Tohu-Bohu

While reading W.H. Auden’s Collected Poems the other night I came upon a word I don’t remember having seen before, nor could I decipher its meaning from the context. Here’s the stanza in question, from “In Sickness and in Health,” written in 1942:

“Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command – Rejoice.”

This was written after Auden’s move to the United States, in New York City, and it reflects his shedding of politics and his evolving return to Christianity. It is an epithalamion for his friends Maurice and Gwen Mandelbaum. The word that threw me was “tohu-bohu,” which sounds like the name of an island in the South Pacific, maybe the one where Melville jumped ship. In fact, it’s a compound of two Hebrew words meaning, respectively, “formlessness” and “emptiness,” and is used in Genesis 1:2 – “without form and void.” In other words, the primordial “stuff” that existed before creation – a notion understood intuitively by both physicists and the faithful.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “tohu-bohu” as “That which is empty and formless; chaos; utter confusion.” The OED’s earliest English citation dates from 1613, and it cites four more uses from the 17th century, but no more until the 19th century (Gladstone, Browning, L.S. Houghton), and none at all after that. My Webster’s Third cites an undated, 20th-century usage by Walter Lippman: “bringing order out of the tohubohu of human relations.” This is speculation, but the word was probably most often used during the centuries when educated writers of English were most likely to possess some familiarity with the original Hebrew – particularly the second sentence of the Bible.

The OED also cites the word as being used in French by Rabelais (1548) and Voltaire (1776). Interestingly, another 19th-century appearance (1871) of the word comes in the third stanza of Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”):

“Et les Péninsules démarrées
N'ont pas subi tohu-bohus plus triomphants.”

Here’s the line in English, as translated by Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock:

“Drifting peninsulas
Were never prey to such formidable commotion!”

How is it possible that such a useful, comic-sounding word never bobbed to the surface of my consciousness before? I’ve been reading Auden and Rimbaud since I was a teenager. Now I see the word all over the Internet. It was even the name of a short-lived Canadian television show. I draw several conclusions from my ignorance: I am sometimes a lazy reader, skimming over words I don’t know; my memory is not to be trusted; English is so abundantly rich it can permit delightful words like “tohu-bohu” to evaporate.