Genesis: the most debated sentence ever written

Bereshit bara Elohim et ha-shamayim ve-et ha-aretz.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Ten words in Hebrew. One sentence. And for over 2,500 years, people can't agree on what it means.

The problem starts with the first word

Bereshit - 'in the beginning.' But does it mean 'at the very beginning, when nothing existed'? Or 'at the beginning of a process, when matter already was'? Hebrew grammar allows both interpretations. The medieval rabbi Rashi believed it referred to the beginning of ordering chaos, not creating from nothing. Christian theologians chose creatio ex nihilo - creation from nothing.

This difference in interpreting a single word split theology for two thousand years.

The book that built three religions

Genesis is the first of the five books of the Torah - the foundation of Judaism. Christians adopted it as the Old Testament. Islam recognizes the same stories - Adam, Noah, Abraham - in slightly altered versions in the Quran.

Over four billion people on the planet consider this text sacred. No other document in history has as many readers who believe it's true.

Written in Hebrew, probably between the 10th and 5th century BCE. Who wrote it? Tradition says: Moses. Modern scholars say: at least four different authors, over hundreds of years, whose texts someone later stitched into one story.

Stories you know but don't understand

Everyone knows Adam and Eve, the apple, the serpent. But the text has no apple - it has 'the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.' The apple is a Latin translation error (malum means both 'apple' and 'evil').

Everyone knows Noah's Ark. But few people know that the flood story is nearly identical to the Epic of Gilgamesh - a Babylonian text older than Genesis by at least a thousand years.

And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

One sentence. And in it, a riddle: if God has no body, what does 'in His own image' mean? Theologians have been working on that question from the Bronze Age to today.

Why scientists keep coming back to it

In 1927, Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaitre proposed the Big Bang theory. Many physicists rejected it - not because it was inconsistent, but because it sounded too biblical. They didn't want a 'beginning.'

Einstein told Lemaitre: 'Your calculations are correct, but your physics is abominable.' Ironically, Einstein was wrong. Lemaitre's cosmology turned out to be true.

Genesis is not a cosmology textbook. But the question it poses - 'why is there something instead of nothing?' - is a question quantum physics still hasn't answered. Ten Hebrew words from 2,500 years ago, still one question ahead of science.