Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
Enuma Elish and Genesis 1
A Babylonian creation epic on seven tablets, with humans made on the sixth. Borrowing, a shared world, or a reply?
Genesis 1:1-2:3, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: did Genesis copy older Babylonian creation stories? Two families tell the story of how the town was founded. Some details match. One borrowed from the other, both remember the same thing, or one is answering the other. Comparing Genesis with its neighbours shows how much they share and where they part.
Since the nineteenth century the parallels between Genesis 1 and the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish have been used to argue that Genesis is derived from it. The parallels are real. What they prove is the question.
The Hebrew tehom, the deep, is related to Tiamat, the goddess Marduk splits to make heaven and earth. Kitchen, quoted by Lennox, points out that the word also exists in Ugaritic and means simply deep or abyss. Genesis 1 does not use the ordinary names for the sun and moon.
Lennox grants the surface similarities: seven tablets and seven days, a similar order, humans on the sixth tablet and sixth day. Then he lists the differences: no theogony, no warring gods, nothing made out of a god's body, no deified sun or stars, and humans as the image of God rather than slaves to ease the gods' labour. He follows Kitchen that in the ancient world simple accounts grow into elaborate legends, not the reverse, and that there is no proven link between the two texts.
Walton uses the ancient texts to recover what an ancient reader assumed, not to derive Genesis from them. In Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology he calls many attempts to trace literary trails from ancient Near Eastern texts to Genesis too facile, more like a Rorschach test than clear literary links, and turns instead to the shared cognitive environment. In Enuma Elish, Marduk's creating is followed by building a temple where the gods find rest, which he reads as the same cluster of creation, temple, rest and rule that Genesis 1 ends on. He also points out where Genesis differs: in the Bible, God has no needs and orders the cosmos around people, not around the gods.
The de-deification theory, which Lennox reports and rejects with Kitchen and Millard, holds that Israel took a mythological text and stripped the gods out of it during the exile.
Lennox's emphasis on difference has to make room for the shared features Walton finds meaningful, such as the temple and rest. Walton's use of the parallels has to keep them as background without letting them set the meaning.
Not a copy. Neither pole thinks Genesis was copied from Enuma Elish, and Kitchen's verdict, as Lennox quotes it, is that the attempts to prove a direct relationship have had to be abandoned.
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), appendix A, quoting Enuma Elish and K. A. Kitchen and A. R. Millard
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), propositions 2, 4, 7
- Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Eisenbrauns, 2011), introduction
- L. W. King, Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of Creation (1902), for the primary text
