The Son Hidden in the First Two Letters of the Torah

Before God is named. Before light is called. The Torah opens with a word. The word opens with two letters. The two letters say: Son.

Part 3 of 9

(Special thanks to MWM Contributor, Lisa MacPeek)

 

Two Letters Before Everything Else

The Torah begins with one word. Bereshit. Six letters. And those six letters contain within them a compression of the entire covenant declaration, as the previous documents in this series have established.

But the six letters do not all arrive with equal weight. The first two, Bet and Resh, carry something that the remaining four build upon. They do not merely open the word. They name the one the word is about.

Bet. Resh. In Aramaic, the language of the ancient Near East, the trade language of the world Moshe (Moses) inhabited, the language spoken across every nation from Egypt to Babylon, these two letters form a word. Bar. And bar means son.

The Torah opens with son. Before Elohim is introduced in the third word. Before the heavens and the earth are mentioned. Before light, before water, before any act of creation is described.

The first two letters of the first word of the covenant text say: son.

The Torah does not introduce the Son. The Torah opens with him. Bar is not a conclusion the covenant arrives at. It is the first two letters of the first word of the first line.

 

Bar in the Aramaic and Hebrew World

בר   Bar — Son

Aramaic: son, child, one who bears the nature of the father. Also used in Hebrew compound names and titles.

Bar appears throughout the Tanakh and into the Apostolic writings as the standard Aramaic word for son. Bar-Timaeus, son of Timaeus. Bar-Yona, son of Jonah, the name Yeshua (Jesus) gave to Shimon (Peter). Bar-Nabba, son of consolation, the name given to Joseph by the emissaries. Bar-Abbas, son of the father, the man released in Yeshua’s place at Passover. Every time the compound appears, bar carries full relational weight. Not merely biological descent. The one who bears the nature, the identity, and the authority of the one he comes from.

Moshe wrote the Torah. Moshe wrote in Paleo-Hebrew, which shared its roots with the broader Semitic alphabet that gave Aramaic its letters and its words. The word bar, son, was not foreign to that world. It was the common tongue of the covenant region.

And Moshe, writing under the direction of YHWH, opened the Torah with a word whose first two letters spell that word. Whether one reads Bereshit as a single unit or allows the letters to speak in their established combinations, the first sound the Torah makes is bar. Son.

 

What the Proverbs Already Knew

This is not a reading imposed on the text from the outside. The text itself, in one of its most striking passages, anticipated exactly this question.

Proverbs 30:4 reads: Who has ascended to heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in his fists? Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is the name of his son? Surely you know.

The question is asked inside the Torah’s own wisdom literature. What is his name, and what is the name of his son? It is not a later addition. It is not an intrusion from another tradition. It is YHWH’s own wisdom literature asking the question that the first two letters of the Torah answer.

The name of his son is embedded in the first word of the covenant. Before the question in Proverbs was written, the answer was already written, in the opening two letters of the opening word of the opening line.

Proverbs 30:4 asks: What is the name of his son? The Torah answered before the question was asked.
The first two letters say it. Bar. Son.

 

The Enlarged Bet

Every Torah scroll ever written carries one visual anomaly in its first letter. The Bet of Bereshit is enlarged. It is written larger than every other letter in the scroll. This is not a scribal accident. It is a preserved tradition, the enlarged Bet is documented, required, and has been maintained without interruption across every hand-written Torah in the history of the covenant people.

Why is it enlarged? The tradition offers several explanations, that it represents the two-ness of creation, that it invites inquiry, that it signals a beginning. These explanations are not wrong. But they are partial. The letter is enlarged because it is the first letter of the first word of the covenant, and that word opens with son. The house is enlarged because the one who will dwell in it is being announced before anything else exists.

The Bet is a house. It is drawn as a house. It is the first picture in the first word. And it is enlarged.

The first declaration of the Torah is architectural: here is the house, and here is the son who will fill it. Everything that follows, the creation, the covenant, the law, the sacrifice, the prophets, the exile, the return, is the story of how the house comes to be filled with the presence it was opened to declare.

 

Yochanan Heard It

Yochanan (John) opened his account of the good news with the same declaration the Torah opened with, but he made it explicit. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

Yochanan was not writing a new theology. He was reading Bereshit.

He was saying: let me tell you what the first word of the Torah actually declares. The Word, the Memra, the divine speech, the one through whom YHWH speaks the covenant into existence, was there at the beginning. Was with God. Was God.

And then Yochanan said: the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us. The word he used for tabernacled is the same concept as the mishkan, the dwelling place, the house, the Bet that opened the Torah. The Word became flesh and moved into the house that the first letter of the first word of the Torah had already declared would be built.

Bar. Son. First two letters. The one Yochanan identified. The one Proverbs asked about. The one YHWH declared before the first sentence of the creation narrative was complete.

Bar. Son. The first sound the Torah makes is a name.

 

 

The Sequence of Priority

The Torah’s opening word establishes a sequence that the rest of the covenant text never reverses. Son comes first. Creation comes second. This is not incidental. It is the declaration that everything else rests on.

The Son is not the solution to a problem that creation produced. The Son is the declaration that preceded the creation. The cross is not an emergency response to human failure. The cross is the Tav, the last letter of Bereshit, written into the first word before the first act of creation is recorded. The house is not built and then given to the Son. The Son is announced and then the house is built around that announcement.

This is what the first two letters of the Torah establish. Bar. Son. Everything else, the six days, the garden, the flood, the covenant with Avraham (Abraham), the exodus, Sinai, the tabernacle, the kings, the prophets, the exile, the return, the Mashiach, is the unfolding of what those two letters declared before any of it began.

 

Bet. Resh.

 

A house. The head of a man.

 

Bar.

 

Son.

 

The Torah does not arrive at the Son. The Torah opens with him.

 

 

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