Pshat and Drash in Bereishis

פשט
A Support for Gosse?
Bereishit/Genesis 2:4

אלה תולדות השמים והארץ בהבראם
ביום עשות ה' א' ארץ ושמיםThese are the generations of the heaven and the earth in their being-created, on the day God made earth and heaven.

In footnoting a midrash about this pasuq, R' Barukh Haleivi Epstein comments in his Tora Temima:

It seems that this is the reason [the midrash] took the word behibbar’am ("in their being-created") out of its פשט (straightforward) meaning — since according to the straightforward understanding of the word, it would mean that the 'generations of the heaven and the earth' were created on the same day as the heaven and the earth [themselves]. But that can't be, since the heaven and the earth were created on Day 1, and their 'generations/descendents' were created during the rest of the [First] Week!

So in other words, the straightforward [pshat] understanding of the Torah is that the 'generations of the heaven and the earth', i.e. the geological and biological history of the universe, were created with the universe itself! So Gosse could have been right! Thank G~d we have the Oral Tradition to teach us that no, in fact God did not create fossils in the ground and ice layers on Greenland 5766 years ago. Of course, with that said, ein miqra’ yotzei’ miydey pshuto — "a scriptural text never abandons its straightforward meaning," leaving room for what us Tricksterists like to call Possibly The Best Practical Joke Ever.

דרש
בראשית ברא אלהים
Bereishit. One of the most ambiguous words in the Torah. Does it mean "in the beginning" as the oldschool translations have it? "At the beginning of" as the new ones do? "With reishit" as some midrashim claim?
I prefer to read it — somewhat unpshaticly, I admit — as First Of All.

Imagínate... Imagine...

Thousands of years ago...

The First Jewish (=Israelite) Commonwealth.
The time of Chieftains, or the time of Kings.

A group of Israelite children are helping their parents in the fields, when a rumor hops, skips, and jumps through the village. The kids are all excited. Their parents are impatient.

A wandering prophet has come to town.
Maybe it's Shemu’eil. Maybe it's Elisha‘.

The adults come to the prophet for advice, blessings, and arbitration. They offer praise to YHVH, God of Israel, and then return home to their figures of Ba‘al and Asheira.

The children come to hear stories.

Prophets tell the best stories.

And so, that night, in a rocky clearing out between the fields, the children of the village gather, build a bonfire, and wait for the prophet to tell them stories. Stories of their heroes, the Chieftains; of their Ancestors; and of God.

The prophet begins to tell them of Creation, and says: "Other nations believe in many gods. They say that in the beginning, bar’u elohim et hashamayim v’et ha’aretz — gods created the heavens and the earth. That Ba‘al, or Marduk, fought against other gods and monsters, and they built the Universe out of pieces of death."

One of the children interrupts, "My parents told me that! And lots of stories about Ba‘al, how he fought with Mot, and how he, y'know, did it with a cow..."

The children giggle. The prophet grins, too, for a second, before returning to the serious matter at hand. He takes out a scroll, shows it to the children, and reads seven words.

Bereishit. Bara’. Elohim. Eit. Hashamayim. V’eit. Ha’aretz.

And he places the scroll back into his bag, and begins reciting the text from memory, embellishing the details as he goes with the traditional legends that have not yet been committed to writing.

But he begins with Bereishit.

"Bereishit—" he says. First Of All.

"First Of All — the most important thing to remember," he continues, "the key to everything, is that bara’ — in the singular! — Elohim et hashamayim v’et ha’aretz. God — one God — created the heavens and the earth..."