Gods, Monsters and the Ancient Chaos Narratives
Becoming Human, Part Three

Part 1: The Story Behind Everything
Last Part: Asking Better Questions
Up Next: The Skies, The Land & Beginning at the Way Back When
There was once this god named Marduk who killed his great great grandma.
To be fair, his grandma was the manifestation of the sea, a dragon and the goddess of chaos, named Tiamat.
But yeah, he killed his grandma.
He opened her mouth and throat by blowing a great wind toward her — because that’s apparently something he could do — and fired an arrow down her throat and pierced her heart. The only logical thing he could do next would be to rip her in half and build the land below with one half and the sky above with the other. So he did.
Yep.
After a while, the gods became weary of feeding themselves.
Don’t we all?
So, problem solver as he was, Marduk slits the throat of one of the other gods and, spilling his blood to the earth, forms humanity from the blood and dirt and mud. It is now humanities responsibility to feed the gods by growing food and making sacrifices.
Problem solved.
So many questions.
First, how is Marduk’s great grandma a dragon? Okay, I can get past that.
But how, exactly, does it make sense that he made the sky out of half of that dragon? The sky isn’t solid. We know that. We’ve sent rockets and satellites up there. We’ve taken pictures of Pluto. We haven’t hit anything yet.
Here’s the thing: the ancient world had no concept of outer space.
Here’s another thing: the entire ancient world had a radically different understanding and experience for how they saw the world.
The earth is a planet-rock-thing that’s traveling around the star we call sun at 67,000 mph, the sky is full of a thin atmosphere separating us from suffocating in space, and if we were to dig straight down, eventually we would reach a fiery core.
Even outside of everything I just said being in English, I just spoke gibberish to the ancient world.
For the ancient world, the land beneath their feet was a flat plane or disc; the skies above existed beneath a vault or firmament, a solid dome holding back the waters above; and if you were to dig straight down you would descend into the deep abyss of the waters below.
This is called a three-tiered universe view of the world.

TIER ONE: the waters below
Water is everywhere. The seas were chaos and dangerous. As far as the ancient world could tell, the sea was a connected body surrounding and underneath the land. It was dangerous and the epitome of chaos, and it was infinite.
TIER TWO: the land
If the sea existed infinitely underneath and around the land, it makes sense to understand the ancient world as seeing the earth as a flat disc, floating on the sea. Without satellite images of our purple marble planet (which didn’t exist until the 1960s), it doesn’t take too much imagination to see where the ancient world was coming from.
TIER THREE: the skies
With no understanding of outer space, what do you see when you look up? Nothing but blue. Everywhere. For the ancient world, the sky was a solid dome that held back the waters above. Rain, of course, was water leaking through this dome. The sun, the moon, the stars were all embedded in this dome.
This is just the way the ancient world saw, well, the world.
So, what does this information about a dragon killing god and a three tiered way of looking at the universe have to do with the biblical story behind everything we’ve been talking about?
Good question.
This three-tierd world is the kind of world the ancient Israelite story was written out of.
This is the Babylonian creation myth called the Enuma Elish. And we’re not done with it. Essentially, this story about how the world came to be, through violence and blood, and is the story that the biblical story behind everything is in dialogue with, refuting and challenging.
When you read, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty…” what do you immediately imagine?
A kind of planet like thing more akin to a clay marble? Some kind of sphere?
Yeah, that isn’t what the original author or audience imagined. The Hebrew word for earth is erets, and its literal meaning is land. Its the land beneath your feet because the ancient world didn’t know the earth was a planet rocketing across space around the sun.
When we read the Bible, we have to take the world in which it came out of into account. Before we move forward into the story behind everything, we’re going to have to dive head first into the world that story was birthed from.
NEXT TIME: is the beginning really the beginning?

