Person and Power of the Holy Spirit: Ruach
Person and Power of the Holy Spirit: Ruach
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
Tōhû (without form) is used elsewhere to mean, in physical terms, a trackless waste (e.g. Deut. 32:10; Job 6:18), emptiness (Job 26:7), chaos (Isa. 24:10; 34:11; 45:18); and metaphorically, what is baseless or futile (e.g. 1 Sam. 12:21; Isa. 29:21). The rhyming bōhû (void) is found only twice elsewhere (see above), each time paired with tōhû.
The deep (tĕhôm) seems to be etymologically akin to (but not derived from) the word tiamat, the personified ocean and rival of the gods in the Sumero-Accadian creation myth. But here it is the literal ocean, whatever poetic play is made elsewhere with the taming of its fury and its monsters (Ps. 74:13, 14; 89:9, 10; 104:6, 7; Isa. 51:9, 10). See also on verse 21.
In the Old Testament the Spirit is a term for God’s outgoing energy, creative and sustaining (cf. Job 33:4; Ps. 104:30). Any impression of Olympian detachment which the rest of the chapter might have conveyed is forestalled by the simile of the mother-bird ‘hovering’ (Moffatt) or fluttering over her brood. The verb reappears in Deuteronomy 32:11 to describe the eagle’s movements in stirring its young into flight; this aspect of intimate contact must be kept in mind throughout.