Who is the babylonian god of creation

Instead, these texts are two examples of the kinds of theological themes that pervaded numerous cultures over many centuries. The stories are not directly connected, but they share common ways of thinking about beginnings. Scholars also came to appreciate the differences between Genesis 1 and Enuma Elish. Genesis 1 is not just a lightly touched-up version of older creation stories. It is a unique piece of Israelite theology.

But this does not mean that the similarities can be minimized. Some scholars have gone to the other extreme saying there is no real value in comparing Genesis 1 to Enuma Elish. Only a very small number of scholars think this way, however. It is very clear that these stories share a common, ancient, way of speaking about the beginning of the cosmos. Those similarities should not be exaggerated or minimized. But they are telling us something: even though Genesis is unique, and even though Genesis is Scripture, it is an ancient story that reflects ancient ways of thinking.

Genesis 1 cries out to be understood in its ancient context, not separated from it. Stories like Enuma Elish give us a brief but important glimpse at how ancient Near Eastern people thought of beginnings.

That way we can learn to ask the questions Genesis 1 was written to address rather than intruding with our own questions. One of the main questions Israelites asked was how their God ranked among the dozens of gods in the ancient world—namely, what made him worthy of devotion rather than the gods of the superpowers like Babylon and Egypt.

Reading Genesis as ancient literature highlights this polemical dimension. Genesis 1 is a bold declaration that the God of a tiny nation with a troubled past is the one responsible for what you see. In the ancient world, those are fighting words. Genesis 1 is certainly not just a Hebrew version of Enuma Elish.

But we cannot fully appreciate the distinct theology of Genesis 1 without first seeing what it shares with Enuma Elish and other ancient narratives.

Understanding the connections between Genesis 1 and other ancient texts like Enuma Elish is a reminder that we do a disservice to Genesis 1 when we view it only through a modern lens.

They urge Tiamat to do battle against Marduk so that they can rest. Tiamat agrees and decides to confront Marduk. She prepares for battle by having the mother goddess create eleven monsters. Tiamat places the monsters in charge of her new spouse, Qingu, who she elevates to rule over all the gods. When Ea hears of the preparations for battle, he seeks advice from his father, Anshar, king of the junior gods. Anshar urges Ea and afterward his brother Anu to appease the goddess with incantations.

Both return frightened and demoralized by their failure. The young warrior god Marduk then volunteers his strength in return for a promise that, if victorious, he will become king of the gods. The gods agree, a battle ensues, and Marduk vanquishes Tiamat and Qingu, her host.

As sky is now a watery mass, Marduk stretches her skin to the heavens to prevent the waters from escaping, a motif that explains why there is so little rainfall in southern Iraq. With the sky now in place, Marduk organizes the constellations of the stars. He lays out the calendar by assigning three stars to each month, creates his own planet, makes the moon appear, and establishes the sun, day, and night.

The myth continues as the gods swear allegiance to the mighty king and create Babylon and his temple, the Esagila, a home where the gods can rest during their sojourn upon the earth. The myth conveniently ignores Nippur, the holy city esteemed by both the Sumerians and the rulers of Kassite Babylonia. Babylon has replaced Nippur as the dwelling place of the gods.

Meanwhile, Marduk fulfills an earlier promise to provide provisions for the junior gods if he gains victory as their supreme leader. He then creates humans from the blood of Qingu, the slain and rebellious consort of Tiamat.

He does this for two reasons: first, in order to release the gods from their burdensome menial labors, and second, to provide a continuous source of food and drink to temples. The composition ends by stating that this story and its message presumably the importance of kingship to the maintenance of order should be preserved for future generations and pondered by those who are wise and knowledgeable.

It should also be used by parents and teachers to instruct so that the land may flourish and its inhabitants prosper. First to be created are the cities, Eridu and Babylon, and the temple Esagil is founded. Then the earth is created by heaping dirt upon a raft in the primeval waters. Humankind, wild animals, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the marshlands and canebrake, vegetation, and domesticated animals follow.

Finally, palm groves and forests appear. Just before the composition becomes fragmentary and breaks off, Marduk is said to create the city of Nippur and its temple, the Ekur, and the city of Uruk, with its temple Eanna.

This account begins after heaven was separated from earth, and features of the earth such as the Tigris, Euphrates, and canals established. At that time, the god Enlil addressed the gods asking what should next be accomplished.

The answer was to create humans by killing Alla-gods and creating humans from their blood. Spar, Ira. The story begins with two primeval gods, Apsu and Tiamat.

There they make such a racket that they torment Tiamat and Apsu, and Apsu gets so annoyed that he decides to kill the young gods. But Tiamat disagrees with this and warns Ea, her son, who then kills Apsu. Ea then becomes the chief god and has a son named Marduk, the grandson of Tiamat, who is more powerful still than Ea or Tiamat. Marduk is given winds to play with as a way of amusing himself, and he uses the winds to make storms, which disturb his elders, just as their frolics had once upset their parents.

These gods convince Tiamat to kill Marduk. But there are some that join Marduk instead. Marduk fights and kills Tiamat and forms the earth from her corpse, slicing her in half. He makes her top half the heavens and her bottom half the ground and the waters. He uses the blood of her second husband, Kingu, whom he also kills, to make human beings. By the act of destroying the evil chaos-monster and, in an obscurely overlapping way, creating our new world out of her corpse, this hero-god becomes the king god in the Babylonian pantheon.

Learn more about the reformation-the power of evil within. From the perspective of the concept of evil, several aspects about this myth are key. First, the chaos god Tiamat is not represented as the source of evil per se, though she is one prior to people like Marduk. Evil, then, is an intrinsic structure of reality, part of the basic framework of the universe.

Evil is natural, just part of the cosmic order.