The Babylonian Genesis

The Story of the Creation

Alexander Heidel

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780226323992
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226112428
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

The origins of Judeo-Christian creation accounts: An complete, authoritative translation of all the extant cuneiform tablets of Babylonian creation stories

The Babylonian Genesis offers, in one compact, accessible volume, a complete translation of all the published cuneiform tablets of the various Babylonian creation stories, of both the Semitic Babylonian and the Sumerian material. Each creation account is preceded by a brief introduction from renowned scholar and translator Alexander Heidel dealing with the age and provenance of the tablets, the aim and purpose of the story, and everything else that a reader of any level  of knowledge needs to understand these stories in their context. Also included is a translation and discussion of two Babylonian creation versions written in Greek. The final chapter presents a detailed examination of the Babylonian creation accounts in their relation to our Old Testament literature.

CHAPTER I

ENÛMA ELISH

Of All the Semitic inscriptions composed in cuneiform writing few have awakened as great a general interest as the epic known among the Babylonians and Assyrians as Enûma elish (“When above”), which takes its name from the opening words of the poem. Aside from linguistic considerations, this widespread popularity of Enûma elish is in part due to its great significance for the study of the theogonic and cosmogonic views of the Mesopotamians, and thus for a comparative study of ancient Near Eastern religion in general; but above all else it is due to the fact that Enûma elish presents quite a number of analogies to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE TABLETS

This great epic is recorded on seven clay tablets and covers in all a little over one thousand lines. The first fragments to come to light were discovered by Austen H. Layard, Hormuzd Rassam, and George Smith among the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s (668–ca. 630 B.C.) great library at Nineveh between the years 1848 and 1876. During their explorations at Ashur (the old capital of Assyria), from 1902 to 1914, the German excavators unearthed a number of fragments of an Assyrian version of the Babylonian story (especially of Tablets I, VI, and VII) which differs from the latter chiefly in that some copies substitute the name of Ashur, the king of the Assyrian gods, for that of Marduk, the king of the Babylonian deities, and in that they make La

mu and La

âmu the parents of Ashur. In 1924–25 two almost complete tablets, I and VI, of a Neo-Babylonian version of the epic were discovered at Kish by the joint expedition of Oxford University and the Field Museum of Chicago. And in 1928–29 the Germans found quite a large Neo-Babylonian fragment of Tablet VII at Uruk (the biblical Erech). Thanks to these discoveries and to purchases of fragments which have been made from dealers in antiquities (the provenance of most of these fragments being uncertain), the epic has been restored almost in its entirety; the only tablet of which a large portion is still wanting is Tablet V.

THE PUBLICATION OF THE MATERIAL

The first to publish an account of the epic was George Smith, of the British Museum, who in 1875 described in a letter to the Daily Telegraph the contents of about twenty fragments of the creation series. In 1876 appeared his book The Chaldean Account of Genesis, which contained a translation and discussion of all the pieces which had been identified. All this material was very fragmentary, but the resemblance of its contents to the initial chapters of the Old Testament was unmistakable, and consequently it had an immediate appeal to a much wider circle of students than would otherwise have been the case. Since then this story has been copied and translated by a great many Assyriologists, especially as new tablets or portions of tablets have been found.

In 1890 Peter Jensen, in his work Die Kosmologie der Babylonier (Strassburg), published a translation together with a transliteration and a commentary; five years later Heinrich Zimmern issued a new and improved translation in Hermann Gunkel’s volume Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Göttingen, 1895); the very next year Friedrich Delitzsch issued Das babylonische Weltschöpfungsepos (Leipzig, 1896). Within a few years this was superseded by Jensen’s penetrating and still highly valuable study of Enûma elish in his book Assyrisch-babylonische Mythen und Epen (Berlin, 1900), containing a transliteration, a translation, and an extensive commentary. At the turn of the century, L. W. King issued a large number of creation fragments in his two volumes The Seven Tablets of Creation (London, 1902), the first of which contains chiefly transliterations, translations, and discussions, while the second offers cuneiform texts only.

More recent publications dealing with this subject are A. Ungnad, Die Religion der Babylonier und Assyrer (Jena, 1921); Erich Ebeling, Das babylonische Weltschöpfungslied in Bruno Meissner, Altorientalische Texte und Untersuchungen, II, 4 (Breslau, 1921); Ebeling’s revised rendition in Hugo Gressmann’s volume Altorientalische Texte zum Alten Testament (Berlin and Leipzig, 1926); S. Langdon, The Babylonian Epic of Creation (Oxford, 1923) and Babylonian Penitential Psalms to Which Are Added Fragments of the Epic of Cre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• A map of the ancient Near East
• Preface
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Symbols and Special Characters
• I. Enûma Elish
• II. Related Babylonian Creation Stories
• III. Old Testament Parallels
• Notes
• Appendix