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.
When heaven was not named
Enuma Elish opens with a world where nothing has a name yet. Genesis 2:4b opens with a world where nothing grows yet. Starting with what was not there was an ancient way to begin.
Genesis 2:4-6, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: what does a story mean when it starts by listing what did not exist yet? Before the town had a name, there was no road and no school. That might be a description of empty land, or a way of saying the town did not really exist until someone named it and gave it a purpose. Which kind of nothing is Genesis describing at its start?
When in the height heaven was not named, / And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name, / … / When of the gods none had been called into being, / And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained; / Then were created the gods in the midst of heaven,
Both open by saying what was not yet there. Enuma Elish: no named heaven, no named earth, no gods called into being, no destinies. Genesis 2:4b-6: no shrub of the field yet, no plant, no rain, and no man to work the ground. Walton argues that in the ancient world a thing existed when it had a name and a function, and he notes that Enuma Elish begins with heaven and earth not yet named and the gods not yet given names. Dalley notes that the opening of Atrahasis, When the gods instead of man, has a format that can be compared with the Epic of Creation. The Jewish Study Bible notes that the medieval commentator Rashi read Genesis 1:1 as a when-clause, which is how some ancient Near Eastern creation stories begin, including the one that starts at Genesis 2:4b.
In Enuma Elish the first things to come out of the nothing are gods: Lahmu and Lahamu are called into being, then Ansar and Kisar, then Anu. The world before creation is a world before the gods. Genesis has no before-God state. God is in the first clause of both accounts, and in Genesis 1 he does the naming himself: he calls the light day and the darkness night. Walton draws the contrast this way: in Genesis God does not operate within a society of gods, and the order he sets up is aimed at people.
The not-yet opening is a shared way of beginning a creation story, not a link to one text, and none of the sources read here claims Genesis took it from Enuma Elish. Walton's method fits it best: no borrowing is needed when a way of thinking is common to the whole region. Whether Genesis 1:1 is itself a when-clause is a translation question; the Genesis tool, Genesis, the Beginning, sets it out in its entry In the beginning, or when God began. The comparison here does not settle it.
Not a claim that Genesis starts with nothing at all. Both accounts start with something present, water in one and a dry, unworked ground in the other. What is missing is order, names and work.
- L. W. King, trans., Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of Creation (London, 1902), Tablet I
- 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, and Comparative Exploration 8.3: Precosmic Condition and Order
- John H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Eisenbrauns, 2011), ch. 3, quoting Enuma Elish I 1-2, 7-9
- Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (Oxford), Notes to Atrahasis, n. 1
- The Jewish Study Bible, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press), note on Genesis 1:1
