Formless and empty?
"The earth was formless and empty..." Whenever I read Gen. 1:2, I picture black, cold, dark empty vacuum of space. But I wonder if that's what the ancient Hebrews would have pictured.
The Hebrew words here are "תהו ובהו" (pronounced: tohu vavohu) According to the Koehler & Baumgartner, this is an "example of hendiadys (Speiser Gen. 5); it signifies the terrible, eerie, deserted wilderness..."
I wonder (and I'm under no pretense that I'm the first to wonder this) how closely תהו (tohu) might be related to תהום (tahom) which comes from the Akkadian tiham(at).
According to the Akkadian creation story "Enuma Elish" the goddess Tiamat, who lives in the ocean, is deafeted by Marduk, and Marduk creates the world by tearing her slain body in half, her top half becoming the sky, and her bottom half becoming the sea. In the Bible, God creates the world by dividing the watery chaos (tohu) into sea and sky. I'm not saying that the Bible is a rewritten account of the Enuma Elish. (In fact, Koehler & Baumgartner spend a paragraph or so citing works that show that the Hebrew tahom is distinct from the Akkadian Tiamat) I'm just wondering if ancient Hebrew cosmology would have pictured the very beginning (this tohu vavohu) as some kind of dark watery sea, and not necessarily as the black vacuum of empty space that I imagine when I read this passage.
Created almost 3 years ago
