Is there a way to store tab seperated values into a 2-d array

I have been looking for a solution on this online but could not get much information (most multi-array examples are not being created from text docs) so here it goes. Say I have a script that reads in values from a text doc example.txt:

Tag1      Value1
Tag2      Value2
Tag3      Value3

Is there such a way where I can programmatically store Tag and Value into a 2-dimensional array so that it looks like:

arrayResult=[Tag1][Value1]
            [Tag2][Value2]
            [Tag3][Value3];

(excuse the syntax please). I would want this done preferably in bash rather than awk.