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:
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