Genesis 1:1. Textual Creativity with Creation Text

The first verse of Genesis, opening the Bible's first Creation Story, invites wonder and contemplation. It has also elicited much interpretation. Here are ideas for some adventurous, playful renderings of the verse, which arise from changing the 'whitespace' of the first three words.

Instead of the traditional placement of the letters as

בראשית     ברא      אלהים

which usually gets translated along the lines of, 'In the beginning G!d created', or 'Towards the beginning when G!d created', we simply shift the letters side to side, moving and altering the spaces between them, so that they spell


ברא    שיתברא      אל      הים

The whole verse then becomes


ברא    שיתברא     אל      הים    את      השמים      ואת      הארץ

The first word now, ברא, could be read literally either as past-tense, 'he/He/it/It created', or as imperative, '[you] create!'. I like the imperative.


שיתברא translates as '[so] that: it/It/he/He would be created'.

I read  אל as 'toward', and thus together with the next word, we get 'towards the Sea'. (One might also try  אל as god/G!d, to get 'god/G!d of the Sea', although that choice seems to me perhaps a bit too monolatrous or idolatrous.)

Finally, note that the object-marker, את, sometimes means 'with'. Let's take it that way in this version of the text.

Putting these words together, the verse might be saying


Create! so that It (the world, the manifestation of holiness, the presence of G!d) is created, towards the Sea, along with the Heavens and the Earth

In the above translation, I imagine a primordial view of Land, Ocean and Sky. Presumably, this triad could also be taken symbolically.

If we restore the word אלהים, dropping the motif of 'towards the sea', and read ברא as past-tense, then the verse might say


[G!d] created, and thus [G!d]-self got created, along with Heaven and Earth

The above version, along with the next one, feels more-emphatically mystical.

If we now read את as 'you [grammatically feminine, balancing the grammatical masculine of the first part of the verse]', then we could get


[G!d] created, and thus The Universe got created -- [and by the way,] you are Heaven and you are Earth

Or, if 'you' need to be masculine, we could move the ה's from the following words over to make אתה, to get an essentially equivalent result.

I invite further exploration in the Comments to this Post. To use some of the vocabulary of this verse: Be creative!