My name is Daniel Forthright, and I read Genesis 1 in the NASB for the first time on a Tuesday morning in a small apartment in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had grown up with the King James Version — its cadences were the ones I’d memorized, the ones that felt like Scripture to me. But a professor at the seminary extension program I was attending handed me a New American Standard Bible and told me to read the creation account again as if I’d never encountered it before.

I did. And it was not the same experience.

What the NASB Brings to Genesis 1

The New American Standard Bible is a formally equivalent translation, meaning it tries to stay as close as possible to the structure and vocabulary of the original Hebrew. For Genesis 1, that matters more than you might expect. The Hebrew of the creation narrative is precise in a way that older English translations sometimes smooth over, and the NASB surfaces those textures.

Take the very opening: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Simple enough. But the NASB then renders verse 2 carefully: “And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” That phrase “formless and void” is the Hebrew tohu wabohu, a dense, almost onomatopoeic pairing that scholars have wrestled with for centuries. Some translations soften it. The NASB keeps the starkness.

The word “moving” in that verse is also worth noting. The Hebrew is merachefet, which has a range of meaning including hovering, brooding, fluttering. The NASB chooses “moving,” which is accurate but understated. Reading that in my Tulsa apartment, I remember sitting with the image for a long time: the Spirit of God moving over something that had no shape yet. [Link: Hebrew word studies in Genesis]

The Structure of the Six Days

One of the most striking features of Genesis 1 in the NASB is how rigidly the formula repeats across the six days. Each day follows a pattern:

  • “Then God said…”
  • “And it was so.”
  • “God saw that it was good.”
  • “There was evening and there was morning, a [nth] day.”

In spoken or memorized versions of the text, that repetition can feel almost liturgical, a kind of sacred rhythm. But reading the NASB cold on the page, the repetition hits differently. It reads almost like a report. Structured. Deliberate. There is no drama in the prose, no emotional escalation. That plainness is itself a theological statement, or at least it invites one.

My professor had argued that Genesis 1 was written in a form closer to temple dedication texts from the ancient Near East than to what we would call a scientific account. I did not know enough then to evaluate that claim well. But reading the NASB’s clean, unadorned rendering, I could see what he meant. This was not poetry exactly, but it was not journalism either. It occupied some third category.

[Link: Genesis 1 literary genre and interpretation]

Day Six and the Creation of Humanity

The account builds toward its climax in verses 26 through 28, which in the NASB read:

“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

The NASB capitalizes “Us” and “Our,” a choice that signals the translators’ theological commitments without forcing an interpretation on the reader. What those pronouns mean has been debated for a long time: a divine council, the Trinity read back into the Hebrew, a rhetorical plural of majesty. The NASB does not resolve the debate, but it marks the moment as significant.

What struck me reading this passage that morning was the structure of the declaration itself. The phrase “in the image of God He created him” appears three times in rapid succession, almost like a refrain. In a text so economical with language, that kind of repetition is meaningful. The NASB preserves it without commentary.

The Hebrew word being translated here is tselem, which in other Old Testament contexts refers to a physical idol or likeness. Whether the “image” in Genesis 1 is physical, functional, relational, or something else entirely has occupied theologians for centuries. Augustine wrote about it. Calvin wrote about it at length in the Institutes. The debate is not settled. But reading the NASB’s plain rendering, you are at least standing in front of the question directly. [Link: image of God theology]

The Seventh Day and the NASB’s Footnotes

A feature of the NASB that casual readers sometimes overlook is its footnote system. In many editions, alternate renderings or Hebrew and Greek terms appear at the bottom of the page. For Genesis 1, some of the most interesting footnotes appear around verse 1 and the opening phrase. The NASB notes that “In the beginning” can also be rendered “When God began to create,” a translation some scholars prefer because it treats the opening clause as temporal rather than absolute.

That alternate reading has significant implications. It changes whether Genesis 1:1 is a summary statement of what follows or an independent act that precedes the unformed earth of verse 2. Most English readers never encounter this debate because their translation commits to one reading without flagging the other. The NASB’s footnotes are one of its genuine scholarly contributions.

I remember showing that footnote to a friend from my home church who had never seen it before. She was not troubled by it, exactly, but she was surprised. “Why doesn’t the pastor ever mention this?” she asked. It is a fair question.

Reading Genesis 1 NASB Alongside Other Translations

If you are studying Genesis 1 seriously, the NASB is worth reading alongside a dynamic equivalence translation like the NIV or the NLT, not because one is superior to the other, but because the gaps between them show you where the Hebrew resists easy translation and where interpretation has already begun.