Tohu wa Bohu

Rob and I have been reading through the book "In the Beginning," by Henri Blocher. The book works through several interpretations of the first few chapters of the book of Genesis, giving various reasons why one interpretation makes more sense than another. It's been an interesting read so far, though it does get a bit academic (in the big words, long sentences, complicated ideas sense of the term). It was in Blocher's book that I first came across the terms tohu and bohu. A search online, however, has revealed that tohuwabohu (or variations on that transliteration) are common in many European languages (an interesting reflection upon the Jewish influence upon Europe despite the Europeans many attempts to eradicate that influence).

Tohu means formlessness, chaos, confusion.
Bohu is generally only found right next to Tohu and is generally taken to mean empty or void.

Pic from RuneSoup with thanks to Terry Pratchett

Tohu and bohu show up in Genesis 1:2. "And the earth was without form, and void..." (King James Version) "Now the earth was formless and empty..." (New International Version) "The earth was unformed and void..." (Complete Jewish Bible).

I find the words, at the very beginning of the creation story, to be a total conundrum. Does "formless and void" have substance? Can you see it? Feel it? Experience it? And if everything is unformed and empty, then how is it that there's water in the second half of that verse? "... and the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water." (CJB) Doesn't that imply that there was a watery part and a non-watery part such that God's spirit could hover in the one and over the other? And if that's the case, doesn't that indicate some pattern or "form" to things?

And what is the tohu and the bohu doing there? Is it the stuff, the medium, that God used to create everything out of? If so, then when he spoke did that shape the tohuwabohu? Or did speaking create things from nothing? And where did the tohuwabohu come from in the first place?

If you were sitting down to write a story, and you thought it was a really important story that you wanted people to grasp, don't you think you'd make it more understandable than this second verse of Genesis? Even the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, makes more sense in the beginning than this second verse of Genesis 1. The Enuma Elish starts like this:

"When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamut, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being..." - sacred-texts.com

They've got chaos in there, and earth and water. There's a lot of similarities. But the story makes sense! You know what's going on. There are only so many ways you can interpret "And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name." But calling something formless and void when there was nothing there yet except that there was something there and it wasn't formless and if it was there then it wasn't void either.... 

All I can say is at least it rhymes. You've gotta admit, that's a nice touch. 

If, in reading through Blocher's book, I reach a higher level of enlightenment besides the joy of rhyming, I'll let you know.