"at the time, the world was a tohu-bohu" (Gen 1:2)

Reading through the story of creation

We started our close reading of Genesis 1 a week ago and have now gotten to v. 2. I’ll remind you that, instead of a statement of what God did “in the beginning,” I understand v. 1 as a clause introducing the story. V. 2 interrupts the introductory sentence to give us some background information, so we can understand the situation when God first acts, in v. 3. Here again is my translation of those first two verses:

1 When God began to create the sky and the earth —

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ׃

2 at the time the world was a tohu-bohu, with darkness over Deep and a God-wind hovering over the water — 

וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֨הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם׃

Note that I’ve added the audio of v. 2 above. If you’d like to hear all of vv. 1-5, you’ll find it has been added (verse by verse) to the September 22nd post “Creation – Day One.” I’ll add them selectively as the series continues. Let me know if you find them helpful, if you’d like them to go phrase by phrase, or whatever other comments you have.

Now, let’s get started.

—  at the time, the world was … The Hebrew of our phrase is ve-ha-aretz haytah וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה. If you have been tuned in to the Hebrew, you realize that I have translated eretz differently here than I did in v. 1. Call the vocabulary police! Robert Alter, in publishing his own translation of the Bible, castigated earlier translations for not always using the same English word to translate the same Hebrew word, as he does, because such words are often used for literary effect.

He’s absolutely right, though he doesn’t follow his own advice as thoroughly as it needs to be followed. Those important words can be used in (for example) Exodus, Jonah, and the Psalms, and a careful reader needs to be able to recognize them in all those places. (The best solution, of course, is to learn Hebrew!)

Nonetheless, when a word ends one verse and the same word begins the next (which ארץ does in the Hebrew text, as you can see) I had better have a pretty good reason for using a different English word for each.

Here’s my reason: the eretz of v. 1 is soon going to be created (spoiler alert: it will happen on Day 3), while the eretz of v.2 already exists. Why is the same Hebrew word used for both? I don’t know, and can only guess. 

It is not clear that Biblical Hebrew had a word for “world” in our sense; olam, which has that meaning in Modern Hebrew, means “eternity” in Biblical Hebrew.  But the way the verb “was” is used here tells us that the sentence we read in v. 1 is being interrupted to give us some background information.  “At the time” in my translation represents this grammatical usage, not a separate Hebrew phrase.  The important thing is that the story is not continuing quite yet.  That is why I have set v. 2 off by dashes.  Now for the grammatical explanation.

Hebrew has two different ways of expressing the past tense.  One is the simple form that is still used in Modern Hebrew: היה hayah ‘he/it was’ (there are different forms for different pronouns, just like English “I am - you are - she is”).  But there is a second form that not only tells us that something happened in the past but that it was the next thing that happened.  V. 3 uses that form.  After God decides to create light, “there was light” — but because that was the next thing that happened, instead of hayah the Hebrew uses the special form ויהי va-yehi.  We’ll talk much more about these two forms later (but still on Day One) when we get to v. 5, where both are used.

V. 2 uses the standard form היתה haytah (different from hayah because eretz is a feminine word, not a masculine one), and not the “consecutive” form.  That would have been ותהי הארץ va-tehi ha-aretz.  The bottom line is that v. 2 does not continue the story but gives us the background information we need to understand the conditions when the creation story begins.  How did this “world” that is not yet the “land” that will be created on Day 3 come into being?  Where did the god who will do the creating come from?  These are questions that our story does not discuss. But what the world is like is important for understanding the process that will begin in v. 3.

a tohu-bohu תֹ֨הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ – Fortunately for the lazy translator, the Hebrew that the Bible uses here, tohu va-vohu, has become an English word, though not one that is in general usage.  Nonetheless, it exists; the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “that which is empty and formless; chaos; utter confusion.”  The word tohu occurs twenty times in the Bible, and it is used in contexts that describe a place as uninhabitable, as well as to mean “worthlessness.”  As Isa 45:18 says of God, “He did not create the world as tohu but formed it to be inhabited.”  Bohu is much less common; it’s found only three other places, in each of the three, it is paired with tohu.  (See Jer 4:23 for a clear reference to this first paragraph of Genesis; we’ll talk about it when we get to v. 3.)

The combined expression works something like “hodgepodge” or “mishmosh.” I was tempted to say “flotsam and jetsam.” But these expressions all leave me with the impression of a world that may be chaotic, but not one that is “formless.” For that, I tell my students, what you want to visualize is tofu. It is not nothing – but it has not yet become something.

In terms of the physics of the thing, there would seem to be two ways to take it.  One is that what’s being described here is something akin to the Greek notion of hyle, primordial matter that has not yet been given the various forms that make up the world we live in now. Some of the medieval commentators who were influenced by philosophical notions seem to have understood it as such.  Another way to look at it is that this is a state of ultimate entropy, an nth degree of randomness that requires to be put into order.

That process — the process of making distinctions and putting things into order — is, as we’ve said, crucial to this first, cosmic, story of creation. But before that process begins, in v. 3, we must see two other aspects of the primordial world. We’ll look at those on Tuesday and Thursday this week.