Creation Myths and Flood Stories
1050 words by ebonycook
The creation myths all have a few things in common. One thing the stories have in common is that most of them involve one powerful person who creates the entire world. In the Enuma Elish, Anshar creates the first begetter, Apsu or sweet water and then Tiamat, the bitter water. In the Creation by Atum, Atum creates Shu(air) and Tefnut(moisture). And the Theology of Memphis explains that Ptah was the one who created Atum in the first place. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos came first. The rest of the world was created and produced from the first begetters in each of these stories. And in the Bible, God speaks the world into existence and has Adam as the first man, and Eve his woman, then the rest of humankind was produced. Also, the creation myths have stories that are similar to biblical events. The almighty beings the Bible and the Enuma Elish wants to destroy their creations because of the badness they create in the world. God sends the flood to rid his people of evil. And Apsu wants to kill his children because of their fighting and partying, and he cannot get any rest due to all the noise. Also, in the Theogony of Memphis, Cronos decides to eat all of his kids because his parents, Heaven and Earth tells him that he would be overcome by one of his children. In most of the stories, heaven and earth and water were the beginning of creation. In the Enuma Elish, sweet water and bitter water (Apsu and Tiamat) created the sky and earth and Anu (the empty heaven). In the Creation by Atum and Theology of Memphis, Atum created air and moisture (shu and tefnut) and then Geb-Nut (earth and sky). In the stories, man was created last. Ea, in Enuma Elish, killed Kingu and used his arteries to make man. In Theology of Memphis, Ptah speaks into existence Atum and Atum masturbates and makes the gods; men come about later. In Genesis 1, God creates man on the 6th day but on the 1st day in Genesis 2. Humans write these creation myths because of the curiosity about how the world evolved and how things have come to be. They write these stories to validate the present social and political order. The creation myth that I found the most interesting is Enuma Elish because this myth came the closest to sounding real and sensible to me than the others, except the Bible of course. Ptah creates Atum by speech, which is similar to God in the Bible. But Atum creates by sneezing and spitting and masturbating, which could have happened but it just seems highly unlikely to me. He was the only one who did not have a female-type partner, he produced the world with himself! Hesiod’s Theogony was so long and boring! Also, the points about the Earth mating with Heaven and Night producing by himself and the Earth mating with Erebus and Erebus with the Night to produce things like Destiny, Nemesis, Cyclopes, Hills, and Murder and Lying, etc. just does not add up. The theogony just grouped a whole bunch of things under one set of parents and does not really explain in detail. But I like the Enuma Elish because it explains in better details how sweet and bitter water mingled to form sky and earth and empty heaven; how the first begetter wanted to destroy his loud and obnoxious kids; how the grandson kills Tiamat and uses her body to make parts of the world and how Kingu was killed to make humans and humans would serve the Gods. Although mythological, the Enuma Elish seems more reasonable than the other creation stories.
The Tiglath-Pileser Principle is a story that exaggerates the victory of an Assyrian King who defeated the Muskaryans for not paying tribute to his Lord Ashur. The principle is that if it is written that a king did a number of things in battle, the amount of victories he claims is really much less than what is said to have happened. So, if the king said that he killed 14,000 of the 20,000 Muskaryans and enslaved the remaining 6,000…what actually happened is that maybe there were only 300 (just my guess) Muskaryans and he only killed 200 men and enslaved 100. This principle relates to biblical stories because ancient writers, including does who recounted biblical stories, may have exaggerated a little bit when they retold about battles and things. For example, in the bible King Hezekiah rebelled against the King of Assyria and would not serve him. What really may have happened is that he refused to pay taxes to the King. And Hezekiah reportedly defeated the Philistines all the way to Gaza. What really could have happened is that he made some Philistine flee all the way to Gaza, and not the whole of the Philistines. The Epic of Gilgamesh is similar to the Bible because it recounts a flood story and has the character Utnapishtim similar to Noah. Utnapishtim builds a boat for the people and animals that will survive the flood and Noah builds an ark. Utnapishtim sends forth a dove, a swallow and a raven to check that the flood waters had receded. Noah sent forth a raven and a dove. Three etiologies from Genesis are why the snake crawls on his belly and has no legs; why women bear pain in childbirth; and why everyone on earth has to die. All of these etiologies stem from the snake coaxing Eve to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and God punishing the three who were involved: snake, Adam and Eve. And no one gets to eat from the tree of Life and be immortal because of Eve, Adam and the snake. The etiology of why students have to take this theology course is because Katherine Drexel, a religious woman, created a school for minorities and wanted its students to learn biblical stories about right and wrong and kindness, love, hate, death and all of the things that goes on in the world so that they can have guidance in each of their different career paths and someday do something to benefit the world by doing a good deed like she did for us.