World Civilizations: Mesopotamia, Part 10 - Creation and Cosmogony

Creation & Cosmogony: The Enuma Elish and the Bible

As we saw previously, in Mesopotamia water from the rivers and from the rains were not only the lifeline of agriculture and life; but also sources of disasters through floods and storms. In fact, the Mesopotamians thought of the world they lived in as a gap between two waters: First, there was definitely water below the ground which came up in springs, wells, and flowed in rivers. Then, there was definitely water in the sky, as the sky looked blue (hence full of water) and the water from the sky came down as rain. They had no knowledge of evaporation and scattering of light that made the sky blue. The thought was that there must definitely be a reservoir of water above the sky as there is one below in the ground. So in their cosmology, the world was inhabited between two layers of water. The earth was a narrow inhabitable place between two large reservoirs of water. So, a natural question to ask would be is:

Who first separated the waters below from the waters above?

This was the central focus of the creation stories in the ancient Near East. In many cultures, the primeval state of the universe is said to be watery chaos or a watery abyss. Taming these primeval waters is an important process in creation. There are lots of creation stories in Mesopotamia and they significantly varied from city to city as well, but the creation story in the city of Babylon eventually became well known due to the political dominance of the Babylonian Empire. This creation story is found in the text known as the Enuma Elish, and was sung every year during the festival of Akitu, the new year of Babylon to honor the patron god of the city - Marduk. We shall focus on this story in this article by taking it as a representative to get a peek into the creation stories of this civilization. So what does this creation story say?

It starts with the beginning of time when there were two primordial gods - Apsu, the god of fresh water and Tiamat, the goddess of salt water. Note that these primordial gods and the waters are pre-existent - hence the creation is not ex nihilo (out of nothing). The god Apsu and the goddess Tiamat mate together to produce many other deities which include the god of sand and silt. (1) The text begins as:

When on high the heaven had not been named,

Firm ground below had not been called by name,

Nothing but primordial Apsu, their begetter,

(And) Mummu*–(Tiamat), she who bore them all, Their waters commingling as a single body;

No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,

When no gods whatever had been brought into being,

Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined—

Then it was that the gods were formed within them.

Another important god produced in this first generation is Anu (the sky god) who then mates with another goddess to produce Ea, the god of wisdom who is in the second generation. Then, these younger gods start making noise that upsets the first god Apsu. Apsu proposes to his wife Tiamat to kill all their children and grandchildren, to which Tiamat disagrees. Somehow, this plan leaks out among the younger gods. Ea plans and, by working with other gods, has Apsu killed. After which, Ea fathers another fourth generation god Marduk. Tiamat is furious when she comes to know that her husband Apsu was killed. She chooses one of her sons Qingu as her new consort and gives birth to a variety of monsters to kill the gods. Marduk eventually takes charge and there is a conflict between the younger gods headed by Marduk and the monsters headed by Tiamat and Qingu. Thus, there is a conflict between the primordial goddess and the later generations of gods (we will see this theme recurring in Greek mythology, too). Marduk, the wind god, blows and inflates Tiamat, bursts her body, killing her and then he splits her body into two - one part is put into the heavens and the other into the earth. Thus, the two halves of the body of the dead water goddess Tiamat are the waters below (ground) and the waters above (sky) respectively. The tears of Tiamat from her two eyes become the Tigris and the Euphrates river, her eyes become the sun and the moon - basically various components of the earth arise from her body. This story also explains why Marduk is the supreme god in the Babyonian pantheon, as he is the leader in this primordial war. This story of the universe created out of the various parts of a god or a goddess should not look strange at all, because it occurs in some form or the other in many cultures. In the Vedas which have many creation stories, one story tells us of the self sacrifice of the primordial deity Puruṣa, giving rise to the four varṇas of mankind.

Marduk tries to become the king of the gods, but the other gods do not want to worship, honor, and serve him. Hence, Marduk creates humanity from the blood of one of the gods Qingu (who had sided with the defeated Tiamat) to serve the gods and relieve them of cultic labor to him. After that, Marduk becomes the king of the gods by assigning the cultic duties to humans. He then makes Babylon as the center of the world and resides in it. The account ends with fifty eulogical names of Marduk.

This indeed does create a little pessimistic picture of humanity - humans are basically workers to the gods and were created as cheap labor for the divinities. Humans are an afterthought in creation, to just serve the gods, and they are not special in creation. Also this can explain why the gods are not particularly benevolent to humans - because humans came from the blood of Qingu, the god who rebelled against the gods. So, humanity carries that guilt from Qingu. This reflected the precarious lives that the Mesopotamians had to endure on a daily basis due to the cruel geography. There are other creation stories in Mesopotamia but they all agree that humans are essentially created to relieve the gods of their labors. This story and the worldview implied in it directly influenced the biblical creation story in Genesis (2). Let us look at the beginning of the Bible where creation happens.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the Deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Genesis 1:1-2

Note that even in the Bible, creation is not ex nihilo. There is primordial water as seen in the end of the second verse (hovering over the waters). The word that is translated as “Deep” in the Bible is actually “Təhom” in the original Hebrew which sounds like “Tiamat”. Now, remember that Hebrew is a Semitic language and related to Akkadian. Many scholars agree that the Hebrew word “Təhom” is etymologically related and is cognate to the Akkadian word “Tiamat”, the name of the goddess of the salt water. Even if we reject that hypothesis, we have another piece of direct evidence. In English, we do not use definite articles for proper names even if they refer to specific entities (for example: we do not say “The Ramaseshan is here” even though the name Ramaseshan refers to a specific person). But for proper nouns referring to specific things that are not names of people, we use proper nouns (eg. “a box” vs “the box” for a more specific box). Here, in the Hebrew Bible, the deep is a specific deep water associated with creation but the Biblical Hebrew text refuses to put a definite article “the” in front of the word “Təhom” anywhere in the entire text even when it refers to the specific primordial deep waters! This only can mean that the Biblical authors treated the word Təhom as a proper name and this directly spells Babylonian influence, since the primordial deep waters is nothing but the goddess Tiamat herself. Next, consider the phrase in the verse that is translated as “spirit of God” which in the original Hebrew is “ruaḥ Elohim”. The word “ruaḥ” in Hebrew actually means “wind”. It is Christians who translate it as “spirit” because they want to bring in the Holy Spirit and justify the Trinity. Jewish translations render the phrase “ruaḥ Elohim” as “wind from God” in the English translation. So, we see that God’s wind is hovering over the surface of the deep waters. This should remind you of the Babylonian wind god Marduk who will blow up and kill Tiamat, splitting her body into two to create the waters below and the waters above (sky). This is what happens in the Bible too. Let us read a little further in the text.

And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. God called the vault “sky.” Genesis 1:6-8

Instead of the wind god splitting the deep waters into two, the God of the Bible does it in Genesis by sending the wind himself. The tower of Babel and the creation story are just two accounts to illustrate the influence of Babylonian culture on Israelite culture; and this is a vast area as there are so many analogies and parallelisms like these.

Note however, that there are other creation accounts from other cities as well, and from other texts. Another prominent creation account is from another text called Atra-Hasis, which is Akkadian but has its origins all the way to Sumer. It has a little different creation story to tell. These multiple creation accounts from various cities did not have any problems existing in the minds of individuals of the same civilization, and none of them fought out for their correctness. So, the Enuma Elish is just one of the many creation accounts (as we have lots of creation stories in Hinduism itself) - it was not the only account even in terms of popularity. It never played the role that the Genesis creation account played in the Judeo-Christian tradition - an account that was held as orthodox and the only one that was right or the only one that had to be believed.

The motif of a sky or wind god slaying a primordial water god is found in Indian culture also. Consider the Rig Vedic tale of Indra slaying the demon Vṛtra(also known as Ahi, the snake) to recover all the waters of the earth that he had hidden in his belly. An epithet of Indra is Apsujit in Sanskrit, which means the one who won over the waters (Ap means water in Sanskrit - sounds like Apsuin Akkadian!). Also, does the Akkadian wind god’s name Marduk, sound like Marut, the Sanskrit term and god for wind?! This is probably a coincidence as Akkadian and Sanskrit are in distinct language families, and hence they cannot be etymologically related through common descent linguistically. But still the question of a sky or wind god slaying a primordial god to retrieve or tame the primordial waters will be a recurrent theme in many other cultures as well. It is as though the primeval state of the cosmos is assumed to be watery chaos in at least one creation myth of many cultures. But somehow in India, fancy leftist scholars tell us that Indra slaying Vṛtra represents immigrant Aryans conflicting with the indigenous Dravidians - why do they not try this toolkit to these dead cultures as well? They wouldn’t, because their real and underlying aim is balkanization, not academic knowledge.

References

Diodorus II 29.2

Clarke, Benjamin “Misery Loves Company: A Comparative Analysis of Theodicy Literature in Ancient Mesopotamia and Israel.” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 2, no. 1 (2010). https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/imwjournal/vol2/iss1/5

William G Lambert, “Babylonian Wisdom Literature”, Oxford University Press 1963

To view the BT text online, refer: https://etana.org/node/582

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job+38

Footnotes

First eight lines of Enuma Elish: Pritchard, James B., ed. (1969). “Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament” (3rd ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03503-2.1969, pp. 60–61

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1&version=NIV

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tiamat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vritra#/media/File:Storyof_Vritra(cropped).jpg

https://www.learner.org/series/invitation-to-world-literature/the-epic-of-gilgamesh/experts-view-enkidus-death/

Authored by Rama Seshan Chandra Sekaran. Published by Brhat.