The remains of some further lines exist, but they are very uncertain, the beginnings and ends being broken away. All that can be said is, that the poem concluded in the same strain as the last twelve lines preserved.
In the foregoing pages the reader has had placed before him all the principal details of the Babylonian story of the Creation, and we may now proceed to examine the whole in greater detail.
If we may take the explanation of Damascius as representing fairly the opinion of the Babylonians concerning the creation of the world, it seems clear that they regarded the matter of which it was formed as existing in the beginning under the two forms of Tiamtu (the sea) and Apsû (the deep), and from these, being wedded, proceeded “an only begotten son,” Mummu (Moumis), conceived by Damascius to be “no other that the intelligible world proceeding from the two principles,” i.e. from Tiamtu and Apsû. From these come forth, in successive generations, the other gods, ending with Marduk or Merodach, also named Bêl (Bêl-Merodach), the son of Aa (Ea) and his consort Damkina (the Aos and Dauké of Damascius).
Judging from the material that we have, the Babylonians seemed to have believed in a kind of evolution, for they evidently regarded the first creative [pg 034] powers (the watery waste and the abyss) as the rude and barbaric beginnings of things, the divine powers produced from these first principles (Laḫmu and Laḫamu, Anšar and Kišar, Anu, Ellila, and Aa, and finally Marduk), being successive stages in the upward path towards perfection, with which the first rude elements of creation were ultimately bound to come into conflict; for Tiamtu, the chief of the two rude and primitive principles of creation, was, notwithstanding this, ambitious, and desired still to be the creatress of the gods and other inferior beings that were yet to be produced. All the divinities descending from Tiamtu were, to judge from the inscriptions, creators, and as they advanced towards perfection, so also did the things that they created advance, until, by contrast, the works of Tiamtu became as those of the Evil Principle, and when she rebelled against the gods who personified all that was good, it became a battle between them of life and death, which only the latest-born of the gods, elected in consequence of the perfection of his power, to be king and ruler over “the gods his fathers,” was found worthy to wage. The glorious victory gained, and the Dragon of Evil subdued and relegated to those places where her exuberant producing power, which, to all appearance, she still possessed, would be of use, Merodach, in the fulness of his power as king of the gods, perfected and ordered the universe anew, and created his crowning work, Mankind. Many details are, to all appearance, wanting on account of the incompleteness of the series, but those which remain seem to indicate that the motive of the whole story was as outlined here.
In Genesis, however, we have an entirely different account, based, apparently, upon a widely different conception of the origin of the Universe, for one principle only appears throughout the whole narrative, be it Elohistic, Jehovistic, or priestly. “In the beginning [pg 035] God created the heavens and the earth,” and from the first verse to the last it is He, and He alone, who is Creator and Maker and Ruler of the Universe. The only passage containing any indication that more than one person took part in the creation of the world and all that therein is, is in verse 26, where God is referred to as saying, “Let us make man,” but that this is simply the plural of majesty, and nothing more, seems to be proved by the very next verse, where the wording is, “and God made man in his own image,” etc. There is, therefore, no trace of polytheistic influence in the whole narrative.
Let us glance awhile at the other differences.
To begin with, the whole Babylonian narrative is not only based upon an entirely different theory of the beginning of all things, but upon an entirely different conception of what took place ere man appeared upon the earth. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” implies the conception of a time when the heavens and the earth existed not. Not so, seemingly, with the Babylonian account. There the heavens and the earth are represented as existing, though in a chaotic form, from the first. Moreover, it is not the external will and influence of the Almighty that originates and produces the forms of the first creatures inhabiting the world, but the productive power residing in the watery waste and the deep:
“The primæval ocean (apsû rêstū) was their producer (lit. seeder);
Mummu Tiamtu was she who brought forth the whole of them.”
It is question here of “seeding” (zaru) and “bearing” (âlādu), not of creating.