Lexicon

H1254 - bara

Strong's: H1254 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: baw-raw' Part of speech: verb (primitive root) Frequency: ~54 occurrences in the Hebrew Bible, concentrated in the Pentateuch and Isaiah.

Semantic range (Brown-Driver-Briggs)

(Qal) to create, shape, fashion, the foundational Genesis-1 sense.
(Niphal) to be created, the passive of (1).
(Piel) to cut down, cut out, clear (a forest), a derived sense.
(Hiphil) to be fat / to make fat, rare, distinct stem (1 Samuel 2:29).

Theological force

In its Qal stem, the only stem used for the divine-creation sense, the subject is always God. No human being ever "barāʾ"s in the Hebrew Bible. This is the lexicographer's strongest argument that bara names a category of activity reserved for deity: bringing into being something new, not merely re-shaping pre-existing material. While bara itself does not lexically require creation ex nihilo (Hebrew has no terminological equivalent for the technical Latin creatio ex nihilo), the word's distribution and its pairing in Genesis 1:1 with the absolute-temporal bereshit (H7225) is what undergirds the doctrine: God brings the heavens and the earth into existence at the temporal beginning, not from any prior material.

The verb is paired in Genesis 1.1 with H7225 - reshit ("beginning"), and the trio bara + Elohim + reshit is the conceptual core of biblical creation theology.

Notable verses

Genesis 1.1, בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, "In the beginning God created"
Genesis 1.27, barāʾ used three times in one verse for the creation of adam in God's image
Genesis 2:3, God blessed the seventh day "because in it He rested from all His work which God had created (barāʾ) and made"
Genesis 5:1, "the day God created (barāʾ) man, in the likeness of God He made him"
Isaiah 40:26, "Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created (barāʾ) these things"
Isaiah 42:5, "Thus says God the LORD, who created (barāʾ) the heavens"
Isaiah 43:1, "thus says the LORD, your Creator (bōrēʾ), O Jacob"
Isaiah 43:7, "everyone who is called by My name, and whom I have created (barāʾ) for My glory"
Isaiah 45:7, "the One forming light and creating (barāʾ) darkness"
Isaiah 65:17, "I create (barāʾ) new heavens and a new earth"
Psalm 51:10, "Create (barāʾ) in me a clean heart, O God", extended metaphorically to spiritual renewal
Amos 4:13, "He who forms mountains and creates (barāʾ) the wind"
Malachi 2:10, "Has not one God created (barāʾ) us?"

Patristic / scholarly note

The Septuagint renders barāʾ with κτίζω (ktizō, G2936), preserving the divine-action specificity. Augustine (Confessions 11-13, c. AD 400; City of God 11, c. AD 420) develops the doctrine of creation ex nihilo by reading bara in Genesis 1:1 alongside Hebrews 11:3 ("the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible") and 2 Maccabees 7:28. He argues against the Greek philosophical assumption of eternal pre-existing matter on the basis of this distinctive Hebrew verb. Modern scholarship (e.g., Bruce Waltke, Genesis commentary; John Sailhamer, The Pentateuch as Narrative) confirms the lexical pattern but qualifies that bara alone does not entail ex nihilo, that doctrine is the joint exegesis of bara + the absolute bereshit + the broader canonical witness.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here. Top-cited references using bara: Genesis 1.1, Genesis 1.27.