This lecture explores the hydro-mythology of Creation, bridging ancient midrashic imagination into conversation with Gaston Bachelard's phenomenology. This paper will trace the Jewish midrashic writings' relations to the trauma of the "weeping waters" and the rupture between lower and upper waters. This rupture established a gendered hierarchy in Jewish myth, identifying the Upper Waters as male and the Lower as female (Gen. Rabbah 13), casting the Deep as a chaotic feminine force which will be explained in the paper.
Drawing on biblical narratives and Enuma Elish, this paper explores how the suppression of the rebellious sea by a patriarchal Creator evolved into a theology of subjugated matter. This dynamic is re-evaluated through Bachelard, for whom material imagination works with the matter of the world and dreams the substance. The symbolism of water as a distinct feminine element—simultaneously nurturing and dissolving—challenges the binary where nature is 'conquered' by the male subject.
Drawing on Kabbalistic literature, the lecture proposes a corrective through Ezekiel's ecological vision. In this prophetic "second creation," living waters from the Temple do not conquer the saline waters of the Dead Sea but unite with them — changing the nature of the sea, healing the water, and making the wilderness bloom. By juxtaposing the prophetic imagination with Bachelard's reveries of matter, the paper offers a new theory wherein conquering the feminine abyss is overcome, and 'dialogue'between the sacred and the chaotic, reunite and are revealed.