GENESIS 1:1 . The first verse of the Tora describes the creation of the universe from nothing previous. Creation is a Divine work, not a quantum event like the Big Bang,. Something inexplicable in terms of the laws of physics that supposedly took place without the intervention of a Creator. As if it were a “miracle without God”.
GENESIS 1:2
והארץ הייתה תוהו ובוהו THE EARTH WAS CREATED WITH NO LIFE
Once it concludes with the description of the first act of Creation, the Tora focuses exclusively in the affairs of our planet.
VEHAARETS HAYETA TOHU VABOHU
These words are usually translated as: “And the earth was without shape and form”.
Some words of the Tora, especially within texts that are universally known, such as the Creation Narrative and the Ten Commandments, have undergone serious modifications as they were translated and in many cases they lost their original Hebrew meaning. The words “tohu vabohu” are one of the best examples I can present of this type of “textual contamination”. Virtually all translations I know interpret the words tohu vabohu as something associated with the idea of chaos: “formless,” “void” “wasted”. This is probably based on the fact that the Septuagint rendered these two words as “unsightly and unfurnished” (according to Jennifer Dines, the words for “unsightly and unfurnished” were chosen because in greek they rhyme, same as tohu vabohu in Hebrew). The Septuagint is a translation that Jewish Sages were forced to do in the third century before the common era. Ordered by the Greek King Ptolemy, the Jewish Sages wrote it strictly for diplomatic purposes, adapting the rendition of the text to Greek culture. It is worth remembering that the Jews not just rejected the Septuagint as a valid Biblical translation: on the 10th of Tebet we fast, among other reasons, in commemoration of the tragic impact that the Septuagint brought to the Jewish people and to the Tora. See this
This ambiguous interpretation of tohu vabohu as an “unsightly void” gave rise to the idea that the Hebrew bible describes the newly created world as in a state of chaos.
WHATS WRONG WTH CHAOS?
The concept of “chaos” is not a Jewish idea. And it is not a neutral idea either. In reality, the idea of chaos expresses a fundamental notion of Platonic Greek philosophy. The Greeks did not believe in the creation of the universe. For Aristotle the World was not created, it was eternal, and always existed. For Plato, on the other hand, the universe always existed, but at first it existed in a state of “chaos” and “disorder.” Until, according to Plato, the Demiurge, a Greek mythological genius / divinity reorganized the raw material and formed the incredibly sophisticated universe we know. For Plato, “In the beginning there was a chaotic mass and the Demiurge converted this chaos into the universe.
Jews do not believe in “chaos” because we believe that God is omnisciente, omnipotent and omnipresent, thus, nothing escapes His control. Ironically this absolutely non-Jewish translation has been so impactful that to this day in modern Hebrew the expression tohu vabohu is used to indicate “a chaotic situation.”
Probably without knowing it, dozens of very interesting biblical “theories”, Jewish and non-Jewish, are based on the false premise of the “primitive chaos that prevailed in the world at the time of its creation.” There are countless theories about how God brought order from chaos (Jordan B. Peterson, for example, discusses this idea ad nauseam), or the supposed compatibility between the Biblical creation story and the element of entropy in the Big Bang theory, etc.
WHAT DOES TOHU VABOHU REALLY MEAN?
When seeking for the meaning of any Hebrew word we should look in the official rabbinic translation of the Tora, known as Targum Onqelos, the Aramaic translation written at the beginning of the second century of the common era. This translation bears “the seal of approval of the great sages of Israel” (Targum Didan).
Following the Targum the words tohu vabohu mean something very simple and completely different from chaos. tohu vabohu means that the earth being created “was desolate and uninhabited,” that is, without life. The second most recognized rabbinic translation, attributed to Ribbi Yonatan ben Uziel, broadens our understanding of the Targum Onquelos and translates “the earth was desolate of animal life and uninhabited of human life.” Why the Tora begins the description of planet earth as lifeless is a question we will later explore. But in the meantime bear in mind that this first thing a modern scientist would observe when exploring a planet would be the existence of living beings on it. tohu vabohu would be the words a scientist could use to affirm that there is no life on Mars.
OUR OWN CHAOS
How it happened that the translation of the Targum Unquelos was overlooked and a mythological pagan idea was somehow introduced in all Jewish translations of the Tora is a question that surpasses me…. I guess that, as it happened more than a few times, our complete ignorance of pagan ideas, sometimes ironically contributes to our adoption of these very ideas “disguised” as Judaism.
