I asked a question over at T-blog and someone gave a nice response on an issue regarding Genesis 1:1-2.

Here was my question:
Doesn’t the vocalization of the Hebrew of Genesis 1:1 being בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית and not לָרֵאשִׁ֣ית give more credence to it being “When God began”?

JeremiahZ9 responded:

The short answer is no.

I wish scholars would be a bit more careful and honest. Reshit is a noun whose semantic range is quite often inherently definite. When you are talking about “a beginning” it is always “the beginning” of something. In fact, reshit only occurs vocalized with an article once in the entire Hebrew Bible in Nehemiah. Now, more often than not it occurs in construct and in such syntactic environments you cannot have an article, but in the few cases where it is not in construct there is still no article and it is still clearly definite in context.

Furthermore, the “when God began to create” assumes that reshit is in construct. However, that means that it wouldn’t have the article anyway. Literally: “In the beginning of God’s creating . . .” = “When God began. So the real question is not the presence of the article, but the state of reshit.

In one sense, the temporal clause translation is a completely legitimate translation. The real key question is whether reshit is in construct. The fact of the matter is, we do not have to take it in construct. It always occurs in that vocalization in the Hebrew Bible, and its vocalization is exactly how we expect a construct to look, and it is in fact almost always in construct. Hence many people assume it must be in construct in Gen 1:1. However, when it is not in construct it is still vocalized the same way. So it is not as if it must be in construct.

Also, although it is not impossible for a perfect to follow the temporal word “beginning” to form a dependent temporal clause, the more usual way for that type of clause to be formed is for the verb form to be an infinitive. Take the comparable noun “after.” In all of its occurrences forming a dependent temporal clause, 55 or so use an infinitive, only 2-3 use a perfect.

On analogy, the LXX has no article on arche, but it translates Generally 1:1 as clearly an independent clause and not a temporal clause. In other words, though the LXX interpreted the first clause as “In the beginning God created” they felt no need to include an article. Arche/reshit simply doesn’t need it.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/09/genesis-phenomenological-reading.html