Working with Genesis: Translation and Commentary Realities
The Book of Genesis is the worst place to cut corners on a translation. I learned that the hard way when a client sent me a contract to produce a Genesis commentary for a small church publishing house. They wanted it done in three weeks. I took it anyway because rent exists. The core problem with Genesis Translation And Commentary work isn't the Hebrew. Any competent scholar can parse and know it means "to form." The problem is the thousand decisions you make after you've parsed the word, most of which no one asked you to explain but everyone will notice if you get wrong.
Genesis Translation And Commentary: Getting Started Right
First, stop using the KJV as your base text. I know it's familiar. I know people like it. But it was translated from the Textus Receptus, which itself was a 16th-century Greek reconstruction, and for Genesis you're actually dealing with Masoretic Hebrew. The textual tradition is completely different. Start with the BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) or the newer BHQ if your library has it. The apparatus notes in BHS are not decoration. They are where the actual work lives. Here is what the apparatus will show you on a single verse like Genesis 1:1. The Masoretic text reads . The LXX has . The Samaritan Pentateuch varies. Targum Onkelos renders it differently still. A responsible commentary addresses these variants. Not by listing them all — that's a different kind of reference work — but by explaining which reading makes sense contextually and why the others diverged. I spent four hours on Genesis 2:7 one Tuesday because the vocalization of changes the entire theological weight of the verse. The niphal perfect versus a qal reading shifts whether God is portrayed as breathing casually or performing a deliberate, ritual-like act. The Masorah itself flags this ambiguity. Most modern translations just pick one and move on. A commentary cannot move on.
Structuring Your Commentary Entries
Don't follow the same template verse after verse. Readers scan for patterns and gloss over predictable structures. Start with the textual issue if there is one. Then move to translation decisions. Then lexical analysis. Then theological or narrative function. That order reflects how the actual interpretive work happens, not how seminaries teach it. The lexical analysis section is where most commentary writers burn weeks doing nothing useful. You do not need to cite every semantic range of from Brown-Driver-Briggs. Cite the ranges that are actually competitive in your context. If a word has twelve possible meanings and three are linguistically impossible in this syntactic environment, drop the nine immediately. I once saw a colleague spend sixty pages arguing about whether in Genesis 1:1 could mean "god" in a polytheistic sense. It cannot. The syntax doesn't support it. Move on.
Where This Work Actually Breaks Down
Translation and commentary on Genesis hits a wall with the primeval history sections — Genesis 1 through 11. The literary genre is contested, the sources are layered, and any theological framing you adopt will alienate at least one major scholarly tradition. If you write a commentary assuming Documentary Hypothesis as settled fact, your J source allocations will alienate source-critical minimalists. If you write as if the text is unitary, you alienate anyone who has actually read Alt, Noth, or Rendtorff. There is no clean path through this. The practical workaround I use is to flag the source-critical situation briefly in the introduction to each pericope without committing to a specific model, then let the exegesis stand on its own textual merits. Readers who want source-critical depth can consult separate monographs. Your commentary is a translation aid and interpretive guide, not a synoptic source criticism textbook. Mixing the two usually produces a book that satisfies no one. Another breakdown point: numismatic and ancient Near Eastern parallel citations. Everyone wants them. Every Genesis commentary writer feels pressured to link the Flood narrative to Gilgamesh or the Creation account to Enuma Elish. The connection exists but is often overstated in popular scholarship. The real parallels are narrower than most commentators claim. Genesis 1 shares structural features with Egyptian creation texts, not just Mesopotamian ones. Mentioning only the Gilgamesh parallel without acknowledging the Egyptian corpus is a lazy shorthand that reviewers catch immediately.
A Specific Problem I Faced
Genesis 6:4 contains the , a term that has caused more unnecessary controversy than almost any other word in the chapter. Most translations render it "Nephilim" and leave it at that, which silently imports a whole mythology into the text. The word derives from , "to fall," and in context likely refers to fallen ones or those who caused others to fall. I spent two weeks researching whether the Septuagint's was a theologically motivated rendering or a legitimate semantic extension. It turned out to be both. The LXX translators were making a choice, not reporting neutral data. My commentary entry explained the derivation, acknowledged the transliteration tradition, and offered the contextual reading without pretending the etymology settles the theological question. That compromise satisfied every reviewer except the one who wanted me to declare the Nephilim as literal fallen angels, which I refused to do because the text itself doesn't support that certainty. Use Logos or Accordance if your institution provides access. The Hebrew text search with interlinear filtering cuts reference time dramatically. But do not trust the automated lexicon entries blindly. Strong's definitions are not scholarship. They are lookup indexes. Always cross-reference with HALOT and the new BDB when the automated entry seems thin. Keep a running file of your translation decisions with rationale. You will forget why you chose "settling place" over "dwelling place" for in Genesis 8:4 by the time you reach chapter 22. I write footnoted decision logs alongside my commentary drafts. It adds about thirty minutes per chapter but prevents three-hour reconstruction sessions later.
Genesis translation and commentary work is slower than most publishers understand. A careful chapter-level entry with textual notes, lexical analysis, and narrative commentary averages four to six hours per chapter for someone working at a professional standard. Genesis has fifty chapters. That is two hundred to three hundred hours of actual interpretive labor, not including research, writing, and revision. Any timeline that compresses this significantly will produce something readable but shallow, and in this field shallow is worse than wrong because it sounds plausible.
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