Peter Enns reignited a musty old debate over the relation, if any, between Gen 1 and the Enuma Elish. Paul Seely recycled the same stale arguments.
They act as if this is new evidence. That conservative scholars have never come to terms with this material. But that’s old news, and it’s been dealt with many times before. Here’s one example:
“Thus, the discourse structure of the initial section of this ‘creation’ epic [Enuma Elish] is similar to that of the Neo-Babylonian ‘creation’ story and Genesis 1. However, there is a difference in theme and purpose. While the latter two stories are concerned with the initial state of the earth or land, the initial section of the Enuma elish is concerned with the creation of gods and goddesses and no reference is made to the earth-water relationship, for the primeval waters, Apsu and Tiamat, in Enuma elish are understood as having existed without any relationship with the ‘earth.’
“In Gen 1 the earth in v2 is simply a part of the created cosmos (‘heaven and earth’ in v1) and refers to everything under the heaven, including the subterranean waters. However, the earth was totally covered by waters and the dry land was ‘not yet’ formed (or seen) until v9 where God said ‘Let the waters from under the heaven be gathered to one place and let the dry land appear.’ Unlike the cosmology in Enuma elish and other ancient myths, the land in Gen 1:9f. was not a product of the primeval water, hence a part of the water, but a product of the divine fiat by which God gathered the waters from under the heaven ‘to one place,’ i.e. as ‘seas,’ which is part of the earth,” D. Tsumura, The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2: A Linguistic Investigation (JSOTS 1989), 82-83.
“This etymological investigation shows that the formal similarities are no proof of direct or indirect ‘borrowing.’ In other words, the fact that the Hebrew term tehom shares a common Proto-Semitic origin with the Akkadian divine name Tiamat and the Ugaritic Tahamu does not support the theory that the Hebrew term is a depersonification of an original divine name,” ibid. 159.
It's obviously not "borrowing": Italian isn't "borrowed" from Spanish, nor the other way around: rather they both come from Latin.
ReplyDeleteAs for dissimilarities, there are similarities as well as dissimilarities between any pair of given things ... even in the way that the same event is viewed by different Bible-authors.
... I still haven't read the Enuma Elish, but the little that I did read left me disappointed. Well, anyway ... can't please'em all ...
Couldn't it be argued that the divine names Tiamat & Tahamu are later personifications, rather than that tehom is a later depersonification?
ReplyDeleteEven so, it would hardly prove borrowing.
Tsumura hardly answers anything with satisfaction. He simply states what he 'hopes' to be the case (i.e., ", the fact that the Hebrew term tehom shares a common Proto-Semitic origin with the Akkadian divine name Tiamat and the Ugaritic Tahamu does not support the theory that the Hebrew term is a depersonification of an original divine name"), but does not actually do the work to prove it.
ReplyDeleteThat is sloppy scholarship at its worst.
ABOULET.COM SAID:
ReplyDelete"That is sloppy scholarship at its worst."
What's sloppy scholarship is your dismissive remark. I didn't reproduce his supporting arguments, just the conclusion.
His monograph carries a commendatory foreword by Kenneth Kitchen, Alan Millard, and Donald Wiseman. It was published by JSOT. And Cyrus Gordon was his doctoral advisor.
His credentials stack up quite nicely compared with yours. Try to scale back your overweening pride.
If you want to attack his scholarship, do so to his face. Email him. Post your correspondence.