it does line up very nicely, but i think you're drawing a few too many parallels. and it's tanniyn, not tehom. tanniyn simply means snake. the reason i say dragons for the gen 1 verse is not the word snake, but word that modifies it. it says "GREAT serpents" ie: dragons.
Tehom is the deep in Gen 1:2, but let us look more closely.
Firstly we have the obvious linguistic connection with Tiamat: they are cognates. Tiamat was the chaos dragon which Marduk slayed. Note in Genesis 1:2 that the divine wind was on the face of the waters. In the Babylonian version this wind was the Umhullu wind which Marduk used to slay Tiamat, the wind forcing Tiamat's mouth open and Marduk was able to force his sword in. The battle is not enunciated in Gen 1, but the elements are there. Then, once Tiamat was killed, Marduk slit her in half and lifted half up to the heavens and out of the other half he created the world. Tehom's role in Gen 1 has totally been sublimated. So, I'm happy that I am principally dealing with tehom. The serpent tannym is merely another name.
Isaiah 30:6 -
it says behemah here, or "beasts." but the words are obviously very similiar. i don't see much reason to think it refers to behemoth at all. especially since that line is actually an addition, after the initial writing of the text. in my version, it's set of from the verse (like poetic verse, not bible verse), and says "the 'beasts of the negev' pronouncement." it's a chapter heading, basically.
The text I have definitely says
BHMWT. Check it out
here.
I said that in the following verse, ie 30:7, we get a reference to Rahab, which is another name used for out chaos dragon. See Ps 89:9ff. God "rules the raging of the sea" we are told followed by the fact that he "crushed Rahab like a carcass". Isaiah 51:9 has the parallelism, "didn't you cut Rahab to pieces, pierce the dragon" immediately followed by "Was it not you who dried up the sea?" Rahab is simply another label for our sea monster/watery chaos dragon and in Isaiah 30:7 we get her mentioned in a verse straight after the mention of Behemoth. This is not coincidental.
But let us not get hung up about Isa 30:6-7, as it doesn't further the basic thesis I put forward. It was just another example of the two creatures appearing together in the same passage.
i think that although both were likely mythological, they were not strictly so. rather, the images used were probably drawn from real animals.
I thought that that was what I was saying. Wasn't it?
What I need to understand is the alternation between the Mesopotamian Tiamat, the Ugaritic Lotan, the Hebrew tehom in Gen 1 and the use of Leviathan elsewhere.
Isaiah 27:1 is an extremely close parallel to a Ugaritic text, so close that I would normally suspect literary borrowing, but how can one connect a text whose latest date is about 1170 BCE (from a civilization which simply folded up shop with its destruction at the hands of the Sea Peoples) and another of perhaps seven hundred years later. It may simply have been a piece of recited poetry which survived all that time.
My guess with the tehom story, ie the undertext of Gen 1, is that it was written either during or after the exile under the influence of the Babylonian creation story and then later filtered through the centralising effect of the one god theology.
This would mean that the two strands may be originally the one story which took two separate routes into the Jewish tradition.
To complicate things further I get the impression that Leviathan is sometimes used as a symbol of Egypt, which would suggest that Behemoth is a symbol for the other great power in Mesopotamia.
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