Genesis 1:2

And the earth was without form, and void,.... It was not in the form it now is, otherwise it must have a form, as all matter has; it was a fluid matter, the watery parts were not separated from the

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And the earth was without form, and void.

The same confused mass or heap is here called both earth, from its most solid and substantial part; and the deep, from its vast bulk and depth; and waters, from its outward face and covering. See Psalms 104:6 2 Peter 3:5. Without form and void; without order and beauty, and without furniture and use. Upon the face, the surface or uppermost part of it, upon which the light afterward shone. Thus not the earth only, but also the heaven above it, was without light, as is manifest from the following verses. The Spirit of God; not the wind, which was not yet created, as is manifest, because the air, the matter or subject of it, was not yet produced; but the Third Person of the glorious Trinity, called the Holy Ghost, to whom the work of creation is attributed, Job 26:13, as it is ascribed to the Second Person, the Son, John 1:3 Colossians 1:16-17 Hebrews 1:3, and to the First Person, the Father, every where. Upon the face of the waters, i.e. upon the waters, to cherish, quicken, and dispose them to the production of the things after mentioned. It is a metaphor from birds hovering and fluttering over, and sitting upon their eggs and young ones, to cherish, warm, and quicken them.

Genesis 1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Ver. 2. And the earth was without form and void,] that is, as yet it had neither essential nor accidental perfection. The Lord afterward did form it into light, the firmament, the water, and the earth; so beginning above, and building downwards (in the new creature he doth otherwise); and in three days laying the parts of the world, and in other three days adorning them. The Rabbins tell us that Tohu and Bohu do properly import Materia prima and privatio; and others of Tohu, derive Chaos, whence the ancient Latins called the world Chobus, and borrowed their word Inchoo (εγχυω), &c. And darkness was upon the face of the deep,] that is, not of hell, as Origen expounds it, but of the deep waters (αβυσσος, see the like, Luke 8:31), which "as a garment covered the earth, and stood above the mountains." This darkness God created not, for it was but the want of light. And to say that God dwelt in darkness till he had created light, was a devilish sarcasm of the Manichees, as if God were not light itself, and "the Father of lights"; or, as if God had not ever been a heaven to Himself, "Ere ever he had formed the earth and the heavens." What he did, or how he employed himself before the creation, is a sea over which no ship hath sailed, a mine into which no spade hath delved, an abyss into which no bucket hath dived. Our sight is too tender to behold this sun. A thousand years, saith a great divine, are to God but as one day, &c. And who knoweth what the Lord hath done? Indeed, he made but one world to our knowledge; but who knoweth what he did before, and what he will do after? Thus he. As for St Augustine: “ The bishop Lybicus was shaping the underworld according to these verses, he said these ideas which he helps to be examined by means of such a mind.” Excellently another, who wanted not wit: As in the element of fire, saith he, there is a faculty of heating and enlightening; whence proceedeth heat and light unto the external near bodies; and besides this faculty, there is also in it a natural power to go upward; which, when it cometh into act, is received into no other subject, but the fire itself: so that if fire could, by abstractive imagination, be conceived of as wanting those two transient operations, yet could we not justly say it had no action, forasmuch as it might move upward, which is an immanent and inward action.

(2) And the earth.—The conjunction “and” negatives the well-meant attempt to harmonise geology and Scripture by taking Genesis 1:1 as a mere heading; the two verses go together, and form a general summary of creation, which is afterwards divided into its several stages. Was is not the copula, but the substantive verb existed, and expresses duration of time. After creation, the earth existed as a shapeless and empty waste. Without form, and void.—Literally, tohu and bohu, which words are both substantives, and signify wasteness and emptiness. The similarity of their forms, joined with the harshness of their sound, made them pass almost into a proverb for everything that was dreary and desolate (Isaiah 34:11; Jeremiah 4:23). It expresses here the state of primæval matter immediately after creation, when as yet there was no cohesion between the separate particles. Darkness.—As light is the result either of the condensation of matter or of vibrations caused by chemical action, this exactly agrees with the previous representation of the chaos out of which the earth was to be shaped. It existed at present only as an incoherent waste of emptiness. The deep.—Tĕ ?hôm. This word, from a root signifying confusion or disturbance, is poetically applied to the ocean, as in Psalms 42:7, from the restless motion of its waves, but is used here to describe the chaos as a surging mass of shapeless matter. In the Babylonian legend, Tiàmat, the Hebrew tĕ ?hôm, is represented as overcome by Merodach, who out of the primæval anarchy brings order and beauty (Sayce, Chaldean Genesis, pp. 59, 109, 113). The Spirit of God.—Heb., a wind of God, i.e., a mighty wind, as rendered by the Targum and most Jewish interpreters. (See Note on Genesis 23:6.) So the wind of Jehovah makes the grass wither (Isaiah 40:7); and so God makes the winds His messengers (Psalms 104:4). The argument that no wind at present existed because the atmosphere had not been created is baseless, for if water existed, so did air. But this unseen material force, wind (John 3:8), has ever suggested to the human mind the thought of the Divine agency, which, equally unseen, is even mightier in its working. When, then, creation is ascribed to the wind (Job 26:13; Psalms 104:30), we justly see, not the mere instrumental force employed, but rather that Divine operative energy which resides especially in the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. But we must be upon our guard against the common error of commentators, who read into the text of these most ancient documents perfect doctrines which were not revealed in their fulness until the Gospel was given. It is a marvellous fact that Genesis does contain the germ of well-nigh every evangelical truth, but it contains it in a suggestive and not a completed form. So here this mighty energising wind suggests to us the thought of the Holy Ghost, and is far more eloquent in its original simplicity than when we read into it a doctrine not made known until revelation was perfected in Christ (John 7:39).

Verse 2. The earth was without form and void] The original term תהו tohu and בהו bohu, which we translate without form and void, are of uncertain etymology; but in this place, and wherever else they are used, they convey the idea of confusion and disorder. From these terms it is probable that the ancient Syrians and Egyptians borrowed their gods, Theuth and Bau, and the Greeks their Chaos. God seems at first to have created the elementary principles of all things; and this formed the grand mass of matter, which in this state must be without arrangement, or any distinction of parts: a vast collection of indescribably confused materials, of nameless entities strangely mixed; and wonderfully well expressed by an ancient heathen poet: - Ante mare et terras, et, quod tegit omnia, caelum, Unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, Quem dixere Chaos; rudis indigestaque moles, Nec quicquam nisi pondus iners; congestaque eodem Non bene junctarum discordia semina rerum. OVID. Before the seas and this terrestrial ball, And heaven's high canopy that covers all, One was the face of nature, if a face; Rather, a rude and indigested mass; A lifeless lump, unfashion'd and unframed, Of jarring seeds, and justly Chaos named. DRYDEN. The most ancient of the Greeks have spoken nearly in the same way of this crude, indigested state of the primitive chaotic mass. When this congeries of elementary principles was brought together, God was pleased to spend six days in assimilating, assorting, and arranging the materials, out of which he built up, not only the earth, but the whole of the solar system. The spirit of God] This has been variously and strangely understood. Some think a violent wind is meant, because , ruach often signifies wind, as well as spirit, as πνευμα, does in Greek; and the term God is connected with it merely, as they think, to express the superlative degree. Others understand by it an elementary fire. Others, the sun, penetrating and drying up the earth with his rays. Others, the angels, who were supposed to have been employed as agents in creation. Others, a certain occult principle, termed the anima mundi or soul of the world. Others, a magnetic attraction, by which all things were caused to gravitate to a common centre. But it is sufficiently evident from the use of the word in other places, that the Holy Spirit of God is intended; which our blessed Lord represents under the notion of wind, John 3:8; and which, as a mighty rushing wind on the day of pentecost, filled the house where the disciples were sitting, Acts 2:2, which was immediately followed by their speaking with other tongues, because they were filled with the Holy Ghost, Acts 2:4. These scriptures sufficiently ascertain the sense in which the word is used by Moses. Moved] מרחפת merachepheth, was brooding over; for the word expresses that tremulous motion made by the hen while either hatching her eggs or fostering her young. It here probably signifies the communicating a vital or prolific principle to the waters.

2. And the earth, &c.] Notice, in the present verse, (1) that “darkness” exists which God is not said to have made: (2) that “waters” exist before the formation of the seas: (3) that “the spirit of God” is mentioned, without explanation of its nature or origin, as “brooding upon the face of the waters.” The whole picture is vague and obscure, because the touches, by which it is conveyed, are left unexplained. The old monstrous and grotesque figures with which primitive Semitic, and possibly primitive Hebrew, imagination sought to fill up the void of the unimaginable past, have been left out. The gap which they filled is not wholly supplied. The description is brief and condensed. But, even making allowance for the brevity of the narrative, we are conscious of the presence of features in it, which represent the dim and cancelled outlines of an earlier mythological story. The thought of the Israelite reader is elevated to a higher religious plane in this simple and stately account. the earth] i.e. the materials out of which the universe is formed. We are not told what the origin of these materials was, or whether God had created them. God is not here spoken of as creating the universe out of nothing, but rather as creating it out of a watery chaos: cf. Wis 11:18. That which is affirmed in Hebrews 11:3, i.e. that God did not make “that which is seen out of things which do appear,” is not asserted in this verse, though it is implied in the general representation of God’s omnipotence and His solitary personal action. was] The simplest description of what “existed” before the first day of Creation. To translate “became,” or “came into being,” in order to import into the verse an allusion to the nebular hypothesis for the origin of the solar system, is an expedient not to be entertained by any scholarly interpreter. It has, however, found favour in some quarters. Apologists have been known to appeal to this verse as demonstrating that the Bible contains anticipations of the latest discoveries in Natural Science, as if the Hebrew auxiliary denoted the process of gradual evolution out of nebulous gas. The theory, however, would never have been thought of except for the well-meaning, but mistaken, purpose of defending the honour of Holy Scripture on the supposition that it must contain perfection of instruction upon all matters of scientific knowledge. It is sufficient to remind the reader that the ancients were entirely ignorant of the Copernican theory of the solar system; and, ex hypothesi, could not have comprehended Laplace’s nebular theory. It violates every canon of interpretation to assume that simple words, like “earth,” “darkness,” “water,” &c., were intended to convey to the Israelite reader not the meanings which the Hebrew equivalents everywhere else conveyed, but those which could only be understood after the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century had transformed men’s conception of the universe.

- II. The Land היה hāyah, “be.” It is to be noted, however, that the word has three meanings, two of which now scarcely belong to our English “be.” 1.

2. And the earth was without form and void — Having stated in the first verse the great fact of the creation, the writer now proceeds to unfold the manner and order of that creation.