You should look
up the meaning then:
Tevah is a post-biblical word, close to the Aramaic tivah. It is derived from the verb tava, which means sink, impress, coin, stamp and formulate.
As a noun, tevah has several meanings. Tevah is an all-inclusive term for everything created. Trees, animals, seas, land, sky and luminaries, are all part of the tevah.
Tevah also means element or substance. It is used in reference to the prime elements: water, fire, earth and air, known as the t’vaim (plural of tevah), formerly believed to constitute all physical matter from which God created the world and all in it (Bamidbar Raba 14).
And yet another meaning for the word tevah is characteristic or character of a living being or a substance (Megilah 14; Yerushlmi, Brakhot 9:2).
The multiple meanings to the word tevah give rise to many interesting phrases in Hebrew.
For example, tevah haadam, literally the nature of a human being, is a term that comes to us from the literature of the Middle Ages, pointing to all kinds of behavioral patterns typical of human beings.
Tevah sheni, on the other hand, translated as second nature, refers to a learned behavior, which has become a part of one’s nature.
Tevah, nature
Already looked up the word numerous times, Tevah in the Strong's is to mean startled or alarmed.
Genesis 6:14–16
Make yourself an ark (tēvāh) of gopher wood [came the instruction]; make rooms
(qinnīm) in the ark, and cover it (kāpar) inside and out with pitch (kopher). This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks.
Ark: tēvāh (unknown word for rectangular boat)
Material: gopher-wood (unknown species)
Rooms: qinnīm (cells; the basic word means ‘bird’s nest’)
Waterproofing: pitch or bitumen (kopher), smeared on (kāphar), inside and out
Length: 300 cubits (ammah) = 450 ft = 137.2 m
Width: 50 cubits = 75 ft = 22.8 m
Height: 30 cubits = 45 ft = 13.7 m
Roof: 1 cubit high(?)
Door: 1
Decks: 3
Compare the sparser data for Moses’ ‘arklet’ in Exodus 2:2–6:
Ark: tēvāh (unknown word for rectangular boat)
Material: gomeh, bulrushes; rush/reed/papyrus; wicker
Waterproofing: hamār, slime; bitumen/asphalt; bitumen; zefeth, pitch.
The biblical word tēvāh, which is used for the arks of Noah and Moses, occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. The flood and baby episodes are thus deliberately associated and linked in Hebrew just as the Atrahasis and Sargon Arks are linked associatively in Babylonia.
Now for something extraordinary: no one knows what language tēvāh is or what it means. The word for the wood, gopher, is likewise used nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible and no one knows what language or what kind of wood it is. This is a peculiar state of affairs for one of the most famous and influential paragraphs in all of the world’s writing.
The associated words kopher, ‘bitumen’, and kāphar, ‘to smear on’, are also to be found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, but, significantly, they came from Babylonia with the narrative itself, deriving from Akkadian kupru, ‘bitumen’, and kapāru, ‘to smear on’. In view of this it is logical to expect that tēvāh and gopher are similarly loanwords from Babylonian Akkadian into Hebrew, but there has been no convincing candidate for either word. Suggestions have been made for gopher-wood, but the identification, or the non-Hebrew word that lies behind it, remains open.
Ideas have also been put forward over the centuries concerning the word tēvāh, some linking it – because Moses was in Egypt – with the ancient Egyptian word thebet, meaning ‘box’ or ‘coffin’, but these have ended nowhere. The most likely explanation is that tēvāh, like other ark words, reflects a Babylonian word.
A cuneiform tablet dealing with boats from around 500 BC, now in the British Museum, mentions a kind of boat called a ṭubbû which is found at a river crossing, apparently as part of a vessel swap among boatmen:
BM 32873: 2
… a boat (eleppu) which is six cubits wide at the beam, a ṭubbû which is at the crossing, and a boat (eleppu) five and a half (cubits) wide at the beam which is at the bridge, they exchanged for (?) one boat which is five cubits wide at the beam.
The consonants t (in tēvāh) and ṭ (in ṭubbû) are distinct from one another, so it is impossible that ṭubbû, a masculine noun of unknown etymology, and tēvāh, a feminine noun of unknown etymology, represent the same word etymologically. I think that the Judaeans encountered the Akkadian boat word ṭubbû used for the Ark in the story along with the other Akkadian ark words and Hebraised it as tēvāh. In this case the original consonants are less important; the idea was to render the foreign word, for it was only to be used twice in the whole Bible, once for Noah, once for Moses. The relationship between the words is thus that they are neither cognate nor loaned: the Babylonian was given a Hebrew ‘shape’. It is much the same as the way in which Nebuchadnezzar’s eunuch Nabu-sharrussu-ukin became Nebusarsekim in the Book of Jeremiah. This would perforce mean that the word ṭubbû must have occurred in place of eleppu, ‘boat’, for Utnapishti’s Ark, in some first millennium BC Babylonian source for the Flood Story that we do not have now.
An alternative possibility is that the Hebrew word tēvāh is a so-called Wanderwort, one of those basic words that spread across numerous languages and cultures, sometimes as a consequence of trade, whose original etymology or language becomes obscured (a good example is chai and tea), lasting for ever. We would have then an old, non-Semitic word for a very simple kind of river boat – conceivably even ultimately ancestral to the English tub – which appears as ṭubbû in Babylonian, tēvāh in Hebrew. One could imagine readily enough that such a simple word for a simple boat might survive along the waterways of the world for endless centuries.
Turned upside down these boats produce a dull ‘dub’ sort of thumpy thud. It is curious that tub, like ark, can mean box, chest and boat. Ironically this Babylonian word ṭubbû, like tēvāh, is rare too: it occurs twice in the tablet just quoted and nowhere else.
Either proposal would account for the biblical name for the Ark:
either the Judaeans encountered the ark word ṭubbû and Hebraised it to tēvāh, or they called the Ark tēvāh because it corresponded to the shape characteristic of that kind of old boat which was known to them as a tēvāh and to the Babylonians as a ṭubbû.
Either way the epic of Ziusudra will predate the younger Noah flood epic, and of course we still have an issue of Tevah, though I'm not totally sure it would relate to the Aramaic Tivah in its entirety. Tevah is still not Gopher Wood related to a very specific instruction.