Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/150

 The main interest of the fragment lies in its non-legendary, matter-of-fact representation of the primæval condition of things, and of the process of world-building. Of special correspondences with Gn. 1 there are perhaps but two: (a) the impersonal conception of chaos implied in the appellative sense of tāmtu (Tĕhôm) for the sea; (b) the comparison of the firmament to a canopy, if that be the right interpretation of the phrase. In the order of the creation of living beings it resembles more the account in Gn. 2; but from that account it is sharply distinguished by its assumption of a watery chaos in contrast to the arid waste of Gn. 2$5$. It is therefore inadmissible to regard this text as a more illuminating parallel to Gn. 1 than the Enuma eliš tablets. The most that can be said is that it suggests the possibility that in Babylonia there may have existed recensions of the creation story in which the mythical motive of a conflict between the creator and the chaos-monster played no part, and that the biblical narrative goes back directly to one of these. But when we consider that the Tiamat myth appears in both the Greek accounts of Babylonian cosmogony, that echoes of it are found in other ancient cosmogonies, and that in these cases its imagery is modified in accordance with the religious ideas of the various races, the greater probability is that the cosmogony of Gn. 1 is directly derived from it, and that the elimination of its mythical and polytheistic elements is due to the influence of the pure ethical monotheism of the OT.—Gu. in his Schöpfung und Chaos was the first to call attention to possible survivals of the creation myth in Hebrew poetry. We find allusions to a conflict between Yahwe and a monster personified under various names (Rahab, the Dragon, Leviathan, etc.—but never Tĕhôm); and no explanation of them is so natural as that which traces them to the idea of a struggle between Yahwe and the power of chaos, preceding (as in the Babylonian myth) the creation of the world. The passages, however, are late; and we cannot be sure that they do not express a literary interest in foreign mythology rather than a survival of a native Hebrew myth.

4. The Phœnician cosmogony, of which the three extant recensions are given below, hardly presents any instructive points of comparison