"and a God-wind" (Gen 1:2)
Reading through the story of creation
This week, we’ve been reading v. 2 of Genesis 1, the verse that describes when things were like “When God began to create the sky and the earth” (v. 1):
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׃
There is only one verb in this verse, the one that tells us the world already was a tohu-bohu when the story begins. “And” (say two more clauses) there was darkness and one more thing. Of the five more words we have yet to read in this verse, two of them combine into a most unusual phrase that will occupy our time today: ruaḥ-elohim. (An ḥ with a dot under it indicates a kind of guttural or rough breathing sound, more or less like the ch in the name of J. S. Bach.)
and a God-wind וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים This word ruaḥ presents a problem that we don’t quite have in English. It most certainly can refer to a wind (it is paired with “rain” in 2 Kgs 3:17), and it also can most certainly refer to what we call in English a “spirit,” that is, something animated and self-aware that moves through the air purposefully (like the “spirit” that comes forward to stand before the Lord in 1 Kgs 22:21).
In addition, though you remember from our previous discussion that elohim can certainly mean “God,” most scholars think it can also be used in Biblical Hebrew as an intensifier, in something of the same way that people nowadays have started referring to “biblical rain” or “biblical losses,” in either case meaning “way out of proportion to what we expected.”
That suggests three possible English translations of the phrase ruaḥ-elohim:
(1) a ferocious wind;
(2) a divine wind;
(3) the spirit of God.
We saw something of the same uncertainty when we were looking at the word shamayim and trying to decide whether it should be translated “sky” or “Heaven.” But with our new phrase we see the difference between translating the Bible and understanding it. Which of those 3 English possibilities were meant by the Hebrew words ruaḥ-elohim? Do they mean a wind or a spirit? Did God employ this wind? Or was it perhaps (in some incomprehensible way) actually an aspect of God?
The Hebrew writer, of course, did not consider these questions. He did not mean “a ferocious wind” or “a divine wind” or “the spirit of God,” he meant ruaḥ-elohim — and that is what he said. I’m reluctant to use the word “impossible,” but it certainly seems extremely difficult to find an English phrase that could convey all three meanings at once. But the Hebrew phrase seems to embody them all as a single package.
It occurs 15 other times in the Bible, in a usage that is (comparatively) simpler, to describe someone who is “possessed” by a spirit. Four times in the Bible, this is actually an evil spirit. Yet it is still called a ruaḥ-elohim, suggesting that it came from the divine realm. This is most certainly a slippery expression – and Gen 1:2 is presenting us with a slippery situation.
We have already talked about the Enuma Elish and how “Deep” of v. 2 seems to be an allusion to Tiamat of that story. But there were other creation stories in the ancient Near East, some closer to home. A story from the Phoenicians along the Mediterranean coast is described (in the Greek discussion from the 2nd century CE that is all we have of it) this way:
He [the writer of the text being described] posits as the source of all things a dark and windy air or a gust of dark air and a muddy and gloomy chaos. These things were limitless and, for ages, had no boundary.1
Can our story be alluding to this as well? It most certainly can. The resemblance to our situation is clear: there is darkness, wind, and chaos. Don’t get me wrong: Genesis is not quoting the Phoenician story or the Enuma Elish either. The author of Genesis knew stories of this kind – not necessarily in precisely the form we know them today – and was aware that Israelites readers might have similar notions about how the world was created.
The Phoenician story is driven by sexual desire; the Mesopotamian one is driven by violence. Both those things are completely absent from Genesis 1. (Fear not, they will show up soon enough.) The allusions to them are meant, I believe, to let sophisticated readers know that there might be more to the story than is told here.
We’ll finish v. 2 on Sunday.
This translation is taken from Guy Darshan, “Ruah Elohim in Genesis 1:2 in the Light of Phoenician Cosmogonies: A Tradition’s History,” Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 45/2 (2019), pp. 51-78, at 54.