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מַיִם (Mayim): Living Water for Thirsty Souls · Reformed Thinking

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Welcome to reformed thinking. We are so glad you were tuning
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in with us today. Yeah, we really are.
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And I want you to start by just imagining something for a
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second. Imagine living on a flat disk of
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Earth. Right.
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Just a flat plane, yeah. You look up and there is a
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massive crushing ocean suspended directly above your head and it
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is held back by like just a thin invisible Dome.
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It is a terrifying image honestly.
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It really is. And then you look down, and
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beneath your feet is this bottomless, dark, chaotic abyss
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1 crack in the floor of the world, or one failure of that
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Dome above you and you are entirely swallowed.
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Just completely wiped out, right?
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So today we are taking a deep dive into the awe inspiring
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reality of the ancient mind. We are tearing into a stack of
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scholarly lexical entries, theological dictionaries, and
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historical linguistics. And we are looking at all this
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to understand how the ancient Hebrew writers categorized,
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feared, and relied upon water. Because the contrast between
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their perspective and ours is just, well, it is stark.
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Oh, it is night and day. I mean, think about it.
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When you walk into your kitchen today and turn on the tap, you
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see a utility. Yeah, it is just a resource.
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Right. You see a verifiable,
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quantifiable chemical compound. Two parts hydrogen, one part
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oxygen, H2O. It is clean.
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We bottle it, we sell it, we measure it in ounces.
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Yeah, we like things to be manageable.
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We like them categorized. But the linguistic data we are
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looking at today just shatters that scientific lens.
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It really does. For the ancient Near Eastern
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mind, water was never a neutral object.
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No, not at all. It was a matter of immediate
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life or sudden violent death. So we are focusing on 2 specific
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ancient Hebrew words that define this worldview.
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We have maim which translates to water.
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And then we have T hum, which refers to the deep or the abyss.
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Right. And our mission for this deep
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dive is to move past the idea of water as a simple utility.
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We want to see it the way they saw it.
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As a dynamic force of life, a psychological metaphor, and a
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direct instrument of divine sovereignty.
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So let us jump right into the water they interacted with every
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single day. Let's look at the grammar of the
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word maim. Yeah, the grammar itself is
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fascinating. It is.
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This word appears roughly 580 times in the Hebrew text.
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Which is a massive footprint in the language.
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Oh, absolutely. But the grammatical curiosity
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that caught my eye in the research is the structure of the
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word itself. Right, because maim is
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grammatically dual or plural. Yeah, it has that M ending in
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Hebrew, which signifies a plural noun, yet the sources note it is
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used in A singular sense. It is a bit of a paradox.
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Sometimes it is paired with singular verbs and other times
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with plural verbs. So what is the linguistic
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rationale behind this? Well, it is actually a brilliant
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reflection of their physical reality.
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The ancient language captures the world's with total accuracy.
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How so? When you look at water in
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nature, it is an uncountable mass.
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In their mind, water is never a solitary object.
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Right, you cannot just point to one individual.
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Water precisely. It is always a collection.
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It is a volume, a moving body. I think the lexicons call this a
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tantum plural, right? Yeah, that is the technical
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term. It is a fancy way of describing
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A noun that only occurs in the plural form because the
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substance itself is inherently plural.
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That makes me think of English words we use every day without
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giving a second thought to the grammar.
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Like what? Words like scissors or pants.
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You never ask someone to hand you a single pant.
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Oh, right. Or mass nouns like sand.
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Yeah, sand is a great example. You do not pick up a single
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grain and call it a sand, you just call it sand.
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That is a solid comparison. But I do have a bit of pushback
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for you here based on the sources.
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OK, let's hear it. Why didn't the ancient writers
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just have a singular word for a single drop?
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I mean, if I have a drop of water on my finger, isn't that a
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singular identifiable piece of water?
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Well, it is a logical question for someone living in a modern
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climate controlled environment. Fair enough, but you have to
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place yourself in the arid desert adjacent geography of the
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ancient Near East. Right, the Levant.
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Yeah, in Levant a single drop of water was entirely irrelevant.
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Because it just does not do anything.
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Spot on. If a single drop of water hits
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the parched ground of the Judean wilderness, it evaporates before
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it can even be registered. It literally vanishes.
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It does nothing. Water was defined entirely by
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its presence as a life sustaining mass.
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So the language lacks A singular word for a drop because a drop
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provides 0 relief. Yeah, zero relief for a thirsty
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flock of sheep or a dying barley field.
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That makes so much sense, and the entries outline the physical
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forms this plural mass took in their daily lives.
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They definitely do. You had rainwater, which Second
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Samuel 21 talks about pouring out from heaven.
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Right. And you had melted snow.
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Yeah, Job 24 mentioned snow vanishing in the heat.
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And then there is spring water drawn from a deep well.
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I think the Hebrew word is beer. Correct.
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And of course, you had the massive flowing waters of major
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rivers. Like the Jordan, the Nile and
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the Euphrates. Right, so the grammar itself
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forces the reader to acknowledge the overwhelming collective
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nature of the substance. It is always a multitude, you
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just cannot isolate it. And as we shift from the grammar
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to the daily application, it becomes so clear that this
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plural mass dictated absolutely everything about their survival.
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Everything about their society, really.
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The research catalogs the domestic applications of Mayim
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pretty heavily. It was the literal substance of
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daily existence. Yeah, you have drinking water
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like in Genesis 21 when Hagar is cast out and given a skin of
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water for the wilderness. And you have water for cooking,
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as detailed in the instructions for the Passover in Exodus 12.
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Right. And then you have water for
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washing. Now the washing aspect is where
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the intersection of daily life and theological reality begins
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to take shape. Because it it is not just about
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hygiene. No, not at all.
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It is not just washing hands and feet like we see in Genesis 18
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when Abraham offers water to his dusty guests.
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The usage transitions into washing garments, vessels and
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sacrificial victims. Which brings us right into the
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cultic or ritual use of water within the sanctuary.
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And the specific cultic designations here are
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fascinating. We see the phrase holy water in
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numbers 5. We also see bitter water in the
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very next verse. Right.
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And we see this concept of living water.
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In this context, that means running water.
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Yeah, used in Leviticus 14 for the purification rights of
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someone recovering from a skin disease.
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So I want to synthesize this for a second because I'm looking at
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these documents and I see the exact same physical substance
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being used in two totally different ways.
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How do you mean? Well, it is used to scrub
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physical dirt off a common cooking pot in Leviticus 11, but
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then it is used as water of purification in Numbers 19.
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Right. To cleanse a person who's become
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ritually impure by touching a corpse.
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Yeah, So what is the bridge between physical dirt and ritual
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impurity? Why use the same substance to
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wash a dirty tunic and to alter a spiritual state?
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To grasp the mechanism at work here, we really have to
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understand the ancient view of creation, order and the
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sanctuary. OK, break that down for.
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Us in their understanding, physical cleanliness was an
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outward, tangible manifestation of an inward or ritual state
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before a holy Creator. So they did not separate the
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physical and the spiritual like we do.
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Precisely. We tend to partition the
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physical world and the spiritual world into two separate
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categories. They did not.
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That is a huge paradigm shift. It is ritual impurity was not
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necessarily a moral sin. It was a state of being out of
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alignment with the intense purity of the sanctuary space.
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Because death, disease and bodily emissions were all
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associated with the curse. Yes, the curse and human
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mortality. The sanctuary was a realm of
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perfect life and order. So you could not bring the
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symbols of mortality into the realm of perfect life.
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You just could not. They bled into each other
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entirely. The physical dirt and the ritual
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status were completely intertwined.
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Right. And water, specifically running
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or living water, was the perfect vehicle for divine cleansing
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decrees. Think about the difference
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between a stagnant puddle and a flowing spring.
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Stagnant water is gross. It holds on to corruption.
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Yeah, it becomes a breeding ground for disease.
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It is essentially dead, but Living Water is active.
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It carries corruption away. That is right, the flowing water
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physically removes the dirt from the hands or the garment, and by
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divine decree it simultaneously removes the ritual impurity.
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It restores the person to a state of order where they can
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once again approach the sanctuary.
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The water acts as a physical mediator of a spiritual reality.
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That concept of running water carrying things away naturally
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shifts our conversation from the water that cleanses the body to
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the water that is produced by the body.
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Oh yeah. This is an interesting part of
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the research. Because if the body is a source
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of mortality and impurity, the language they use to describe it
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reveals a lot about their culture.
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The research catalog some incredibly specific and honestly
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amusing linguistic idioms regarding human biology.
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The euphemisms in the Hebrew text are a brilliant study in
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cultural communication and really textual dignity.
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They had to talk about bodily functions, but they chose to
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veil them. Avoiding direct terms for bodily
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functions is an entirely human trait.
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I mean, we do it all the time today.
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Oh, constantly. If you are at a dinner party,
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you do not announce the biological specifics of what you
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are about to do. No, please do not.
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You say you are going to the restroom or using the
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facilities. Or just washing up.
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Yeah, and the ancients were doing the exact same thing.
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The text points to the phrase water of the feet found in
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Second Kings 18 and Isaiah 36. Which the lexicons explicitly
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define as urine. We also have water of Gaul in
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Jeremiah 8, which refers to poisoned bitter water.
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And there is a pretty intense scholarly debate listed in our
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research over Isaiah 48. Oh, right, where the phrase
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waters of Judah might actually translate to water from your
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loins. Yeah, referring to Seminole
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fluid and tracing the physical lineage of the people.
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So the use of these euphemisms maintains a high level of
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dignity within a sacred text. While still recording some
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really harsh historical and biological realities.
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The second Kings 18 narrative is a perfect example of this.
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It really is set the scene for us.
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Well, the Assyrian military commander is standing outside
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the walls of Jerusalem and he is just taunting the Israelites.
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He is threatening them with a siege so prolonged and severe
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that the inhabitants will be starved to the point of
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consuming their own waste. It is horrific and the text has
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to record the absolute horror and degradation of the Assyrian
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threat. But the writers use the idiom
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water of the feet to do so. Right.
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A linguistic veil is drawn over the grotesque physical reality.
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It tells you what is happening, how terrible the situation is,
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without degrading the sacred nature of the historical record.
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It is a way of handling the shame of human frailty.
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Yeah, very tactful. So we have covered the physical
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water on the ground, the cultic water and the Tabernacle and the
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biological water of the human body.
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But the lexical entries take us into the human mind next.
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Water flows directly into how the ancient writers describe
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their own internal emotional states.
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The psychological metaphors associated with MAME are some of
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the most vivid images in the entire text.
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They really are The writers consistently use water to
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signify intense weakness, cowardice, or terror.
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I know you have the references right there.
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Yeah, I do, and they paint a grim picture of human panic.
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Joshua Chapter 7 describes the heart of the people melting and
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becoming like water after a military defeat.
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And Ezekiel 7 says that in the face of impending judgment, all
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hands will go limp and every knee will turn to water.
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Plus, Lamentations too speaks of pouring out your heart like
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water in the midst of overwhelming grief.
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It is a very consistent metaphor.
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Now here is where I have to push back on the logic of the ancient
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writers based on what we just discussed.
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OK, what is your issue with it? We just talked about how water
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is a massive, uncontrollable force.
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It dictates survival. It is strong enough to carve
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canyons out of solid rock. Yeah, it sweeps armies away.
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Right. So why in a world would they use
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this unstoppable, destructive substance as the ultimate
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metaphor for weakness and fear? Well, it is an excellent
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question. When you look at a roaring
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river, you see force. Yeah, undeniable force, but the.
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Key to this specific psychological metaphor is not
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water's force, it is water's complete lack of solid form.
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I see. Think about the physical anatomy
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of terror. Think about a time you
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experienced sudden, overwhelming panic.
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Like a real physical threat. Yeah, what actually happens to
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your central nervous system? Well, your stomach drops, your
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knees buckle, you feel completely faint, like you just
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cannot hold your own weight. Exactly.
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I mean, spot on. Your structural integrity
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vanishes. Wow.
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Yeah, when the text says a heart melts to water or knees become
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like water, it is describing a person losing their internal
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skeleton. They literally become fluid.
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Yes, they're unable to stand their ground in the face of a
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terrifying enemy, or more significantly, in the face of
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the holy judgment of a sovereign Creator.
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The human frame just cannot support itself.
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It loses all rigidity. The metaphor is about the loss
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of form. That is it.
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That paints such an accurate, terrifying picture.
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You are trying to stand firm, you're trying to be courageous,
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but your very bones have turned to.
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Liquid you cannot brace yourself against the threat.
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The research also points to water as a metaphor for
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transitoriness, which connects directly to this idea of lacking
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A graspable form. Yeah, Job 11 mentions this.
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It says that you will forget your misery, remembering it only
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as waters that have passed away. Which makes sense, because if
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you try to hold a handful of river water, it slips right
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through your fingers. You cannot retain it, no matter
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how tightly you squeeze your hands.
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So the metaphor here focuses on passing time and passing
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suffering. The water flows downstream.
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It is impossible to hold back the current, but it is also
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impossible to hold onto the water itself.
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The misery and the trauma are washed away by the relentless
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current of Providence. It is a statement about the
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temporary nature of human suffering under the sun.
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It passes. That gives MAME a massive
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semantic range. It really does.
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It covers everything. From the water boiling in a
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cooking pot, to the purification of a priest, to the feeling of
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sheer terror in your chest, to the passing of time.
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But having analyzed the surface water, the biology and the
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psychology, the sources we are looking at dramatically shift
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the scale. This is the part I have been
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waiting for. Because if maim is the water we
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interact with on a daily basis, the water we drink and the water
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we weep, what is the water we absolutely cannot control?
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This brings us to the second word in our stack of research.
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Enter T home. T home.
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The lexicons define this word as the deep, the abyss, the
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primeval flood. The text notes that this word
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occurs 36 times in the Hebrew Bible, and it is found primarily
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in the poetic and prophetic texts.
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So if Maim is the river you wash your clothes in, Kahom is the
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cosmic ocean. To comprehend the weight of
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Tahom, we really have to outline the ancient cosmological
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architecture. Yeah, because when they looked
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at the world, they did not see a globe floating in a vacuum of
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space. No, not at all.
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They understood the earth to be situated within massive,
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overwhelming bodies of water. You had the firmament above,
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which acted as a solid Dome holding back the upper waters.
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Right. The sky and those upper waters
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were the source of rain released through the floodgates of
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heaven. And below the earth, sustaining
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the land but also threatening it, You had the subterranean
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ocean. The sources cite some staggering
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verses for this worldview. Job 38 talks about the waters
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hardeningly like stone, and the surface of the deep, the Tahom
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becoming firm. And Soul 104 describes the deep
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covering the earth like a garment.
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Just picture the sheer psychological terror of that
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concept. Is hard to even wrap your mind
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around. You are living your life, you
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know, farming your land, raising your family on this disk of
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habitable earth, and suspended directly beneath your feet is a
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bottomless, dark, chaotic ocean. It is a profoundly unsettling
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geographical reality to inhabit. Yeah, you are sandwiched between
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two massive bodies of water that could at any moment collapse and
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reclaim the dry land. And because key home represents
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A4, so vast, so dark, and so thoroughly beyond human
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management, early modern scholars assumed the ancient
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Hebrews must have worshipped it. Or at least feared it as a rival
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God of chaos. Right.
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And this leads us to deconstruct a massive historical
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misconception. The sources outline this in
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great detail. The text introduces us to the
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1895 Gunkel hypothesis. Herman Gunkel was a highly
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influential German scholar. And he claimed that the Hebrew
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word tiham was directly derived from Tiamont.
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Now for you listening who might be unfamiliar with ancient Near
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Eastern mythology, we need to explain who Tiamont was.
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Yeah. Give us the background there.
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In the Babylonian creation epic known as the Enuma Elish, Tiamat
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was the mythical Chaos dragon. She was the monstrous divine
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personification of the Salt sea. According to the myth, she waged
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a massive cosmic war against the storm God Marduk.
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And Marduk slays her, splits her carcass in half, and uses her
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body to form the heavens and the earth.
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So Gunkel argued that when the Hebrew writers talked about the
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deep, the Tiham, they were basically just adapting this
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Babylonian monster myth. He argued they stole the
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concept. He did, and Gunkel's hypothesis
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sent shock waves through academic circles at the time.
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Because it challenged the uniqueness of the biblical
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creation narrative. Right, but the lexical
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dictionaries we are reviewing spend a substantial amount of
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time entirely refuting this hypothesis.
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And they do so using cold, hard linguistic evidence.
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Yes. First, they look at the
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phonetics of the words themselves.
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The Hebrew Tahom is derived from a common Semitic route.
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That route is Tahom, right? Correct, and the sources
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mentioned that this route shows up in Arabic as Tiama, which
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simply refers to a coastal plain.
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And in Ugaritic as yam now to make sure we are keeping this
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accessible for everyone. What exactly is Ugaritic and why
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does it matter here? Ugaritic is an ancient Canaanite
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language discovered in the city of Ugarit, which is located in
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modern day Syria. So it is related to Hebrew.
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It is a cousin language to Hebrew.
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They share a lot of the same vocabulary and grammatical
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structures. OK, so the fact that the root
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word for Teham shows up in Ugaritic in Arabic proves that
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it is an independent native Semitic word.
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Spot on. It was not borrowed from
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Acadian, which was the language of Babylon.
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The phonetic rules of how words transfer between those languages
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demonstrate definitively that Tihom is not a linguistic
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descendant of Tihomoth. But the linguistic refutation is
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only half the. Argument right there is a
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theological layer to this. The far more compelling point
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the dictionaries make is how the word is actually deployed in the
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Hebrew text. Because Tom is never
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personified. Never.
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I noticed that detail in the research and it is a massive
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distinction. The text points out that the
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Hebrew Bible does occasionally use poetic names for mythical
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sea creatures. Words like Leviathan or Rahab.
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Yeah, but Talam is never treated as a conscious, living figure.
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It has no will of its own, it does not speak, it does not plot
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revenge, and it does not wage war as a rival deity.
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It is entirely UN mythical in its usage.
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It is treated as a natural physical element of the created
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order. It is an inanimate object.
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Think about how we talk about severe weather today.
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We personify hurricanes. We do.
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We give them names. Right, we say Hurricane Katrina
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devastated the coast, or Hurricane Helene is making a
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path toward the Panhandle. We assign them human names and
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we describe them almost like they have agency.
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But we all know they're just weather patterns, yeah.
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We do not actually think Helene is a conscious monster seeking
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revenge against Florida. And the ancient Hebrews knew the
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exact same thing about Tejon. They knew it was a terrifying,
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lethal natural element, but they knew it was not a rival God.
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So if the Deep is not a rival God fighting against the
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Creator, the next logical question the sources address is
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its actual relationship to the Creator.
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This is where the underlying theological reality of these
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lexical entries comes to the absolute forefront.
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The writers of these texts viewed the universe through a
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very specific lens. The source is stress page after
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page. That teahome is simply a realm
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of divine activity. It is completely subordinate.
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Yeah, Psalm 33 says that God places the deep in storehouses.
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He bottles up the ocean. And Psalm 77 says the deaths
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quake at his approach. The abyss trembles when the
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creator walks by the. Theological reality presented
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here is one of absolute, unquestioned divine sovereignty.
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Because in the Pagan myths surrounding Israel, creation was
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the result of a cosmic battle. Right.
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Marduk had to fight Tiamat to establish order.
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Bail had to fight Yem, the sea God.
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But in the Hebrew text, the deep does not fight God.
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It obeys him without hesitation. It is part of the created order
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from the very beginning. Look at Genesis One, verse 2.
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The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the
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surface of the deep. Yeah.
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And the Spirit of God is simply hovering over it.
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There's no battle, there's no struggle for dominance.
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The creator is not threatened by the Abyss.
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None whatsoever. The lexicons draw our attention
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to the sheer weight of Psalm 135, verse 6.
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Which states that God does whatever he pleases in heaven
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and on earth, in the seas and all the depths.
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All the TM on. The terrifying bottomless abyss
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that humans cannot even begin to comprehend or control is merely
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an instrument in the hands of the Creator.
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It responds instantly and totally to his historical and
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creative decrees. The word decree is the perfect
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summary here. The deep acts solely because it
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is commanded to act. And because TM is an instrument
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of the creator, the sources show us that it can be wielded in two
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entirely different ways. Depending on what that divine
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decree happens to be. Yeah, it possesses a dual nature
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and how it affects humanity. We see the two faces of Tiham
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clearly outlined in the texts. The first face is absolute
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destruction. The ultimate uncreation.
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The sources point straight to the Genesis flood.
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The text says all the fountains of the Great Deef broke open
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the. Tiham fractures the crust of the
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earth and swallows the dry lamb. The boundaries set in Genesis
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One are removed. And we see it again in Exodus 15
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at the crossing of the Red Sea. The Song of Moses says that the
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Deeps covered the Egyptian army. They sank into the depths like a
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stone. The Abyss is weaponized as an
22:52
instrument of peer judgement. But the lexicons contrast this
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destructive face with a second face, which is blessing.
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I found this part so surprising in the research.
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Genesis 49 talks about the blessings of the deep that lies
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below. And Ezekiel 31 describes how the
23:08
deep waters nourish a massive cedar tree, making you grow tall
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and sending streams through all the forest.
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So how do we reconcile this? It is a striking contrast.
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How can the identical cosmic force be the ultimate nightmare
23:21
that swallows empires and the ultimate blessing that makes the
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crops grow? It all links back to intention
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and boundary. Unbounded, the deep is chaos.
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Yes, when the Creator removes the boundaries, as in the days
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of Noah, the Tehom acts as an agent of uncreation and
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righteous judgment. It washes away the corruption of
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the earth. It returns the world to the
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state of Genesis one, verse 2. But bounded and channeled by
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God's Providence, it is the inexhaustible source of
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agricultural life. The springs that water the
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valleys, the deep aquifers that sustain the roots of the trees
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during a blistering drought. These are the Tehom functioning
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under a decree of blessing and preservation.
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The substance of the deep does not change, the sovereign
24:04
command governing it changes. It is the difference between a
24:07
house fire burning your property to the ground and a fire
24:10
contained safely in a hearth, keeping your family warm to the
24:13
winter. The element is identical.
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The boundaries dictate the outcome.
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The Tahom is always mighty, but it's might is either unleashed
24:20
for judgement or restrained for the prosperity of the land.
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And humans have absolutely no say in which way it goes.
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Men at all. They cannot bribe the deep.
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They cannot build walls high enough to stop it.
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They are entirely dependent on the Creator's benevolent
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governance of the waters. A.
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Farmer relying on the spring and the soldier fearing the flood
24:39
are both looking at the exact same instrument of sovereignty.
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As we bring all these sources together, we are looking at a
24:45
massive semantic and theological range.
24:48
We covered a lot of ground today.
24:49
We really did. We started with maim, the plural
24:54
mass of water that dictates daily survival in a harsh
24:57
climate. We looked at how it washes a
24:59
dirty cooking pot and purifies a person for the sanctuary.
25:03
We. Looked at the linguistic dignity
25:05
of bodily euphemisms veiling the shame of human biology.
25:09
We analyzed the psychological terror of a heart melting into
25:11
fluid, losing all structural integrity in the face of fear.
25:15
And then we scaled all the way up to T Hum, the cosmic ocean
25:18
beneath the Earth. We saw that it is not a mythical
25:21
dragon, but a physical reality that quakes at the voice of God.
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Acting as an instrument of total destruction or abundant
25:28
blessing, depending entirely on a sovereign decree.
25:30
It is a comprehensive view of the natural world, completely
25:34
subjected to a holy will. It really is, and I want to
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leave you with a final thought experiment to Mull over as you
25:39
go about your week. Something to keep in mind, yeah.
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Today, when we walk into our kitchens and turn on a tap, we
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see a utility. We see something mundane that we
25:49
purchase from the city, something we manage, filter and
25:52
control. But these ancient texts
25:55
challenge us to view our reality differently.
25:58
They challenge us to see water as an untamable force that
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submits only to its maker. The next time you are caught in
26:04
a heavy, unrelenting rainstorm, or the next time you stand on
26:08
the beach and look out at the dark, rolling horizon of the
26:10
ocean. Consider what you actually
26:12
looking. Are you just looking at a
26:14
massive collection of H2O? Or are you looking at the MAME
26:18
and the T home? Elements that possess the sheer
26:20
strength to level cities, yet bend entirely and immediately to
26:24
a sovereign decree. It completely reframes the
26:26
physical world around us. It certainly does.
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Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into the source
26:31
material. Keep reading, keep questioning,
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and keep your intellectual curiosity sharp.
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We will see you next time.