Rashiרש״י

English

תהו ובהו DESOLATE AND VOID — The word תהו signifies astonishment and amazement, for a person would have been astonished and amazed at its emptiness. תהו is estordison in old French. בהו VOID — The word signifies emptiness and empty space.

Rosenbaum–Silbermann 1929–34 · silbermann

Hebrew / Aramaic

Rashi on Gen 1:2, s.v. תהו ובהו · pd

Notes

Three lines that turn the parable of BR 2:2 into a lexicon. Tohu is a word for astonishment and desolation, because a person would be astonished and appalled at the bohu in it — the emptiness is the thing seen and the astonishment is what seeing it does. Then the la'az: tohu is estordison in Old French, from estordir, to stun or daze, the word for the swimming in the head after a blow; Rashi gives the reader the sensation rather than the definition. Bohu he glosses reikut ve-tzadu, emptiness and waste — which are the two Aramaic words Onkelos used for the whole pair, in the other order. The Latins who answer this crux describe what was missing from the earth; Rashi describes what looking at it would do to you.

Threads

• → echoes · Bereshit Rabbah
  Rashi's 'tohu is a word for astonishment and desolation, for a person would be astonished and appalled at the bohu in it' is the verb of Bereshit Rabbah 2:2, where the earth sits toheh u-voheh over her lot. The midrash's parable has become a lexical entry, and the one who is astonished has changed from the earth to the reader.
• → echoes · Targum Onkelos
  Rashi glosses bohu as 'reikut ve-tzadu', emptiness and waste — the two Aramaic words Onkelos uses to render the whole pair, 'tzadya ve-reikanya', in the other order. Rashi's peshat on the pair is the targum's, split between the two Hebrew words.
• ← echoes · Moses ben Naḥman (Naḥmanides)
  Ramban quotes the Bahir's R. Berekhya — 'what is tohu? a thing which astonishes people' — which is Rashi's etymology from the same root; but in Ramban the thing that astonishes is the primary matter itself, which cannot hold a name, rather than the sight of an empty land.
• ← parallel · Nicholas of Lyra
  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.