Genesis vs. the Enuma Elish: Two Creation Accounts Examined Side by Side
The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation epic. It was composed in Akkadian, likely in the 18th to 16th centuries BCE in its earliest form, though the versions we have come primarily from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, dating to the 7th century BCE. It was discovered during excavations at Nineveh in the 1840s and 1850s by Austen Henry Layard and Henry Rawlinson, and the tablets are now held at the British Museum, where their cuneiform text is catalogued in the museum’s collection database.
Genesis 1 is the Hebrew creation account. Its composition date is debated among scholars, but most critical scholarship places it in the 6th–5th centuries BCE in its final edited form, though the traditions it encodes are older. The relationship between these two texts has been a subject of serious scholarly inquiry since George Smith first translated the Babylonian flood narrative in 1872 and noticed its parallels with Genesis — a discovery that created considerable public controversy at the time and has never entirely subsided.
What follows is a column comparison of the two accounts. I have tried to let the texts speak before offering analysis. Readers who want the primary sources can access a full English translation of the Enuma Elish through the Sacred Texts archive and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at Oxford.
The Beginning: Primordial Waters
Enuma Elish
“When on high the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been called by name; naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, and Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all, their waters commingling as a single body.”
Genesis 1
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Both accounts begin with unnamed, undifferentiated waters as the primordial state. In the Enuma Elish, Apsu (fresh water) and Tiamat (salt water) are the original divine beings. In Genesis, the formless “deep” — tehom in Hebrew — is linguistically related to the Akkadian Tiamat, a connection noted by most Old Testament scholars and not seriously disputed.
Separation: Light from Darkness, Waters from Waters
Enuma Elish
Marduk defeats Tiamat and splits her body: “He split her like a shellfish into two parts: half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky, pulled down the bar and posted guards. He bade them to allow not her waters to escape.”
Genesis 1
“And God said, ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.’ So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it.”
The structural parallel here — the splitting of the primordial waters to create a dome or firmament separating upper and lower waters — is present in both accounts. In the Enuma Elish, this is accomplished through divine combat. In Genesis, it is accomplished through divine speech. The action is the same; the method and the moral character of the agent differ entirely.
The Creation of Humanity
Enuma Elish
“Blood I will mass and cause bones to be. I will establish a savage, ‘man’ shall be his name. Verily, savage-man I will create. He shall be charged with the service of the gods that they might be at ease.”
Genesis 1–2
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky…’ The Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”
This is the most theologically significant divergence. In the Enuma Elish, humanity is created to serve the gods — to do the labor the lesser gods had been complaining about. In Genesis, humanity is created in the image of God and given dominion. The raw material overlap (blood, dust/clay) exists in both traditions. The purpose attributed to humanity is opposite. The Babylonian human is a slave created to relieve divine inconvenience. The Hebrew human is an image-bearer given authority over creation.
What the Parallels Mean — and Don’t Mean
In my reading of both the scholarly literature and popular treatments of this comparison, I find two errors made with roughly equal frequency. The first is the error of the skeptic who concludes that parallel = derivative: Genesis copied Babylon, therefore Genesis is not original, therefore it is not reliable. This does not follow. Parallel traditions can indicate shared cultural memory of actual events, or shared cognitive structures in how humans process origins, or literary dependence — and distinguishing between these requires more evidence than the parallel itself provides.
The second error is the error of the apologist who dismisses the parallels entirely to protect a particular view of biblical uniqueness. The parallels are real. Ignoring them does not make them go away and does not serve honest inquiry.
What the comparison actually reveals is a deliberate theological argument being made within a shared cultural framework. The Genesis account uses the same vocabulary, the same structural sequence, and some of the same imagery as the dominant creation myth of the ancient Near Eastern world — and then systematically reassigns the theological meaning of every element. The combat is gone. The divine beings are gone. The servitude is replaced with dignity. If Genesis was composed after the Babylonian exile, as much scholarship suggests, it reads as a point-by-point theological rebuttal written in the opponent’s own language. That is a different claim than either “Genesis copied Babylon” or “there is no relationship.”
Solomon Rael is the editor of Codes of the Covenant. For more on ancient texts that intersect with the biblical record, see The Nephilim, the Anunnaki, and the Book of Enoch. For the physical evidence that contextualizes these texts, see 10 Archaeological Discoveries That Confirm Biblical Accounts.