Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and
author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning
God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation
of the Hebrew. She claims she has carried out fresh textual
analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never
intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the
Earth was already there when he created humans and animals. Prof
Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at
Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said
she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in
the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other
creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia. She said she
eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in
the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to
create” but to “spatially separate”. The first sentence should
now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the
Earth”