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the complete review - epic

Enuma Elish

edited by
Johannes Haubold, Sophus Helle,
Enrique Jiménez, and Selena Wisnom

general information | review summaries | our review | links

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Our Assessment:

B+ : a fine edition of a significant work, with very good supporting material

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Every translator has his own theory of how to go about his task. To this reader, Lambert might have striven for a little more consistency of phrasing, to help the reader unfamiliar with the original. (...) Sometimes this reader felt that even the master sometimes rather missed the mark (.....) In thinking through Lambert's translation of this large, complex poem, the reader has made only a first step into this book, and may justly conclude that theory and practice of translation, apart from conveying meaning in presentable English, were not of the same level of interest to Lambert as precise philological understanding of the text, its purpose, cultural background, and as a product of an individual effort of creativity and learning. (...) Everyone interested in Mesopotamian literature and religion or ancient mythology will want to have Babylonian Creation Myths close to hand" - Benjamin R. Foster, Archiv für Orientforschung
  
  
• "Babylonian Creation Myths is an excellent book and a worthy memorial of a great Assyriologist." - Michael P. Streck, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
  
  
• "Since the book is not intended for the professional cuneiformist but rather for the Old Testament scholar and Christian minister, there is no transliteration of the Accadian text; the linguistic notes, too, are very few in number. (...) His translation, therefore, is not noteworthy for its simplicity and lucidity alone; it contains not a few improvements over its predecessors and will prove of considerable value even to the expert Assyriologist." - S.N.Kramer, Journal of the American Oriental Society
  
  
• "The author's translations are generally good and contain numerous improvements over his precursors, mainly based on suggestions made by his teacher, Arno Poebel. Such commendation does not mean that no further improvements are possible; Assyriology is still in its lexicographic adolescence, in spite of its extraordinary progress during the half-century between 1890 and 1940." - W.F.Albright, Journal of Biblical Literature
  
  
• "Heidel's translations of the Babylonian materials are perhaps the best and most complete anywhere available to the OT student, and are in themselves well worth the price of the book." - J.Philip Hyatt, Journal of Biblical Literature
  
  
• "(T)he cuneiform texts are given in translation only, without transliteration and without extended philological discussion in footnotes. Still it is evident that the translation is based on a thorough critical study of the text. It is original, and wherever it differs from previously published translations the reason is clearly set forth, so that for future students of cuneiform the book will have real value." - Ovid R. Sellers, Journal of Near Eastern Studies
  
  
• "Dr.Heidel's fresh translation stands in a legitimate succession to the best of its predecessors. He thinks of the poem as a hymn in honor of Marduk rather than as a creation story, yet he recognizes its significance for the origins of Babylonian cosmogony. (...) The translation is enriched by careful documentation and fine linguistic content." - James Muilenburg, Journal of Religion
  
  
• "A translation may have two objects: it may be either intended to display the translator's felicity of diction (...) or it may be intended to facilitate the study of a difficult original, while it gives the translator's countrymen generally some acquaintance with a foreign work which deserves to be known by them, though they cannot hope to learn its language. The latter has been the object set before himself by Professor Langdon. The text has been rendered throughout as closely as is consistent with intelligibility; but the translation loses nothing thereby. If his English is occasionally marred by solecisms, it is because he has unwittingly introduced a Babylonian idiom into our language." - Journal of Theological Studies
  
  
• "But does it make for good literature ? Perhaps not from a modern perspective. As in many narratives about gods, the characters are one-dimensional, the hero is remote and unlikeable, and there is no attempt to engage the reader's emotions--even when a mother comes to realize that she must kill her children. But Enuma elish is a poem of great antiquity from an alien culture. In form and structure, it is a superb example of Babylonian poetry. Many other qualities that made it special as a Babylonian poem do not come across in translation. Fortunately, the introduction and thirteen accompanying essays make a masterly case for it as a remarkable example of carefully structured verse, and for its poet as a highly skilled and innovative writer. Though unapologetically academic, the essays are lucid and helpful, and some are compelling. They leave no doubt that, technically and intellectually, Enuma elish was in its day a tour de force. Three thousand years later, this excellent little book helps us see why." - Andrew George, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Enuma Elish is an almost complete 1095- (or 1096; both figures are mentioned here ...) line Akkadian poem, recorded on seven Tablets; it is the second-longest surviving Akkadian poem, after Gilgamesh. [As a footnote in the Introduction helpfully explains: "Assyriologists distinguish between ‘tablets’, which are the physical manuscripts on which the story survives, and ‘Tablets’, which are the subdivisions of the story that were written on one tablet each, corresponding to the songs of a classical epic or the episodes of a modern TV series"] Readers have long been quite well-served by editions offering a translation of the text and supporting material, including several that include -- as this one does -- a transcription of the Akkadian text. [As is explained here: "A transcription of an Akkadian text renders it as a sequence of words, while a transliteration renders it as a sequence of cuneiform signs, and it is the former convention that has been adopted here: readers who wish to read a transliteration of the text, including a synoptic overview of the differences between the preserved manuscripts, are advised to consult the eBL website". While the cuneiform text is of interest as well, the transcription -- in recognizable-glyph form -- give readers a much better idea of the sound of the poems.] This edition presents a new translation of the text, as well as an Introduction and then thirteen essays addressing various aspects of it and its history and influence, over three sections: 'The History of the Epic', 'Major Themes', and 'Poetics and hermeneutics'.
       The subtitle here describes the poem as: 'The Babylonian Epic of Creation' -- the editors finding the term 'epic' appropriate, "given how well the text fits the criteria by which the genre is defined", while acknowledging that some scholars resist application of that term; in one of the essays included here, 'Enuma Elish outside the cuneiform tradition', Eckart Frahm notes that: "Given this almost obsessive focus on one single god and the city in which he was worshipped, it is no wonder that for some modern scholars, Enuma Elish should be classified as not an epic but a hymn: a poem about the One, rather than the many" (and, indeed, near the close, the work refers to: "the song of Marduk"). It is certainly a creation-story, however, a chronicle from the beginnings of the co-mingling of the waters of "primordial Apsû" and "the creative force Tiamat" to the completed ascendancy of Marduk -- summed up in the Introduction as: "a transformation from this initial state of absolute fluidity to an ordered, strictly hierarchical world that has Babylon at its centre and Marduk as its king", with the epic concluding with the reciting of the fifty names and their attributes the gods give Marduk -- "and so made his path supreme".
       The epic opens:

When heaven on high had not been named
and the ground below was not given a name,
primordial Apsû, who fathered them,
and the creative force Tiamat, who gave birth to them all,
were mingling together their waters:
they had not yet bound meadows or lined the reedbeds.
When none of the gods had been brought forth,
had not been given names and had not decreed destinies,
then were the gods created within them.

He bound Apsû and killed him,
he turned to Mummu and locked him up.
He founded his home upon Apsû,

Ea rested calmly within his chamber,
and called it Apsû, ‘that makes known the shrines’.
There he founded his sanctuary:
Ea and his wife Damkina lived in splendour.

The opening words of this and the preceding line form a neat symmetry: ikmīšū-ma, ‘he bound him’, and īkimšū-ma, ‘he took from him’. This line also contains a key pun on the words šīmāti, ‘destinies’, and lā simatīšu, ‘not his right’.

     Like other cosmogonies, Enuma Elish describes how order emerged from chaos. Its treatment of communication mirrors this arc: we begin with a chaotic burst of noise (I 21-4) that culminates in a first moment of communicative breakdown. By contrast, the poem ends with an extended passage of harmonious unisono speech in which the gods acclaim their newly minted king (VI 121–VII 136).

As order emerges from chaos over the course of the text, dysfunctional forms of communication such as ‘shouting’ (šasû) and ‘plotting’ (kapādu) give way to the proper exercise of ‘counsel’ (milku) among characters who accept their place in society, contain their emotions, and know to distinguish good from evil. Within this arc, the early tablets of Enuma Elish introduce both the ideal of communication through counsel and some of the pathologies that threaten communicative breakdown, chief among them unchecked emotions. As the narrative progresses, the importance of calming those emotions emerges ever more clearly.

Enuma Elish depicts the world as a fundamentally fluid matter that was bound by Marduk into shapes that then acquired their identity in language, meaning that language, according to the epic, carves out specificity from an originally shapeless state. But because the epic is itself made of language, it does not chart this transition neutrally: it is actively invested in the world of words, and I will argue that the epic recreates in its own poetic form the shift from liquid to language, participating in the creation of order out of water.

- M.A.Orthofer, 22 May 2025

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Links:

• Bloomsbury publicity page
• Les éditions du Cerf publicity page
• Ugarit-Verlag publicity page
• Trotta Editorial publicity page
• Poem of Creation (Enūma eliš) at the electronic Babylonian Library

• See Index of Epics under review
• See Index of Bilingual editions under review
• See Index of Books Written Before 1900

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© 2025 the complete review

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