Before discussing whether Eve was the goddess who gave birth to humanity, we need to know more about where the first chapters of Genesis came from. They deal with creation, the fall, and the flood. Who wrote them? These stories all took place in Mesopotamia. It is the birthplace of several ancient civilisations, such as the Sumerians and the Babylonians. These civilisations are much older than the Jewish nation, and they had myths about creation and the flood that are at least 1,000 years older than the Jewish Bible. The Jews lived in exile in Babylon in Mesopotamia when they compiled their scriptures. Most likely, they used existing myths from the area to write the first chapters of Genesis. A Babylonian creation myth, the Enūma Eliš, is a bit like the first chapter of Genesis:

When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primaeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods, none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods amid heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being.

It may not seem that obvious, but there are similarities with the first chapter of Genesis. Both begin from a stage of chaotic waters before anything comes into being. In both, a fixed dome-shaped firmament divides these waters from the habitable Earth, and both share similar descriptions of the creation of celestial objects and ordered time. The Jews wrote their own story but used existing myths to make their own. The creation of man in Genesis resembles the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. It tells that the gods became tired of working on Creation and made a man to do the hard work. They put a god to death and mixed his blood with clay to produce the first human in the likeness of the gods:

In the clay, god and man
Shall be bound,
To a unity brought together;
So that to the end of days
The Flesh and the Soul
Which in a god have ripened –
That soul in a blood kinship is bound.

In Genesis, God created humans in the likeness of the gods (1:26). God rested after six days of hard labour (Genesis 2:2-3). God then made a man to work the ground (Genesis 2:5) and made him from soil (Genesis 2:7). In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods created the first man in Eden, the garden of the gods in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The same happened in Genesis (Genesis 2:14). There is an alternative account of the creation of man in the story of Enki and Ninmah. The gods, burdened with creating the earth, complained to Namma, the primaeval mother. Namma then kneaded some clay, placed it in her womb, and gave birth to the first humans.

The Mesopotamians thus had at least two creation accounts, one in which the gods created man from soil and one in which a goddess gave birth to humanity. Two themes are present. Hence, there might be more to Eve being the Mother of All the Living. There exists a duplicity indicating the tale of Eve and Adam in Genesis could be a merger of those two tales.

The epic further tells that the first man, Enkidu, was wild, naked, muscular, hairy and uncivilised. The gods sent a woman to tame him with her nakedness and love. By making love to him for a week, she turned him into a civilised man of wisdom and like a god. She gave him a meal and clothed him. In Genesis, Eve let Adam eat (Genesis 2:6) and gave him the knowledge of the gods. Eve and Adam were naked before they came to knowledge (Genesis 3:7). God clothed them (Genesis 3:21).

The Epic of Gilgamesh differs from Genesis, but the similarities are also striking. In both stories, a god creates a man from the soil. The man lives naked in nature. A woman then tempts him. In both accounts, the man accepts food from the woman, covers his nakedness, and leaves his former life. The appearance of a snake stealing a plant of immortality in the epic is also noteworthy.

The flood story in Genesis also closely resembles the account in the Epic of Gilgamesh. The stories are so similar that few scholars doubt the epic is the source of the biblical narrative. In the epic, the city of Shurrupak at the Euphrates River had grown. The god Enlil could not sleep because of the sounds the city made. The gods then agreed to drown all the humans in a flood.

But the god Ea appeared to Utnapishtim, warned him and asked him to build an ark. With his children and hired men, Utnapishtim built an enormous boat, and he went on it with his relatives, animals, and craftsmen. The storm god, Adad, sent a terrible thunderstorm with pouring rains that drowned the city. Then the gods felt sorry for what they did.

After seven days, the weather calmed. Utnapishtim looked around and saw an endless sea. He saw a mountain rising out of the water. After another seven days, he released a dove into the air. The dove returned, having found no place to land. He then released a swallow that also came back. Then he released a raven that did not come back. Utnapishtim disembarked and made an offering to the gods.

The Bible tells that all the people had grown evil. Only, Noah was blameless and faithful. And so, God decided to send a flood to wipe out humanity but to spare Noah and his family. God ordered Noah to build an ark that could also harbour males and females of every animal species, and food for them all. Then the flood came for forty days. No one survived. After forty days, Noah sent out a raven. Then he sent out a dove to see if the waters had receded. Once the waters had receded, God asked Noah to get out of the ark with his wife, his sons and their wives, and to release the animals. Noah disembarked and made a sacrifice to God. It is more or less the same story.

Latest revision: 4 November 2023

Featured image: Dutch replica of Noah’s Ark. By Ceinturion CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.