The Etiology of Creation: Gods, Mortals, and Their Relationships in The Enuma Elish Evelyn Reese Austin College

The etiology of Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Creation story, imagines the world's creation as an event of divine sacrifice and ordered beauty. The tale tells the anecdote of how the queen of chaos, Tiamet, and her consort Quingu go to war against the god Marduk and the lesser gods because of a disagreement with Marduk's grandfather Anu (Ohio Weslyn University 2020). Tiamet is vanquished, her body becomes the universe of stars and planets spanning out and separating the seasons and annual year while the remaining gods sacrifice Quingu on both sides, and his blood conceives man (Ohio Weslyn University 2020). Ultimately, the narrative tells how humankind was conceived, man's purpose, how destiny and time were created, and the cosmos' establishment.

The relationship between the divine and humanity in the Enuma Elish is one of dominant ownership. The Babylonian gods differ from the Hebrew's monotheistic Yahweh, following more after the self-serving Egyptian deities (Puchner pp. 8). In the tale, the Babylonian gods were so power-craven and bloodthirsty they engaged in a mammoth war. The Igigi, the worker gods, were forced to keep the cosmic chaos in check and rebelled in the war from longsuffering (Brisch 2012). The victorious god...