water: the substance itself and any quantity of it, from a cupful to a river to the sea
This is the ordinary Hebrew word for water, and it carries an unusual load. In a land where the difference between a good year and a famine was the winter rain, one word had to cover the cup a servant draws at a well, the spring a town is built around, the river that marks a border, the sea, and the vast body of water God divided at the beginning. The senses below are not different words. They are one substance seen at different scales and in different roles.
Because water decides whether people live, Hebrew writers reach for it constantly as a picture. Trouble that swallows a person becomes deep water closing over the head. An invading army becomes a river in flood. Courage that fails becomes a heart melting into water. On the other side, rain and springs are the plainest sign of God's generosity, and a spring that never runs dry becomes a picture of God himself: Jeremiah calls him a "fountain of living waters" whom the people abandoned in order to dig cracked pits that hold nothing.
Several uses hardened into set phrases worth recognizing:
- "living water" is water that moves, from a spring or a running stream, as opposed to water standing in a jar, and it is what several of the cleansing rules require
- "mighty waters" is stock poetic language for the threatening sea, and by extension for enemies and for death itself
- "water of the feet" is a polite substitute for urine, one of a few places where the word stands in for something the writer would rather not name
One oddity is worth knowing. The word always looks plural in Hebrew, even when a single cupful is in view. That is a quirk of a very old form, not a statement about quantity, which is why English versions swing between "water" and "waters" with nothing changing underneath. When a writer wants the great dark mass under the world specifically, Hebrew usually reaches for the deep (תְּהוֹם) instead, and the Flood itself has its own name (מַבּוּל).
Nuances
Whether the overflowing springs of Proverbs 5:16 picture a husband's sexual unfaithfulness, and so use water discreetly for the body's reproductive life.
- contestedThe springs spilling into the street are the man's own sexual life squandered outside the marriage, part of a run of water images in Proverbs 5 that stand for marital intimacy.; Paul A. Kruger, "Promiscuity or Marriage Fidelity? A Note on Prov 5:15-18," Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 13 (1987): 61-68
- contestedThe line is a rhetorical question warning the man not to let what belongs at home be scattered abroad, and the water imagery need carry no reference to bodily fluid at all.; Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1-9, Anchor Bible 18A (New York: Doubleday, 2000)
Disputed
Whether the primeval and cosmic waters of the Hebrew Bible carry a background of divine combat against chaos.
- contestedIsrael inherited a widespread story in which the storm god defeats the Sea and its monsters, and that story stands behind the biblical waters, faintly in Genesis and openly in the poetry of the Psalms, Isaiah and Job.; Hermann Gunkel, Schoepfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1895); John Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988); Bernard F. Batto, Slaying the Dragon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992)
- contestedThe category of chaos is a modern overlay. The deep is an ordinary inherited Semitic word for the ocean rather than a borrowed goddess, Genesis 1 contains no combat at all, and the storm and flood pictures in the poetry are metaphors for real danger rather than survivals of myth.; David Toshio Tsumura, Creation and Destruction: A Reappraisal of the Chaoskampf Theory in the Old Testament (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2005); Rebecca S. Watson, Chaos Uncreated, BZAW 341 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005); John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011)