Eshc means darkness; not merely an intense darkness, but what may be denominated a “thick darkness;” it is an enshrouding darkness which compresses and hinders. It is precisely such a darkness as would be produced by the interstratified cloud-layers between the convolutions of a forming spiral nebula, or the cloud-strata surrounding the earth before electrolytic decomposition of the aqueous vapors had ensued. With the advent of the sun, in the narrative, this darkness and the term which expresses it disappear.
Teou-m is the word above explained, with the termination -m, expressing the idea of arrested, doubtful, indefinite, as applied to all existence; the word “undifferentiated nature” properly interprets its vagueness and general character of an abyss of being, in the etymological sense of “nature” as the totality of things at that time born or produced.
Rove means breath, in the sense of an expanding, liberating, or developing spirit; its literal meaning is “the breath, the spirit which dilates and frees.”
Mrepht, brooded with incubating love; reph is composed of re, “to be full of good-will, to be agreeable,” and eph, “to cover, to protect, to incubate, to brood.”
Mim, the seeds of all beings, the waters. It is said, “the choice of this letter m, to signify water [the alphabetical Egyptian letter m is represented by the two undulatory lines which in the hieroglyphics represent water], is connected with the Egyptian ideas of the cause of the generation of living beings.” [ Numbers xxiv. 7], “He shall pour the waters out of his buckets, and the seed [zro] in the waters [b-mim].” The latter word is plural in form, but both singular and plural in sense.
Aour, diffused light; a light resembling the dawn, but quite distinct from the light of the sun. The latter was not established until the fourth day, and its advent is characterized by a new word, leair, “to cause light to move above the earth.”
Joum is day, generically, and lile night.
Rqiô, the expanse; atrqiô, the individualized substance of the expanse. Space, in the opinion of the Egyptians, “not being a vacuum, but a material substance, Moses could say, and was even compelled to say, ‘the substance of space, that which constitutes it.’ ”
Osh, made. This word first occurs in verse 7, and is there applied to the making a separation between the waters or aqueous vapors condensed around the earth and those condensed around some similar spot “above, as regards the individuality of the expanse,”—to wit, the solar core or nucleus,—to which, attracted by gravity from the attenuated vapors of the space between, is due the subsequent establishment of the solar light and heat, as in an electrical arc light, and the presence of oxygen in the terrestrial atmosphere. These processes, involving the constitution of our atmosphere and of the sun’s photosphere and chromosphere, were not completed until two subsequent cosmical periods had elapsed, from the third to the fifth. The word osh, in its different combinations and inflections, is also used in verse 11, where it signifies “making,” as applied to fruit; “yielding” fruit, in verse 12; “they made,” as applied to the sun and moon, in verse 16; “made,” as applied to the entity of quadrupeds and higher animals generally, in verse 25; “we will make,” as applied to man, verse 26; “had made,” as applied to “every entity of creation,” verse 31; “had made,” as applied to the specially directed work as mlactou, chapter ii. verse 2; and finally, in the general summing up in verse 3 of the second chapter, as an element in a compound substantive phrase “according to the making-act,” or “in accordance with the making of creation.”
“Oshout,” it is said, “signifies a manual operation, carried on according to a previously conceived idea, or model.”