Mesopotamia and the Bible: A Comparison of Creation Accounts - Mark Chavalas - November 10th - Friday Night Lecture

Since the deciphering of the cuneiform scripts in the 1850’s, it has been apparent that the enormous output of texts from Mesopotamia provided an important but somewhat unclear context for understanding the Old Testament in its original environment. Texts like the Hammurabi Code and the Gilgamesh Epic caused varied reactions, ranging from a rejection of any connection to the Bible whatsoever, to the belief that all cultural traditions in the Bible were derived from Mesopotamia.

With this in mind, I will compare aspects of the so-called Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma Elish) and other Mesopotamian creation narratives with the biblical account in Genesis, In particular, I will address the recent ideas of John Walton (The Lost World of Genesis One, 2009, and Genesis One as Ancient Cosmology, 2011), who has argued that creation in Genesis should be viewed in functional, rather than material terms. Further, he posits that the cosmos in Genesis should be viewed in temple terms (i.e., there is a close relationship between the material world and God's temple described in Genesis).

Mark W. Chavalas is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he has taught for over thirty years. He and his wife Kimberlee are the parents of six adult children and three grandchildren. Among his publications are the co-edited, Mesopotamia and the Bible (with K.L. Younger Jr.) and the co-authored IVP Bible Background Commentary (with J. Walton and V. Matthews).