55 pages • 1 hour read
Leonard William King, ed.The Seven Tablets of Creation: The Enuma Elish
Fiction | Scripture | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Order in the World Has Been Divinely Ordained
The clearest message to be drawn from the Enuma Elish is that, while chaos was the original state of creation, eventually order and stability prevailed. The gods of disorder, Tiamat and Apsu, fail decisively in the Creation Series, quickly defeated by those who favor organizing creation. In the view of the Babylonian poet who compiled and recorded the Creation Series, order begins with the heavens and progresses as the restrictions are placed upon the sky and the ocean, upon the moon and sun—who are ordered to cooperate with one another, upon the gods who reside in the stars as part of the zodiac, and eventually upon humanity, vegetation, and animal life.
Given that this creation story develops from emergent agrarian civilizations making the transition from mendicant hunter-gathers to a stationary agricultural life, it’s not hard to envision the importance of keeping things orderly. Cities came into being for the first time in the Fertile Crescent, with those who lived in them depending on stability. A strong city-state, like Babylon, could provide security and open markets for crops and other goods. Other matters, like the weather and the fertility of the soil, were out of the control of the city. For such variables, citizens turned to Marduk, the god of order, justice, mercy, and, above all, fertility. In a sense, the conflict between Marduk and Tiamat continues to be played out every spring. As with the Nile in Egypt, the Euphrates River that flows through Babylon floods annually, leaving in its wake a new carpet of fertile soil. This embodies the Enuma Elish struggle: The mighty river flows forth but is tamed by the god of order and fertility.
This was also a time of immense human progress, not unlike the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, or the microcomputer age of the early 21st century. The rapidly changing nature of human life in the ancient Near East was a double expression of the need for order and stability. Change implies a lack of certainty, which makes human beings yearn for the firm foundation of stability. At the same time, human advancement also requires order. It’s difficult to institute new ideas and develop new technology in the middle of a famine or a siege. For these reasons, the Babylonians desired a god who could grant stability and keep things in good order.
The Purpose of Humanity Is Divine Service
Though the creation of human beings is a secondary concern in the Enuma Elish, when Marduk gets around to bringing humanity into the world, he makes a great sacrifice: ordering the severing of his own head so that he can mix his blood with the earth. As secondary as humanity might be, its creation is completely intentional, and its purpose is undeniable. Human beings, as created by Marduk and affirmed by all the gods of the pantheon, have only one reason for existing: divine service. The Enuma Elish says specifically that humanity was placed upon the earth to build shrines to the gods and to serve them.
It’s somewhat ironic that the portion of Tablet Six that is thought to contain Marduk’s precise marching orders for his newly created humans is lost literally to the sands of time. Readers of the Enuma Elish realize, therefore, that there are specific divine instructions imparted to them by the highest of gods, but unfortunately the record of them disappeared.
What makes the conundrum of the commandment to divine service all the more interesting is the depiction of the gods in the Creation Series. Entirely emotional, driven by fear and selfishness, seemingly helpless in the face of real danger, the gods seem to embody human childishness more than divinity. One is left to wonder how human beings are to serve capricious, childish gods like these.
Accurate Scholarship Is Possible with Proper Resources
The Seven Tablets of Creation are actually two distinct volumes. One book is the ancient Babylonian creation myth, essentially unavailable to human readers for two millennia. The other book is Leonard William King’s story of recovering and compiling the Creation Series in a correct and comprehensible manner. King devotes half the pages of The Seven Tablets of Creation to explaining the manner in which he reassembled a sufficient amount of tablet fragments such that he could understand how the cuneiforms they contained fit together. In doing so, King achieved dramatic advances in scholarship. His constant message, as he details his methods, deductions, and progress, is that the gains he has made are possible because he had the proper resources. Those included tablet fragments that were not available a quarter century before, the scholarly writings of other translators who were also diligently working on the Enuma Elish, and the texts of ancient scribes like Berossus who were acquainted with the original writing.
King’s work is very much a celebration of the achievements of a purely academic pursuit. He records that he felt compelled to produce the new translation of the Creation Series because he was, in a sense, the right person in the right place at the right time. From his example, a reader may recognize what can be achieved with the right resources and attitude.
The Biblical Hebrew Creation Stories Emerged Partly from the Enuma Elish
From the first lines of the book to the last portion of the afterword, King is intent on describing the similarities between the Enuma Elish—as well as other any Near Eastern mythological sources—and the Hebrew Bible, particularly the initial creation story contained in the first chapter of Genesis. This concern seems to lurk in the background of every portion of his work.
King succeeds in demonstrating that Babylonian mythology is carried forward in the Hebrew Bible, not only in Genesis 1 but also in a variety of different passages. Much of the Hebrew scriptures’ engagement with Babylonian religion has to do with the rejection of Babylonian theology and in particular with the rejection of Baal, which was the contemporary Palestinian name for the god Marduk. So thorough and complete is his demonstration of the presence of Babylonian influence in the Hebrew Bible that he feels compelled to end the book with a defense of Judaism as a distinct and complete religious faith that is devoid of Babylonian theology.
