[Westbrook]

> It became without form and void.

Your word, not God’s.

[aruanan]

It became without form and void.

Your word, not God’s.

This is an old, old way of trying to sneak in some undefined period of time within which, with varying degrees of hand-waving, anything could be made to happen so that anything necessary to "harmonize" one description of creation with any type of naturalistic depiction of creation could be obtained.

What the proponents of this misreading seem unable to appreciate is that if everything became without form and turned into a void, that is, emptiness, then there was, by definition, nothing at all about the previous world, as posited, that could persist into the recreated world to be mistaken for something else. "Without form and void" necessarily resets everything to zero as far as anything definable goes.

[CynicalBear]

>>Your word, not God’s.

Well, let’s look at a direct translation.

And the earth was without form, and void;
Vav..Erets......hayah..tohu..............bohu;

and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
....choshek...........................tehown

The word for "was" - hayah - is the same word used in Genesis 19:26 where Lot's wife was (hayah) turned into a pillar of salt.

Hayah is a verb; to be, become, come to pass, exist, happen, fall out

The earth became (or had become)without form and void.

Not my words. The words from the original language of scripture inspired by God.