"with darkness over Deep" (Gen 1:2)

Reading through the story of creation

In Sunday’s post, we began to look at v. 2 of Genesis 1:

at the time the world was a tohu-bohu

וְהָאָ֗רֶץ הָיְתָ֥ה תֹ֨הוּ֙ וָבֹ֔הוּ

Now we’re going to continue with the next phrase in the verse:

with darkness over Deep

וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם

with darkness וְחֹ֖שֶׁךְ ve-ḥoshekh The second important background fact we must understand about the situation before creation began, after there being some sort of indeterminate, unformed material substance, is that it is dark.  Even if there were any distinct objects already in existence – which there aren’t – we could not see them.  Interestingly, it is not the lack of differentiation in the existing matter that is of primary importance according to this phrase, but the darkness.  Speaking in contemporary terms again, this is a world without energy.

Note: I have translated Hebrew וְ ve-, which students automatically translate as and, as the preposition “with.” Hebrew is notorious for linking short clauses with this conjunction, which becomes and over and over again in translations like the King James Version or the Hertz Chumash. English, of course, prefers to link clauses somewhat more intricately; moreover, וְ ve- has a wider range of meanings than English and. So expect to see various translations of it as we move forward.

over Deep עַל־פְּנֵ֣י תְה֑וֹם The Hebrew says more literally that there was darkness al-pnei “over the face” of Deep.  “Face” is simply a poetic metaphor for the surface, as we will see in the last phrase of this verse.  The word על al by itself can mean “on,” so the combination (which occurs almost 200 times in the Bible) seems to imply being “over” an extent of some kind, not just “on top of” some object.

The critical word here is tehom ‘Deep’.  Many Bible translations say “the deep,” as we might in English when describing the vast ocean that covers most of our planet, and tehom is related to words we know from older Semitic languages meaning “water” or “the ocean.”  But this is not ha-tehom ‘the’ deep, as “the sky” was ha-shamayim and “the earth” was ha-aretz.  It has no definite article.  It’s a proper noun, a name – like Marduk.

I chose that name deliberately because the Babylonian creation story we’ve already mentioned, the Enuma Elish, stars Marduk as the creator god.  But he does not simply say “let there be light” as God does in this creation story.  Instead, he must battle a primordial sea-goddess named Tiamat – a name that seems to be related to our word tehom.  In the Enuma Elish, Marduk wins the battle with Tiamat and slices her into two pieces, making one piece the ocean and the other the sky.

The Enuma Elish was written in a language called Akkadian, and so were the famous Amarna letters sent to King Tut’s father. The Amarna letters that were written in Canaan are in a dialect even closer to Hebrew than was used in the Akkadian homeland. Many cuneiform tablets have been found in archeological digs in Israel. So this literature was certainly known to some ancient Israelites, and no doubt to others from being retold orally.

You can read more of the Enuma Elish, in a translation by the Assyriologist W. G. Lambert, on the Etana (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near East Archives) website. It begins this way:

1~When the heavens above did not exist,
2~And earth beneath had not come into being—
3~There was Apsû, the first in order, their begetter,
4~And demiurge Tia-mat, who gave birth to them all

V. 1 of our Genesis story, like the Enuma Elish, begins when the heavens “did not exist” and the earth “had not come into being.” When our story opens with “darkness over Deep [tehom],” it hints to those who knew these earlier stories that creation is indeed the result of a battle that has already taken place, while leaving everyone else – including the Bible’s many readers during the centuries when the Babylonian stories were not known – none the wiser.

Genesis is not interested in telling us the story of creation in that way, but it does leave open the possibility that the ultimate tale of creation (if we could indeed know it) did involve such a battle of gods. Remember that the curtain rose on our story to reveal a world of tohu-bohu and a main character, God, already in place. In fact the creation story of Genesis 1 will allude to the idea of creation as the outcome of a battle again on Day Five.

The stories of a battle fought by God in order to create the world are referred to quite openly in biblical poetry, suggesting that such stories were well known to at least some Israelites.  Genesis 1, however, is intent on presenting God as alone when he created the world.  Are we seeing creation begin during the calm after the storm?  Referring to “darkness over of Deep” suggests that we are.

But wait! Where – and who – is Apsu? According to the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, apsu is a loanword in Akkadian from Sumerian AB.ZU, “subterranean waters.” The actual name of Tiamat is hinted at broadly in Gen 1:2, but Apsu, if he is indeed there, is hinted at much more subtly, in the “water” of the phrase we’ll look at on Thursday.

A note for those who are interested in the languages: Unlike Akkadian, Sumerian is not related to any known language, but some of its words did enter Akkadian and, via Akkadian, even into Hebrew. (You can learn more about Sumer and Akkad and the relationship between them in this post on my older Bible Guy blog.) One originally Sumerian word that is very well known to those who know Hebrew is הֵיכָל heikhal ‘palace, temple’. It comes from the Sumerian words E.GAL, meaning “big house.” If you’ve been to Jerusalem, you may well have walked past Heichal Shlomo, on King George St.