Enuma Elish: Marduk Defeats Tiamat and Creates the World

The Babylonian creation epic begins before the earth exists and before the sky has a name. There are only two things: Apsu, the freshwater deep, and Tiamat, the salt-water ocean — and they are not separate. Their waters commingling as a single body, the poem says. From that mingling come the first gods.

The gods multiply, grow noisy, and disturb Apsu's rest. He conspires with Tiamat to destroy them. The gods learn of the plot, and one of their number — the wise Ea — kills Apsu in his sleep and builds his palace over the body of the fresh water. Tiamat, furious, prepares for war. She creates monsters — horned serpents, dragons, the mushussu, the rabid dog, the scorpion-man — and appoints a new husband, Kingu, to lead her army. She gives Kingu the Tablet of Destinies and binds it to his chest.

The gods are terrified. The oldest among them, Anu and Ea, confront Tiamat and retreat. Then Marduk steps forward. He is the youngest of the great gods, son of Ea, and he bargains: If I am to be your champion against Tiamat, you must grant me supremacy over all the gods — my word must be law. The gods, desperate, agree.

Marduk arms himself with four winds, a net, a club, an arrow, lightning, and a flame. He rides his storm-chariot to meet Tiamat. The confrontation is vivid and physical. He casts his net over her; she opens her vast mouth to swallow him; he drives the winds in so she cannot close it; she inflates like a balloon; he shoots his arrow through her belly and splits her in half.

Then comes the act of creation. He split her like a shellfish into two parts. From one half of Tiamat's body Marduk makes the sky; from the other, the earth. From her eyes he draws the Tigris and Euphrates. From her tail he makes the Milky Way. He takes the Tablet of Destinies from the defeated Kingu, kills Kingu, and — using Kingu's blood mixed with clay — creates human beings: to do the service of the gods, that the gods may be free.

Recited on the fourth day of the Babylonian New Year festival, Enuma Elish was not merely mythology. It was political theology: Marduk's supremacy over the old Sumerian gods mirrored Babylon's supremacy over the older Mesopotamian city-states. The same pattern — combat, victory, creation — recurs across ancient Near Eastern texts and shadows the later imagery of God battling the sea-monster Leviathan in the Hebrew psalms. When Genesis says the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, it is speaking against a tradition in which those waters had a name, a will, and teeth.