The Babylonian Creation Myth, Genesis, and Reading the Bible

*These thoughts are not intended to be fully developed. For the most part, they are musings about my current coursework at the University of Chicago.

In my Intro to Hebrew Bible and Jewish Thought course, we were asked to consider the importance of a Babylonian creation myth (available here) in regard to the Hebrew Bible. In particular, the creation accounts in Genesis 1:1-2:4a and Genesis 2:4a-24. Extensive scholarship exists on the relationship, or lack of relationship, between the Genesis creation accounts and the Babylonian creation myth. As I read these texts a few nights ago, I noticed words of praise in the Babylonian creation myth. The apparent genre of this portion of text read more like a Psalm than a creation account. The words praise Marduk and celebrate his success after defeating Tiamat, who seemingly instigated a civil war amongst the gods and goddesses (translation from Benjamin Foster, Before the Muses, p. 468):

Over all things that your hands have created,
Who has [authority, save for you]?
Over the earth that you created,
Who has [authority, save for] you?
Babylon, to which you have given name,
Make our [stopping place] there forever.

I find this portion of the Babylonian creation myth intriguing because it occurs within the epic narrative that constitutes the myth. The text switches from a mode of narration to a mode of praise. Perhaps, at some point in time and space, this poetic worship (liturgical, perhaps?) made its way into the Babylonian creation myth.

When we consider the greater landscape of the ancient Near East, in particular ancient Israel, it seems to be even more of a possibility. A poem in Exodus 15, for example, is one which many scholars suggest stood outside of the Hebrew Bible originally as a poem. According the the margin commentary in the Jewish Study Bible, “the language style of the poem are archaic and share many features with Ugaritic poetry of the Late Bronze Age, suggesting that it is one of the oldest poems in the Bible” (136).

Like the Babylonian creation myth, the poem embedded in Exodus occurs in the process of narration. Although I am not suggesting any sort of special relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the Babylonian creation myth based on these observations, I do suggest that the way in which poetry in embedded into the narrations demonstrates that they are within the same general framework of the ancient Near East. Thus, whenever we read the Hebrew Bible, we must consider how contemporaneous literature (i.e. the Babylonain creation myth, Egyptian texts, Akkadian texts, etc.) was was constructed into coherent texts.