Targum Onkelos

English

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.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Hebrew / Aramaic

Sefaria, 'Onkelos Genesis' · pd

Notes

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.

Threads

• ← contests · Philo of Alexandria
  Onkelos renders the ruach as a wind from before the Lord, which takes the divine name in the verse as a genitive of origin and removes any question of the spirit's status. Philo keeps the genitive and reads it as a genitive of cause: the breath is called God's because breath gives life and God gives life. Two Jewish readings, four centuries apart, of the same two words, and they go in opposite directions from the same grammatical instinct, that of God is doing work in the sentence.
• ← echoes · Rashi
  Rashi glosses bohu as 'reikut ve-tzadu', emptiness and waste — the two Aramaic words Onkelos uses to render the whole pair, 'tzadya ve-reikanya', in the other order. Rashi's peshat on the pair is the targum's, split between the two Hebrew words.
• ← cites · Abraham ibn Ezra
  'as the Aramaic translator has said' — Onkelos' tzadya ve-reikanya, supported from 'the howling waste of tohu' (Deut 32:10) and 'after tohu' (1 Sam 12:21), where the word means without substance.