Enuma Elish Themes

In the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation epic likely written in the second millennium BCE, the reader is quickly thrown into the midst of a community of gods, their identities hard to distinguish, and often at enmity with each other. Before long, the hero-god Marduk emerges to subdue chaos and establish order among the gods, soon bringing into existence the recognizable forms of the heavens, the earth, and the rudiments of human civilization—the city…

Marduk, or “Lord” in much of the text of the Enuma Elish, is the patron god of Babylon. The central argument of the Enuma Elish as a whole is thus to elevate Marduk as the sovereign deity—to demonstrate that out of the Babylonian pantheon, he is the supremely powerful god; and not only that, he displaces older gods, like the Sumerian Ea, in importance. By portraying Marduk as a figure whose will…

In the Enuma Elish, much of the action is driven by the primordial goddess Tiamat, whose traits are associated with irritability, reactivity, and deception. This is because Tiamat is the sea-goddess—associated with a force (water) that, for ancient Babylonians, was unpredictable and prone to behave in ways that were hostile to human life. Therefore, the creation epic portrays Marduk’s battle with her as key to the founding of human civilization…