In 1849, Austen Henry Layard, an English Assyriologist, politician and diplomat, discovered an ancient Mesopotamian creation myth at Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh which was named Enuma Elish, meaning “when on high”, inscribed on seven cuneiform tablets containing the Babylonian creation myth. After being translated in 1876, they led critical scholars to conclude that the creation account in Genesis 1 was dependent upon Enuma Elish.
But he wasn’t the only one to suggest such a theory! The Bible German Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch in one of his most famous lectures delivered before Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1902, also suggested that the Babylonian accounts contain more ancient and original forms of cycles of stories than those found in the Bible. After having examined the Ashurbanipal library’s seven cuneiform tablets inscribed in Akkadian, he suggested that the biblical authors attributed to Yahweh the heroism of the Babylonian god Marduk, known from Enūma Eliš, the Babylonian creation myth composed in the late 2nd millennium BC.
He presented biblical examples, among them, Psalm 89:10–11, Psalm 74:13–15 and Job 9:13:
It was You who drove back the sea with Your might,
Who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters;
It was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan,
Who left him as food for the denizens of the desert,
It was You who released springs and torrents,
Who made the mighty rivers run dry.
He also demonstrated among other Enūma Eliš accounts, that the background for Isaiah 51:9–10 and Job 26:12–13, that both describe the Lord striking down the sea monster Rahab and a dragon, are based on a cylinder-seal bearing a picture of Marduk with one large eye and one large ear, standing on a dragon and holding a weapon in his right hand. Another example lies in Genesis I with the light splitting the Deep which recalls Marduk splitting the goddess of the water Tiamat.
Some may argue that the Torah (1.400 BC) is older than the Ashurbanipal’s library (600 BC), forgetting that the Torah was compiled by Ezra in the 4rth century BC in Babylon and we have no concrete proofs that Moses (if he ever existed) wrote it in 1400 BC! On the contrary, some events in Torah prove its posterior compilation, as well as Origen’s accounts on Moses that disproved the Moses’ “historical” myths. Besides, Enūma Eliš was composed in the late 2nd millennium BC.
Do you still believe that the Hebrew Bible contains religious truths of its own, or it is only an accumulation of shallow literature drawn from Babylonian texts?
R&I – TP
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Article URL : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C5%ABma_Eli%C5%A1