Creation of the world

Where do the first chapters of Genesis come from? They deal with Creation, the fall, and the flood. Who wrote them? These stories mostly ran in Mesopotamia, the birthplace of several ancient civilisations. These civilisations are much older than the Jewish nation and 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 when they compiled their scriptures. They took local myths 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.

Both Enūma Eliš and Genesis start with chaotic waters before anything comes into being. Genesis says, ‘The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ In both, a fixed, dome-shaped firmament divides these waters from the habitable Earth, and both have descriptions of the creation of celestial objects and the ordering of time.

The purpose of creation myths is to explain why we exist. Humans are naturally curious and desire answers to such questions. Another purpose is justifying the social order. The peasant population toiled to support the lavish lifestyles of the elites, who were the priests and the rulers. And so, the gods, or God, created man to work the ground, bring offerings to the temple, and pay taxes. The Jewish Bible lays out in great detail the required offerings to the temple and the priests in Leviticus, so Judaism looks like yet another peasant-exploitation scheme devised by priests.

Men and women

The creation of man in Genesis resembles the creation account in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes how the gods, tired of working on creation, created a man to do the job. 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) and 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 another story about the origin of man in the story of Enki and Ninmah. The gods, burdened with creating the Earth, complained to Namma, the primordial 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 stories: one in which the gods created humans from soil and another in which a goddess gave birth to humanity. The story of Eve and Adam in Genesis relates to these two tales. Likely, Adam was Eve’s son in the original tale, and the Jewish scribes used the first story to tailor the story of Eve and Adam to their theological requirements. Adam’s purpose was to be a companion to Eve rather than to work the garden, as the Bible now claims.

The epic further details that the first man, Enkidu, was wild, naked, muscular, hairy and uncivilised. The gods then sent a nude woman to tame him. By making love to him for a week, she turned him into a civilised man of wisdom, who was like a god. She made him a meal and clothed him. In Genesis, Eve made Adam eat (Genesis 2:6), which gave him the learning of the gods. Eve and Adam were naked (Genesis 3:7) before the Lord gave them clothes (Genesis 3:21).

The Epic of Gilgamesh differs from the Genesis account, but the similarities are 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, receives knowledge, covers his nakedness, and leaves his former life. The appearance of a snake stealing a plant of immortality in the epic is also noteworthy. There were likely similar stories circulating, and we have only a few remaining clay tablets. There might also have been a story where the first woman, Eve, gave birth to the first man, Adam.

The Great Flood

The Great Flood in Genesis also closely resembles the account in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Few scholars doubt that the epic is the source of the biblical narrative. The epic notes that the city of Shurrupak, situated on the banks of the Euphrates River, had grown. The deity Enlil could not sleep because of the sounds the city made. To deal with the noisy humans below, the gods agreed to drown them all.

The deity Ea warned his friend Utnapishtim and asked him to build an ark. With his children and hired men, Utnapishtim built an enormous boat and 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 regretted what they had done.

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 didn’t come back. Utnapishtim disembarked and made an offering to the gods.

According to the Bible, everyone had grown evil. Only Noah was blameless and faithful. For that reason, God decided to send a flood to wipe out humanity, but to spare Noah and his family. God then ordered Noah to build an ark that could also harbour males and females of every animal species and provide food for them all.

The flood came for forty days. No one survived. After forty days, Noah sent out a raven. Then, he sent a dove to see if the waters had receded. Once the waters receded, the Lord instructed Noah to leave the ark with his wife, his sons, and their wives, and to release the animals. Noah then disembarked and made a sacrifice.

The Greek version

A long time ago, there was a great war between the Olympic gods and the so-called Titans. Some titans sided with the gods. Prometheus, whose name means ‘thinking ahead’, was one of them. He foresaw that the Olympic gods, led by Zeus, would win the battle, so he sided with them. After the battle, Zeus rewarded him by letting him create various life forms. Prometheus, with Zeus’ permission, first created animals and then decided to make upright figures, modelled after the gods. Without consulting Zeus, Prometheus then breathed the breath of life into humans, displeasing the supreme god. Prometheus also stole the fire of the gods and gave it to the humans.

Zeus punished Prometheus for his transgressions by tying him to a rock. Every day, an eagle came by to peck out his liver, which would grow back during the night, a torment without end. A hero named Heracles, however, later liberated him. Zeus also punished the humans. He ordered Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing, to create a beautiful but dangerous and inquisitive new creature, the woman. Zeus then sent the woman, whose name was Pandora, to humankind, gave her a box and warned her in strong terms to never look inside, even though he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist her curiosity. All the gods had put dangerous gifts within the box.

The men, impressed by her looks, adopted Pandora. One day, the curious Pandora could no longer resist the urge and decided to open the box. Out of the box then popped up all the disasters that have plagued humanity since then: famine, disease, earthquakes, and war. The disaster spreads like lightning among the people who, until then, had lived free from troubles and disease. Women told an alternative account in which Pandora didn’t open the box, but her husband, a brother of Prometheus named Epimetheus, whose name means ‘thinking afterwards’. There are a few noteworthy parallels with the Bible:

• The humans were created in the image of the gods.
• The creation of humans happened by breathing the breath of life into them.
• The creation of woman occurred after the creation of man.
• The woman’s curiosity brings disaster to humankind.
• Pandora’s box plays a role similar to the tree of knowledge in Eden.

The ancient Greeks also had a flood myth. The Greek supreme god, Zeus, had decided to punish humanity with a flood. King Lycaon of Arcadia had sacrificed a boy to Zeus, who, appalled by this offering, decided to put an end to human evil by unleashing a deluge. Deucalion and Pyrrha survived Zeus’ world-destroying flood by building an ark. Warned by the titan Prometheus, they sailed on away and landed on Mount Parnassus, where the goddess Themis instructed them to repopulate the earth by throwing stones that would turn into new people. The similarities between these stories suggest that cultures influenced each other, yet also diverged in significant ways.

Latest revision: 23 September 2025

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