"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-."
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