Genesis was not the first time humans wrote about creation. Long before the Hebrew Bible was written — at least 1,000 years, and by some counts 2,000 — the people of ancient Mesopotamia had already written a rich body of creation stories. The Sumerians built the world's first cities between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Since about 3000 BCE they had been writing creation myths, flood stories, and hero tales on clay tablets. In the 1840s and 1850s, archaeologists dug up the ruins of Nineveh and found something that shook Western theology. The library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal held tablets with stories that looked unmistakably like the core stories of the Bible. Not a loose likeness. The same structure, the same order of events, sometimes the same words.
The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation epic. It opens with a watery chaos. Out of it the god Marduk makes the heavens and the earth. He separates light from darkness. He divides the waters above from the waters below. He makes humanity from the blood of a killed divine rebel named Kingu. In its written form, the Enuma Elish is at least 500 years older than Genesis, and the spoken traditions behind it are older still. Genesis 1:2 describes the earth as 'formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.' The Hebrew word for 'the deep' is tehom. It is linguistically related to Tiamat, the primordial ocean-dragon of the Enuma Elish. This is not a coincidence. One text is the ancestor of the other.
In 1872, a British scholar named George Smith was working on the Nineveh tablets at the British Museum. He translated a passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh and froze. He was reading a flood story. A god decides to wipe out humanity. One good man is warned. He builds a huge boat. He fills it with animals of every kind. A great flood covers the earth. The boat lands on a mountain. The man sends out birds to find dry land — first a dove, which comes back, then a raven, which does not. He gets off the boat, builds an altar, and makes an offering. The god smells it and promises never to destroy humanity again. Smith was reportedly so excited that he started taking off his clothes in the museum reading room. He had found Noah — centuries before Noah.
The Atrahasis Epic is another Mesopotamian text, from about 1700 BCE. It gives an even older and fuller version of the same story. In it, the god Enlil decides to destroy humanity with a flood because people have grown too noisy. The god Enki warns the hero Atrahasis — whose name means 'exceedingly wise' — in almost the same words used to warn Noah in Genesis 6. Atrahasis is told to build a boat, fill it with animals, and ride out the flood. The match is not just in theme. It is in structure, in the order of events, and in places nearly word for word. Scholars do not really ask whether Genesis borrowed from Mesopotamian sources. It clearly did. The real question is what the Hebrew authors did with what they inherited — what idea of God they built into it, and what they changed in the retelling.
The Garden of Eden story also has Mesopotamian roots. The Sumerian paradise Dilmun was a sacred, spotless place — free of sickness and death — set where the sun rose. Losing immortality by eating a forbidden plant shows up in the Epic of Gilgamesh: the hero finds the plant of immortality at the bottom of the sea, only to have a serpent steal it while he sleeps. In Mesopotamian art the serpent stood for wisdom and renewal — it shed its skin, so it was linked with immortality. The Hebrew authors took that symbol of divine wisdom and immortality and flipped it into the cause of humanity's fall. That flip was a deliberate choice, and you can only see it if you know what came before.