Adamu

The Seven Tablets of Creation have been thought to be primary source material for the Genesis account.

I am interested in whether or not a consensus exists on this issue here at IIDB.

My own opinion is that this text, as well as other mesopotamian texts, are indeed the source material for the authors of Genesis.

Please opine.

davidbach

This is great stuff! I had no idea that we had other "Genesis" accounts from antiquity. Why has no-one mentioned this to me before? Of course, we know that Noah is derived from Utnapishtim, and I knew of Marduk as a Babylonian deity, but this is new to me. And it is over a hundred years old.

At a superficial reading, the parallels are very convincing. Several inconsistences in Genesis are resolved, such as the "waters above" and "waters below" and the lack of light before plants were "created". The Babylonian version shows the latter to be a "mistranslation". Since the "flood" is clearly an old legend re-told, it seems likely that the "creation" is also. Having two (or three) versions also tends to support this thesis.

Thanks for introducing me to this study. Enligtenment!

David.

rhutchin

I think there is an original source from which both the Seven Tablets of Creation and the Genesis account are derived.

Malachi151

Of course we can't say that Genesis is dependent directly on The Seven Tablets, but it does seem that most or all of Genesis is a commentary on existing Mesopotamian religious stories.

This point is important. The authors of Genesis were intentionally changing up their won traditional stories as a form of commentary.

This is really evident in the Noah flood account.

Adamu

Thanks, all, for the responses.

davidbach: Most welcome! I think even closer study will elucidate much about biblical narratives; some parallels are striking.

rhutchin: Interesting. And while off topic here, I'd like to hear more.
In what records do we find such an original source, a mother culture, I wonder?

Malachi151: Indeed, it does appear the redactors of Genesis largely usurped the stories which were being told already for millennia, sometimes including references to the ancient near eastern cultures, while other times simply condensing or omitting them.


Any others?

DrZoidberg

I'm a big fan of this theory. I can't remember where I read it, (Winberg, Dawkins, Armstrong?) but somebody mentioned that The Enuma Elish could be viewed as a scientific textbook for the illiterate. Where it's not the gods or the story that is important but the philosophical and scientific concepts. The story is then just a framework to hang it all on to make it easier to remember.

Anybody else here this and knows where the idea comes from? Supposedly the story changes around a lot, but the gods functions in each tradition from Scandinavia to the Middle East where very similar.

Adamu

Indeed it does seem that Gods and mythologies the world over are quite similar.
I think it was Joseph Campbell (Masks of God?) who said something like "it all started in a mud puddle in Sumer."

But the Enuma Elish as "scientific textbook?"
Interesting.
How so?

DrZoidberg

If I remember correctly it's a compilation of ideas floating around 4000-2000 BC. One example I remember was Leviathan/Tiamat. Both these gods represent the empty void. Back then people supposedly believed that the deep sea went on forever. The ultimate destructive force since anything it swallows is gone forever. That's why it symbolised by a giant monster. Every pagan variant has this same myth. In Enuma Elis Tiamat was one of the first gods to rise from the formless state/world without form. So genesis doesn't refer to the original form as empty, since emptiness came after the original state of the world. The same concept of "void" is repeated all over the pagan world, and always a monster.

There was a whole bunch of these examples. Another is that the magic number 7 is repeated over and over in each myth. It can be, gods, kings, generations, daughters, years or days. This is an indicator that there's something symbolic going on, rather than a description of literal events.

Is this a "History of God" thing? Does it ring a bell with to anyone? One thing I do like though is that in the Enuma Elis the Garden of Eden is a physical place that can be found on the east bank of the Caspian Sea.

I know Neal Stephenson does a lot of speculating in his, (very good) book "Snow Crash". I hope it's not from there I got these ideas. That would suck, because it's just fiction. But I don't think so.

gstafleu

It is too strong to say that the Enuma Elish is the "source material" of genesis. For one thing, I don't think it mentions that humans are made out of clay, I think. For that you have to go to the story of Atrahasis, the Sumerian version of Utnapishtim.

But it does discuss similar topics with some similarity in how these topics are addressed. For example, the cosmos is created from the watery chaos, but notice it is a mingling of two waters: Apsu and Tiamat. But after that the story has Marduk (the patron god of Babylon) slay the primeval goddess Tiamat. It is hard to find an equivalent for that in Genesis, it is more reminiscent of the killing of the Titans by Zeus: it symbolizes the replacement of an old set of gods by a new set.

A closer match is the story of Atrahasis and Noah. Again the word "source" is too strong here (it is not as if someone read Atrahasis and then said "nice try, let's see if we can do this better"), but one can definitely see a connection between the two.

Sumer was the older civilization, a non-Semitic one. It was "followed" by Babylon, a Semitic civilization (iirc), which used many of Sumer's traditions, but giving the gods and heroes its own names (Inanna became Ishtar, Atrahasis became Utnapishtim etc.). Of course their was lots of contact between the "Hebrews" and Babylon, so it is not surprising to see versions of Sumerian and Babylonian traditions appear in the Hebrew stories. But they are not "copies," they have been changed to fit the Hebrew's needs.

Gerard Stafleu

Adamu

Thanks for expounding.

I've read some work where the Enuma Elish is considered an astronomical text describing not the formation of the universe but specifically our solar system.

I was wondering if this was what you were intimating.