse in the margin: Augustine Gn. litt. I.5 (water as matter; love not from need; 'not in place but by a power surpassing all'); Jerome's merahephet, cited by PL column; an unlabelled sentence that is Bede's Trinity gloss via Rabanus ('Tota ergo Trinitas hic operata'); and one Migne marks 'ISID. in Gen.?' (the floating hearts, which is Isidore's moral reading in Augustine's wording). The lemma reads 'Spiritus Domini', the Old Latin, not the Vulgate's 'Spiritus Dei' — Wilson's [var:] flags it. The bird enters the Glossa through Jerome only; the Syrian and the craftsman are both absent.
Power, not placeBird brooding, warmingThe Trinity namedOver the heart
English: Wilson Pruitt
latin · compilation 1110–1130 · Laon
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.
The gloss that stands at the head of verse 2 in the margin, labelled BEDA and compressing his paragraph to five sentences, keeping Job 38:7 and the two heavens. The second gloss on this lemma — Walahfrid's 'useless, unfruitful, and unordered', which is Remigius verbatim — is already on the site inside the K7 witness glossa-1-2-ruach, where Wilson's edition appended it; it is not sliced again here. A third gloss, again from Bede, follows on 'and there was darkness' and ends by naming earth and water as the unformed matter: that belongs to K4. English here is a fresh draft, superseded when Wilson's Glossa edition reaches this lemma.
Said of earth, not of heaven
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · compilation 1110–1130 · Laon
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The school answer in the form the twelfth century actually read: Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram III.19, printed under his name, abridged to the two moves that matter and set beside the verse. What the abridgement drops is the argument — Augustine's careful 'otherwise how is it true, what was said, to our image, if the human was made to the image of the Son alone?' becomes the flat 'for it would not truly be said, to our image' — so that a reader of the Gloss gets the conclusion with the reasoning compressed to a clause. This is the page on which Peter Comestor, Hugh and Abelard all begin. The same volume of the Gloss, ninety columns later, prints the angel reading of Gen 11:7 without a word of warning; see `glossa-11-7-angeli`.
'Let us make' is the TrinityTo the image of the Trinity itself
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · compilation 1110–1130 · Laon
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.'
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. ⚠ A second anchor note applies: this is a gloss on Gen 11:7, the tower of Babel, not on Gen 1:26 or on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf because it says of venite, confundamus what nobody in the Gloss says of faciamus: he is understood to have said it to the angels. And it gets there by the same route the rabbinic bench does. The gloss pairs Gen 11:7 with Gen 1:26 as the two plural verses; it then answers the plural of Gen 11:7 with the singular of Gen 11:8 — 'and he divided them' — exactly as the plural of Gen 1:26 is answered by the singular of Gen 1:27. That is R. Yoḥanan's rule at b. Sanhedrin 38b, which lists the same two verses in the same order with the same singular refutations beside them, and it is the structure of Augustine's chapter de locutione qua Deus Angelis loquitur (`aug-civ-16-6`), where Gen 1:26 is refused to the angels and Gen 11:7 is granted to them. Three benches, the same pair of verses, the same test. The Gloss is the one place where a Latin schoolbook prints the angel reading as the plain sense, and it does so where the image clause is missing and the argument against it therefore fails.
He said it to the angelsThe verb is singular, so one maker
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
מפרשיםTargums · Midrash · Bavli · Rashi
rabbinic · c. 200 · Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)
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.
Onkelos makes two decisions at once: ruach is a wind, not a spirit, and 'from before the LORD' keeps God at a remove; merahefet becomes menashva, 'blowing'. No bird, no hovering. Etheridge's PD English exists on Sefaria but did not return by version title; fetch from archive.org.
A wind
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
rabbinic · 100–300 · Palestine
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Evidence by omission, and it only reads as evidence next to the same targum's Gen 1:1. There Onkelos writes YY for Elohim, the Tetragrammaton, which is not plural in form, so that a reader of the Aramaic cannot raise the question of two authorities from the noun at all (see `targ-onk-1-1`). Here the plural verb is left standing: na'avid enasha be-tzalmana ki-dmutana — let us make a human in our image, as our likeness — with nothing added, nobody addressed, and no angels. The one difficulty the Aramaic could have removed as easily as the other, and did not. Whatever governed Onkelos's hand at Gen 1:1, it was not a general policy of smoothing plurals out of the creation account; and Pseudo-Jonathan, working on the same verse in the same language, does add the angels in so many words.
The verb is singular, so one maker
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
rabbinic · 100–400 · Palestine
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.
'Spirit of mercy' answers the wind/spirit question in a third way: neither the weather nor the Holy Spirit but a divine disposition. Neofiti's 1:1 'with wisdom' is the K1 anchor. Hebrew licence on Sefaria is 'unknown' — the MS transcription is PD in substance; confirm before embedding.
Spirit of mercy
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
“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).
The opening of the section, and it settles in one move what the whole rabbinic side of this crux will do with the pair: it reads it through Jeremiah. R. Berekhya begins from Prov 20:11, 'even a boy is known by his deeds' — while the plant was still unripe it put out thorns — and lands on Jer 4:23, 'I have seen the land, and behold, it is tohu va-vohu.' The prophet used the phrase of a land under judgement; so the phrase in Gen 1:2 can be read as a verdict rather than a description, and the four readings that follow in 2:2–2:5 all take that licence. Nothing on the Latin bench cites Jer 4:23 at all.
The verse tells history
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
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].”
The etymology Rashi will give as lexicography is here still a parable, and the parable is about grievance. A king buys two slaves with one bill of sale and one price and decrees that one shall be fed from the treasury and the other must work to eat; the second sits toheh u-voheh — bewildered and astonished — saying, we were bought together, why him and not me? So the earth sat toheh u-voheh: the celestials and the terrestrials were created together, the celestials are fed on the radiance of the Presence and we must toil. R. Yehuda bar Simon tells it again with two maidservants, one kept in the palace and one banished, and the earth's complaint becomes mortality: they live for ever and we die. The pair is not a state of matter here but a state of mind, and it belongs to the earth, who is a person with a case to make.
Astonishment
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
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.
The verse read straight through as a history of the generations: tohu is Adam, who came to nothing; va-vohu is Cain, who sought to return the world to tohu va-vohu; the darkness is the generation of Enosh; the face of the deep is the generation of the Flood; the spirit of God is the wind God made pass over the earth (Gen 8:1); and 'let there be light' is Abraham. Then day and night are Jacob and Esau. The move is exactly Bruno of Segni's in the twelfth century — the verse as a periodization running from the first man to the last redemption — and neither could have known the other; the difference is whose history it is. Note that Resh Lakish's reading of the same verse as the four kingdoms follows immediately in 2:4, which is built as a K7 witness for the Messiah's spirit; its first half belongs here too (see notes/cross-crux.md).
The verse tells history
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
“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.
Two answers in one section. Resh Lakish: the ruach is the spirit of the King Messiah (Isa 11:2), brought by repentance-as-water. Then the Ben Zoma story: 'blowing' is not written but 'hovering' — like a bird beating its wings, touching and not touching. Note the bird is an unspecified 'of' and the claim is touching-and-not-touching; the Bavli's version has a dove and no touching at all.
Spirit of the MessiahDove hovering, not touching
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
“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.”
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The rabbinic bench asks the Latin bench's question in three words — be-mi nimlakh, with whom did he take counsel — and then, instead of answering it, prints four answers side by side and lets them stand. R. Yehoshua in R. Levi's name: he took counsel with the work of heaven and earth, and the parable is of a king with two sanqlitin, the Greek synklētikoi, senators, without whose knowledge he did nothing. R. Shmuel bar Naḥman: with the work of each day, like a king with one counsellor. R. Ami: be-libbo nimlakh, he took counsel with his own heart — and the parables that follow are about blame rather than about counsel, the architect and the broker who lose the king's money, so that 'he was saddened in his heart' (Gen 6:6) explains the counsel backwards from the regret. Rav Asi repeats the second. Note what is not here and is in every Latin witness on this daf: nobody suggests that the plural could point to a plurality in God. The question is whom God consulted, not who spoke; and the two extremes the midrash offers, a senate and a soliloquy, are the two Rupert of Deutz will name in Latin at Liège six hundred years later — non tam senatu quam soliloquio — choosing the soliloquy, as R. Ami does, and meaning by it the opposite thing.
He took counsel with the household aboveA soliloquy, not a senate
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
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?
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The single most important passage on this daf, because it is the rabbinic bench saying out loud that it knows what the other bench does with this verse. Moses is writing the Torah at dictation; he reaches na'aseh adam and stops: ribbon ha-olam, mah attah noten pitchon peh la-minim — Master of the world, why are you giving the minim an opening? And the answer is not a defence of the plural but a refusal to protect it: 'write, and whoever wants to err, let him err.' Then the reason the risk was worth taking, and it is a moral one: God made greater and lesser, and a great man who will not ask leave of a lesser is to learn from his Creator, who consulted the ministering angels before making a human. R. Levi will not have even that — let hakha malkhu, there is no consulting here — and gives a parable in which the king asks what to do with a block of stone, hears his advisers say baths, and makes a statue: who is going to stop him? So the passage holds three positions at once: that the plural is dangerous, that it teaches humility, and that the consultation was never real. What it does not do is deny that the verse can be read as the minim read it. That is the concession the Latin bench never makes and never needs to, and it is the clearest evidence on the site that the two readings of Gen 1:26 were known to each other.
He took counsel with the household aboveBecause the heretics attack itThe consultative form marks the creature's standing
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · compilation 400–500 · Galilee (Tiberias / Sepphoris)
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.’
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. A disputation, reported as a disputation, on exactly the two verses this crux is built on. The minim ask R. Simlai how many divinities created the world; he answers from Deut 4:32, bara and not baru; they come back with Gen 1:1, and he gives the same answer — baru Elohim is not written here but bara Elohim, which is R. Yitzḥak's argument at Bereshit Rabbah 1:7 word for word (see `br-1-7`); they come back with na'aseh adam be-tzalmenu, and he sends them to the next verse, va-yivra and not va-yivre'u. Between the second and third exchange he states the rule the whole passage exists to illustrate: wherever you find an opening for the minim, you find the refutation beside it. Three things follow for this daf. The singular-verb argument that K1 and this crux both carry as a piece of grammar is here a polemical instrument aimed at named opponents. Gen 1:1 and Gen 1:26 are treated as one question, which is the reason this Gen 1:26 material belongs on a Gen 1:1–2 daf at all. And the disciples are not satisfied — those men you pushed off with a reed; what will you answer us? — so the midrash itself marks the grammatical answer as a debating move rather than an explanation, and gives the students a different one: that from now on the image needs a man, a woman and the Shekhinah. […] The passage continues in the printed English with two further exchanges, on Josh 22:22 and Josh 24:19, which are the same manoeuvre on other verses; they are outside the Hebrew segment as Daat prints it and are elided here.
The verb is singular, so one makerThe refutation is beside the openingBecause the heretics attack it
English: The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah, 2022
rabbinic · redaction 500–600 · Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)
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."
Two sentences, and they answer the crux's second question in the way no Latin does: the pair names two things, and you could point at them. Tohu is a green line that encircles the whole world and darkness comes out of it (Ps 18:12); bohu are the slimy stones sunk in the deep from which the waters come out — and the proof is Isa 34:11, 'he shall stretch over it the line of tohu and the stones of bohu', read as an inventory rather than as a curse. The baraita stands in the list of the ten things created on the first day (segments 4–5 here, which are K5's text), so tohu and bohu are creatures with a day of creation. Ibn Ezra knows this tradition from Sefer Yetzirah and sets it aside; Ramban knows it and keeps the proof-text while turning the line into a builder's measuring cord.
A green line and slimy stones
English: Sefaria Community Translation
rabbinic · redaction 500–600 · Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)
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.
The Bavli's Ben Zoma reads merahefet as a physical fact about distance: hovering measures the gap between upper and lower waters. The anonymous continuation then argues the gap into a hair's breadth. Steinsaltz/Davidson English is CC BY-NC and is NOT embedded; this is a fresh draft against the Wikisource Aramaic.
Dove hovering, not touching
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
rabbinic · redaction 500–600 · Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The angel reading in its most literal and least apologetic form: God does not merely take counsel with the ministering angels, he puts the question to them in the words of the verse — retzonkhem na'aseh adam be-tzalmenu, is it your will that we make a human in our image — and when they object he burns them, twice, until a third company learns not to answer. Two things make this the sharpest rabbinic witness here. First, the plural of the verse is taken as a real address to real hearers, which is precisely the reading Basil calls a Jewish fiction, Ambrose refuses because a servant cannot be a partner in the work, Bede excludes by a ratio, and Bruno says would produce many creators; the Latin bench's characterisation of the position is, on this page, accurate. Second, the story concedes the objection the Latin bench presses: the angels contribute nothing, are destroyed for speaking, and are told the world is not theirs. The consultation is real and the partnership is not, which is a distinction no Latin witness on this daf considers.
He took counsel with the household above
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
rabbinic · redaction 500–600 · Babylonia (Sura / Pumbedita)
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).
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The rule of R. Simlai at Bereshit Rabbah 8:9 stated as a rule and then run down a list, and the list is what matters here. Three verses where God speaks or is spoken of in the plural, each with the singular that follows it set beside it as its own answer: na'aseh adam against va-yivra, havah nerdah at Babel against va-yered YHWH, niglu elav ha-Elohim against la-El ha-oneh oti. The first two are exactly the pair Augustine takes up at De civitate Dei XVI.6 in a chapter headed what kind of speech is to be understood, by which God speaks to the angels, where Gen 1:26 is refused to the angels because of the image clause and Gen 11:7 is granted to them because there is nothing to prevent it; and they are exactly the pair the Glossa Ordinaria joins at PL 113:114D, glossing venite at Babel by faciamus hominem and answering both with their singulars. Three benches select the same two verses out of the whole Pentateuch and apply the same test to them. Nobody is reading anybody. The selection is forced by the Hebrew, and the disagreement is only about what the plural was doing there in the first place. Note the word: pakru, they blasphemed or broke loose — a harder verb than the she'elu, they asked, of the midrash's version, and the Bavli has dropped the disputation and kept the rule.
The refutation is beside the openingThe verb is singular, so one makerBecause the heretics attack it
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
rabbinic · 600–800 · Palestine
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.
Same 'spirit of mercies' as Neofiti; the verb menatva ('breathed / blew') keeps the Onkelos line. Etheridge embedded verbatim (PD).
Spirit of mercy
English: J. W. Etheridge, 1862
rabbinic · 600–800 · Palestine
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The angel reading written into the text of Scripture itself, which is as far as the rabbinic answer to this crux can be pushed. Where the Hebrew has 'and God said, let us make', Pseudo-Jonathan has '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'. Two additions, and the second is doing work: dating the angels to the second day forestalls the objection that they might have been co-creators, since they were made after the beginning and are therefore creatures like the rest. The Glossa Ordinaria at PL 113:114D says ad angelos dixisse intelligitur — he is understood to have said it to the angels — of the plural at Babel, and cross-refers to faciamus hominem; a Latin reader of the twelfth century and an Aramaic reader of the eighth are looking at the same plural and reaching for the same hearers. That the targum puts it in the biblical line rather than in a gloss is why Basil could say ferunt enim, quod angelis dixerit and be reporting rather than caricaturing.
He said it to the angels
English: J. W. Etheridge, 1862
rabbinic · 1075–1105 · Troyes
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).
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Rashi takes the angel reading as the plain sense and gives it a motive: anvetanuto shel ha-Qadosh barukh Hu, the humility of the Holy One, learned from this verse. Because the human is in the likeness of the angels and they might be envious, he took counsel with them; and this is his habit, for Micaiah saw the LORD on his throne with all the host of heaven standing to his right and his left (1 Kgs 22:19), which cannot be a right and a left but is a court, some arguing for acquittal and some for guilt, and Daniel's decree of the watchers is the same court. The word he uses for it is pamalya shel ma'alah, the household above, from the Latin familia — so that the Latin bench's senatus and the rabbinic bench's imperial household are the same borrowed picture of a court, used to opposite ends. That God natal reshut, took leave, from his own retinue is the strongest form of the reading anywhere on this daf, and Rashi will spend his second comment defending it against the obvious objection.
He took counsel with the household above
English: M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929–34
rabbinic · 1075–1105 · Troyes
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)
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The objection and the answer, in a hundred words, and it is the whole of this crux compressed. The objection: the angels did not help, and the plural gives the minim room to rebel. The answer is in three parts. Scripture did not refrain, because the point was to teach derekh eretz and the measure of humility, that the great should consult and take leave of the lesser. Had it written e'eseh adam, we should not have learned that he speaks with his court but only with himself — which is Ambrose's non dicit faciam, sed faciamus at Milan, the identical grammatical observation put to the identical use of ruling out a soliloquy, and to the opposite conclusion about who is being addressed. And the refutation of the minim was written beside it: va-yivra et ha-adam, and he did not write va-yivre'u, which is R. Simlai's rule and answer from Bereshit Rabbah 8:9. Rashi at Troyes about 1090 is thus doing openly what no Latin witness on this daf does: he names the risk the verse carries, weighs it against what the verse teaches, and decides that the teaching is worth the opening. Whether the minim he has in mind are the Christians of northern France is not said here and is not needed: the grammatical opening is the same one Abelard will exploit at the Paraclete forty years later.
The refutation is beside the openingThe verb is singular, so one makerHe took counsel with the household above
English: M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann, 1929–34
rabbinic · 1080–1105 · Troyes
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.
Three lines that turn the parable of BR 2:2 into a lexicon. Tohu is a word for astonishment and desolation, because a person would be astonished and appalled at the bohu in it — the emptiness is the thing seen and the astonishment is what seeing it does. Then the la'az: tohu is estordison in Old French, from estordir, to stun or daze, the word for the swimming in the head after a blow; Rashi gives the reader the sensation rather than the definition. Bohu he glosses reikut ve-tzadu, emptiness and waste — which are the two Aramaic words Onkelos used for the whole pair, in the other order. The Latins who answer this crux describe what was missing from the earth; Rashi describes what looking at it would do to you.
AstonishmentNo seed, no living thing
English: Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34
rabbinic · 1080–1105 · Troyes
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.
Rashi's dove over the nest is the Bavli's dove (Chagigah 15a), not Bereshit Rabbah's unspecified bird. The Old French gloss acoveter means 'to cover, to brood' — which is exactly Jerome's incubabat. Rashi and Jerome, seven centuries apart, gloss the same Hebrew verb with the same vernacular sense from opposite sides. The Throne of Glory standing in the air is from a different source [CHECK: PdRE / Midrash Konen].
Dove hovering, not touchingThrone of Glory
English: Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34
rabbinic · c. 1155 · Lucca
“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.
A grammarian clearing the ground. Saadia Gaon had derived tohu from tehom, the deep; Ibn Ezra refuses it, because the mem of tehom is a root letter, as in hadom. Then he names Sefer Yetzirah's green line and slimy stones — the baraita of b. Chagigah 12a in its other home — and sets it aside in four words: 'what is correct is as the Aramaic translator said', that is, Onkelos' tzadya ve-reikanya, waste and empty; and he proves it from 'the howling waste of tohu' (Deut 32:10) and 'after tohu' (1 Sam 12:21), where the word means without substance. Bohu is 'the brother of' tohu, its vav standing for a hey. His own answer is then physical and is Basil's: at the creation of the firmament and the dry land there was no settled place on the earth, because it was covered with water. The community translation embedded here leaves mefulamot untranslated and renders bohu as 'and confused'; it is CC0 and is kept as it stands.
Hidden under the watersNo seed, no living thing
English: Sefaria Community Translation
rabbinic · c. 1155 · Lucca
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The finding of this session, and it is a correction to what the daf would otherwise say about Ibn Ezra. At Gen 1:1 he explains the plural Elohim as the honorific plural — 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 (see `ibn-ezra-1-1-elohim`). Here, on the plural verb, he is offered the same explanation by Saadia Gaon — na'aseh is the manner of royal speech, with Gen 29:27, Dan 2:36 and Num 22:6 for proofs — and he demolishes it: ve-elleh ha-edim edei sheker hem, and these witnesses are false witnesses. Each proof text is parsed away, nitnah as a nifal and not a first person plural, nakkeh bo as Balak and his camp or else an infinitive; R. Moshe ha-Kohen is told he erred in his book; and Daniel could not have used a plural of grandeur to the king of kings. Then his own answer: God said to the angels, let us make a human — we shall occupy ourselves with him, and not the water and the earth, which had brought forth the plants and the animals. So the grammarian who takes the plural noun to be empty takes the plural verb to be full, and full in the way the Latin bench most objects to. The two positions are not inconsistent — a plural of honour is a fact about nouns, and na'aseh has a real subject — but only a reader who has both pages can see that Ibn Ezra's answer to this crux is the angel reading.
Not a plural of majestyHe said it to the angels
English: Sefaria Community Translation
rabbinic · 1263–1270 · Girona
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.
The flattest possible answer to 'is darkness a creature': it is one of the four elements, and it is fire. Ramban reads the whole of v. 2 as an inventory of the elements under other names — darkness is elemental fire, which is dark, 'and were it red, it would redden the night for us'; the deep is water; the spirit is air; the earth is dust — and then arranges them in their spheres, fire enveloping air, air the water, water the earth. The Latin bench has the same physics and never uses it here: Comestor knows perfectly well that shadow is cast by bodies, and even he will not say that the darkness of v. 2 is an element, because Augustine has made the privation of light the orthodox answer and an element is not a privation. Ramban is under no such constraint, and the sentence costs him nothing.
Darkness names the element of fireGod made the darkness too
English: Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76
rabbinic · 1263–1270 · Girona
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)
The one witness on either bench that makes the pair a matched technical vocabulary. The primary matter, which the Greeks call hyle, is called in the holy tongue tohu — the word derived from the rabbinic betohe, of a man who bethinks himself of what he has done, because if a man came to fix a name to this matter he would think again and call it something else, having no form to fasten a name on. The form that the matter puts on is called bohu, a compound word, bo hu, 'in it there is'. Then Isa 34:11 read as a workshop: the line of tohu is the cord by which the craftsman marks out the plan of his building, the stones of bohu are the forms in it — the same verse the Chagigah baraita read as a green line round the world and stones in the deep. He closes with Sefer Yetzirah and with the Bahir's R. Berekhya, who defines tohu as 'a thing which astonishes people' — Rashi's etymology, now describing a substance rather than a viewer. Chavel's English shows on Sefaria as CC BY, which is surprising for a 1971 Shilo text: licence key chavel-ramban is marked for checking before publication. The paragraph that precedes this one — creation from absolute nothing, and the hyle as the only thing created — belongs to K4 and is not sliced here.
Matter and its formAstonishment
English: Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76
rabbinic · 1263–1270 · Girona
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. A fourth answer, and the only one on either bench that keeps the plural literal and puts a creature in it without putting an angel in it. Ramban argues from the order of the chapter: God created something from nothing on the first day only, and afterwards formed and made from what he had created, so that the waters were told to swarm and the earth to bring forth. At the human the formula changes because the two agents are named together — 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 the Holy One to give the spirit, as Gen 2:7 then says twice over. Be-tzalmenu ki-dmutenu follows exactly: the human will resemble both, his body the earth he was taken from and his spirit the beings above. He credits the reading to R. Yosef Kimḥi and calls it the most acceptable of all that have been thought about the verse — a phrase that quietly sets aside Rashi's angels, which he does not name here. Ramban's answer at Gen 1:1 was that Elohim is el hem, the force of all the forces, with a secret not disclosed; his answer here needs no secret at all, and no plurality in God whatever.
I and the earth
English: Charles B. Chavel, 1971–76
ScholaeCarolingian and twelfth-century Latin, 790–1170
latin · c. 790 · Aachen
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.
A Carolingian question-and-answer catena that labels its sources. Jerome quoted verbatim under his name at col. 1116C; Augustine's sun-over-earth (Gnm I.5) quoted at col. 1112D. The first witness that shows the two Latin lines (Hebrew bird, power-not-place) sitting side by side as authorities.
Bird brooding, warmingPower, not place
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 790 · Aachen
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.
The crux asked as a schoolroom question — Cur inanis et vacua? — and answered twice, once about coastlines and once about the soul; the second answer is Isidore word for word. What makes this witness matter is not the answer but where it stands. Five columns earlier, at PL 96:1111B, the same compilation prints Augustine's Manichaean paragraph on the same verse under the Old Latin lemma, terra invisibilis et incomposita, and at 1114C it prints Augustine again on the same words. Here it reads the Vulgate's lemma and asks a different question of it. Wigbod does not notice, and neither does the reader: the two Latin texts of Gen 1:2 sit in one book without a seam.
No seed, no living thingThe earth of our flesh
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 790 · Tours
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Augustine's sentence from De Genesi ad litteram III.19 cut in half and given to two speakers, D and M, so that the observation becomes a pupil's and the doctrine a master's. Nothing is added and one thing is lost: Augustine wrote ad imaginem Dei, and had a paragraph of argument about why it is not ad imaginem Filii; Wigbod writes ad imaginem suam, which makes the point unarguable and unexaminable at once. The compilation is also where the attribution slips — the excerpt is headed AMBROSIUS, de creatione hominis, and the words are Augustine's. That is the ordinary condition of the Carolingian florilegia and is why the Latin bench of the ninth century can be read for what it circulated rather than for what it thought.
'Let us make' is the Trinity
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 796 · Tours
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.
Augustine compressed to one sentence for the schoolroom. Note 'Spiritus Domini' (Old Latin) not 'Spiritus Dei' (Vulgate) — the Vetus Latina lingers in Alcuin's lemma.
Power, not place
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 796 · Tours
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.
The whole crux compressed into eight words for the schoolroom, and the most interesting thing about it is the parenthesis: 'ex vers. LXX'. Alcuin knows he is expounding a lemma that is not in the Bible his pupils carry, and says so. He splits the pair between the two answers the Latin bench will keep — invisible has to do with light, unordered with form — and gives no reason for either. Angelomus takes this answer over word for word two generations later and puts it inside a discussion of Jerome's text, where it becomes a gloss on 'the other translation'.
Hidden under the watersUnformed matter
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 796 · Tours
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The whole crux reduced to two questions and twenty-eight words of answer, which is what the Interrogationes are for, and worth having on the daf precisely because it shows what the Carolingian school thought a pupil needed. Two distinct answers are given and neither cancels the other: the consultative form marks the dignity of the rational creature, and the plural number shows one working of three persons. Note that the first of these is the only thing Alcuin says about the change of formula, and it is not a Trinitarian point at all — it is an argument about the honour of the thing made, which is Bereshit Rabbah 8:8's argument for why the plural was worth the risk (Moses is told to write it anyway, so that the great should learn to consult the small) with the moral swapped from humility to nobility. Four questions later, at Inter. 40, Alcuin returns to it and gives the Augustinian pairing — cur iterum dixit: Creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam, cum antea dixisset: ad imaginem nostram? … ut utrumque, et pluralitas personarum, et unitas substantiae insinuaretur — but that is a distinct argument and is not merged into this slice. ⛔ Alcuin does not answer a lemma grep on this crux's Latin words: the Interrogationes are organised as questions and the lemma sits in the question, not in a running exposition.
'Let us make' is the TrinityThe consultative form marks the creature's standing
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 822 · Fulda
'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.
Augustine's craftsman in Rabanus' own words at col. 446D; then at 447C he copies Bede's Trinity sentence verbatim. Rabanus is the bridge by which both lines reach the Glossa.
The craftsman's willThe Trinity named
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 850 · Luxeuil
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.
Angelomus splices the two Latin lines into one sentence: Augustine's 'not by place but by power' and Jerome's bird, the latter presented as 'another translation' and unnamed. Jerome's 'nonnulli' (some suppose) has hardened into 'haeretici'.
Power, not placeBird brooding, warming
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 850 · Luxeuil
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.
A ninth-century compiler doing, in one paragraph, what this crux exists to show. He asks the Vulgate's question, answers it with Augustine's unformed matter, then reaches for the other version — 'unseen and unordered' — and glosses it with Alcuin's eight words from Interrogatio 30, unattributed; then he turns to Bede's argument that the phrase is withheld from heaven, and copies Bede's sentence about the heaven set apart from the turning of this world. Three sources and two Latin translations, spliced without a join. His 'invisa' for 'invisibilis' is his own or his exemplar's.
Unformed matterHidden under the watersSaid of earth, not of heaven
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 890 · Auxerre
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Three sentences, and the middle one is the most useful thing on the Latin half of this daf. Quasi quodam concilio dicit: Faciamus — as though by a kind of council he says, let us make — is Bereshit Rabbah 8:3's be-mi nimlakh, with whom did he take counsel, in a Latin word; and the third sentence records, without naming anyone, that some say it is to be referred to the angels. That is the rabbinic bench's own primary answer, reported at Auxerre about 890 as a live opinion among Latin readers and rejected only comparatively — melius tamen, it is better referred to the Trinity, not: it is impossible. Remigius is the one Latin witness here who neither refutes the angel reading nor accepts it, and the mildness is the evidence: by the end of the ninth century the reading is in the schools as an option, and nobody on this daf says where it came from.
'Let us make' is the TrinityThe consultative form marks the creature's standingHe said it to the angels
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 900 · Auxerre
'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.
Augustine's craftsman, now with 'wisdom' — the Spirit as the plan before the work. Remigius also gives a moral reading at col. 55D (the fluid hearts of men).
The craftsman's will
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 900 · Auxerre
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.
Three adjectives that outlived their author. 'Useless, unfruitful, and unordered' is the gloss the Glossa Ordinaria prints on this lemma under the siglum STRAB., word for word and with the sentence about the mingled elements and the thin waters after it; from the Glossa it reaches Comestor, who keeps 'useless and unfruitful' and drops 'unordered'. The last clause is worth noticing on its own: the waters above the firmament still have the quality the primordial waters had, so that a reader can look up and see what verse 2 was talking about.
No seed, no living thingHidden under the waters
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1100 · Segni
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.
The craftsman becomes a house-builder sorting timber. The digitization reads 'Dei. vero' — the PL plate should be checked for the stop.
The craftsman's will
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1100 · Segni
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.
Isidore's allegory moved off the individual soul and onto history: the empty earth is the Church before she had children, the darkness on the deep is the unread Scripture, and the emptiness ends not at the third day but at the end — when the fullness of the Gentiles has come in and Israel is saved, the earth will no longer be called empty and void. Structurally this is Bereshit Rabbah 2:3, which reads the same clause as the generations from Adam to Abraham and ends with the morning of Jacob; and it is Resh Lakish's four kingdoms in 2:4, which ends with the spirit of the Messiah. Three readings of one clause as a periodization of sacred history, with the same shape and opposite contents, and no possible contact. Bruno's Corpus Corporum text carries a stray '3' before 'ad Ecclesiam confugerent', which is dropped here as a printer's mark.
The verse tells historyThe earth of our flesh
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1114 · Liège
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.
'If you consider the letter carefully' — and the letter, considered carefully, yields a list of what was not there yet: dry land, firmness, stars, kinds. Rupert then splits the pair the way the twelfth century regularly splits it, empty of shoots and void of animals, which is Abelard's division (fruit and inhabitant) and Hugh's in the Adnotationes (seeds and shoots) with the terms moved about. None of the three cites another, and the distribution of the two terms differs each time: what they share is the conviction that the pair is a pair, and that each word must be given its own privation.
No seed, no living thing
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1114 · Liège
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.
Rupert has the egg but not the Syrian: the image arrives already naturalized. His 'love' is Confessions XIII.9 turned Trinitarian. Not found by the plan's search; surfaced by grepping the TEI for the bird vocabulary.
Bird brooding, warmingLove, gift, weight
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 1112–1117 · Liège
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. Rupert states the philological observation more plainly than anyone else on the Latin bench — mutavit vocem suam, he changed his voice — and then does something no one else does: he names the two things the change of voice could mean and rejects one of them. The counsel is non tam senatu quam soliloquio, not so much a senate as a soliloquy. That is the disagreement of Bereshit Rabbah 8:3 settled in four words, and settled the other way from where it starts. There R. Yehoshua in R. Levi's name says God took counsel with the work of heaven and earth, and the parable is of a king with two sanqlitin — Greek synklētikoi, senators — while R. Ami says be-libbo nimlakh, he took counsel with his own heart. Rupert, who has never heard of either, uses the Roman word for the first and the Augustinian word for the second, and chooses the second. Abelard chooses it too, twenty years later, and gives it a source: a man consulting his own reason makes two of himself, as in Boethius and in Augustine's Soliloquies. The image of God pausing for breath is Rupert's own and is not in the tradition.
'Let us make' is the TrinityA soliloquy, not a senate
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 1130 · The Paraclete (Nogent-sur-Seine)
'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…
The one Latin witness who reports the Hebrew as 'fluttering' (volitabat) — which is what merahefet means in Deut 32:11 and what Ben Zoma and Rashi hear — rather than Jerome's 'brooding'. He keeps 'warming' only as 'a certain translation'. Where did Abelard get volitabat? Not from Jerome. A Jewish informant is possible [CHECK]. The excerpt spans cols 735B–735D; the middle is elided in the English.
FlutteringBird brooding, warming
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1130 · The Paraclete (Nogent-sur-Seine)
'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.
Abelard gets Bede's conclusion out of a single word. 'Terra AUTEM erat inanis et vacua': the adversative conjunction implies a contrast, so what is said of the earth is being denied of heaven, and heaven is not empty because the angels are its inhabitants — whose creation Moses passes over on purpose, lest man, drawn to the worship of God, should see another nature preferred to himself. That last reason is Abelard's own and belongs to no one else on this crux. The division of the pair — empty of fruit, void of an inhabitant — matches Rupert's and Hugh's without citing either.
No seed, no living thingSaid of earth, not of heaven
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1130 · Paris
'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.
The school formula at its shortest, and it gives two distributions rather than one: empty of seeds and void of shoots — or else empty because the earth was hollow and void because there was nothing in the hollow but air and mist. The second is a physical picture, and it is the one Hugh's own Adnotationes go on to develop in the sentences on the mist, the deep and the waters that are built as the K7 witness hugh-adnot-gen-1-2, immediately after this.
No seed, no living thing
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1130 · Paris
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The one place on the Latin bench where the angel reading is not merely reported but taught, and taught as a moral. Hugh gives the change of formula a shape — work, informing word, counsel, three advances across Gen 1:1, 1:3 and 1:26 — and then draws from the third the lesson that we should not disdain to take counsel from equals and from lesser people, since he himself so speaks to the angels. He goes further than any rabbinic witness on this daf dares to: quorum ministerio forsitan formatum est corpus hominis, by whose ministry perhaps the human body was formed, which is the thing Basil calls a Jewish fiction and Bruno says would make many creators. Only then comes vel quod melius est, or what is better — the counsel of the Trinity. So the school of St Victor about 1130 holds both readings, prefers the second, and gets from the first exactly the moral Bereshit Rabbah 8:8 gets: that the great should consult the small, and that the Creator did it first. Hugh's ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram is called singular in the last clause; he means the singular of Gen 1:27, and the sentence is loose in the printed text.
He said it to the angels'Let us make' is the TrinityThe consultative form marks the creature's standing
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 1130 · Paris
'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.
The most physical Latin reading: the waters are a mist of mixed elements, the Spirit is God's intention. Hugh's Adnotationes are the literal school; his De sacramentis treats the same verse theologically. The TEI reads 'praecerat' for 'praeerat'.
The craftsman's will
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1133 · The Paraclete (Nogent-sur-Seine)
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The same man who is this crux's star witness on Eloim at Gen 1:1, asking the same question at the other verse, and the two pages should be read together: at 1:1 the evidence is a Hebrew noun that is plural in form beside a singular verb, and here it is a Latin verb that is plural in form beside a singular verb three lines later. Both times the argument runs the same way — the plural gives the persons, the singular gives the one creator — and both times it is addressed to Jews by name: dicant Judaei si possunt. What is new here is the analogy, and it is the most interesting thing on the Latin bench for this daf. A man who consults his own reason 'sets up himself and his reason as though they were two', as Boethius does in the Consolation and Augustine in the Soliloquies. That is R. Ami's answer at Bereshit Rabbah 8:3, be-libbo nimlakh — he took counsel with his heart — used to prove the opposite conclusion: for R. Ami the inward counsel shows that no second party was involved, for Abelard it shows how a real plurality can speak in one mouth. Rupert had reached the same figure sixteen years earlier and called it a soliloquy without naming the book.
Eloim is plural: three persons'Let us make' is the TrinityA soliloquy, not a senateThe verb is singular, so one maker
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · 1130–1137 · Paris
'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.
The first plain statement on the Latin bench that there is another translation of this clause. Hugh quotes the Vulgate's lemma, gives the Old Latin word in the same breath, and then goes on to Augustine's reading — heaven and earth name the matter of everything, in which all things were made together in essence before they were made one after another in form. He does not say which text is better, or where the other comes from; he simply will not let a reader think there is only one. Alcuin had named the Septuagint three hundred years earlier and then expounded the Greek lemma as if it were the Bible; Hugh names the variant while expounding the Vulgate. Wigbod printed both, five columns apart, and said nothing.
Unformed matter
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1140 · Regensburg
'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.
By 1140 'vel aquas fovebat' is offered as a bare variant reading, no Syrian, no bird: the image has become a lemma.
Bird brooding, warmingThe Trinity named
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · c. 1170 · Paris
'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.
The gloss arrives at the Paris schools in its final form: Remigius' three adjectives, minus one, applied not to the earth but to the machina mundialis, the world considered as a piece of apparatus not yet fit for use. Comestor then identifies the deep with what the Greeks call chaos, which is the classical name the earlier bench avoids — Abelard, in the sentences that follow the slice built here (PL 178:734D), had said that 'certain of the philosophers or poets called this confusion chaos' and kept his distance; Comestor states it as a fact of vocabulary. From here it goes into the Historia's readership, which is everyone.
No seed, no living thingUnformed matter
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 1169–1173 · Paris
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.
⚠ Anchor note: this is a comment on Gen 1:26, not on Gen 1:1–5. It is on the daf under the second clause of the anchor rule — it argues the same philological question the Elohim of Gen 1:1 raises, whether a plural form of speech about God implies a plurality in God — and is anchored on Gen 1:2 beside that material. The handbook settling it, and the interest is in what it settles and what it leaves standing. Comestor gives two readings without ranking them: the Father speaks to the Son and the Holy Spirit — which is Ambrose's and Basil's answer, refused by Augustine on the ground that ad imaginem nostram would then have to be tuam or meam — or the plural is the common voice of the three, which is Augustine's. He does not notice that the first is the one Augustine wrote two books to exclude, and neither reading is argued for. The angels are not mentioned at all: between Hugh at St Victor about 1130, who teaches the angel reading as a moral and grants the angels a possible ministry in forming the body, and the Historia scholastica about 1170, which is the book every priest in Latin Europe will be examined on, the option has simply dropped out of the syllabus.
The Father speaks to the Son'Let us make' is the Trinity
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · c. 1170 · Paris
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).
The textbook of the schools fuses Jerome's Hebrew and Basil's Syriac into one sentence and adds a new opponent: Plato's world-soul, i.e. William of Conches and the Chartres reading of the Spirit as anima mundi. The bird has become a proof against philosophers.
Bird brooding, warming
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
latin · 1322–1332 · Paris
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.
The craftsman analogy at the end of its life, and shortened to a clause. Augustine put it as a question about how a will can be borne over anything; Rabanus made it a simile, like a craftsman whose will is borne above the things to be made; Remigius and Bruno each restated it. Lyra states it as a gloss, without argument and without naming anyone, because by 1330 it is simply what the words mean: spiritus Dei, id est voluntas. What he adds is the object. The other Latins have the craftsman's will over his work; Lyra has it over a specific physical thing he has just described, the heap and commixture of the elements with the water lying over the earth, and the two verbs are formare et ornare, which are the two halves of the chapter as the schools divided it, the work of distinction and the work of ornament. The Spirit is not hovering over water on this page. It is a will directed at a job of work whose stages the commentary has already named.
The craftsman's willPower, not place
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson
latin · 1322–1332 · Paris
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.
The two halves of the pair given two different physical causes, in the tersest form this crux ever reaches. Inanis is invisibilis and the reason is optical -- the earth was covered on every side with water, so there was nothing to see; vacua is unfurnished, and the reason is botanical -- no plants or herbs yet. That is Bede's and Remigius's distinction with the theology taken out and a mechanism put in. Then the etymology, which is the reason to print this passage: abyssus from a, without, and byssus, the whitest of linens, so that the abyss is what is without whiteness, because white is the colour that holds the most light. Isidore is the source of the etymological habit and not of this etymology; what Lyra does with it is make the darkness of Gen 1:2 a statement about a colour rather than about a privation, which is the Latin bench's usual answer, or about the wicked, which is the rabbinic bench's. He goes on to give abyssus a second sense, the confusion and commixture of everything below the sphere of the moon, and to date the elements' accidental properties to the third day.
Hidden under the watersNo seed, no living thing
Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson