The mass of matter supposed to be in confusion before it was divided by the Almighty into its proper classes and elements. It does not appear who first asserted the notion of a chaos. Moses, the earliest of all writers, derives the origin of this world from a confusion of matter, dark, void, deep, without form, which he calls TOHUBOHU; which is precisely the chaos of the Greek and barbarian philosophers. Moses goes no farther than the chaos, nor tells us whence its confused state; and where Moses stops, there precisely do all the rest.