Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Stories of Creation and Flood: Part III

Tags: genesis 1, flood, genesis 6-9, atra hasis, ugarit, ebla, sumerian king list, toledot, elohim, genesis 3, enuma elish--> This article was first published in a 4 part series, starting in the Winter 1996 issue of Bible and Spade. FloodCreation and FloodUntil recently, the Creation and the Flood have often been treated as separate units. One of the reasons for this may be that initially discovered ancient Mesopotamian documents provided either a Creation myth without the Flood story (“Enuma elish” and others) or the Flood story without a Creation motif (“Gilgamesh Epic,” tablet XI), all in seventh-century neo-Assyrian copies from the Nineveh of Ashurbanipal’s time.1 Therefore, scholars were busy comparing Genesis 1 with “Enuma elish,” and Genesis 6–8 with “Gilgamesh” XI, without integrating these two sections of Genesis.However, we now have some evidence that the “continuous narrative of the first era of human existence” in the ancient Near East covered both the Creation and the Flood, as Millard (1994: 116) and others have noted. For example, the “Atra-Hasis Epic” from the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 1630 BC), which Lambert and Millard presented in 1969 in a thorough study, with the text and its translation,2 covers the history of man from his creation to the Flood. This history was widely known in ancient Mesopotamia, and a similar tradition with the same overall structure was known in the early second millennium BC.Recently Jacobsen suggested the existence of a Sumerian version of such a tradition. According to him, the Sumerian Deluge Tablet from Nippur, which gives not only an account of the Flood but also a list of five cities before the Flood like those in the Sumerian King List,3 may be combined with another Sumerian fragment from Ur and a later bilingual fragment from Nineveh. This combined text, which he names the “Eridu Genesis” (1994: 129–30),4 comprises: (1) the creation of man, (2) the institution of kingship, (3) the founding of the first cities and (4) the great Flood. While Jacobsen’s reconstruction of two Sumerian fragmentary texts (ca. 1600 BC) and one Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual fragment (ca. 600 BC) from three different places remains hypothetical, it seems that an overall tradition linking Creation, early kings, and the Flood existed in Babylonia from early times (Millard 1994:125).Comparative Approach. Biblical scholars have accepted the view that a similar tradition, which links Creation and the Flood, is also reflected in the overall literary structure of Genesis 1–11. Coats, following Clark, notes that in the Sumerian King List and the 'Atra-Hasis Epic', "various narrative elements are set together in something of the same series as the OT primeval saga" (1983: 38).According to Clark, "in his total outline P is influenced by the King List tradition which had now (in some editions) incorporated the flood narrative."As for “J,” he proposes that "J is basically dependent on the tradition of the Atrahasis epic for his outline of the primeval history including the sequence of creation, repeated sin, punishment, and divine grace culminating in the flood" (1971:187–88).It is not so simple, however, to divide the Mesopotamian traditions exactly between the King List, “priestly” tradition, and the “Atra-Hasis” “epic” tradition. In fact the latter played important roles in the priestly tradition. For example, it is reported that a Babylonian incantation priest cited a part of the “Atra-Hasis Epic” to advise a late-Assyrian king on a drought (Lambert and Millard 1969: 27–28).5A number of scholars have made a thorough study of “Atra-Hasis” and its relevance to Genesis research.6 For example, Kikawada, who abandons the source analysis of Genesis, studied the structural similarities between “Atra-Hasis” and Genesis 1–11 as a whole. According to him, both compositions used the same literary convention, “a five point outline,” consisting of (1) creation: man, (2) first threat, (3) second threat, (4) final threat: flood, (5) resolution,narrating primeval history up to the time of a great flood, followed by a solution to the problem that persisted throughout the pre-flood history, namely “increase of population.” While “Atra-Hasis” gives “the urban solution,” birth control, to this problem of population growth, “Genesis offers dispersion, the nomadic way.” Kikawada, following Kilmer’s view of “over-population,” (1972) suggests that “Genesis 1–11 may be a polemic against urban life and its solution to over-population, birth control” (1975: 12–13). Similarly, Moran and Frymer Kensky hold that Genesis 9:1ff. is “a conscious rejection” of the “Atra-Hasis Epic” (Moran 1971; Frymer-Kensky 1977).However, Oden rejects the overpopulation hypothesis. He holds that "the primary theme of Atrahasis is the development and then the maintenance of the boundary between the gods and humans" (1981:200). According to him, the key to the interpretation of the “Atra-Hasis Epic” is in the human activity, indicated by the “noise” and the “tumult” that “rob Enlil of sleep and prompt him to command the plague, droughts, and then the flood.” The “crime” was that ofscheming humans noisily planning ways to alter the divinely established order so that their status might become something more than workers for the gods (1981: 204).7Oden therefore holds that the Tower of Babel tale (Gn 11:1–9), in which human aspirations to divine status are so transparent, seems to be “the visual equivalent of the auditory assault of Atrahasis” (1981: 210–11).Whether overpopulation or the guilt of man brought the Flood is still a lively issue in interpreting the epic, as Moran recently pointed out (1987). The similarities between the Genesis account and the “Atra-Hasis Epic” do not support the idea that Genesis is a direct borrowing from the Mesopotamian but do indicate that Mesopotamian materials could have served as models for Genesis 1–11, as Jacobsen holds (1994:141). P.D. Miller also admits that "there were Mesopotamian models that anticipate the structure of Genesis 1–11 as a whole" (1994:150).K.A. Kitchen notes a similar outline, namely “creation-flood-later times,” and a common theme, namely “creation, crisis, continuance of man,” of the “primeval proto-history” in the “Atra-Hasis Epic,” the Sumerian Flood story, and the Sumerian King List, as well as in the Genesis account. He recognizes here a common literary heritage, formulated in each case in Mesopotamia in the early 2nd millennium BC (1977: 31). However, there are also many differences between the Mesopotamian traditions and the Genesis account, in addition to the basic concepts of divine-human relationship. According to Jacobsen, the P source of Genesis has a rather pessimistic view of existence, introducing moral judgment on man’s sinfulness, while the “Eridu Genesis” holds “an affirmative and optimistic view” (1994:142). Whether the Genesis viewpoint is pessimistic or not, however, depends on the way scholars treat Genesis 1–11 as a literary whole, a subject to which I will return later.Jacobsen takes the “Eridu Genesis,” as well as the Biblical account (P), neither as a history nor as a myth; he assigns them to a “mytho-historical” genre, since they both have a chronological arrangement along a line of time, with a chain of cause and effect, and show interest in numbers and chronology (1994: 140–141). Miller is supportive of Jacobsen’s view, since the “Eridu Genesis” and “the full shape of Genesis 1–11” (not just the P account) share both “substantial content with typical myths of the ancient Near East” and “features that remind one more of historical chronicles (1994: 148).



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