Tohu Wa Bohu

• Philological Comparison:
• Implication
• The Physics of Genesis are Greek Physics
  • Contrast with the Hebrew “tohu wabohu”
  • Hebrew (tohu wabohu) → “formless and void”
  • Greek (aoratos kai akataskeuastos) → “obscure/unseen and unstructured/unconstructed”
  • Why one is “better” than the other depends on your frame
  • The Core Difference
  • The Beauty of Genesis in Greek
  • The Historical Problem of “Hebrew”
  • The Verdict
• Read More

Compare:

Tohu Bohu both means "empty" (as a paired poetic formula), but when taken together has been translated/embellished to "formless and void" (or more literally purposeless and unformed).

• tohu (תֹהוּ) - emptiness as lack of aim; ineffective; purposeless
• va-(וָ) and
• bohu (בֹּהוּ) - emptiness as lack of structure; unformed - (always paired with tohu)
• bohu is a dependent term — it does not have it's own definition alone, but qualifies a condition already marked by tohu. bohu has no independent attestation outside the fixed pair, so its meaning in historical translation has been and must be inferred contextually and relationally. We cant say with certainty what bohu means exactly.

bohu Linguistic analysis: bohu never exists unpaired from tohu and only in biblical texts, nor does it exist in any external Hebrew non-biblical literature, nor in biblical Hebrew enscriptions/blessings before 290BCE the Greek Septuagint authoring.

• No archeological evidence of Hebrew literature / libraries exist (only fragments, minor blessings, enscriptions)
• Earliest archeological use we have for any Hebrew including tohu bohu is in the later biblical ~250BCE Dead Sea Scrolls).
• The document hypothesis is not archeological evidence, and does not prove an earlier literary tradition.
• as you can tell it's meaning has been embellished by translators, without any other literature to to the philology to learn what it really means; its meaning must be inferred entirely from parallelism and reuse
• we can never truly know originally what bohu meant, without independant use

Philological Comparison:

• aoratos (ἀόρατος) — Plato uses this of the obscure/unseen mind: invisible realm, the unintelligible, the unmanifest.
• akataskeuastos (ἀκατασκεύαστος) — Technical term implying unstructured, no form or arrangement has been constructed; found in Aristotle’s use of σκευή for structure or preparation.

Implication

Genesis 1:2 in Greek is not a derivative version. It reflects:

• A Greek-speaking world’s interpretation of primal cosmology.
• A primary version rather than a secondary one.
• A scientific vocabulary of pre-form, non-being, and construction that didn’t yet exist in early Hebrew.

Greek Septuagint:

• The Greek uses technical, abstract philosophical vocabulary: ἀόρατος (unseen; obscure), akataskeuastos (unconstructed; unstructured; not yet prepared).
• The style reads like an inner cosmological, almost technical exposition of Orphic metaphysical reality. It frames mental ordering in terms of Hellenic philosophical categories rather than simple story.

The Physics of Genesis are Greek Physics

When one reads the Septuagint, the cosmology is immediately recognizable to anyone steeped in Hellenic science. The division of the waters above and below, the shaping of the cosmos out of the ἄπειρον-like undifferentiated mass, all echo the language and categories of 3rd-century Greek natural philosophy. Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BCE) speaks in the same terms: the cosmos ordered, not from “chaos” in a poetic sense, but from an aoratos kai akataskeuastos (ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος) — “unseen and unconstructed.” This is physics in the Greek sense: describing what is, by reason and by observable principles.

Contrast with the Hebrew “tohu wabohu”

The supposed Hebrew Vorlage gives the strange phrase tohu wabohu (formless and void) — a nonsense rhyme, not a cosmological principle. It lacks any grounding in natural philosophy. It is not science, nor even mythic physics, but poetic rhyming.

The second term bohu only ever occurs in tandem with tohu (Genesis 1:2; Isaiah 34:11; Jeremiah 4:23). That is suspicious in itself: bohu has no independent life in the Hebrew corpus. It looks invented simply to rhyme with tohu.By contrast, the Greek aoratos kai akataskeuastos is a carefully balanced description that reflects philosophical categories current in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. This is the language of cosmology, not folk poetry.

• If the Septuagint were truly translating a Hebrew Vorlage, we would expect tohu wabohu to become something like “empty and void” (κενὸν καὶ μάταιον, for example). But instead, the Greek translators render with philosophical precision: aoratos kai akataskeuastos "obscure and unstructured".
• This suggests that the Greek is not a translation but the original conceptual matrix, aligned with Hellenic cosmology

On the surface “formless and void” (tohu wabohu) and “obscure and unstructured” (aoratos kai akataskeuastos) sound like near-synonyms. But they operate in different conceptual registers.

Hebrew (tohu wabohu) → “formless and void”

• Register: poetic, imagistic.
• Tohu = wilderness, desolation, a wasteland (cf. Isaiah 45:18).
• Bohu = emptiness, a void (appears only alongside tohu).
• The effect: a verbal flourish describing a scene of desolate emptiness.
• This is not technical language; it’s evocative, like saying “bleak and barren.”

Greek (aoratos kai akataskeuastos) → “obscure/unseen and unstructured/unconstructed”

• Register: philosophical, technical.
• Aoratos = not visible, imperceptible (cf. Plato Timaeus 52a, where the “receptacle” of creation is called aoraton).
• Akataskeuastos = not constructed, not organized, lacking arrangement (cf. Aristotle uses kataskeuē for “structure, disposition”).
• The effect: a precise description of a pre-cosmic state: imperceptible to the senses, not yet ordered into structure.
• This belongs in the language of physics and cosmology, not mere poetry.

Why one is “better” than the other depends on your frame

• If you are a theologian or poet: tohu wabohu has rhetorical power. It paints a desolate emptiness, the canvas on which God creates.
• If you are a philosopher or physicist: aoratos kai akataskeuastos is better, because it uses terms of perception (visible/invisible) and ontology (constructed/unconstructed). These are categories you can argue with in a cosmological debate.

The Core Difference

• Formless and void (Hebrew) → descriptive image of emptiness.
• Unseen and unconstructed (Greek) → analytical statement about a state of matter before form.

So they sound similar in English, but in Greek vs. Hebrew they come from totally different intellectual worlds: one from poetic parallelism, the other from philosophical physics.

The Beauty of Genesis in Greek

Genesis in Greek is not a barbarous tale of tribal origins. It is a hymn of cosmological order: light and darkness, waters divided above and below, dry land appearing, the celestial lights fixed in their courses. This is the same physics the Greeks taught: Empedocles’ four roots, Anaximander’s apeiron, Heraclitus’ fire. It is Greek science in mythic form. The Septuagint is not a clumsy translation — it is original Greek composition, cast in the same intellectual world as Apollonius and the Alexandrian scholars.

The Historical Problem of “Hebrew”

The fairy tale we have been told — that there was once a Hebrew original in the 9th century BCE, from which the Greeks later translated — collapses under scrutiny. By 400 BCE Hebrew was already a dead language, a scribal archaism. The Judeans of Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE did not speak Hebrew; they spoke Greek. Their scriptures were written in Greek because their thought was Greek. The idea of a Hebrew original was a later invention, a retrojection by rabbinic schools of the 2nd–3rd century CE, who sought to claim primacy by fabricating an “Urtext” in their own tongue.

The Verdict

The legend (Letter of Aristeas) says that 72 rabbis all wrote the same Greek text, that doesn't sound like embellishment at all. Of course, that letter was believed to be a forgery, even in ancient times. Pick one, either it wasn't a forgery and the Greek was divine, or, it was a forgery and the Greek came first.

The Letter of Aristeas forces a binary choice: either the story is true and the Greek text is divinely translated into the Greek with better clarity than the Hebrew, or it is a forgery and the Greek text must be treated as a primary Greek composition; modern attempts to hold both positions are internally incoherent.

The Old Testament in its oldest form is Greek. It speaks Greek physics. It sings Greek cosmology. Its categories are Hellenic, not Semitic. The “Hebrew Bible” story is a medieval construction, a way of giving antiquity to a text that in truth belongs to the Greek-speaking Alexandrian mystery world of the 3rd century BCE.

Read More

• Genesis Translation from Source is where Tohu Wa Bohu (empty and empty) is used in the Hebrew, in place of the more technical initiatory language aoratos and akataskeuastos (obscure and unconstructed).
• Old Testament Greek Origins - Septuagint in the Greek language was very likely the original primary source for the Old Testament. But without a doubt, the Greek Septuagint was the main source referenced by Greek New Testament authors.
• Greek is the Original Language of Christianity- The apostles wrote in Greek, and exclusively referenced the Greek Septuagint. If you're not reading Greek, you're not reading the Christian Bible. If you're any kind of Christian, then Greek is your best most accurate source.
• Orphic Cosmology is the framework being butchered in the Hebrew Translation of the Old Testament. A representation of the Cosmic Egg, achieved through Initiatory Fire