H8415

• {"n":"Genesis 7:11","s":"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.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=genesis-7-11","r":"Genesis 7:11","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads the deep or the great deep, an ordinary common noun with no personal or mythological overtone in English at all."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"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."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"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."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"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."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"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."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"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."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u05ea\u05b0\u05bc\u05d4\u05d5\u05b9\u05dd tehom \u00b7 H8415"}],"src":["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"]}