Usually understood as the deep primeval ocean or subterranean waters, tehom is seen in Gen 1:2 as a component of the tohu-wabohu, the "formless and void," that was the earth in its early stages of God's original creation before God spoke things into being to fill and to order it into a state fit for human occupation.
Older scholarship tended to derive tehom from Tiamat, a monster of personified chaos and the mother of the gods recorded in a Sumerian and Babylonian myth (Enuma Elish). She tried to kill off the lesser gods to which she had given births. Instead she was killed by Marduk and out of her body became the stuff for the creation of the heavens and the earth. These same scholars then argued that Genesis shared the same theological significance of the word as found in those Sumerian and Babylonian myths. But Tiamat and tehom share only a similar but different cognate root1 and the theologies between Genesis and these myths are decidely different. But, even if Tiamat and tehom shared the same root, as Routledge suggests, he avers,
תְה֑וֹם [tehom] cannot derive from Tiamat, there appears to be general agreement that it is from the same root, and so may have been included as an intentional allusion to the Babylonian myth; though, significantly, in the Genesis narrative תְה֑וֹם is not given divine status nor even personified. The reference, in the same verse, to the earth as ּהוֹבָוּהוֹת (tohu wabohu) which the NIV translates, ‘formless and empty’, has been widely taken to refer to a primordial chaos, which is then transformed by God. This, again, appears deliberately to recall Ancient Near Eastern mythology; though the absence of a conflict motif in Genesis 1 suggests that, as with תְה֑וֹם, chaos is passive rather than in active opposition to the Creator."2
References:
1. NIDOTTE 4: 275-77.
2. Robin Routledge, "Did God Create Chaos?" Tyndale Bulletin 61.1 (2010): 69-88 (73).
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