What the First Word Actually Is
Before God is named. Before anything is created. Before light exists. The Torah opens with a declaration. And the declaration is not what most people have been told it is.
Part 1 of 9
(Special thanks to MWM Contributor, Lisa MacPeek)
The First Word of Everything
The Torah, the five books of Moshe (Moses), the written covenant that bears the name of YHWH 6,828 times, does not begin with God. It does not begin with the divine name. It does not begin with a statement of divine identity or a declaration of divine authority. It begins with a word.
Bereshit.
In the beginning. This is how every English translation renders it. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The word is treated as a temporal marker, a timestamp placing the narrative at the start of time. In the beginning. Before everything else. At the commencement of all things.
But Bereshit is not merely a timestamp. It is the first word YHWH chose to place at the opening of the covenant text he gave through Moshe. And in a covenant tradition where every letter is counted, every enlarged character is preserved, every name carries its covenantal weight, and nothing is accidental, the first word is not an accident. It is a declaration.
The rabbinical tradition has wrestled with this word for centuries. Why does the Torah begin with the letter Bet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, rather than Aleph, the first? Why does the Torah not begin with God, Elohim, whose name starts with Aleph, the first letter? Why does the covenant text open with an enlarged Bet pointing to a house, rather than with the divine name or the divine identity?
These are not idle questions. The rabbis who asked them knew that the choice of the first word, the first letter, the first declaration was not arbitrary. And in asking why the Torah begins with Bereshit they were standing at the edge of an answer they could not afford to give.
Bereshit is not a timestamp. It is the first word YHWH chose to place at the opening of the covenant text. In a tradition where every letter is counted and nothing is accidental, the first word is a declaration. And the declaration was already complete before God was named.
What the Rabbis Already Knew
The rabbinical tradition is not ignorant of the depth of Bereshit. The Midrash, the ancient body of rabbinic interpretation, contains extensive discussion of why the Torah begins with this specific word. The question Why does the Torah begin with Bet and not Aleph is one of the most famous questions in rabbinic literature.
One traditional answer is that the Bet, shaped like a house open on one side, points forward. Its open side faces the text that follows. A Bet at the beginning is a declaration that what comes after it is what matters. Do not look behind the Bet. Look at what the Bet is pointing toward.
Another tradition notes that the first and last letters of the Torah, Bet at the beginning of Bereshit, Lamed at the end of Israel in Deuteronomy, spell the Hebrew word lev. Heart. The Torah begins and ends with a heart. The covenant text from its first letter to its last is the heart, the living center of the relationship between YHWH and his people.
These are genuine observations. They are not wrong. But they are observations that orbit the declaration without landing on it. The rabbinical tradition has circled Bereshit for two thousand years, noting its depth, its layers, its hidden structures, and has consistently stopped short of following the word to where it points.
Because where it points requires saying something the tradition defined itself against. And what it points to was visible to anyone reading the word in its original pictographic form, the form in which Moshe wrote it, the form in which every Hebrew reader before the Babylonian exile encountered it. The form where each letter was not just a sound but a picture. And the pictures together were a declaration that the tradition could not afford to acknowledge.
The Six Letters
What They Are
Bereshit is spelled with six Hebrew letters. In the square script used in Torah scrolls today they are Bet, Resh, Aleph, Shin, Yod, Tav. Read right to left as Hebrew is written.
But in the Paleo-Hebrew script in which Moshe originally wrote the Torah, the pictographic alphabet that preceded the Babylonian exile and the script change that Ezra performed around 458 BCE, each of these six letters was a picture. Not an abstract symbol representing a sound. An actual picture of something from the physical world.
The six pictures that constitute the first word of the Torah are these.
Bet A house. A tent. A dwelling. The place where family lives.
Resh The head of a man. A person. The first. The chief.
Aleph The head of an ox. Strength. Power. God. Sacrifice.
Shin Teeth. To consume. To destroy. To press and crush.
Yod A hand or arm. Work. What the hand does. Willingly done.
Tav Two crossed sticks. A cross. A mark. A sign. A covenant.
These are not invented meanings. They are the established pictographic values of the Paleo-Hebrew letters documented in the archaeological and linguistic record of the ancient Semitic alphabets from which Hebrew descended. The pictographic origins of these letters are not disputed. What is debated, and what the documents in this series will address carefully, is whether words were intentionally constructed to encode pictographic declarations.
What is not debatable is what the six pictures say when read together. And what they say was always going to be said. Because the one who chose the first word of the Torah chose it knowing what every letter pictured.
The house, the Son of God, destroyed, by his own hand, on the cross.
Before God Is Named
This is the observation that requires stillness to receive fully.
The third word of Genesis 1:1 is Elohim, God. The divine name YHWH does not appear until Genesis 2:4. But the first word of the Torah, before God is named, before YHWH is introduced, before the creation of light or sky or land or sea, declares the Son of God destroyed by his own hand on the cross.
The gospel is the first word. Not the last word. Not the culmination arrived at after extensive narrative preparation. The first word. Written before anything else. Placed at the opening of the covenant text as the declaration that everything following it is the outworking of.
The creation of the heavens and the earth, that follows Bereshit. The covenant with Avraham (Abraham), that follows Bereshit. The exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah at Sinai, the forty years in the wilderness, the entry into the land, the kings, the prophets, the exile, the return, all of it follows Bereshit. The entire covenant history follows the first word. And the first word already declared where the covenant history was going.
To the cross. Through the hand of the Son. By the destruction of the one who was God. So that the house, the dwelling place of YHWH among his people, could be established. Not the temple of stone. The temple that Yeshua (Jesus) declared would be raised in three days. The dwelling that Yochanan (John) described as the Word becoming flesh and dwelling, tabernacling, among us. The house that the enlarged Bet at the beginning of Bereshit is shaped like and pointed toward.
The gospel is the first word. Before God is named. Before anything is created. Bereshit declares the Son of God destroyed by his own hand on the cross. Everything that follows in the Torah, in the entire covenant history, is the outworking of what the first word already said.
Why This Series Requires Many Documents
Bereshit is not one observation. It is a doorway into a room that the covenant tradition has been furnished for three thousand years. Every wall of that room carries something that points the same direction.
The first two letters, Bet and Resh, form the word bar. Son. In Aramaic bar means son and it appears in the Psalms and in Daniel. The Torah opens with the word Son before any other declaration is made. Before God. Before beginning. Son.
Hidden inside Bereshit are the letters brit, covenant. Bet-Resh on one side and Yod-Tav on the other, surrounding the Aleph-Shin at the center. Covenant of fire. The hand and the cross surrounding God and destruction. The covenant that is a covenant of fire because it was accomplished through the consuming destruction of the one who bore it.
The fourth word of Genesis 1:1, sitting at the center of the first verse, untranslated in every English Bible, is Aleph-Tav. The first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The beginning and the end. And in Revelation 1:8 Yeshua declares I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. The Hebrew equivalent of that declaration is Aleph-Tav. And it sits invisible and untranslated at the center of the first verse of the Torah.
The first letter of the Torah is enlarged, the Bet of Bereshit, just as the center letter of the Torah is enlarged, the Vav of gachon. The house at the beginning. The nail at the center. Both marked. Both preserved. Both pointing.
Each of these observations deserves its own document. Each one requires precision. Each one deserves the honest caveat about pictographic interpretation, and then the full weight of what the evidence shows. This series will give each one the space it requires.
Because what Moshe wrote at the beginning was not a timestamp. It was not simply a grammatical convention for opening a narrative. It was a declaration embedded in the language itself, in the pictures that the letters were before they became letters, that the entire covenant was moving toward one moment. One act. One Son. One hand. One cross.
And YHWH placed it first. Before anything else was said. Before the light was called into existence. Before the heavens and the earth were named. Before God was introduced.
The first word said everything.
Bereshit. In the beginning.
The house. The Son of God. Destroyed. By his own hand. On the cross.
The first word of the Torah. Written before God was named. Written before anything was made. Written before the beginning.
The gospel is not the conclusion of the covenant story. It is the first word.
The Gospel Revolution • Mike Williams Ministries
William Ethan Massengill • Michael Lilborn Williams • Daniel Thomas Rouse
Published by Audrey Williams