The True Genesis of the Human Species
The Genesis Creation story was edited into more or less the form we know today sometime between the years 589-539 BC, during the Babylonian Capitvity of the Jews, probably by Ezra. However, about 500 years before this, during King David��s time, somebody in the royal court was responsible for creating the basic stories which Ezra based his edited version on. Most likely these stories were created by someone who was commissioned to create a legacy or just to entertain the king. This unknown storyteller, however, got his/her material from much older stories that existed perhaps 500-3000 years earlier during the times of the Sumerians and the Old Babylonians, circa 3500-1500 BC.
In this epic which was modified into Babylonian tastes from older Sumerian stories, a male god names Marduk ascends to power after killing his rivals Tiamat (a water godess) and her consort Kingu. In the process, he uses Tiamat��s carcass as the foundation to create the heavens and the earth, in exactly the same way that Elohim (the Hebrew word for ��God��) creates a ��firmament�� (which actually means ��dome��, the Hebrew word ��raqi��a��) that separates the water in the sky from the water below in the Bible. In ancient Hebrew cosmology, they believed (along with the other Mesopotamian peoples) that the sky was a ��dome�� (��raqi��a��) made of a blue rock called lapus lazuli with perforations in it to let the light from the abode of the gods to shine through (hence the stars) as well as the rain to fall. The ��water above the heavens�� in Genesis means that the ancient Hebrews believed that there was actual water being held aloft by the blue dome of lapus lazuli which they thought the sky was made of. The ��water below the dome�� is obvioulsy seas and lakes and so forth. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk uses the slain body of Tiamat the water goddess to create the water above and below the heavens. In the Hebrew text of Genesis, it says ��In the beginning the land was ��tohu�� and ��bohu����, two words which have been traditionally translated as ��formless�� and ��void��. In truth, the original meaning of the word ��tohu�� is a mystery because it��s such an ancient word, but some scholars think that it is derived from the Babylonian word ��Tiamat�� which has a strong connection with water. Thus, re-translated the phrase would become: ��The land was watered (full of water) and empty��. This seems to make more sense because in the same sentence it goes on to say ��and the wind (spirit) of God hovered on the face of waters,�� which seems to take it for granted that the topic of water being everywhere had already been introduced previously.
Marduk also creates the first men form the blood of Tiamat��s slain consort Kingu. He mixes the blood with clay from the ground, and voila, the first humans who were created to be not FRIENDS of the Gods, but as SLAVES for the Gods. Later when this Sumerian / Babylonian story was modified by the crafty Hebrew storyteller in King David��s court, he changed quite a few things, most notably raising the status of mankind from slaves that the gods created to God��s greatest creation.
In the story of Noah and the ark, God tells Noah to build an ark to save himself and some animals because he plans to wipe out the human population because they are too evil. In the much older Sumerian / Babylonian verson (about 2500 years earlier assuming that the Noah story was modified and told in King David��s court) which becomes incorporated by the Babylonians into the longer ��Epic of Gilgamesh��, the fellow��s name is Atrahasis, and Enki (the Sumerian / Babylonian god of knowledge) tells him to do the same, but the reason why the gods are wiping the humans out is because the human population has multiplied too quickly, and the noise and trouble they make bother the gods. So, for seven days and seven nights Atrahasis bears the rain, until a bird lands on his ship with a twig which signals to him that the waters are abating. Note that in the Genesis version (Genesis 6-9) there is a CONFUSION about how long it rains for. First it says seven days and seven nights as in the older version, but later on it gets switched to forty days and forty nights (read it carefully!) This is because the editor of Genesis probably had to deal with two separate versions of the story from different tribes, and for some reason he chose to include both versions.
This kind of inclusion of different versions of a story is more common in the Bible than one might think, the other notable place where this happens being in Genesis 2-3. First it says that man and woman are created at the same time, but later on it says that woman was created separately and from the rib of man. Religious buffs who would defend this have made up all sorts of excuses for this over the centuries, the Hebrew-ignorant people basically saying that the ��separate creation�� version is a more detailed account of the ��simultaneous creation�� one, which doesn��t fly when one examines the original Hebrew text, because it is obvious that the two stories were written by different people who even call God by different name. The Jews, understanding the discrepancy more clearly, made up a story during the middle ages that the first ��simultaneous creation�� was Adam and his first wife Lilith, whom Adam later rejected because she wanted to be equal to Adam. Lilith ended up being banished from the Garden of Eden and her name became synonymous with evil for centuries afterwards until recently when she has become a symbol for equality between the sexes.
Bibliography: anything written by the great Sumeriologist Samuel Noah Kramer, as well as the translation of the ��Epic of Gilgamesh�� by John Carpenter, and the indispensable ��Encyclopedia of Religion�� edited by Mercia Eliade.
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