Bereishit: Before the Beginning

This week we roll the Torah scroll back to the beginning, and read:

Bereishit, God created the heavens and the earth — and the earth had been tohu vavohu, and darkness over the face of tehom, and a ruach of Elohim was hovering over the face of the waters — then God said: “Light, be!” and light was. (Genesis/Bereishit 1:1-3)

Beginning

bereishit (בְּרֵאשִׁית) = in a beginning, at first, when first. (The prepositional prefix be- (בְּ) =in, at, among, through, by, when. Reishit (רֵאשִׁית) = (noun) a beginning, a first step, a starting point; (adjective) first-rate, choicest, best.)

Two possible accurate translations of Genesis 1:1 are “In a beginning, God created” or “When God first created”.

Although the old King James translation of the first word as “In the beginning” is no longer popular, it is also a reasonable possibility. Normally a prefix meaning “in the” would be ba (בַּ), not be- (בְּ). But reishit is an unusual word, in that it does not take a definite article even in contexts where the English translation would be “the beginning” or “the first step”. In 50 of the 51 times that reishit appears in the Hebrew Bible, there is no prefix indicating a definite article (“the”).¹ And the word bereishit appears four times in the book of Jeremiah in the phrase “at the beginning of the reign of”.²

Therefore, the translation “In the beginning, God created” is also accurate—and it has a different implication. “In the beginning” indicates that there was only one beginning. “In a beginning” indicates that this creation story describes only one beginning, and there might have been—or will be—others.³

What does God create in this verse of the bible?

… the  shamayim and the eretz … (Genesis 1:1)

shamayim (שָׁמַיִם) = heavens, skies.

eretz (אֶרֶץ) = land, earth.

Shamayim, always plural, refers to the visible dome above the horizon containing the sun, moon, stars, and clouds. Birds fly in the shamayim. The heavens are not called the abode of God until Deuteronomy 26:15.⁴

Eretz can refer to a specific land (such as “Eretz Israel”), or to all the land in the world. Eretz can also mean “Earth”—our world—but not dirt, which is adamah. In Genesis 1:1-2 God has not yet created land, so eretz can only mean Earth or the world.⁵

Yet what God creates on the first “day” is not the heavens and the earth, but light:

Then God said: “Light, be!” and light was. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and called the darkness night. And it was evening and it was morning, one day. (Genesis 1:3-5)

What does God create first: the heavens and the earth, or light? 20^th-century translator Everett Fox explained that “the shamayim and the eretz” is “probably a merism—an inclusive idiom meaning ‘everything’ or ‘everywhere’—such as Hamlet’s ‘There are more things in heaven and earth …’”

So Genesis 1:1 actually means one of the following:

1. In the beginning, God created the world—
2. In a beginning, God created the world—
3. When God first created the world—

Translation 1 implies that God created only one world, and this is it. There was a single moment when creation began; the moment when God created light.

Translations 2 and 3 leave the possibility open that our world is one of many that God has or will create. Other worlds may exist in a different time and/or space.

“There was a God before He created the world, who was perhaps involved in other things prior to choosing to turn His Divine attention to our homeland. … Genesis 1:1 is the biblical account of the commencement of our narrative journey, but not necessarily God’s.” (Dennis Shulman,)⁶

Translation 3 also opens the possibility that God’s creation of the world did not stop on the seventh “day”, but is ongoing.

“The Lord created the world in a state of beginning. The universe is always in an uncompleted state, in the form of its beginning. It is not like a vessel at which the master works to finish it; it requires continuous labor and renewal by creative forces. Should these cease for only a second, the universe would return to primeval chaos.” (Simcha Bunim Bonhardt)⁷

Tohu

You might have noticed that so far I have not referred to Genesis 1:2. This parenthetical but important verse is inserted between “When God first created the world” and “God said: Light, be! And light was.”

— and the eretz [Earth] had been tohu vavohu, and darkness over the face of tehom, and a ruach of Elohim was hovering over the face of the waters — (Genesis 1:2)

tohu (תֺהוּ)= emptiness, unreality; worthlessness, worthless people or things; chaos, shapelessness, undifferentiation.

vavohu (וָבֺהוּ) = “and the vohu”. The word vohu appears only three times in the bible,⁸ always as part of tohu vavohu. Therefore vavohu is probably an intensifier for tohu, and is often translated with an alliterative synonym, as in “void and vacant”, “chaos and confusion”, “a worthless waste”, “a hodge-podge”, or “a mish-mash”. Tohu vavohu could also mean “an insubstantial unreality”.

The word tohu appears in the Hebrew 20 times. Eleven of these occurrences use the word either as a synonym for “nothing”, or as a descriptor of an empty, depopulated desert.⁹ In six other places, tohu is a synonym for either “worthlessness” or “worthless people or things”.¹⁰ This leaves two occurrences of the word tohu that are harder to translate. One is the tohu vavohu in Genesis 1:2; the other is in second Isaiah.

The creator of the heavens, he is God,
          who formed the earth and made it.
          He established it.
He did not create tohu;
          For dwelling he shaped it. (Isaiah 45:18)

In other words, God created the world as an orderly place to live in; God did not create undifferentiated chaos.

One opinion in the commentary is that tohu is indeterminate matter that has the potential to become something definite.

“The first raw material was something entirely new. It is described as tohu to indicate that at that point it was merely something which had potential, the potential not yet having been converted to something actual.” (Sforno)¹¹

It seems that when God began to create the world in the book of Genesis, tohu already existed. That means God did not create the world ex nihilo, out of nothing, as many Jewish and Christian commentators have claimed from the first century C.E. onward. God had tohu, at least, as a raw material—though God may have previously created tohu vavohu, darkness, and tehom.

On the other hand, some commentators claim that these words describe what the universe was like before God created anything.

“At the beginning of creation, God encounters primordial material (Genesis 1:2) … The universe in its pristine state betrayed a disorganization and utter lack of order which God found intolerable and on which He felt compelled to impose order. … His dissatisfaction with the chaotic state of existence leads to the reordering, classifying, and distinguishing described in the primordial week of creation.”¹²

“This description raises two questions potentially troubling to monotheism. First, if God did not create the primeval entity, who did? And second, doesn’t the claim that there are elements of the universe that predated Creation diminish God’s omnipotence and sovereignty? … I believe that scripture would like us to understand that these materials were always there, coexistent with God.”¹³

Darkness and water

Tohu vavohu is not the only thing that already exists when God begins to create.

— and the earth was tohu vavohu, and darkness was over the face of tehom,and a ruach of God was hovering over the face of the waters— (Genesis 1:2)

tehom (תְהוֹם) = a place of deep water, i.e. a sea bed or an underground spring. The word is often translated as “deeps” or “abyss”.¹⁴

ruach (רוּחַ) = wind; spirit; mood or disposition. (Ruach is also one of several words that mean “breath”.)

In Genesis 1:2, either a divine wind is preparing to expose the land that lies underneath the water (as the east wind exposes the land under the Reed Sea in Exodus); or God’s spirit (or metaphorical breath) is hovering over the water while God decides what to do.

Are darkness and deep waters part of tohu vavohu? Or are they separate materials that were also present before God began to create the world? Classic commentators considered the original tohu as both dark and watery.

“Darkness and silence were before the world was made, and silence spoke and the darkness became visible.” (Pseudo-Philo)¹⁵

“This tohu vavohu is alternately referred to by the Torah as “water” … at this point God wanted to imbue this tohu vavohu with some quality, [some] useful meaning, hence God’s spirit moved above it in order to inspire such a change. When something assumes definitive, solid dimensions, it has become qualitatively superior to water, which slips through one’s fingers, cannot be held in one’s hand. This mass which has thickened out of a primordial murky liquid something is—the earth.” (Radak)¹⁶

Speech and separation

Yet the text in Genesis does not say that God turned tohu, darkness, or water into the items God creates over the course of six “days”.

When God first created the heavens and the earth—and the Earth was tohu vavohu, and darkness was over the face of deep water, and a ruach of God was hovering over the face of the waters—then God said: “Light, be!” and light was. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. And God called the light “day” and called the darkness “night”, and it was evening and it was morning: one day. (Genesis 1:1-5)

Tohu, darkness, and deep waters existed before God created light. But God creates light by speaking. And simply commanding light to exist makes it so—ex nihilo.

So on the first “day” of creation, the world includes both the darkness that pre-existed the beginning of creation, and the light that God creates ex nihilo. God separates light from the existing darkness—a separation in time, distinguishing day from night.

On the second day God speaks again, and creates a dome or vault that separates the waters into two areas, one below the dome and one above it. This is the first separation in space.

And God called the dome shamayim [heavens, skies]; and it was evening and it was morning, a second day.  (Genesis 1: 8)

When God speaks on the third day, the waters below the skies collect into one place and dry land appears.

And God called the dry land eretz [earth], and called the gathering of the waters: seas. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:10)

Thus God’s first creations in Genesis are light, sky, and land—as well as time and space.

Apparently God is dissatisfied with what already exists (tohu, darkness, and tehom), so God creates light using speech alone, then makes separations and sets boundaries in both time and space to change the pre-existing raw materials into the sky, the land, and the seas.

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Today someone writing about the creation of the world might start with the mysterious Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when a single point of something suddenly existed. Billions of years later, a floating cloud of interstellar gas (mostly hydrogen) and dust (microscopic particles made of other elements) collapsed into a solar nebula – a spinning, swirling disk of raw material. Gravity made this nebulous tohu vavohu—excuse me, gas and dust—coalesce in the center to form our sun—and light was. Clumps of gas and dust farther out in the solar nebula compressed into planets. One of them was our Earth. Both creation stories are amazing.

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1. The exception is the word lareishit (לָרֵאשִׁית) = “for the first [fruits]” (Nehemiah 12:44).
2. Jeremiah 26:1, 27:1, 28:1, and 49:34.
3. See my post Bereishit: A First-Rate Beginning.
4. The etymology of shamayim is uncertain. It may be related to an Akkadian word shamu, meaning “lofty”. If there was once an equivalent Hebrew root word shamah, the plural would be shamayim, i.e. “lofty places”. On the other hand, shamayim may be the Hebrew noun mayim (מַיִם), which means “waters”, with a prefix sh- (שְׁ) meaning “that is”. God makes the shamayim in Genesis 1:6-8 by separating the waters above from the waters below.
5. According to modern scholars, Genesis 1:1-2:4 was written in the 6^th century B.C.E. The first recorded proposal that our world is a sphere was made in the 5^th century B.C.E. by Pythagorean astronomers. So the author(s) of Genesis chapter 1 would not imagine Earth as a sphere. They might use eretz to refer to our world, but not to a planet Earth.
6. Dennis Shulman, The Genius of Genesis, iUniverse Inc., 2003, p. 25.
7. Simcha Bunim Bonhardt, 1765-1827, translated in www.sefaria.org.
8. Genesis 1:2, Isaiah 24:10, 34:11; Jeremiah 4:23.
9. Deuteronomy 32:10; Isaiah 29:21, 40:17, 40:23, 41:29; Jeremiah 4:23; Psalm 107:40, Job 6:18, 12:24, 26:7.
10. 1 Sam 12:21 (twice); Isaiah 44:9, 45:19, 49:4, 59:4.
11. Ovadiah Sforno, 16^th century, translation in www.sefaria.org.
12. James A. Diamond, “Creating Order from Tohu and Bohu”, www.thetorah.com.
13. Israel Knohl, The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 2003, p. 12.
14. The word tehom occurs 35 times in the Hebrew Bible. The only time tehom contains fire instead of water is in Amos 7:4.
15. Pseudo-Philo, circa 70-150 C.E., translation in www.sefaria.org.
16. Radak (an acronym for Rabbi David Kimchi, 1160–1235), translation in www.sefaria.org.