Genesis: Creation as a Process

From a book review in the NY Times about The Five Books of Moses, a much-remarked new translation by Robert Alter:

Return, then, to the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch – the Torah – where pronouns are often ambiguous, words are compacted with multiple meanings and clauses can begin to make sense not in the ordinary sequence of reading but only in the course of doubling back and rereading. Here is how Mr. Alter renders that first sentence of Genesis:

"When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ "

That sentence unsettles. The creation is not a completed act, but part of a process. The act of speaking is the focus of attention, coming after an almost breathless catalog of elements in a world "without form and void" (as the King James version puts it), in which "welter and waste and darkness over the deep" and "God’s breath" are components of a primordial earth.

It isn’t likely that this rendering will soon replace the old. It doesn’t easily scan. But it is so weirdly convincing, and so evocative of matters beyond conventional understanding, that it anticipates not just the story of Creation but the epic enterprise of translation and commentary into which Mr. Alter leads us.

(Emphasis added.)