Tehom

But in that, like, those few words there, it says, right, it says a wind or spirit of God, right, hovered over the face of the deep.

The Hebrew word deep there is, in Hebrew, tahom, which is exactly the same as the Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat.

Tahom Tiamat.

Which, again, is not to say that there's an actual Mesopotamian god hidden in the Hebrew Bible.

She shares about Rashi, who shares Tohu as an expression of the wonder and the astonishment when a person feels at the Vohu, the emptiness of it all, and says, wow, if I had been there, I would have been astounded at such absence.

And there was darkness on the face of the waters when she uses a poetic expression Translation from Stephen Frosch, translating Tehom as murmuring deep.

Yes, that feels funny.

The poetic reading conveys some of the complex harmonics of Tehom.

The Hebrew roots, hamam, hamah, chom, cover meanings like humming, murmuring, cooing, groaning, tumult, music, Restlessness, stirring, panic, a large register of tones and sounds and movement.

The place of non-silence is not silent.

So what is that referring to so far? That his land is blessed.

And it will have the bounty of the heavens and the Tehom.

Tehom is always a reference to the waters in the depth.

Like the water where the springs will shoot forth their water from.

So yourself will have bounty and it will be blessed

They were so upset.

And they broke through the Tehom.

They broke through the lower waters.

They broke through that to try to make it up.

It says, He dug up the shitin.

He dug up those drain pipes, those holes in the foundation of the temple to go all the way down.

The lower waters of the depths of the Tehom, it rose up and it wanted to inundate the world.

It wanted to make a big flood.

Now, here he's referred to as a Leviathan.

Now, the reason why is because his primary source of occupancy or residency is the Great Deep, a great sea, you know, just way out there.

You know, folks want to know, and I heard Dr. Ruckman one time talking about, you know, how he would have no part in going to the moon.

And I said, yeah, I ain't into that.

The waters encompassed me.

Ad nefesh tehom, into the deep, deep, uh, uh, depths of the water encircling me.

Um, my-- the weeds were tangled around my head.

You're imagining the seaweed now getting all around him.

It has darkness too.

It has a deep, but there is no battle no rival god rises from the sea no divine council trembles before a monster no creator needs weapons winds nets or an army god speaks and the world obeys that difference is going to matter enormously because when we place genesis beside the enuma ilish we do not just find possible echoes from the ancient world we find two radically different answers to the same enormous question what was there before the world began and what kind of power turned chaos into order So let's slow down and look at that one word, Tehom.

In Hebrew, Tehom means the deep or the great watery abyss.

In Genesis 1-2, darkness is over the face of Tehom.

it is there before dry land before plants before stars before animals before human beings it is part of the raw unshaped condition from which the ordered world will emerge and to anyone who knows the enuma elish the resemblance can feel almost impossible to miss tiamat the primordial salt-water power the mother of gods The vast sea transformed into a divine person.

The being Marduk must face before he can establish order in the universe.

The Hebrew deep remains Tihom, silent before the voice of God.

And that is where the comparison becomes more than a word game.

It says he's gone down to Sheol, which is the deep under the earth, where dead people go.

But then he says he's at the bottom of Tahom, which is the deep water.

So you can't be in both unless Tahom is underneath It's so far down that he's actually underneath Sha'ul.

I don't know.

But I mean, the metaphors are not clear.

I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, to ever the earth was.

When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water," remember, the fountains of the deep, the Tehom, the creation period.

Verse 25, "Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: while as yet he," meaning God, "had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.

When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth, when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: When he gave to the sea his decree," meaning we're parting, the Lord is decreeing to the seas their habitations.