Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 7:11
The fountains of the great deep, and the windows of heaven. The word for deep is a cousin of the name of a Babylonian sea-goddess.
Genesis 7:11, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine two neighboring languages both having a word that traces back to the same ancient root for the sea, and one of those languages later personifies that word as a goddess while the other keeps it as an ordinary noun for deep water. That is roughly the relationship between Hebrew tehom and Babylonian Tiamat.
Because the sources of the flood, the deep breaking open and the windows of heaven, use the same word for the deep that opens Genesis 1:2, a word that is a genuine linguistic cousin of the name of the Babylonian chaos goddess Tiamat, though what that relationship proves is more contested than it first sounds.
Every version reads the deep or the great deep, an ordinary common noun with no personal or mythological overtone in English at all.
תְּהוֹם tehom · H8415
Tehom, the deep, at Genesis 1:2 and again here at 7:11, is a recognized linguistic cognate of Akkadian tiamtu, the ocean, personified in Babylonian myth as the goddess Tiamat, whom Marduk defeats in the creation epic Enuma Elish. Older scholarship argued Genesis preserves a demythologized version of that combat story; more recent comparative Semitic work argues both words simply descend independently from a common Proto-Semitic word for the deep, without one being a suppressed retelling of the other. The windows of heaven, arubbot, opening alongside the deep pictures the flood as creation's waters, once held back at Genesis 1, breaking loose again.
English deep is a plain descriptive noun carrying no mythological freight; a reader has no way to hear a cognate relationship to a Babylonian goddess's name sitting behind the ordinary English word, nor to notice that the flood is described as creation's original waters returning.
A linguistic cognate between a biblical term and a name from a neighboring mythology is real evidence of shared ancient vocabulary, but it is not by itself proof of borrowing a myth. Keep those two claims, shared word history and shared story, separate, and check which one a given scholar is actually arguing.
Every version renders it deep without argument. The live scholarly question is how much weight to put on the tehom/Tiamat connection: strong echo of a suppressed combat myth, or simply two related Semitic languages independently using an inherited word for the sea.
- tehom as a cognate of Akkadian tiamtu / Tiamat: comparative Semitic philology, widely accepted as a linguistic (not necessarily mythological) connection
- Tsumura's argument for independent descent from a common Proto-Semitic term rather than direct borrowing
- tehom's earlier appearance at Genesis 1:2
