Genesis 1:2


Genesis 1:2 is the second verse of Book of Genesis and of the Genesis creation narrative. It is a part of the Torah portion Bereshit.

Text

Masoretic Text

Transliteration of Masoretic Text

  1. Ve: "and"
  2. ha’aretz: "the earth"
  3. hayeta: "was", pa'al construction past tense third person feminine singular
  4. tohu vaḇohu: difficult to translate, but often rendered as "formless and void"
  5. vechoshekh: "and darkness"
  6. ‘al-pene: " over face", pənê being a plural construct state of the Hebrew word for face
  7. tehom: a mythological or cosmological concept often translated as "the Deep"
  8. veruach: "and ruach", a difficult term translated as "spirit" or "wind"
  9. Elohim: the generic Hebrew term for God or gods
  10. merachephet: often translated as "hovered/was hovering". The word is ריחף in pi'el participle form prefixed with one letter prefix "m-".
  11. ‘al-pene hammayim: "over face of the waters".

Analysis

Genesis 1:2 presents an initial condition of creation - namely, that it is tohu wa-bohu, formless and void. This serves to introduce the rest of the chapter, which describes a process of forming and filling. That is, on the first three days the heavens, the sky and the land is formed, and they are filled on days four to six by luminaries, birds and fish, and animals and man respectively.
Before God begins to create, the world is ' : the word ' by itself means "emptiness, futility"; it is used to describe the desert wilderness. ' has no known meaning and was apparently coined to rhyme with and reinforce '. It appears again in Jeremiah 4:23, where Jeremiah warns Israel that rebellion against God will lead to the return of darkness and chaos, "as if the earth had been 'uncreated'." ', chaos, is the condition that ', ordering, remedies.
Darkness and "Deep" are two of the three elements of the chaos represented in '. In the Enûma Eliš, the Deep is personified as the goddess Tiamat, the enemy of Marduk; here it is the formless body of primeval water surrounding the habitable world, later to be released during the Deluge, when "all the fountains of the great deep burst forth" from the waters beneath the earth and from the "windows" of the sky. William Dumbrell argues that the reference to the "deep" in this verse "alludes to the detail of the ancient Near Eastern cosmologies" in which "a general threat to order comes from the unruly and chaotic sea, which is finally tamed by a warrior god". Dumbrell goes on to suggest that this verse "reflects something of the chaos/order struggle characteristic of ancient cosmologies". However, David Toshio Tsumura argues that the term ' is simply a common noun referring to underground water, and disputes any connection between the term and chaos.
The "Spirit of God" hovering over the waters in some translations comes from the Hebrew phrase ', which has alternately been interpreted as a "great wind". Victor P. Hamilton decides, somewhat tentatively, for "spirit of God" but notes that this does not necessarily refer to the "Holy Spirit" of Christian theology. Rûach has the meanings "wind, spirit, breath," and ' can mean "great" as well as "god". The which moves over the Deep may therefore mean the "wind/breath of God", or God's "spirit", a concept which is somewhat vague in the Hebrew bible, or simply a great storm-wind.