Formless and Void (Gen 1:2) and the Sitra Achra

 This is a short toss-out-there. In a journal I am copy-editing, one of the authors is talking about the interplay between the literal sense of the text and the reality conveyed through it by the divine author for Catholic exegesis of Scripture and doctrine of inspiration. In a nutshell, I am with the article's author on thinking that it does not damage the claim that the reality behind Gen 1 is creation ex nihilo if you say that the literal sense of Genesis 1 at the time of its composition in no way concretely and positively put forth that exact idea.

However, I think the article author ceded too much ground to the Greeks in a somewhat perfunctory way. His language in talking about "formless and void" (Gen 1:2) is about "unformed matter," which is the formulation for the Greek doctrine that the matter of the universe is eternal in an "unformed" state (and then formed into concrete states by the unmoved mover).

I don't think that is what is going on in Genesis 1:2 with the "formless and void" language. There is only one other place in the Hebrew Bible where these two words are found in conjunction with each other, in Jeremiah 4:23 ... and, in the surrounding context, it isn't as an innocuous lack of characteristics:

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void [same 2 words as Gen 1:2]; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the LORD, and by his fierce anger. (Jer 4:23-27)

This is language of upheaval and holy hell breaking loose, killing everything. It should be kept in mind that the Hebrew word Tehome, the "deep" over whose face the spirit hovered, is likely derived from the name of some mythic sea dragon or other (the classic theory is that it is from Tiamat, the mother sea dragon goddess ... fitting with the heavens and the earth being made by a divisioning, just as Marduke makes heavens and earth by splitting Tiamat's body and making each from one of the halves; this theory would make the composition Genesis 1 after the Babylonian exile, to pick up those elements in the Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, but I have seen other theories that it comes form Ugaritic mythologies closer to the dates traditionally posited for Moses in Canaan).




This is not the nice innocuous "unformed" blob of Greek doctrine; this is seething, smoking, spitting, boiling chaos. I think the better analog for it is the Sitra Achra, from Kaballah and Hasidic thought: the "other side," the dark said, unholy evil. In later Jewish thinking creation was not truly finished until the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and in certain strands of, for lack of a better word, "legend" or "mystical" thinking, the Temple was not only the "axis mundi" (Latin: center/axis of the world) but also sat over a well in which the primal evil of the world is contained.

Along these lines, the Temple was much like the spirit hovering over the face of the "deep." And "formless and void" is not simply a nice bit of flubber, but rather, to quote Pink Floyd, it is "hell opened up and put on sale" (allusion to unbridled capitalism thoroughly intended).