a sea: any great stretch of water, whether the open ocean, a particular sea or lake, or a river wide enough to be spoken of as one.
Israel lived alongside one great water, the Mediterranean, and that is where this word starts. From there it widens to cover whatever large body of water a writer has in view, usually identified by a phrase rather than by a separate word: the Great Sea for the Mediterranean, the Salt Sea for what we call the Dead Sea, the sea of Kinnereth for the inland lake later known as Galilee, the sea of reeds that Israel crossed leaving Egypt. Hebrew also draws no line where English does between a sea and a huge river (נָהָר), so the Nile and the Euphrates can each be called a sea when a writer wants their width and force in view.
In poetry the word takes on a charge that the flat English "sea" does not carry. The sea is the one power a person cannot fence in or quiet, so it becomes the thing God alone commands. He rebukes it and it dries up, he splits it and a nation walks through, he sets sand as a boundary it cannot cross, he stills its uproar. Israel's neighbours told of a storm god who fought and defeated a sea god actually named Sea, and some of the language of those old poems survives in the Bible's own poetry. What never survives is the theology: here the sea is never a rival god, only a made thing under orders, praised as "good" on the day it was gathered and finally healed of its saltness in a prophet's vision.
How much of that older story still echoes in a given poem is the one live argument about this word, and scholars split over it: some hear a defeated enemy behind lines like the splitting of the sea in Psalm 74, others hear only water, weather, or a human army. Nobody disputes what the word denotes, which is why the argument is a theological one rather than a lexical one.
One narrow use grew out of all this. The enormous cast-bronze basin that stood in the courtyard of Solomon's temple, ten cubits across and resting on twelve oxen, was called simply "the Sea." It was a made ocean, kept inside the sanctuary for the priests to wash in, and many readers take the name as deliberate: the water Israel feared, tamed and put to use in God's house.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the poems in which God defeats, confines or dries up the sea still carry echoes of an older story where the sea was a hostile god.
- majorityA good many poetic texts reuse a pattern known from Canaanite religion, where the storm god defeats a sea god and wins his kingship, and apply it to Yahweh; in those texts the sea is a subdued hostile power rather than mere water.; Hermann Gunkel, Schopfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Gottingen, 1895); Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Harvard University Press, 1973); John Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea (Cambridge University Press, 1985); Bernard F. Batto, Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (Westminster/John Knox, 1992); Debra Scoggins Ballentine, The Conflict Myth and the Biblical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- minorityThe idea of a chaos battle has been applied far too loosely, often without anyone defining what chaos means; most of the supposed conflict passages are about a thunderstorm, a flood, or a human enemy, and the sea in them is simply water.; Rebecca S. Watson, Chaos Uncreated: A Reassessment of the Theme of "Chaos" in the Hebrew Bible, BZAW 341 (de Gruyter, 2005); David Toshio Tsumura, Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Eisenbrauns, 2005); Brendon C. Benz, "Yamm as the Personification of Chaos?" in Creation and Chaos, ed. JoAnn Scurlock and Richard H. Beal (Eisenbrauns, 2013)
- minorityThe texts show something between a full battle and a simple command: God masters and holds back forces that genuinely resist him, so the sea is checked rather than finished off.; Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Harper & Row, 1988)