the deep: the vast cosmic body of water under and around the world, from the primeval ocean of creation to the springs beneath the ground and the unreachable depths of the sea
This is one word for one great body of water seen from many angles.
- At creation it is the unformed cosmic ocean lying over the unshaped earth.
- In the Flood its springs burst open and its waters rise.
- Under the ground it is the reservoir that feeds streams and makes land fertile.
- Out at sea it is the depth no diver reaches.
- When a person is drowning or overwhelmed it becomes a picture of being pulled down past all rescue.
The same water can be calm and life-giving in one verse and crushing and deadly in the next, which is why the senses below shade into one another rather than splitting into separate words.
The word almost always appears in poetry and almost never takes the word "the," which gives it an ancient, weighty feel, as if it names a familiar fixed feature of the world. Hebrew shares this word with its neighbors (the same root turns up in Ugaritic, Eblaite, and Arabic place-names), so it is old common property rather than a borrowing, and it carries no sense of being a god or a monster on its own. Where the deep seems to act, to roar, raise its hands, tremble, or mourn, the poetry is personifying it the way it personifies hills and rivers; the deep is always something God made and rules, never his rival.
Readers should resist two opposite mistakes the senses below help guard against: reading a pagan chaos-monster into the plain cosmology of Genesis, and flattening the vivid, near-living depths of the Psalms and prophets into mere scenery.