Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 7/10/06, Bryant J. Williams III wrote:

> 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.

The above seems to say much the same as in parts of the mail that
I wrote that you quote:

> > 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.

Note: In the discussion so far, it seems we have reached agreement
on this point -- that is, that the words are cognates.

[...]
> > 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):

And the above book and articles inside may also be of very much
interest to readers of this thread.

[... long snip -- including a very in depth review of the evidence for
tehom and tiamat being cognates ... ]

> > 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.

I argued in that post, and in a later post, about a basic Semitic
cosmogony which spoke of how Tehom was split into two.  This
is definitely further supported by your quote above that Tehom
is divinized in Ugaritic.  Now, Harris seems to take the position
that it was originally "merely deep waters" and was independently
divinized in Ugaritic and Akkadian, but it could have been
equally argued that this was a divinity name and was "un-
divinized" in Hebrew.  Ugarit, from my point of view, is not
Canaanite, neither linguistically nor culturally, but is indicative of
West Semitic and Northwest Semitic culture and language.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com