As the curtain rises on the dawn of time, before the stars are hung, the Holy Spirit steps onto center stage:
“In the beginning, God . . .”
I first learned these words in the original Hebrew while in college, though I didn’t take Hebrew willingly. My dear mentor, Dr. Horton, had encouraged me to sign up for his Hebrew 101 class. I tried to explain that foreign languages felt like a knotted silver chain necklace—I could never untangle them. Whether in a romantic language like Spanish or something as basic as Pig Latin, I could barely string together enough words to find a nearby bathroom. But Dr. Horton’s persistence outmatched my timidity.
During my junior year, he convinced me to gather around a table with six seminary students twice a week for lectures and discussion about Hebrew. My linguistic experiment went about as well as expected. Dr. Horton had to keep reminding me to open the workbook from the back, as with all Hebrew literature. I struggled to comprehend all the strange-shaped letters and dots for vowels. Reading the language felt like trying to solve a puzzle with most of the pieces missing. I still remember my first exam. I stared at the page, unsure how to begin. My palms grew sweaty. My heart sank. After hours of studying, I still couldn’t recognize a single letter or word. I didn’t even know where to put my name on the test. Sensing my distress, Dr. Horton approached and asked if I needed help.
“I don’t recognize anything,” I said.
“This might help,” he replied, with a twinkle in his eyes. He placed the tips of his fingers on my paper and, with a flick of his wrist, turned the one-page test right side up.
It was a very long semester.
As the end of the spring term approached, my progress resembled veritable regress. With grandpa-like compassion, Dr. Horton developed an alternative final exam for me so I could pass the class: I simply needed to read the Bible’s first chapter in Hebrew. Out loud.
The offer was generous and thoughtful, but insufficient. I still couldn’t pronounce the words or navigate the letters with their dots and dashes.
“I’ll record it for you,” he offered.
In the weeks leading up to the final, I listened to Dr. Horton’s gravelly voice read the first chapter of Genesis around the clock like office background music. Eventually, I could identify words and their meanings, but I still struggled to pronounce the syllables aloud. In desperation, I resorted to memorizing the entire chapter by rote—and it worked!
To this day, whenever I read the opening words of the Hebrew Bible, my mentor’s voice rumbles inside my head: Bereshit bara elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Ah, those words. At the inception of all, God stands on the precipice of shaping glorious galaxies and solar systems and a baby-blue marble named Earth. Here is the beginning of things before the beginning of things. This cosmic story elicits awe as it opens with a majestic wide-angle shot of deep darkness, then zooms in slowly: The Creator is about to create.
In the Hebrew, the word for “create” is bara, meaning “to give being to something new.” As the Spirit sweeps in, that which never was is called into existence:
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.
The phrase “formless and empty” is translated from the Hebrew expression tohu wa vohu, which speaks of the dark unknown of the watery deep. Though it’s tempting to think of today’s oceans and seas as vacation playgrounds and places of respite, these dreamy locales are often interrupted by devastation caused by hurricanes and typhoons and tsunamis. The unpredictable nature of the aquatic deep is nothing new.
Throughout the Old Testament, large bodies of water are often viewed as synonymous with chaos: the unknown, the mysterious, the deadly. Back then, the oceans were uncharted territory, and whether one traveled by sea or by lake, hand-made watercraft were no match for a sudden storm. Beneath the water’s surface swirled a mixture of folklore and fear, tales of sea monsters and rumors of leviathans that swallowed ships whole.
The opening scene of Genesis displays a shadowy abyss representative of unmitigated pandemonium. When viewed up close like this, the language leaves one unnerved, if not terrified.
Inky blackness. Threatening chaos. Wild disarray. Tohu wa vohu.
At first glance, this feels more like a horror movie than a creation story. Imagining the seascape, something within me wants to recoil, quivering and scared. Whenever I am faced with the unknown, I tend to hesitate, to practice my well-honed avoidance skills. I have an aversion to chaos in all its forms—the chaos that reigns in the wake of heartbreaking loss, shattered dreams, or disappointments too painful to whisper aloud. Most of us have experienced a tohu wa vohu season in life—a sudden or slow-moving or ever-accumulating devastation from which it seems impossible to recover. The confusion and chaos that ensue can cause our knees to buckle and hit the floor or make us grab our favorite squish pillow and sob until we feel lifeless and void. We desperately need an intervention, something or someone to tame the mayhem. The Spirit waits in the wings, ready to do just that—though not in the way we might expect.
Credit: Excerpted from Chapter 2/The Spirit Who Hovers of The God You Need To Know, By Margaret Feinberg. Copyright 2025, Zondervan. Used with permission.
Photo Credit: ©Unsplash/ Christian Erfurt
