Pre-creation: Genesis 1:1-2[edit]
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
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.
—(Genesis 1:1-1:2)
Although the opening phrase of Genesis 1:1 is commonly translated in English as above, the Hebrew is ambiguous, and can be translated at least three ways:
1. as a statement that the cosmos had an absolute beginning ("In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.");
2. as a statement describing the condition of the world when God began creating ("When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was untamed and shapeless."); and
3. essentially similar to the second version but taking all of Genesis 1:2 as background information ("When in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth being untamed and shapeless, God said, Let there be light!").[27]
The second seems to be the meaning intended by the original Priestly author: the verb bara is used only of God (people do not engage in bara), and it concerns the assignment of roles, as in the creation of the first people as "male and female" (i.e., it allocates them sexes): in other words, the power of God is being shown not by the creation of matter but by the fixing of destinies.[24]
One interpretation is that "the heavens and the earth" is a set phrase meaning "everything", i.e., the cosmos. This was made up of three levels, the habitable earth in the middle, the heavens above, an underworld below, all surrounded by a watery "ocean" of chaos as the Babylonian Tiamat.[28] The earth itself was a flat disc, surrounded by mountains or sea. Above it was the firmament, a transparent but solid dome resting on the mountains, allowing men to see the blue of the waters above, with "windows" to allow the rain to enter, and containing the sun, moon and stars. The waters extended below the earth, which rested on pillars sunk in the waters, and in the underworld was Sheol, the abode of the dead.[29]
The opening of Genesis 1 continues: "And the earth was formless and void..." The phrase "formless and void" is a translation of the Hebrew tohu wa-bohu, (Hebrew: תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ

), chaos, the condition that bara, ordering, remedies.[30] Tohu by itself means "emptiness, futility"; it is used to describe the desert wilderness; bohu has no known meaning and was apparently coined to rhyme with and reinforce tohu.[31] The phrase appears also in Jeremiah 4:23,[Jer. 4:23] where the prophet warns Israel that rebellion against God will lead to the return of darkness and chaos, "as if the earth had been 'uncreated'".[32]
The opening of Genesis 1 concludes with a statement that Darkness was on the face of the Deep (Hebrew: תְהוֹם

tehôm) Darkness and the Deep are two of the three elements of the chaos represented in tohu wa-bohu (the third is the formless earth). In the Enuma Elish, the Deep is personified as the goddess Tiamat, the enemy of Marduk;[30] 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.[33]
The Rûach of God moves over the face of the Deep before creation begins. Rûach (רוּחַ

has the meanings "wind, spirit, breath", and elohim can mean "great" as well as "god": the ruach elohim may therefore mean the "wind/breath of God" (the storm-wind is God's breath in Psalms 18:16 and elsewhere, and the wind of God returns in the Flood story as the means by which God restores the earth), or God's "spirit", a concept which is somewhat vague in Hebrew Bible, or it may simply signify a great storm-wind.[34]