Week 1 Genesis 1
Genesis introduces the project this way: in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Then the writer steps back to begin describing the pioneering stage of the process: the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.
The version I’m reading uses the phrase: the surface of the deep. I check a few other versions. Most of them say the deep. It’s a legitimate term – a nautical term – that means the ocean. But it’s not very common and I wonder why a translator wouldn’t just say “the ocean” (a couple of versions say things like primeval ocean and watery depths. One said the abyss which can – but might not – refer to the ocean. One slangy paraphrase says: earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness (I’m not sure about bottomless emptiness because there might have been a solid subsurface core with a crust or plates or layers made up of some basic structural elements like granite & iron & nickel & carbon & sulphur that might come in handy later.)
But whatever…it looks like initially – in the period of time before the actual heavens-and-earth mentioned in verse-one appeared – God began with a very basic & primary & elemental mass of water. No shape or contours to it. Unconfigured. Empty of anything else. Dark. The fluid infrastructure of the coming world.
Note: quote from Genesis 1:1-2 (NASB and The Amplified Bible CSB NABRE & The Message)