The Koren Tanakh – Hebrew-English

“When God began creating heaven and earth, the earth was void and desolate, there was darkness on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved over the waters....” Thus unfolds the most revolutionary as well as the most influential account of creation in the history of the human spirit.

Yet what I find so profound and counterintuitive is how the Torah frames creation. It does so not from a vantage point of physics or cosmology, but rather through a phrase we hear repeatedly in the opening verses: “And God said, Let there be... And there was....” What is truly creative, we learn, is not science or technology per se, but rather the word. That is what forms all being.

Judaism treats mere words with a great degree of seriousness: “Life and death are in the power of the tongue,” says the book of Proverbs (18:21). Likewise the verses in Psalms (34:13-14.), “Whoever of you loves life and desires to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies.”

There are ancient cultures who worshipped the gods because they saw them as powers: lightning, thunder, the rain and sun, the sea and ocean that epitomized the forces of chaos, and sometimes wild animals that represented danger and fear. Judaism was not a religion that worshipped power, despite the fact that God is more powerful than any pagan deity. Judaism, like other religions, has holy places, holy people, sacred times, and consecrated rituals. What made Judaism different, however, is that it is supremely a religion of holy words.

Creation, revelation, and the moral life begin with the creative word, the idea, the vision, the dream. Language — and with it the ability to remember a distant past and conceptualize a distant future — lies at the heart of our uniqueness as the image of God. Just as God makes the natural world by words, so we make the human world by words. Already at the opening of the Torah, at the very beginning of creation, the Jewish doctrine of revelation is foretold: that God reveals Himself to humanity not in the sun, the stars, the wind or the storm but in and through words — sacred words that establish eternal covenant between heaven and earth, and thus become co-partners with God in the work of redemption.