Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Joel Stucki" <joel AT stucki.ws>]

On 7/8/06, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
> "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-."

Insightful post Yitzhak. One other point that you did not delve into
is that in Enuma Elish Tiamat is defeated and divided in two with one
half of her becoming the sky and the other half the sea, just as the
waters of Genesis. Even if you believe a general Semitic root is
responsible for the similarity of the two words rather than a direct
allusion, you still have to account for these other similarities in
the story.
When you also look at comparisons of the six days of creation vs the
six generations of gods and the seventh cycle of rest, the order
things were created in, etc. It seems too similar to think there is
not a direct connection between them.
Shoshanna's idea that the Babylonians copied the Torah is also
problematic since the oldest copy of Enuma Elish predates Moshe by
several hundred years. So either there was an earlier creation account
for the Babylonians to copy or the influence went from Babylon to the
Jews. From Shoshanna's perspective, the Torah would predate the earth
written in black fire on white fire and lying on the lap of God. It
could be possible that these earlier chapters were revealed to an
earlier patriarch so that they could be incorporated in Babylonian
mythology either through direct copying or cultural memories.

Joel Stucki