Celestial Ties: Are Biblical, Greek, and Mesopotamian Cosmologies Connected?

The cosmologies of ancient Israel are difficult to reconstruct. The opening chapter of Genesis is one of the few biblical passages that gives some information. It begins with the creation of light, though the source of the light is not specified:

‏^{בראשׁית א:ג} וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי אוֹר. ^א:ד וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת הָאוֹר כִּי טוֹב וַיַּבְדֵּל אֱלֹהִים בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ.

^{Gen 1:3} God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. ^1:4 God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.^[1]

It is not until day 4—after creating the sky, earth, and plants—that God creates the celestial bodies that fill the heavens (more on this later).

Since at least the end of the 19^th century,^[2] scholars have attempted to connect this creation account with the cosmogonic and cosmological traditions of Israel’s neighbors, most commonly the Mesopotamian epic Enuma Elish, which tells the story of how Marduk becomes king of the gods.^[3]

The Stars Are Not Gods: Genesis vs. Enuma Elish

Following his victory over Tiamat, the monster that represents chaos,^[4] Marduk organizes the firmament. He sets the stars, planets, and their stations and assigns them to each god:

^{Enuma Elish V, l. 1} He fashioned heavenly stations for the great gods,
² And set up constellations, the patterns of the stars.
³ He appointed the year, marked off divisions,
⁴ And set up three stars each for the twelve months.
⁵ After he had organized the year,
⁶ He established the heavenly station of Nēberu to fix the stars’ intervals.
⁷ That none should transgress or be slothful
⁸ He fixed the heavenly stations of Enlil and Ea with it.^[5]

This passage effectively mirrors the organization of the stars on Babylonian astrolabes,^[6] cuneiform tablets listing the thirty-six stars associated with the months of the year.

Genesis is often interpreted as demythologizing the astral powers to the level of mere instruments created by God, rather than objects endowed with their own agency. Thus, when creating the different celestial lights on day 4, God emphasizes their function in establishing a cultic calendar:

‏^{בראשׁית א:יד} וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי מְאֹרֹת בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמַיִם לְהַבְדִּיל בֵּין הַיּוֹם וּבֵין הַלָּיְלָה וְהָיוּ לְאֹתֹת וּלְמוֹעֲדִים וּלְיָמִים וְשָׁנִים.

^{Gen 1:14} And Elohim said: “Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs both of feasts and of days and years.

According to this interpretation, the term אֹתֹת, “signs” for the established times, serves as a cipher, a reference to the Mesopotamian tradition of astral divination in which stars are “the signs,” i.e., omens, par excellence.^[7] In addition, in contrast to Mesopotamian religion, in which the sun, Shamash, and the moon, Sin, are named deities, Genesis 1 does not explicitly name either body, but refers to them merely as “great” and “small” luminaries, respectively:

‏^{בראשׁית א:טז} וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים אֶת שְׁנֵי הַמְּאֹרֹת הַגְּדֹלִים אֶת הַמָּאוֹר הַגָּדֹל לְמֶמְשֶׁלֶת הַיּוֹם וְאֶת הַמָּאוֹר הַקָּטֹן לְמֶמְשֶׁלֶת הַלַּיְלָה וְאֵת הַכּוֹכָבִים.

^{Gen 1:16} Elohim made the two great lights, the great light to preside over the day, the little one to preside over the night, and the stars.^[8]

From this point of view, Genesis devalues a fundamental idea not only of Mesopotamian religion but also Mesopotamian divinatory, and therefore “scientific,” knowledge (the two domains of religion and divination being closely intertwined): that the stars are both elements of the natural world and divine powers.

Moreover, this demythologization has often been seen as part of a more general anti-Babylonian polemic directed against the political theology reflected in Enuma Elish, which celebrates Marduk’s sovereignty over the cosmos. In Enuma Elish, the creation (and disappearance) of a constellation by Marduk’s word is the sign by which his royalty is recognized:

^{Enuma Elish IV, l. 25} He gave the command and the constellation disappeared,
²⁶ With a second command the constellation came into being again.
²⁷ When the gods, his fathers, saw (the effect of) his utterance,
²⁸ They rejoiced and offered congratulation: ‘Marduk is the king!’”

The priestly writings instead promote the idea of God as the absolute master of the universe. One important difference, however, is that Enuma Elish emphasizes the sovereignty of Marduk, while the language of kingship is absent from Genesis 1.^[9]

Greek Philosophy: The Stars Are Suspended from the Sky

Genesis’s cosmology also elicits comparison with Greek philosophy. Like the Priestly redactor(s), the 6^th century B.C.E. Ionian thinkers Anaximander and Anaximenes, operating in Miletus, an ancient Greek city in western Anatolia (modern Turkey), demythologize the astral divinities. They thus oppose Greek cosmogonical traditions in which stars and celestial phenomena are treated as divinities.^[10]

Reflecting on the material composition of celestial bodies, and on the question of how these bodies can remain suspended on the celestial vault without falling apart, and can move there with regular and predictable trajectories, Anaximander argues:

^{Anaximander D7} The stars are a wheel of fire; they have been separated from the fire in the world and are surrounded by air […] The wheel of the sun is twenty-seven times that of the moon; and the sun occupies the highest position, the circles of the fixed stars the lowest one.^[11]

Anaximenes posits that the stars hang in the heavenly vault like nails or fiery leaves:

^{Anaximenes D 14} [On the constellations]. Anaximenes: the stars are stuck into the crystalline [namely sphere] like nails. Some people say that they are fiery leaves like paintings.^[12]

The images of suspended stars burning in the sky are conceptually similar to the conclusion of day four in Genesis, which imagines the firmament, רקיע, as a celestial vault from which the sun, moon, and stars hang like lamps, a kind of illuminated dome surmounting the earth:

‏^{בראשׁית א:יז} וַיִּתֵּן אֹתָם אֱלֹהִים בִּרְקִיעַ הַשָּׁמָיִם לְהָאִיר עַל הָאָרֶץ. ^א:יח וְלִמְשֹׁל בַּיּוֹם וּבַלַּיְלָה וּלֲהַבְדִּיל בֵּין הָאוֹר וּבֵין הַחֹשֶׁךְ וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי טוֹב.

^{Gen 1:17} Elohim established them in the firmament of heaven to illuminate the earth, ^1:18 to preside over day and night and separate light from darkness. Elohim saw that this was good.

Like Anaximander and Anaximenes, who attribute the light of the celestial bodies to fire, Genesis also imagines that the light from the celestial bodies derives not from within the stars, but from a separate source: God, who established and appointed each of them to its function, is ultimately responsible for their shining.

Two primary models have been proposed to explain the relationships between the Mesopotamian mythological traditions, on one hand, and Genesis and the Ionian cosmologies on the other.

Cultural Influence from East to West

The classical model sees Hebrew and Greek cosmology as influenced by Near Eastern themes and patterns of thought, borrowing and adapting these themes to new cultural contexts.^[13] The notion of influence, however, is open to criticism, both because it is not clear how influence may be defined or recognized and because it is difficult to establish a historical context in which these exchanges may have taken place.

One theory suggests that Neo-Assyrian astronomy of the 8^th–7^th century introduced the notion of the predictability of the heavens into Hebrew and Greek cultures.^[14] The Judeans and Greeks of the 6^th century then developed a new cosmology involving a secularization of the cosmos and a denial of the divine nature of the stars.

Despite its strong explanatory power, however, evidence for an encompassing model involving exchanges between Israel, Mesopotamia, and Greece is meager. To be sure, Mesopotamian learned traditions may have been known to the biblical authors, but as the Greeks did not read cuneiform, they likely would not have had direct access to Assyrian texts. Indeed, there is no evidence for direct literary contact between Greece and Assyria during this period.

An Eastern Mediterranean “Intellectual koiné”?

An alternative model based on the notion of an Eastern Mediterranean intellectual koiné, or “common language,” explains the similarities through a “cultural and intellectual conglomerate shared by the different societies located around the Mediterranean basin.”^[15] Jan Gertz has used this notion to criticize the idea that Genesis’s depiction of the celestial bodies as luminaries or lamps is a polemic against the Babylonian gods.^[16]

According to Gertz, the pre-eminence of the creator deity in Genesis is remarkable compared to the polytheistic configurations set up by the Enuma Elish, but the desire to degrade the astral powers is not as clear, especially when compared to other biblical texts in which this polemic is much more pronounced (e.g., Isaiah 40). Rather, Genesis’s designation of celestial bodies by their function reflects an intention to begin world history by organizing and classifying all the natural elements, starting with the celestial ones.

Such a classificatory attitude corresponds to what could be defined as “scientific prose,” before actual science was born. In other words, in ancient times “science” did not start from theory. Rather, it meant making lists, inventories, classifications as comprehensive as possible. This intention is shared within an intellectual koiné that includes, on the one hand, Mesopotamian scribes, and on the other, Ionian philosophers, and to which belong also the priestly circles responsible for Genesis 1.

An erudite commentary on Enuma Elish from the Neo-Assyrian period offers evidence of this common intellectual milieu.^[17] It describes the levels of the universe assigned by Marduk to each god, but like Genesis and the fragments of Anaximenes and Anaximander, it attributes their light to a separate source, a “lamp of electrum”:

^{KAR 307, 30} The Upper Heavens are luludanitu-stone. They belong to Anu. He [Marduk] settled the 300 Igigi inside. ³¹ The Middle Heavens are saggilmud-stone. They belong to the Igigi. Bel sat on the high dais inside, ³² in the lapis lazuli sanctuary. He Marduk made a lamp of electrum shine inside. ³³ The Lower Heavens are jasper. They belong to the stars. He drew the constellations of the gods on them.^[18]

Gertz’s remarks provide a convincing qualification to the idea that Genesis 1 sought to demythologize Enuma Elish, suggesting that the text is not simply offering a counter-narrative about the nature of creation and the divine, but that it aims at articulating two different ways of conceiving the world, combining a traditional mythological vision with a “scientific” attitude concerning the nature of the universe.

The notion of koiné, however, for thinking about the relationships between different cosmologies suffers from the same problem as the influence model: We still have to ask how many common developments in the Mediterranean we need to observe before we can justify this koiné. What is more, such a notion presupposes a self-understanding of the Mediterranean as a unified intellectual whole, which in antiquity is never attested, at least until the Hellenistic period.

Three Different Cosmological Models

While a common underlying cosmological model existing between the Enuma Elish commentary (KAR 307), Genesis 1, and Anaximander and Anaximenes could explain the appearance of similar metaphors to describe celestial bodies in terms of “lamps,” “lights,” or “flaming wheels” suspended in the sky, the texts employing these metaphors are otherwise not similar.

At opposite ends of the spectrum, the Mesopotamian cosmological speculations represent a world in which each area of the sky is associated with and presided over by a specific deity, while the Ionian philosophers conceive of a universe that functions without gods. The Priestly scribes responsible for the Genesis creation account, however, aim to promote God’s superiority and distance from the created world.