Tehom


Tehom, literally the Deep or Abyss, refers to the Great Deep of the primordial waters of creation in the Bible. Tehom is a cognate of the Akkadian word tamtu and Ugaritic t-h-m which have similar meaning. As such it was equated with the earlier Sumerian Tiamat. In Modern Arabic, Tihamah refers to a coastal plain of the Red Sea.

Overview

Tehom is first mentioned in Genesis, where it is translated as "deep":
It was from here that the waters of Noah's flood had their origin and the place that God temporarily receded the Red Sea for the Israelites to pass over before destroying the pursuing Egyptian army, and the place that God will dry up for the righteous to walk on towards their redemption at the End of Days.
Gnostics used this text to propose that the original creator god, called the "Pléroma" or "Bythós" pre-existed Elohim, and gave rise to such later divinities and spirits by way of emanations, progressively more distant and removed from the original form.
Tehom is also mentioned as the first of seven "Infernal Habitations" that correspond to the ten Qliphoth of Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, often in place of Sheol.
Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern writes in his comparative study of Babylonian and Hebrew creation myths:
According to both traditions before the creation all was water. The deep is personified as a terrible monster, which in the Babylonian version bears the name of "Tihamat," corresponding to the Hebrew "Tehom," used as the technical expression for the primæval ocean. The Hebrew word is employed without the article, like a proper name, thus indicating that in Israelite tradition also it stood originally for some mythological being.

Robert R. Stieglitz stated that Eblaitic texts demonstrate the equation of the goddess Berouth in the mythology of Sanchuniathon with Ugaritic thmt and Akkadian Tiâmat, via the name bʾrôt.