Lexicon

H0922 - bohu

Strong's: H922 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: BOH-hoo (after "and" it softens to vohu, as in tohu wavohu) Part of speech: masculine noun Root: from an unused root meaning to be empty OT occurrences: 3, and all three are paired with H8414 - tohu: Genesis 1:2, Isaiah 34:11, Jeremiah 4:23 Key phrase: tohu wabohu (תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ), "waste and void" (Genesis 1:2, ASV)

Semantic range

The lexicons give a single sense: emptiness, void. With only three occurrences, and all of them in the same pairing, the word's meaning is learned from its company. Tohu supplies the picture of a trackless waste; bohu adds that nothing lives there. The ASV renders it "void" in Genesis 1:2 and Jeremiah 4:23 and "emptiness" in Isaiah 34:11.

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Theological force

The second half of "unformed and unfilled"

Tohu describes the earth as not yet ordered, a place without the structure that would make it livable. Bohu describes it as not yet filled. The pair works as one idea: an earth that is real but empty, with no shape for life and no life in it.
Genesis 1 answers both halves. Days 1 to 3 give form (light and dark, sky and sea, land and plants). Days 4 to 6 fill what was formed (lights, birds and fish, animals and humankind). By the end of the chapter the bohu is gone: the earth is full and "very good" (Genesis 1:31).

What the other two uses show

Isaiah 34:11: Edom after judgment, given over to the pelican, the porcupine, the owl and the raven, with God stretching over it "the line of confusion, and the plummet of emptiness" (ASV). The builder's measuring tools are used to mark out a land for emptiness rather than for building. The land is still there; its people are not.
Jeremiah 4:23: "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void; and the heavens, and they had no light" (ASV). The vision goes on: no people, the birds fled, the fruitful field a wilderness (Jeremiah 4:25-26). Jeremiah describes Judah's coming judgment in the language of creation run backwards.
In both, bohu means a real place emptied of life, never "nothing at all." That is the strongest lexical reason to read Genesis 1:2 as an earth not yet inhabited rather than as non-existence. David Toshio Tsumura (Creation and Destruction, 2005, revising his 1989 study) argues the phrase describes a desolate, empty earth and has nothing to do with a mythic chaos.

Not a ruined world, not eternal matter

Against the gap theory. Jeremiah's use shows tohu wabohu can describe a land after judgment, and gap theorists (Thomas Chalmers, 1814; G. H. Pember, 1876) read Genesis 1:2 that way, as a world ruined between 1:1 and 1:2. But the phrase describes emptiness, not its cause. An unfinished earth and an emptied one are both "void." Jeremiah borrows the language of Genesis to say judgment would undo creation; that borrowing cannot be reversed to prove an earlier ruin. The full syntactic case against the gap reading is set out under H8414 - tohu.
Against eternal matter. The empty earth of 1:2 is the earth God created in 1:1. Creation from nothing rests on Genesis 1:1 as the absolute beginning, supported by John 1:3, Hebrews 11:3 and Romans 4:17. See Creatio ex Nihilo.

Notable verses

Genesis 1.2, "And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (ASV)
Isaiah 34.11, "he will stretch over it the line of confusion, and the plummet of emptiness" (ASV)
Jeremiah 4.23, "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void" (ASV)

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here. All three occurrences have passage pages: Genesis 1.2, Isaiah 34.11, Jeremiah 4.23.