Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/96

72 Dr. Smythe Palmer traces the Biblical account of the Creation to its origin in Babylonia. It is Babylonian alike in matter and form, though both have passed through a Hebrew medium and been modified and coloured on their way. It presupposes that conception of the origin of the present order of the world which is set forth in the Chaldæan epic of the Creation discovered by George Smith. The obscurities of the Hebrew text have been explained and supplemented by the Babylonian beliefs which modern research has brought to light. The watery chaos of Genesis was derived from Babylonia, like the "deep" over which "the breath of Elohim" is said to have brooded.

Long ago it was pointed out that the chaos described in Genesis i. 2 was not the primitive condition of the earth. "The earth," it is stated, "had been waste and void"; "in the beginning," when first created by Elohim, it must have been "good." Kurtz and others accordingly conjectured that the cause of this degeneration has been omitted, and that between the first and second verses of the chapter we must supply a history of the fall of Satan and his rebel angels. The Chaldean epic of the Creation has brilliantly confirmed the conjecture. The epic is really a pasan of praise to Merodach, the Sun-god of Babylon, commemorating his triumph over the powers of chaos and darkness, and his consequent establishment of the universe as it exists to-day. Between the "beginning," which corresponds with the first verse of Genesis, and the creation of the existing order of things comes a long description of the struggle of the god with Tiâmat, the dragon of darkness, and the rebel hosts of anarchy whom she led.

Tiâmat is the tĕhom or "deep" of the Old Testament, personified as a goddess, or rather as a female principle of nature. She represented the sea, as yet unreduced to order or discipline, a sea which, when stirred up by demoniac storms and raging winds, overwhelms the land and destroys all that is on it. The idea is the same as that which underlies the story of the Deluge, and takes us back to those primæval days of Babylonian history when the larger part of the plain of Babylonia was still covered by the waters of the Persian Gulf, and the rivers which flowed through it had not been confined within embankments or drawn away into canals. That Tiâmat should have been conceived of as a dragon or serpent is illustrated by comparative folklore. In other parts of the world besides Babylonia the serpentine forms