Alan...As Narkissos mentioned, the modern concept of creation ex nihilo was foreign to the Hebrew mind and the OT shows that the creation was conceived of as an ordering and fashioning of primeval chaos -- the same concept of creation found in the Enuma Elish and other ANE texts. I read Genesis 1:2 as a description of the cosmos BEFORE creation (which is nicely paralleled in the Phoenician creation myth). There was no heaven, there was no earth, all there was in the beginning was the watery deep, darkness, and God's rwch over the waters. God's first creative act put limits on the pre-existent darkness (banishing it to the temporal abode of "night") and his second and third acts put limits on the watery deep, creating "heaven" and "earth" as byproducts. So it wasn't the case that there was an already-created "earth" in v. 2. Rather, the earth was a nothing, it was uncreated chaos (thw), it was in a state of oblivion. God had yet to make it as a place, as dry ground that wasn't covered by the watery deep. In Job 26:7 we have a description of heaven (i.e. God's habitation, see Isaiah 14:13) being stretched and earth being poised over thw / nothingness (granted, blymh is a hapax legomenon). Interestingly, we have in Genesis 1 a description of the heavenly vault being raised over the watery deep followed by the earth being produced by a removal of waters. What is also really interesting about Job 26:7 is that it directly follows two verses about Sheol: "The Rephaim [ghosts of the dead] writhe beneath the waters, with their denizens, Sheol is naked before him, and Abaddon has no covering" (v. 5-6). This implies that the "nothing" that heaven and earth are placed over is Sheol which is either "beneath the waters" (i.e. the watery deep) or "the waters beneath" (as the verse could also be read). In other words, the watery deep is the thw that heaven and earth are above and Sheol is below, or it otherwise is the same place as Sheol. Sheol is watery just like the primeval deep (see also Jonah 2:3-6) and it is also dark like the darkness on the primeval deep (Job 17:13). There are other texts that liken Sheol to mire or mud (Psalm 40:2, 69:1, 14-15, 140:10), which recalls the mixed, muddy state of the deep in the Phoenician creation myth (which refers to Mot, the god of the underworld, as signifying "mud" or a "watery putrefaction") and the muddy habitation of Mot in Ugaritic myth (KTU 1.5 i 6-8, ii 13-16). The deep in Genesis 1 seems to be a combination of what would become both land, seas, and the heavenly waters (prior to God's subdivision of the deep into these entities). You may have also noticed that the creation of Sheol is nowhere mentioned in the OT. This is probably because Sheol, the realm of the dead, is itself uncreated. Those who pass into obvilion go to the place of oblivion. They leave the created world and go to a sort of no place.
