Biblical Hebrew Forum

[ian goldsmith <iangoldsmith1969 AT yahoo.co.uk>]

Not that I'd want to criticise any personal theories,
but don't you think that concluding that just because
'thm' shares some consonantal value with 'tiamat' that
they must be one and the same, is tentative to say the
very least.
This conclusion would be diametrically opposed to the
views of any monotheistic authors of the Hebrew texts.
Anathema is not too strong a word for such.
If, as is suggested by many 'JEDP+' theorists, and
this work was composed much later than is
traditionally accepted, surely the author/authors
would have been familiar with the names of foreign
deities and would have taken stringent measures to
exclude any such reference.
It is true that some words we use today are drawn from
the religous life of other civilisations, but their
meaning is nearly entirely forgotten.
I would offer that 'thm' may be enigmatic in its
meaning, but not having the complete understanding of
the word does not mean there is need to invent one.




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