Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Bryant J. Williams III" <bjwvmw AT com-pair.net>]

Yitzhak, et al,

TWOT, Volume II, pp. 965-966, article on "tehom" by R. Laird Harris.

"An older treatment of Gen. 1:2 found a similarity between tehom of the Gne
creation account and the Enuma Elish story in which Tiamat was vanquished by
Marduk and from her body earth and heaven were made. It is said that in Gen 
also
there is implied a fight in which the spirit of God also rushed on the chaos
monster tehom and thus made the ordered universe. Much of this is tendential
exegesis. It is now admitted that lingusitically tehom cannot be derived from
Tiamat because the middle radical, a laryngeal, is lost in Akkadian and would
not be manufactured in a borrowed word. Thus, ba'al becomes in Akkadian Bel 
and
borrowed back in Ida 46:1 as bel. Actually Tiamat and tehom come from the same
root. The root referred merely to deep waters and this meaning was kept in
Hebrew as a noun for water in the deep ocean and deep in the ground. But in 
the
animistic thought of Akkadian it became divinized into the goddes of the 
ocean,
Tiamat. In Ugaritic the "h" is preserved (thm) as in Hebrew and the ocean is
sometimes divinized as in Akkadian, though Ugaritic so far shows no creation
account. (UT 19: no. 2537)." Page 966.

I think that if one looks at the above article, and the previous one before 
that
(TWOT, Volume II, pp. 964-965, tohu, by Ronald F. Youngblood) it help the
discussion further along.

En Xristwi,

Rev. Bryant J. Williams III
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>
To: <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 08, 2006 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] bara vs' bero in Genesis 1:1


> 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
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