"At the first" in the Bible

Why is the article the used in the following verse of the Bible?

At the first God made the heaven and the earth.

To me at first, which according to OED means at the beginning; in the initial stage or stages, sounds more natural, unless there are specific grammatical delicacies that I am not aware of.

The passage is from an app on my iPhone called My Bible Pro. It uses the King James Version of the Bible. Here are some screenshots.

Evidently, this is from the Basic English Bible (BBE), not the more common King James Version.

If you find out how to switch your app to the King James Version, though, you're bound to find some linguistic oddities there, too. Language has changed a lot over the past 300 to 400 years. Whether you read Shakespeare, Chaucer, or the King James Bible, you can't expect it to sound like contemporary English, which is why more contemporary translations have been written.

The Basic English translation may have some grammatical oddities as well, but for very different reasons. It was deliberately written with very few basic words; it's essentially a "Green Eggs and Ham" translation of the Scriptures.

As for why it was translated as "At the first" and not "At first", I'm guessing they wanted to retain the three-word prepositional phrase construct, but for some reason thought "In the beginning" would be too difficult for its target audience.

At the first God made the heaven and the earth is most certainly not from the King James Bible, whose first words are In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

At the first is, however, found in these two subsequent passages in Genesis:

Unto the place of the altar, which he had made there at the first: and there Abram called on the name of the LORD. (13:4)

And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first. (28:19)

At the first might also be occasionally found elsewhere, but at first is more usual in most contexts.