A colossal error at the beginning of the Bible

BarcelonaA few days ago, La 2 aired John Huston's film The Bible (1966). The original title of the film is Bible: In The Beginning, although, committing an anglicism that is not found in this title, on La 2 it was read At first. Every reader of the first sentence of the Bible He knows that the Old Testament, which narrates the creation of the world according to Hebrew mythology, begins with these words: "In the beginning [or "In the beginning"] God created the heaven and the earth." But in the original Hebrew language, this beginning of the books of Moses is glazed due to the ambiguity of the word beresheet (beginning, principle, head) and the syntax of the first three verses.

As the Greek Bible, called "of the 70" or of Alexandria, despite being written by more than one generation of rabbis, translated the Hebrew expression as "in arché", it should not be surprising that almost all Bibles translated into Latin later, such as that of St. Jerome, some earlier ones and many later ones, put: "In principle". From there it passed into modern languages, as we read in the King James Bible ("In the beginning"), in Luther's ("At the beginning"), in the French of La Pléiade ("Ave inception...), almost all of them.

Since the Jewish religion is not only based on everything that emanates from the five books of Moses, or Pentateuch, but also on the endless interpretation of any minutiae or ambiguity that can be found in the Hebrew text - and even if it is not found in them -, in my and in modern languages of the initial words of the Genesis. The word beresheet, added to the rest of the phrase, would not mean: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth", but rather: "When God began to create heaven and earth...", which is something else.

For the very wise rabbis, translators of the Old Testament into English (The Jewish Publication Society, 2008), there is no doubt about it. How should we accept that God is the subject of a sentence that later says of himself that "in the beginning he created..."? In the beginning of God? Impossible: God has no beginning or end according to Hebrew mythology and religion: he has always been and always will be.

So the Tanak English that we just mentioned puts at the beginning of the Genesis: "When God began to create heaven and earth...", which is what they finally accepted in a footnote in the Cantera-Iglesias Bible ("Some preferred to translate: "At the beginning of the creation of 'Elohim...»"), and, in Catalan, the Interconfessional, also in a footnote ("Another possible translation would be: «When God began to create heaven and earth...»"). It's not that the other readings were "possible"; it's that they were a colossal error, a heresy. How much ink this sentence has wasted!