Double Helix: Our Spiritual DNA – April 30, 2025
Chapter 1: From the First Story
“…In the beginning….” Genesis 1:1
The first text was written down in the language of ancient, Biblical Hebrew. The language of the Hebrew Scriptures is skeletal at best. There are no vowels, only consonants. We have no idea how things were pronounced and there is no punctuation at all. We don’t know for certain where one sentence ends and another begins. In addition to this sparsity of punctuation, there were just fewer words, which means that every ancient Hebrew word was expansive in its meaning and every time we translate that word into English, we limit its meaning drastically. It is as if we are taking the water that would fit in a large bathtub and trying to put it into a tea cup. You cannot capture all the broad meaning of most ancient Hebrew words with one precise English word. The act of translating is therefore often a violent act of severe limitation. We are cutting off huge swaths of meaning. We must begin the reading of English Bibles with this knowledge in mind: that we are only touching the tip of the iceberg, that there is so much more meaning beyond the words on the page.
Let’s look at these first three words of the Bible. For centuries, they have been translated as In the beginning. This is one possible translation, but the Hebrew has no indefinite articles! That means these words could be translated In a beginning.
In the eleventh century, a rabbi named Rashi taught the traditional meaning and his opinion won the day, but it is an interpretation. What if the greater meaning is In a beginning? What if there were many beginnings? In many dimensions. The possibilities are endless.
The Hindus conceive of a cyclical universe. It begins and ends but then begins again. And how can we know if this is true? Our tradition as Christians roots us in one created universe. But maybe there was more than one beginning. Maybe it did happen again and again. How could we ever know? We cannot know. The conversation itself is nonsensical. Scientists wonder if the universe was created with a big bang and will expand to a mysterious point when its action is reversed and it will then start to condense into eventual nothingness once more, from which another big bang might occur. Is there ever a true beginning or a true end? We may be incapable of knowing…
This mystery of the indefinite article is humbling. I have always loved how Scripture seems to tell us all that we need to know but no more than that. Often we are left with more questions than answers, because there are questions which we will never be able to answer in this life. Who are we to know if God created more than one beginning? We are not given permission to go there and perhaps this is best, for our limited minds cannot comprehend this mystery.
These first words do tell us one thing for sure, that there was a beginning, our beginning, the beginning of life as we know it. The ancient Hebrew will never specify if there was another beginning before this one, that is something that we will never know for we cannot even contemplate it-it’s just too cosmic a question. This is a beginning, and that is all that we need to know.
