FAQ - What is the Hassamayim as mentioned in Genesis 1 verse 1
Recently, during our live appearance on Coast To Coast AM, one the callers asked me a terrific question about a Hebrew word he studied in theological seminary - “hassemayim” which appears in Genesis 1:1 and is the basis for the typical translation of the word “heavens”. This question actually delves right to one of the fundamental issues of Hebrew translation, and why a fresh translation is so badly needed.
The fact is, “Hassemayim” is actually not a word at all. It is a confusing convolution of two ancient Hebrew root words; ‘sem’, and ‘mi’ which form the basis of the words ‘semim’ (shemim) and ‘mim’ (mayim). It seems that somewhere along the line, probably during the creation of the Greek Septuagint or possibly even earlier, somebody got the words mixed up. It was an easy mistake to make and quite understandable how this may have happened. Unfortunately, no one noticed there was an error, and the new conflation found its way into the canon. And there it stayed, through countless different translations and analyses. Now that we have databases and the ability to perform comparative and exhaustive audits of contextual semantic variation, spelling variations, affix usage, and root word analysis, it is abundantly more clear (but still pretty darn confusing) that some erroneous translations were made that do not agree with the original root words.
This type of tangled mess occurs with a few other words that we have identified so far, but the instance of Shemim and Mayim seems particularly gnarly and sorting it out thoroughly has been an ongoing project here at the Bara Foundation for many months. We are attempting to discover contextually just exactly who are the Shemim, and who are the Mayim, and how they are different but also how they are related.
In order to accomplish this task we first had to sort out a lot of misunderstandings and misinformation around Hebrew prefixes, Masoretic diacritics, and some fundamental differences between ancient and modern Hebrew languages.
So while we are not quite ready yet to publish a full report on this topic, we are getting fairly close to sharing a concise examination of the Shemim in particular, and getting this completed is one of our priorities for the coming months. In the meantime, since one of our founding principles is that of openness and transparency, we will let you take a look over our shoulders at this work in progress by openly showing our thought processes and research sources. Feel free to take a gander at our online dictionary entry for the Shemim.
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