This week we are going to learn about a very myth-understood word! And we will be doing that so that we can talk about one of the flood myths of ancient Babylon written down during the time of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—the Atrahasis Epic. We’ll learn a bit about ancient storytelling, the difference between mythology and lies, and how we can compare and contract stories from the Bible with the writings of other cultures to learn how different our God is from the false gods of the nations.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Today we’re going to talk about a very myth-understood word. And that word is myth and another word just like it is mythology—the reason why these words are so important is because we are going to talk about the flood myths of one of Israel’s closest neighbors Sumeria/Babylon before we talk about the Flood described in Genesis. The Epic of Atrahasis was written during the times of the patriarchs, which is a fancy word that we use to mean Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—who we will get to before too much longer. A patriarch was the male head of a household, usually the oldest man. A matriarch was the female head of the household, usually the wife, mother or sister of the patriarch. So, when we talk about the Jewish people or the nation of Israel, we talk about their patriarchs being Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and each of the thirteen tribes also had a patriarch because Jacob had twelve sons and eleven of those sons plus Joseph’s two sons became the heads of the tribes of Israel. If that confuses you, don’t worry about it because we will describe it in the future and you won’t be tested on this. The tribes had matriarchs too—Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel. The Kingly line had David as its patriarch and the Priests had Aaron as their patriarch.
But, like I said, during the times when the Patriarchs lived, the Babylonian Empire was just beginning. Maybe you have heard of the famous King Hammurabi and his law code? He was a very wise king—although a lot of his laws are seriously messed up. Maybe when you are a grown up you can read them. You know what? A lot of stories from that time, no matter what country they are from, are pretty messed up. The laws their kings gave were usually better than nothing, than anarchy—which is what you call it when a society has no rules at all—but some of their laws were really horrible and downright evil. That goes for all of the law codes I have read—Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite and Egyptian. It’s hard to believe sometimes the things that those guys thought was a good idea or fair. Those kinds of laws are always great if you are rich and powerful but not so much if you aren’t! But, the kinds of laws that a society comes up with tell us a lot about what they thought about their gods and what the character of their gods was like. And that’s also why we read the ancient myths from these countries, along with their laws, so we can understand what the heck was going on in their brains that they thought throwing someone into a river to see if the gods will rescue them was a good way to see if someone was guilty or innocent of a crime! They did this because of their beliefs. Myths always reflect people’s beliefs about their gods.
But what is a myth, anyway? A myth is a story that claims to explain what has happened or why things are the way they are. A myth isn’t like a history because a history has names and dates and evidence that it is true and is based upon the claims of people who were actually there. A myth is a claim that something is true, but a myth cannot be proven. Sometimes myths are called legends. What we cannot do is make the mistake of saying that myths are nonsense stories or lies. So, when someone talks about the Creation myth or the Flood myth, they are describing the kind of literature it is—not making claims as to whether or not it happened. Sometimes people hear the word myth and get really angry but when we understand the meaning of the word and we understand how it was originally used, there is no need to get angry. A myth is just a story about why things are the way they are–it is meant to teach us important things about what we believe. So, the flood myth in the Bible is going to tell us important things about the God of the Bible—our God—and the flood myths of Mesopotamia will tell us important things about their gods. Of course, their gods aren’t real gods and absolutely no one worships or believes in them anymore, but reading their flood myths will teach us about what their character was like—which means their personality, whether they could be trusted or not, if they were reasonable or unreasonable, kind or cruel, hard-working or lazy, wise or foolish. That kind of thing. The Flood myth in the Bible, the story Genesis tells us, will tell us those exact same things about our God and we can compare our God with the gods of the Babylonians to see how different He is from them.
When we study stories like these and see what they say about the gods of Babylon and Sumeria, we can really see a huge difference between them and the God of the Bible. That’s why we are going to learn about them before we read the Bible account. They are pretty messed up. Now, I am not going to recite the whole Epic of Atrahasis to you or anything. What I am going to do is rewrite it as a more understandable story. We’ll have some fun with it. And after the story, we’re going to stop and talk about how messed up all of this is. I want you to imagine you are a child in ancient Babylon, huddled around a family fire in the middle of winter. Maybe you are eating a bowl of lentils and a piece of flat bread—during the winter there often wasn’t a whole lot more than that to eat. Your grandfather, the patriarch of your family, is a very old man. If you were ten, then maybe your dad is about twenty-eight, and your grandfather would be very old—forty-six years old. He might live another twelve years because most people suffered terribly in ancient times from disease and not having enough to eat and certainly not a very balanced diet. His teeth were probably black and he would scratch a lot because he had head lice and parasites. His skin was very brown and wrinkly because of all the time he spent in the sun, working hard to provide for his family. Don’t even ask me what he smelled like! But things were easier in the winter—easier because there was less work but harder because there was also less food. Still, your favorite part of winter would be listening to the stories and songs of your grandfather and the other elders on cold winter nights, huddled together with your brothers and sisters.
“Listen, children!” Grandfather would say, his eyes twinkling with excitement, “There was a time, long, long ago, when the lower gods were just like us—they were the Igigi gods. The seven great Anunna gods needed to eat! They needed their grain. They needed their meat! They needed fruit and vegetables to fill their bellies! So, they forced the Igigi gods to work hard in the fields and as shepherds. By the sweat of their brow, they dug the canals and planted the grain and harvested the fruit and tended the flocks. By the strength of their arms, they dug the Tigris and Euphrates, and they dug wells for good water. They took all of the leftover rock and clay and they made the mountains!
They worked and worked, year in and year out. The lower gods drudged away as slaves and they counted the years of their slavery. For forty long years they served the Anunna gods as mere slaves and they became very tired—they worked day and night to satisfy the demands of the seven Anunna gods. When they could no longer bear the drudgery, they began to complain to the seven, they began to speak against the greater gods.
From down in their ditches they began to mutter to one another, “We need to take our problem to someone who can do something, the regional authority, the one in charge of all our labors! We must remove Enlil, the great warrior, the one who is the counselor to all the Anunna gods, from his resting place! We must do something to the great warrior Enlil! We must remove him from his Temple, high atop his Ziggurat!”
They said, “We will not work for them anymore! We will burn our tools! We will destroy our workbaskets and our workplaces! We will stop working and we will fight them instead!” And the Igigi gods agreed and they took up their weapons and prepared for battle. To the gate of Enlil, they carried their weapons to fight the seven Anunna gods. It was was night when the Igigi surrounded the House of Enlil, and Enlil did not know it. The Great Temple of Ekur in Nippur was surrounded in the middle of the night and Enlil was sleeping unaware!
Nusku, a messenger of the Anunna, met the Igigi at the gate of Enlil. Weapons in hand, he met the Igigi and said, “Anu, the father of all, Enlil, the warrior and advisor, Ninurta, the god in charge of your labors, and Enuggi, the overseer, have sent me with a message for you! Who is responsible for all of this? Who has dared to come after the Anunna with weapons? Who has declared war on the greater gods? Whoever is responsible has done a bad thing against his masters.”
The Igigi did not back down. They stood together and were very brave. “All of us together have done this thing! We have declared war on the Anunna because of our back-breaking labor and excavation. We are done being miserable and we are declaring war on you!”
Nusku went back to the throne room and reported back to the seven the words of the Igigi, that they were tired from slaving away for the forty long years and would never work as slaves again. After giving it much thought, Ea spoke up and said, “We know they are telling the truth! We cannot accuse them of lying! Every day we heard their cries and we ignored their complaining! How can we accuse them of lying now? Call the goddess Nintu—let her create humans to do the work instead of the Igigi gods. Let her create men to bear the heavy yoke of the Igigi gods. Let men do the hard and miserable work instead of the Igigi!
Nintu called forth Enki to bring her clay for the making of humans, and Enki said that they should kill one god and use his flesh and his blood for the making of humans. The Anunna all agreed that this was an excellent idea. Nintu, the mother, made a lump from all the flesh and blood and spirit and clay and the Igigi spit upon it. Nintu mixed the flesh and blood of the god with clay and so man was made with the flesh and blood and spirit of the god but also with the clay from the earth so he would always know who he was and where he was from and why he was created. When she was done, she said, “You gave me this job and I have finished it! I have created humans and they will do all of the hard work of the gods. I have released the Igigi from their hard work and slavery. From now on, the humans will do all of the difficult work of the lower gods and they will complain and cry out instead. I have freed the Igigi and I have restored peace among the greater and lower gods.”
And there was great happiness among the gods until the humans multiplied greatly on the face of the earth and there were too many of them. They made so much noise that the gods could not get any sleep, there was so much noise that the gods had no peace and quiet at all and so they decided to send a great flood to wipe out all of the humans they had made. But Enki went in secret to his follower Atrahasis and gave him a dream warning him about the coming disaster. But being just a man, he could not understand the dream and he prayed to Enki to explain the meaning. Enki told his servant Atrahasis to build a boat, because there would be a seven day flood that would destroy all life.
Atrahasis warned the elders and they built a boat. Atrahasis brought all kinds of animals and birds and livestock on board with him, and he threw a great feast and he brought his family on board the boat. But Atrahasis was very upset! He walked in and out of the ark! He couldn’t sit and he couldn’t kneel down. He was so brokenhearted and upset that he was vomiting. Then the weather changed and it became dark. They heard the storm god beginning to rumble and threaten. Atrahasis had just enough time to close the door and seal it with pitch before Adad began to roar in the wind and the rain that beat upon the boat. Atrahasis cut the rope that tied him to the earth.
The storm came on violently and there had never been anything like it before or since. The storm was like a battle and the rain and darkness were so severe that the people couldn’t even see one another. The rain bellowed like an angry bull and the wind screeched like an eagle. The darkness was so thick that they could feel it and the sun disappeared.
But then the gods realized their terrible mistake! With the people gone and no one to offer sacrifices, they became hungry and began to starve. The Anunna and Igigi were dying of hunger and dying of thirst! Their food was gone! Their slaves were gone! What would they do?
It was only then that they smelled the pleasing aroma of a sacrifice and look! There was Atrahasis and his family making a sacrifice! The gods crowded around the altar like flies, greedily devouring the cattle and the sheep of his sacrifice and the unleavened bread of his offering. The gods swore that they would never again kill all life in the world, but to solve the problem of the noise they would take away immortality from men. No longer would men live forever. And they would make it so that many of the babies of humans would die and that many of the women would not be able to have babies.
“And that, children, is why we are now born, and why many die in childhood, and why we grow old and we die. We made too much noise and the gods dealt harshly with us! And this is also why we have to work so hard, because the Igigi gods rebelled against the Anunna gods, and we were created to care for the needs of the gods in their place. The Anunna decided to create men, to create us, to do the work of digging and planting and harvesting and building and shepherding. That is our purpose and that is why we grow the food that the priests take to the Temple every morning and afternoon, to feed the gods so that they will bring the rains, and the sun, and the moon and give us wisdom and everything else we need to live.”
Do you see how myths worked in the ancient world? Myths told stories to explain the big questions that all people have. Why don’t people live forever? In the ancient world, a great many babies died and people wanted to know why—it hasn’t been until very recently that children rarely die because of changes in our diet and modern medicine, and people have always wanted to know what their purpose was. We always have these kinds of questions. Christians and Jews read the Bible when they want to understand the meaning of these questions, and the Babylonians came up with this story. It had probably been passed down for a long time in the form of stories told around fires in homes before someone finally wrote it down during the time of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But what are the differences that we see between the Bible and the Epic of Atrahasis? Well, for one, our God doesn’t need to be fed by humans. We weren’t created to make sure He doesn’t have to starve to death. We also weren’t created to be slaves. In fact, the Bible tells us that God made the earth to serve our needs—that God made it perfectly for us to be exactly what we needed so that we can eat.
What kinds of gods are these guys? Dang—they are just plain nasty. One, they think that they can just make all the weaker gods their slaves. Not cool. God created everyone equal in the beginning—one big family, remember? He created us to be image-bearers to rule wisely over creation and to show the world what He is like. Sorry, but when you are making people work hard for forty years as slaves you are most certainly not acting like God and on top of that, you are making other people who are also created in God’s image into slaves. That’s like making a slave out of God. Just no, nope, not good. Slavery was normal in the ancient world but that doesn’t make it right. Moses allowed people to take slaves when they would go to war too, but that doesn’t mean it was God’s original will for humans to do that. Jesus called things like that “allowances” because our hearts are so hardened and stubborn that we are just determined to do bad things and Moses made some of the laws so that those things would be less bad. But now, we know that it’s always bad to own other people and force them to work, no matter what. Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, did that but could you imagine Jesus doing it? No way. He died for everyone because He wants everyone to be able to be free.
And killing everyone just because it got too noisy? Again—dang! Now, I will admit that there are some people in my neighborhood who are happy that I am not one of those gods because for two whole weeks they were setting off really loud fireworks every night after 10pm. The kinds that go up into the sky and explode and make my windows shake. So, I totally get the temptation to just get rid of everyone but it doesn’t mean that it would be right to do it or that I would even seriously think about it. I was just tired and angry and they were being really bad neighbors. In the flood story in the Bible, what was different? Well, the Bible says that God was putting an end to violence and evil, not noise. God wasn’t annoyed or angry or wrathful, it says that He was heartbroken and that He regretted ever making humans because of all the horrible things they were doing to one another. The Bible says that everyone’s thoughts were evil all day every day of their lives. I can’t even imagine what that would look like. I certainly wouldn’t want to live in a world like that.
What about what those gods did after the flood? Making it so that babies die? Making it so that some women couldn’t have babies? That’s just mean and spiteful. And how about making it so that people will get old and die? That’s very different from the story the Bible tells us. The Bible says that we were originally created to get old and die, and that it was only if we ate from the Tree of Life that we would live forever. Could you even imagine living forever—as a slave? That’s how the Babylonians thought about life before the flood.
Bottom line, the Epic of Atrahasis tells us a lot of unpleasant things about the Babylonian gods and what they thought of themselves and why they were created in the first place. Remember when I told you about Hammurabi’s laws? In those laws you were either a rich man or you were in trouble. If you were poor or you were a woman then your life was worth next to nothing. If a rich man killed a poor man then very little or nothing would happen to him. If a poor man killed a rich man? Boy howdy, there was going to be big trouble. That’s because they believed in a world where men mattered and women didn’t. And rich men mattered and poor men almost didn’t matter at all. Enslaved people were just property like a plow or a hammer or a whatever—they weren’t considered to be people. That’s why the Anunna gods didn’t care while they listened to the Igigi gods moaning and groaning as they worked so hard to dig those trenches and plant and harvest and shepherd and all that. Rich people didn’t care that poor people suffered and men didn’t really care what happened to women. That world was all about believing that people deserved whatever happened to them, if they were poor or women or children—because they didn’t much care about kids either.
Now, we believe that all people are created equal and so we know that it is wrong to have different laws for different kinds of people. If a President gets away with a crime that a grocery cashier goes to jail for then we know that is wrong. We know that a pastor of a church and every person in the church all have to obey the exact same commandments. But that’s because of the Bible and especially Jesus’s teachings in the Bible. They didn’t have those and so these people didn’t know and it’s obvious when we read their myths.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray you will have a wonderful week studying the Scriptures with the people who love you.