“Formless and void”
Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:2 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A poetic way of saying the earth was just dark and empty before God got to work.
The cultural key
The pair tohu wabohu is nearly untranslatable: a rhyming jingle for desolate, unformed, uninhabitable waste. 'The deep' (tehom) and the primeval waters were, in the surrounding cultures, the domain of chaos monsters that a creator-god had to defeat in battle before making the world (as in Babylon's Enuma Elish). Genesis pointedly drains that drama: there is no combat, no rival. The waters simply sit there while the Spirit of God 'hovers' over them, a verb used elsewhere for a bird brooding over its young (Deuteronomy 32:11).
Recovered meaning
The opening is not a struggle against chaos but a calm sovereignty over it. Where the neighbors' gods fought the sea to a bloody standstill, Israel's God broods over the formless waters like a bird over the nest, and simply begins to speak.