Enuma Elish and the Genesis Creation Account
The Urantia Book · 74:8.6
Adam and Eve
The Genesis story of creation, postdating the times of Adam by almost fifteen hundred years, was a brief, composite, and somewhat distorted narrative of these events. The Hebrew creation narrative was first reduced to writing about one thousand years after Moses' death; only then did the Hebrews compile their existing creation narrative as it is now found associated with the early portions of the Old Testament.Read the full UB paper →
Ancient Source · Babylonian / Akkadian
Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Creation Epic (~1750 to 1100 BCE)
When on high the heaven had not been named, and below the earth had not been called by name, then there was naught but primordial Apsu and Tiamat, the salt sea, who mingled their waters together. The gods were created within them. Marduk split Tiamat in two like a shellfish; from one half he formed the heavens, from the other the earth. He set up the constellations, fixed the year, and assigned the moon to mark the months.
Tablets I and IV, trans. L.W. King / E.A. Speiser (ANET pp. 60 to 72)
Discovered in 1849 in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The seven tablets were read on the fourth day of the Babylonian New Year festival.
The Parallel
Both accounts open with primordial waters and darkness. Both describe the firmament being made by separating waters above from waters below (Genesis 1:6 to 7; Enuma Elish IV.137 to 140). Both describe creation in a structured sequence culminating in the appearance of humans. Both end with the deity resting and being honored. Genesis 1 is monotheistic and elegantly simplified, but the underlying scaffolding (chaos waters, separation, ordering, rest) is recognizably Mesopotamian.
Why It Matters
The UB is explicit that the Hebrew creation story was written down roughly a thousand years after Moses, during and after the Babylonian captivity. That is exactly when the Hebrew priesthood would have had direct contact with the Enuma Elish. The UB does not attack Genesis; it locates it historically and points readers toward Papers 57 to 65 for the actual account of how Urantia was formed.
Scholarship
- Heidel, Alexander. The Babylonian Genesis (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 1951).
- Lambert, W.G. Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 2013).
- Walton, John H. Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (Baker, 2006), ch. 9.
- Pritchard, ANET pp. 60 to 72, 501 to 503.