Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [45]
The Babylonian creation story parallels the arrival of civilization (i.e., city life) in the area. It depicts the universe’s beginning as a split between the god of sweet water, Apsu (the cosmic ocean above and below the earth), and the goddess of saltwater (sea), Tiamat (related to the Hebrew tehom, meaning “deep” in Gen 1:1), who were originally locked in sexual embrace.
When on high, the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter,
(And) Mummu-Tiamat, she who bore them all, Their waters comingling as a single body;
No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,
When no gods, whatever had been brought into being,
Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined-
Then it was that the gods were formed within them.
(Tablet 1.1-8, ANET, 61)3
Eventually Marduk, god of Babylon, destroys Tiamat, who is brutally killed while bound, then split and refashioned into the cosmos. Warfare was part of the fabric of life in this contentious river valley, producing new order and new government. From each piece of the goddess, Marduk fashions part of the known world and from the divine blood of Tiamat’s general Kingu, Marduk makes the human race: “Out of his blood, they fashioned mankind” (Tablet 6.32, ANET, 68). The importance of blood in the Babylonian creation story mirrors the Biblical concept of blood as the location of life (See, e.g., Gen 4:10; 9:4). The Babylonian creation story concerns many important conceptions for the Mesopotamian peoples. Among them is the prominence of Mesopotamian accomplishments in civil engineering-canals, for example-in separating brackish, chaotic swamp into farmland and estuary. Central political rule produced land reclamation and expanded agriculture through irrigation but depended upon the dominance of one city-state over another. The long and incomplete history of Mesopotamian creation stories mirrors the often incomplete dominance of one group of allies over the others in the area. Certainly, the primacy of Marduk in this version was meant to demonstrate the destined role of the city of Babylon to rule by military force in the area.
More often, the Mesopotamian versions of creation included clay with the liquid that creates humanity. Fabrication out of clay is so omnipresent in Babylonian creation stories that Enuma Elish may have assumed it and simply neglected to mention clay explicitly. Made from clay, a living being is possessed of a breath-life-force (napištu, cognate with the Hebrew word nefesh). It might also contain another wind-like component, the zaqiqu. This latter was sometimes viewed in bird form and associated with dreaming because it was able to flit about and depart the body when it was asleep.4
In the Atramḥasis epic, which contains both a creation and a flood, a very interesting new aspect is developed; the nascent human is fused with an eemmu. eemmu is the standard word for ghost in Mesopotamia. In this case, however, the text does not indicate that we have a divine spirit or an immortal soul. Rather, it almost seems to imply the opposite, the human who possesses eemmu now must die. When the human dies, the eemmu takes up residence underground while the esemtu or the pagru (two words signifying “corpse”) rests in the earth.5 Thus, as in the Biblical story, the forces that combine to keep us mortal were evident in the creation story itself. Because the word eemmu comes from temum (report, instruction, wisdom), we see that mortality and wisdom are related from the first.6 Cosmology, the story of our beginnings, is a very common way to address the issue of whom we are and what our “self” is. But that is not the only way in which the Mesopotamians reflected on human identity and mortality.
Adapa
IN MESOPOTAMIA, most of the gods lived in the sky, though one powerful goddess, Ereshkigal, and her consort ruled the underworld, sometimes