Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 7/9/06, James Christian Read wrote:

> e.g. Heaven, Hell, Paradise. These three concepts have
> become so singular in there usage that we use them in
> English as proper nouns without a definite article.
> In the same way it is quite possible that the 'deep'
> referred to in the hebrew passage was a concept to the
> hebrews so singular in its usage that it was used as a
> proper noun. We elevate nouns to the status of proper
> nouns when there is only one of them. For example,
> London. We use the word London as a proper noun because
> in the UK (as far as I know) there is only one London
> and so phrases such as 'a London' simply don't make
> sense. However, this does not constitute evidence in
> any way that I am referring to a foreign god of the
> same name.

The words London, Heaven, Hell, Paradise are all proper
names.  They are proper names of places rather than
beings.  So I suppose you could say that Tehom is a
proper name of a place or a location in the cosmos from
the point of view of Creation.  That may lead to an
investigation of the word Tehom itself -- Does Tehom
describe a place, and how would we know a name of a
place when we see one?  That is, we know that the words
Sodom or Jerusalem are names of places.  But which clues
in the text would lead us to know that these are names of
places?  That is probably a nice and interesting question,
but it's not necessary to go into it.

The other various arguments you use -- that Tehom is
not personified in any other way, that Tehom is not mentioned
again, Tehom is not killed nor split up in the account -- are
not really useful, since part of the claim is that this is a
modified account that used foreign, sometimes "idolatrous,"
concepts as a basis upon which to build a "monotheistic"
account.  It is thus possible that all obvious references to the
"non-monotheistic" parts have been edited out.  All that
remains is a peculiar usage that by itself does not say
that much but in view of the prevailing views of the creation
during Biblical times is very suspicious.  The arguments
listed above are not evidence against this claim because
they support it, or rather it is based on those features of
the account.  Also, things like "Tehom is not split up or
killed" are dependent upon "Tehom is not mentioned
again."  So these are not independent arguments, and it's
probably best to drop "Tehom is not mentioned again".

That Tehom is a possible name of a place in the Cosmos
may be problematic in view of the nature of the word in that
it tends to refers to the sea or to water.  There is no such
water-place that can be referenced so easily in the known
theory of cosmology, of course, so that might be considered
a problem.  It could be taken as a reference to "Space," and
the light taken as a reference to the Big Bang, but that will
be very problematic when 2000 years from now, some
people on the b-hebrew mailing list will refuse to accept that
opinions of the by-then disproved over a thousand years prior
Big Bang theory had influenced the interpretation of the
Creation.

In short:
1) Most of the arguments (those listed in abc's) at the end of
your post may be valid arguments except that the claim
under discussion takes them into account.
2) Tehom could be a proper name of a place.  But I don't see
any other evidence that Tehom is a name of a place, not
that I've really looked.
3) I can foretell the future just as well as you:

> Imagine if an scientist wrote a report about the planet
> Jupiter and someone 3,500 years later said that this
> scientist was copying from an ancient Roman myth and
> his reference to Jupiter was a reference to the Roman
> god of the same name. There is only one Jupiter in our
> solar system and Jupiter is the accepted way in the
> English language of referring to this planet.

And by the way, the name of the planet Jupiter *is* a refernce
to the Roman god of the same name!  Actually, the moons of
Jupiter, such as Io or Europa, are references to the Roman
and Greek mythology.  Jupiter itself may very well *be* the
Roman god of the same name.

As for Dave Washburn's comments, the Gen 16:12 example
fails because the phrase is used with a pronoun-suffixed
noun "his brothers."  If we were to list out reasons for the
definite article being omitted in Hebrew, this would be one
of them:
1) there is a pronoun suffix
2) it is a proper name
3) it is in the context of a parallelism (ie, "poetry")

Dave, if you want to claim there are no rules in using the
definite article ("piling assumption upon assumption") you
are just wrong.  There are rules, and the Hebrew of the
Bible follows them in the great majority of cases.  It is even
possible to measure this, and to construct a statistical
test to identify those cases where a proper name is used
to some confidence level.  As for your suspicion relating to
the author of the text, I must say I suspect differently.  If
we went to the author of the text he wouldn't say "Huh?!"
He would say, "No, Yitzhak is right.  Gabriel's Theological
Modification and Harmonization at your service.  If you want
those old references to Tehom, that's going to cost extra.
Sorry, I'm being paged by that Mohammad guy."  So the
difference between those two suspicious positions of the
author's thoughts is that I have brought evidence that
supports my position.  Yes, it's not 100%.  It's just 95%
(a guess of course, but you can derive a number by
performing the statistical test).   But that isn't showing that
I have piled assumption upon assumption or that I've not
carried out my argument to its logical conclusion.  It rather
shows that I have indeed identified a very likely place of
mention of a foreign deity, within a very theologically
critical section of the Bible, and that you have very little
textual arguments against it.  I could have claimed that
"(al pney derekh" is formulaic, a figure of speech.  But
how would I prove it?  It's also not clear why you think that
something "being formulaic" is not valid evidence.  "(al
pney ha)adamah" is just as valid evidence as "(al pney
derekh" and "(al pney tehom".  It would be better for your
argument to accept the evidence for what it is, the
problematic texts for what they are, recognize that
there are rules of Hebrew grammar and usage of the
definite article is definitely in their scope, and that instead
of attempting to find non-problems in my logic, you find
evidence that supports your position.  But if it's all a
question of whether you'll buy it, that's fine, don't buy it.
But maybe it's a good idea to skip over to the next store
and buy some evidence.  Otherwise, you may end being
left with nothing.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com


> Is it not also possible that the hebrew passage is just
> using the correct proper name for the singular concept
> of tehom with no intention whatsoever of talking about
> a foreign god? Because it would certainly seem so when
> you read the rest of the account for many reasons:
>
> a) Tehom is not personified in any way
> b) Tehom is not killed by elohim in the account
> c) There is no further reference to Tehom whatsoever
> d) The very phrase in which Tehom appears is otherwise
> a description of the lifeless and unformed state of the
> heavens and the earth after elohim's initial act of
> creation
> e) The creation account in question just happens to be
> part of a wider body of literature which claims that
> all other gods are merely lifeless idols
>
>
> All things considered, it would seem that if there is
> any connection between the two accounts it could only
> be that Babylonian culture chose to name one of its
> ancient gods after the physical entity it represented
> and nothing more. The fact that their Enuma Elish
> portrays Tiamat as being divided in half to form the
> waters above and below could well be an embellishment
> of a common tradition of creation passed down through
> the generations including Noah (Babylon's Gilgamesh).Tehom is not killed by 
> elohim in the account
> c) There is no further reference to Tehom whatsoever
> d) The very
>
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