Monthly Archives: December 2012


The dollar isn’t what it used to be.

I’m not talking economics here; I’m talking esthetics. And actually, the dollar bill is about the only one that actually IS what it used to be. The U.S. mint and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing have redesigned most of our money in ways that show a miserable falling off in design and execution.

Our $5, $10 and $20 bills and our coins have suffered a severe drop in quality when considered as art.

Yes, money is art, whether it’s the engraving that makes up the bills or the bas-relief sculpture on our coins. There are long histories in both as art mediums, from the intricate lozenge-and-dot portraits of the 17th and 18th centuries and the commemorative medallions struck from the Renaissance on.

But craftsmanship at the mint and at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has declined precipitously, leaving us with wallets full of bad art. This wouldn’t be so noticeable if the older coins and bills hadn’t been so beautifully made.

Look at an old bill, before the anti-counterfeiting “improvements” of the 21st century. Not only are the portraits more lifelike — there’s a personality behind the eyes in Grant’s picture on the $50 bill — the designs also are fuller, more detailed and graceful, full of trailing acanthus and olive leaves.

The vegetative growth and architectural motifs that used to grace our bills announced our national fecundity. We were a waxing moon, a rising tide. The scrollwork and border ornament recalled the inventive bustle of the Renaissance.


The new bills, full of iridescent ink, microprinting and watermarks to discourage counterfeiting, are defensive and speak of a nation feeling the need to protect itself. There is no room now for the purely ornamental or decorative profusion of the old designs. Everything there has a purpose, stripped down like some typographic battlement.


Genuine beauty comes from an effusion of confidence and grace; in contrast, our new bills look as though they were designed by forensic engineers.

Even worse are the newer coins, which look less like legal tender and more like tokens at a state fair. Or perhaps you catch yourself trying to peel back the foil to eat the chocolate inside.

The portraits on them are an embarrassment — one observer noted that the frontal portraits must have been “zombie presidents.”

One problem is that the coin designers have chosen to represent the faces not in profile, but head-on. It’s hard to make a shallow relief sculpture of a full face without having the nose stick out too much. The new coins try, but because they have to be flat — after all, they have to stack — the nose gets squashed flat into the cheeks, and the eyebrow ridge stick out as much as the nose. Hence the zombie look.

Looks not important

Madison looks more like Count Olaf in the Lemony Snicket movie than a founding father. Jefferson has an eyebrow ridge like Frankenstein’s monster.

madison snicket

The “Return to Monticello” nickel is just as bad, with its oddly squished portrait of Jefferson, off-center on the coin’s front.

The problem is that the rationale for changing the design is conceptual, not visual.

As Edmund Moy, most recent director of the U.S. Mint (resigned in 2011, leaving the office vacant), said, “We are proud of the result of interesting design innovations like the forward-facing Jefferson nickel, so appropriate in showing a forward-thinking president who had the foresight to expand our country westward through the Louisiana Purchase.”

Fine metaphor, lousy image. There’s a reason we have used profiles since the beginnings of coinage some 2 millennia ago.

The worst is probably the new State Quarters series. The many state designs vary in quality, but it’s the road-kill George Washington on the front that’s the main problem.

These things are hard to describe in words, but reach into your pocket and pull out some art — I mean, some change — to see for yourself.

If you have more than a couple of quarters, at least one is likely to be the old eagle-backed quarter that has been standard since 1932, and another will probably be one of the new state quarters.

Look at Washington’s head on both. The old head was satisfying and sculptural; the new head is flat, ugly and can’t make up its mind if it wants to be bas-relief sculpture or incised drawing. Sculpture and drawing are different things, and they don’t sit well together in such a tiny space as a coin.


“Relief on most modern coins is lower,” says Michael White, spokesman for the Mint, “because of volume and vending-machine usage. When you make billions of coins, you don’t do the same relief.”

Little relief in sight

In fact, there’s hardly any relief at all.

You can see that confusion between the three-dimensional sculpture and the outlined two-dimensional drawing on many of the individual state designs. The Michigan quarter is practically nothing but an outline map of the state. That isn’t sculpture. Coins this dull could be molded out of plastic and tossed out at Mardi Gras parades.

Even the space around Washington’s head is a disgrace. Move the old quarter in the light to notice that the background space is not flat, but dish-shaped. Because it’s modulated, it catches the light as it moves in a way that makes the space — even the empty space — come alive. But the new quarter has a flat, uninflected background, as if no one really cared or paid attention.

All around, the founding fathers’ portraits have lost their vitality. Look at the lifeless portraits on the newer $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills. Hamilton’s nose is out of joint on the $10.


Look at Andrew Jackson on the $20 and ask yourself, “What’s going on with those shoulders?” His head looks like a giant paste-on over what might be taken for a volcano.

Aside from poor draftsmanship, there’s a lowering of craftsmanship in the bills.

The problem is that money is printed by engraving, and the engraving process is a slow, exacting one that few people have either the talent or patience for anymore.

We live in a time that moves much faster than it did in the 16th, 17th or 18th centuries, when engraving rose to a peak of craftsmanship. We don’t want to spend the time to do it anymore.

The engraver has to cut a line in a metal plate using a sharp metal burin. For the lozenge-and-dot technique used for portraiture, a series of parallel lines have to be drawn to follow the contours of the face. They are incised more shallowly in areas that should be light and more heavily in darker areas. Keeping the pressure even is a task for someone who has a great deal of time to spend getting it right.

In the details

Few people have the patience needed or the courage to attack a metal plate knowing that making a mistake means having to start over again.

We’re a nation with ADD, and our money shows it. The esthetic concern fades away. Who actually looks at money, anyway?

Perhaps decline is a historical inevitability. One remembers the incredible flowing drapery carved by Greek and Roman sculptors and the slow decline of the art into the third and fourth centuries, when the drapery folds no longer had any relation to the body underneath.

This is what happens when people lose their ability to see, to look with attention. It has often been said that we live in a visual culture, but that’s not really true. We may have given up the written word, but what we are calling visual is really just a written symbol: The stick-figure female that signifies the women’s restroom. It is an ideogram. You read such symbols, not see them. It gives up its meaning instantly.

A real woman, in contrast, can be studied for a lifetime.

There are hopeful signs. The initial design update of the bills had a giant medallion holding the presidential portraits. But instead of placing the medallion in the center, they shifted it off to the side. It may have looked more au courant, but it was totally out of balance.

But the newer bills, such as the most recent $5 bill, has done away with the medallion altogether, and although Lincoln is still large, he fits into the design better without the space-eating oval surrounding him. And with the addition of subtle colors, a line of stars and an eagle, it begins to recover from the disaster of the previous design.


They haven’t attacked the $1 bill yet. Perhaps that’s because the naked dollar simply isn’t worth counterfeiting.



Money facts

* George Washington first appeared on a $1 bill in 1869.

* It wasn’t until 1907 that someone figured out that a lower relief, matched to the same height as the rim of a coin, would allow the coins to be stacked evenly.

* The first coin with a president on the front came in 1909, when the Lincoln-head penny made its debut on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth. The Washington quarter (1932) came second, followed by the Jefferson nickel (1938) and the Roosevelt dime (1946).

* The 5-cent nickel isn’t the only one: There used to be other nickels, worth 3 cents and 1 cent.

* The Eagle is not a nickname but a congressionally mandated coin with a $10 value. It’s no longer in circulation. There were also Double Eagles ($20), Half Eagles ($5) and Quarter Eagles ($2.50).

* Nickels were originally called half-dimes. Dime was originally spelled disme.

* The $10 bill was once called a sawbuck because a Roman numeral X on its face reminded some of a carpenter’s sawbuck. A $20 was called a double sawbuck.

* The $5 used to be nicknamed a fin, as in, “Buddy, can you spare a fin?”

* We are familiar with Washington on the $1 bill; Jefferson on the $2; Lincoln on the fiver, Hamilton on the sawbuck, Jackson on the $20, Grant on the $50 and Benjamin Franklin on the infrequently used $100 bill. But there used to be higher denominations: William McKinley on the $500, Grover Cleveland on the $1,000, James Madison on the $5,000 and Salmon P. Chase on the $10,000.

* Salmon Chase, secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln, was also on the first $1 bill (1862, when he was still in office — no shrinking violet, Chase).

* Martha Washington is the only woman whose portrait has appeared on a U.S. currency note. It appeared on the face of the $1 Silver Certificate of 1886 and 1891 and on the back of the $1 Silver Certificate of 1896.

* The highest denomination note ever put in circulation was Hungary’s 100 million-billion pengo, issued in 1946, worth about 20 cents at the time.

wildflowers copy

Sometimes, it’s not just where you take a trip, but when.

You can be too young to appreciate something or too old to partake.

When I was young, I loved the spring flowers, from the first jonquils that burst through the last snow on the lawn, to the wake robin in the woods. Nothing could compare with the speckled salmon color of the pinxter flower hanging over the stream, dripping dew in the early morning from the long, bowed tongues of its stamens.

All up and down the East Coast, the bright red stars of fire pinks grew along paths and blue spiderwort grew under the shade of trees. When they came out, the Eastern Seaboard seemed to be waking from its frozen sleep and taking its first deep stretches of the year.

After that, the seasons seemed anticlimactic. Summer was when leaves were turned to dry Swiss cheese by hungry insects. Fall was when those leaves dried out completely and fell off. Back then, I didn’t trust anyone over 30, either.

But a single road trip through northwestern New Jersey changed that for me. As I drove up the Delaware River in October from Philadelphia, north past the Water Gap and into the Kittatinny Mountains, every field was a paint box.

There had been a death in my family, and I had just gone through a divorce. After the formalities, I drove along the river, looking for some quiet.

In its northern parts, the Delaware is not much of a river; it is just a broad, shallow, stony-bottomed stream with a sandy bluff on one shore or the other, depending which way the riverbed turns.

The Kittatinnies are not much in the way of mountains, either.

But along the roadsides, the bobbing orange heads of black-eyed Susans mixed with the midnight blue of ironweed.

There is something different about the fall wildflowers, something weedier, something more insistent. Their vegetable smells and sticky white sap are less immediately pretty, but they have more character: They are grown-up.

Perhaps, too, it is the drier air of autumn, the mixed stands of plants, blending goldenrod with Queen Anne’s lace, bull thistle and hawkweed in a Pointillist stew of color.

Anyway, that’s how it seemed as I drove by the railroad yard in Port Jervis, at the point New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania all meet. The old yard was grown over in asters.

There were millions of them in the open acres of the yard, each with its yellow disk surrounded by blue ray flowers. Intermixed were all the other fall flowers: the yarrow, boneset, coneflowers and chicory left over from midsummer.

And in the weedy field, even the spring flowers were represented, not by their blossoms, but by their fruits: the burrs; seed pods; milkweed down and nightshade berries.

There was yet no frost in the air, but you could see it coming in the overgrown fields that grind in the breeze with the peculiar sound of weeds.

I am now 64 and this is not a story about flowers.


Contemporary American conservatism is a very strange duck. Maybe a platypus. 

To begin with, it espouses what has always previously been called liberalism: When our nation was founded, it was the conservative Hamilton who imagined a strong central government and the liberal Jefferson who feared it. 

Conservatism has traditionally been in favor of strong government. It is one of its hallmarks through history. Of course, behind that belief in central power was the heart of true conservatism: maintaining privilege for those who enjoyed it. That is why we could talk about Soviet hardline conservatives hanging on to Communism. It was their own privilege they were attempting to save. 

It was conservatives who supported the aristocracy in monarchist Europe; it was conservatives who fought reform in 19th century England and justified the subjugation of Ireland; it was conservatives who supported segregation in the American Jim Crow South. The record of conservatives on the progress of human liberation is a dismal one. 

There is a graspingness and miserliness at the heart of historical conservatism. All change threatens the status quo and that threatens those who hold the best cards.

But what remains the oddest thing about the current iteration of conservatism in America is the way it marries this retention of old social norms — even injust ones — with a form of political radicalism that would have dumbfounded the founders. 

At the heart of the Tea Party movement is what can only be described as “soft” anarchism. One central tenet is the dictum that government is not the solution, government is the problem, and therefore, we need to eradicate government. This is not, in any way, shape or form, conservatism. It has no relation to conservatism historically, nor conservatism in ideal or theory. 

The philosophical grandfathers of the Tea Party, let’s face it, are Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Max Stirner. Get the government out of the way and everything will be peachy-hunky.


Those who call themselves libertarians can sign on to this soft anarchism and feel their views are coherent. But so-called conservative Republicans have a hard time reconciling this anti-government sentiment with the converse idea that everyone should behave according to the Judeo-Christian norms they observe. On one hand, they extoll personal freedom, and on the other hand, they negate it to anyone who disagrees with them. 

Even more, those Republicans who have signed on to the Tea Party’s soft anarchism have a difficult time matching that up with their own drive for political power. And we must face the fact that our two-party system is just a bipolar grasping of power. Republicans can claim that government should be smaller, but a short gander at the record proves that after years of striving for the power, when they have it, Republicans use it just as much as Democrats. What’s the point of winning if you don’t get the perks? 

That’s why I call this a platypus. The parts don’t belong together.

I suppose one shouldn’t expect any political movement to be philosophically coherent. Politics remains sausage manufacturing and always will. But the part that causes thoughtful people profound disquiet comes with the reflection on history.

This marriage of one radical idea with reactionary social conservatism has along history, and not a history that inspires much confidence or hope.

Every tyranny or reign of terror has its own version of a radical idea melded with a nostalgic longing for a past where everyone was good and righteous and behaved in the old-fashioned ways. Look at the incorruptible Robespierre; look at the agrarian virtues of Mao; look at xenophobic Stalin. 

Not to put too fine a point to it, and I don’t mean to equate one-to-one Republicans with Nazis, but the same principle is at work. No one extolled the virtues of family and marriage more than the National Socialists. Hitler loved children and dogs, as they say. The combination of reactionary social ideas with radical political ideas has fueled this kind of crackpotism since the days of Plato. 

During the last election, a healthy percentage of Americans turned away from the extremism of the Tea Party, and I don’t have a fear that this platypus will reconquer our politics. America has a long history of quietism, and has always in the past, so far, retreated from any radical departure from the comfort it finds in a stodgy middle class normality. It’s one of our country’s saving graces: We don’t go in, like the French, for theory. 

But nonetheless, this water-and-oil mixture of radicalism and reaction is something, as the doctors always say, we should keep an eye on. 


I’m going to make an argument here that will perturb any normal classical music lover: The atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg is not atonal.

Schoenberg is a whipping boy for all those who hate, just hate what happened to music in the 20th century. He is held to be the archdeacon of unlistenable cacophony. But whether you like his music, the way you might like the music of Mozart, or not, a good deal of the disapprobation that has been visited upon him is undeserved and derives from a complete misunderstanding of his music, and I would argue a misunderstanding of what is called classical music, in general. 

Some background: Arnold Schoenberg was born in Vienna in 1874, when Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms were still alive, and the two ruled the German music world, as two poles of artistic radicalism and conservatism. Schoenberg was 8 when Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, premiered in 1882. He was 23 when Brahms died (when Schoenberg was born, Brahms had not even written his first symphony). 

He became a composer, writing first in the arch-Romantic style that borrowed a good deal from Wagner’s chromaticism and Brahms’ idiosyncratic rhythmic complexity. He came of age in a Vienna dominated by the musical will of Gustav Mahler.

As a composer, he believed he was moving on the logical path set forward by Wagner, Brahms and Mahler, among others, a path that moved historically from diatonic to chromatic music, and then to music of indistinct tonality — which has sometimes been called atonal. His final move was to a structured composing method he felt would reimpose order in the making of music. In this, he was one of the two primary sources of Modernism in music, along with his “archenemy,” Igor Stravinsky.

(That “method” was, of course, the 12-tone, or dodecaphonic system, also called “serial” music — more of that later). 

To those ears used to hearing music with tonic and dominant harmonies in major and minor modes, Schoenberg’s later music seemed hopelessly aimless, and worse, ungrounded in traditional harmony. To them, it seemed like noise rather than music.

Setting aside questions of taste: For some of us, Schoenberg’s music is unutterably beautiful, while others may never see (or hear) past the dissonances. But as I said at the beginning, there is a serious misunderstanding of Schoenberg’s aim. 

By my definition, Schoenberg’s music — even his later 12-tone music — is not actually atonal. If I want atonal music, I must look to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

What! You say? How can that be?

I’m not being facetious: I’m making a central point about classical music.

For the sake of argument, we should say that what we call music is often broken down into three primary components: melody, rhythm and harmony. It is admittedly simplistic to make this generalization, but it has a kernel of truth to it: If we divide the world’s music up, it can be said that Asian music is given over to the primacy of melody and can consist of melodies of incredible complexity; African music respectively finds enormous complexity and expressiveness in rhythm. Yes, there is melody, harmony and rhythm in all these musics, but there is a special place given to melody in the often drone-harmonied Asian music, and a special place to rhythmic complexity on sub-Saharan African music.

But European music has placed its money on harmony. Since the Renaissance, harmony has been the most expressive, and certainly the most complex element of European music. By the 18th century, this had evolved into a system of keys and key relationships.

If you want a demonstration of what I mean by harmony being the central element, consider something as simple as Bach’s Prelude in C-major from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In it a simple eight-note rhythmic figure is repeated, over and over, twice to a bar, unchanged for 32 bars. That is 64 identical iterations. It serves as both melody and rhythm. The only thing that changes is the harmony, constantly shifting: It is beautifully expressive in its simplicity. 


Or take a Schubert song. It would appear that the melody is what makes Schubert so can’t-get-out-of-your-head, but in fact, it is the often-wild and inventive harmonies he has underpinned them with. Try re-harmonizing any of his songs and the magic evaporates. 

Reharmonize Andrew Lloyd Webber and it hardly matters; in fact, his music is commonly reharmonized with each new arrangement, so indifferent is the harmonic underpinning. In a good deal of contemporary music (mostly pop) the harmonies are merely ornaments to the beat and tune, and can be interchanged with impunity. The “chords” are just called “changes,” and little thought is given to them, or to their interrelationships. 

This is what I consider atonal music. It may be consonant and it may all sound very pleasant, but it does nothing expressive with its harmonies and there is no coherence to key relationships. 

All music also depends on the setting up of expectations and then satisfying them or deflecting them. This is true of the changing rhythms of African drums or the melisma of the Arabian oud. 

Tension and resolution. 

In Western music, this creation of expectation and its subsequent completion falls primarily to harmony. 

The primary engine of this tension is dissonance and the primary resolution is found in the subsequent consonance. But that is only in the short term. To make a piece of art that lasts longer, requires a more sophisticated pattern: how to delay the final resolution until it comes to us like a dawn sun after a dark night. 

Consider the slow tread to C-major in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the tonal resolution comes after many short glimpses, but not in full till the finale. Or even more extreme: the way Bruckner withholds the genuine tonal resolution until the very last B-flat chord of his Fifth Symphony. 

Wagner depends on holding off that longed-for resolution; it’s what gives the Liebestod its unendurable sense of longing.

The history of Western music is the history of what Leonard Bernstein once called “newer and better ambiguities” in tonality. The thumping tonic-dominant structure of Beethoven turns eventually to the sliding chromaticism of Wagner, and later, the battering tone clusters of Stravinsky. 

You can hear the way tonality gives direction to music in something as simple as the blues. The chord changes in the blues, although they are sometimes given a little kick by adding sixths or sevenths to the basic chords, is a very simple set of chord progressions. Tonic, tonic; subdominant, tonic; dominant, tonic. Over and over. You can feel the movement at each chord change.

Classical music does that to, albeit in a more complex, subtle and varied manner. You need to feel the chords — the harmonies, change under your feet.

Listen to the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, one the most memorable and moving in his oeuvre. The melody is hardly more than a single repeated note in a repeated “Dum-ditty-dum-dum” rhythm. But the harmony changes constantly and meaningfully: It moves from A-minor and into C-major and on to B-major and B-minor before noodling back through the dominant E to the home A-minor at the end of the phrase. Beethoven keeps it alive and fresh; he keeps it interesting. 


You should not only notice, you should feel the harmony. It is meant to convey emotion.

The best way to do this is to listen more to the bass line than the soprano. You’ll get the tune whether you listen especially to it or not, but listen to the bass, and you’ll hear where the music is going.

Brahms always used to cover up everything but the bass staff in a score when looking at the printed version of a new piece of music. He claimed it was the best way to tell whether the music had any lasting value. 

Of course, music isn’t just the triads on parade: It is the non-harmonic tones that give it spice. 

Dissonance is everywhere in music. You cannot have music without it. If you think Schoenberg is dissonant, you should consider Johann Sebastian Bach. He is probably the most dissonant composer of all time. Of course, there is this central distinction between his dissonance and that of Schoenberg: Bach always resolves his dissonance.

If you were to take a simple choral tune, say, “Ein feste Burg,” (“A Mighty Fortress is our God”) and play only the off beats, you would hear something as modern and dissonant as Schoenberg himself. All those passing tones, all those appoggiaturas, all those mordants and nachschlags. Most of the vertical harmony (harmony at any given moment, seen from highest note to lowest bass) in Bach is clangorous , but always resolved immediately and given a place in the key structure of the melody. 

When we are comfortable in C major or G minor, we feel comfortable also to take minor departures, in full expectation of the resurrection of harmonic order. All is right in Bach’s universe.

Schoenberg lived in a different time from Bach, a time when all was not right. It was the early 20th century, and wars, ethnic cleansing, fascism, colonialism’s evils and even the death of God made life seem less secure. For Schoenberg, tension was the order of the day, not resolution. And so, in his so-called atonal music, each cluster of tones, although the equal of any tone cluster in Bach, is not fit into a hierarchy of key, and does not anticipate its own resolution into something emotionally satisfying. 

If Wagner attempted to keep resolution at bay for minutes and quarter-hours at a time, Schoenberg keeps it at bay for entire pieces of music.

Each cluster twists in a matrix of implied tonal structure, but moves from one to the next in such an eel-like manner that no tonal structure is ever settled or constructed. We are never in D minor, although it may seem at certain instants that we are headed there.

The meaning of Schoenberg’s music, thus, depends on our ears expectation of tonality, and its meaning depends on the denial of the same. In this sense, Schoenberg’s music is still tonal, even when it avoids any key center. Even at its most radical, his music relies on our own ear’s sense of the harmonic universe in which it exists to provide “Luft von anderem Planeten:” “air from another planet.”


That is true even of the serial music he wrote. It’s emotional resonance depends on our placing it in an endlessly shifting tonal universe, a ball of mercury that cannot be pinned down. 

In this sense, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music, although it is written in a key, does not depend on tonality the way Western music from Bach to Debussy did. Its tonality is mere happenstance, something unconsidered because merely habitual, something virtually unseen, or unheard by its creator. 

And hence, I claim that Schoenberg’s music is tonal, and Webber’s music is not.


I’ve always been interested in the way things translate from one language to another. Of course, that also means from one culture to another, and, as in the case of Bible translation, from one era to another. Time changes, language metamorphoses, and our world-views alter with our understanding of the world around us.

There is no question that the most powerful translation of Genesis can be found in the King James version, but words that meant one thing in the era of Shakespeare may very well mean something different now. And the verse forms of ancient Hebrew are different from our expectations of poetry, now.

So, I’ve always wondered, what does the original Hebrew mean in the Torah? Is there a way to make a translation that hews closely to the original meaning, the tribal meaning of the language?

I’ve gone through several interlinear translations, several translations in clear text, and lots and lots of footnotes to come up with something that gives me as close as I can tell, what the original Creation story meant in its Hebrew iteration, uninflected by several millennia of religious interpretation, sectarian wars and violence, pogroms and anathemae.

In the interests of disclosure, I should admit up front that I have no stake in this game: I am not a believer (when asked, I usually say I have no religion, I’m not even an atheist), so I’m not trying to persuade anyone that the Bible is true, or not true, or that this or that dogma is the “true” one. This is just my attempt to understand what metaphors and language was used in the ancient Middle East as they slowly came to terms with what would become their religion.

Believe me, I don’t claim this is a good translation of the first Creation story in Genesis. But it is a defensible one.

King James is still the king, but its rather archaic feeling — which, of course, was not archaic when it was written — has unfortunately become the default diction and rhetoric of belief. (So much that Joseph Smith’s “Book of Mormon” is written in a botched imitation of the sound of KJV, albeit with lousy grammar and many gross lexical misunderstandings).

There are many points in the Hebrew text where scholars either disagree, or throw up their hands and say, “We just don’t know what is being said here.” They give it their best guess, like the bit about the stars being created for calendar use. The original Hebrew is obscure.

Anyway, here’s my version:

Genesis, the beginning

When it all started up, and the gods were arranging the sky and the ground,

When the earth was emptiness with darkness over the ocean,

the wind of the gods hung over the face of the water

The gods said:

“Let there be light,” and light happened.

And the gods said, “We did a good job.”

the gods split up the light and the dark,

calling the light “Day,” and the dark, “Night.”

There was a sunset; there was a sunrise — One Day.

The gods said:

“Let there be a bowl over the water and let it split up water from water.”

The gods made the bowl

and separated the water that was below the bowl

from the water that was above the bowl.

It Was.

The gods called the bowl, “Sky.”

There was a sunset; there was a sunrise — Two Days.

The gods said:

“Let the water under the sky be brought together in one place

and let the dry land be seen.”

It Was.

The gods called the dry part “Ground,” and the collected waters they called “Sea.”

The gods saw the craftsmanship was good.

The gods said:

“Let the ground sprout with growing sprouts —

plants that seed-forth seeds, fruits trees that fruit, according to their type.”

It Was.

The ground grew growing sprouts, seeding plants seeding seed plants, fruiting fruit trees.

The gods recognized they were well made.

There was a sunset; there was a sunrise — Three Days.

The gods said:

“Let there be lamps in the bowl of the sky to split up the day from the night, that they may be signs (Hebrew “difficult”) for a calendar, and let them be lamps in the bowl of the sky to provide light on the ground.”

It Was.

The gods made two big lamps:

The bigger lamp for ruling the day; the smaller lamp for ruling the night.

And the stars.

The gods placed them in the bowl of the sky to provide light on the ground and to rule the day and the night.

The gods liked what they saw.

There was a sunset; there was a sunrise — Four Days.

The gods said:

“Let the water swarm with a swarm of beings, and let the birds fly across the bowl of the sky.”

The gods created huge sea serpents and all the crawly things that crawl about, with which the water swarmed, after their type, and all the birds, after their type.

And the gods saw they looked good.

And the gods blessed them, saying:

“Grow fruit and be many and fill the water of the seas and let the birds be many.”

There was a sunset; there was a sunrise — Five Days.

The gods said:

“Let the ground bear creatures in types, herd-animals, crawling things, wild things of the earth, all divided by type.”

It Was.

The gods made the wild things of the earth, divided by type, and the herd animals, divided by type, and the crawling things in the dirt, divided by type.

The gods saw it was working out well.

The gods said:

“Let us make people in our shape, looking like us.

Let them rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, all the earth, all the crawling things that crawl on the ground.”

So the gods made people in their shape, so they looked like the gods,

male and female, the gods created them.

The gods blessed them and said to them:

“Grow fruit and be many and fill up the earth and conquer it. Have rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky and all the crawly things that crawl on the ground.”

The gods said:

“Here, we give you all the seeding plants that seed that are on the face of the earth, all the trees in which fruits fruit. For you they will be for eating. And also for all the living things of the earth — all the birds of the sky and the crawly things that crawl about on the ground — all green plants for eating.”

It Was.

Then the gods looked at all they had done with exceeding satisfaction.

There was a sunset; there was a sunrise — Six Days.

So, everything was finished — sky and earth, with all their entourages.

The gods had finished, on the seventh day, the work they had done

Then they stopped on the seventh day, all the work they had done.

The gods gave the seventh day their blessing and made it sacred, for on that day, they stopped working on all that they had done.

This is how it all began, the sky and the earth and all history.