This page was originally published in December 2016.
Here’s how the KJV reads Genesis 1:2 —
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness (was) upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Here’s how I read the verse:
. . . the land was inchoate and [synonym for inchoate], with darkness on the surface of the primeval ocean, and God’s spirit (?) hovering (?) over the surface of the water . . .
Let’s work through some of the issues involved.
First, I’m reading hʾrṣ as the land, as opposed to the sky or the water, the other two elements of our three-tiered universe as pictured in Genesis. I don’t have a strong case to make for land as opposed to earth, I just prefer it because I see this as referring to the fact that the land had not yet been brought up and separated from the waters. In the primeval state of the universe, Genesis pictures everything as covered by water. The creation story begins then, with God creating a separate space where human and animal life can grow. But if someone wanted to say, the earth here, I wouldn’t be confident that they’re wrong.
The next interesting word is thw, which you may pronounce as TO-hu. This little word doesn’t quite mean ‘without shape,’ as the KJV suggests. If you survey the nineteen verses where it appears, its various contexts suggests something along the lines of waste, wasteland, something unreal, something nonexistent, something false, something empty. In this case, the issue at hand is that the land is either nonexistent at this point, or else it is buried underwater. I chose inchoate, which seems to cover the possibilities decently.
Trickier still is bhw, (BO-hu) which is void in the KJV and which I could not bring myself to translate into English. It’s not laziness (I think) that caused me to leave it untranslated. It’s that it’s only used three times in the entire Bible, without enough contextual hints for me to distinguish it from thw. Outside of this verse, it is used in Jeremiah 4:23 and Isaiah 34:11. In Jeremiah, it is simply used to echo the language of Genesis 1. In Genesis 1, the land is thw and bhw prior to God’s creative acts; in Jeremiah 4:23, the land becomes thw and bhw due to God’s destructive acts — destruction being the opposite of creation. In Isaiah 34:11, a verse which uses imagery along the same lines has God bringing anti-creative destruction upon Edom, over which he stretches the line of thw and the stones of bhw. Unfortunately, in all three of these verses, it is impossible to distinguish the meaning of bhw from thw.
If we had more examples of bhw in biblical Hebrew we could, but we don’t, so we can’t. Or at least I can’t. At the very least, I don’t think we can say that the word specifically means void in the sense of empty. Perhaps during the time period when the Hebrew Bible was written, thw and bhw was simply a stock phrase, like the English phrase helter-skelter. If you say that something is helter-skelter, you are not making two distinct claims: that it is both helter and skelter.
Perhaps the phrase thw wbhw in Hebrew similarly makes only a single claim, and should be translated as a single phrase.
Where the KJV has face, I use surface, simply because this seems to me to be better contemporary English. The Hebrew pny can mean surface of or face of, depending on context. Since in the modern English sense of the term water doesn’t have a face, I chose surface. Face would possibly anthropomorphize the water to modern English readers, and Genesis 1 is a strikingly non-anthropomorphic text when it comes to the elements of creation.
Where the KJV translates deep, the Hebrew has thwm, which you may pronounce as te-HOM. In other Ancient Near Eastern creation tales, there is a character named Tiamat, a goddess of the sea who is involved in the process of creation. Though etymologically related, the thwm of Genesis is unlike Tiamat, in that it is not anthropomorphized. However, compare Psalm 77:16: Waters saw you, O God, waters saw you. They were afraid; and tehomot [plural of tehom] trembled.
Though thwm is not treated as an acting or speaking character in Genesis, still the idea in what follows will be that thwm is restrained through the creation of land, and kept underneath. When the flood occurs later in Genesis, the fountains of thwm will be broken up and, in a reversal of the creation story, the world will be covered once again in water, making it unsuitable for life. Similarly, in Genesis 1 the sky is created to hold back the waters above, making life possible by restraining them. When the flood arrived, holes in the sky will allow the water to come rushing down to destroy all life.
As to the rwḥ (RU-aḥ) of God, it is hard to say exactly what the author of Genesis had in mind. In Hebrew, as with the Greek pneuma, this word can be used either for spirit (and God sends spirits to do various things in the Hebrew Bible) or as a wind (God also sends wind in the Bible). Under the influence of Trinitarian theology, it would be easy to read the phrase as a capitalized “Spirit of God.” However, the various ideas associated with Trinitarian thought are not found in the Hebrew Bible, so it is anochronistic to read “the Second Person of the Trinity” here for God’s rwḥ.
However, I’m not completely sure how we should take this. Perhaps it is God’s own spirit spoken of as being over the waters; perhaps it is a spirit sent by God; perhaps it is even a wind from God. I’ve even heard an interpretation that ‘God’ is used here as an adjective for ‘mighty,’ and we should read the phrase ‘wind of God’ as meaning ‘a mighty wind.’ I don’t know how to solve this one.
In addition to the question of what the rwḥ is, there’s also the question of what the rwḥ is doing. According to Genesis it is mrḥpt (me-ra-ḤE-fet), that is, rḥp–_ing above the water. The verb is rare, and is found in the _piel conjugation only here and in Deuteronomy 32:11, where an eagle yrḥp, that is, _rḥp-_s, over its young. This is enough to inspire some guesses: brooding, hovering, fluttering, and the like, but not quite enough to narrow the verb down.
There is also a rḥp verb in Jeremiah 23:9, but it is a qal verb. Even if this verb is somehow related in meaning to our piel rḥp, this verse may introduce more confusion, because in Jeremiah it is the prophets bones that are _rḥp-_ing (trembling?) in response to Yahweh and his holiness.
In addition to the possibilities just mentioned, I have also seen the proposal that ‘God’s wind swept over the waters’ (CEB). On page 75 of this book, we find the following unusual proposal: “the spirit-storm of God had stood in the air like an eagle opposite the waters.” This last quote is from E. Axel Knauf’s chapter “Why ‘Joshua’?”, a contribution to SBL’s Deuteronomy-Kings as Emerging Authoritative Books: A Conversation. That book, in turn, is part of a larger generous project to which publishes peer-reviewed scholarly monographs on the Bible and related literature online. You can find the whole series here.