Content area
Full text
RICHARD J. CLIFFORD, Creation Accounts in the Ancient Near East and in the Bible (CBQMS 26; Washington: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1994). Pp. xiv+ 217. Paper $9.
Richard Clifford has written a much needed volume for anyone who seeks to understand biblical conceptions of creation within the ancient Near Eastern cosmogonic tradition. This book will also be a valuable resource for students of ancient Near Eastern religions in general. In part 1 the cosmogonic traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Canaan are examined sympathically and honestly--completely absent is any tendency to denigrate the achievements of extrabiblical ancient Near Eastern poets and theologians for the aggrandizement of their biblical counterparts. Part 2 is a study of selected biblical cosmogonic texts.
Because of the relative abundance of Mesopotamian texts, considerably more space is given in part 1 to the study of Sumerian and Akkadian cosmogonies than to Egyptian and Canaanite cosmogonies. C. follows J. van Dijk in assigning Sumerian cosmogonies to two ideal types: cosmic and chthonic. In the cosmic type (the Nippur tradition) the cosmos resulted from the union ("marriage act") of An (Heaven) and Ki (Earth); Enlil, their firstborn, separated them. The creation of humankind was by emersio (i.e., on the day of creation humans emerged, plantlike, from the earth loosened by a pickax). In the chthonic type (the Eridu tradition) creation was thought to be the result of Enki, the personification of underground water, impregnating the barren land and causing life-vegetative, animate, and human--to spring forth thereupon. Humans...