Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Don Grothe" <grothe AT uniontel.net>]

Can the word "was" in the verse "Now the earth was unformed and void" be 
translated "became"?

This is one response from a Hebrew Scholar:

When the word hayah refers to a change in state, then it takes a le- before 
the noun; here we have no le- so this is a report of a state that was, not 
that became something from something else.  At this stage in the Creation 
story, we are just getting the first reports on the initial state of chaos 
(an early mix of time/space/energy/matter), which only later "became" 
something else more ordered.