Enuma Elish: How Marduk Fought Tiamat and Made the World

 Apsu is the father of various gods in Mesopotamian mythology. He is the personification of the fresh water and the ruler of all underground water. 

He and his wife Tiamat, the personification of salt water, created the first generation of gods from their mingled waters. 

Some of their children are Lahmu and Lahamu, the first set of twins, and Anshar and Kishar, who are the parents of Anu, the supreme heaven god

Enuma Elish: How Marduk Fought Tiamat and Made the World

Enuma Elish is an old poem from Babylon. 

It has seven tablets with words on clay. It tells how Marduk, the god of Babylon, became king of all gods and made everything.

First, there was only water. Apsu and Tiamat were the water gods. They had many children who were loud. Apsu wanted to kill them, but Ea killed him first. Ea lived on Apsu and had Marduk.

Marduk was strong and had many weapons. He played with the wind and made Tiamat mad. She made war and monsters. She gave Qingu the Tablet of Destinies, which controlled fate.

Ea could not stop Tiamat, but Marduk could. He asked to be king of the gods first. The gods said yes and gave him weapons. He fought Tiamat and cut her in half. He used her body to make the earth and the sky. He also made the sun, moon, stars, and time. He built Babylon for the gods and made humans from Qingu’s blood. The gods worked for him. The poem ended with a song for Marduk.

Enuma Elish is a story about Babylon and its gods. It shows how Babylon was powerful and how its god made everything. It tells us how ancient people saw their world and their gods.

Enuma Elish portrays humans as slaves of the gods who are made from the blood of Qingu, a traitor god who was given the Tablet of Destinies by Tiamat. 

Humans are created to relieve the gods of their work and serve them.

The Enuma Elish is an ancient Babylonian creation myth that has some similarities and differences with the biblical account of creation in Genesis. 

Some of the similarities are:

• Both stories begin with a temporal clause: “when on high” or “when above” in Enuma Elish, and “in the beginning” in Genesis.
• Both stories describe a primordial chaos of water before anything else existed. In Enuma Elish, the water is represented by two gods: Apsu, the god of fresh water, and Tiamat, the goddess of salt water. In Genesis, the water is called “the deep” and is covered by darkness.
• Both stories involve a separation of the waters into upper and lower waters by a barrier. In Enuma Elish, Marduk, the hero god of Babylon, splits Tiamat’s body in half and uses one half to form the sky and the other half to form the earth. In Genesis, God creates a dome called the sky to separate the waters above from the waters below.
• Both stories include the creation of luminaries to give light and mark time. In Enuma Elish, Marduk sets up the stars, the sun, and the moon in the sky and assigns them their positions and duties. In Genesis, God makes two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night, along with the stars.
• Both stories have a connection between Babylon and a tower or ziggurat. In Enuma Elish, Marduk builds Babylon as his home and the center of religion for the gods. In Genesis, humans build a city and a tower called Babel, which means “gate of God” in Babylonian, but God confuses their language and scatters them over the earth.