A Barrier Above the World, Two Ways to Build It

This scene is the passage most often placed beside Genesis one, verses six and seven, where God makes a firmament to divide the waters above from the waters below, since both texts describe a solid barrier holding back a cosmic ocean above the sky. The comparison stops well short of the two texts agreeing about how that barrier came to exist. Genesis describes a word spoken, with no combat and no defeated rival, while the Enuma Elish requires a battle, a slain goddess, and a body split in half before the same kind of barrier can be built. Scholars have argued this difference in both directions, some proposing that a text like Genesis is answering, and pointedly stripping the violence and the rival deity from, a Babylonian tradition of this kind, others cautioning that shared cosmic geography, a solid sky holding back waters above it, was common currency across the ancient Near East and does not by itself prove one text is responding to the other. What the comparison secures without dispute is that the same physical picture of the world, a habitable space walled off from waters both above and below, appears in both traditions, whatever each one says about how that wall came to stand.