The Earth was what??? In this article I will first share a list of translations, then I will share my translation and unique interpretation.
Translations
Latin Versions and Derivatives:
inanis et vacua (Vulgate)
void and empty (Douay Rheims)
empty and unoccupied (CPDV)
idel ond æmti (AElfric, Old Anglo-Saxon)
idol and void (Wycliffe)
Greek Versions and Derivatives:
aoratoj kai akatskeuastoj --- invisible and unformed (LXX w/ literal Eng trans.)
kenwma kai ouqen --- empty and nothing (Aquila)
qen kai ouqen --- nothing and nothing (Theodotion)
argon kai adiakriton --- unproductive and indistinguishable (Symmachus)
unsightly and unfinished (Brenton's English Septuagint)
Hebrew Derivatives:
chaos and vacancy (Hebrew Interlinear CHES 2.0 Version)
formless and void (NASB)
formless void (NJB)
formless wasteland (NAB Vatican Version)
without shape and empty (NET)
waste and void (Young's Literal)
without form and void (KJV & RSV)
formless and empty (WEB)
Foreign Language Bibles:
desordenada y vacia (Spanish, La Santa Biblia)
vide et deserte (French, La Sainte Bible)
afluniaidd a gwag (Welsh Bible)
Scholars:
astonishingly empty (Rashi)
completely empty (Rashbam)
empty waste (Ibn Ezra)
completely prime matter (Ramban)
desert waste (Claude Westermann)
haltos et gestaltos (Gorg)
contingent potentiality in a potentiality of being (Fabre d'Olivet)
hodgepodge (Jack Sasson)
mish-mash (William P. Brown suggestion)
welter and waste (Robert Alter)
chaos and watery chaos (Albright)
uninhabitable and unproductive (absence of fauna and flora: Roberto Ouro)
desert-like and empty or desolate and uninhabited (Tsumura)
Scholarly Notes:
"barrenness of the earth before anything grew on it" (N.H. Tur Sinai)
"a state of confused matter ... with no differentiation or organization" (U. Cassuto)
Targum Neof according to G. Anderson: "This text first reproduces the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew pair tohu wabohu and then interprets them. The first term, tohu, is interpreted to mean absence of faunal life; the second term, bohu, the absence of floral life." (from 'The Interpretation of Genesis 1 in the Targums', CBQ, 1990 p. 23)
My Translation:
astonishing-desert
Some Remarks on Translations
I am in strong opposition to translation rendering 'formless' or 'without form' or 'shapeless' or 'without shape'. These translations are oxymora. They are influenced by outmoded Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophies. They are fodder for troubled philosophers and opium induced drunks. The subject of the verse, the Earth, is a noun of reality. It is an object, an astronomical object. By definition it has form or shape. The Earth had a form long before the main light-event. In supernatural vision, the prophet saw at an object that has a form. In this same vein I am opposed to the translations which include 'invisible' or 'nothing' or 'void'. Again the prophet saw an astronomical object so these would be non-nonsensical.
I am also opposed to the philosophical translations that suggest this verse refers to prime matter or any sort of philosophical translation. Sacred authors and prophets do not fop around with philosophy. A prime matter translation and interpretation destroys the context. What is prime matter? Define prime matter ________. Do you really think the ancient Hebrew had any notion of prime matter or saw prime matter? Does prime matter have a surface of waters?
I am also strongly opposed to the 'chaos' or 'Chaoskampf" translations and interpretations. These associate Genesis 1 with the Ancient Near Eastern myths. They read a struggle against evil into the Text. The holy author inspired by the Holy Spirit himself could not possibly be influenced by pagan creation myths.
And I am against the idea that this verse directly refers to Hell or fallen angels. No stretch of the imagination could possibly see these in this verse since the Earth is described with surface features.
I do tend to favor the abiotic translations and interpretations. The Earth that the sacred author describes is obviously without living entities whether fauna or flora or microorganisms. These are narrated as coming into form within the light-event. But this line of thought doesn't resolve the mystique of the word. What exactly did the sacred author see and then describe? How can one reconcile the notions of desert, desolation, aridity, idleness, emptiness, etc with that of a water covered surface? Can one make sense of this seeming contradiction? I think one can.
Earth was and still is a very old inactive dark star or rogue planet that naturally transitioned for countless years prior to the main event prophetically recorded in Genesis 1. Planets are cooling and compressing stars with vast histories. The object that the prophet saw and later described was what is perhaps what we could call an 'ice planet' or 'ice world'. The Earth was slumbering in cold interstellar space away from newer active stars. She was not far from the newer Sun and yet not yet orbiting the Sun. Her surface was icy H20 and volatiles with ancient subsurface liquid oceans (or abysses). The subsurface abysses were heated by her hot core that stimulated mantle and crust. Like Antarctica she was dry and arid yet still had an immense water supply. Her surface was idle and barren. The Spirit was about to stimulate her surface in the light-event. But upon first impression, the prophet was mystified by what he saw. This is what led him to trace and utter the Hebrew word wrapped in the mystique of the ages:
tōhû wābōhû
A Tōhû wābōhû Thought Experiment
Imagine you are an inhabitant of the Middle East. You live about four thousand years ago. You've never seen an image captured by the space crafts in your life. But you have had the fortune of travelling all around the Middle East. You are familiar with all sorts of terrain. You've seen the lush pastures and vines of the Fertile Crescent but you have also been to the Arabian Peninsula and explored the edges of the Arabian Desert. You've seen the dread dunes of the Rub' al Khali. Maybe you've even seen or heard of the white deserts of Egypt. But your heart is in the Holy Land. You are a Hebrew. You speak a primitive mode of the Hebrew tongue and of course you love your God who led you out of Egypt.
One night you go to sleep. While asleep instead of dreaming a dream of fragmented memories you experience a vivid movie in which you seem to be a part of!!! The first frame of the movie appears as something like this:
the Jovian Moon Ganymede
What would be your first impression? How would you first describe this object in your own tongue and in accord with your own experiences? Perhaps it would remind you something like the Moon, yet given your location and time is there even a word to describe something like this? What would you write about it?
If you have read some of this blog you know I am biased toward a prophetic interpretation of Genesis 1. I assume the sacred author had a vision, of course stimulated by God. Gen 1:2 is his basic description of the first frame of his prophetic 3D movie. Either in retrospect or while experiencing the movie he realized that the object he was looking at was Earth. I assume at least in the beginning of his vision on the first Divine Day, he saw Earth from a bird's eye view and described what he saw.
I don't want anyone to take the above image too literally. I chose Ganymede as a model for the thought experiment. Ganymede is a good model since it has little or no atmosphere as well as a surface of icy H2O and silicate rock. It is also thought that a salt water ocean exists under the surface layers of ice water. Plus Ganymede is perhaps an old dark star like Earth. Maybe Ganymede is something like the Earth that the sacred author first saw in his prophetic movie. He may have had a closer view brought into focus as the vision unfolded. Recall of the God induced vision led him to pen the famous tōhû wābōhû description.
My interpretive theory for the tōhû wābōhû concept is fairly simple. The Earth that the sacred author saw reminded him of a desert or wasteland. Only for him this was no ordinary desert terrain. For him deserts were regions of land with boundaries relating them to other terrains. But the wasteland that the Genesis 1 prophet saw had no boundaries other than the boundary of the entire object facing him. The entire face appeared bare, dry, without rain (no atmosphere), lifeless, inactive, uninhabited, and so on and so forth. And so he conceptualized an ultimate wasteland, a wasteland to end all wastelands, a strange wasteland. To him the Earth that he saw was a surreal desert, a super-desert, since he had no concept of an entire planetary surface barren before his eyes, perhaps excepting the Moon, but even in comparison to the Moon this was even vivid and strange. And of course he understood the difference between the Earth and Moon.
The ancient Hebrew has a manner of repeating a word so as to denote intensity or emphasis. An example of this is taken from Genesis 3:16. God uses the word rabah twice in succession to denote intensity:
Increasing I increase your labor pains, etc.
Word repetitions or so called 'figures of repetition' are not exclusive to ancient Hebrew tongue, they are common to many languages. In fact there is a catalog of word repetitions in Greek. Figures of repetition are employed to stimulate emphasis, clarity, amplification or emotions. The Genesis 1 author did something similar only he got a little creative. He provokingly added a manner of mystique to his amplifier by changing the first letter and connecting via the Hebrew letter 'waw'.
Tohu can refer to a desert or a wasteland (see Tsumura: The Earth and Waters in Genesis 1 & 2: A Linguistic Investigation). The connected word bohu is a spontaneous intensifier of the word tohu. Because of the strangeness of the object recalled from the vision the sacred author decided to invent the new word bohu so as to intensify and even mystify the referent of tohu. Instead of simply duplicating tohu so as to intensify, he decided to get a little creative and may I say stylish, by changing a letter and connecting via the waw letter. So instead of tohu tohu we are given tōhû wābōhû. The modified intensifier that is tōhû wābōhû used only two other times in all of extant literature (beyond Sacred Scripture).
This word discloses a mystic experience. One can almost feel the emotion evoked from the very word he invented. What he saw was wondrous and momentous. And so it is my theory that the sacred author invented the word in response to his prophetic vision. The word is later adopted by Jeremiah and Isaiah for use in their prophecies. Tōhû wābōhû or tohu and bohu paralleled in the same verse is exclusively used in Hebrew Prophecies. It is a prophetic word.
The referent of tohu wa-bohu is the whole surface of the ancient Earth. In the 'structure' of the second verse, Earth and tohu wabohu have no parallel whereas waters is paralleled to abyss, and darkness is paralleled with Spirit of God.
And when Earth was an astonishing-desert, and darkness over --- a face of abyss, and the Spirit of God oscillating over --- a face of waters.Tohu wabohu is a description of the entire object facing the sacred author in the prophetic movie. The Earth first appeared to be a desert world. The sacred author could have simply stated: And when Earth was an astonishing-desert. Tōhû wābōhû is the sacred author's name of the object we call Earth which grammatically speaking is the subject Earth of this sentence. It is the head descriptor or main descriptor of the Earth. The paralleled second and third clauses: "Darkness over a face of abyss and the Spirit of God oscillating over the face of the waters" modify and add additional information to the main descriptive word: tōhû wābōhû and of course the main subject Earth.
I translate tohu wabohu as astonishing-desert or astonishing-wasteland in honor of Rashi's idea:
The word תֹהוּ is an expression of astonishment and desolation that a person wonders and is astonished at the emptiness therein. (Rashi Commentaries)Rashi's idea fits in with my prophetic assumption. The sacred author was astonished by what he saw. The Hebrew word tōhû wābōhû has wrapped up in it all the excitement and strangeness of seeing an object that has never been seen before. This is why it is a unique wonder of a word. I think Rashi has a good attitude toward this word. In the midst of all the solemnity and gravity read into this story I suggest there was a little playfulness and creativity happening in the mind of this Middle Eastern child of God when he wrote. This suggestion fits the context. The miraculous transformation of the Earth described in this story is a joyful occasion. It must have been for a prophet an elating as well as majestic experience to see it happen in a prophetic state. He even experienced the satisfaction of God described in "And God saw that is was good!" So instead of going with desert wasteland, I went with astonishing-desert or astonishing-wasteland. Other ideas could be ultimate-desert or super desert.
These translation are concrete and I prefer it this way. They offer the reader an opportunity to visualize the setting. But there is a problem with this translation and interpretation. Scholar R. Gilboa raises the issue:
Suggestions for tohu as ‘desert’ (a geographical term often used for arid and uninhabited land OED) are implausible even impossible since we are told that everything is covered with waters. (p. 242, Intercourses in the Book of Genesis)Gilboa seems to be biased toward a mythical chaos interpretation but this is a reasonable point. We have a bit of an enigma here. I would answer his valid objection by stating the ancient Earth could have been thought of a desert while covered with waters. This is what everyone should want to know. How is this possible? What was the Earth when the Spirit was sent forth so as to stimulate it? The sacred author knew that there was a water supply on the Earth's surface and under the surface. He saw what he figured were waters erupt from the surface, react, and wrap around into the the first essential modern atmosphere. Then he saw that God moved the Earth close to the Sun so as to receive her light.
But before these courses of events happened the Earth was moving between stars. She was located far enough away from younger active stars so that her surface waters were not stimulated to liquid. Her surface was 'flooded' over with waters, but the waters were perhaps frozen. And maybe the waters in her subsurface remained liquid via the stimulation of her hot core. But on the outside she was an idle ice world. An ice world can be thought of and described as a desert or a wasteland especially to an ancient Middle Easterner who has never seen one before!
Now you may ask what is the Earth? What was her history prior to the Divine phenomena recorded in Genesis 1? How did she get her water supply? I've already said many times in previous articles that I hold to the assumption that the Earth is an old dark star or rogue planet. I'm not a follower of the solar nebular hypothesis and the Big-Bang with its time constraint. I think the Earth naturally transitioned to her long black dwarf phase from a young active phase such as our Sun. She is supposed to have begun as a star magnitudes larger than our Sun. She was fit to fuse and compress a sold iron core. Prior to her stimulation and transfiguration with God she cooled to a phase where she may have synthesized H & O to H2O at her outer layers not to mention many other crystals, chemicals, compounds and so on. Or she may have assimilated H2O by swinging through dense interstellar medium in her galactic rotation or even by crossing paths with other stars such as TW Hydrae which has an abundant water supply in its formation disk. And like I said before regardless of what I think about the Earth prior to the main event in Genesis it is clearly described as an astronomical object with surface features as we will further see. So the only other choices we have other than the above is
1. God simply created this astronomical object ex nihilo which He could have done but did not need to since he had gazillions of rogue planets to choose from
2. It was a planet formed in a primeval nebula of another star not our Sun and got thrown out of orbit, wandering through interstellar space like a rogue.
But I think planets could very well be old cool stars. Some of these are captured or guided into orbit of newer active stars via their heliospheres. Once they are guided in they swing around the mother star by the fundamental subatomic object connecting as well as constituting all the atoms of the Universe. But our planet was not captured. It was placed in orbit around the Sun by God on the fourth Divine day in the course it's transfiguration that God initiated perhaps just beyond the Sun's heliosphere.
The beauty of the story is that our history began with God and Heaven and the Earth, alone beyond the Sun's influence. Everything about the Earth as it now is: is unique. The Earth is elect, meaning God chose it out of gazillions. He made a connection with it by emitting the Spirit, and he renewed her face!
Tōhû wābōhû serves as a mystic first description of Earth as the sacred author saw her prior to the miraculous light event enacted by God via the missive Spirit.
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