Biblical Hebrew Forum

["JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.apu.ac.uk>]

Yitzhak:
Isa 51:9-10 - this text is clearly suggestive of a divine fight
between God and the chaotic Sea, comparable to Marduk
vs. Tiamat, or Ba(l vs. Yam. 
END QUOTE

JCR: Not to me it isn't. There is mention of a conflict 
with a dragon but no mention of any such conflict with 
the water. The waters merely bend to Yah's will, a 
recurrent theme throughout the tanakh. In fact, if one 
wanted to paganise the tanakh it would be far easier to 
try to depict Yah as an ancient water god than to 
justify any claims that this verse is referencing 
Babylonian Tiamat.

Yitzhak:
Tehom could refer to a deity, it is at the proper
place, and comparison with other ANE cosmogonies suggests
that Tehom in this place in a cosmogony is a deity, but the
resistance to use diety names when describing the planets as
well as the rather monotheistic representation of the story
suggests God may suggest the other way around.
END QUOTE

JCR: But what you have just said is self-contradictory.
If moshe was being so careful to choose words which 
did not allude to foreign gods why would he choose the 
word tehom if he believed it to be so inseperable a 
concept from the foreign god Tiamat? Could it not be 
that he just viewed the word 'tehom' as the correct 
way of referencing the primordial body of water and 
the thought that somehow one day we would confuse this 
as a reference to Babylonian Tiamat did not even enter 
into his head? And could it not also be that if we are 
to believe that the final editor of the torah used 
older sources that this story predates any Babylonian 
custom of associating a god Tiamat with the waters?

Yitzhak:
But if so,
why did the author, which probably was not ignorant of the
representation of Tehom in divine terms both in other ANE
cultures and in his own culture (such as in Isa 51), use the
word Tehom?
END QUOTE

This is a rather large assumption. Why would an Egyptian 
royal/scholar be acquainted with Babylonian gods and 
mythologies? Would it not be more likely that he be 
acquainted with Egyptian ones? And just how conscious 
of cognates do we believe the ancients to have been?
Only with retrospect and analysis of linguistic patterns 
have you been able to present a theory of how tehom is 
a cognate of Tiamat. Do we really expect the ancients 
to have been able to perform such complex linguistic 
analyses? And if the Genesis author were purposefully 
referencing Tiamat why did he not simply use the word 
Tiamat instead of the neutral Tehom which has absolutely 
no unambiguous divine attestations whatsoever?

Yitzhak:
It is at this point that the differences in interpretation of
a cosmogony such as Genesis become more obvious.
END QUOTE

JCR: And it is at this point that it is necessary to 
answer one fundamentally simple question. Is there 
anything whatsoever in the Genesis creation account 
that would lead a reader (ignorant of Babylonian myths) 
to believe that the Genesis creation account is 
referencing a god of the primordial waters?


James C. Read
UK



















a cognate of Tiamat. Do we really expect the ancients
to have been able to perform such complex linguistic
analyses? And if the Genesis author were purposefully
referencing Tiamat why did he not simply use the word
Tiamat instead of the neutral Tehom which has absolutely
no unambiguous divine attestations whatsoever?

Yitzhak:
It is at this point that the differences in interpretation of
a cosmogony such as Genesis become more obvious.
END