Celestial Ties: Are Biblical, Greek, and Mesopotamian Cosmologies Connected?

Biblical translations follow NJPS, with modifications.

Here I take German Old Testament scholar Hermann Gunkel’s (1862–1932) work as a starting point.

Editor’s note: On the Babylonian context for Enuma Elish, see Wayne Horowitz, “Enuma Elish: Babylonia’s Creation Myth and the Enthronement of Marduk,” TheTorah (2023); and Uri Gabbay, “Babylonian Rosh Hashanah,” TheTorah (2014).

Tiamat is the primeval watery deep. She is capable of generating several monstrous creatures (dragons and snakes) and, in the fight against Marduk, is visualized as a gigantic sea monster, which is smashed and cut in pieces by the god (Enuma Elish IV, 31–140).

Translation follows Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013).

Francesca Rochberg, Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 164–190. For more on astrolabes, see Wayne Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998). See also Francesca Rochberg, “Enuma Elish, knowledge of the heavens, and world order,” in Enuma Elish: The Babylonian Epic of Creation, ed. Johannes Haubold , Sophus Helle , Enrique Jiménez and Selena Wisnom (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 237–256.

This interpretation fits particularly well with the idea that Genesis 1 counters Mesopotamian cosmologies.

The alternation between moon and sun introduces a temporal dimension necessary for the proliferation of life, thus further developing and completing the first distinction between light and darkness (Gen 1:3–5). The choice of the term מָאוֹר, “luminary,” to designate the moon and sun, also points in a cultic direction: In priestly writing, מָאוֹר is used elsewhere exclusively to indicate the 7-armed lamp in the sanctuary (Exod 25:6; 27:20; 35:8, 14, 28, 39, 37; Lev 24:2). These aspects underline a correspondence between the temporal and spatial structure of creation and that of the Temple. Such a correlation fits perfectly with the perspective of priestly traditions.

The work of reappropriation and reaction to Enuma Elish and the political ideology behind it is not unique to the biblical authors. It began in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, perhaps in response to the decline of Babylonian power in the early the first millennium, and developed in Mesopotamia and elsewhere. In this perspective, the priestly account of origins could be interpreted as a “counter-text,” that resides within a wider tradition of rewriting, commenting on and responding to Babylonian cosmogony. See Eckart Frahm, “Counter-texts, Commentaries, and Adaptations: Politically Motivated Responses to the Babylonian Epic of Creation in Mesopotamia, the Biblical World and Elsewhere,” Orient 45 (2010): 3–33.

Such traditions are reflected mostly in Hesiod’s Cosmogony and the several myths on katasterismoi, in which gods, heroes, and humans are transformed into constellations.

τὰ δὲ ἄστρα γίνεσθαι κύκλον πυρός, ἀποκριθέντα τοῦ κατὰ τὸν κόσμον πυρός, περιληφθέντα δ’ ὑπὸ ἀέρος […]εἶναι δὲ τὸν κύκλον τοῦ ἡλίου ἑπτακαιεικοσαπλασίονα  τῆς σελήνης, καὶ ἀνωτάτω μὲν εἶναι τὸν ἥλιον, κατωτάτω δὲ τοὺς τῶν ἀπλανῶ ἀστέρων κύκλους. See Anaximander D7, in André Laks and Glenn W. Most, Early Greek Philosophy, Volume II: Beginnings and Early Ionian Thinkers, Part 1, Loeb Classical Library 525 (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2016).

[περὶ σχημάτων ἀστέρων] Ἀ. ἥλων δίκην καταπεπηγέναι τὰ ἄστρα τῶι κρυσταλλοειδεῖ. ἔνιοι δὲ πέταλα εἶναι πύρινα ὥσπερ ζῳγραφήματα. See Anaximenes D 14, in Laks and Most, Early Greek Philosophy, Volume II.

Walter Burkert offers the most in-depth reflection on the subject, identifying four main contexts in Greek literature in which the “oriental influence” is considerable and, in his view, clearly recognizable: wisdom, mythology, astronomy, and mathematics. See Walter Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Baruch Halpern, “Assyrian astronomy of Gen 1 and the birth of Milesian philosophy,” Eretz-Israel 27 (2003): 74–83; and Baruch Halpern, “Late Israelite Astronomy and the Early Greeks,” in Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors, from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina, ed. William G. Dever and Seymour (Sy) Gitin (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003), 323–352. This reconstruction is predicated upon the flawed assumption of Assyrian religious imperialism in the West. Prohibition or manipulation of local cults was foreign to Assyrian expansionistic policy, which usually did not interfere with intellectual institutions nor enforce assimilation to Assyrian customs or values. See for example Ariel Bagg, “Palestine under Assyrian Rule: A New Look at the Assyrian Imperial Policy in the West,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 133 (2013): 119–144.

Nathan Wassermann, “Review of West, East Face of Helicon, Oxford, 1997,” Scripta Classica Israelica 20 (2001): 261–268 (at 262). On this hypothesis, see Erik van Dongen, “The Study of Near Eastern Influences on Greece: Towards the Point,” KASKAL: Rivista di storia, ambienti e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico 5 (2008): 233–250. The Mediterranean is seen as a “free circulation of peoples and the cultures they carry with them, in enterprises that are for the most part private, small-scale and untraceable, so that the evidence is not to be found in specific events, but in general observations on ecological, sociological and anthropological mechanisms.” The model underpinning this hypothesis is set out in Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

Jan Gertz, “Antibabylonische Polemik im Priesterlichen Schöpfungsbericht?,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 106 (2009): 137–155.

Editor’s note: On ancient Mesopotamian commentaries, see Uri Gabbay, “Commentaries Were Written as Soon as Ancient Texts Were Composed,” TheTorah (2024), esp. note 2.

Translation follows Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, 4.