Compare & Correlate · Lexical
Tohu va-bohu
Two words that the corpus, not a reader, puts together. The pair occurs twice — the earth before the first word, and the land after judgement — and a third verse takes the two apart and uses them as builder's tools. The second of the pair occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible.
Lexical: A word the passages share, with its count in the annotated corpus.
Tohu va-bohu. Lexical — the link is the words themselves, checked token by token against the annotated Hebrew corpus, with a count wherever rarity is the finding.
- בֹּהוּ bohu, “emptiness” — 3 verses in the annotated Hebrew corpus: Genesis 1:2, Jeremiah 4:23, Isaiah 34:11
- תֹּהוּ tohu, “formlessness, nothing” — 19 verses in the annotated Hebrew corpus: Genesis 1:2, Deuteronomy 32:10, 1 Samuel 12:21, Job 6:18, Job 12:24, Job 26:7, Psalms 107:40, Isaiah 24:10, Isaiah 29:21, Isaiah 34:11, Isaiah 40:17, Isaiah 40:23, Isaiah 41:29, Isaiah 44:9, Isaiah 45:18, Isaiah 45:19, Isaiah 49:4, Isaiah 59:4, Jeremiah 4:23
Sources:
- Counts derived from the annotated Hebrew corpus in data/corpus_source/annotated/, and re-derived by tests/test_correlations.py on every run.
Row by row
| Genesis 1 | Jeremiah 4 | Isaiah 34 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The words | the pair, joined: the earth, before the first wordGenesis 1:2 | the same pair, of the land after judgementJeremiah 4:23 | the two apart: the line of tohu, the stones of bohuIsaiah 34:11 |
| And the light | darkness over the face of the deepGenesis 1:2 | to the heavens, and their light is goneJeremiah 4:23 | owl and raven take possession of itIsaiah 34:11 |
| What the passage does with it | the state the six days work uponGenesis 1:2 | walks back through the six days in order: light, then mountains, then no human, then the birds fledJeremiah 4:23-26 | a measuring line and plumb stones, used to un-buildIsaiah 34:11 |
Where it appears in the text
- Genesis 1 — the pair's first occurrence, in the second verse
- Jeremiah 4 — the pair's only other occurrence, and the reversal of the six days
- Isaiah 34 — the one verse that holds the two words apart
In the app this comparison opens beneath each of those chapters. Open it in TheophilusBible.