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TABLET 5:--Creation and ordering of the heavenly bodies. Corresponds nearest of
all to the fourth day (Gen. 1: 14-19).
TABLET 6:--Lost.
TABLET 7:--Creation of cattle and creeping things, and probably man also.
Corresponds to the sixth day (Gen. 1: 24-31).
We now give a translation of the opening lines of the first tablet:--
"At that time the heavens above named,
Nor did the earth below record one:
Yea, the deep was their first creator,
The chaos of the sea was the mother of them all.
Their waters were embosomed in one place, and
The flowering reed was ungathered, the marsh-plant was ungrown."
The reference to the chaotic deep as the mother of them all seems a mutilated story of
the time recorded in Gen. 1: 2. These tablets do not go back to the primal creation of
Gen. 1: 1. Confusion and conflict is the beginning of their story. There is more than
superficial resemblance, for the cuneiform word Tiamat corresponds with the Hebrew
Tehom, "the deep" (Gen. 1: 2).
We will not weary the reader with the rest of the translation; this teaches that the
chaos and emptiness was broken by the creation of "gods". The last legible lines of the
tablet however are suggestive, "Far extended were the days, until the host of heaven and
earth were made". Some translations read, "Far extended were the days until the gods
ansar and Ki-sar were made". An-sar means, "heaven host", and Kis-sar, "earth host"
with which should be read Gen. 2: 1, "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and
all the host of them".
Tablets 2:, 3:, and 4: are taken up with the doings of Marduk (Merodach), who
eventually slays Tiamat (The Deep):--
"He split her like a flat fish into two halves, He took one half of her and made it the
covering of the sky; He stretched out the skin, and caused a watch to be kept, enjoining
that her waters should not issue forth."
Beneath the strangeness of these words one can hear the remains of a great truth. The
present heaven was a special creation, as Gen. 1: 6-8 teaches. The keeping back of the
waters of the great deep is an echo of the words of Job 38: 4-11.
The third tablet contains a passage which speaks of sin being found among the "gods".
As we believe that the fall of Satan and his angels has much to do with the condition
indicated in Gen. 1: 2, the following lines are suggestive:--
"The great gods, all of them determiners of fate,
They entered, and deathlike the God Sar filled (?)
In sin one with the other the compact joins.