The syntax question. The Hebrew can be read two ways: as an independent sentence ("In the beginning, God created…") or as a dependent temporal clause ("When God began to create…, the earth was formless…"), a reading as old as Rashi and adopted by the Jewish Publication Society's modern translation. MiSTeR keeps the independent sentence — the Masoretic vowel-pointing reads bara as a finished perfect verb, and the ancient versions (Septuagint, Vulgate) heard it as a complete statement. Six of the seven shelf versions agree; only TLB takes the dependent reading: "When God began creating the heavens and the earth."

"The heavens" (plural) vs "heaven". Hebrew hashamayim is grammatically dual/plural. NIV ASV NWT render "the heavens" as here; KJV GNV have "the heaven" and DRB "heaven, and earth" — the singular inherited from the Greek and Latin, not the Hebrew. (The NWT 1984 prints "In [the] beginning": the brackets are honest — Hebrew has no article there — but English needs one, so bracketing it adds noise rather than precision.)

Elohim. The word for God is plural in form but takes a singular verb throughout the chapter — standard Biblical Hebrew for the one God (often called a "plural of majesty"). Every version simply says "God"; so does this one.

Tohu vavohu is a rhyming pair — roughly "unformedness and emptiness" — and no English doubling quite catches the sound. MiSTeR lands on "formless and empty", the same solution as NIV, because it is the most accurate plain-English pair even though it loses the rhyme. Compare KJV "without form, and void" (stately, but "void" now sounds legal), ASV "waste and void", DRB "void and empty" (from the Vulgate's inanis et vacua), NWT "formless and waste", and TLB's free "a shapeless, chaotic mass."

"The deep" — tehom — is the primeval ocean; the word is an ancient Semitic term for the primal waters (its Babylonian cousin was personified as the sea-goddess Tiamat, though Genesis pointedly treats the deep as mere water, not a rival god). NWT's "surface of [the] watery deep" is accurate but padded.

Ruach Elohim merachefet — ruach means wind, breath, or spirit; the participle merachefet ("hovering, fluttering") is used in Deuteronomy 32:11 of an eagle hovering over its young, which is why "hovered" is kept here: the image is a living presence poised over the waters, not weather. NIV "was hovering" matches; KJV GNV ASV DRB all say "moved (upon/over) the waters," a flatter verb by way of the Latin ferebatur; TLB has the Spirit "brooding over the dark vapors." NWT stands alone: "God's active force was moving to and fro" — lexically defensible for ruach in isolation, but it is a doctrinal rendering (the Watch Tower Society denies the Spirit's personality), and it erases the bird-hovering image the participle carries. NWT 1984 also renders "the earth proved to be formless" — over-translating the plain verb "was."

Two Hebrew words; the shortest creative act in literature. Nearly every version converges on "Let there be light" — MiSTeR keeps it because it is both exact and unimprovable. DRB is the interesting outlier: "Be light made. And light was made." — a word-for-word calque of the Vulgate's fiat lux, et facta est lux, which shows what translating the Latin instead of the Hebrew sounds like. NWT has "Let light come to be," and narrates the verse as "God proceeded to say" — the 1984 edition renders Hebrew's narrative verb form (wayyiqtol) with progressive scaffolding ("proceeded to," "went on to") throughout the chapter. The aspect theory behind it is real but overworked: standard grammar reads these forms as plain narrative past, which is how every other version (and this one) renders them.

The verb hivdil, "to separate/divide," is one of the chapter's structural words — God creates largely by separating (light/darkness, waters above/below, day/night). MiSTeR uses "separated" consistently every time the root appears (vv. 4, 6, 7, 14, 18) so the pattern stays visible in English. KJV GNV DRB say "divided"; the modern versions prefer "separated." The Hebrew word-order of the first clause is literally "God saw the light, that it was good" (so KJV); modern English says the same thing more naturally as "God saw that the light was good."

"Day one," not "the first day." The Hebrew uses the cardinal number here — "one day" — then switches to ordinals ("a second day," "a third day"…) for the rest of the week, and only day six gets the definite article. Most English versions flatten this: KJV "the first day", NIV "the first day", GNV "the first day", TLB "Together they formed the first day." But the literal shelf preserves it: ASV "one day", DRB "one day" (the Vulgate's dies unus), and NWT "a first day" — one of the places the NWT's woodenness pays off. MiSTeR renders "day one": exactly the Hebrew, and natural modern English.

"Named" vs "called". Hebrew qara l- is the naming formula (the same idiom used when Adam names the animals). "Called the light Day" is fine but slightly archaic; "named" is the modern verb for that act. Note also that KJV's "And the evening and the morning were the first day" rewrites the Hebrew's two rhythmic clauses ("and there was evening, and there was morning") into a single summary clause — the original's drumbeat, kept by every modern version and by this one, is worth preserving.

The chapter's hardest word. Raqia comes from a verb meaning "to hammer out, beat flat" (used of beating metal into sheets; Job 37:18 speaks of skies "hard as a cast-metal mirror"). Ancient readers pictured a solid dome holding back the upper ocean. The Septuagint rendered it stereōma ("firm structure"), the Vulgate firmamentum — which is why KJV GNV DRB ASV all say "firmament": a Latin loan-word that tells a modern reader nothing. NWT says "expanse" (as did the 1984-era NIV), which is honest but deliberately vague — it hides the hammered-solid image. NIV (2011) says "vault", and MiSTeR agrees: "vault" is a real modern English word that keeps the architectural, load-bearing picture the Hebrew paints — a translation should let the text describe the sky the way its author saw it. TLB paraphrases the whole scene as vapors separating to form sky above and oceans below.

God names the vault shamayim — the very word rendered "the heavens" in verse 1. Hebrew has one word where English has two registers ("heaven" the divine realm, "sky" the thing above your head). Since verse 8 names the visible dome that birds fly under (v. 20), MiSTeR uses "sky" here while keeping "the heavens" in the cosmic opening of verse 1 — and accepts the cost: the reader loses the fact that it is the same Hebrew word, which this note repays. KJV GNV DRB ASV NWT all write "Heaven" here; NIV also says "sky."

Two passive wishes: "let the waters be gathered… and let the dry land be seen (appear)." All seven versions agree in substance; the differences are style only ("gathered together unto one place" in the older versions). MiSTeR keeps "be gathered to one place… let the dry land appear" and renders the recurring formula vayehi-khen as "And so it was" — every shelf version has "and it was so"; flipping the word order is a small freshness that changes nothing in meaning.

"The gathering of the waters" — miqveh — is, delightfully, the same word later Judaism uses for the ritual immersion bath (a mikveh must be filled with naturally gathered water; the usage descends from verses like this one). KJV DRB render it in full ("the gathering together of the waters called he Seas"); MiSTeR compresses to "the gathered waters" for natural English. Note erets here is the same word as "the earth" in verse 1 — Hebrew uses one word for planet-scale "earth" and farm-scale "land"; the naming here sets dry land over against sea.

The Hebrew puns. Literally "let the earth grass grass" — verb and noun from the same root, a favorite Hebrew device (it happens again in v. 20 with swarming and flying). MiSTeR echoes it with "sprout with green growth". KJV "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed" loses the echo; NIV "Let the land produce vegetation" is accurate and colorless; NWT "cause grass to shoot forth" gets partway there.

"Of their own kind" — l'mino. The word min means simply "sort, kind" — a farmer's word, not a taxonomy. KJV's "after his kind" preserves a genuine 1611 archaism: "his" was still the ordinary neuter possessive (the word "its" was brand-new in 1611 and barely appears in the whole KJV). Readers who build biological theories on the precision of "kinds" are leaning on a word that carries no such weight in Hebrew.

The refrain days. The Hebrew has no definite article on days two through five — "a third day," "a fourth day" — which ASV and NWT preserve and KJV NIV GNV DRB smooth into "the third day." MiSTeR keeps the indefinite article; see the verse 31 note for the payoff.

Me'orot is not the word for "light." Verse 3's or is light itself; ma'or is a light-bearer, a lamp. NWT alone makes the distinction explicit with "luminaries" — genuinely the most precise word on the shelf, though stiff. MiSTeR keeps "lights," accepting the small loss for plain English (this note carries the difference).

Mo'adim means "appointed times" — the word the Torah later uses for the festival calendar (Leviticus 23 calls the feasts mo'adim). KJV GNV ASV DRB NWT all say "seasons," which modern readers hear as winter-spring-summer-fall — probably too weak. NIV (2011) says "sacred times," which is probably too strong for a clause that also governs ordinary days and years. MiSTeR renders "appointed times" — the sun and moon are being installed as the calendar.

The sun and moon are never named. Hebrew has ordinary words for them (shemesh, yareach) — and both were also names of gods worshipped across the ancient Near East. Genesis pointedly calls them "the greater light" and "the lesser light": demoted from deities to fixtures, lamps with a job. And then, in three almost throwaway Hebrew words, "and the stars" — the objects of Babylonian astral religion, tossed in like a footnote. MiSTeR keeps the bare "— and the stars." KJV prints "he made the stars also," supplying "he made" in italics (the translators' honest signal for words not in the Hebrew); GNV similarly "he made also the stars"; DRB matches the Hebrew's brevity ("and the stars"). TLB names "the sun and moon" outright — readable, but it undoes the author's deliberate refusal to name them. Memshelet ("dominion") is rendered "to govern" here (NIV agrees; KJV/GNV/ASV/DRB "to rule"; NWT "for dominating" — over-muscled English).

Literally "God gave them into the vault of the sky" — natan is the everyday verb "give," here meaning to set or install. All versions say "set" or "put." The purpose clauses restate verse 14's job description; MiSTeR keeps the repetition (Hebrew narrative loves saying things twice; trimming it would be editing, not translating).

Two puns in one verse: "let the waters swarm swarms… and let flyers fly." MiSTeR keeps both: "swarm with swarms… let flying creatures fly." ASV nails the first ("Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures"); NIV drops it ("Let the water teem with living creatures"); NWT keeps both but in strange English ("swarm forth a swarm of living souls").

"Flying creatures," not "birds." Hebrew of covers everything on the wing — Leviticus files bats and winged insects under the same word — so NWT's "flying creatures" is exactly right, and MiSTeR agrees with it here. KJV GNV DRB say "fowl." Note also the older versions' grammar makes the waters produce the birds ("Let the waters bring forth abundantly… and fowl that may fly," KJV; DRB likewise) — that follows the Septuagint and Vulgate; the Hebrew as pointed gives the birds their own separate command, flying over the earth while the waters swarm below.

Nefesh chayah — literally "a living nefesh." The word later English theology renders "soul," but in Hebrew it means a breathing, living being — fish and bugs are nefesh here. NWT translates "living souls" hyper-literally (the Watch Tower keeps "soul" precisely to teach that a soul is the creature, not a ghost inside it — a fair lexical point made in misleading English). MiSTeR says "living creatures," with the rest of the modern shelf.

What are the taninim? Elsewhere the word means serpent (Exodus 7), dragon, or sea-monster (Isaiah 27:1 pairs it with Leviathan; Psalm 74 has God crushing the heads of taninim). Neighboring mythologies made such creatures rival gods for the storm-god to battle; Genesis instead lists them as day-five creations — the chaos monsters are just big animals God made. KJV GNV DRB say "great whales" (from the Greek kētē) — far too narrow. ASV "great sea-monsters" and NWT "great sea monsters" keep the mythic edge; NIV "great creatures of the sea" flattens it. MiSTeR renders "great sea-beasts" — bigger than whales, without committing the text to a mythology it is arguably debunking. This is also the second appearance of the loaded verb bara "create" (v. 1 the cosmos, v. 21 the first animal life, v. 27 humanity — the verb marks the thresholds).

The Bible's first blessing, and it lands on fish and birds before humans. "Be fruitful and multiply" is one of the great fixed phrases of English — every shelf version keeps it or a close variant (NWT "become many"; NIV "increase in number"). MiSTeR keeps "Be fruitful and multiply" unchanged: some phrases have earned their place, and difference for its own sake is not a translation virtue.

Three land categories: behemah (large domestic animals — KJV ASV "cattle" in the old broad sense; MiSTeR and NIV "livestock"; NWT "domestic animal"), remes (everything that scurries and slithers low — "creeping things"), and chayto-erets (an archaic poetic form, "wild beasts of the earth" — the form itself is elevated; MiSTeR "wild animals of the earth"). An easy-to-miss detail: the animals are brought forth by the earth at God's command — creation by delegation, matching the earth sprouting plants on day three. All seven versions preserve it.

"Let US make." The famous plural. Readings on offer: God addressing the heavenly court (as in Job 1 and Isaiah 6); a plural of deliberation ("let's…"); or, in Christian tradition since the church fathers, an early glimmer of the Trinity (the Geneva Bible's marginal notes — half the reason that Bible was beloved, and, to King James, dangerous — read it as God's eternal counsel). A translator's job is to keep the plural and let the reader wrestle; all seven versions do, and so does MiSTeR.

Adam = humankind. Not a personal name here, and not males-only — verse 27 immediately unpacks it as "male and female." KJV GNV ASV DRB NWT say "man" (defensible in their eras' English); NIV 2011 says "mankind"; TLB paraphrases "Let us make a man — someone like ourselves." MiSTeR says "humankind" because that is what the Hebrew means and modern English can say it without awkwardness. The grammar agrees: "and let them rule" — the Hebrew verb is plural even in this verse. DRB has "let him have dominion," following the Vulgate's singular against the Hebrew.

"In our image, according to our likeness" — two prepositions, two nouns (tselem, a concrete word used for statues; demut, resemblance). In the ancient world a king set up his image in provinces he ruled, to stand for his authority — which flows straight into "let them rule" (radah, a king's verb). GNV and NIV say "rule"; KJV ASV DRB "have dominion"; NWT "have in subjection" (its habit of maximal English).

The first poetry in the Bible. The verse breaks into three parallel lines, with bara ("created") drummed three times. MiSTeR sets it off with dashes and keeps all three.

Him… them. The Hebrew really does shift number mid-verse: "he created him" (humanity as a single thing), then "male and female he created them." KJV ASV GNV DRB NWT all preserve the shift; NIV 2011 smooths it to "he created them" both times (gender-accurate about adam, but it erases a deliberate feature); TLB recasts the whole verse as rhyme. MiSTeR keeps him/them — the oneness and the twoness are both in the text, and the note carries the fact that "him" refers to humankind, not to a male.

The "replenish" trap. KJV reads "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth" — and ASV kept it in 1901. In 1611 "replenish" simply meant "fill completely" (Latin replere); it never meant "re-fill." But modern readers hear "fill again," and whole doctrines (the "gap theory" — a ruined and re-created pre-Adamic world) have leaned on that misreading of an English archaism. The Hebrew mil'u just means "fill" — as GNV already had it in the 1500s ("fill the earth"), and as NIV, DRB ("Increase and multiply, and fill the earth"), NWT and MiSTeR all render it.

"Subdue" stays strong. Kavash is a forceful verb — bringing land under control, mastering it. Softening it would be commentary; so would sharpening it into license (the verse grants stewardship-as-royalty, exercised in a chapter where humans are given only plants to eat — see v. 29). MiSTeR keeps "subdue it" with KJV/GNV/ASV/DRB/NIV/NWT; TLB paraphrases along the lines of "you are masters" of the animal world.

The vegetarian grant. Humans get seed-plants and fruit; animals get green plants. Eating animals enters the Bible only after the flood (Genesis 9:3) — a detail all versions preserve but few readers notice. KJV offers a second great archaism here: "to you it shall be for meat" — in 1611 "meat" meant food of any kind (as in "meat and drink"); the verse is about produce. MiSTeR: "They are yours to eat."

Hineh, the attention-word opening v. 29, is "Behold" in the older versions. MiSTeR uses "Look —", which is what "behold" has become in living English. In v. 30 the phrase nefesh chayah recurs ("everything… with life in it"); KJV "wherein there is life" — see the v. 20 note on nefesh and the NWT's "soul" renderings.

"Very good." The seventh and final "good" of the chapter — six times "good," and now, with the whole surveyed, very good. Every version lands here; TLB characteristically amplifies ("excellent in every way"). MiSTeR keeps the plain superlative and renders hineh as "and look, it was very good," letting the delight show in modern idiom.

"THE sixth day." For the first time, the day-formula takes the definite article — day one through day five were indefinite ("a second day…"), but this one, the day creation is completed, is the sixth day. In KJV NIV GNV DRB the climax is invisible (they printed "the" on every day); ASV preserves the whole pattern and its payoff; NWT, having correctly kept days 1–5 indefinite, prints "a sixth day" — missing the one place the Hebrew article actually appears. MiSTeR: indefinite through day five, "the sixth day" here, exactly tracking the Hebrew.