Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
Formless and void
The starting point in verse 2 is tohu and bohu. Whether that means shapeless matter or a world not yet working changes what the days are doing.
Genesis 1:2, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what was missing in verse 2? The house was empty. Empty of furniture, empty of people, or not finished enough to live in yet? Each reading is natural and the sentence does not choose. Translators have mostly picked shapeless. Others read the Hebrew as not yet working. The words themselves carry more than one of those.
Translations agree to a remarkable degree: formless and void, without form and void, formless and empty. That agreement can hide the fact that the meaning of tohu is a study in itself.
Tohu occurs twenty times. It describes howling wilderness, idols that accomplish nothing, trackless waste, empty arguments, the worthlessness of the nations, and the desolation of Jeremiah 4:23 where the light is gone, there are no people and the towns are in ruins. Bohu occurs only three times, always with tohu. David Tsumura, after a full analysis, translates tohu as "unproductive." Verse 2 also already has material in it: the waters of the deep.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Lennox reads the movement of the chapter as starting from a world without form and void and shaping and filling it step by step until it is fit for creatures who bear God's image. He ties this to Isaiah's statement that God did not create the world empty but formed it to be inhabited: emptiness was the first stage, not the last.
Walton argues nothing in the twenty uses of tohu concerns material form. The contexts point to what is nonfunctional and unproductive. So Genesis 1 begins with no functions rather than with no matter, which matches ancient Near Eastern accounts that describe the time before creation by what is missing: no productivity, no order, no temple. He reads "it was good" the same way, as functioning properly, on the strength of Genesis 2:18, where "not good" plainly means not yet complete.
The gap theory read verse 2 as a fall into ruin, "the earth became formless." Walton reports that the Hebrew will not bear "became" and that the theory has largely disappeared.
The two poles are closer here than anywhere else. Both read verse 2 as a world not yet fit for its purpose. The difference is whether shaping and filling are material acts (Lennox) or the assigning of roles in an ordered system (Walton).
Not chaos as a rival god. Lennox, citing Kitchen, notes that the Hebrew word for the deep, tehom, means deep or abyss. It is not the goddess Tiamat of the Babylonian epic.
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), proposition 4, Table 2
- David Tsumura, Creation and Destruction (Eisenbrauns, 2005), as cited by Walton
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 3 and appendix A
