This paper examines Gregory Mobley’s informative analysis of the creation narratives within the Ancient Near Eastern literature, with special reference to the Enuma Elish and its parallels to the biblical creation accounts. Ideas relating to Pentateuchal authorship, modern skepticism, and literary forms presented by George Coates, Claus Westermann, and John Van Seter will likewise be examined and contrasted. The paper then concluded by considering the genre of myth with reference to the Incarnation Theology Model as presented by Peter Enns.

Mobley on the Enuma Elish and Divine Conflict in the Ancient World

Gregory Mobley examines the creation narratives within the Ancient Near Eastern literature. Here he not only includes the biblical story found in the book of Genesis but includes the Babylonian story of the Enuma Elish. What these ancient stories have in common, explains Mobley, is that they involve a divine battle (Mobey, 2012: 17). We shall examine the Enuma Elis conflict between the chief god Marduk and the monster Tiamat.

The Enuma Elish is a famous story from the ancient world inscribed in cuneiform script and Akkadian. It comes down to us on numerous clay tablets. From these one discovers the storm god, Marduk, and his conflict with Mother Ocean, of whom he subdues and defeats in battle. It was from Mother Ocean’s body parts that the world was created.

The Mother Ocean is referred to as Tiamat, a monster personified with feminine characteristics (Mobley, 2012: 18). Tiamat is a symbol of primordial creation and the chaos that accompanied it. But Tiamat isn’t alone in her monstrous efforts as she has her own gang of eleven monsters (1.134-46). These monsters are hideous creatures, usually consisting of a hybrid of feared beasts such as fish-men, bull-men, serpents, dragons, and monster snakes. Ultimately, Tiamat and her gang aren’t powerful enough to slay Marduk. Rather, it is Tiamat who meets a gruesome end when Marduk hurls a zephyr through her mouth. While Tiamat is vulnerable, Marduk shoots an arrow through her belly to finish her off. Tiamat now defeated her gang flees although Marduk captures and imprisons them by binding them to his feet (5.72-73).

For the Babylonians, this narrative explains the origin of the physical universe (Mark, 2011). It not only explains why the world exists but why the world works and obeys some kind of order (Mobley, 2012: 18). Thanks to Tiamat’s iconic defeat, reality and the world have been stabilized, although an uneasiness yet persists. This uneasiness is due to the world having been created from Tiamat’s body parts, a deliberate act on the author’s part. Mobley writes that “her body parts are used it suggests that something unstable lies beneath physical reality” (Mobley, 2012: 19). This uneasiness underlying reality is the perpetual danger of chaos that threatens to envelop the world. On this creation myth, these worries are warranted in light of the fact that the world is created from chaos. Chaos is the “raw material,” so to speak. These fears strongly felt, the Enuma Elish says that watchmen were assigned to keep an eye on Tiamat (4.139-40). These watchmen are to ensure that chaos will be kept at a distance and that Tiamat will never return (Beal, 2001: 17-18).

Mobley explains that like the Enuma Elish, the biblical story has its version of divine combat taking place at the beginning of time (Mobey, 2012: 17). This combat is between God and the dragon of chaos (referred to as Rahab or Leviathan), a conflict found in numerous texts of the Old Testament (Psalms 74:14, 16-17, 89:10-12; Isa. 51:9; Job 3). For the Israelites, it was common knowledge that God had already defeated this monster (Isa. 51:9). Mobley highlights that there is no single narrative outlining this conflict, which is why it exists in bits and pieces. According to Professor Michael Fishbane, there are no “full-scale narratives” of the divine combat myth in the Bible. Instead, what we find are “highly condensed epitomes and evocations of these events” (Fishbane, 2003: 64).

Moreover, Mobley and others (Orlinsky, 1969; Enns, 2010) have identified similarities between the Bible’s divine combat myth with the Enuma Elish (Mobley, 2012: 20). For example, the “shadow” of Tiamat appears in Genesis. The difference, however, is that it doesn’t appear as a personified serpent, instead, the biblical story refers to it as “the abyss” (Hebrew tehom). In Genesis 1, dragons also make an appearance as they feature on day five of creation except, unlike with the Enuma Elish, “they are just another phylum within creation” and are therefore not represented as enemies and foes of order (Mobley, 2012: 20). Claus Westermann agrees with Mobley, saying that the Enuma Elish and several Ancient Near Eastern texts bear “a striking resemblance to the biblical Creation and Flood stories” (Westermann, 1974: 8). Westermann, however, goes further than Mobley in terms of theological significance saying that such parallels, for Christianity specifically, have raised concerns for the inspiration of Scripture as they might seem to “renounce the unique importance of the biblical texts” (Westermann, 1974: 9). Westermann’s observation is a good one and is a question Christian scholars have grappled with (See Peter Enns’ Inspiration and Incarnation (2005) and Thom Stark’ The Human Faces of God (2011)).

Summarizing and Contrasting the Views of Coates, Van Seters, and Westermann.

George Coates urges readers to appreciate the Old Testament narratives as a literary art (Coates, 1983: 3). He emphasizes this because of the contemporary western tendency to favour historicity, “the real history” (Coates, 1983: 3), of the biblical texts instead of appreciating the texts themselves. Coates does not say that the historical reconstruction is unimportant, but rather that it needn’t always be one’s primary focus. For Coates, the real value of the biblical texts lies within the literary forms rather than attempts at historical reconstruction (Coates, 1983: 3). If this is the basis from which the reader or exegete operates then objective history becomes largely irrelevant since one finds value in literary forms independent of whether or not they are historically accurate. By referring to a biblical text as a literary art, Coates means to say its artistic narrative depicting environments in symbolic and verbal forms (Coates, 1983: 4). Many would find Coates’ idea refreshing in a contemporary setting that seems to emphasize objective history as the ultimate value of historical texts. But value can lie elsewhere too, as Coates argues.

Like Mobley, Claus Westermann shows much interest in the Bible’s creation narrative. However, although Mobley focuses on the Enuma Elish and the parallels it shares with the biblical account, Westermann tends to focus more on the diversity of creation accounts within the Bible. He mentions the two accounts in Genesis that come down in two separate sources with the earliest of the two being P, the Priestly code from the sixth to fifth centuries BCE and the older J source, the Yahwist source from the tenth to ninth centuries BCE (Westermann, 1974: 5-6). The earlier account found in Genesis 1:1-2:4a speaks of God’s creation of the world and then of man, whereas the later account of Genesis 2:4b-24 provides a fuller and more detailed account of the creation of man.

Similarly, Westermann agrees with Coates that there is a western tendency to look to construct objective history around the biblical creation account. Because of this many have come to doubt the account and, in some cases, ridiculed it as a primitive myth (Westermann, 1974: 2). Such skepticism stems largely from the influences of the Enlightenment and the development of the natural sciences that are today regarded as the “lord of the domain” (Westermann, 1974: 4). Under these domains, such stories which speak of Gods, miracles, and supernatural events within space and time are dismissed. Nonetheless, many Christian thinkers, also presented with these challenges, have found this concern largely misplaced.

Most scholars acknowledge the need to view the biblical creation account in its ancient setting. Old Testament professor Peter Enns, a Christian scholar who has reflected widely on the relationship between science and religion, the Bible, and Christianity, explains that “the opening chapters of Genesis participate in a worldview that the earliest Israelites shared with their Mesopotamian neighbors” (Enns, 2015: 87). The follow up to this insight is that if the Bible’s ancient authors indeed shared such a worldview then it would border on an intellectual arrogance to expect them to be consistent with modern scientific ways of thinking. The creation narrative certainly precedes the advent of modern science by thousands of years. Enns says that the Genesis narratives, specifically the creation and flood accounts, were related and understood in a context that “was not a modern scientific one but an ancient mythic one” and that this is the setting in which we need to understand it (Enns, 2015: 87). Westermann agrees on the misguided project of expecting the Genesis creation account to be scientifically accurate (Westermann, 1974: 12), although such a view remains in certain conservative Christian circles.

John Van Seters takes a different approach. He asks how we are to make sense of the literary features found within the Pentateuch. Like Westermann, he believes that the Pentateuch comes to us in multiple sources rather than according to the traditional view of single authorship (Van Seters, 1998: 7). Many scholars who have examined the text of the Pentateuch in great detail have discovered instances of additions to older narratives that sometimes appear to give them a new context or theme. Other times there are inconsistencies between narratives within close proximity that “have led to the conclusion that more than one author is at work in the Pentateuch” (Van Seters, 1998: 7).

There are numerous hypotheses concerning the authorship of the Pentateuch, notably the Supplementary Hypothesis, Traditional-Historical Hypothesis, Fragmentary Hypothesis, and Documentary Hypothesis (Van Seters, 1998: 8). Although there is debate concerning which of these are most accurate (Van Seters, 1998: 13), the Documentary Hypothesis remains the most popular and “most persistent explanation” for the literary features within the Pentateuch (Van Seters, 1998: 8), and identifies four sources: D, P, J, and E (McDermott, 2002: 21). There has been a revival around a few of the other hypotheses, with some scholars, like Van Seters himself, holding to a hybrid form. Van Seters’ hypothesis agrees that there are multiple sources constituting the Pentateuch, although he holds to just three of them (he removes E, the Elohist source) (Van Seters, 1998: 14). What nearly every scholar agrees on, however, is that the Pentateuch was not written by a single author.

On Myth and the Incarnational Theology Model

Myth, as a genre, seems somewhat elusive. But it is a genre, among many, that those wishing to take the Pentateuch seriously need to entertain. Coates, for example, identifies numerous literary genres within the Pentateuch including the saga, fable, tale, novella, history, report, myth, and etiology (Coates, 1983: 5-10).

Myth, as Westermann observes, is often viewed negatively thanks to the efforts of the influential twentieth-century New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann and because of the Enlightenment that emphasized rational and empirical explanations over and above religious and supernatural ones. Myth has come to be seen as something unhistorical and false, and therefore valueless (Westermann, 1974: 12). This is unfortunate, argues Westermann, as much value can be found within myth itself, its meaning, and its function. It provides insight into an ancient people’s self-understanding, their understanding of existence, and their self-expression (Westermann, 1974: 12-13).

On Coates’s view, however, myth is a narrative that takes place within a fantasy world and that is designed to account for reality within the real world by reference to the gods and their activities within the divine world (Coates, 1983: 10). Mobley’s examination of the Enuma Elish is a good example of this definition. The Enuma Elish is a narrative, a fantastical one nonetheless, with its battle between gods, that seeks to explain why the world exists and why it appears orderly.

Peter Enns offers a unique perspective with an explanation that differs from those provided by Westerman and Coates. He argues that myth is “an ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories: Who are we? Where do we come from?” (Enns, 2015: 87). God, in his revelation, thus adopted the mythic categories through which the ancient Israelites thought. Enns defines this as the Incarnational Theology Model (Enns, 2010). Although it is not without its critics, it is a model that many have found appealing. The model holds that God, in his power, opted to descend to the ancient Israelites and use what was in front of him to establish revelation. This would require than God used the mythic categories of the ancients. Enns parallels this to God descending in Jesus Christ and urges us to be “thankful that God came to them just as he did more fully in Bethlehem many, many centuries later” (Enns, 2015: 56). It is precisely because God chooses to descend to human level, whether that is during the times of Moses or within first-century Palestine, that demonstrates his love for his creatures and the world that he made.

Conclusion

This paper has examined several prominent voices while attempting to contrast them where possible. From Mobley we discovered the richness in Ancient Near Eastern texts, their creation myths, and the parallels they share with the biblical creation accounts. Coates, one discovers, values the biblical texts as literary art while, in agreement with Westermann, is also critical of the notion that the biblical texts only have value if they are historically accurate. John Van Seters presented his interesting hybrid theory that looks to take into account the literary features of the Pentateuch. Finally, Enns and Westermann provide some helpful insight on myth. Enns’ Incarnational Theology Model provides as a helpful means to understand myth, and how myth itself was a category through which God  provided his revelation.

References

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