void: sheer emptiness, a land with nothing and no one in it; the word never stands alone, but only rhymed with its twin in the phrase rendered "formless and empty"
This is a word that never lives on its own. All three times it appears it is bolted to its rhyming partner (תֹהוּ, "emptiness"), making a two syllable chime that English versions try to echo with pairs like "welter and waste" or "wild and waste," and that has passed into ordinary German as a word for chaos. Because it never breaks free of that phrase, anything said about its meaning is really said about the pair.
What the pair pictures is a place with nothing in it: no people, no animals, no growth, nothing to make it a home. The nearest relative in a sister language is an Arabic word for being empty or hollow, which fits how the Bible uses it. The three appearances turn on that one picture:
- In Genesis the earth is empty like this before God speaks over it.
- In Jeremiah the prophet looks at the land and sees it back in exactly that state, creation running in reverse.
- In Isaiah the phrase is pulled apart, and a builder's measuring line and plumb weight are used on Edom, not to raise a city but to mark it out for ruin.
What scholars argue about is whether the word adds a thought of its own. Some read it as the "unfilled" half of the phrase against its twin's "unformed" half, matching the way Genesis first shapes the world and then stocks it. Others hold that it is there for the sound, reinforcing its partner rather than adding a new idea, and may even have been coined to rhyme. Either way it never softens the picture: wherever these two words stand together, the land is bare.
Whether בֹּהוּ is original in Jeremiah 4:23, where the phrase repeats Genesis 1:2 verbatim, or a secondary addition to a text that first read only תֹהוּ.
- majorityThe word is original, and the full phrase is an intentional citation of Genesis 1:2 anchoring the prophet's de-creation vision in Jeremiah 4:23 to 26.; Michael Fishbane, "Jeremiah IV 23-26 and Job III 3-13: A Recovered Use of the Creation Pattern," Vetus Testamentum 21 (1971): 151-167; William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1986), 163-168; Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1-20, AYB 21A (Doubleday, 1999), 357-360
- minorityבֹּהוּ is secondary here on text-critical grounds, so the verse originally read תֹהוּ alone.; Henning Graf Reventlow, "Jeremiah IV 23: tohu without bohu," Vetus Testamentum 47 (1997): 247-249
Whether the split pairing in Isaiah 34:11, קַו־תֹהוּ וְאַבְנֵי־בֹהוּ, deliberately alludes to Genesis 1:2 as an eschatological reversal of creation, or simply describes an uninhabitable desolation with no creation allusion in view.
- majorityThe split pairing is a deliberate allusion to Genesis 1:2, applying the language of the unformed earth to Edom as an un-building of creation.; John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1-39, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1986), 611-612; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39, AYB 19 (Doubleday, 2000), 452-455; Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 28-39: A Continental Commentary, trans. T. H. Trapp (Fortress, 2002), 322-331
- minorityNo direct connection with the Genesis creation account: the phrase states that the land will be desolate and waste, unable to receive inhabitants.; David Toshio Tsumura, Creation and Destruction (Eisenbrauns, 2005), 32
Disputed
What the phrase תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ denotes: a primeval chaos, an empty and uninhabited wasteland, or a materially existing but nonfunctional world.
- contestedA primeval chaos, whether mythologically loaded or demythologized, which God orders in the act of creation.; Hermann Gunkel, Schoepfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1895); Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, rev. ed., OTL (Westminster, 1972), 47-51; Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton University Press, 1988), 47
- contestedAn earth that is empty, uninhabited, and unproductive, with no mythic chaos in view; the sense is desolation and the absence of life.; David Toshio Tsumura, The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2, JSOTSup 83 (JSOT Press, 1989), 17-43; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 6-7; Rebecca S. Watson, Chaos Uncreated, BZAW 341 (de Gruyter, 2005), 13-20
- minorityA material world lacking function and order, so that תֹהוּ means nonfunctional and בֹּהוּ unfilled with functionaries.; John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Eisenbrauns, 2011); Bruce K. Waltke with C. J. Fredricks, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 59-60