Before the Beginning, When on High

Editors note: I struggled for some time trying to figure out how to go about this post. The material is so incredibly rich that attempting to mine the entirety of its value in a single post is just not feasible and would do overall harm to the coherence of the project. What we are going over in this post is the Babylonian creation myth as it appears in Mesopotamia in the Enuma Elish. I’ve decided that in this post I am going to simply go over the key aspects of the story so, with later posts, I can connect it in a meaningful way to the project. Unlike many of the biblical stories, the Enuma Elish is not part of our shared cultural language (in an obvious or overt way) and there is no expectation on my part that people will come to this project knowing it (the way I would, say, assume that everyone at least has the broad strokes of the Noah and the Flood story).

Bereshit, the first word in the book of Genesis, means “in the beginning.” I am sad to say that I do not have a working knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, but thanks to resources like the Strong’s Concordance and the fifty-eight Volume Cambridge Bible for Colleges and Schools, it is fairly easy to get at least some insight into it.

The root word of bereshit is rosh which means head as well as start. One is reminded of the Italian music convention da capo literally “the head” but meaning “from the top.” However, while Genesis is a cosmological beginning, it is far from the beginning of stories. Today we will be looking at a story whose written form predates Genesis by about a thousand years and is part of an oral tradition likely stretching back at least to the 10th-14th millennia BC, around the time of the end of the last ice age.

The Enuma Elis (meaning “When on High”) is an ancient Babylonian creation myth which, during the tribal unification of the Mesopotamian Empire, became the leading creation story as well as cosmological, ethical and political philosophy. Written in Akkadian cuneiform on seven clay tablets, the written version of this story dates to somewhere between the 18th-12th century BC and as such it is the oldest written story in the world. Babylonians recited and acted out the story of the Enuma Elish on New Years Eve (the birth of our New Year’s celebration complete with resolutions as we will soon see).

The story begins with the original primordial gods Apsu (the personification of the masculine as well as of fresh

water and order) and Tiamat (the personification of the feminine and salt water and chaos). They are in an eternal embrace that gives rise to the mixture of saltwater and freshwater in a chaotic and undifferentiated universe. Through their union, Apsu and Tiamat give birth to the first gods including Lahmu and Lahamu (the gods of silt and mud), Anshar and Hishar (the gods of the horizon of sky and earth. These elder gods continue to multiply and give rise to Anu (god of the sky) and through Anu to Ea (also called Nudimmud), god of wisdom and waters.

These younger gods are full of youth and vital energy which annoys their father Apsu who decides to destroy them despite protests from Tiamat who loves her children. Using his powers of magical wisdom, Ea figures out Apsu’s plan. He casts a spell to put Apsu to sleep and in his sleep slays him (sleeping and waking taking on significance in both near eastern and early hellenic cosmogony synthesizing in Chrsitianity). Ea builds a place to dwell on Apsu’s corpse, establishing his dominance over the fresh waters. Tiamat is left grieving. (We are going to go into depth on this over the week, but it is worth serious thought from the outset what it means to kill father culture, for all intents and purposes the patriarchy, and then inhabit and sustain yourself on its corpse).

Tiamat, angered by the death of Apsu, decides to take revenge on the gods. Now the gods, they are gods…but Tiamat is chaos itself….as well as their mother…so this represents a serious threat. With Tiamat, goddess of salt water, coming to destroy the inhabitants of the world we see what will later be the biblical flood.

To accomplish her apocalyptic goal of killing the gods she creates an army of chimeric monsters (serpents, dragons, scorpion-men, etc) and she elevates Kingu, one of her offspring, to be her consort and the head of her army. Kingu is, for all intents and purposes, Satan. He is the chief bad guy. Tiamat gives Kingu the tablets of destiny which symbolize his divine authority over the universe.

The gods, clearly panicked by Tiamat’s preparations, send Ea to confront Tiamat, to confront chaos itself. But Ea falters at her power and so Anu is sent. Anu also fails. Whatever these elder gods, children of the primordial deities, are they are not the sort of thing that can confront chaos and successfully tame it. It is hard, in our modern world, to easily forget how important it is to figure out what it is that can confront and defeat chaos. Thousands of years of building a society which separates us so intensely from primordial chaos makes us callus to the centrality of this fight.

The chaos of nature is constantly present in the ancient world. It is only in relative modernity that children stopped dying at the rate of 50% before their first birthday. We take for granted how close ancient man lived to chaos and do so at our own peril as millions of years of evolution has prepared the human mind to deal with this and while today we use the same systems applied differently the cognitive platform we use today is still the one that evolved as a consequences of the need to contend with nature.

In their desperation the elder gods turn to Ea’s son Marduk who is born with four eyes and the ability to speak magical words. Marduk agrees to confront Tiamat and her army led by Kingu, but he has conditions. A grand council of the gods convened to confirm Marduk’s conditions. Should he be successful at defeating Tiamat, Marduk demands that he will be the new holder of the tablets of destiny and he will rule amongst the gods as their king. So this is what the story is about. This is a story about who should be in charge and the answer is the one in charge should be the one who heroically and voluntarily goes out into the world to confront and defeat chaos. Whatever it is that the elder gods are, they are not that.

The gods agree to Marduk’s demands and he quickly arms himself and heads to confront Tiamat. Marduk takes with him to the battle, amongst other things, a bow and arrows, a mace, lightening, a net and the four winds (the winds are in the form of words he can speak) and, of course, being the god of many eyes Marduk brings his power of attention.

When he confronts Tiamat, Marduk uses his words, the four winds, to disrupt the movements of Tiamat enabling him to trap her in a net, put an arrow through her heart while speaking the winds into her, distending her body. Being able to throw chaos off course using the power of articulation is another thing that bares a great deal of time thinking about. Marduk then subdues the army of monsters created by Tiamat, captures Kingu and seizes the tablet’s of destiny claiming divine authority.

Marduk splits Tiamat’s corpse into two using one half to create the heavens and one half to create the earth. Marduk organizes the cosmos assigning rules to the stars, planets and constellations to regulate time. You can think of this as primitive, but it is far from the case. That the chief god would assign rules to the stars, planets and consolations in an insanely complex idea. The first thing you need in order to come up with that idea is to recognize patterns in celestial bodies, the seasonal intervals and the patterns that the cosmos follow. After all, it would not be necessary to posit a cause to those things if you didn’t know they exist. Now, pull yourself away for 10 seconds and think about how, six thousand years ago, people figured out celestial patters. I mean, compared to these people who get labeled as primitive and archaic, modern man are a bunch of pikers.

Further, Marduk assigns tasks to the elder gods, now subordinate to his authority, and establishes the moon to mark the months and the stars to act as a celestial calendar. The gods praise Marduk and emphasize his role as the celestial architect of an ordered universe replacing the former precosmognic harmony maintained through the embrace of Tiamat and Apsu. The father’s (Ea) will was not enough without the son’s attention and articulation.

Now that Marduk has created the heavens and earth out of the slain body of Tiamat he moves on to create human beings. In order to do this Marduk needs to make a sacrifice. The sacrificial victim, since he led the rebellion and was Tiamat’s consort, is Kingu. Kingu is slain and his blood is mixed with clay in order for Marduk to create humans. As we delve deeper into analysis of this story over the week it is important here to note that the blood of the most evil monster which could be conjured up by the god of chaos is that which humans are made of. We see echoes of this some thousand years later as the book of Genesis explains how mankind is the offspring of a fratricidal, resentful murderer cursed by God.

Humans, created from the blood of Kingu, are then tasked with serving the gods through offerings and building and maintaining temples. The elder gods, now subordinate to Marduk, give him fifty names (including “Him with Fifty Names”) and the great temple of Esaglia is dedicated in his honor. The fifty names of Marduk are likely from a process of unifying multiple disparate tribes (especially the Hittite Kumabri Cycle). This unification is part of a larger process I described in the essay on Shepherds. As the Mesopotamian Empire was being formed out of many tribes as distillation of local dieties are being brought together and many of them get assimilated into what we know as Marduk.

There are a number of things going on in this story but I will leave them for the supplementary essays to follow. I do want to mention, however, some of the major themes we see. Our ancient ancestors, having come to gather over the course of ten thousand years since the last ice age to form families then tribes then kingdoms and now an Empire and they have some important questions to address.

The first and foremost to my thinking is who or what should be in charge. From the Enuma Elish we see that the Mesopotamian answer to what it is that should be in charge is expressed in the attributes of Marduk. Whatever the elder Gods were they were not the sort of thing that could go into the chaotic unknown, grapple with the dragon of chaos herself, defeat her and make the heavens and earth out of her dispatched corpse. For this challenge a new kind of god needed to emerge and the qualities that make Marduk successful are his ability to pay attention and properly articulate words which can transform the world.

What the Mesopotamians understood, and as far as we know they are the first ones to understand, is that the King is also subservient to something. This is just not the way people thought of this. The king was, for all intents and purposes, a god.  The Emperor of Mesopotamia, you would think, would be answerable to no one. This is far from the truth. The Emperor of Mesopotamia is himself is subservient to the principle of divine sovereignty. An emperor was emperor only insofar as he was a good avatar of Marduk on earth. This ranks up there, historically, with one of the most significant discoveries of man.

Each year at the New Year’s celebration the nobles and the priests would take the emperor outside the city walls. Once there they would strip him of all his royal garb and insignia and demand that he explain all the ways over the year that he had not lived up to his role of being Marduk on earth. After his confession the priests would beat him with a glove as penance and he would explain how it is he would be a better incarnation of Marduk in the year to follow. If you recognize an early form of our current tradition of New Years Resolutions you would be correct.

Should his pleas and promises be accepted by the nobles and the priests the emperor would have his authority reinstated for another year, be given a royal concubine to mate with and the new year would be birthed with the creative sexual act.

One might think that this sounds primitive but that is absolutely wrong. It is amongst the most sophisticated ideas man has ever had. There is no reason you would think that the emperor of the greatest empire would be subservient to an abstracted concept of sovereignty and submit to the chastisement of his court and priests for all the ways in which he has not lived up to the abstract concept to which he is subordinate. The sheer span of time that it took man to be able to abstract out concepts like sovereignty from any particular sovereign and recognize that it was the abstract principle and not the sovereign is immense. Animals still have not done them. There is not an abstract principle to which the alpha chimp recognizes himself as subordinate to. Chimpanzee sovereignty is nestled in the chimpanzee sovereign not in an abstract concept.

Along with the themes of kingship the Enuma Elis contains the classic story of the triumph of order over chaos. This, in the form of the Hero’s Journey, is the primary underpinning narrative of mankind and we find its first written expression here.

The story also serves to show how Babylon, the largest of the tribes and nations that came together under the Mesopotamian Empire, was the primary nation as it’s city and patron deity are elevated to the peak of the hierarchy making Mesopotamia a cultural and political hegemony of Babylon.

For now I will leave this story here as trying to go into each element of it in a single post would become too unruly. Over the course of the next week I will, with the supplementary essays, harvest what I can out of this story which will set the stage for our move into the heart of this project, a full scale biblical analysis.