Biblical Hebrew Forum

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

On 7/12/06, James Christian Read wrote:
> 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.

I am not trying to "paganize" the Tanakh.  I am trying to
read it in the right context, and in view of your original
question, to explain why the word Tehom in Genesis 1
is indicative of pagan concepts even if Genesis 1 itself
as we have it today is monotheistic.  Furthermore, the
claim is not that this verse is referencing the Babylonian
Tiamat, but a Canaanite Tehom, both of which are
developments from an original Semitic diety Tiha:m (or
perhaps Tha:m?).  As for Isa 51:9-10, what we have are
two verses that stand out in the context of the paragraph.
The pararaph itself appears to be referring to the Exodus
although I am not sure this is explicit.  Specifically, 9b
and 10a stand out by the introduction of the verse part
with the words hlw) )t-hy):

hlw) )t-hy) hmxcbt rhb, mxwllt tnyn
hlw) )t-hy) hmxrbt ym, my thwm rbh

The JPS translation is:

Art thou not it that hewed Rahab in pieces,
 that pierced the dragon?
Art thou not it that dried up the sea,
 the waters of the great deep?

Besides the obvious similar structure between the two
verses, noted by the initial two or three words, there are
also the two verbs mxrbt and mxcbt.  (The x may be a
different one in each root, though.  I need to check that part).
The parallelism Rahab = Tanin is clear.  But in light of the
similarity in form and structure between these two
parallelisms, we are also justified for looking for a
connection between 9b and 10a.  Are Yam and Tehom
Rabbah also references to the dragon?  It appears that
there is a double meaning here.  The verb mxrbt means
to dry, but it also means to destroy.  Yam and Tehom
are references to a sea, but they are also names of the
chaotic sea dragon that was defeated.  When the
author writes: "Were you not the one that xrb Yam?"
it could mean either: "Were you not the one that
destroyed the Chaotic Sea dragon Yam?" as well as
"Were you not the one that dried up the Sea?"  The
same goes for the second part of the parallelism:
".. the waters of Tehom the Great" vs "the waters of
the great deep."  If, as is quite possible, the verses
are referring to the Exodus and the splitting of the Sea,
why then does it mention the dragon?  The mention of
the dragon in verse 9, forces us to view verse 10 in two
ways: the destruction of the chaotic sea dragon, and
the drying up and splitting of the sea.  These verses
therefore directly acknowledge the usage of Tehom,
not simply as a generic word for Deep, but as a word
for the chaotic sea dragon.

> 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?

Please reread the introduction to the post where I
introduced a second method of interpreting the Genesis
account.  Very basically, Moses or whomever wrote the
Genesis creation account, should not necessarily be seen
as having written and chosen every word of the account,
but of changing the then "commonly accepted" theory in
order to pass a message.  The reading of the Creation
account should not be seen simply as reading a historical
narrative, but of attempting to discover the differences
between the Genesis creation narrative and the then
accepted creation narrative.  Please note that I have not
taken a position that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and
I believe that this part could date as late as the 4th
century BCE.  Rather, I am speaking as much as
possible on grounds that you can perhaps more easily
accept.  It is wrong to simply look to Babylonian Tiamat
as the source of Tehom.  The idea is that originally
there was a Semitic chaotic sea god(dess) Tiha:m.
In Babylon, this evolved to the goddess Tiamat.  In
Canaan, this evolved to Tehom.  I think it is hard to
accept that anyone from the late second millenium
BCE to the late first millenium BCE would be unaware
that Tehom was a reference to a chaotic sea dragon
or god.  It was part of the language, part of the
symbolism that authors used.  It is like me making
a reference to Snow White.  Yes, when I write "snow
white" I could just be speaking of a hue of white so
majestic that it resembles snow.  But I could also
be speaking of the legend of Snow White.  And if I
wrote the sentence, "She was as beautiful as Snow
White," I could an allusion to the legend, without
necessarily accepting the historicity of Snow White,
and you could ask "Well isn't it possible that in that
sentence the meaning intended was just the color
of white snow?"  But the answer is no, everyone
would recognize the allusion to Snow White today
just like everyone would recognize the allusion to
Tehom or Tehom the Great.  Now I'm not sure
whether the ancient Israelites would have known the
"legend of Tehom" without accepting its historicity
the way we do today with Snow White, but I think
the comparison is the same, and Isaiah 51 is a
very direct proof that such literary symbolism of
Tehom was current in the minds of the ancient
Israelites.

> 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?

Again, I am not saying the reference is to the Babylonian
Tiamat, but rather to the Canaanite counterpart Tehom.
They may also have identified Tehom with Tiamat, but this
is unclear, and it is a secondary issue.  That might be
much like the Greeks and Romans identified "Jupiter" with
"Zeus Pater."  Yes, the two are etymologically related.  But
they could easily have been identified based on the
comparable roles of the gods rather than some some
awareness and realization of the similar etymology.

> 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?

Isaiah 51 shows that the Israelites were not ignorant of
the myths relating Tehom as the sea dragon that the
God destroyed and cut up.

Yitzhak Sapir
http://toldot.blogspot.com