Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On 7/7/06, K Randolph wrote:

> The linguistic and traditional understanding of Genesis 1:1 is that God
> created the primeval realm of water, that before that creation, there was
> total nothingness (as far as the physical universe is concerned). This whole
> argument claiming that there was pre-existing matter is an attempt to
> shoehorn Babylonian and other ANE myths into Genesis.

First, you're wrong.  There are linguistic clues that suggest water was not
created (it doesn't say it was created), and there are traditional
interpretations
that allow for prior existence before the creation told in Genesis (for 
example,
God created the Torah first, God created a whole world first).  In
fact, I think it
is important to separate between your own personal understanding and
"traditional" understanding, because there are probably as many traditional
understandings of creation as there are people who read the creation
accounts.

> Further, your claim that "Tahom" is an allusion to Babylonian myth could
> just as well be understood that the Babylonian myth was an allusion to a
> Hebrew original, one that was not written on pottery, clay, stone or other
> durable materials, but was written just the same.

That Tehom appears as a proper name in Genesis at the right place, and
yet no elaboration is made suggests the Hebrew is an allusion rather than
the other way around.  Here in the Bible it appears as a foreign concept to
the entire account of creation.  However, I did not speak of "allusion" in the
strict sense (which is clear from reading my post).  This is explained further
below.

> Yitzhak: as for that site you linked to below, how often do I have to answer
> that Genesis 1 is not poetry, nor a hymn, rather it is prose that lists day
> by day the activities that were accomplished each day? As such, it resembles
> more a ship's log than poetry. That site violates basic rules of exegesis.
> Rather it does a lot of eisegesis.

The site is by Prof. Christopher Heard and not by me.  Prof. Christopher Heard
has participated in discussions on list so maybe he can answer for himself if 
he
wants or cares (unless he quit the list).  Since I did bring the
reference to the
site, let me just point out that in the link I provided, Christopher
does not say
that Genesis 1 is a hymn or poetry, but says that strictly speaking it is not
poetry!  Furthermore, he says that scholars have suggested that Genesis 1 is
almost poetic, which is true!  Scholars have suggested that.  It is
due, in part,
to the fact that the account acts as a unified whole and yet is structured in 
a
way prose normally isn't.  Also, some arguments regarding the absence of the
direct article letter he in front of Tehom speak of the phrase being "poetic."

James and Rolf further questioned the claim that Tehom is a perfect cognate
of Tiamat.  More accurately, James questioned and Rolf disputed the claim
that Tehom is a borrowing from Tiamat.  I agree with Rolf that Tehom is not
a borrowing from Tiamat but is instead cognate with it, as I said before.  A
close reading of my earlier post will show that I used the term "allusion" 
only
loosely.  Since Rolf quoted Westermann, let me quote David Tsumura,
"Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Stories of Creation and Flood", in R.
Hess and  D. Tsumura (eds.), "I Studied Inscriptions from before the Flood"
(p. 31):

"Ever since H. Gunkel's famous book Schopfung und Chaos in Urzeit und
Endzeit (1895), scholars have taken it for granted that the Hebrew tehom in
Gen 1:2 has its mythological background in the ancient Babylonian goddess
Tiamat of the "creation" myth "Enuma elish," in which the storm-god Marduk
fights with and wins over the sea dragon Tiamat, establishing the cosmos.  I
have thoroughly reexamined the problem from a linguistic point of view, and
it is now clear that it is phonologically impossible to conclude that tehom
'ocean' was borrowed from Tiamat.  The Hebrew tehom 'ocean', together with
the Ugaritic thm, the Akkadian tiamtu, the Arabic tiha:mat, and the Eblaite
ti-)a-ma-tum /tiha:m(a)tum/ is simply a reflection of a common Semitic term
*tiha:m-."

Taking Joshua Fox's study of isolated nouns that I previously mentioned on
the list, we can see the following:

*tiha:m; "sea"; Akk. tamtum, tia:mat, Arab taham "land sloping down by the
sea", tiha:mat "(geographical name for a coastal plain)"; Heb thom; Sy
thoma (loanword); Ug taha:matu

Other examples of similar nouns:
*dhira:( "arm"; Arab dhira(, Geez Mazra:(t, Heb zroa(, )ezroa(, Syr dhra(a,
Ug dhr(
*xima:r "ass"; Akk ime:rum, Assyrian ema:rum, Arab xima:r, Heb x(a)mor,
Meh xayr, Sab xmr, Syr xmara, Ug xmr

In all these examples, we find that the long a: develops into o in Hebrew, a
phenomenon that is commonly known as the "Canaanite shift."  We also
find that whereas Akkadian and Arabic may have an "i" vowel in the start,
the Hebrew has a schwa.

Thus, tehom is a cognate.  Now, cognates can have varied meanings and
the meanings can develop in various ways.  It is therefore significant that
the word tehom is used as a proper name in the right place (before
division of the seas).  As a cognate, tehom joins several other words that
can be shown to be cognates and which have divine or cosmological
connotations: Canaanite/Heb. Ba(al vs Babylonian Bel and Canaanite/Heb
(a$toret - vs Babylonian I$tar stand out.  It appears, and it is quite
plausible that just like the language developed in two separate paths to
East Semitic and West Semitic, so too did various cosmological and
divine concepts and entities.  Now, just like other concepts and words,
divinities and cosmological ideas also develop uniquely in various
cultures even if a common background can be reconstructed.  There may
also be later developments whereby the Babylonian culture influenced the
Canaanite/Hebrew one with its concepts.  We do know of the existence of
this myths in Canaan at an early date (the Gilgamesh tablet from Megiddo:
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/archaeology/megiddo/bar5.html ).  So
Babylonian cultural influence is known, and yet, the amount of how much
they influenced a Creation account that mentions the cognate Tehom
cannot be measured.  All that can be said is that the word Tehom,
appearing as it does as a proper name at the proper place in the Genesis
account, seems to relate to some similar concept as the Babylonian
Tiamat.  We may not be able to pinpoint this concept much further, or to
learn much about what contrasts there were between the West Semitic
Tehom and the Babylonian Tiamat, but the use of the word in Genesis 1
certainly suggests that much more is involved than a simple "abyss."

Some technical notes:
Rolf raised his points before and they have been answered on list here:
https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/b-hebrew/2002-July/013550.html
Rolf never replied back to this message.

I wrote "haaretc at the end of the verse" where I meant "hammayim at
the end of the verse".

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com