Tool Alpha
The ANE Desk
Old Testament passages beside the ancient Near Eastern texts they are compared with, and what Israel does with what it shares.
Clay and the blood of a god
Atrahasis makes the first people from clay mixed with the flesh and blood of a slaughtered god. Genesis 2:7 makes the man from dust and the breath of life. Earth plus something from above, in both.
Genesis 2:7, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what does it mean that people are made of earth and something more? The potter put a little of himself into every bowl. That could mean his fingerprints, his care, or his own blood in the glaze. The sentence is true each way, and it means something different each way. What does God put into the man in Genesis 2:7?
Nintu shall mix clay / With his flesh and his blood.
Both make the first humans from the ground plus something that comes from the divine side. In Atrahasis a god, Ilawela, is slaughtered in the assembly, the birth goddess mixes clay with his flesh and blood, and the great gods spit on the clay. In Genesis the man is formed from dust and God breathes the breath of life into his nostrils. The IVP Bible Background Commentary pairs them directly: dust and clay are what the body returns to, and the god's blood stands for the divine part in people, a concept like God's breath. Walton reads the materials as statements about connection rather than chemistry: clay or dust ties people to the land, and the flesh and blood of a god tie them to deity.
Walton draws two differences. In Israel no physical element is provided by the deity; the breath is not a part of God, though God is the source of life. And Atrahasis makes a population at once, seven males and seven females, where Genesis makes one man and then one woman. Walton calls the single first pair a distinctive of the Genesis account. Nobody dies to make the man in Genesis. In Atrahasis the making of people requires killing a god.
The pairing is common ground in the sources read here, and none of them argues that Genesis 2 was drawn from Atrahasis. Walton's own reading, that the materials are archetypes and not a statement about what bodies are made of, is an interpretation, not something the tablets say outright. The Genesis tool, Genesis, the Beginning, takes up the questions Genesis 2 raises for Adam in its entries Two creation accounts? and Adam: archetype, individual, or both?
Not a claim that the breath of life is a piece of God. That is exactly where Walton says Genesis and Atrahasis part.
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- Stephanie Dalley, trans., Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford), Atrahasis, Tablet I, columns iv-v
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews and Mark W. Chavalas, IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (InterVarsity Press), on Genesis 2:7
- John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2018), ch. 9, Comparative Exploration 9.1: Polygenesis and Monogenesis, and Comparative Exploration 9.2: Archetypal Humanity in Israel and the Ancient Near East
