“…Lucy was tired of being manipulated and moved about like a game piece. It was time to make her own decisions. With hardly a thought of what it would mean, Lucy leapt up, hurled open the door of the coach, and threw herself onto the grass.”
“When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.”
*welter and waste. The Hebrew thou wabohu occurs only here and in two later biblical texts that are clearly alluding to this one. The second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it, an effect I have tried to approximate in English by alliteration. Thou by itself means emptiness or futility, and in some contexts is associated with the trackless vacancy of the desert.
– Genesis 1:1, translated by Robert Alter, with commentary
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