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.
Waters above, waters below
Marduk splits Tiamat in two and makes half of her a covering for heaven, with a bolt and a guard to hold her waters back. Genesis 1:6-8 divides the waters with an expanse. The picture is shared. How it happens is not.
Genesis 1:6-8, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: if two people describe the same sky the same way, does that mean they agree about who put it there? The dam holds the lake back. One person thinks of an engineer. Another thinks of a river spirit that was beaten and pinned in place. The dam looks the same either way. What does Genesis say holds the upper waters back, and how did it get there?
He split her up like a flat fish into two halves; / One half of her he stablished as a covering for heaven. / He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman, / And bade them not to let her waters come forth.
Both pictures have waters above and waters below with something set between them to hold the upper waters in. King called the Babylonian covering for heaven a firmament and paired it with the second act of creation in Genesis. The IVP Bible Background Commentary makes the same comparison at Genesis 1:6-8: Marduk divides Tiamat to make the waters above and the waters below. Walton adds that separating was a common way of describing creation across the region. In Egypt the air god Shu came into being as the space between the waters above and below. A Sumerian text, Praise of the Pickax, says of Enlil, "To separate heaven from earth he hastened."
In Enuma Elish the sky is half a corpse, and the waters behind it have to be guarded with a bolt and a watchman. In Genesis the waters are divided by a word and nothing has to be killed or guarded. Walton puts it plainly: "Israel had no need to divide a god". He also says Genesis keeps the ancient cosmology of waters above and below while it drops the ancient theology. The IVP commentary reads the expanse for what it does, regulating rain and sunlight, more than for what it is made of. The Genesis tool, Genesis, the Beginning, has the Hebrew and the arguments over the expanse in its entry The firmament.
The shared picture of the cosmos is not in dispute among the sources read here. What it means is. King took it, with tehom, as a pointer to the Babylonian source of Genesis 1. Walton and the IVP commentary treat it as the common cosmology of the ancient world, which Genesis uses without needing any one text. Walton also adds a caution that cuts against easy pairing: in Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology he reports finding almost no Akkadian text that speaks of separating heaven and earth as distinct from the splitting of Tiamat's body.
Not a lesson in physics. Neither text is describing what the sky is made of in the modern sense. Both are describing who is in charge of it.
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- {"u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/gods-of-the-bible\/rahab\/","n":"Rahab","s":"A chaos monster God cuts to pieces, and also a nickname for Egypt.","r":"Job 9:13"}
- L. W. King, trans., Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of Creation (London, 1902), Tablet IV
- L. W. King, Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition, Schweich Lectures 1916, Lecture III
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews and Mark W. Chavalas, IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (InterVarsity Press), on Genesis 1:6-8
- John H. Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic, 2018), ch. 8, Comparative Exploration 8.4: Created Functions, Naming, Separating, Giving Roles, quoting Praise of the Pickax
- John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Eisenbrauns, 2011), ch. 3
