Enuma Elish

Also called Enûma Eliš, Babylonian creation epic

The Babylonian account of how the world was made — Marduk killing the sea-goddess Tiamat and building the cosmos from her body — read alongside Genesis 1 ever since its publication in 1876.

Object: Baked clay tablets in Akkadian cuneiform, the poem running to seven tablets
Found at: Kuyunjik (Nineveh), in the library of Ashurbanipal; further copies later at Ashur, Kish and Sultantepe
Found in: Excavated in the Nineveh campaigns from 1850 onward; identified and published in 1876
Found by: Excavated by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam for the British Museum; the creation text was identified and published by George Smith
Dates from: The Nineveh copies were written in the seventh century BC; when the poem itself was composed is genuinely disputed, with proposals spread across the second millennium BC Disputed dating
Now held at: British Museum, London, with further copies elsewhere

"When On High"

The poem is named for its opening words, enuma elish, "when on high." It survives on seven clay tablets, mostly from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh, and was published by George Smith in 1876, four years after his flood discovery. The seven is worth pausing on, because Smith did not write it. From the fragments he had he concluded that "the series included at least twelve tablets", counting among them "fragments of three tablets on the creation and fall of man" and fragments "relating to the war between the gods and evil spirits". It was A. H. Sayce, revising the book in 1880 — four years after Smith's death — who struck those two groups out and wrote, in the same sentence frame, that the series included "at least seven tablets". The number everyone now uses is a later editor's subtraction rather than the discoverer's count, and it happens to be the one that held. A ritual text describes the poem being recited before Marduk's statue at the New Year festival, which tells you what it was for — a civic liturgy exalting Babylon and its god as much as a story about origins. That ritual text is itself very late, from the Parthian period, so the recitation is well attested for the end of Babylonian religion and inferred backwards for its beginning.

It begins before anything is named, with only the mingled fresh and salt waters, Apsu and Tiamat. Younger gods are born, are noisy, and are resented; Apsu plots to destroy them and is killed first. Tiamat responds by breeding monsters and making war, and the terrified gods can find no champion until Marduk agrees — on condition that they make him supreme over all of them. He kills Tiamat, splits her body like a shellfish, and makes the sky from one half and the earth from the other; he sets the stars in their courses and fixes the calendar; and finally, so that the gods need not labour, humanity is made from the blood of the slain god who led Tiamat's revolt.

Set Beside Genesis 1

The similarities that struck early readers are structural. Both begin with a watery, formless state; both proceed by separation — waters above from waters below, sky from earth; both set the lights in the heavens to mark seasons and days; both culminate in humanity; and the Hebrew word for the deep in Genesis 1:2, tehom, is linguistically related to the name Tiamat. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this was widely taken as evidence that Genesis was a sanitised Babylonian myth, an argument pressed hard in what became known as the Babel-Bible controversy.

The differences are at least as striking, and current scholarship weights them more heavily. Genesis has no theogony — God is not born and has no rivals. There is no combat: the deep is simply there and is simply divided, and the great sea creatures of Genesis 1:21, which in the Babylonian frame would be monsters of chaos, are listed among the things God made and called good. The sun and moon are not deities but lamps, and Genesis pointedly declines to name them. And humanity is not slave labour made from a rebel's blood but is made in God's image and blessed. Where the two overlap in idiom, Genesis reads less like a copy than like a rebuttal.

Holding It Honestly

Two claims should be resisted. The first is that Genesis simply borrowed from Enuma Elish; the direct-dependence case, popular a century ago, is not the mainstream position now, and the differences are too systematic to be accidental tidying. The second is that there is no relationship at all; the shared vocabulary, sequence, and imagery are real, and Israel plainly wrote within a world that told this kind of story.

The position most scholars hold, and the one this atlas takes, is in between: Genesis 1 speaks the cosmological language of its neighbours and uses it to say something they did not say. Knowing the neighbours' version makes the biblical text sharper, not weaker — you cannot hear an argument if you have never heard the position it is arguing against.

Scripture references

Genesis 1:1-2 — The formless deep — tehom, the word related to Tiamat
Genesis 1:6-10 — Separating the waters and the dry land
Genesis 1:14-19 — The sun and moon as lamps, unnamed and undeified
Genesis 1:21 — The great sea creatures, made and called good
Genesis 1:26-28 — Humanity in God's image, not as the gods' labour force

Sources

Holding institutionAncient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses: Marduk — Oracc (University of Pennsylvania), a peer-reviewed academic corpus project · "A ritual text dating to the Parthian period describes how Enūma eliš was recited in front of Marduk's statue during the New Year's festival, which also involved a ritual slapping of the king"Supports: The akitu recitation, and the fact that the evidence for it is a very late text
Primary textG. Smith, The Chaldean Account of Genesis (London: Sampson Low, 1876) — George Smith, Department of Oriental Antiquities, British Museum — the first edition, published in the year he died · Public domain, read in full at the Internet Archive. Smith sorts the creation fragments into seven groups and concludes that "these fragments indicate that the series included at least twelve tablets, the writing on each tablet being in one column on the front and back". The two groups Sayce afterwards removed — "fragments of three tablets on the creation and fall of man" and "fragments of tablets relating to the war between the gods and evil spirits" — are still standing hereSupports: The 1876 publication, and Smith's own count of the tablets in his own words
Primary textThe Chaldean Account of Genesis, a new edition revised by A. H. Sayce (1880) — A. H. Sayce, then Deputy-Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford, revising Smith's book; his preface is dated 21 May 1880 · Public domain, read in full. This is the edition that says "at least seven tablets": Sayce deleted Smith's last two groups of fragments and changed the number in the sentence that survived them, leaving the rest of Smith's wording standing. It also carries the Ashurbanipal colophon tying the series to the Nineveh library. Smith's own text is in the 1876 edition above, and a sentence found only here belongs to his editorSupports: The seven-tablet structure, which is Sayce's revision rather than Smith's count, and the Nineveh provenance
ReferenceBible Odyssey (SBL): Gilgamesh and the Bible — Society of Biblical Literature
EncyclopediaWikipedia: Enûma Eliš