Yam

Yam is Baal's first rival in the Ugaritic cycle. He falls to two named weapons that Kothar forges and speaks incantations over: Yagrush, "Driver," which fails to fell him, and then Ayyamarri, which strikes him between the eyes and drops him (KTU 1.2 IV). His Ugaritic title is zbl ym tpt nhr, "Prince Sea, Judge River," so the sea and the river flood are one power under two names. An eighteenth-century BC letter from Mari, quoting Nur-Sin of Aleppo to King Zimri-Lim, has the storm god say "the weapons with which I had battled against Sea I gave to you," the earliest literary witness to the Baal and Yam combat, centuries older than the Ugaritic tablets. In Israel's cultic poetry the sea is a personified combatant alongside Tannin, Leviathan, and Rahab: Yahweh rebukes it, smashes its heads, dries up its waters or sets their limits. Psalm 74 pictures a battle before creation that splits the personified yam, matching Ugaritic Yam, and in the same breath the sea serves as backdrop and as an opponent with real agency. The temple furniture keeps the image. Solomon's molten sea (1 Kings 7:23-26; 2 Chronicles 4:2-10), a bronze basin about fifteen feet across standing on twelve bronze bulls, put the cosmic Sea, tamed and domesticated, inside Yahweh's house.