Tohu wa-bohu

The King James Version translation of the phrase is "without form, and void", corresponding to Septuagint ἀόρατος καὶ ἀκατασκεύαστος, "unseen and unformed".

[4] Tohuw is frequently used in the Book of Isaiah in the sense of "vanity", but bohuw occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible (outside of Genesis 1:2, the passage in Isaiah 34:11 mentioned above,[5] and in Jeremiah 4:23, which is a reference to Genesis 1:2), its use alongside tohu being mere paronomasia, and is given the equivalent translation of "emptiness, voidness".

In Genesis Rabbah 1:14, Rabbi Akiva refutes gnostic and other heretical views that matter existed primordially and that God alone did not create the world.

[6] In Genesis Rabbah 2:2, the amoraim Abbahu and Shimon ben Pazi give analogies in which tohu wabohu means "bewildered and astonished" (mentally formless and void), referring to the Earth's confusion after, having been created simultaneously with the Heavens in Genesis 1:1, it now immediately plays an inferior role.

[7] In the 12th century, Abraham bar Hiyya was the first to interpret the tohu and bohu of Gen. 1:2 as meaning "matter" and "form", and the same idea appears in the anonymous Bahir 2.9–10, which was probably edited by the Hachmei Provence.