In the beginning God created heaven and the earth. Period. And the earth was without form, comma, and void; semicolon; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Even before the creation of anything, it’s clear that there was punctuation. That being said, this example is a particularly bad one to use:

“בְּ רֵ אשִ ִׁ֖ יתבָּרָּ ָ֣ אאֱֹלהִ ִ֑ יםאֵֵ֥ תהַ שָּ מַ ִׁ֖יִםוְּ אֵֵ֥ תהָּ אָָּֽ רֶ ץ ”

Hebrew written in the original version of Old Testament did not have anything resembling English punctuation. Punctuation was totally lost and absent and something that would not rise for many centuries afterward.

One of the more contested pieces of punctuation in modern times — one that you wouldn’t even find in modern English translations of the Bible — is the em dash. As Noreen Malone writes in an article for Slate arguing against the increasingly frequent modern usage of the dash, “[f]olklore — if you’re willing to trust it — holds that it’s been around since the days of Gutenberg but didn’t catch on until at least the 1700s because the em dash wasn’t used in the Bible, and thus was considered an inferior bit of punctuation.”

It should, however, be noted that in Malone’s piece, the further explanation of the origin of the dash’s name is incorrect. Contrary to popular belief, the em dash does not get its name from being the identical length of a typeface’s letter “m”, as numerous other sources would have you to believe.

The first question that a writer might have regarding this mysterious mark of punctuation is what exactly is its intended use? The answer to this — or perhaps lack thereof — is where both its adoration and disapproval simultaneously arises from: an excerpt from William Shrunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style — a Bible for the grammatic unto itself — remarks “[a] dash is a mark of separation stronger than a comma, less formal than a colon, and more relaxed than parentheses” and can essentially be used as a liberal replacement for any.

Elements also adds that writers ought to “use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” This leads us as writers to have to beg the existential question of when would punctuation be inadequate? English Professor Martha Nell Smith answers this, explaining that “[t]he dash is an invitation to the reader to make meaning” and that its adequate purpose might be to “highlight the ambiguity of the written word”. Ben Yagoda in another Times article, states that “[w]riters who deploy this mark comfortably and adeptly are conscious of the rhythm and dynamics of a sentence. A well-placed dash adds energy and voice.”

It should be noted that there is an important distinction and difference between the dash and the hyphen. There is a particularly handy key on your keyboard for the hyphen, most likely between the zero and plus — and her resemblance to the dash is at first tempting — using this symbol instead is grammatically incorrect and, frankly, much less aesthetically appealing. Also quoted in Mooney’s Times article is Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet, explaining that explicitly because “[t]here isn’t an em dash button on a standard keyboard” its tone could be regarded as “faux casual, since it takes some know-how to implement in digital conversation.”

When taking a step back and properly meditating on punctuation — not just the meagre em dash — it can be said that it is the symbolic absence of words. Not whitespace, no, yet still a linguistic void on its own. A paragraph solely composed of this series of marks and dashes is just as silent and unpronounceable as the blank page, and as inherently meaningless. At best, at its most creative peak, it becomes mere ASCII art. The constructs and instructions for the operation of word after word, sentence after sentence, but never those words themselves. Instead enviously beside, or perhaps in-between, as the hyphen and the apostrophe. The apostates of communication, with the ability to defect the meaning or to dissent from a word or phrase’s original intention, but holding no meaning in itself. The sort of nothingness that could only be found in the beginning.