132. The word of his mouth, no god hath annulled.
133. He casts his glance without turning his neck,
134. When he roars, no god can face his anger.
135. Wide is his heart, great his goodness;
136. The sinner and transgressor in his presence ..........
137. They received instruction, they spake before him.
(The concluding lines are too broken for connected translation.)
2. The First Chapter of Genesis and the Foregoing Creation Epic.
The Babylonian Creation Epic, in the form in which we know it, took shape in the city of Babylon. Naturally, therefore, the god Marduk is made the central figure. It is he only who was sufficiently powerful to overcome the primeval dragon, it was he who created the heavens and the earth, it was he whom at the end gods and men adored.
A Babylonian priest, Berossos, in a work composed after the time of Alexander the Great, gives an account of Babylonian ideas of the creation of the world, which is but the tradition of the epic in a slightly different form. A neoplatonic philosopher, Damascius, who lived about 560 A. D., has also preserved a part of the tradition in a form almost identical with that of the epic.