Creation Stories
In the ancient Israelite, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures there was a dynamic interaction between the neighbors, a kind of communication that resulted in similar views of the cultures' physical environments. When comparing Ancient Near Eastern creation stories, the ancient stories demonstrate that there was a commonly shared world view, cosmology and cosmogony in the Ancient Near East as reflected in the Babylonian, Egyptian, and Israelite creation stories. I will use a simple "comparative literature" method to argue in defense of this thesis. The first similarity that occurs is in the very opening lines of the book of Genesis, and the Enuma Elish. It is the use of a programmatic title as the stories' first words. In Genesis, "In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth," and in the EE, "When skies above were not yet named," parallels can be seen not only in the programmatic function, but in a linguistical one as well. It should be mentioned that when the Israelites wrote of the heavens and earth in this respect, they were not referring to the "places" that a modern day Christian would think, those of the heaven being a place of pure good attained after death and the earth being a planet. Rather, they are
Yet another important similarity, of each story, is that they are impressionistic. The elements of each story represent something, and it may not be easily attainable what that thing is. For example, the primeval waters in each story represent potential. Great energy lies within the waters, and out of them the creation is brought forth. The similarities in the stories also help to understand the stories themselves. Especially pertaining to the book of Genesis, the common world view and shared cosmology between the ancient cultures aids in realizing the function of the rhetoric and other descriptive mechanisms employed by the authors of the texts. Because more similarities can be described for pages and pages, perhaps the most important approach to these stories is to realize the basic fact that because the cultures were in communication with each other, and because they wanted to create god in their own image, the parallels of the stories will be endless. In each Ancient Near Eastern creation story, there is a sudden appearance of the god out of the primeval waters. The writers were not concerned with where the god had been before the interaction of the waters, that is something the cultures did not even consider. They did consider, however, the theogony of the gods,
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Approximate Word count = 866
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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