What if we are asking the wrong questions? What if...?
As always, when we dive into the text, we have to consider two things: What are our methodological assumptions? What are the original authors/audience methodological assumptions? Then we have to examine if the two are the same.
Let's start by looking at the word "beginning". The questions I posed at the beginning (there's that word again!) of this post assumes our understanding of what the English word means. When we use "beginning", we are usually referring to the beginning of something. But what about the Hebrews? Did they mean this when they used the phrase beresit? Just because we can translate this Hebrew phrase as "in the beginning" doesn't mean we have the right to read our English understanding into it. In doing linguistics, we have to derive the meaning of the word from its own cultural sources, not read our cultural understanding into. This means that in order to understand what beresit means, we have to look at its usage elsewhere in Scripture, as well as looking to see if there is anything in the ANE culture that can help us understand the word better.
If we are going to be rigid in our examination, sure, resit can be used to refer to the beginning of something, but we must ask, "how does this word function in the rest of the Hebrew Bible?" As John Sailhammer has pointed out in his book, Genesis Unbound, the unique function of the word in the Hebrew refers to an initial period or duration rather than a specific point in time (pg. 38). To support his case, he draws on such verses as Job 8:7, which speaks of the early part of Job's life, not the actual beginning of his biological life. He also quotes Jeremiah 28:1, which refers to the beginning period of of Zedekiah's reign. In his commentary on Genesis, John Walton also notes that "When the ancients kept records of a king's reign, his first year did not begin with his accession to the throne, but with the first new year's day of his reign. Historians refer to the partial preliminary year as the accession year. In Hebrew, it was referred to as the resit of his reign. This was an initial period of time, not a point in time." (Walton, NIV Application Commentary on Genesis, Kindle, loc 1326).
While this helps us some, the problem is that neither of these verses are similar in syntax with Genesis 1:1. This then forces us to look to other documents in the ANE to help point us in the right direction. In the Egyptian text called Papyrus Leiden, someone from Thebes describes the god Amun who emerged in the beginning or "on the first occasion." In his book , Egyptian Religion, S. Morenz discusses the wide usage of this phrase in Egyptian literature, and shows that it is not used as an abstract idea, but as a reference to a first time occasion(166-68). In essence, the Egyptians used "beginning" as a period of time, not a point in time. Therefore, based on all the factors that we have, it is best to understand the phrase beresit in Genesis 1:1 to be referring to an initial period of time, not a specific point in time.
The next thing we have to determine is "what is included in this initial period?" Is it a separate act of creation that takes place prior to the seven days, or does it include the seven days? This is what we will look at in our next post.