Is the Genesis creation story a Sumerian ripoff?

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redhen

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I always had a hard time reconciling the Genesis creation story with the much older Sumerian myth - Enuma Elish, which has the same elements being created on the exact same days, even a sabbath on the seventh day. Then I read this article and it all makes sense now.

ignatius.com/magazines/hprweb/austriaco2.htm

"Ratzinger notes that a study of the origins of the creation texts in the Wisdom literature especially reveal that they were written to respond to the Hellenistic civilization confronted by the Israelites. 13 Thus, it is not surprising that the human authors of these accounts did not use the image of the six days to assert their faith in the one Creator God. This image would not have been appropriate for their time and would not have been understood by their Greek contemporaries. In contrast, a study of the origins of the Hexaemeron, the six-day account of creation, found in the first chapter of Genesis reveals that it was written to respond to the seemingly victorious Babylonian civilization confronted by the Israelites several centuries before their encounter with the Greeks. Here, the human author of the sacred text used images familiar to their pagan contemporaries to refute the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation account that claimed that the world was created when Marduk, the god of light, killed the primordial dragon. 14 Thus, as Cardinal Ratzinger points out, it is not surprising that nearly every word of the first creation account addresses a particular confusion of the Babylonian age. For instance, when the Sacred Scriptures affirm that in the beginning, the earth was without form and void (cf. Gen. 1:2), the sacred text refutes the existence of a primordial dragon. When they refer to the sun and the moon as lamps that God has hung in the sky for the measurement of time (cf. Gen. 1:14), the text refutes the divinity of these two great celestial bodies believed to be Babylonian gods. These verses, and they are only two of many examples, illustrate the intent of the human author of the Hexaemeron. He wanted to dismantle a pagan myth that was commonplace in Babylon and assert the supremacy of the one Creator God. Cardinal Ratzinger concludes:
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Thus, we can see how the Bible itself constantly readapts its images to a continually developing way of thinking, how it changes time and again in order to bear witness, time and again, to the one thing that has come to it, in truth, from God’s Word, which is the message of his creating act. In the Bible itself the images are free and they correct themselves ongoingly. In this way they show, by means of a gradual and interactive process, that they are only images, which reveal something deeper and greater. "
I did a search on the forum and could not find any answers.
Hopefully this might help others who have the same question
 
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redhen:
Default Is the Genesis creation story a Sumerian ripoff?
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Being that the book of Genesis is the divinely inspired word of God; then, no it is not a ‘Sumerian ripoff’.

What you quote above by Ratzinger makes a lot of sense. I don’t see that as leading to a conclusion of Genesis being a Sumerian ripoff, however. Kidna reminds me of the way the Church has a tendency to hold councils or declair things dogma in responce to falsly held beliefs.
 
Hmm maybe it’s just me then, but when I first read the similarities in the two accounts it was clear that one was plagarized from the other.

Gen 1
  1. Divine spirit created by word all matter but is independent of it
  2. earth is desolate with darkness over the deep
  3. 1st day: light
  4. 2nd day: sky dome
  5. 3rd day: dry land
  6. 4th day: heaven lights
  7. 6th day: creation of humans
  8. 7th day: God rests and sanctifies sabbath
Enuma Elish
  1. Divine spirits and cosmic matters coexist
  2. primeval chaos; war of gods against Tiamat (the deep sea)
  3. light emanates from the gods
  4. creation of firmament (dome)
  5. creation of dry land
  6. creation of heavenly lights
  7. creation of humans
  8. the gods rest and celebrate with a banquet
Atheists delight in highlighting these similarites
anatheist.com/Articles/history_creation1.html
 
You could say the same for the greek myths of creation and the fall (Epimetheus and Pandora) as well. Just because the ancient peoples didn’t have Divine revelation doesn’t mean they couldn’t come to conclusions about the Truth. The Truth is out there always for anyone to grasp at. To say that one group plagarized the Truth from another isn’t very good reason. You can’t plagarize the Truth, It just Is. I think that having commonalities in these “stories” points more to humanity all coming from one set of parents, passing down the same experiences generation after generation. Its a witness to the Truth.
 
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redhen:
Hmm maybe it’s just me then, but when I first read the similarities in the two accounts it was clear that one was plagarized from the other.

Gen 1
  1. Divine spirit created by word all matter but is independent of it
  2. earth is desolate with darkness over the deep
  3. 1st day: light
  4. 2nd day: sky dome
  5. 3rd day: dry land
  6. 4th day: heaven lights
  7. 6th day: creation of humans
  8. 7th day: God rests and sanctifies sabbath
Enuma Elish
  1. Divine spirits and cosmic matters coexist
  2. primeval chaos; war of gods against Tiamat (the deep sea)
  3. light emanates from the gods
  4. creation of firmament (dome)
  5. creation of dry land
  6. creation of heavenly lights
  7. creation of humans
  8. the gods rest and celebrate with a banquet
Atheists delight in highlighting these similarites
anatheist.com/Articles/history_creation1.html
Click to expand...
Read carefully the article in which Cardinal Ratzinger discusses the interpretation. Genesis 1, 1-11 is a point by point refutation of the sumerian story. Not a refutation of the “facts” as people accepted them to be back then but a refutation of what the facts meant. Perhaps it would be fair to say that the author of Genesis accepted all of the Sumerian version except where it suggested there was more than one God and except where it said that creation was not good. This is not a knock off or plagarism but a correction of the unacceptable while leaving the acceptable.

The more I read of Cardinal Ratzinger /Pope Benedict XVI the more he makes sense in very subtle ways. I don’t think he will make news like JPII but he seems like a very wise man.

Jim
 
By the way, have you heard the story of Sargon, one of the great kings of Sumeria. Apparently he was found in a basket floating in a river. Sound like anyone else we know?

The fact that the story of Moses birth is similar to this story is again not a plagarism or a knock off but a literary form that highlights the greatness of Moses in a way the contemporaries of the author would understand.

Jim
 
Read this - it will clear it up.

The “Toledoths” of Genesis

This article is all about the true structure of the Book of Genesis; a structure that is so simple and straightforward - as the reader is going to discover - that even a child would have no trouble understanding it in its basic form. The chief credit for having laid bare this structure in all its profound simplicity belongs to the British scholar, P. J. Wiseman(1), upon whose thesis the following article will be based.

more…
 
Consider that Moses’s account is the divinely inspired retelling of the event. I think that the flood story also would fall into that catagory.
 
Written on Tablets
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             Another important fact needs to be emphasised in                  connection with the use of the Toledoth formula. The second time                  that it occurs, in Genesis (5:1), we read: "This is the book of                  the origins of Adam." Here the Hebrew word *sepher*, translated                  "book," means "written narrative," or as F. Delitzsch has translated                  it, "finished writing."(30) The Septuagint actually                  goes so far as to render the first Toledoth (Genesis 2:4) as:                  "This is the book of the origins of the heavens and the earth."                  Regarding this fact, Wiseman has pointed out:
“We must realise that the ‘books’ of antiquity were tablets, and that the earliest records of Genesis claim to have been written down, and not as is often imagined passed on to Moses by word of mouth.”(31)
 
cont’d

Genesis therefore contains the following series of tablets possessed by the persons whose names are stated in the various colophons:
Code: 
            TABLET: 1 
            CONTENTS: 1:1 to 2:4 
            WORDING: This is the book of the origins of the heavens and the                  earth. 

              
            TABLET: 2 
            CONTENTS: 2:5 to 5:2 
            WORDING: This is the book of the origins of Adam. 

              
            TABLET: 3 
            CONTENTS: 5:3 to 6:9a 
            WORDING: These are the origins [or histories] of Noah. 

              
            TABLET: 4 
            CONTENTS: 6:9b to 10:1 
            WORDING: These are the origins [or histories] of the sons of Noah.                

              
            TABLET: 5 
            CONTENTS: 10:2 to 11:10a 
            WORDING: These are the origins [or histories] of Shem. 

              
            TABLET: 6 
            CONTENTS: 11:10b to 11:27a 
            WORDING: These are the origins [or histories] of Terah. 

              
            TABLET: 7-8 
            CONTENTS: 11:27b to 25:19a 
            WORDING: These are the origins [or histories] of Ishmael and Isaac.                

              
            TABLET: 9-11 
            CONTENTS: 25:19b to 37:2a 
            WORDING: These are the origins [or histories] of Esau and Jacob.
 
The stories within the Sumerian tablets (as well as other religious texts) and the Hebrew scriptures are too similar for me to “personally” resist seeing a possitive connection from which “maybe” a better understanding could be achived by reading the two (or more) separate traditions. I highly respect Cardinal Ratzinger and do fully agree with him in that the Genesis story may have been rewritten in order to correct certain theological speculations.
In fact the Sumerian gods might very well have been fallen angels, and one would therefore be involved in devil worship if one would follow such a religion. However, the information itself still might be of great value.
In my opinion the author of the “first story” found in the book of Genesis intented to write a scientific discription of a form of evolving or developping creation of life.The Sumerian Epic of Creation and Genesis both have the interesting feature of being scientifically accurate in terms of what was created first. In creating a world, you begin with energy (light), form the planet itself, divide the land from the water, grow grass, herbs, fruit (in that order), initiate day/night and seasons, create fish, fowl, cattle, creeping thing and beasts of the earth (again, in that order), until finally you create man.

Sumerian gods allegedly came to Earth from a place in heaven called Nibiru - more than 450,000.
We know the apostles used the book of Enoch in which reads of creatures resembling those found in other myths, such as the Sumerian gods; Enoch identifies them as evil creatures.
Book of Enoch
[Chapter 6]

1 And it came to pass when the children of men had multiplied that in those days were born unto 2 them beautiful and comely daughters. And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men 3 and beget us children.’

If we take Peter’s statement:
“…a day for the Lord is like a thousand years”.
According to Jewish litterature, the time existing between Adam(the Fall of
Humanity)) and the “end of the world” consists of 6 thousand years. Peter,
in his epistle, writes to the church concerning the “coming of Christ”. He said that Jesus was not slow in coming, and that they certainly were living in the last “days” (plurial), but that " a Day was as a thousand years for the Lord. Hence, comes the belief that we are now living in the last days;that is 6000 years since Adam, and two thousand years (last days) after Christ.This is believed by not only some christians, but some Jews as well.Certainly, this is all speculations, however, it seems odd to me that
we are living during times never witnessed before, where man has the
capacity to destroy this planet, something predicted by the prophets. And
this, precisely after the 6 thousand years prophecied by the Jewish people and two
thousand years (Peter claimed that they were living in the last days), after
the death of Jesus.
Therefore, if Peter meant the statement to be taken litterally, let us
continue. “…and a thousand years, are like unto a Day”. What would a
thousand years of the former definition of the day used by Peter ( 1
day=1000 years) be equalled to? and let “this” be equal to a “Genesis Day”.
364,000 years * 1,000 years = 364,000,000 years = 1 Genesis Day.If a Genesis
Day can be identified as being equal to 364 million years, then, there is
ample time for the mammals and humans to be created within the same Day.
According to Genesis,fishes seem to have existed during the 5th Day, or over
7 million years ago, which is actually close to the oldest fish fossils,
being 530 million
years old.Early life, according to Genesis, started on the 3rd Day, that is,
a little over 1 billion years ago, and this is in full agreement with the scientific data at hand. However, I believe that life started
when God said “Let there be light”, for as St John said, this light was the
Life of God.Recent theories are that Earth began a pattern of crust
formation, erosion, and sediment recycling as early in its evolution as 4.35
billion years ago,".According to Genesis, it would be about 2.2 billion
years. Would this still be considered “way off the mark” for someone writing
4 thousand years ago?🙂

Andre
 
Why may I ask is it so difficult to believe that Our Father made everything as is from the beginning? It could have been 10,000 years ago for all we know. How are we to know the truth until 5.5 million years go by and the people then can tell what things are like then? It is so distuctive to our faith to constantly come up with something to put a wedge inbetween ourselves and our faith.
Science, especially evolution, has become in its own a false “religion”. People have more faith in what scientist say (all though we can be sure they weren’t present at any of these events) and faith in the Catholic Churches teaching is just thrown off as a way to dispute some other form of thinking.
If we are to believe in the evolution of anything why didn’t someone talk about it before Darwin? As well as were are the not totally evolved creatures to say that this is possible? If God wanted us to believe that we evolved don’t you think that he would have started out with that? There is nothing in Gen. that says there was evolution. It says God made and it was. That doesn’t sound like evolution to me. Plus the bible isn’t a science book.

“God put difficulties in the sacred texts in order to humble us” quote from Scott Hahn.
The tree of knowledge distroyed the grace in Adam and Eve as well as curiosity killed the cat.
 
Okay, this may seem a bit far fetched, but bear with me.

First off, Id like to say that I dont personally believe that the Genesis account was intended to be taken literally on all points, so this hypothesis is just an idea out there for you to think about.

Lets imagine that the Creation account in the bible was completely true and literal. Everything happened exactly how it is worded in scripture in the exact amount of time stated in the Torah.

Now imagine that a couple thousand years went by and there has never been a written record of how it happened. The story of the creation of the world has been passed from generation to generation and culture to culture by word of mouth alone. Naturally there would be changes to the story from culture to culture. Based on who passed the story and how they told it, it would gradually change. However, many similarities would remain intact when comparing story to story from different cultures, since they all originated from one true origin.

Then, finally God reveals the true story to Moses of how it actually happened so to be written in the the Torah and preserved in the Tenach forever. He gives him an actual retelling of how creation and the origins of man occured.

The account given to Moses would most likely resemble the stories of ancient cultures throughout the world (for instance, almost every culture has a flood story, and many creation stories have striking parallels). It would resemble them because many were rooted in the truth of that original account, altered from translation to translation and so on.

This might explain why the Torah resembles some “older” creation stories. The stories arent actually older, they were just written down earlier. And they were retellings of the true creation account (later revealed to Moses) that had gone through so many generations of retelling that they seemed to be completely different stories with only similarities to the Bible story. But the Torah itself tells the original the way God saw it happen.

Just an idea.
 
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Neilbass2:
Okay, this may seem a bit far fetched, but bear with me.

First off, Id like to say that I dont personally believe that the Genesis account was intended to be taken literally on all points, so this hypothesis is just an idea out there for you to think about.

Lets imagine that the Creation account in the bible was completely true and literal. Everything happened exactly how it is worded in scripture in the exact amount of time stated in the Torah.

Now imagine that a couple thousand years went by and there has never been a written record of how it happened. The story of the creation of the world has been passed from generation to generation and culture to culture by word of mouth alone. Naturally there would be changes to the story from culture to culture. Based on who passed the story and how they told it, it would gradually change. However, many similarities would remain intact when comparing story to story from different cultures, since they all originated from one true origin.

Then, finally God reveals the true story to Moses of how it actually happened so to be written in the the Torah and preserved in the Tenach forever. He gives him an actual retelling of how creation and the origins of man occured.

The account given to Moses would most likely resemble the stories of ancient cultures throughout the world (for instance, almost every culture has a flood story, and many creation stories have striking parallels). It would resemble them because many were rooted in the truth of that original account, altered from translation to translation and so on.

This might explain why the Torah resembles some “older” creation stories. The stories arent actually older, they were just written down earlier. And they were retellings of the true creation account (later revealed to Moses) that had gone through so many generations of retelling that they seemed to be completely different stories with only similarities to the Bible story. But the Torah itself tells the original the way God saw it happen.

Just an idea.
Click to expand...
Sounds good to me!
 
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robins:
If we are to believe in the evolution of anything why didn’t someone talk about it before Darwin?
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Actually the Church has defended herself against evolution from the begnning.
 
No.

One must believe and then will begin to know. Next one will slowly grow in love and understanding.

Augustine wrote an outstanding book on the first few chapters of Genesis. Actually five or more works address these chapters.

Read him…
 
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AugustineFL:
Being that the book of Genesis is the divinely inspired word of God; then, no it is not a ‘Sumerian ripoff’.

What you quote above by Ratzinger makes a lot of sense. I don’t see that as leading to a conclusion of Genesis being a Sumerian ripoff, however. Kidna reminds me of the way the Church has a tendency to hold councils or declair things dogma in responce to falsly held beliefs.
Click to expand...
I have always wondered where the idea of divine inspiration came from. It is one thing to believe that the prophets such as Isaiah actually had visions from God. That appears to be true, as evidenced by the events of the New Testament. It is another to believe that God actually told someone that this was how the earth was made and this was how man was made and so on and so forth. It seems more believable to me that the creation, the great flood, and the tower of Babel, among other things, are just myths written by earlier Jewish writers to try to demystify God and to give a concrete feel to His whole existence. For instance, the story of the flood seems to suggest that God actually made a mistake and eventually apologized to humanity. Can we really believe that God acted so hastily as to wipe out His wicked children when in the New Testament He is seen as so forgiving and loving? Doesn’t a story like that suggest that God isn’t so tolerant of His children after all?
 
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redhen:
First time poster here 🙂

I always had a hard time reconciling the Genesis creation story with the much older Sumerian myth - Enuma Elish, which has the same elements being created on the exact same days, even a sabbath on the seventh day. Then I read this article and it all makes sense now.

ignatius.com/magazines/hprweb/austriaco2.htm
Click to expand...

First point - the Enuma Elish is not Sumerian in its language: it’s written in a Semitic language called Akkadian, which was the native Semitic language of Babylonia and Assyria; and is entirely unrelated to Sumerian, although they had a good deal of influence on one another.​

The Creation is only a part of the E.e. - its main theme is the exaltation of Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, over the other gods, after his victory over the primeval goddess Tiamat, who represents the sea. The Enuma elish - the words mean “When on high” - as we have it was probably written about 1100 or so; it is based on older materials, many of them Sumerian texts; Marduk is given the part of saviour of the gods which was earlier given to the god Ninurta; Tiamat is an Akkadianised form of the creatress Namma.

etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?simplesearchword=create&simplesearch=translation&searchword=&charenc=gcirc&lists=

It’s not a mere borrowing, partly because there are at least a dozen Sumerian creation texts; there are many similarities between the Genesis material and the older ones (there are fragments of creation texts elsewhere in the OT, which suggest that JHWH was also seen as a warrior-creator); but the difference in tone and temper is what makes the Genesis text really different. It’s different, not because it gives a blow by blow account of creation, but because of its moral tone and its monotheism; and because it is is monotheistic, its God is a free and soverreign Creator; not a warrior like Marduk or Ninurta or some others.
 
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