The World English Bible is a project, carried out by Michael Paul Johnson, a missionary, to update the American Standard Version and create a useful public domain translation.
Minor Updating
Much of what the ASV does is relatively systematic, almost mechanical. So, for example, it moves the punctuation closer to normal contemporary use. So where the ASV reads in Genesis 1:1
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
the WEB reads:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
This makes no significant difference to meaning, but is intended to make reading easier. Similar changes include the reduction of the Hebrew Bible’s frequent use of “And” at the beginning of sentences, the replacement of “upon” with “on”, the replacement of “face” with “surface” in Genesis 1:2.
Now, I don’t always think that the WEB is well-advised in these sorts of minor changes, but let us set those to the side for now.
More Significant Changes
In other cases, somewhat more significant changes are made. So, for example, where the ASV describes the primeval earth as “waste and void” (Genesis 1:2), the WEB reads “formless and empty”. In the same verse, the ASV’s “moved upon” is replaced with “was hovering over”.
We may make a chart of these differences for Genesis 1.
| Verse | ASV text | WEB revision |
| 1:1 | waste and void | formless and empty |
| 1:2 | the Spirit of God moved upon | God’s spirit was hovering over |
| 1:4 | God saw the light, that it was good | God saw the light, and saw that it was good |
| 1:5 | one day | the first day |
| 1:6 | a firmament … the firmament (2x) | an expanse … the expanse (2x) |
| 1:7 | God called the firmament Heaven | God called the expanse sky |
| 1:9 (also 26, 28) | heavens | sky |
| 1:11 | Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit … wherein is the seed thereof | Let the earth yield grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit … with their seeds in it |
| 1:12 | the earth brought forth grass | The earth yielded grass |
| 1:12 | wherein is the seed thereof | with their seeds in it |
| 1:14 (so also 15, 17) | the firmament of heaven | the expanse of the sky |
| 1:14 | for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years | for signs to mark seasons, days, and years |
| 1:16 | he made the stars also | He also made the stars |
| 1:20 | Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures | Let the waters abound with living creatures |
| 1:21 | the great sea-monsters | the large sea creatures |
| 1:24 | Let the earth bring forth | Let the earth produce |
| 1:24 (also 25, 26) | cattle | livestock |
| 1:24 (also 25) | beasts of the earth | animals of the earth |
| 1:28 | replenish | fill |
| 1:29 | every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed | every tree, which bears fruit yielding seed |
| 1:29 | to you it shall be for food | It will be your food |
| 1:30 | beast of the earth | animal of the earth |
| 1:31 | the sixth day | a sixth day |
Comments
As should be visible from the chart above, there is a lot to discuss in Genesis 1. Part of the difficulty with this chapter lies in the nearly poetic style of the prose, which relies on repetition of the same terms and sorts of phrases repeatedly. And so a decision, for example, on how to translate shamayim in one verse has repercussions throughout the chapter. It does not help that the very first verse of Genesis can be construed in several different ways.
As for myself, I read Genesis 1:1 as being a temporal clause, with Genesis 1:2 parenthetical, and Genesis 1:3 as the main clause of the first sentence of Genesis. On this, Genesis 1:1 begins with God beginning to create shamayim and erets. For erets, the ASV and WEB both read “earth”, and I will leave well enough alone here. There is a case for reading “land”, but let us leave that to the side.
The shamayim is a bit more trouble. In the Hebrew Bible, the shamayim is a sort of crystalline dome which holds back the celestial waters, above which YHWH’s throne may be found. Birds fly under it. The ASV and WEB call shamayim “the heavens”, and this, at least, is better than the KJV’s “heaven”. In any case, however, in English “heaven” generally refers to where one (hopefully) goes after death, a meaning which is foreign or the Hebrew cosmology, in which the dead go down to Sheol.
I think it is best to read shamayim consistently as “sky”.
Then we come to the term raqia, which the ASV renders “firmament” and the WEB “expanse”. Firmament has the virtue at least of suggesting something solid, as the Hebrew term implies. The WEB takes the reader away from the Hebrew picture and imports modern cosmology into Genesis 1 by reading the raqia as an (open) expanse, a wide space. A better equivalent than either would be dome.
The six days of creation are called, in the Hebrew, yom ehad, yom sheni, yom shelishi, yom rebiʿi, yom hamishi, and finally yom ha-shishi. That is, one day, a second day, a third day, a fourth day, a fifth day, and then the sixth day. The sudden appearance of “the” seems to emphasize the importance of the sixth day, upon which God created mankind. The ASV translates these distinctions quite literally. We could also forgive if a translation were to level out the distinction read each day as “a [number] day” or read each day as “the [number] day”. Instead, the WEB reads the days as the first, but a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth. There is no good justification for this.
Next we come to the word zera, or “seed”. In Hebrew, the word zera is singular even when it denotes a multiplicity of little seeds. We can do the same in English: a farmer buys “seed” for his field, even though we know that what the farmer purchased is not a single literal seed.
For a Christian Bible, such as the WEB is, there is an additional reason to consider leaving “seed” in the singular. In Galatians 3:16, Paul makes a great deal out of the fact that the word “seed” in the Hebrew Bible is singular. Taking the word out of the singular makes a hash of Paul’s exegesis. If there were something unclear about the word “seed”, that could only be solved by rendering it in the plural, then there might be an argument for it. But “seed” is clear enough.
In addition, the WEB’s meddling with “seed” created an interesting inconsistency. In Genesis 1:11, the WEB changes the ASV’s “herbs yielding seed” to “herbs yielding seeds”, and the ASV’s “wherein is the seed thereof” to “with their seeds in it”. However, in the very next verse, where the ASV again has “herbs yielding seed”, the WEB forgets this pluralization program and simply reads “herbs yielding seed”. Later in verse 12, the WEB picks up the program again and reads “with their seeds in it”. Following this, the WEB abandons it entirely, and so singular seed is found in Genesis 1:29, 7:3, 47:9, 23, 24, and so on.
For Genesis 1:2, it is little difference whether one reads “Spirit of God” as the ASV does, or “God’s spirit”. However, I think that in the context of a creation narrative, it seems more likely to read the Hebrew ruah elohim as “a wind from God”. And, for the difficult verb merahefet, if ruah elohim is “a wind from God”, then merahefet should be something like “sweeping”.
In verse 4, the Hebrew reads vayare elohim ki tob, which, translated woodenly, gives the ASV’s, “And God saw the light, that it was good”. The WEB attempts to clean up the awkward (in English) construction by reading “And God saw the light, and saw that it was good”. I think we can be a bit more direct here, and simply read “And God saw that the light was good”.
In verses 11 and 12, the ASV has a series of different verbs: “Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit … the earth brought forth grass, herbs yielding seed … and trees bearing fruit …”.
These different verbs reflect a variety of different Hebrew verbs: tadshe … mazria … ose … watotse … mazria … ose. The ASV has as many different verbs as the Hebrew does. But the WEB seems to flatten several of these distinctions, and lean upon the English verb “yield” to do so. “Let the earth yield grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit … the earth yielded grass, herbs yielding seed … and trees bearing fruit.” Why do this? And if so, why not go all the way, and have the trees “yield” fruit as well?
I’m not sure. In any case, these two verses do have several additional complications. For one thing, the term translated as “grass” in the WEB and ASV is a more general term for vegetation, and the phrase translated “after their kind” needs a more meaningful translation in English. The term translated “herbs” is a broad word, something like “plants” in English. In some sorts of English, “herbs” refers to a fairly narrow class of plants that one uses as seasonings in cooking, and I want to avoid any similarly narrow implication in the translation.
Verse 14, in describing the function of the heavenly bodies, has a particularly difficult set of words: lᵉʾotot u-lᵉmoʿadim u-lᵉyamim wᵉšanim. The ASV reads this “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years”. The WEB reads “for signs to mark seasons, days, and years”. One difficulty here is with the word translated “seasons”. This word is used to refer to set times in general, and specifically to the annual festivals of the Israelite calendar. As far as I know, it is not used for “seasons” in the sense of “the four seasons of the year”. I am not sure if “festivals” quite hits the mark, but I do think it would be an improvement over “seasons” in this verse.
In verses 16, where the Hebrew simply says “and the stars”, I think the WEB and ASV go a bit too far in reading “He also made the stars” / “he made the stars also”. I think there is a case to be made that the Hebrew text deliberately marginalizes the host of heaven by confining the stars to a single tiny phrase in the creation story.
In verses 17, the Hebrew reads as the ASV does, “to give light upon the earth”. The WEB has changed this to “to give light to the earth”. The ASV reading should be retained.
In verses 20, the ASV does a good job of reproducing the repetition in the Hebrew, so that yishretsu ha-mayim sherets nefesh hayyah becomes “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures”. I am not sure why the WEB flattens this to “Let the waters abound with living creatures”. This also introduces an inconsistency, as the WEB leaves the English “swarm” for the same Hebrew verb in verses 21.
We also find here an odd use of the word “open” where no Hebrew equivalent exists. The WEB reads “let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the sky”. There is nothing here that specifies that the raqia is “open”.
In verses 21, the expression ha-tanninim ha-gedolim carries mythological overtones, and to my ears the ASV’s “the great sea-monsters” captures this well. The ASV reads “large sea creatures”, which I do not think can be justified here.
In verses 24, God says, in the ASV, “Let the earth bring forth (totse) living creatures”, which echoes the language of 12, in which we read that “the earth brought forth (watotse) grass”. The WEB removes this echo, by translating the verb in 12 as “yield” but the one in 24 as “produce”. Given the way that Genesis 1’s stylistic effect relies on the repetition on key terms, this seems to me to be a step backward.
In verses 24, the WEB translates the term behemah as “livestock”, where the ASV had “cattle”. While at an earlier time in history, “cattle” may have been appropriate, for too many readers today “cattle” refers narrowly to bovines, and behemah is a broader word than this.
In verses 26, God uses the archaic-sounded term hayto-erets, literally “living thing of earth”, but which has the connotation of “(large) wild animal”. The ASV’s “beasts of the earth” seems to me to do a good job of capturing the nuance here. The WEB’s “animals of the earth” is jarring and misses the mark.
This verse also introduces a new category of living thing, the remes. This word refers, more or less, to small creatures which scurry about on the surface of the earth. And so the verse divides “living creatures” into domestic livestock, small critters that scurry about, and (larger) wild beasts. The term “creeping things” seems to me to not quite grasp the point, at least in today’s English, and so I prefer “crawling things”.
In verses 28, the WEB replaces the archaic “replenish” with “fill”. This is an excellent move, because in today’s English, “replenish” seems to imply that the world was previously filled, has become emptied, and is now being filled again — something that is not at all implied by the Hebrew term for “fill” used here.
In verses 29, the Hebrew text is unusually awkward in its description of fruit trees — awkward in a way that other references to fruit trees in Genesis 1 are not. The ASV does a good job of capturing this awkwardness: “every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed”. The WEB makes the awkwardness disappear by deleting one of the uses of the word “tree”, and thus reads, “every tree, which bears fruit yielding seed”. If one were to prefer the WEB’s approach, the comma after tree should be removed.
In verses 29, the Hebrew text reads, lakem yihyeh lᵉʿoklah, which the ASV reads as “to you it shall be for food”. This is indeed awkward, but I think the WEB slightly misses the sense when it reads “It will be your food.” Perhaps something more like “It will serve as food for you” will get the point across.
A Stab at a Revision
1 When God began to create the sky and the earth — 2 Now the earth was waste and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and a wind from God was sweeping across the waters — 3 God said, Let there be light. And there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good, and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning: one day.
6 And God said, Let there be a dome in the middle of the water, and let it separate water from water. 7 And God made the dome, and it separated the waters which were under the dome from the waters which were above the dome. And it was so. 8 And God called the dome Sky. And there was evening, and there was morning: a second day.
9 And God said, Let the water under the sky be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
11 And God said, Let the earth grow green with greenery: plants producing seed, and every kind of fruit tree bearing fruit with its seed in it on the earth. And it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth greenery: every kind of plant producing seed, and every kind of tree bearing fruit with its seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening and there was morning: a third day.
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the sky-dome separate day from night, and let them be for signs to mark festivals, and for days and years; 15 and let them be for lights in the sky-dome to give light upon the earth. And it was so. 16 And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night, and the stars. 17 And God set them in the sky-dome to give light upon the earth, and to rule over day and night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening and there was morning: a fourth day.
20 And God said, Let the water swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the sky-dome. 21 And God created the great sea-monsters, and every kind of living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed, and every kind of winged bird. And God saw that it was good.
22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. 23 And there was evening and there was morning: a fifth day.
24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creatures: every kind of livestock, and crawling thing, and beast of the earth. And it was so. 25 And God made every kind of beast of the earth, and every kind of livestock, and every kind of thing that crawls on the ground. And God saw that it was good.
26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the livestock, and over all the beasts of the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth. 27 And God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it. And have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that crawls on the earth.
29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; this will serve as food for you. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the sky, and to everything that crawls on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food. And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning: the sixth day.
Additional Notes
7 it separated. The Hebrew text does not explicitly state the subject of the verb “separated”. In light of the command in verses 6, “let it separate”, it seems to me that the subject would most naturally be the dome, thus I translate “and it separated.” However, the Septuagint disagrees. To quote Brenton, “And God made the firmament, and God divided …”
7 And it was so. Following the Masoretic Text. The Septuagint has this phrase at the end of verse 6, which fits better with the overall pattern of the rest of Genesis 1, in which “And it was so” tends to follow immediately after something that God says.
8 And God called the dome Sky. Following this, the Septuagint reads “And God saw that it was good.”
9 place. Hebrew maqom. With a change of one letter, one could read miqwe, “collection” or “gathering together”, which shares the same verbal root as the “gathered together” of this verse. The Septuagint appears to presuppose a Hebrew text which reads miqwe. The Septuagint also has a longer rendering of the whole verse. To modify Brenton slightly: “And God said, Let the water which is under the heaven be collected into one collection, and let the dry land appear, and it was so. And the water which was under the heaven was collected into its collections, and the dry land appeared.” (Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament: English Translation [London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1870], Ge 1:9.)
10 gathering together. Hebrew miqwe, see verse 9.
26 all the beasts of the earth. Following the reading in the Syriac. The Masoretic Text reads “all the earth”, but this appears to be a mistake.
27 man. The use of the male-coded word “man” here is not ideal, but every alternative seems to create additional problems.
Further Agenda
I feel I owe the reader an explanation on the issue of quotation marks.
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