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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Yam
The sea as an opponent God fights, not just water.
Psalm 74:13-14, in every translation this tool compares.
The sea. God rebukes it, splits it, and tramples its waves, which is how you would talk about an opponent, or how a poet might talk about water. Hebrew poetry keeps leaving open whether the sea here is scenery or an opponent.
God rebukes the sea, splits the sea, tramples the waves, and the Hebrew poetry keeps leaving open whether the sea is scenery or an opponent.
H3220 (יָם), 396 occ, nearly all the ordinary sea
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.
Scenery or opponent. Stolz's DDD article has the sea serving as backdrop and as an opponent with real agency in the same psalms, and the Ugaritic Yam supplies the opponent. Against a personal reading, nearly all of the word's 396 occurrences are the ordinary sea, and a poet can rebuke water without believing anyone is listening.
- Job 7:12
- Job 26:12
- Psalm 74:13
- Psalm 89:9-10
- Habakkuk 3:8
- 1 Kings 7:23-26
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- F. Stolz, "Sea," DDD, 737-741 (the bronze sea and Yam's title *zbl ym tpt nhr* come later in the same long article)
- Dempsey Rosales Acosta, "Lord of Hosts," *Lexham Bible Dictionary*
- Gibson, *Canaanite Myths and Legends*
- M. S. Smith, *The Ugaritic Baal Cycle*, Vol. I, on KTU 1.1-1.2
