Re "what gives?": It could signify a profound link between the Hebrew language, the seers who wrote down those words, and the fundamental metaphysics of the universe - or it could be an utterly trivial coincidence of sounds seized on by those desperate to elevate their preferred sacred book above the general run.
We have no idea who those original scribes were or of their state of consciousness, and we have only hazy notions of how the text has been copied and altered over the centuries. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <hepa7@...> wrote : The first prepositional phrase of the Hebrew Bible is b'reshit. It actually means in (b') [a] beginning (reshit). (There is no indefinite article in Hebrew; with the definite article, that would be something like bareshit* (b' + ha [the] + reshit)). So the first two sounds of the Hebrew Bible are (next to) identical with the first two sounds of the Sanskrit word brahma(n). The second word of the Hebrew Bible is bara. It is so called qal perfect, we believe. In addition to 'he created', depending on context, it could also be translated to 'he creates' (Hebrew verbs have a gender, as opposed to those of, say, English), or 'he shall create'. We not at all sure, but we think we once heard it claimed, that the basic meaning of the verb root for 'bara' (ברא [from right to left: bet resh aleph]) is 'to fill'. If that's the case, we thing the meaning is not that far from that of the of the root for Sanskrit 'brahman', namely 'brh', which means 'to expand'. Blah, blah, blah, (what gives?) : ) * the Hebrew preposition b' is a prefix, not an isolated(?) word!
