The beginning that we all grew up with was ex nihilo.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
There was nothing, and then there was a then - the first beginning - when God created heaven and earth out of nothing.
But that cannot be right, as many children have noted. For in the next lines the earth was tohu wabohu, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep, and God's breath hovered over the face of the water, and only then, when all that was there already, God spoke and said, there was light, and there was light.
Some theologians have, as some theologians would, explained the incongruity away. Maybe the first sentence introduces the topic. Maybe God first created primordial matter out of which he then created everything else. But these are forced attempts; clearly the first act of creation is: He said.
According to Rashi, there is also a grammatical reason why the standard translation cannot be right. One little vowel is off. In the beginning would be bareshit: b (in), a (the), reshit (beginning); what is written is bereshit: be (in), reshit (beginning). Beginning is not made into a noun, a thing, but remains a verb, an action.
When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was tohu wabohu, and darkness lay upon the face of the deep, and God's breath hovered over the face of the water, God said, There was light, and there was light.
To my ears, the dependent clause translation rings true. The old Hebrew writers didn't write in punchy one-liners like Hemingway or John: In the beginning was the word. They wrote in run-on sentences. And it feels right that the beginning is a run-on sentence. It is not easy to begin. A lot has to be there at once, the one depending on the other: darkness, emptinesss, water, face, breath, and then speech and light.
What was there already before there was anything was a kind of nothing that can only be described in rhyming nonsense: tohu wabohu. Darker, earlier than even that time when 'twas brillig and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabes. Just like those words of Jabberwocky, the phrase tohu wabohu is not simply nonsense. Tohu does mean something, even though what it means is nothing: emptiness, wasteness. Wohu occurs nowhere else except as a reference to this passage. It is designed to repeat and reinforce the sense of the first word.
Parmenides argued that non-being cannot be spoken of, and later philosophers have concluded that even that cannot be said. Non-being is nothing, and nothing is just nothing, it (what?) is not something of which one can try but fail to speak. And nothing can come out of nothing, for there is nothing for it to come out of. And even nonsense is no use to evoke nothing, for there is nothing to evoke.
But is this true of nothing in the sense of emptiness, the womb of the world? Is it true of an ordinary womb?
From a sideways-on perspective, the womb can be described as a living container, filled with amniotic fluid, within a woman. From a child's perspective, it is a dark emptiness before language, an infinite sea in which you drifted, of which you were a part, to which - even though you don't remember - you long to return. It cannot be meaningfully described, but it cannot be denied either. And so it can only be evoked with a kind of babbling, with words that rhyme as if they undulate: tohu wabohu.