Is Genesis Plagiarized?

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

WARNING: This is a long-read. Don't just read one section. If this is too long for you, I will summarize at the end.

First, some background on where this idea stems......

On December 3, 1872, George Smith, a former bank-note engraver turned Assyriologist, stunned the Western world by announcing that he had discovered a Babylonian story of a great Flood resembling the well-known account of the Deluge in the Book of Genesis. Four years later, Smith published a collection of Mesopotamian myths and heroic legends entitled The Chaldean Account of Genesis (“Chaldean” being a synonym for Babylonian used in the Bible).

The book included Smith’s own English translation and discussion of a Babylonian Creation myth and other mythological compositions that he had pieced together from cuneiform fragments discovered during the preceding quarter of a century by the British excavations at Kyunjik, ancient Nineveh. About the Babylonian Creation myth, Smith wrote: “The story, so far as I can judge from the fragment, agrees generally with the account of the Creation in the Book of Genesis, but shows traces of having originally included very much more matter.”

According to Smith, the biblical account of the Seven Days of Creation (Genesis 1:1–2:4a, also known as the Priestly Creation account) was simply an abbreviated Hebrew version of a more ancient Babylonian tale.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

A century and a quarter after Smith made his astounding announcement, the Babylonian Creation myth—now regularly called by its Akkadian name Enu ma Eliš (after the first two words, meaning “When above”)—is widely recognized for its great importance to the history of ancient Mesopotamian religion. But for most Bible readers, the significance of Enu ma Eliš (pronounced eh-NOO-ma eh-LEESH) lies in its perceived connection to the Creation story in Genesis 1:1–2:4a and a few other biblical passages relating to the Creation and to a primordial conflict between the Israelite deity YHWH and some vicious sea monsters.

The notion that the biblical Creation story depends heavily on Enu ma Eliš is so entrenched that most modern commentaries on Genesis mention the connection. Any compendium of ancient Near Eastern texts related to the Bible will include Enu ma Eliš. The curriculum for teaching Bible in secular Israeli high schools has been revised to include the teaching of Enu ma Eliš. Nahum Sarna’s classic Understanding Genesis devotes four pages to the myth.

Alexander Heidel’s widely used collection of Mesopotamian Creation myths, The Babylonian Genesis (written “not for the professional Assyriologist but rather for the Old Testament scholar and the Christian minister”), lends 58 pages to parallels between the Babylonian and biblical texts.

But was George Smith right? Was the author of the Genesis Creation account heavily influenced by this ancient Babylonian tale? To answer this, we must first ask, What is Enu ma Eliš?

First and foremost, Enu ma Eliš is a poem, consisting of 1,059 lines written in the Akkadian language and inscribed in cuneiform on seven tablets.

The story that this great poem tells is a myth; that is, it explains the world as a reflection of divine activities and relationships between gods.

 

[SuikodenII]

I thought it was common knowledge that those bible stories were just different forms of previous stories from other cultures...

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Tablet 1. It is the timeless, mythic past when nothing existed apart from two personified masses of water, Tiamat (sea water) and Apsû (spring water). These proto-divine male and female figures engaged in an endless mingling of their waters that we might call the “Big Bang.”

Such dalliance led inevitably to pregnancy (of both partners) and the birth of several gods. As time passed the baby gods grew into big gods, who were a rowdy bunch, partying constantly at home, which happened to be the watery realm that was the body of Tiamat. This wild behavior raised the ire of Apsû, who, as typical of haggard fathers throughout time, decided to end it all and kill the kids and the kids’ kids and their kids, too. He plotted the act with his vizier Mummu, but the dastardly design got out, giving the young ones a chance to defend themselves, and, to be sure, one of the younger gods, Ea,
ended up killing his great-great grandfather Apsû, stripping him of his divine regalia and building his own house on the body of his slain ancestor. Ea and his spouse, Damkina, immediately moved in, and the two of them set
about making love and having a baby: Marduk.

The newborn infant was no regular lad. Four pairs of eyes and four pairs of ears (compare the four-faced creatures of Ezekiel 1:6) made him very attentive and gave him excellent peripheral vision, but he grew up
rapidly and became a bit obstreperous.

His favorite game was throwing dust into a set of four-winds (a present from grandfather Anum) and muddying up great-great-great granny Tiamat. This childish behavior may not have disturbed recently widowed and long-suffering Tiamat, but it did get on the nerves of the gods living within her; and they, playing on her sense of guilt over having failed to come to the aid of her late husband, cajole and convince her to take up arms and put an end to Marduk’s intolerable behavior and their consequent suffering. In order to do the task, she has a certain Ummu Hubur (the name means “Mother Noise”) produce for her a swat team of 11 raging, poisonous monsters at whose head she appoints the god Kingu.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

I thought it was common knowledge that those bible stories were just different forms of previous stories from other cultures...

Stay tuned and you'll see just how deep the rabbit-hole goes.....​

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Tablet 2. The younger gods, threatened by these scary beasts, fly into a panic and start looking for someone to come to their rescue. Ea, who got word of the war preparations, first approaches his grandfather Anšar (the deified horizon) and then daddy, Anum (the sky god), and reports the dire situation, but they do not come to the rescue, so Chicken-Little style the whole bunch of them ends up appealing for help from none other than the ultimate cause of their woes, Marduk. Marduk opportunistically accepts the invitation on the condition that if he defeats Tiamat and saves the gods, they will obey his commands. He will be their supreme, unchallenged ruler.

Tablet 3. In order to conclude an agreement, an envoy named Gaga is dispatched to Lahmu and Laha mu (Anšar’s parents), and all the gods gather at a grand banquet with lots of eating and drinking. When they are sufficiently inebriated, they ratify the agreement and enthrone Marduk as number one god.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Tablet 4. At the enthronement celebration Marduk is asked to prove the power of his word by making a constellation vanish and reappear, which he immediately does. “He spoke with his mouth, and the constellation disappeared; he spoke again with his mouth, and the constellation was formed,” the text tells us. After this display of verbal creativity, the gods outfit him with royal regalia, arm him and send him off to meet Tiamat. The myth reaches its climax in a decisive duel to the death between champion Marduk and Tiamat. Marduk arms himself with a bow and arrow, mace, net, four winds (probably the toy that Anum had given him as a child), and seven special winds designed to get inside Tiamat and give her gas. He mounts a chariot drawn by winds that can apparently move in all four directions.

For armor and headgear, he dons terrifying divine radiance, and, lest he be wounded, he also carries in his mouth an incantation, and holds in his hand a plant for warding off poison. Fully suited and geared up, he goes off to find Tiamat. When he meets her, they engage in a war of words and finally they lock in battle. At this point, Marduk opens his net with the intent of bagging her in it and then “the wicked wind which was sneezing behind him he directed into her face.”

This is surely a thinly veiled way of saying that he broke wind in her face. As if this were not enough, Tiamat opens her mouth wide to swallow the wind dispatched from his rear but in the end she fills up with wind, developing stomach cramps and constipation. Finally, Marduk shoots his arrow at her and splits her belly.

With Tiamat defeated and, literally, deflated, the gods supporting her go into hiding and the 11 terrible monsters are captured and led away. Finally, Marduk captures Kingu, the god who was leading the monsters, and takes away the tablets of destiny that Tiamat had given him before the battle. The war over and the enemy rounded up, Marduk returns to his captive, Tiamat, splits open her head with his mace, and has the wind blow away her blood. He next splits open her body “like a drying fish,” creates the heavens in the upper half, and establishes there a divine dwelling place, Ešarra, which is the mirror image of Ea’s subterranean dwelling place, Apsû.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Tablet 5. At this point “Creation”—or, rather, the ordering of the known world—starts. Working more or less from top to bottom, Marduk installs in the appropriate parts of Tiamat’s corpse the heavenly bodies in the heavens, meteorological phenomena in the atmosphere, and mountains, subterranean waters, the Euphrates and Tigris, the bond of heaven and earth, the netherworld and the oceans in and on the earth. Marduk then celebrates his triumph by distributing trophies and displaying vanquished enemies. He dons royal garments, and the gods declare him king and accept his authority. He then proposes to build Babylon to serve as a lodging place for gods who go up and down between the subterranean Apsû and heavenly Ešarra (compare Genesis 28:10–22, in which Jacob dreams of angels ascending and descending a staircase that reaches to the heavens).

The gods eagerly accept this proposal.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Tablets 6 and 7. But before Marduk carries out his plan, he decides to help relieve the gods of their work by creating Man. Actually; creating Man is only his suggestion, for the actual act is carried out by his father, Ea.

The creation of Man is described only briefly and elliptically; we learn only that Man was made from the blood of Kingu, who was slaughtered as punishment for having led the rebel gods. Having created Man, the gods proceed to carry out Marduk’s plan to build Babylon, and in particular its main temple, Esagila. The gods mold bricks for a year, and when the temple is finally in its place as a rest stop between subterranean Apsû and heavenly Ešarra, all the gods of heaven and the underworld sit down together at a grand dedication banquet. This ceremony is another opportunity for reaffirming allegiance to Marduk and glorifying him by proclaiming his 50 names along with intricate explanations of each one.

The poem concludes:

The [wo]rd of Marduk who created the Igigi-gods,
[His/Its] let them [ ], his name let theme invoke.
Let them sound abroad the song of Marduk,
How he defeated Tiamat and took kingship.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

How much does this strange and exciting tale really resemble the Creation account of Genesis 1:1–2:4a and other biblical references to Creation? What kind of relationship, if any, is there between these texts?

The concluding couplet of Enu ma Eliš, quoted above, suggests one of the most significant differences. Here, as in many Mesopotamian works, the author explains to the readers what the text they have just read is really about. In this case, he defines the entire composition as a hymn or song in praise of Marduk, who created the great gods (Igigi), defeated Tiamat and then assumed the throne. Compare this with the concluding line of the biblical Creation account:

Such is the story of heaven and earth when they were created. (Genesis 2:4a, New Jewish Publication Society Version)

In short, Genesis 1 is about the Creation, while Enu ma Eliš is about the creator. That’s why near the end of Enu ma Eliš, the gods bless Marduk, hero of the story, while at the end of the Creation account, God, hero of the story, blesses and sanctifies the Sabbath, his final creation. Further, in Genesis 1 God sees several times that what he has created is good, while in Enu ma Eliš the gods on several occasion express approval for Marduk and what he has promised to do or has done.

The two stories also vary in tone. Genesis 1:1–2:4a is a tightly structured narrative, simple in language but stately in elevated prose style and marked by use of repetition, formulaic language, and command-fulfillment sequences (“God said, ‘Let there be’ ... and there was”), all of which suggest divine planning, control and transcendence. Enu ma Eliš, in contrast, is a dramatic narrative poem in which tension builds and then is relieved again and again. Moreover, it is (in my opinion) a comic-heroic work not lacking in frivolity. Though some refer to Enu ma Eliš as the Babylonian Genesis, this is an unfortunate appellation—encouraging readers to approach the text with religiosity and reverence, when they might better bring a sense of humor and a taste for adventure.

Nevertheless, from the Victorian period on, numerous scholars have attempted to draw parallels between Genesis 1 and Enu ma Eliš—especially Tablet V, on the ordering of Creation. George Smith, in his Chaldean Account of Genesis, listed several, from the watery chaos that precedes Creation (see Genesis 1:1) through Marduk’s and God’s satisfaction with Creation: “And God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:12, etc.).

In 1902, Bible scholar Friedrich Delitzsch offered one of the most famous discussions of the Bible and Enu ma Eliš in the first of his Babel und Bibel lectures, delivered before Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In this lecture Delitzsch solemnly announced that Babylonian sources preserved more ancient and thus more original forms of full cycles of stories found in the Bible. Delitzsch suggested that the biblical authors had transferred directly to YHWH, God of Israel, the heroism of Marduk, god of Babylon, as known from Enu ma Eliš. He offered a handful of biblical examples, including Job 9:13, Psalm 89:10–11 and Psalm 74:13–15 (quoted here):

It was You who drove back the sea with Your might,
Who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters;
It was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan,
Who left him as food for the denizens of the desert,
It was You who released springs and torrents,
Who made the mighty rivers run dry

 

[Tom]

well duh.



every religious text is just an continuation of something that came before it, that's how the evolution of myths/ideas work.

The only other explanation is that God directly came down and actually gave humans this information which would be absurd

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Delitzsch showed his audience a cylinder seal bearing a picture of Marduk with one large eye and one large ear, standing on a dragon and holding a weapon in his right hand. This seal, which had been discovered by
German excavators, was cited by Delitzsch as the background for Isaiah 51:9–10 and Job 26:12–13, both of which describe the Lord striking down the sea monster Rahab and piercing a snake or dragon.

According to Delitzsch, the Priestly author of the Creation account in Genesis 1:1–2:4a, in contrast to the authors of Psalms, Job and Isaiah, tried to remove all mythological traces from his text, yet he was not entirely successful. Trace elements of Babylonian myth could be found throughout Genesis, said Delitzsch. For example, the light-splitting of the Deep (Hebrew Tehôm) in Genesis 1 recalls Marduk splitting the watery goddess Tiamat.

Delitzsch was not saying anything new, but he created a sensation throughout Europe and America by introducing the connection between Enu ma Eliš and the Bible to the popular consciousness, from the Kaiser on down. Delitzsch also gained attention and support for his subjective, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian insinuations that Mesopotamian religion was on an equal if not higher level than that of the Hebrew Bible, and that the Bible contains no religious truth of its own but is only an accumulation of shallow literature drawn from Babylonian texts.

If the generation preceding Delitzsch used archaeological and Assyriological discoveries to prove the truth of the Bible, from his time on the same evidence would be enlisted in demonstrating the Bible’s inferiority.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Alexander Heidel, in his well-known book The Babylonian Genesis, offers a clear summary of the parallels (he calls them “points which invite comparison”) that Smith, Delitzsch and other early scholars had detected:

Thus Enu ma elish and Genesis 1:1–2:3 both refer to a watery chaos, which was separated into heaven and earth; in both we have an etymological equivalence in the names denoting this chaos [Hebrew Tehôm and Akkadian Tiamat]; both refer to the existence of light before creation of the luminous bodies; both agree as to the succession in which the points of contact follow upon one another; and in both cases the number seven figures rather prominently. And turning to the poetic writings of our Old Testament literature, we find quite a number of passages which, like the story of Marduk’s fight with Tíâmat, treat of a conflict between the creator and various hostile elements.

Heidel adds to this list the divine nature of the participants in Creation; creatio ex nihilo—creation out of nothing; polytheism and monotheism in the respective stories; primeval chaos; primeval darkness; creation of the firmament; creation of the earth; creation of the luminaries; creation of plant and animal life; creation of man; the word of the creators; divine rest; the seven tablets and the seven days; and the general outlines of events in Enu ma Eliš and Genesis 1:1–2:3.

But Heidel concludes:

The similarities are really not so striking as we might expect ... In fact, the divergences are much more far-reaching and significant than are the resemblances, most of which are not any closer than what we should expect to find in any two more or less complete creation versions (since both would have to account for the same phenomena and since human minds think along much the same lines) which might come from entirely different parts of the world and which might be utterly unrelated to each other.

What Heidel does consider striking, however, is “an identical sequence of events as far as the points of contact is concerned.” In other words, of all the points mentioned above, only a few are really highly similar, but these particular points appear in the same order in the respective compositions. This indeed seems to be a strong argument in favor of dependence.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

In discussing the possible connection between Marduk and the God of the Hebrew Bible, Heidel noted that the idea of a primeval war between a god and the sea is an idea born in the West and imported into Mesopotamia, so the Bible would more likely have borrowed it from closer neighbors than the Babylonians. Here, Heidel relies on evidence in myths discovered at Ugarit (on the Mediterranean coast of modern Syria) a decade after the First World War (and ipso facto unavailable to Smith and Delitzsch).

Proof that this was indeed the case comes from the words the Bible uses for the sea monster. On the fifth day of Creation, in Genesis 1:21, God creates Tannîn, often translated “sea serpents”). This same creature appears as tnn, or Tunnan, in Ugaritic myth:

Surely I fought Yamm [Sea], the Beloved of El
Surely I finished off River, the Great God,
Surely I bound Tunnan and destroyed (?) him.

The biblical Leviathan (Psalm 74) has its parallel in ltn (Litan), who battles god in another Ugaritic myth:

When you killed Litan, the Fleeing Serpent,
Annihilated the Twisty Serpent,
The Potentate with Seven Heads,
The heavens grew hot, they withered.

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

Assyriologist Wilfred Lambert, who is preparing the eagerly awaited authoritative edition of Enu ma Eliš, notes that many of the parallels between the Babylonian poem and the Bible are as common throughout Near Eastern literature as to be insignificant.

The watery beginnings of the universe have parallels not only in other
Mesopotamian Creation myths but even in Egyptian and Greek texts and thus cannot be evidence of particularly Babylonian influence. The splitting of the waters (in Genesis, on the second day) is uniquely parallel to the splitting of aqueous Tiamat in Enu ma Eliš, although the splitting of other substances is well attested in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Egyptian and Greek myths. As for the third day, Lambert finds a Mesopotamian parallel to the separation of the sea from the dry land, but it is not from Enu ma Eliš. The most important parallel Lambert finds is with the seventh day, the Sabbath. Man is created in Enu ma Eliš to give rest to the gods. If so, both Enu ma Eliš and Genesis 1:1–2:4a climax with divine rest.

All told, Lambert sees the connections between Genesis 1 and Enu ma Eliš as relatively few in number.

As recent scholarship is making clear, simplistic comparison between Enu ma Eliš and the biblical tradition—as if the Bible were directly dependent on Enu ma Eliš and it alone—is patently untenable. And yet there is clearly some kind of relationship. Enu ma Eliš appears to be one of a range of sources that the biblical authors drew upon.

But although Delitzsch and Smith dismissed this borrowing as naive and mechanical, I believe something far more thoughtful and thought-provoking was taking place. The literary character of Enu ma Eliš itself offers an example of how and why the Biblical author drew on this source. Enu ma Eliš is on the surface a unified work with a clear, consistent plot and message.

Yet it, too, adopted and assimilated numerous ideas and literary themes from earlier sources. So, for instance, the notion of the creation of the gods and the world by sexual intercourse and birth is already found in Sumerian sources. Young gods who prevent their parents from sleeping, and, indeed, divine unrest and sleep deprivation are central themes in the Atra-hasis myth dating to the Old Babylonian period (first half of the second millennium B.C.E.), with roots in the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninmah.

Marduk in Enu ma Eliš has four eyes and four ears. This reminds us of Ezekiel’s chariot vision, but more important is a bronze statue found near Ishchali (ancient Neribtum, Iraq) dating from the Old Babylonian period
representing an identically endowed deity. If this statue is not Marduk himself it is without doubt a god of the same species.

The sequence of events of giving the Tablets of Destiny to Kingu, danger threatening the gods, the gods’ panic, the appeal to several gods in search of a champion who will defeat the monster holding the tablets, and the
eventual transfer of the Tablets of Destiny to the victorious champion has a close parallel in the Akkadian myth about the god Ninurta’s defeat of the Anzû bird.