The Enûma Eliš was recognized as bearing close relation to the Jewish creation in Genesis from its first publication (Smith 1876), and it was an important step in the recognition of the roots of the account found in the Bible, and in earlier Ancient Near Eastern (Canaanite and Mesopotamian) myth. Some contend that the Genesis account is true and that stories such as the Enuma Elish are a derivation of that account.
The ancient Mesopotamians believed that the earth was a flat circular disc surrounded by a saltwater sea. The habitable earth was a single giant continent inside this sea, and floated on a second sea, the freshwater apsu, which supplied the water in springs, wells and rivers and was connected with the saltwater sea. The sky was a solid disk above the earth, curved to touch the earth at its rim, with the dwelling of the gods above the sky or on top of the solid sky, and sometimes the gods were denizens of the heights between the earth and the sky. So far as can be deduced from clues in the creation story in the Bible and in the New Testament's Matthew 4:8, the ancient geography was identical with that of the Babylonians: a flat circular earth floating above a freshwater sea, surrounded by a saltwater sea, with a solid sky-dome (raqia, the "firmament") above. It is the creation of this world which Enûma Eliš and Genesis 1 describe.
Genesis 1:1-3 can be taken as describing the state of chaos immediately prior to God's creation: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. "
In both Enûma Eliš and Genesis, creation is an act of divine speech; the Enûma Eliš describes pre-creation as a time "when above, the sky or heights had not been named, and below the earth had not been called by name", while in Genesis each act of divine creation is introduced with the formula: "And God said, let there be...". The sequence of creation is similar: light, firmament, dry land, luminaries, and man. In both Enûma Eliš and Genesis the primordial world is formless and empty (the tohu wa bohu of Genesis 1:2), the only existing thing the watery abyss which exists prior to creation (the god of Tiamat in the Enûma Eliš, təhôm, the "deep", a linguistic cognate of tiamat[citation needed], in Genesis 1:2), as with the one of the Egyptian creation myths, the watery abyss being a deity named Nu. In both, the firmament, conceived as a solid inverted bowl, is created in the midst of the primeval waters to separate the sky or heights from the earth (Genesis 1:6–7, Enûma Eliš 4:137–40). Day and night precede the creation of the luminous bodies (Gen. 1:5, 8, 13, and 14ff.; Enûma Eliš 1:38), whose function is to yield light and regulate time (Gen. 1:14; Enûma Eliš 5:12–13). In Enûma Eliš, the gods consult before creating man (6:4), while Genesis has: "Let us make man in our own image..." (Genesis 1:26) – and in both, the creation of man is followed by divine rest.
In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is a chaos monster, a primordial goddess of the ocean, mating with Abzû (the god of fresh water) to produce younger gods. In the Enûma Eliš she opposes when Abzû conspires to kill the younger gods, and she warns the most powerful of those, Ea, who puts Abzû under a spell and kills him.
Later when Ea's son Marduk creates problems for her yet sleeping god youngsters by playing with sand storms and tornadoes, she conspires to retaliate by creating eleven frightening monsters and erecting her son Kingu as their general, but this plot fails when Marduk slays them all including Tiamat herself. From Tiamat's body the world is formed, land and sea.
Tiamat was known as Thalattē (as variant of thalassa, the Greek word for "sea") in the Hellenistic Babylonian Berossus' first volume of universal history. It is thought that the name of Tiamat was dropped in secondary translations of the original religious texts because some Akkadian copyists of Enûma Elish substituted the ordinary word for "sea" for Tiamat, because the two names essentially were the same, due to association.
Though Tiamat is often described by modern authors as a sea serpent or dragon, no ancient texts exist in which there is a clear association with those kinds of creatures. The Enûma Elish specifically states that Tiamat did give birth to dragons and serpents, but they are included among a larger and more general list of monsters including scorpion men and merpeople, none of which imply that any of the children resemble the mother or are even limited to aquatic creatures.
Within the Enûma Elish her physical description includes a tail, a thigh, "lower parts" (which shake together), a belly, an udder, ribs, a neck, a head, a skull, eyes, nostrils, a mouth, and lips. She has insides (possibly "entrails"), a heart, arteries, and blood.
The Tiamat myth is one of the earliest recorded versions of the Chaoskampf, the battle between a culture hero and a chthonic or aquatic monster, serpent or dragon. Chaoskampf motives in other mythologies linked directly or indirectly to the Tiamat myth include the Hittite Illuyanka myth, and in Greek tradition Apollo's killing of the Python as a necessary action to take over the Delphic Oracle.
According to some analyses there are two parts to the Tiamat myth, the first in which Tiamat is creator goddess, through a "sacred marriage" between salt and fresh water, peacefully creating the cosmos through successive generations. In the second "Chaoskampf" Tiamat is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos.
Robert Graves (1955[page needed] considered Tiamat´s death by Marduk an outstanding example of how occurred the shift in power from matriarchy to patriarchy. Merlin Stone in When God Was a Woman (1976) follows Graves and also links the supposed rise of Patriarchal power structures and the assumption of power by the monarchial "lugal" (Lu = Man, Gal = Big), during the Early Dynastic period of Sumerian History, and the institutionalisation of warfare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat
Even though Tiamat and the chaos monsters do not appear in Gen 1, there is primordial chaos. The Bible begins midstream, the waters are there: the primeval cosmic soup, the ?tohu wavohu (Gen 1:2a). Creation begins when the ruakh elohim begins moving over tehom.
Eventually the chaos is bounded, and shaped into structures, into a cosmos. Tiamat in Genesis is not a personified serpent, but is instead tehom, the soupy cosmic abyss. The great sea dragons, the tanninim, are in Gen 1 — they show up on Day Five — but they are just another phylum within creation and are neither personified nor cast as opponents of order.
Jon Levenson in Creation and the Persistence of Evil writes that "the confinement of chaos rather than its elimination is the essence of creation." Creation in Gen 1 is not about making things out of nothing, it is about bringing definition and differentiation. The chaos was not obliterated. It was controlled, fenced in, held behind a firmament, and organized into structures — everything according to its kind.
A second observation of Levenson's is the biblical conjunction of creation and of covenant; namely, that humans assist in the stability of the created order through upholding these cosmic structures, through virtue. A third point follows closely from this, namely, that sin, trespass, inattention to the details, threaten to undo the structures of order.
http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=623
To read the Enuma Elish, click here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/caog/caog08.htm
