This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net.
31 July 2022 Navigate 'up' to the Genesis index: index-genesis.
In the Revised Version, Genesis 1:2 reads like so:
And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
The "deep" here is in Hebrew tehom, not an adjective for depth, but a noun referring to, well, something that we don't quite have an English word for. Here it refers to the primeval ocean that existed before the creation. Some scholars relate it to Tiamat, the mythological monster of the sea, defeated in some other creation stories as a prelude to the creation of earth as a habitable world.
Regardless of how much Tiamat has to do with tehom, there is the similarity in that the water must be dealt with by God in Genesis before the world can become habitable. First, it must be pushed back, creating a space for the dry land to inhabit. Then, a sky must be made to hold back the waters above and keep them from drowning the land.
In the story of Noah's flood, the un-creation story, the process is reversed by opening up all the wellsprings of the great tehom, leading to the flooding of the earth. The tehom, rhetorically, can function as a kind of opposite of the sky, as in the blessing in which a son of Jacob is granted "blessings of the sky above, and blessings of tehom beneath." It is used both for the sea, and for the groundwaters below the earth.
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