What Is the Enuma Elish?

 Researched and written by ChatGPT

The Enuma Elish is an ancient Babylonian creation story, written in Mesopotamia and preserved on seven clay tablets in cuneiform. The surviving version is usually dated to the late second millennium BCE, although parts of the tradition may be older.

Its name comes from the opening words, Enuma Elish — “When on high.”

The story begins before the world as we know it exists. There are no cities, no land, and no humans. Instead, there are primordial waters represented by divine beings: Apsu, associated with fresh water, and Tiamat, associated with salt water and the chaotic sea.

From them come generations of gods.

Conflict follows.

Eventually the younger god Marduk battles Tiamat, kills her, and uses her body to construct the ordered cosmos — forming the heavens and the earth. Marduk then becomes the supreme god of Babylon.

Humans are created afterward, in part to perform the labour and service previously expected of the gods.

That last point is especially interesting because the Enuma Elish comes from the same broad Mesopotamian cultural world in which some of the earliest biblical traditions later developed.

There are noticeable echoes between Mesopotamian creation stories and Genesis: primordial waters, the ordering of chaos, the division of the waters, the creation of the heavens and earth, and finally humanity.

That doesn't mean Genesis simply copied the Enuma Elish. It does mean Genesis did not appear in a cultural vacuum.

Long before the Hebrew Bible was compiled, people in Mesopotamia were already telling elaborate stories about creation, divine beings, cosmic waters, humanity, and humanity's relationship with the gods.

And those clay tablets survived.

Which makes the Enuma Elish a fascinating piece of the much older world sitting behind the biblical stories most of us were taught as children.