Nicholas of Lyra

English

Empty, that is, invisible, because it was covered on every side with waters. And void, because it was not yet furnished with plants and herbs. There follows. And darkness etc. of the abyss, that is, over the face of the elements. For abyssus is so called from a, which means 'without', and byssus, which is a kind of the whitest linen; whence abyssus is as it were 'without whiteness or brightness', because a white colour has the most of light in it.

Draft English (Claude), awaiting Wilson · cc-by

Latin

Koberger 1486-87, leaf n43 recto, right column, lemmas e-g (archive.org biblia-sacra-lyra_202308, page/n43.jpg) · lyra-koberger-1487

Notes

The two halves of the pair given two different physical causes, in the tersest form this crux ever reaches. Inanis is invisibilis and the reason is optical -- the earth was covered on every side with water, so there was nothing to see; vacua is unfurnished, and the reason is botanical -- no plants or herbs yet. That is Bede's and Remigius's distinction with the theology taken out and a mechanism put in. Then the etymology, which is the reason to print this passage: abyssus from a, without, and byssus, the whitest of linens, so that the abyss is what is without whiteness, because white is the colour that holds the most light. Isidore is the source of the etymological habit and not of this etymology; what Lyra does with it is make the darkness of Gen 1:2 a statement about a colour rather than about a privation, which is the Latin bench's usual answer, or about the wicked, which is the rabbinic bench's. He goes on to give abyssus a second sense, the confusion and commixture of everything below the sphere of the moon, and to date the elements' accidental properties to the third day.

Threads

• → parallel · Rashi
  Rashi glosses tohu as a word for astonishment and desolation, a state of the beholder. Lyra, who read Rashi and cites him by name all over this chapter, does not take it here: he gives inanis a physical cause, the water covering the earth, and vacua another, the absence of plants. Where he follows Rashi he says so; this is a place where the Latin tradition's own answer, Bede's invisible-because-dark and unordered-because-shapeless, is the one he refines.
• → parallel · Bede
  Bede asks why these things are said of the earth and heaven passed by, and answers from what the earth lacked. Lyra six hundred years later keeps the two-part answer and supplies a cause for each half, water for the invisibility and the absence of plants for the emptiness. The Latin bench's account of tohu va-vohu changes very little between Jarrow and Paris; what changes is that Lyra thinks the question is answerable by physics.
• → parallel · Babylonian Talmud
  Two benches derive the meaning of the verse's hardest words from the words themselves, and neither could have used the other's language. The Bavli makes tohu a green line that encircles the world and from which darkness goes out. Lyra takes the Greek-derived Latin abyssus apart into a-byssus, without whiteness, and gets the darkness of v. 2 out of the etymology of the name for the deep. Both are answering the same question -- what does the verse mean by darkness -- with the resources of the language each happens to be reading it in.