Enuma Elish

A Babylonian creation epic used in Corpus Witness as comparative Ancient Near Eastern literature.

Enuma Elish is a Babylonian creation epic, dated here to the late second or early first millennium BCE at medium confidence. Corpus Witness uses it as comparative Ancient Near Eastern literature beside Genesis, not as a book that any Jewish or Christian canon once contained. The status for those canons is not applicable. Parallels in theme, such as cosmic order and divine conflict, are literary comparisons. They are not quotations, and they are not evidence that editors removed a Babylonian tablet from a Bible.

Never a book of Jewish or Christian canons. Comparison is historical and literary, not a claim that it was “removed” from the Bible.

Date

Late 2nd–early 1st millennium BCE (medium confidence)

Confidence

medium

Languages

Akkadian

Traditional authorship

Anonymous Babylonian priests

Authorship note

Babylonian creation myth of Marduk; not Scripture in any Jewish or Christian tradition

• Kuyunjik tablets · Nineveh Enuma Elish tablets

  7th century BCE copies · Akkadian · Akkadian creation tablets

  The Enuma Elish is known from Akkadian clay tablets, the best-known set coming from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE. Those tablets are copies of an older Babylonian poem. L. W. King’s 1902 edition made a public-domain English text available. The tablets are Mesopotamian literature. They are not manuscripts of Genesis, and no Jewish or Christian canon list receives the Enuma Elish as Scripture. Comparison with Genesis is a modern scholarly question about shared ancient Near Eastern themes, not a claim of quotation.

• lists noncanonical

  Jewish biblical canon

  Enuma Elish is ancient Mesopotamian literature on clay tablets. Jewish communities did not receive it as a book of the Torah or of the wider Tanakh. Readers compare its creation or flood scenes with Genesis because the themes overlap. Comparison is not reception of the Mesopotamian poem as Scripture. No Jewish canon list names Enuma Elish. The Hebrew Bible’s own flood and creation narratives are the texts synagogues read.

• lists noncanonical

  Early Christian canon lists

  Early Christian churches did not read Enuma Elish as a biblical book. Their Old Testament was the Jewish Scriptures in Greek or, later, in Latin revision, not the Akkadian or Sumerian tablet series. No festal letter, Muratorian list, or North African council names Enuma Elish. Modern scholars set the poem beside Genesis. That comparison belongs to ancient Near Eastern study. It is not early Christian canonical reception.

• ProtestantNot applicable

  Babylonian epic, never a Protestant Bible book.

• CatholicNot applicable

  Babylonian epic, never a Catholic Bible book.

• OrthodoxNot applicable

  Babylonian epic, never an Orthodox Bible book.

• EthiopianNot applicable

  Babylonian epic, never an EOTC Bible book.

• TanakhNot applicable

  Comparative Mesopotamian literature, not Tanakh.

• LXXNot applicable

  Not a Septuagint book.

• Early ChristianNot applicable

  Not a Christian scriptural book.

• Second TempleNot applicable

  Older Mesopotamian epic used only for comparison.

No council, confession, or canon list in this dataset names Enuma Elish. Tradition status is recorded in the section above.

• Shared tradition · Genesis 1 ↔ Tablet sequence

  Low confidence — disputed or tentative.

  Both texts tell a creation story from the ancient Near East. The dataset does not claim that Genesis quotes the Enuma Elish.

No dated canon event in this dataset is tied to Enuma Elish.

• L. W. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation (1902), English edition of the Babylonian Enuma Elish. Comparative Ancient Near Eastern literature, not a biblical canon book.