The word that serves as some of the primary inspiration for this study is the Hebrew word, tehom. In our English bibles, this word translates to deep, depths, flood, sea, or abyss, but typically the word is used to convey some meaning of a primeval or primordial ocean. Now those are some very mystical-sounding words to simply say we are talking about the waters of creation.
Genesis 1:2a The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.
This idea of a primordial sea is not unique to the Israelites. In fact, this concept was rather common among the ancient Near Eastern cultures and is enshrined in other famous creation myths such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Many have compared Genesis’ account of creation to the Enuma Elish, noting similarities between Tiamat (a Babylonian goddess representing the primordial sea) being divided in order to form creation and God’s separating of the waters to form creation.1
Tehom is therefore a word loaded with symbolism. God separated the waters of chaos to bring forth the dry land, an act of order and creation. This is repeated as God separates the waters of the Red Sea in exodus.
Exodus 15:8
At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up;
the floods stood up in a heap;
the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.
The other side of this coin, the tehom is also described as covering the land again in several stories. If dividing the tehom is an act of order and creation, then releasing it is an act of chaos and un-creation or death, often seen in the context of judgments. Here we have examples coming from the Red Sea, Noah’s Ark, and Ezekiel’s Judgment against Tyre.
Exodus 15:4-5
“Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea,
and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.
The floods covered them;
they went down into the depths like a stone.
Genesis 7:11
In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.
Ezekiel 26:19
“For thus says the Lord GOD: When I make you a city laid waste, like the cities that are not inhabited, when I bring up the deep over you, and the great waters cover you,
To round us out, this is the context in which we see Jonah’s use of the term as well, as he is clearly feeling God’s hand in his situation from the belly of the fish.
Jonah 2:5
The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
Jonah taps into this same symbolism to describe his plight. He begins layering some cosmological pictures within his book and inviting readers to dive in and take a deeper look at all the imagery the book of Jonah portrays.
- Mazzinghi, Luca. “Creation in the near Ancient East: The Babylonian Poem ‘Enuma Elish’.” Ghana Journal of Religion and Theology, vol. 12, no. 1–2, Dec. 2022, pp. 21–25. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.4314/gjrt.v12i1-2.3.
All verses are from the English Standard Version translation unless otherwise noted.
Reflection Questions
There are many Hebrew words for ‘water’ or ‘sea’ so what is it Jonah is trying to communicate by specifically using the word tehom?
Try doing a word study on tehom, what other themes do you notice in passages with the word?
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