Sorry Christians, but the creation account in Genesis is borrowed -- it is based on the Enuma Elish.

The parallel is real and worth taking seriously: Genesis and the Babylonian Epic of Creation both come out of the same ancient world, and both open with a formless deep before anything is ordered. What the parallel does not show is copying, and the differences are the interesting part.

1. The shape of the stories is opposite. The Enuma Elish is a theogony: gods are born, rival each other, and one of them wins. Genesis has no divine birth, no rivalry, and no god who becomes the sky. It has one God who simply is, and who speaks. Strip out theogony and combat and there is no Babylonian plot left to borrow.

2. Babylon makes the world from a corpse. Marduk splits Tiamat's body to make sky and earth, and fashions humans from the blood of her general to relieve the gods of work. Genesis has creation by speech and humanity in God's image. "By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host" (Psalm 33:6). The mechanism and the dignity of the human being are both inverted.

3. The deep is not a goddess here. In Genesis 1:2 the darkness is over "the face of the deep" -- Hebrew tehom, a word related to Tiamat's name -- and the deep does nothing. It has no will, no voice, no claim. It is water. A borrowed character would not be left lying there inert while God speaks over it.

4. Israel's own poetry knows the difference. Psalm 74:14 says God "crushed the heads of Leviathan," and Job 38:7 pictures the morning stars singing together. Israel could use combat imagery when it wanted to. Genesis 1 deliberately does not, which suggests a writer making a theological choice rather than copying a script.

5. The sun and moon are demoted to lamps. Israel's neighbors worshiped the sun, moon, and stars as gods. Genesis calls them lights: "And God made the two great lights" and set them "to give light on the earth" (Genesis 1:16-17). The polemic is unmistakable. Genesis is arguing against the worldview the objection says it borrowed from.

6. Shared vocabulary is not shared text. John Walton's point in The Lost World of Genesis One is that Genesis speaks the cultural language of the ancient Near East while making a completely different claim about who God is. Two documents can share a cosmology and disagree about everything that matters. Parallels have to be weighed, not counted.

7. The direction of dependence is unsettled. The Babylonian tablets we possess are later than the usual date assigned to the Epic's composition, and the dating of Genesis is itself disputed. Some scholars argue the influence ran the other way, or that both drew on an older shared tradition. "Genesis borrowed it" is a hypothesis presented as a finding.

8. The argument proves too much. Comparative work in the nineteenth century concluded that Israel had borrowed almost everything, and each of those conclusions had to be walked back as the texts were read more closely. If resemblance proved derivation, the Enuma Elish would be derived from older Sumerian material and the objection would have no target left. The method has a track record, and it is poor.

9. This is not a hill most scholars die on. The claim that Genesis is "based on" the Enuma Elish is a minority position in Assyriology and biblical studies today. The mainstream view is contact, shared setting, and deliberate contrast. Christians can hold that view without embarrassment, because Genesis never claims to be written in a cultural vacuum.

Genesis reads like a correction of its neighbors' theology, not a copy of it, and the correction is the message: the sea is not a god, the sun is not a god, and you are not a slave made to feed one. That is a stronger reading of the evidence than the borrowing thesis, and it is the reading the text itself invites.

Sources: John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One; Michael Heiser; Paul Copan.

Related challenges:
• Please check your facts – the biblical account of Noah was derived from the Babylonian myth of Utanapishtim. Your mythical God didn’t 'inspire' it.
• Christian claims are not credible! Wouldn’t we expect SOME evidence of the exodus from Egypt, if it took place? 2.5 million people wandering around for 40 years in a specific geographic location...and NOTHING!
• So Adam and Eve lived for 900+ years and Methuselah celebrated 930 years. Is it just me, or do these claims not strain credulity beyond its limits?