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A direct borrowing from the Babylonians has not taken place, and while the Babylonian records are in all probabilities much older than the Hebrew, the latter again contain elements, as Gunkel has shown, of a more primitive character than the Babylonian production.
Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think, who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks. Its beginning, its middle, and its end each possess distinctive characters. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice, and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of justice.
Gunkel has demonstrated the Babylonian origin of the myth embodied in the twelfth chapter of Revelations. This myth is but another form of the Marduk-Tiâmat contest, which, it will be recalled, is the chief episode in the Babylonian creation 'epic. More significant is the influence exerted by the religious ideas of Babylonia upon the various Gnostic sects that arose within the Christian Church.
If we assume with Gunkel that the stories embodied in the first chapters of Genesis were long current among the Hebrews before they were given a permanent form, the adaptation of old traditions to an entirely new order of beliefs involves a casting aside of features that could not be used and a discarding of such as seemed superfluous.
The wanderer sank, and went down to the Marsh King, as he is named, who rules in the great moorland empire beneath. They also called him "Gunkel King," but we like the name of "Marsh King" better, and we will give him that name as the storks do. Very little is known of the Marsh King's rule, but that, perhaps, is a good thing.
See Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos, p. 13. On the acquaintance of Hebrew writers of the Babylonian exile with cuneiform literature and on the influence exercised by the latter, see D. H. Mueller, Ezechielstudien. Planets, Stars, and Calendar. It will be appropriate at this point, to give a brief account of the astronomical system as developed by the Babylonian scholars.
The ô is represented in Babylonian by â, and the ending at in Tiâmat is an affix which stamps the Babylonian name as feminine. T'hôm in Hebrew is likewise a feminine noun, but it should be noted that at a certain stage in the development of the Semitic languages, the feminine is hardly distinguishable from the plural and collective. Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos, pp. 29-82, 379-398.
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