Lexicon

H8414 - tohu

Strong's: H8414 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: TOH-hoo Part of speech: masculine noun Root: from an unused root meaning to lie waste OT occurrences: 20, in 19 verses (it appears twice in 1 Samuel 12:21). Eleven of the 20 are in Isaiah. Greek equivalent (LXX): at Genesis 1:2 the Septuagint renders tohu wabohu as aoratos kai akataskeuastos, "unseen and unfurnished" Key phrase: tohu wabohu (תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ), "waste and void" (Genesis 1:2, ASV), paired with H0922 - bohu

Semantic range

Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses tohu as formlessness, confusion, unreality and emptiness. HALOT's range runs from desert and wasteland to emptiness and nothingness. Grouped by how the word is actually used:

Wasteland, trackless desert. The land no one can live in or find a way through: "in the waste howling wilderness" (Deuteronomy 32:10, ASV); caravans "go up into the waste, and perish" (Job 6:18, ASV); princes made to "wander in a wilderness where there is no way" (Job 12:24; Psalm 107:40).
A ruined, emptied place. "The waste city is broken down" (Isaiah 24:10, ASV); Edom measured out for desolation (Isaiah 34:11); the land undone in Jeremiah 4:23.
Empty space. "He stretcheth out the north over empty space, And hangeth the earth upon nothing" (Job 26:7, ASV).
Futility, nothingness, the worthless. Idols are "vain things which cannot profit nor deliver" (1 Samuel 12:21, ASV) and "wind and confusion" (Isaiah 41:29); the nations are "less than nothing, and vanity" before God (Isaiah 40:17, ASV); labor spent "for nought and vanity" (Isaiah 49:4, ASV); empty legal pleading (Isaiah 29:21; 59:4).

The physical senses are the base. The sense of "nothingness" is figurative and evaluative: an idol is tohu because it is worthless, not because it does not exist as an object.

See this page's graph and discover linked topics

Theological force

Unformed and unfilled, not nothing

At Genesis 1:2 tohu stands with its rhyming partner bohu: the earth "was waste and void" (ASV). The clearest guide to the pair is the other two places they occur together. In Isaiah 34:11 they describe Edom after judgment, a land handed over to owls and ravens. In Jeremiah 4:23 the prophet sees the land as tohu wabohu, and the following verses fill in the picture: no light, no people, the birds fled, the fruitful field a wilderness (Jeremiah 4:25-26). In both, the land still exists. What is missing is order, life and inhabitants.

David Toshio Tsumura (The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2, 1989; revised and expanded as Creation and Destruction, 2005) argues on linguistic grounds that the phrase describes the earth as desolate and empty, an unproductive and uninhabited place, and that it has nothing to do with a mythic state of chaos.
Isaiah 45:18 uses the same word as a statement of purpose: God "created it not a waste, ... formed it to be inhabited" (ASV). Tohu is the opposite of "inhabited."
So the best one-line gloss for Genesis 1:2 is "unformed and unfilled." The earth, the deep, the waters and the darkness are already there; the Spirit of God is moving over them.

The six days answer the two words

The rest of Genesis 1 reads as God's answer to tohu and bohu. Days 1 to 3 give the world form by separating realms: light from darkness, waters above from waters below, sea from dry land. Days 4 to 6 fill those realms: lights for the day and night, birds and fish for sky and sea, animals and humankind for the land. The pattern is widely noted across interpretive positions, including by readers who take the days as ordinary days. It does not by itself decide the age of the earth (see Genesis Interpretation Spread).

Why this does not support the gap theory

The gap or ruin-and-restoration theory, proposed by Thomas Chalmers in 1814 and popularized by G. H. Pember (Earth's Earliest Ages, 1876), reads a long interval between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2: an original world, a judgment (often tied to Satan's fall), and a later re-creation. It leans on tohu in two ways, and neither holds.

"Was" read as "became." The verb hayah (H1961 - hayah) can mean "become" in some contexts, but Genesis 1:2 opens with "and" plus the subject ("and the earth") before the verb, a clause shape Hebrew narrative uses for background description, not for the next event in a sequence. Narrative sequence is carried by the "and then" verb form that begins 1:3 ("And God said"). The grammar describes the state of the earth at creation; it does not report a fall into ruin.
Isaiah 45:18 read as "God did not create it waste, so it must have become waste." The verse is about God's purpose: He did not create the earth to be tohu, to stay empty; He formed it to be inhabited. That is exactly what Genesis 1 narrates, an earth brought from unfilled to filled.
Jeremiah 4:23 read as a picture of a pre-Adamic judgment. Jeremiah applies the phrase to Judah's coming judgment, using creation language in reverse. It shows that tohu wabohu describes a land emptied of life, which fits an unfinished earth as easily as a ruined one. It does not show that Genesis 1:2 was a ruin.

Weston Fields' Unformed and Unfilled (1976) remains the standard full-length critique of the theory, with particular attention to the Hebrew text.

Why this does not deny creation from nothing

A second misreading runs the other way: if Genesis 1:2 describes material already present, perhaps God only shaped pre-existing stuff. The answer is that Creatio ex Nihilo never rested on 1:2.

Genesis 1:1 is the absolute beginning: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (ASV), where "the heavens and the earth" means everything. See H7225 - reshit and H1254 - bara. The Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate both read 1:1 as a complete sentence, not as a "when God began to create" clause.
Genesis 1:2 then describes the condition of what God had just made. The earth that is "waste and void" is the earth of 1:1.
The New Testament states the doctrine directly: "All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made" (John 1:3, ASV); "what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear" (Hebrews 11:3, ASV); God "calleth the things that are not, as though they were" (Romans 4:17, ASV).

So tohu names neither a ruined former world nor eternal raw material. It names a real, created earth that is not yet ordered and not yet home to anything. The same distinction matters in Ris3n's Refinement to Jay's Empty Set World Theory, where the empty world is God alone "before" Genesis 1:1, and the "waste and void" of 1:2 is already creation.

Notable verses

The paired phrase tohu wabohu

Genesis 1.2, "And the earth was waste and void" (ASV), the earth before the six days
Isaiah 34.11, "the line of confusion, and the plummet of emptiness" (ASV), Edom surveyed for desolation
Jeremiah 4.23, "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void" (ASV), creation language reversed in judgment

Wilderness and waste

Deuteronomy 32.10, Israel found "in the waste howling wilderness" (ASV)
Job 6:18, caravans that "go up into the waste, and perish" (ASV)
Job 12:24 and Psalm 107:40, rulers made to wander "where there is no way"
Isaiah 24:10, "The waste city is broken down" (ASV)

Purpose and space

Isaiah 45.18, "created it not a waste, ... formed it to be inhabited" (ASV)
Job 26.7, "He stretcheth out the north over empty space" (ASV)

Futility and idols

1 Samuel 12:21, "vain things which cannot profit nor deliver" (ASV)
Isaiah 40:17 and 40:23, the nations and their rulers as nothing before God
Isaiah 41:29 and 44:9, idols and their makers as "confusion" and "vanity"
Isaiah 49.4, "I have spent my strength for nought and vanity" (ASV)

Patristic and scholarly note

The early church read Genesis 1:2 through its Greek wording, "invisible and unfurnished." Basil of Caesarea, in the second homily of his Hexaemeron, explains the earth as unseen because covered by water and unfinished because not yet adorned with its plants, and he uses the verse against the idea of uncreated matter. Augustine, in Confessions 12, treats the unformed earth as matter God first made from nothing and then formed, so that even the formlessness of 1:2 is creaturely. Modern lexical work (Tsumura) has moved the discussion away from a mythic "chaos" toward a plainer reading of an empty, uninhabited earth, and that reading fits the church's historic doctrine of creation without strain.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here. Key references: Genesis 1.2, Isaiah 45.18, Jeremiah 4.23, Isaiah 34.11, Deuteronomy 32.10, Job 26.7.