Our English title, “genesis” was adopted from St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate translation (Liber Genesis). The Latin title came from the Septuagint translation (the Greek translation of the Old Testament made about 300 years before Christ). “Genesis” is a transliteration of the Greek word geneseos, a word that translates the Hebrew word toledoth, which means “generations.” The Hebrew word is a key word in identifying the structure of Genesis. Translators have usually rendered the Hebrew word toledoth as “account” or “generations” (Genesis 2:4; 5:1; 6:9: 10:1; 11:10, 27: 25:12, 19; 36:1, 9; 37:2). However the Hebrew title of the book of Genesis is plucked from the first two of the seven Hebrew words of the first sentence that begins the Genesis prologue: “In [the] beginning.” The definite article “the” is not present in the Hebrew text (Hebrew-English Old Testament), nor is it present in the Greek Old Testament Genesis translation (The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English). Our English title, “genesis” comes from the Greek word meaning origin, source, birth, or beginnings. The first two Hebrew words in Genesis 1:1 are b’re’shiyt [be re’siyth], pronounced “bay-ray-sheet,” which means “in beginning” or “in first.” The Hebrew prefix “b” [be] can be translated as “in,” “for,” “through,” or “with;” while the Hebrew word “re’shiyt,” from the Hebrew root rosh [as in Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish feast which means “head (start) of the year”], is defined as “the first in place, time, order or rank; specifically a first fruit; beginning, chief, first, principal thing” (Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance; Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon).
