Biblical Hebrew Forum

["K Randolph" <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

On 7/11/06, Yitzhak Sapir <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Joel, and all,
>
> I agree.  But in order to draw a more careful line about whether
> Tehom is simply a word that means "Deep", undivinized from
> its origins, or whether Tehom is a reference to a god, I think it
> would be best to suggest how the Genesis account may be
> interpreted.
Big red flag! What follows is speculation and eisegesis. The clue is
in the "would be best to suggest how the Genesis account may be
interpreted" emphasizing "may".

> Suppose today you were called Moses and had a revelation from
> God.  God might say, "Listen, the Big Bang theory the scientists
> are speaking of is generally right.  However, let me show you my
> part of it."  God would describe the process in much the way it is
> described in astronomical texts (see for example:
> http://www.olemiss.edu/courses/astr103/Topics-Extrasolar/Beginning-N.html
> ) but explaining his part in the process.  At the most basic level,
> we might learn from this revelation that the process was directed
> and guided by God.  Now suppose, that 1000 years from now,
> theories of the Creation are much more developed, some of the
> events before Planck time can be further described, and some
> other events are known to take place probably a little differently
> than described in current models, because of involved experiments
> that showed results inconsistent with the models.  Would the
> revelation of God given today be wrong because God described
> his part in the process in terms of the current model?  The
> question is what God was out to tell us.  God probably did not
> want to get into involved discussions of the physics involved,
> nor of events that can only be described using advanced
> mathematics that we had not yet developed.  The revelation of
> God is not to be measured in the details of what happened in
> the period of 10^-41 second, but rather what God added or
> changed from the currently accepted model of creation.  It
> would be wrong for someone in 1000 years to claim that the
> physical theories developed by that time are wrong and the
> exact details of the divine revelation are inerrant simply
> because God used terms and concepts that made sense to
> us today but are out of date in 1000 years.
>
> There are of course other ways to interpret a divine
> revelation, but this is one of them, and it paves the way to
> seeing how a revelation can be given in the context of a
> borrowing of a cosmogony.  Such a method of interpretation
> also places a different emphasis on the study.  In order to
> understand the revelation, we must understand what was
> borrowed, and how it was changed.  While this may have
> been common knowledge to Israelites in Biblical times, it
> is much less so today.
You are making an assumption of borrowing that has no evidence to back
up your assumption. Just because surviving copies of Enuma Elish are
older than surviving copies of accounts of Genesis Flood, does not
make it the older account.

> Karl and George have suggested that the usage of the word
> Tehom in the Bible shows that it is not a divine name in
> Hebrew.  While some usages may indeed indicate a
> "de-mythologized" meaning, others are ambiguous and also
> suggestive of divine interpretation:
>
> 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.  It is hard to see the mention
> of either Yam or Tehom Rabbah in this verse as a reference
> to non-personalized or even non-divine forces.
This is a reference to Moses at the Red Sea. No demythologizing here.

> Gen 49:25 The parallelism $mym/thwm immediately
> follows )l )byk/$dy, which is clearly a divine
...not!

> Deut 33:13 A similar parallelism to the last example, but
> here, while various words can be interpreted as divinities, it
> appears the implication is of regular nouns, and there is no
> other reason to read this as a diety.
A repeat of the above.

Even in English we say that the U.S. has been blessed with a good
climate and soils for agricultural production. This is not deifying
the climate and soils. There is no reason to assume that when we find
a similar statement in Biblical Hebrew, that we are not dealing with
the same idea.

> Ps 104:6 - Here, we find Tehom in parallelism with mym.  So
> perhaps on the face of it, we do not find any direct reference
> to a diety.  But in 104:25-26, the Sea/Yam, which starts out
> being described naturally, is described in the end of the verse
> as Leviathan.

You misread the verse. Leviathan is an animal living in the sea,
created by God, who looks to God for his food. Read the context. Even
in poetry, leviathan is just another animal, albeit large.

> ...   Leviathan is almost exclusively refered to not
> as a natural manifestation

Wrong. It is one of the creatures in the sea.

>  ... but as a creature with a proper
> name,

No more so than a lion or other animal.

> ... and Ps 74:14 seems to describe the fight between God
> and the Sea very clearly,

There is no fight between God and the Sea in this verse.

> ... while Isa 27:1 alludes to a similar
> fight.

Again the only evidence of a fight is eisegesis.

> ...  One gets the impression that while Ps 104 describes
> Yam in natural terms, it is not because it is de-mythologizing
> Yam, but rather, it is expanding on Yam, using the term
> as both a divine term when comparing to Leviathan, and a
> natural term, when compared to the great size of the sea.  If
> Yam is so described, it would be hard to suggest that Tehom
> is not also so described.  Because there is no outright
> comparison, this text has to be taken as ambiguous, however.
>
> These examples suggest that while Tehom may be used in
> some places in the Bible as a natural term, it is used in others
> as a reference to the diety itself.  The most obvious example
> from the above is Isa 51, of course.  Significantly, Isa 51 and
> Ps 104, which provide evidence that Tehom was viewed as a
> diety or at least not entirely in natural terms (as far as 104),
> are also cosmogonies.  Context and genre appear to play an
> important role -- just like one could describe the sun in plain
> terms and refer to just the plain sun in many texts and yet in
> certain texts refer to a Sun god, when that context requires it,
> so too here, Tehom appears to be used as a natural term, like
> the word Yam, except those places where the context allows
> for a divine interpretation.  Cosmogonies are definitely such
> examples.  While $amayim may usually used as a natural
> term, examples such as Job 28:12-13 suggest that a
> parallelism with $mym does not deny the meaning as the
> great Chaotic Sea god that God vanquished in bringing
> order to the world.
For crying out loud, Job is poetry. Even in poetry, there is
absolutely no reference to God vanquishing the deep, rather the
subject of this passage is where wisdom comes from. This
anthropomorphizing the deep is no different than saying that the trees
clap their hands in joy (Isaiah 55:12). By the way, you got the verse
numbers wrong.

> In Genesis 1, therefore, one finds the text as it is now
> ambiguous.

Only when you start with weird eisegesis.

> ...  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.  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?

If, as suggested by the literary style, this document (Genesis
1:1–2:4) stems from the very beginning of time, then the other
cultures of the ANE had not yet been invented.

> ....  In fact, since Shamayim is an otherwise
> relatively natural word and one used often to compare with
> Tehom, why did the author not speak of Shamayim?  It
> would even have made more sense in the context of the
> verse since Shamayim were created in verse 1, and the
> previous part of verse 2 described the )arec.  Why take a
> word that has rather obvious divine connotations in
> this particular textual context, and use it instead of more
> natural words, especially when you go out of your way to
> describe the Sun and the Moon, which are natural terms
> as well?
>
> It is at this point that the differences in interpretation of
> a cosmogony such as Genesis become more obvious.
> While an interpretation which suggests Genesis was a
> new revelation describing in detail the steps and details
> of creation may find it hard to explain such a usage,
> except to attempt to deny it, an interpretation that
> suggests Genesis was based on creation accounts of
> the time, and that the revelation is to be found not in
> the details, but in the changes from those accounts,
> can explain the presence of Tehom as something that
> wasn't changed from the earlier accounts.  Rather, the
> use of other terms such as Ma)or for Sun and Moon
> may suggest that here the word Tehom, while not
> changed from previous accounts must be still read in
> a new context.
>
> Yitzhak Sapir
> http://toldot.blogspot.com

With this the way you treat the Biblical texts, no wonder you
repeatedly twist our statements into straw man arguments (a logical
fallacy, look it up) that makes discussing ideas with you so very
difficult.

Karl W. Randolph.