Genesis: Formless, Void, Deep

Here we are.

To the best of my ability I’ve attempted, in the last twenty-five posts, to create a primer for this moment. Beginning with the importance of the image of the shepherd in the ancient world to the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cosmogonies which preceded the ancient Hebrews, to how various scientific disciplines have found false conflict with religious texts and an attempt to introduce some philosophical and theological vocabulary. The truth is, I barely scratched the surface. There is too much. It is too big. What I do believe I was successful with is allowing the reader to see where my interpretation is coming from, the background that I see as relevant and which plays a constitutive role in how I read these texts.

Of course, my reading of these ancient and sophisticated texts is only one of millions and if you put all of them

together we would still be lacking — something about all the books in the world. With this in mind, I beg your pardon for inevitable repetitions. Further, if you read the About this Project section you will know that I intend to jump around quite a bit. Peter Manchester’s backwards looking methodology is, in my opinion, the best way to contend with these texts as it takes into account our modern perspective rather than trying to work around it. For this reason there is always backwards looking at these texts and the fluidity of which we will move back and forth can get complicated — for the author as well as the reader. I am glad you are coming along with me for this and I genuinely hope you find something of value here. If you have lingering questions please feel free to email me at the address in the Contact section. Your questions are more than welcome.

For those who are still confused with the backwards looking method I can explain it best like this. If there is validity in the gospels then it is the case that they will fit with the ancient stories of Genesis. The later cannot be the case if it does not correspond to the former and the former cannot be the case if it violates the later. Just as water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen now and in ancient times, despite ancient people having no idea what that means, our current knowledge can be used to our advantage when looking backwards instead of being an impediment as is often the case with modern scholarship. With this in mind, when we look into the ancient stories of Genesis with, say, the trinity in mind we are employing the methodology which Peter Manchester called backwards looking and which I am attempting to use throughout this project.

With that, let’s take a look under the hood of reality.

The first sentences of Genesis are “In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” (Gen. 1:1-2)

There is quite a lot going on here and we are going to need to take it apart to get an idea of the road we are about to walk.

“In the beginning” (Heb. B’rêshîth Gr.Ἀρχή Lat. in principio) has a lot going on. The first thing to note is that it is at the start of time. In the Old Testament, at the very start of time, God was already there. The first line of Genesis presumes that the world does not exist, but God does. This is a drastic departure from every other cosmogony which existed prior to the Genesis account. The Babylonians, Phoenicians and Egyptians (as well as the their contemporary Hellenic cosmogonies) all include a theogony.

Before their gods go about the business of making the world we get a story about how the gods themselves come into existence. While there are primordial gods that preexist the creator gods, those primordial gods do not interact with the world.

The assumption that God is there prior to time itself places the God of the Old Testament, unlike all earlier notions of God, outside the world, outside space and outside time. Whatever God is, he is not part of the world he created. He stands outside as its creator. This is one of the many reasons that scientific reasoning, empirical reasoning about the world, cannot contend with the idea of God. You cannot apply the methodology for studying the empirical world to a being which existed prior to it and which stands outside and independent of it.

This move, having God exist prior to spacio-temporality,  also separates the Old Testament God from the polytheistic thought which was evolving into monotheism. If you have been following along you may have noticed my insistence on the evolutionary unification process of culture, the human mind and God. As man’s psyche became more incorporated and more unified so did his understanding of God. This in no way suggests God as a man made construction, but does point to the fact that man’s understanding of God has been (is?) evolving along with his mind.

Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung describes the shift from polytheism to monotheism as a dramatic process in human evolution. He likens man’s understanding of the polytheistic gods as being reflective of a primitive and still evolving fragmented psyche which has yet to integrate a sense of self which would unify the conflicting forces acting upon man (hunger, aggression, lust etc.). The evolution to monotheism took an immense amount of time and effort and is reflective of a growing sophistication and unity in the mind of man.

A further insistence we see here which separates the God of the Old Testament from earlier sacred texts is the assumption of his existence. Not only is there no theogony explaining where God comes from or how he was born, but his existence, power and perfection are not a question. God is assumed, to use Immanuel Kant’s terminology, a synthetic a priori judgement. We will talk more about Kant when we discuss the trinity and it’s image in man as well as much later on when we talk about the enlightenment era philosophy. For the time being it is sufficient to say that Kant put a lot of effort into showing how an a priori judgment can also be a synthetic judgement. This is to say it is a judgement which we make prior to or independent of sense experience while simultaneously the predicate adds new information to the subject. I will eventually argue this is merely science and enlightenment age philosophy catching up to trinitarian idea found in the gospels, but we can save that for later.

While all of this is crucial, it is only scratching the surface of what we need to talk about with regard to these opening lines of Genesis. A lot here is missed because of linguistic issues and, sadly, it is often glossed over. The simple fact is that all languages have untranslatable idiosyncrasies and Genesis was not written in English. Further, the Ancient Hebrew that Genesis was written in shares a proto-semitic linguistic root developed in the Levant with the Ancient Akkadian language of Mesopotamia. Because of the shared linguistic roots and the prominence of the Mesopotamian empire and its myths there is a strong influence of Babylonian ideas in the most ancient stories of Genesis that we find at the beginning (the creation and Adam and Eve specifically). With this in mind I want to take a look at some of the things in these first lines of Genesis that are easily missed without an understanding of their linguistic and mythological heritage.

We begin with “the earth was without form, and void.” This conjures up, for us modern English readers, a certain abyss, a primordial swamp and that is a good start. But there is much more to this. The Hebrew reads that the earth was tohu va-bohu (Heb. תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ). This remarkable and difficult to render term is so meaning laden that we could have an entire essay just to try and explain it. Tohu, looking at its other uses in the biblical stories and other literature, is something like “formless,” but also “confusion” and “chaos.” There is a suggestion of an emptiness in both structure and idea. It is something unformed and more than merely unformed there is no discernible structure or order. This isn’t just an empty room, it is an empty room where Newtonian physics has broken down, there is no ability to make any sense of the emptiness and there is a dragon. It is emptiness and chaos as predator. The root of tohu is related to the idea of bewilderment.

Va-bohu is even more difficult. In some ways you can think of it as a superlative addition to tohu but it is more than just that. There is an emphasis in va-bohu on a kind of barren desolation.

So what we have here is something without any kind of meaningful structure, a place where there is no truth, no physical laws, no understanding and this is very important for us when we consider the next clause which is where all of this comes together and begins to make sense. The next clause is that “darkness was on the face of the deep.”

The word in Hebrew that is used for “deep” is tehom (Heb. תְּהוֹם) and this is where it gets tricky. Tehom translated as “deep” is horrifically insufficient though I can’t think of a way to translate it better without explaining it in an entire essay so I do have some sympathy for the English translators of the Bible. While it does mean deep it also means a formless body of water and can be associated with the underworld. In both Psalm 104:6 and Job 38:16 we see it being used as some kind of vast, mysterious depth. You can find tehom used in Exodus 15:5 with regard to the Red Sea (the first baptism) as well as the subterranean waters in Psalm 42:7. It is also the waters that swallow up Jonah in Jonah 2:5.

This is, however, only the beginning when it comes to tehom though. See, this is where it gets complicated and, frankly, beautiful. The reconstructed root of tehom is the proto-semitic thm which means “deep” or “abyss” as well as “sea” and “ocean.” The Akkadian word that tehom shares the same proto-semitic root is essentially a Hebrew translation of  tâmtu (or tiāmtu), which, in the Babylonian creation myth becomes the dragon Tiamat. Tiamat is the primordial goddess that, when separated from her eternal embrace with her consort Abzu, unleashes her wrath on the elder gods. As she is the goddess of the sea her wrath is seen as an early variant of the flood myths, the most famous of which being the flood which Noah contends with. Further, she brings with her chaos.

The story of Tiamat is quite literally the oldest story in the book. It is the Saint George story. Remember, St. George is in a falling down castle in a somewhat run down town and the castle and town are being terrorized by a dragon. Poorly maintained castles and careless villages are always being hassled by dragons. St. George (or in the Tiamat story, Marduk), willingly confronts the dragon and slays her, taking her treasure and bringing it back to share with the newly saved village thus proving his fitness for reproduction. This is the story we were acting out when humans were still tree dwelling animals on the plains. It is the pattern of humanity writ large.

David E. Jones, in his excellent book An Instinct for Dragons (2000), goes over how the representation of the dragon is a human universal. His hypothesis, a hypothesis I believe to be accurate, was that dragons represent the meta-predator. They are chimeric beings which are made up of all the things which prey on humans and as such the dragon is the meta-predator…the embodiment of predation as such. The dragon, the predator as such, also hoards the greatest of treasures. Answering the problem of the dragon is the oldest and most important question of man.

The answer in the east was to learn that the treasure was meaningless and thus avoid the dragon, but these ancient stories starting from the Babylonian creation myth of the war between Tiamat and Marduk, the answer is something very different. The answer is that the one who confronts the dragon forthrightly despite being fully aware of the dangers and using attention and articulation defeat the dragon and generously share the treasure is the one who creates the world and rightfully is given authority (notice here, authority….not power. The distinction is crucial).

Back to the first lines of Genesis and we see that this is one of the things God is doing. He looms over the chaotic void, the deep waters, the dragon and using the word speaks order into the chaos, defeating the dragon, tehom, and through his confrontation with the deep and his word brings a habitable world into existence. In doing so, God does not merely create the world but set the pattern which is meant to be understood by humans as the proper mode of being.

Coming back around to the beginning we see that these first two lines of Genesis are incredibly complex and, because they are presented in the native human epistemic form of narrative that depth is both able to be conveyed in a way that preliterate people would remember easily and be able to tell as a story, but also leaves its treasures hidden to the modern reader who has to contend with multiple ancient languages and historical creation myths to see what is going on. To the initiated, as Heraclitus would have put it, the story’s meaning is clear and elegantly presented. But to the uninitiated, it is confusion. Heraclitus explains this in terms of having a wet soul and being asleep for the confusion and a dry soul and being awake for those who can understand.

So what we see here is a refinement, I believe due to the evolving mind of man, of the Babylonian story. At the start

of time there is something which is chaotic, a void, deep and watery but even though it is the most dangerous possible threat it holds in it the seed of potential as such. God, who stands outside of the as-of-yet uncreated space and time, not wielding power in the form of strength but in the form of articulation, the word, speaks into the chaos and allows its potential to be structured leading to the creation of the world. Moreover, that creation is deemed good.

However, more than leading to the creation of the world he establishes the pattern of heroism that human’s are

called upon in their daily life to display when the dragon that is the finite, painful and tragic existence of life rears

its ugly head. The treasure for successfully contending with that dragon is the return to paradise (we will talk more about that with the garden of Eden and the crucifixion of Christ — and yeah yeah yeah I know, I am still only on the second sentence of Genesis so God knows when that will be) and as such God, with his actions at first — the law comes later — shows man the manner in which the tragic precondition of life can be overcome. The answer in the west is very different than the far east. The answer is not detachment, but rather heroism.

One important note on one of the distinctions between the Hebrew creation story and its Babylonian predecessor, while both God and Marduk willingly confront the chaos dragon and defeat it in order to bring into existence an orderly world, in the former the representation is in a battle. Yes, Marduk wins this battle with articulation and attention but that does not diminish from the fact that it is a war that he arms himself and sets out to fight. His word is breathed into the mouth of Tiamat allowing for him to cleave her in two. However, in the Hebrew story it is more sophisticated. God creates the heavens and the earth not by wining an epic battle with the dragon of chaos, but merely by using the word. It is the simple exhalation of the word by God into the abyss which separates the chaotic deep into heavens and earth and allows for the continued creation of order.